Seize the Night

Casper.

I was surprised to find my balance restored. Maybe the brief disruption of equilibrium hadn’t been a reaction to the spinning lights and shadows, but had been merely another transient effect similar to the pressure that, earlier, had muffled our voices and made breathing difficult.

The hot breeze — and the stink it carried — disappeared. The air was cool and calm once more. The sound of the winds began to fade, as well.

Next, perhaps, the spacesuited man on the floor would dissolve into a twist of icy vapor that would rise and vanish like a wraith returning to the spirit world where it belonged. Soon. Before we had to take a close look at it. Please.

Certain that Bobby couldn’t be persuaded to retreat, I followed him toward Hodgson’s body. He was deep into the same stoked, gonzo mind-set with which he surfed twenty-foot, fully macking behemoths: a maximum kamikaze commitment as total as his more characteristic slacker indifference. When he was on this board, he would ride it all the way to the end of the barrel — and one day straight out of this life.

Because the lights in the walls were contained within the surface layer of glassy material and shed only a small fraction of their illuminating power into the egg room itself, Hodgson wasn’t well revealed.

“Flashlight,” Bobby said.

“Not smart.”

“That’s me.”

Reluctantly, steeling myself to take a close look at the back side of the aforementioned lion’s teeth, I stepped cautiously to the right of the body as Bobby moved less cautiously to the left. I switched on one flashlight and played it over the far too solid ghost. Initially the beam jiggled because my hand was shaking, but I quickly steadied it.

The Plexiglas in the helmet was tinted. The single flashlight was not powerful enough to let us see either Hodgson’s face or his condition.

He — or possibly she — was as still and silent as a headstone, and whether a ghost or not, he seemed indisputably dead.

On the breast of his pressure suit was an American-flag patch, and immediately below the flag was a second patch, featuring a speeding locomotive, an image clearly from the Art Deco period of design, which evidently had been adapted to serve as the logo for this research project. Although the image was bold and dynamic, without any element of mystery, I was willing to bet my left lung that this identified Hodgson as a member of the Mystery Train team.

The only other distinguishing features on the front of the suit were six or eight holes across the abdomen and chest. Recalling how Hodgson had turned to face the wall out of which he had appeared, how he had held his hands up defensively, and how he had jerked as if hit by automatic-weapons fire, I at first assumed that these punctures were bullet holes.

On closer inspection, however, I realized that they were too neat to be gunshot wounds. High-velocity lead slugs would have torn the material, leaving rips or starburst punctures rather than these round holes, each as large as a quarter, which looked as though they had been die cut or even bored with a laser. Aside from the fact that we had heard no gunfire, these were far too large to be entry wounds; any caliber of ammunition capable of punching holes that big would have passed directly through Hodgson, killing Bobby or me, or both of us.

I could see no blood.

“Use the other flash,” Bobby said.

Silence had replaced the last murmuring voices of the wind.

Explosive scripts of bright, meaningless calligraphy continued to scroll through the walls, perhaps marginally less dazzling than they had been a minute ago. Experience suggested that this phenomenon, too, was about to wind down, and I was reluctant to stimulate it again.

“Just once, quick, for a clearer look,” he urged.

Against all instincts, I did as Bobby wanted, crouching over the cumbersomely attired figure for a better view.

The tinted Plexiglas still partially obscured what lay beyond, but at once I understood why, with the single flashlight, we hadn’t been able to see poor Hodgson’s face: Hodgson no longer had a face. Inside the helmet was a wet churning mass that seemed to be feeding voraciously on the remaining substance of the dead man: a sickening pale tangle of seething, squirming, slithering, jittering things that looked somewhat soft-bodied like worms but were not worms, that also looked somewhat chitinous like beetles but were not beetles, a greasy white colony of something unnameable that had invaded his suit and overwhelmed him with such rapidity that he had died no less abruptly than if he had been shot straight through the heart. And now these twitching things responded to the flashlight beam by surging against the inner surface of the Plexiglas faceplate, teeming with obscene excitement.

Bolting to my feet, reeling backward, I thought I saw movement in some of the holes in the abdomen and chest of Hodgson’s violated pressure suit, as though the things that had killed him were going to boil out of those punctures.

Bobby split without firing the shotgun, which he might easily have done, out of shock and terror. Thank God he didn’t pull the trigger. A shotgun blast or two — or ten — wouldn’t wipe out even half the hellacious swarm in Hodgson’s pressure suit, but it would probably pump them into an even greater killing frenzy.

As I ran, I switched off the flashlights, because the fireworks in the walls were gaining speed and power once more.

Although Bobby had been farther from the exit than I was, he got there ahead of me.

The vault door was as solid as a damn vault door.

What I’d seen from a distance was confirmed close up: There was no wheel or other release mechanism to disengage the lock bolts.

14

Back toward the center of the room, about forty feet away from the vault door, Hodgson’s pressure suit was where we had left it. Because it hadn’t collapsed upon itself like a deflated balloon, I assumed that it was still filled out by the nightmare colony and by the remaining odds and ends of Hodgson on which those squirming things were feeding.

Bobby tapped the barrel of the shotgun against the door. The sound was as real as steel striking steel.

“Mirage?” I suggested, tossing his deficient explanation back at him as I shoved one flashlight under my belt and jammed the other into a jacket pocket.

“It’s bogus.”

In reply, I slapped my hand against the door.

“Bogus,” he insisted. “Check your watch.”

I was less interested in the time than in whether anything might be coming out of Hodgson’s pressure suit.

With a shudder, I realized that I was brushing at the sleeves of my jacket, wiping at the back of my neck, scrubbing the side of my face, trying to rid myself of crawling things that weren’t really there.

Motivated by a vivid memory of the squirming horde inside the helmet, I hooked my fingers in a groove along the edge of the door and pulled. I grunted, cursed, and pulled harder, as though I might actually be able to move a few tons of steel by tapping the store of energy I’d laid up from a breakfast of crumb cake and hot chocolate.

“Check your watch,” Bobby repeated.

He had rucked back the sleeve of his cotton pullover to look at his own watch. This surprised me. He had never before worn a timepiece, and now he had one just like mine.

When I consulted the luminous digital readout on the oversize face of my wristwatch, I saw 4:08 P.M. The correct time, of course, was short of four o’clock in the morning.

“Mine, too,” he said, showing me that our watches agreed.

“Both wrong?”