Seize the Night

detected the sound of the Hodgson thing’s approach if it had been beating a bass drum.

When the luminous phenomenon in the walls had been extinguished, surely the phantasmagoric engine had shut down altogether, surely we had come all the way back to reality, surely the Hodgson thing had ceased to exist as abruptly as it had appeared, surely—

Again, Bobby struck the vault door with the shotgun. It didn’t toll this time. The tone was flat, less reverberant than before, as if he had slammed a hammer into a block of wood.

Maybe the door was changing, in the process of dematerializing, but it was still blocking the exit. We couldn’t risk trying to leave until we were certain we wouldn’t be passing through it while it was in a state of flux and possibly capable of taking some molecules from our bodies with it when it vanished for good.

I wondered what would happen if the Hodgson thing had a firm grip on me when its very substance began to transform. If, for even a moment, my hand had become one with the steel of the vault door, perhaps part of me would become one with the pressure suit and with the squirming entity inside the suit: a close, too-personal encounter that might destroy my sanity even if, miraculously, I survived with no physical damage.

Blackness pressed liquidly against my open eyes, as if I were deep underwater. Although I strained to catch the slightest sign of the approaching figure, I was as sightless here as I’d been in the corridor outside the room where I’d found the veve rats.

Inevitably, I recalled the kidnapper with the white-corn teeth, whose face I’d touched in the blinding dark.

As then, I now sensed a presence looming before me, and with more reason than I’d had previously.

After all that had happened in this Mystery Train terminal, this antechamber to Hell, I was no longer inclined to discount my fears as the product of a hyperactive imagination. This time I didn’t reach out to prove to myself that my darkest suspicions were groundless, because I knew that my fingertips would slide down the smooth curve of the Plexiglas faceplate.

“Chris!”

I jerked in surprise before I comprehended that the voice was Bobby’s.

“Your watch,” he said.

The radiant readouts were visible even in this soot-thick murk. The green numbers in those displays were changing, counting forward so rapidly that many hours were falling behind us in a fraction of a second. The letters in the day and month windows were passing in a blur of continuously changing abbreviations.

Time past was giving way to time present.

Hell, in truth I didn’t know exactly what was happening here. Maybe I didn’t understand this situation at all, and maybe a bend in the fabric of time had nothing to do with what we’d witnessed. Maybe we were entirely delusional because someone had spiked our beer with LSD. Maybe I was at home, snug in bed, asleep and dreaming. Maybe up was down, in was out, black was white. I knew only that whatever was happening now felt right, felt a lot better than would a sudden embrace from the thing in Hodgson’s suit.

If, in fact, we had been more than two years in the past, if we were now racing forward to the April night on which we had begun this bizarre adventure, I thought I ought to have felt some change within myself — a singing in my bones, a fever from the friction of the frantically passing hours, a sense of growing back to my real age, something. But a descent on a slow elevator would have had a greater physical effect than this express ride along the rails of time.

On my wristwatch, the month suddenly stopped at Apr. A second later, the day and date froze, and immediately thereafter, the time display registered a clear, steady 3:58 A.M.

We were home, minus Toto.

“Cool,” Bobby said.

“Sweet,” I agreed.

The big question was whether we had a fellow traveler with us, a wormy-faced companion in a pressure suit, like nothing Auntie Em or anyone else in Kansas had ever seen.

Logic argued that the Hodgson thing was lost in the past.

It might be delusional, however, to assume that logic applied within this singular situation.

I withdrew the flashlight from under my belt.

Didn’t want to switch it on.

Switched it on.

The Hodgson thing wasn’t face-to-face with me, as I had feared. A quick sweep of the light revealed that Bobby and I were alone — at least in that portion of the egg room into which the flashlight beam would reach.

The vault door was gone. I couldn’t see it either when I looked directly at the exit tunnel or when I relied on my peripheral vision.

Apparently, the room had become so sensitized to light that once again, generated by the single beam, faint luminous whorls began to pulse and wheel in the floor, walls, and ceiling.

I immediately switched off the flashlight and jammed it under my belt.

“Go,” I urged.

“Going.”

As darkness descended once more, I heard Bobby scrambling over the raised threshold, feeling his way forward through the short, five-foot-high tunnel.

“Clear,” he said.

Crouching, I followed him into what had once been the airlock.

I didn’t turn on the flashlight again until we were out of the airlock and in the corridor, where not one stray beam could find its way back to the glassy material that lined the egg room.

“Told you it would fade,” Bobby said.

“Why do I ever doubt you?”

Neither of us spoke another word all the way up through the three stripped subterranean floors of the facility, through the hangar, to the Jeep, which stood under a sky from which clotting clouds had purged all stars.

15

We drove southwest across Fort Wyvern, through Dead Town, past the warehouses where I had confronted the kidnapper, switching off the headlights as we reached the Santa Rosita, down the access ramp along the levee wall, onto the dry riverbed, obeying not a single stop sign along the way, ignoring every posted speed limit, with a loaded shotgun in a moving vehicle, a concealed weapon in my shoulder holster even though I possessed no license to carry, a cooler of beer between my feet, trespassing in flagrant violation of the federal government’s Defense Base Closure and Realignment Act, while holding numerous politically incorrect attitudes, of which a few might well be against the law. We were two Clydes without a Bonnie.

Bobby had so expanded the gap in the river-spanning fence that we drove through with room to spare. He parked immediately outside the grounds of the military base, and together we got out of the Jeep and lowered the flaps of chain-link, which he had rolled up and hooked to the top of the fence.

A close inspection would reveal the breach. From a distance greater than fifteen feet, however, the violation of the fence could not be seen.

We didn’t want to announce that we had trespassed. Without doubt we would soon be returning by this same route, and we would need easy access.

The tire tracks leading through the fence betrayed us, but there wasn’t a way to erase them quickly and effectively. We had to hope that the breeze would become a wind and obliterate our trail.

In a few hours, we had seen more than we could process, analyze, and apply to our problem — things that we ardently wished we’d never seen. We would have preferred to avoid another sortie onto the base, but until we found Jimmy Wing and Orson, duty required us to revisit this nest of nightmares.

We were leaving now because we were temporarily at a dead end, not sure where to continue the search,