Seize the Night

but as though they had painstakingly positioned themselves with an intricacy similar to the elaborate lines in a Haitian priest’s voodoo veves.

I know all about veves because my friend Bobby Halloway once dated an awesomely beautiful surfer, Holly Keene, who was into voodoo. The relationship didn’t last.

A veve is a design that represents the figure and power of an astral force. The voodoo priest prepares five large copper bowls, each containing a different substance: white flour, cornmeal, red brick powder, powdered charcoal, and powdered tannis root. He makes the sacred designs on the floor with these substances, allowing each to dribble in a measured flow from his cupped hand. He must be able to draw hundreds of complex veves freehand, from memory. For even the least ambitious ritual, several veves are needed to force the attention of the gods to the Oumphor, the temple, where the rites are conducted.

Holly Keene was a practitioner of good magic, a self-proclaimed Hougnon, rather than a black-magic Bocor. She said it was maximum uncool to create zombies by reanimating the dead, cast curses that transformed her enemies’ beating hearts into rotting chicken heads, and stuff like that — even though, as she made clear, she could do those things by renouncing her Hougnon oath and getting a Bocor union card. She was basically a sweet person, if a little odd, and the only time she made me uneasy was when, with passionate advocacy, she declared that the greatest rock-’n’-roll band of all time was the Partridge Family.

Anyway, the rat bones. They must have been here a long time, because no flesh adhered to them — as far as I could see or cared to look. Some were white; others were stained yellow or rust red, or even black.

Except for a few scattered gray puffballs of hair, the rats’ pelts surprisingly had not survived decomposition. This led me to wonder briefly if the creatures’ bodies had been rendered elsewhere, their boiled bones later arranged here by someone with more sinister motives than those of Holly Keene, bikinied Bocor.

Then, under many of the skeletons, I saw that the tile floor was stained. This vile-looking residue appeared to be gummy but must have been brittle with age, because otherwise it would have lent an appalling odor to the cool dry air.

In a deeply hidden facility on these grounds, experiments in genetic engineering had been conducted — perhaps were still being conducted — with catastrophic results. Rats are widely used in medical research. I had no proof but plenty of reason to suppose that these rodents had been the subjects of one of those experiments, though I couldn’t imagine how they had wound up here, like this.

The mystery of the veve rats was only one more of Fort Wyvern’s virtually infinite supply of enigmas, and it had nothing to do with the more urgent mystery of Jimmy Wing’s disappearance. At least I hoped it didn’t. God forbid that I should open another door, farther along the hall, and discover the ritualistically arranged skeletons of five-year-old boys.

I stepped backward, out of the rodents’ equivalent of the legendary elephants’ graveyard, easing the door shut with a click so preternaturally soft that it could have been heard only by a cat on methamphetamines.

A quick arc of the flashlight, hotter than ever in my hand, revealed that the corridor was still deserted.

I moved to the next door. Stainless steel. Unmarked. Lever handle. Identical to the previous one.

Beyond was a room the size of the first, sans rat skeletons. The tile floor and painted walls gleamed as if they had been spit-polished.

I was relieved by the sight of the bare floor.

As I backed out of the second room and silently eased the door shut, the troll voice rose once more, nearer than before but still too muffled to be understood. The corridor remained deserted both ahead and behind me.

For a moment the voice grew louder and seemed to draw closer, as though the speaker was approaching a door, about to step into the hallway.

I thumbed off the flashlight.

The claustrophobic darkness closed around me again, as soft as Death’s hooded robe and with pockets almost as deep.

The voice continued grumbling for several seconds — but then abruptly broke off, seemingly in mid- sentence.

I didn’t hear a door open or any sound to indicate that the kidnapper had entered the hallway. Besides, light would betray him when at last he came. I was still the sole presence here — but instinct warned me that I would soon have company.

I was close to the wall, facing away from the direction I’d come, toward unexplored realms.

The extinguished flashlight was now cool in my hand, but the pistol felt hot.

The longer the quiet lasted, the more it seemed bottomless. Soon it was an abyss into which I imagined myself drifting down, down, like a deep-sea diver festooned with lead weights.

I listened so hard that I was half convinced I could feel the fine hairs vibrating in my ear canals. Yet I could hear only one sound, and it was strictly internal: the thick, liquid thud of my own heartbeat, faster than normal but not racing.

As time passed without a noise or a sudden wedge of light from an opening door farther along the corridor, the likelihood grew that in spite of what instinct told me, the troll voice had been receding rather than approaching. If the kidnapper and the boy were on the move and heading away from me, I might lose their trail if I didn’t stay close behind them.

I was about to switch on the flashlight again, when a shiver of superstitious dread passed through me. If I had been in a cemetery, I would have seen a ghost skating on the moon-iced grass between tombstones. If I had been in the Northwest woods, I would have seen Big Foot shagging among the trees. If I had been in front of any garage door, I would have seen the face of Jesus or the Holy Virgin in a weather stain, warning of the Apocalypse. I was in the bowels of Wyvern, however, and unable to see any damn thing at all, so I could only feel, and what I felt was a presence, an aura, like a pressure, hovering, looming, what a medium or a psychic would call an entity, a spiritual force that could not be denied, chilling my blood and marrow.

I was in face-to-face confrontation with it. My nose was only inches from its nose, assuming it had a nose. I couldn’t smell its breath, which was a good thing, as its breath must smell like rotting meat, burning sulfur, and swine manure.

Obviously, my nuclear imagination was nearing meltdown.

I told myself that this was no more real than my feverish vision of a gigantic spider in the elevator shaft.

Bobby Halloway says my imagination is a three-hundred-ring circus. Currently, I was in ring two hundred and ninety-nine, with elephants dancing and clowns cartwheeling and tigers leaping through rings of fire. The time had come to step back, leave the main tent, go buy some popcorn and a Coke, bliss out, cool down.

I was ashamed to realize that I didn’t have the guts to switch on the flashlight. I was constrained by a fear of what might be eye-to-eye with me.

Though part of me wanted to believe I was suffering a runaway chain reaction of imagination, and though I probably was just jerking my own chain, there was good reason to be afraid. Those aforementioned experiments in genetic engineering — some designed by my mother, who had been a theoretical geneticist — had ultimately not been controllable. In spite of a high degree of biological security, a designer strain of retrovirus had gotten out of the lab. Thanks to the remarkable talents of this new bug, the residents of Moonlight Bay — and, to a lesser extent, people and animals in the wider world beyond — have been…changing.

So far, the changes have been disturbing, sometimes terrifying, but, with a few notable exceptions, they have been subde enough that authorities have successfully concealed the truth about the catastrophe. Even in Moonlight Bay, at most a few hundred people know what is happening. I myself learned only a month before this April night; upon the death of my father, who knew all the dreadful details, and who revealed things to me that I now wish I didn’t know. The rest of the townspeople live in happy ignorance, but they may not be out of the loop much longer, because the mutations may not remain subtle.

This was the thought that had paralyzed me when, if instinct could be trusted, I found myself facing some presence in the blind-dark passageway.