blades slashed.
In this pandemonium of light and darkness, wholly encapsulated by a chaos of spinning flames and tumbling shadows, I was becoming increasingly disoriented. Though I stood still, with my feet widely planted for balance, I felt as if I were moving, twirling like poor Dorothy aboard the Kansas-to-Oz Express. Forward, behind, right, left, up, down — all rapidly became more difficult to define.
Again, from the corner of my eye, I glimpsed the door. When I looked more directly, it was still there, formidable and gleaming.
“Bobby.”
“I see it.”
“Not good.”
“Not a real door,” he concluded.
“You said the place wasn’t haunted.”
“Mirage.”
The storm of light and shadow gained velocity. It seemed to be escalating toward an ominous crescendo.
I was afraid that the furious motion, the increasingly spiky and disturbing patterns in the walls, foretold an onrushing event that would translate all this energy into sudden violence. This ovoid room was so strange that I was unable to imagine the nature of the threat rushing at us, couldn’t guess even the direction from which it might come. For once, my three-hundred-ring imagination failed me.
The vault door was hinged on this side; therefore, it would swing inward. There was no lock wheel to disengage the ring of thick bolts that were currently seated in holes around the jamb, so the door could be opened only from the short tunnel between this room and the airlock, from the other side, which meant we were trapped here.
No. Not trapped.
Striving to resist a surging claustrophobia, I assured myself that the door wasn’t real. Bobby was right: It was a hallucination, an illusion, a mirage.
An apparition.
My perception of the egg room as a haunted place grew harder to shake off. The luminous forms raging through the walls suddenly seemed to be tortured spirits in a dervish dance of anguish, frantic to escape damnation, as though all around me were windows with views of Hell.
As my heart pumped nearly hard enough to blow out my carotid arteries, I told myself that I was seeing the egg room not as it was at this moment but as it had been before the industrious gnomes of Wyvern had stripped it — and the entire facility around it — to the bare concrete. The massive vault door had been here then; but it was not here now, even though I could see it. The door had been dismantled, hauled away, salvaged, melted down, and recast into soup ladles, pinballs, and orthodontic braces. Now it was purely apparitional, and I could walk through it as easily as I had walked through the spiderweb at the top of the porch steps of the bungalow in Dead Town.
Not intending to leave, wishing merely to test the mirage hypothesis, I headed toward the exit. In two steps, I was reeling. I almost collapsed, facedown, in a free fall that would have broken my nose and cracked enough teeth to make a dentist smile. Regaining my balance at the penultimate moment, I spread my legs wide and planted my feet hard against the floor, as though trying to make the rubber soles of my shoes grip as firmly as a squid’s suckers.
The room was not moving, even if it felt like a ship wallowing in rough seas. The movement was a subjective perception, a symptom of my increasing disorientation.
Staring at the vault door in a futile attempt to
Thus far, the kaleidoscopic displays in the walls had not been accompanied by sound. Now, though the air remained dead calm, there arose a hollow and mournful moaning of wind, as it might strike the ear when blowing off barren alkaline flats.
I looked at Bobby. Even through the tattoos of light and shadow that melted across his face, I could see that he was worried.
“You hear that?” I asked.
“Treacherous.”
“Fully,” I agreed, not liking the sound any more than he did.
If this noise was a hallucination, as the door apparently was, at least we shared it. We could enjoy the comfort — cold as it might be — of going insane together.
The unfelt wind grew louder, speaking with more than one voice. The hollow wail continued, but with it came a rushing sound as of a northwester blowing through a grove of trees in advance of rain, fierce and full of warnings. Groaning, gibbering, soughing, keening. And the lonely tuneless whistling of a blustery winter storm playing rain gutters and downspouts as though they were icy flutes.
When I heard the first words in the choir of winds, I thought that I must be imagining them, but they swiftly grew louder, clearer. Men’s voices: half a dozen, maybe more. Tinny, hollow, as if spoken from the far end of a long steel pipe. The words came in clusters separated by bursts of static, issuing from walkie-talkies or perhaps a radio.
The rising cacophony of wind was almost as disorienting as the stroboscopic lights and the shadows that kited like legions of bats in a feeding frenzy. I couldn’t discern from which direction the voices came.
Ghosts. I was listening to ghosts. They were dead men now, had been dead since before this facility had been abandoned, and these were the last words they had spoken immediately before they perished.
I didn’t know exactly what was about to happen to these doomed men, but as I listened, I had no doubt that some terrible fate had overcome them, which was now being replayed on some spiritual plane.
Their voices grew more urgent, and they began to speak over one another:
They were shouting now, some hoarse and others shrill, every voice raw with panic:
Instead of words in the wind, there were screams such as I had never heard before and hoped never to hear
