Seize the Night

I had an impression of a large, looming object concealed in that montage. A towering and complex shape. Something black and gray, so well camouflaged in the gloom that the eye couldn’t quite seize upon the outline of it.

Bobby whispered, “Sasha, your light. Here.”

She directed it where he pointed, at the floor.

The light gleamed off one of the inch-thick steel angle plates anchored to the concrete, where heavy machinery had once been mounted. These prickled up from the floor at many points in the room.

I didn’t understand why Bobby had called our attention to this unremarkable object.

“Clean,” he said.

Then I understood. When we had been here last night — in fact, on every occasion that I had passed through this hangar — these angle plates and the bolts holding them down had been smeared with grease and caked with dirt. This one was shiny, clean, as though someone had recently done maintenance on it.

Holding the cat in one arm, Roosevelt moved his light across the floor, up the steel post, across the tracks above us.

“Everything’s cleaner,” Doogie murmured, and he meant not since last night but just since we had entered the hangar.

Though I’d taken my hand off the post, I knew the vibrations in the steel had increased, because I could hear that faint ringing coming from the entire double colonnade that flanked us and from the tracks that the columns supported.

I looked toward the far, dark end of the building, and I swore that something immense was moving in the gloom.

“Bro!” Bobby said.

I glanced at him.

He was gaping at his wristwatch.

I checked mine and saw the digital readouts racing backward.

Sudden fear, like cold rain, washed through me.

A strange muddy red light rose throughout the hangar, evenly distributed, with no apparent source, as if the very molecules of the air had become radiant. Perhaps it was a dangerous light to an XPer like me, but this seemed the least of my troubles at the moment. The red air shimmered, and though the darkness retreated across the entire building, visibility hardly improved. This odd light cloaked as much as it revealed, and I felt almost as if I were underwater, in a drowned world…in water tinted with blood.

The flashlight beams were no longer effective. The light that they produced seemed to be trapped behind the lenses, pooling there, rapidly growing brighter and brighter, but unable to pass beyond the glass and penetrate the red air.

Here and there beyond the colonnades, dark forms began to quiver into existence where there had been nothing but bare floor. Machines of some kind. They looked real and yet not real, like objects in a mirage. Phantom machines at the moment…but becoming real.

The vibrations were getting louder, and their tone was changing, growing deeper, more ominous. A rumbling.

At the west end of the room, where there had been a troubling darkness, there was now a crane atop the tracks, and hanging from the boom was a massive… something. An engine, perhaps.

Though I could see the shape of the crane in the dire red light, as well as the object that it was lifting, I could also see through them, as if they were made of glass.

In the low rumbling that had grown out of the faint high-pitched ringing in the steel, I recognized the sound of train wheels, steel wheels revolving, grinding along steel tracks.

The crane would have steel wheels. Guide wheels above the track, upstop wheels below to lock it to the rails.

“…out of the way,” Bobby said, and when I looked at him, he was moving, as if in slo-mo, out from beneath the tracks, sliding around a support post with his back pressed to it.

Roosevelt, as wide-eyed as the cat he held, was on the move.

The crane was more solid than it had been a moment ago, less transparent. The big engine — or whatever the crane was transporting — hung from the end of the boom, below the tracks; this payload was the size of a compact car, and it was going to sweep through the space where we were standing as the crane rolled past overhead.

And here it came, moving faster than such a massive piece of equipment could possibly move, because it wasn’t really physically coming toward us; rather, I think that time was running backward to the moment when we and this equipment would be occupying the same space at the same instant. Hell, it didn’t matter whether it was the crane moving or time moving, because either way the effect would be the same: Two bodies can’t occupy the same place at the same time. If they tried, either there would be a fierce release of nuclear energy in a blast heard at least as far away as Cleveland, or one of the competing bodies — me or the car-size object dangling from the crane — would cease to exist.

Although I started to move, grabbing at Sasha to pull her with me, I knew that we had no hope of getting out of harm’s way in time.

Time.

As we reeled toward a moment in the past when the hangar had been filled with functional equipment, just as the oncoming crane appeared about to click into total reality…the temperature suddenly dropped. The muddy red light faded. The rumble of big steel wheels became a higher-pitched ringing.

I expected the crane to retreat, to roll back toward the west end of the building as it grew less substantial. When I looked up, however, it was passing over us, a shimmering mirage of a crane, and the burden that it carried, which was once more as transparent as glass, hit Sasha, then hit me.

Hit isn’t the correct word. I don’t really know what it did to me. The ghost crane swept past overhead, and the ghost payload enveloped me, passed through me, and vanished on the other side of me. A cold wind briefly shook me. But it didn’t even stir my hair. It was entirely internal, an icy breath whistling between my very cells, playing my bones as if they were flutes. For an instant I thought it would blow apart the bonds among the molecules of which I’m composed, dispersing me as though I’d never been anything but dust.

The last of the red light vanished, and the pent-up beams sprang out of the flashlights.

I was still alive, glued together both physically and mentally.

Sasha gasped: “Raw!”

“Killer,” I agreed.

Shaken, she leaned against one of the track-support columns.

Doogie had been standing no more than six feet behind me. He had watched the ghost payload pass through us and vanish before it reached him.

“Time to go home?” he wondered only half jokingly.

“Need a glass of warm milk?”

“And six Prozac.”

“Welcome to the haunted laboratory,” I said.

Joining us, Bobby said, “Whatever was going on in the egg room last night, it’s affecting the entire building now.”

“Because of us?” I wondered.

“We didn’t build the place, bro.”

“But did we start it up last night, by energizing it?”

“I don’t think, just because we used two flashlights, we’re major villains here.”

Roosevelt said, “We’ve got to move fast. The whole place is…coming apart.”

“Is that what Mungojerrie thinks?” Sasha asked.

In ordinary times, Roosevelt Frost could fix you with a solemn look that any undertaker would envy. With one eye still full of dark amazement at what he had just seen, and with the other eye swollen half shut and shot through with blood, he made me think I’d better pack my bags and get ready to meet that glory-bound train.

He said, “It’s not what Mr. Mungojerrie thinks. It’s what he knows. Everything