Seize the Night

“I’m not wearing neoprene.”

“So it’s a style issue, huh?”

He laughed, but the tattered laughter frayed into choking.

Doogie announced, “Elevator’s ready.”

“Let’s move you,” Sasha suggested, as tiny chips of concrete joined the fall of dust.

“Never thought I’d die so inelegantly,” Bobby said, his hand tightening on mine.

“You’re not dying,” I assured him.

“Love you…bro.”

“Love you,” I said, and the words were like a key that locked my throat as tight as a vault.

“Total wipeout,” he said, his voice fading until the final syllable was inaudible.

His eyes fixed on something far beyond us, and his hand went slack in mine.

I felt a whole great slab of my heart slide away, like the shaling face of a cliff, down into a hateful darkness.

Sasha put her fingertips to his throat, feeling for a pulse in his carotid artery. “Oh, God.”

“Gotta get out of here now,” Doogie insisted.

In a voice so thick I didn’t recognize it as my own, I said to Sasha, “Come on, let’s get him in the elevator.”

“He’s gone.”

“Help me get him in the elevator.”

“Chris, honey, he’s gone.”

“We’re taking him with us,” I said.

“Snowman—”

“We’re taking him with us!”

“Think of the kids. They—”

I was desperate and crazy, crazy-desperate, a dark whirlpool of grief churning in my mind, sucking away all reason, but I was not going to leave him there. I would die with him, beside him, rather than leave him there.

I grabbed him by the shoulders and started dragging him into the elevator, aware that I was probably frightening the kids, who must already be scared shitless, no matter how contemporary and cool and tough they were. I couldn’t expect them to clap their hands with glee at the prospect of taking an elevator ride up from Hell with a corpse for company, and I didn’t blame them, but that was the way it had to be.

When they saw that I wasn’t going anydamnwhere without Bobby Halloway, Sasha and Doogie helped me drag him into the elevator.

The rumbling, the banshee shrieking, the snap-crackle-pop that seemed to indicate imminent structural implosion all faded suddenly, and the drizzle of concrete chips stopped, but I knew this had to be temporary. We were in the eye of the time hurricane, and worse was coming.

Just as we got Bobby inside, the elevator doors started to close, and Orson slipped in with so little time to spare that he almost caught his tail.

“What the hell?” Doogie said. “I didn’t press a button.”

“Somebody called it, someone upstairs,” Sasha said.

The elevator motor whined, and the cab rose.

Already crazy-desperate, I became crazier when I realized that my hands were slick with Bobby’s blood, and more desperate as I was overcome by the idea that there was something I could do to change all this. The past and the present are present in the future, and the future is contained in the past, as T. S. Eliot wrote; therefore, all time is unredeemable, and what will be will be. What might have been — that’s an illusion, because the only thing that could have happened is what does happen, and there’s not anything we can do to change it, because we’re doomed by destiny, fucked by fate, though Mr. Eliot hadn’t put it in exactly those words. On the other hand, Winnie-the-Pooh, much less of a broody type than Mr. Eliot, believed in the possibility of all things, which might be because he was only a stuffed bear with a head full of nothing, but it also might be the case that Mr. Pooh was, in fact, a Zen master who knew as much about the meaning of life as did Mr. Eliot. The elevator rose — we were at B-5—and Bobby lay dead on the floor, and my hands were slick with blood, and there was nevertheless hope in my heart, which I didn’t understand at all, but as I tried to see clearly the why of my hope, I reasoned that the answer was in combining Mr. Eliot’s insights and those of Mr. Pooh. As we reached B-4, I glanced down at Orson, whom I’d thought was dead but was now alive again, resuscitated just as Tinker Bell had been after she’d drunk the cup of poison to save Peter Pan from the murderous schemes of the homicidal Hook. I was beyond crazy, caught in a wave of totally macking lunacy, sick with terror, sicker with despair, sickest with hope, and I could not stop thinking about good Tink being saved by sheer belief, by all the dreaming kids in the world clapping their small hands to proclaim their belief in fairies. Subconsciously, I must have known where I was going, but when I snatched the Uzi out of Doogie’s hands, I had no conscious idea what I intended to do with it, though judging by the expression on the waltz wizard’s face, I must have looked even crazier than I felt.

B-3.

The elevator doors opened on B-3, and the corridor beyond was filled with muddy red light.

In this mysterious radiance were five tall, blurry, distorted maroon figures. They might have been human, but they might have been something even worse.

With them was a smaller creature, also a maroon blur, with four legs and a tail, which might have been a cat.

In spite of all the might-have-beens, I didn’t hesitate, because only precious seconds remained in which to act. I stepped out of the elevator, into the muddy red glow, but then the corridor was full of fluorescent light when I crossed into it.

Roosevelt, Doogie, Sasha, Bobby, Mungojerrie, and I — me, myself, Christopher Snow — stood in the corridor, facing the elevator doors, looking as if they — we — expected trouble.

A minute ago, down on B-6, just as we had loaded Bobby’s corpse into the elevator, someone up here had pushed the call button. That someone was Bobby, a living Bobby from earlier in the night.

In this strangely afflicted building, time past, time present, and time future were all present here at once.

With my friends — and I myself — gaping at me in astonishment, as if I were a ghost, I turned right, toward the two oncoming security men that the others hadn’t yet seen. One of these guards had fired the shot that killed Bobby.

I squeezed off a burst from the Uzi, and both guards were cut down before they fired a shot.

My stomach twisted with revulsion at what I’d done, and I tried to escape my conscience by taking refuge in the fact that these men would have been killed by Doogie, anyway, after they had shot Bobby. I had only accelerated their fate while changing Bobby’s altogether, for a net saving of one life. But perhaps excuses of that sort make excellent paving stones for the road to Hell.

Behind me, Sasha, Doogie, and Roosevelt rushed into the corridor from the elevator.

The astonishment among all these doppelgangers was as thick as the peanut butter on the banana sandwiches that had ultimately killed Elvis.

I didn’t understand how this could be happening, because it had not happened earlier. We had never met ourselves in this hallway on our way down to find the children. But if we were meeting ourselves now, why didn’t I have a memory of it?

Paradox. Time paradox, I guess. You know me and math, me and physics. I’m more a Pooh guy, an Eliot guy. My head ached. I had changed Bobby Halloway’s fate, which was, to me, a pure miracle, not mere mathematics.

The elevator was full of muddy red light and the blurry maroon figures of the kids. The doors began to slide shut.

“Hold it!” I shouted.

Present-time Doogie blocked the door, half in the fluorescent corridor and half in the murky red elevator.