Seize the Night

He shouted. His words weren’t clear, but he wasn’t suggesting a tour and complimentary lunch in the cafeteria.

Anyway, he wasn’t calling to us but to the pair of phantasms strolling toward the turn in the corridor. They spun around and gaped at us as though they were stunned sailors gazing at the ghost ship Marie Celeste gliding silently past in a light fog.

We had spooked them as much as they had spooked us.

The one in the suit evidently wasn’t merely a well-tailored scientist or a project bureaucrat, and certainly not a Jehovah’s Witness pushing Watchtower magazine in a tough territory, because he drew a handgun from a holster under his jacket.

I reminded myself that ghosts couldn’t hurt us unless we gave them power by feeding them with our fear — and then I wondered if this rule applied to haunts packing heat. I wished that I could remember the name of the comic book in which I’d chanced upon this wisdom, because if the information had been in Tales from the Crypt, it might be true, but if it was from an issue of Donald Duck adventures, then I was screwed.

Instead of opening fire on us, the armed apparition pushed past his two phantom friends and disappeared through the door that the one in jeans had opened.

He was probably running for a telephone, to call security. We were about to be crunched, swept up, bagged, and put out for garbage collection.

Around us, the corridor rippled, and things changed.

The white ceramic floor tiles quickly faded beneath us, leaving us standing on bare concrete, although I felt nothing move underfoot. Here and there along the hall, patches of tile remained, the edges not sharply defined, feathering into the concrete, as though these were widely scattered puddles of time past that hadn’t yet evaporated from the floor of time present.

The rooms opening along the inner wall of the corridor no longer had doors.

Shadows swarmed as the fluorescent panels began to disappear from the ceiling. Yet, in an irregular pattern, a few fixtures remained, brightening widely separated sections of the corridor.

I took off my sunglasses and pocketed them as the grease-pencil scheduling chart dissolved from the wall. The bulletin board still hung unchanged.

One of the wheeled carts faded away before my eyes. The other cart remained, though a few of the odd instruments racked on it were becoming transparent.

The ghost in blue jeans and the ghost in a lab coat really looked like spirits now, mere ectoplasmic entities that had congealed out of a white mist. They started hesitantly toward us, then began to run, perhaps because we were fading from their view just as they were disappearing from ours. They covered only half the ground between us before they vanished.

The suit with the gun returned to the hallway from the office, having raved to security about Vikings in jumpsuits and invading cats, but he was now the weakest of revenants, a shimmering wraith. As he raised his weapon, he departed time present without a trace.

The throbbing electronic noise was less than half as loud as it had been at full power, but like some of the lights and floor tiles, it didn’t fade altogether.

None of us was relieved by this reprieve. Instead, as the past receded into the past where it belonged, we were seized by a greater urgency.

Mr. Mungojerrie was dead right: This place was coming apart. The residual effect of the Mystery Train was gathering power, feeding on itself, extending beyond the egg room, rapidly seeping throughout the structure. The ultimate effect was unknowable but sure to be catastrophic.

I could hear a clock ticking. This wasn’t the timepiece in Captain Hook’s omnivorous crocodile, either, but the reliable clock of instinct telling me that we were on a short countdown to destruction.

With the ghosts gone, the cat sprang into action, padding to the nearby elevator shaft.

“Down,” Roosevelt translated. “Mungojerrie says we have to go farther down.”

“There’s nothing below this floor,” I said, as we all gathered at the elevator. “We’re on the lowest level.”

The cat fixed its luminous green eyes on me, and Roosevelt said, “No, there’re three levels beneath this one. They required an even higher security clearance than these floors, so they were concealed.”

During my explorations, I’d never thought to look into the shaft to see if it served hidden realms that couldn’t be accessed by the stairs.

Roosevelt said, “The lower levels can be approached…from some other building on the base, through a tunnel. Or by this elevator. The steps don’t go down as far.”

This development posed a problem, because the elevator shaft wasn’t empty. We couldn’t simply climb down the service ladder and go where Mungojerrie directed. Like the scattered floor tiles, like the few remaining fluorescent panels, and like the softer but still ominous electronic hum that throbbed through the building, the past maintained tenacious control of the elevator. A pair of stainless-steel sliding doors covered the shaft, and most likely a cab waited beyond them.

“We’ll be quashed if we hang around here,” Bobby predicted, reaching out to press the elevator call button.

“Wait!” I cautioned, stopping his hand before he could do the deed.

Doogie said, “Bobster’s right, Chris. Sometimes fortune favors the foolhardy.”

I shook my head. “What if we get in the elevator, and when the doors close, the damn thing just totally vanishes under us like the floor tiles did?”

“Then we fall to the bottom of the shaft,” Sasha guessed, but that prospect didn’t seem to give her pause.

“Some of us might break our ankles,” Doogie predicted. “Not all of us, necessarily. It’s probably only about forty feet or so, a mean drop but survivable.”

Bobby, a Road Runner cartoon freak, said, “Bro, we could have ourselves a full-on Wile E. Coyote moment.”

“We’ve got to move,” Roosevelt warned, and Mungojerrie scratched impatiently at the stainless-steel doors, which remained stubbornly solid.

Bobby pressed the call button.

The elevator whined toward us. With the oscillating electronic hum continuing to pulse through the building, I couldn’t determine whether the cab was descending or ascending.

The corridor rippled.

The floor tiles began to reappear under my feet.

The elevator doors slowly, slowly slid open.

Fluorescent panels reappeared on the corridor ceiling, and I narrowed my eyes against the glare.

The cab was full of muddy red light, which probably meant the interior of the shaft occupied a different point in time from the place — or places — that we occupied. There were passengers, a lot of them.

We stepped back from the door, expecting the crowd in the elevator to give us trouble.

In the corridor, the throbbing sound grew louder.

I could discern several blurry, distorted, maroon figures inside the cab, but I couldn’t see who or what they were.

A gunshot cracked, then another.

We were under fire not from the elevator but from the end of the corridor where, earlier, the sonofabitch in the suit had drawn down on us with a handgun.

Bobby took a bullet. Something peppered my face. Bobby rocked backward, the shotgun flying out of his hands. He was still dropping as if in slow motion when I realized that hot blood had sprayed my face. Bobby’s blood. Jesus, God. Even as I was swiveling toward the source of the gunfire, I discharged my shotgun and immediately chambered another shell.

Instead of the guy in the dark suit, there were two guards we had never seen before. Uniforms, but not army. No service that I recognized. Project cops. Mystery Train security. Too far away to be anything other than annoyed by my shotgun fire.