Seize the Night

the longer I remained suspended in the gloom, the more I felt that I was not the spider, after all, not the diner but the dinner, and that a mutant tarantula as big as an elevator cab was ascending from the pit below, its sharp mandibles silently scissoring.

My dad was a professor of poetry, and throughout my childhood, he read to me from the entire history of verse, Homer to Dr. Seuss, Donald Justice to Ogden Nash, which makes him partly responsible for my baroque imagination. Blame the rest of it on that aforementioned snack of cheese, onion bread, and jalapenos.

Or blame it on the eerie atmosphere and the realities of Fort Wyvern, for here even a rational man might have legitimate reasons to entertain thoughts of giant ravenous spiders. The impossible was once made possible in this place. If the hideous arachnid in my mind’s eye was the fault of just my dad and my diet, then my imagination would have conjured not a simple spider but an image of the grinning Grinch climbing toward me.

As I hung motionless on the ladder, the grinning Grinch rapidly became an inexpressibly more terrifying image than any spider could have been, until another hard crash boomed through the building, shaking me back to reality. It was identical to the first crash, which had drawn me this far: a steel door slamming in a steel frame.

The sound had come from one of the two levels below me.

Daring the maw of spider or Grinch, I went down one more story, to the next opening in the shaft.

Even as I arrived at this second subterranean floor, I heard the grumbling voice, less distinct and even less comprehensible than it had been before. Unquestionably, however, it issued from this level rather than from the final floor, at the base of the pit.

I peered toward the top of the ladder. Orson must be gazing down, as blinded to the sight of me as I was to the sight of him, sniffing my reassuring scent. Reassuring and soon ripe: I was sweating, partly from exertion and partly from anticipation of the pending confrontation.

Clinging to the ladder with one hand, I felt for the shaft opening, found it, reached around the corner, and discovered a metal handgrip on the face of the jamb, which facilitated the transition from the ladder to the threshold. No two-by-six safety barricade had been bolted across the gap at this level, and I passed easily out of the elevator shaft into the subbasement.

Out of a distillate of darkness into a reduction of darkness.

Drawing the Glock, I sidled away from the open shaft, keeping my back against the wall. The concrete felt cold even through the insulating layers of my coat and cotton pullover.

I was overcome by a prideful little flush of accomplishment, a curious if short-lived pleasure to have made it this far without detection. The flush almost at once gave way to a chill as a more rational part of me demanded to know what the hell I was doing here.

I seemed insanely compelled, driven, to travel into ever darker — impossibly bleak — conditions, to the heart of all blackness, where the darkness was as condensed as matter had been the instant before the Big Bang spewed forth the universe, and once there, beyond all hope of light, to be crushed until my shrieking spirit was pressed from my mind and from my mortal flesh like juice from a grape.

Man, I needed a beer.

Hadn’t brought one. Couldn’t get one.

I tried taking slow deep breaths instead. Through my mouth, to minimize the noise. Just in case the hateful troll, armed with a chain saw, was creeping closer, one gnarled finger poised over the starter button.

I am my own worst enemy. This, more than any other trait, proves my fundamental humanity.

The air didn’t taste remotely as good as a cool Corona or a Heineken. It had a faintly bitter tang.

Next time I went chasing after bad guys, I’d have to bring a cooler full of ice and a six-pack.

For a while I conned myself with thoughts of all the eight-foot glassy waves waiting to be surfed, all the icy beers and the tacos and the lovemaking with Sasha that lay ahead of me, until the feeling of oppression and the claustrophobic panic gradually lifted.

I didn’t fully calm down until I was able to summon a mental picture of Sasha’s face. Her gray eyes as clear as rainwater. Her lush mahogany hair. The shape of her mouth curved by laughter. Her radiance.

Because I’d been cautious, the kidnapper was surely unaware that I was present, which meant he would have no reason to conduct his business without benefit of a lamp. Being unable to see his victim’s terror would diminish his twisted pleasure. The absolute darkness seemed proof to me that he was not dangerously close but in another room, shut off from here but nearby.

The absence of screams must mean that the child had not yet been touched. To this predator, the pleasure of hearing would be equal to the pleasure of seeing; in the cries of his victims, he would perceive music.

If I couldn’t detect the dimmest trace of the lamp by which he worked, he wouldn’t be able to see mine. I fished the flashlight from under my belt and switched it on.

I was in an ordinary elevator alcove. To the right and around a corner, I found a corridor that was quite long and perhaps eight feet wide, with an ash-gray ceramic-tile floor and poured-in-place concrete walls painted pale, glossy blue. It led in one direction: under the length of the warehouse that I had recently traversed at ground level.

Not much dust had filtered down to this depth, where the air was as still and as cool as that in a morgue. The floor was too clean to reveal footprints.

The fluorescent bulbs and diffusion panels hadn’t been pulled out of the ceiling. They didn’t pose any danger to me, because power was no longer supplied to any of these buildings.

On other nights, I had found that the government’s salvage operation had stripped away items of value from only limited areas of the base. Perhaps, in the middle of the process, the Department of Defense accountants had decided that the effort was more expensive than the liquidation value of the salvaged goods.

To my left, the corridor wall was unbroken. Along the right side lay rooms waiting behind a series of unpainted, stainless-steel doors without markings of any kind.

Even though I was currently unable to consult with my clever canine brother, I was capable of deducing on my own that the slamming of two of these doors must have produced the crashes that had drawn me down here. The corridor was so long that my flashlight couldn’t reveal the end of it. I wasn’t able to see how many rooms it served, whether fewer than six or more than sixty, but I suspected that the boy and his abductor were in one of them.

The flashlight was beginning to feel hot in my hand, but I knew the heat wasn’t real. The beam was not intense, and it was directed away from me; I was keeping my fingers well back from the bright lens. Nevertheless, I was so accustomed to avoiding light that, by holding this source of it too long, I began to feel something of what hapless Icarus must have felt when, flying too near the sun, he’d detected the stink of burning feathers.

Instead of a knob, the first door featured a lever, and instead of a keyhole, there was a slot for the insertion of a magnetic card. Either the electronic locks would have been disabled when the base was abandoned or they would have disengaged automatically when the power was shut off.

I put one ear to the door. There was no sound whatsoever from within.

Gingerly, I pressed down on the lever. At best I expected a thin, betraying skreek and at worst the “Hallelujah Chorus” from Handel’s Messiah. Instead, the lever worked as noiselessly as if it had been installed and oiled only yesterday.

With my body, I pushed open the door, holding the Glock in one hand and the flashlight in the other.

The room was large, about forty feet wide by eighty feet long. I could only guess at the precise dimensions, because my small flashlight barely reached the width of the space and could not penetrate the entire depth.

As far as I could see, no machinery or furniture or supplies had been left behind. Most likely, everything had been hauled off to the fog-wreathed mountains of Transylvania to re-equip Victor Frankenstein’s laboratory.

Strewn across the vast gray tile floor were hundreds of small skeletons.

For an instant, perhaps because of the frail-looking rib cages, I thought these were the remains of birds — which made no sense, as there is no feathered species with a preference for subterranean flight. As I played the flashlight over a few calcimine skulls and as I registered both the size of them and then the lack of wing structures, I realized that these must be the skeletons of rats. Hundreds of rats.

The majority of the skeletons lay alone, each separate from all the others, but in places there were also piles of bones, as though a score of hallucinating rodents had suffocated one another while competing for the same imaginary hunk of cheese.

Strangest of all were the patterns of skulls and bones that I noted here and there. These remains appeared to be curiously arranged — not as though the rats had perished at random dropping points,