Seize the Night

“The way to where?”

“You’ll see. We’re all going soon,” he said with disconcerting assurance. “The train is already pulling out of the station.”

Wendy was the fourth and last child through the gate valve at the entrance to the chamber. Orson followed her, still tottering a little.

Doogie motioned urgently to me, and I rose to my feet.

Randolph’s pale green eye fixed on me, and he gave me a bloody, broken-toothed, eerily affectionate smile. “Time past, time present, time future, but most important…time sideways. Sideways is the only place I ever wanted to go, and your mother gave me the chance.”

“But where is sideways?” I asked with considerable frustration as the building shook around us.

“My destiny,” he said enigmatically.

Sasha cried out, and her voice was so full of alarm that my heart jolted, raced.

Doogie looked down the tunnel, aghast, and then shouted, “Chris! Grab one of those chairs!”

As I snatched up one of the collapsed folding chairs and then my shotgun, John Joseph Randolph said, “Stations on a track, out there sideways in time, like we always knew, always knew but didn’t want to believe.”

I had been right when I’d suspected that truths were hidden in his strange statements, and I wanted to hear him out and understand, but staying there any longer would have been suicidal.

As I joined Doogie, the half-closed gate valve, which was the door of the chamber, began to slide all the way shut.

Cursing, Doogie gripped the valve and put all his muscle against it, the arteries in his neck bulging from the effort, slowly forcing the steel disc back into the wall.

“Go!” Doogie said.

Because I’m the kind of guy who knows good advice when he hears it, I squeezed past the mambo king and sprinted along the sixteen-foot section of tunnel between the two enormous valves.

Above a thundering and a windlike shrieking worthy of the final storm on doomsday, I could hear John Joseph Randolph shouting, not with terror but with joy, with passionate conviction: “I believe! I believe!”

Sasha, the kids, Mungojerrie, and Orson had already passed through to the next section of tunnel beyond the outer gateway.

Roosevelt was wedged into the breach, to prevent the valve from sealing Doogie and me in here. I could hear the motor grinding in the wall, trying to drive the steel disc into the fully closed position.

I jammed the metal folding chair into the gap, above Roosevelt’s head, bracing the valve open.

“Thanks, son,” he said.

I followed Roosevelt through the gate.

The others were waiting beyond, with an ordinary flashlight. Sasha looked far more beautiful when she wasn’t green.

The gap in the gateway was a tight fit for the sass man, but he popped through, too, and then he wrenched the chair out of the gap, because we were likely to need it again.

We passed the Mystery Train patch and the image of the crow. No draft currently moved through this tunnel. None of the newspaper clippings ahead of us stirred at all. And yet the large sheet of art paper, which featured the graphite rubbing of the carved-stone bird, was fluttering as if a gale-force wind were tearing at it. The loose ends of the paper curled and flapped vigorously. The crow seemed to be pulling angrily at the pieces of tape that fixed it to the curved steel surface, determined to break out of the paper as, according to Randolph, it had once arisen out of rock.

Maybe I was hallucinating this business with the crow, sure, and maybe I was born to be a snake charmer, but I wasn’t going to hang around to see if a real bird morphed out of the paper and took flight, any more than I was going to lie down in a nest of cobras and hum show tunes to entertain them.

On a hunch that I might want proof of what I’d seen down here, I tore a few newspaper clippings from the wall and stuffed them in my pockets.

With the faux crow flapping furiously against the wall behind us, we hurried on, keeping our group together, doing what any sane person would do when the world was coming apart around him and death loomed at every side: We followed the cat.

I tried not to think about Bobby. The first problem was just getting to him. If we got to him, everything would be okay. He would be waiting for us — cold and sore and weak, but waiting by the elevator where we had left him — and he would remind me of my promise by saying, Carpe cerevisi, bro.

The faint iodine odor that had been with us all the way through the labyrinth was sharper now. Threaded through it were whiffs of charcoal, sulfur, rotting roses, and an indescribable, bitter scent unlike anything I had smelled before.

If the time-shifting phenomena were spreading down here into the deepest realms of the structure, we were at greater risk than at any moment since we had entered the hangar. The worst possibility wasn’t that our escape would be delayed or even cut off by the motor-driven valves. Worse, if the wrong moment of the past intersected with the present, as had happened more than once upstairs, we might suddenly be inundated by whatever oceans of liquid or toxic gas had pumped through these tubes, whereupon we would either drown or suffocate in poisonous fumes.

26

One cat, four kids, one dog, one deejay-songwriter, one animal communicator, one Viking, and the poster child for Armageddon — that’s me — ran, crawled, squirmed, ran, fell, got up, ran some more, along the dry beds of steel rivers, brass rivers, copper creeks, one white light flaring off curved walls, brightly spiraling, feathery darkness whirling like wings everywhere that the light didn’t reach, with the rumble of invisible trains all around, and a shrill shrieking like the whistles of locomotives, the iodine smell now chokingly heavy, but now so faint it seemed the previous density had been imagined, currents of the past washing in like a mushy tide, then ebbing out of the present. Terrified by a periodic sound of rushing water, water or something worse, we came at last to the sloping concrete tunnel, and then into the alcove by the elevator, where Bobby lay as we had left him, still alive.

While Doogie reconnected the wires in the elevator control panel, and while Roosevelt, carrying Mungojerrie, shepherded the kids into the cab, Sasha, Orson, and I gathered around Bobby.

He looked like Death on a bad hair day.

I said, “Lookin’ good.”

Bobby spoke to Orson in a voice so weak that it barely carried over the sounds of clashing times, clashing worlds, which I guess is what we were hearing. “Hey, fur face.”

Orson nuzzled Bobby’s neck, sniffed his wound, then looked worriedly at me.

“You did it, XP Man,” Bobby said.

“It was more a Fantastic Five caper than a one-superhero gig,” I demurred.

“You got back in time to make your midnight show,” Bobby told Sasha, and I had the sickening feeling that, in his way, he was saying goodbye to us.

“Radio is my life,” she said.

The building shook, the train rumble became a roar, and concrete dust sifted down from the ceiling.

Sasha said, “We have to get you in the elevator.”

But Bobby looked at me and said, “Hold my hand, bro.”

I gripped his hand. It was ice.

Pain cramped his face, and then he said, “I screwed up.”

“You never.”

“Wet my pants,” he said shakily.

The cold seemed to come out of his hand and up my arm, coiling in my heart. “Nothing wrong with that, bro. Urinophoria. You’ve done it before.”