Seize the Night

floors must have been deconstructed, whereupon a blinding fury of massive dump trucks and excavators replaced the earth that they had once removed, and then after a final crackle of red light passed across the site and winked out, all was still.

The hangar and everything under it had ceased to exist.

The spectacle left the kids ecstatic, as if they had met E.T. and ridden on the back of a brontosaurus and taken a quick trip to the moon all in one evening.

“It’s over?” Doogie wondered.

“As if it never was,” I suggested.

Sasha said, “But it was.”

“The residual effect. A runaway residual effect. The whole place imploded into…the past, I guess.”

“But if it never existed,” Bobby said, “why do I remember being inside the place?”

“Don’t start,” I warned him.

We packed ourselves into the Hummer — five adults, four excited kids, one shaky dog, and a smug cat — and Doogie drove to the bungalow in Dead Town, where we had to deal with Delacroix’s rotting cadaver and the ceilings festooned with frankfurter-size cocoons. An exorcist’s work is never done.

On the way, Aaron Stuart, the troublemaker, reached a solemn conclusion about the blood on my hands. “Mr. Halloway must be dead.”

“We’ve done this,” I said impatiently. “He’s not dead anymore.”

“He’s dead,” Anson agreed.

“I may be dead,” Bobby said, “but my pants are dry.”

“Dead,” Jimmy Wing agreed.

“Maybe he is dead,” Wendy brooded.

“What the hell is wrong with you kids?” I demanded, turning in my seat to glare at them. “He’s not dead, it’s a paradox, but he’s not dead! All you’ve got to do is believe in fairies, clap your hands, and Tinker Bell will live! Is that so hard to understand?”

“Ice it down, Snowman,” Sasha advised me.

“I’m cool.”

I was still glaring at the kids, who were in the third and final seat. Orson was in the cargo space behind them. He cocked his burly head and looked at me over the kids’ heads, as if to say Ice it down.

“I’m mellow,” I assured him.

He sneezed a sneeze of disagreement.

Bobby had been dead. As in dead and gone. As in deader than dead. All right. Time to get over it. Here in Wyvern, life goes on, occasionally even for the deceased. Besides, we were more than half a mile from the beach, so anything that happened here couldn’t be that important.

“Son, the Tinker Bell thing makes perfect sense,” Roosevelt said, either to placate me or because he had gone stark, raving mad.

“Yeah,” said Jimmy Wing. “Tinker Bell.”

“Tinker Bell,” the twins said, nodding in unison.

“Yeah,” Wendy said. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

Mungojerrie meowed. I don’t know what that meant.

Doogie drove over the curb, across the sidewalk, and parked on the front lawn at the bungalow.

The kids stayed in the vehicle with Orson and Mungojerrie.

Sasha, Roosevelt, and Doogie took positions around the Hummer, standing guard.

At Sasha’s suggestion, Doogie had included two cans of gasoline in the provisions. With the criminal intention of destroying still more government property, Bobby and I carried these ten gallons of satisfyingly flammable liquid to the bungalow.

Going back into this small house was even less appealing than submitting to extensive gum surgery, but we were manly men, and so we climbed the steps and crossed the porch without hesitation, though quietly.

In the living room, we set down the gasoline cans with care, as though to avoid waking a quarrelsome sleeper, and I switched on a flashlight.

The cocoons that had been clustered overhead were gone.

At first I thought the residents of those silky tubes had chewed free and were now loose in the bungalow in a form that was sure to prove troublesome. Then I realized that not even one wisp of gossamer filament remained in any corner, and none floated on the floor.

The lone red sock, which might once have belonged to one of the Delacroix children, lay where it had been previously, still caked with dust. In general, the bungalow was as I remembered it.

No cocoons hung in the dining room. None were to be found in the kitchen, either.

Leland Delacroix’s corpse was gone, as were the photographs of his family, the votive-candle glass, the wedding ring, and the gun with which he had killed himself. The ancient linoleum was still cracked and peeling, but I could see no biological stains that would have indicated that a dead body had been rotting here recently.

“The Mystery Train was never built,” I said, “so Delacroix never went to…the other side. Never opened the door.”

Bobby said, “Never got infected — or possessed. Whatever. And he never infected his family. So they’re all alive somewhere?”

“God, I hope so. But how could he not be here when he was here and we remember it?”

“Paradox,” Bobby said, as if he himself were entirely satisfied with that less than illuminating explanation. “So what do we do?”

“Burn it, anyway,” I concluded.

“To be safe, you mean?”

“No, just because I’m a pyromaniac.”

“Didn’t know that about you, bro.”

“Let’s torch this dump.”

As we emptied the gasoline cans in the kitchen, dining room, and living room, I repeatedly paused because I thought I heard something moving inside the bungalow walls. Every time I listened, the elusive sound stopped.

“Rats,” Bobby said.

This alarmed me, because if Bobby heard something, too, then the furtive noises weren’t the work of my imagination. Furthermore, this wasn’t the scuttling-scratching-squeaking of rodents; it was a liquid slithering.

“Humongous rats,” he said with more force but less conviction.

I fortified myself with the argument that Bobby and I were just woozy from gasoline fumes and, therefore, couldn’t trust our senses. Nevertheless, I expected to hear voices echoing inside my head: Stay, stay, stay, stay….

We escaped the bungalow without being munched.

Using the last half gallon of gasoline, I poured a fuse across the front porch, down the steps, and along the walkway.

Doogie pulled the Hummer into the street, to a safer distance.

Moonlight mantled Dead Town, and every silent structure seemed to harbor hostile watchers at the windows.

After setting the empty fuel can on the porch, I hurried out to the Hummer and asked Doogie to back it up until one of the rear tires was weighing down the manhole. The monkey manhole.

When I returned to the front yard, Bobby lit the fuse.

As the blue-orange flame raced up the walkway and climbed the front steps, Bobby said, “When I died…”

“Yeah?”

“Did I scream like a stuck pig, blubber, and lose my dignity?”

“You were cool. Aside from wetting your pants, of course.”

“They’re not wet now.”