Seize the Night

“The process.”

“What process?”

“The room, the machine, the process, whatever it is.”

“It can’t be running by itself,” I insisted, in full-on denial of what was happening around me.

“The beam energy?” he wondered.

“What?”

“The flashlight beams?”

“Can you be any more obscure?”

“Way more, bro. But I mean, that’s what must’ve powered it up. The energy in the flashlight beams.”

I shook my head. “Doesn’t make sense. That’s almost no energy at all.”

“This stuff soaked in the light,” he insisted, sliding one foot back and forth on the radiant floor, “spun it into more power, used what it absorbed to generate more energy.”

“How?”

“Somehow.”

“That’s not science.”

“I’ve heard worse on Star Trek.”

“It’s sorcery.”

“Science or sorcery, it’s real.”

Even if what Bobby said was true — and obviously there was at least some truth in it — the phenomenon was not perpetually self-sustaining. The number of bright eruptions began to decline, as did both the richness of the colors and the intensity of the lights.

My mouth had gone so dry that I needed to work up some saliva before I could say, “Why didn’t this happen before?”

“Were you ever here with two flashlights?”

“I’m a one-flashlight guy.”

“So maybe there’s a critical mass, a critical amount of energy input, needed to start it.”

“Critical mass is two lousy flashlights?”

“Maybe.”

“Bobby Einstein.” With my concern not in the least allayed by the subsidence of the light show, I looked toward the exit. “Did you see that door?”

“What door?”

“Totally massive vault, like a blast door in a nuclear-missile silo.”

“Are you feeling that beer?”

“It was there and not there.”

“The door?”

“Yeah.”

“This isn’t a haunted house, bro.”

“Maybe it’s a haunted laboratory.”

I was surprised that the word haunted felt so right and true, resonating loudly in the tuning fork of instinct. This wasn’t the requisite decaying house of many gables and creaking floorboards and inexplicable cold drafts, but I sensed unseen presences nonetheless, malevolent spirits pressing against an invisible membrane between my world and theirs, the air of expectancy preceding the imminent materialization of a hateful and violent entity.

“The door was there and not there,” I insisted.

“It’s almost a Zen koan. What’s the sound of one hand clapping? Where does a door lead if it’s there and not there?”

“I don’t think we have time for meditation just now.”

Indeed, I was overcome by the feeling that time was running out for us, that a cosmic clock was rapidly ticking toward the stop point. This premonition was so powerful that I almost bolted for the exit.

All that kept me in the egg room was the certainty that Bobby would not follow me if I left. He was not interested in politics or the great cultural and social issues of our times, and nothing could rouse him from his pleasant life of sun and surf except a friend in need. He didn’t trust those he called people with a plan, those who believed they knew how to make a better world, which seemed always to involve telling other people what they should do and how they should think. But the cry of a friend would bring him instantly to the barricades, and once committed to the cause — in this case, to finding Jimmy Wing and good Orson — he would neither surrender nor retreat.

Likewise, I could never leave a friend behind. Our convictions and our friends are all we have to get us through times of trouble. Friends are the only things from this damaged world that we can hope to see in the next; friends and loved ones are the very light that brightens the Hereafter.

“Idiot,” I said.

“Asshole,” Bobby said.

“I wasn’t talking to you.”

“I’m the only one here.”

“I was calling myself an idiot. For not getting out of here.”

“Oh. Then I retract the asshole remark.”

Bobby switched on his flashlight, and immediately the silent fireworks dazzled across the lining of the egg room. They didn’t well up slowly but began at the peak of intensity that they had previously achieved by degrees.

“Turn on your light,” Bobby said.

“Are we really dumb enough to do this?”

“Way more than dumb enough.”

“This place has nothing to do with Jimmy and Orson,” I said.

“How do you know?”

“They’re not here.”

“But something here may help us find them.”

“We can’t help them if we’re dead.”

“Be a good idiot and turn on your light.”

“This is nuts.”

“Fear nothing, bro. Carpe noctem.”

“Damn,” I said, hung with my own noose.

I switched on my flashlight.

13

A riot of fiery lights erupted within the translucent walls around us, and it was easy to imagine that we were in the canyons of a great city stricken by insurrection, bomb throwers and arsonists on every side, blazing rioters ignited by their own torches and now running in terror through the night, cyclones of tempestuous fire whirling along avenues where the pavement was as molten as lava, tall buildings with orange flames seething from the high windows, smoldering chunks of parapets and cornices and ledges trailing comet tails of sparks as they crashed into the streets.

Yet at the same time, with the slightest shift of perspective, it was also possible to see this panoramic cataclysm not primarily as a series of bright eruptions but as a shadow show, because for every Molotov-cocktail flash, for every roiling mass of hot napalm, for every luminous trail that reminded me of tracer bullets, there was a dark shape in motion, begging interpretation as do the faces and figures in clouds. Ebony capes billowed, black robes swirled, sable serpents coiled and struck, shadows swooped like angry ravens, flocks of crows dived and soared overhead and underfoot, armies of charred skeletons marched with a relentless scissoring of sharp black bones, midnight cats crouched and pounced, sinuous whips of darkness lashed through the balefires, and iron-black