Seize the Night

here is going to… come apart. Soon.”

“Then let’s go down and find the kids and Orson.”

Roosevelt nodded. “Let’s go down.”

24

In the southwest corner of the hangar, the empty elevator shaft was as it had been the previous night. But the stainless-steel jamb and threshold at the stairhead doorway — overlooked by salvagers — were free of grease and dust, which they had not been at any time since I first explored this structure, nearly a year earlier. In the beam from Sasha’s flashlight, the first several steps were not covered in dust any longer, and the dead pill bugs were gone.

Either a kindly gnome was preceding us, making the world more pleasing to the eye, or the phenomena that Bobby and I had witnessed in the egg room, one night before, were leaching beyond the walls of that mysterious chamber. My money was not on the gnome.

Mungojerrie stood on the second step, peering down the concrete stairwell, sniffing the air, ears pricked. Then he descended.

Sasha followed the cat.

The stairs were wide enough for two people to walk abreast, with room to spare, and I stayed at Sasha’s side, relieved to be sharing the point-position risk with her. Roosevelt followed, then Doogie with the Uzi. Bobby was our tail gunner, keeping his back to one wall, crabbing sideways down the stairs, to make sure no one crept in behind us.

Aside from being suspiciously clean, the first flight of steps was as it had been on my previous visit. Bare concrete on all sides. Evenly spaced core holes in the ceiling, which had once been the end points of electrical chaseways. Painted iron pipe attached to one wall, as a handrail. The air was cold, thick, redolent with the scent of lime that leached from the concrete.

When we reached the landing and turned toward the second flight, I put one hand on Sasha’s arm, halting her, and to our feline scout I whispered, “Whoa, cat.”

Mungojerrie halted four steps into the next flight and, with an expectant expression, looked up at us.

The ceiling ahead was fitted with fluorescent fixtures. Because these lights weren’t switched on, they posed no danger to me.

But they hadn’t been here before. They had been torn out and carted away when Fort Wyvern shut down. In fact, this particular structure might have been scoured to the bare concrete long before the base was closed, when the Mystery Train ran off the tracks and scared its designers into the realization that their project had been pursued with a truly loco motive.

Time past and time present existed here simultaneously, and our future was here, too, though we could not see it. All time, said the poet T. S. Eliot, is eternally present, leading inexorably to an end that we believe results from our actions but over which our control is mere illusion.

At the moment, that bit of Eliot was too bleak for me. While I studied the fluorescent lights, trying to imagine what might wait ahead of us, I mentally recited the initial couplet of the first-ever poetry about Winnie- the-Pooh—“A bear, however hard he tries / Grows tubby without exercise”—but A. A. Milne failed to drive Eliot from my mind.

We could no more retreat from the dangers below, from this eerie confusion of past and present, than I could return to my childhood. Nevertheless, how lovely it would be to crawl under the covers with my own Pooh and Tigger, and pretend that the three of us would be friends, still, when I was a hundred and Pooh was ninety- nine.

“Okay,” I told Mungojerrie, and we continued our descent.

When we reached the next landing, which was at the doorway to the first of the three subterranean levels, Bobby whispered, “Bro.”

I looked back. The fluorescent-light fixtures above the steps behind us had vanished. The concrete ceiling featured only cored holes from which the fixtures and the wiring had been stripped.

Time present was again more present than time past, at least for the moment.

Scowling, Doogie murmured, “Give me Colombia anytime.”

“Or Calcutta,” Sasha said.

On behalf of Mungojerrie, Roosevelt said, “Got to hurry. Going to be blood if we don’t hurry.”

Led by the fearless cat, we slowly descended four more flights, to the third and final level beneath the hangar.

We found no additional indications of hobgoblins or bugaboos until we reached the bottom of the stairwell. As Mungojerrie was about to lead us into the outer corridor that encircles this entire oval-shaped level of the building, the muddy red light that we had first seen on the ground floor of the hangar pulsed beyond the doorway. It lasted only an instant and then was replaced by darkness.

A general dismay rose from our little group, mostly expressed in whispered expletives, and the cat hissed.

Other voices echoed from somewhere in this sub-subbasement, deep and distorted. They were like the voices on a tape played at too slow a speed.

Sasha and Roosevelt switched off their flashlights, leaving us in gloom.

Beyond the doorway, the bloody glow pulsed again, and then several more times, like the revolving emergency beacon on a police cruiser. Each pulse was longer than the one before it, until the darkness in the hallway retreated entirely and the eerie luminosity finally held fast.

The voices were growing louder. They were still distorted, but almost intelligible.

Curiously, not one scintilla of the malign red light in the corridor penetrated to the space at the bottom of the stairs, where we huddled together. The doorway appeared to be a portal between two realities: utter darkness on this side, the red world on the other side. The line of bloody light along the floor, at the threshold, was as sharp as a knife edge.

As in the hangar upstairs, this radiance brightened the space it filled but did little to illuminate what it touched: a murky light, alive with phantom shapes and movement that could be detected only from the corner of the eye, creating more mysteries than it resolved.

Three tall figures passed the doorway, darker maroon shapes in the red light, perhaps men but possibly something even worse. As these individuals crossed our line of sight, the voices grew louder and less distorted, then faded as the figures moved out of view along the hall.

Mungojerrie padded through the doorway.

I expected him to flare as if sizzled by a death ray, leaving no trace behind except the stink of scorched fur. Instead, he became a small maroon shape, elongated, distorted, not easily identifiable as a cat even though you could tell that he had four feet, a tail, and attitude.

The radiance in the hall began to pulse, now darker than blood, now red-pink, and with each cycle from dark to bright, a throbbing electronic hum swelled through the building, low and ominous. When I touched the concrete wall, it was vibrating faintly, as the steel post had vibrated in the hangar.

Abruptly, the corridor light flashed from red to white. The pulsing stopped. We were looking through the doorway at a hall blazingly revealed under fluorescent ceiling panels.

Instantaneously with the change of light, my ears popped, as if from a sudden decrease in air pressure, and a warm draft gusted into the stairwell, bringing with it a trace of the crisp ozone scent that lingers on a rainy night in the wake of lightning.

Mr. Mungojerrie was in the corridor, no longer a maroon blur, gazing at something off to the right. He was standing not on bare concrete but on clean white ceramic floor tiles that had not been there before.

I peered up the dark stairs behind us, which appeared to be firmly anchored in our time, in the present rather than the past. The building was not phasing entirely in and out of the past; the phenomenon occurred in a crazy-quilt pattern.

I was tempted to sprint up the steps as fast as I could, into the hangar and from there into the night, but we