Seize the Night

I protested: “Orson, the kids — we don’t even know if they’re alive!”

“They’re alive,” Roosevelt said.

“We don’t know.”

“We know.”

I turned to Sasha for support. “Are you as crazy as the rest of them?”

She said nothing, but the pity in her eyes was so terrible that I had to look away from her. She knew that Bobby and I were as tight as friends can get, that we were brothers in all but blood, as close as identical twins. She knew that a part of me was going to die when Bobby died, leaving an emptiness even she would never fill. She saw my vulnerability; she would have done anything, anything, anything, if she could have saved Bobby, but she could do nothing. In her helplessness, I saw my own helplessness, which I couldn’t bear to contemplate.

I lowered my gaze to the cat. For an instant I wanted to stomp Mungojerrie, crush the life out of him, as if he were responsible for our being here. I had asked Sasha if she was as crazy as the rest of them; in truth, I was the one who was kooking out, shattered by even the prospect of losing Bobby.

With a lurch, the elevator started down.

Bobby groaned.

I said, “Please, Bobby.”

“Kahuna,” he reminded me.

“You’re not Kahuna, you kak.”

His voice was thin, shaky: “Pia thinks I am.”

“Pia’s a dithering airhead.”

“Don’t dis my woman, bro.”

We stopped on the seventh and final level.

The doors opened on darkness. But it wasn’t that view of starry space, merely a lightless alcove.

With Roosevelt’s flashlight, I led the others out of the elevator, into a cold, dank vestibule.

Down here, the oscillating electronic hum was muffled, almost inaudible.

We put Bobby on his back, to the left of the elevator doors. We laid him on my jacket and Sasha’s, to insulate him from the concrete as much as possible.

Sasha fiddled in the control wiring and temporarily disabled the elevator, so it would be here when we returned. Of course, if time past phased completely out of time present, taking the elevator with it, we’d have to climb.

Bobby couldn’t climb. And we could never carry him up a service ladder, not in his condition.

Don’t think about it. Ghosts can’t hurt you if you don’t fear them, and bad things won’t happen if you don’t think them.

I was grasping at all the defenses of childhood.

Doogie emptied stuff out of the backpack. With Roosevelt’s help, he folded the empty bag and wedged it under Bobby’s hips, elevating his lower body at least slightly, though not enough.

When I put the flashlight at Bobby’s side, he said, “I’ll probably be way safer in the dark, bro. Light might draw attention.”

“Switch it off if you hear anything.”

“You switch it off before you leave,” he said. “I can’t.”

When I took his hand, I was shocked at the weakness of his grip. He literally didn’t have the strength to handle the flashlight.

There was no point leaving him a gun for self-defense.

I didn’t know what to say to him. I had never been seriously speechless with Bobby before. I seemed to have a mouth full of dirt, as if I were already lying in my own grave.

“Here,” Doogie said, handing me a pair of oversize goggles and an unusual flashlight. “Infrared goggles. Israeli military surplus. Infrared flashlight.”

“What for?”

“So they won’t see us coming.”

“Who?”

“Whoever’s got the kids and Orson.”

I stared at Doogie Sassman as if he were a Viking from Mars.

Bobby’s teeth chattered when he said, “The dude’s a ballroom dancer, too.”

A rumbling noise rose, like a freight train passing overhead, and the floor shook under us. Gradually, the sound diminished, and the shaking stopped.

“Better go,” Sasha said.

She, Doogie, and Roosevelt were wearing goggles, with the lenses against their foreheads rather than over their eyes.

Bobby had closed his eyes.

Frightened, I said, “Hey.”

“Hey,” he replied, looking at me again.

“Listen, if you die on me,” I said, “then you’re king of the assholes.”

He smiled. “Don’t worry. Wouldn’t want to take the title away from you, bro.”

“We’ll be back fast.”

“I’ll be here,” he assured me, but his voice was a whisper. “You promised me a beer.”

His eyes were inexpressibly kind.

There was so much to be said. None of it could be spoken. Even if we’d had plenty of time, none of what was in my heart could have been spoken.

I switched off his flashlight but left it at his side.

Darkness was usually my friend, but I hated this hungry, cold, demanding blackness.

The fancy eyewear featured a Velcro strap. My hands were so unsteady that I needed a moment to adjust the goggles to my head, and then I lowered the lenses over my eyes.

Doogie, Roosevelt, and Sasha had switched on their infrared flashlights. Without the goggles, I had not been able to see that wavelength of light, but now the vestibule was revealed in various shades and intensities of green.

I clicked the button on my flashlight and played the beam over Bobby Halloway.

Supine on the floor, arms at his sides, glowing green, he might already have been a ghost.

“Your shirt really pops in this weird light,” I said.

“Yeah?”

“Bitchin’.”

The freight-train rumble rose again, louder than before. The steel and concrete bones of the structure were grinding together.

The cat, with no need for goggles, led us out of the vestibule. I followed Roosevelt, Doogie, and Sasha, who might have been three green spirits haunting a catacomb.

The hardest thing I’d ever had to do in my life — harder than attending my mother’s funeral, harder than sitting by my father’s deathbed — was to leave Bobby alone.

25

From the vestibule, a sloping tunnel, ten feet in diameter, descended fifty feet. After reaching the bottom, we followed an entirely horizontal but wildly serpentine course, and with every turn, the architecture and engineering progressed from curious to strange to markedly alien.

The first passageway featured concrete walls, but every tunnel thereafter, while formed of reinforced concrete, appeared to be lined with metal. Even in the inadequately revelatory infrared light, I detected sufficient differences in the appearances of these curved surfaces to be confident that the type of metal changed from time to time. If I’d lifted the goggles and switched on an ordinary UV flashlight, I suspect that I would have seen steel,