Seize the Night

Orson wouldn’t let the guy get out of the elevator shaft.

I scooped up the flashlight and hurried to the third in the line of doors along the hall. It was ajar, and I pushed it all the way open.

Of the three chambers I’d thus far explored, this was the smallest, less than half the size of the other two, so the light swept from wall to wall. Jimmy was not here.

The only item of interest was a balled-up yellow cloth about ten feet beyond the threshold. I almost ignored it, eager to try the next door along the corridor, but then I ventured inside, and with the same hand that held the gun, I plucked the rag off the floor.

It wasn’t a rag, after all, but the soft cotton top from a pair of pajamas. A crew-neck pullover. About the right size for a five-year-old. Across the chest, in red and black letters, were the words Jedi Knight.

A sudden foreboding made my mouth go dry.

When I’d followed Orson away from Lilly Wing’s house, I had already reluctantly decided that her little boy was beyond saving, but subsequently, against my better judgment, I had allowed myself to hope too much. In this uncertain space between birth and death, especially here at the end of the world in Moonlight Bay, we need hope as surely as we need food and water, love and friendship. The trick, however, is to remember that hope is a perilous thing, that it’s not a steel and concrete bridge across the void between this moment and a brighter future. Hope is no stronger than tremulous beads of dew strung on a filament of spiderweb, and it alone can’t long support the terrible weight of an anguished mind and a tortured heart. Because I had loved Lilly for so many years — now as a friend; in other days, more deeply than one loves even the dearest friend — I had wanted to spare her from this worst of all calamities, from the loss of a child. I had wanted this more desperately than I’d realized, and consequently I’d been running across a bridge of hope, a high arched span, which now dissolved like gossamer and directed my attention to the chasm beneath me.

Clutching the pajama top, I returned to the corridor.

I heard the boy’s name, “Jimmy,” before I realized that I was the one who had softly spoken it.

I called to him again, not sotto voce this time but at the top of my voice.

I might as well have spoken in a murmur, because my shout drew no more response than my whisper. No surprise. I hadn’t expected a reply.

Angrily, I wadded the thin pajama top and stuffed it in a coat pocket.

With the illusion of hope dispelled, I could more clearly see the truth. The boy wasn’t here, not in any of the rooms along this hallway, not on the level below this one or on the level above. I’d thought it must have been difficult for the kidnapper to descend the maintenance ladder with Jimmy, but Jimmy hadn’t been with him. The yellow-eyed bastard had at some point realized he was being followed by a man — and a dog. He had put Jimmy elsewhere before carrying the pajama top — which was saturated with the boy’s scent — into the rat catacombs under the warehouse, hoping to mislead us.

I remembered how uncertain Orson had become after leading me so confidently to the warehouse entrance. He had wandered nervously back and forth in the serviceway, sniffing the air, as though puzzled by contradictory spoor.

After I’d entered the warehouse, Orson had remained loyally at my side as we had been drawn by the noises rising from deeper in the building. By the time I’d found the Darth Vader action figure, I’d forgotten Orson’s hesitancy and had become convinced that I was close to finding Jimmy.

Now I ran toward the elevator alcove, wondering why I hadn’t heard a bark or a snarl. I’d expected the kidnapper to be surprised when he found a dog waiting for him on the main level. But if he’d known that he was being tracked and had taken the trouble to use the pajama top to establish a false trail, perhaps he was prepared to deal with Orson.

When I reached the alcove, it was deserted. The shaft wasn’t aglow with the kidnapper’s light, which I had glimpsed just before I’d gone into the third room and found the pajama top.

I directed my flashlight up toward the warehouse, then down at the bottom of the shaft, one floor below. There was no sign of my quarry in either direction.

He might have descended. Maybe he was more familiar with this section of the Wyvern maze than I was. If he knew of a passage connecting the lowest level of the warehouse with another facility, elsewhere on the military base, he could have left by that back door.

Nevertheless, I intended to go upstairs and find Orson, whose continued silence worried me.

I could risk climbing with one hand partly encumbered, but I couldn’t hold both the flashlight and the pistol and still keep my balance. The Glock wouldn’t be helpful if I wasn’t able to see trouble coming, so I holstered it and kept the light.

As I ascended from the second subterranean level toward the first, I became convinced that the kidnapper had not gone all the way up to the ground floor of the warehouse. He had climbed just one level, halfway. He was waiting there. I was certain of it. He was waiting there like a troll with a lemon-sour gaze. Going to ambush me as I clambered past the next entrance to the shaft. Lean out, smile to reveal all his neat doll-size teeth, and take a whack at my head with another club. Maybe he’d even discovered a better weapon this time. An iron pipe. An ax. A scuba diver’s spear gun loaded with a barbed, explosive-tipped, shark-killing bolt. A tactical nuclear weapon.

I slowed and finally stopped before I reached the rectangular black hole in the shaft wall. From a few rungs below, I played the flashlight beam into the alcove, but I was at an angle that allowed me to see little more than the ceiling of that space.

Indecisive, I hung on the ladder, listening.

Finally I overcame my trepidation by reminding myself that any delay could be deadly. After all, a humongous mutant tarantula was crawling toward me from the pit below, poison dripping off its serrated mandibles, fiercely angry because it hadn’t gotten me on my way down.

Nothing gives us courage more readily than the desire to avoid looking like a damn fool.

Emboldened, I quickly climbed past the first basement, to the main level, into the office where I had left Orson. I was neither hammered into mush by a blunt instrument nor shredded by giant arachnid jaws.

My dog was gone.

Drawing the pistol once more, I hurried from the office into the huge main room of the warehouse.

Flocks of shadows flew away from me, then circled to roost in even greater profusion at my back.

“Orson!”

When circumstances left him no alternative, he was a first-rate fighter — my brother the dog — and always reliable. He wouldn’t have allowed the kidnapper to pass, at least not without extracting a painful toll. I’d seen no blood in the office, and there was none here, either.

“Orson!”

Echoes of his name rippled across the corrugated steel walls. The repetition of those two hollow syllables was reminiscent of a church bell tolling in the distance, which made me think of funerals, and in my mind rose a vivid image of good Orson lying battered and broken, a glaze of death in his eyes.

My tongue grew so thick and my throat so tight with fear that I could barely swallow.

The door by which we’d entered was wide open, just as we had left it.

Outside, the sleeping moon remained bedded down in mattresses of clouds to the west. Only stars lit the sky.

The cool clear air hung motionless, as sharp with dire promise as the suspended blade of a guillotine.

The flashlight beam revealed a discarded socket wrench that had been left behind so long ago it was orange with rust, from its ratchet handle to its business end. An empty oil can waited for wind strong enough to roll it elsewhere. A weed bristled out of a crack in the blacktop, tiny yellow flowers rising defiantly from this inhospitable compost.

Otherwise, the serviceway was empty. No man, no dog.

Whatever might lie ahead, I’d deal with it more effectively if I recovered my night vision. I switched off the light and tucked it under my belt. “Orson!”

I risked nothing by calling out at the top of my voice. The man I’d encountered under the warehouse already knew where I was.

“Orson!”