Seize the Night

“No. That’s what time it is. Here. Now. In this place.”

“Witchy.”

“Pure Salem.”

Then I registered the date in a separate window below the digital time display. This was the twelfth of April. My watch claimed it was Mon Feb 19. So did Bobby’s.

I wondered what year the watch would reveal if its date window had been four digits wider. Somewhere in the past. A memorably catastrophic afternoon for the big-brow scientists on the Mystery Train team, an afternoon when the feces hit the flabellum.

The speed and brightness of the spiraling-bursting-streaming lights in the walls were slowly but noticeably diminishing.

I looked toward the bio-secure suit, which had proved no more secure against hostile organisms than a porkpie hat and a fig leaf, and I saw that whatever inhabited it was moving, churning restlessly. The arms flopped limply against the floor, and one leg twitched, and the entire body quivered as though a powerful electric current was passing through it.

“Not good,” I decided.

“It’ll fade.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“The screams did, the voices, the wind.”

I rapped my knuckles against the vault door.

“It’ll fade,” Bobby insisted.

Though the light show was diminishing, Hodgson — rather, the Hodgson suit — was becoming more active. It drummed the heels of its boots against the floor. It bucked and thrashed its arms.

“Trying to get up,” I said.

“Can’t hurt us.”

“You serious?” My logic seemed unassailable: “If the vault door is real enough to keep us in here, then that thing’s real enough to cause us major grief.”

“It’ll fade.”

Apparently not having been informed that all its efforts were pointless, due to its impending fade, the Hodgson suit thrashed and bucked and rocked until it rolled off its air tank and onto its side. I was looking at the dark faceplate again, and I could feel something staring back at me from the other side of that tinted Plexiglas, not simply a mass of worms or beetles, stupidly churning, but a cohesive and formidable entity, a malevolent consciousness, as curious about me as I was terrified of it.

This was not my feverish imagination at work.

This was a perception as unambiguous and valid as the chill I would have felt if I’d held an ice cube to the nape of my neck.

“It’ll fade,” Bobby repeated, and the thin note of dread in his voice revealed that he, too, was aware of being observed.

I was not comforted by the fact that the Hodgson thing was forty feet away from us. I wouldn’t have felt safe if the distance had been forty miles and if I’d been studying this spastic apparition through a telescope.

The pyrotechnics had lost perhaps a third of their power.

The door was still cold and hard under my hand.

As the light show proceeded toward a final flourish, visibility declined, but even in the slowly deepening gloom, I could see the Hodgson thing rolling off its side, lying facedown on the floor, and then struggling to get to its hands and knees.

If I’d correctly interpreted the gruesome sight I’d glimpsed through the faceplate, hundreds or even thousands of individual creatures infested the pressure suit, flesh-eating multitudes that constituted a nest or hive. A colony of beetles might operate under a sophisticated structure of divisional labor, maintain a high degree of social order, and work together to survive and prosper; but even if Hodgson’s skeleton remained to provide an armature, I couldn’t believe that the colony would be able to form itself into a manlike shape and function with such superb coordination, interlocked form, and strength that it could walk around in a spacesuit, climb steps, and drive heavy machinery.

The Hodgson thing rose to its feet.

“Nasty,” Bobby murmured.

Under the flat of my damp palm, I felt a short-lived vibration pass through the vault door. More peculiar than a vibration. More pronounced. It was a faint, undulant…tremor. The door didn’t simply hum with it; the steel quivered briefly, for a second or two, as though it were not steel at all, as though it were gelatin, and then it became solid — and seemingly impregnable — once more.

The thing in the pressure suit swayed like a toddler unsure of its balance. It slid its left foot forward, hesitated, and dragged its right foot after the left. The scraping of its boots against the glassy floor produced only a whispery sound.

Left foot, right foot.

Coming toward us.

Perhaps more of Hodgson survived than just his skeleton. Maybe the colony had not completely devoured the man, had not even killed him, but had bored into him, nestling deep into his flesh and bones, into his heart and liver and brain, establishing a hideous symbiotic relationship with his body, while taking firm control of his nervous system from the brain to the thinnest efferent fiber.

As the fireworks in the walls darkened into amber and umber and blood red, the Hodgson thing slid its left foot forward, hesitated, then dragged its right. The old Imhotep two-step, invented by Boris Karloff in 1932.

Under my hand, the vault door quivered again and suddenly turned mushy.

I gasped when a painful coldness, sharper than needles, pierced my right hand, as if I had plunged it into something considerably more frigid than ice water. From wrist to fingertips, I appeared to be one with the vault door. Although the egg-room light was rapidly fading, I could see that the steel had become semitransparent; like a lazy whirlpool, circular currents were turning within it. And in the gray substance of the vault door were the paler gray shapes of my fingers.

Startled, I yanked my hand out of the door — and had no sooner extracted it than the steel regained its solidity.

I remembered how the door had first been visible only out of the corner of my eye, not when I looked directly. It had acquired substance by degrees, and it was likely to dematerialize not in a wink but in installments.

Bobby must have seen what had happened, because he took a step backward, as though the steel might suddenly become a whirling vortex and suck him out of this place into oblivion.

If I hadn’t extracted my hand in time, would it have broken off at the joining point, leaving me with a neatly severed but spurting stump? I didn’t need to know the answer. Let it be a question for the ages.

The chill had left my hand the instant that I’d withdrawn it from the door, but I was still gasping, and between each convulsive breath, I heard myself repeating the same four-letter word, as if I had been stricken by a terminal case of Tourette’s syndrome and would spend the rest of my life unable to stop shouting this single obscenity.

Advancing through dim bloody light and legions of leaping shadows, like an astronaut returned from a mission to Planet Hell, the Hodgson thing had crossed half the original distance between us. It was twenty feet away, relentlessly dragging itself forward, obviously not offended by my language, driven by a hunger almost as palpable as the stench of hot tar and rotting vegetation that earlier had been borne on the wind from nowhere.

In frustration, Bobby struck the door with the shotgun barrel. That steel plug tolled like a bell.

He didn’t even bother to point the weapon at the Hodgson thing. Evidently, he, too, had reached the conclusion that the impact of stray buckshot against the walls of the chamber might energize the place and leave us trapped here longer.

The light show ended, and over us fell absolute darkness.

If I could have stilled my storming heart and held my breath, I might have been able to hear the whispery slippage of rubber boot soles over the glassy floor, but I was a one-man percussion section. I probably couldn’t have