Seize the Night

The throbbing electronic sound swelled louder. It was fearsome.

I remembered John Joseph Randolph’s pleasurable anticipation, his confidence that we would all be going to the other side soon, to that sideways place he wouldn’t name. The train, he’d said, was already beginning to pull out of the station. Suddenly I wondered if he’d meant the whole building might make that mysterious journey — not just whoever was in the egg room, but everyone within the walls of the hangar and the six basements below it.

With a renewed sense of urgency, I asked Doogie to look in the elevator and see if Bobby was there.

“I’m here,” said the Bobby in the hall.

“In there, you’re a pile of dead meat,” I told him.

“No way.”

“Way.”

“Ouch.”

“Maximum.”

I didn’t know why, but I thought it wouldn’t be a good idea to return upstairs to the hangar, beyond this zone of radically tangled time, with both Bobbys, the live one and the dead one.

Still holding the door, present-time Doogie stepped into the elevator, hesitated, then returned to the corridor. “There’s no Bobby in there!”

“Where’d he go?” asked present-time Sasha.

“The kids say he just… went. They’re jazzed about it.”

“The body’s gone because he wasn’t shot here, after all,” I explained, which was about as illuminating as describing a thermonuclear reaction with the words it go boom.

“You said I was dead meat,” the past-time Bobby said.

“What’s happening here?” the past-time Doogie demanded.

“Paradox,” I said.

“What’s that mean?”

“I read poetry,” I said with super-mondo frustration.

“Good work, son,” said both Roosevelts in perfect harmony, and then looked at each other in surprise.

To Bobby, I said, “Get in the elevator.”

“Where are we going?” he asked.

“Out.”

“What about the kids?”

“We got them.”

“What about Orson?”

“He’s in the elevator.”

“Cool.”

“Will you move your ass?” I demanded.

“A little crabby, aren’t we?” he said, stepping forward, patting my shoulder.

“You don’t know what I’ve been through.”

“Wasn’t I the one who died?” he asked, and then disappeared into the murky red elevator, becoming another maroon blur.

The past-time Sasha, Doogie, Roosevelt, and even the past-time Chris Snow looked confused, and the past- time Chris said to me, “What are we supposed to do?”

Addressing myself, I said, “You disappoint me. I’d expect you, at least, to figure it out. Eliot and Pooh, for God’s sake!”

As the oscillating thrum of the egg-room engines grew louder and a faint but ominous rumble passed through the floor, like giant train wheels beginning to turn, I said, “You’ve got to go down and save the kids, save Orson.”

“You already saved them.”

My head was spinning. “But maybe you still have to go down and save them, or it’ll turn out that we didn’t.”

The past-time Roosevelt picked up the past-time Mungojerrie and said, “The cat understands.”

“Then just follow the damn cat!” I said.

All of us present-time types who were still in the corridor — Roosevelt, Sasha, me, Doogie holding the elevator door — stepped back into the red light, but when we were in the cab with the kids, there was no red light at all, just the incandescent bulb in the ceiling.

The corridor, however, was now flooded with red murk, and our past-time selves, minus Bobby, were maroon blurs once more.

Doogie pressed the button for the ground floor, and the doors closed.

Orson squeezed between me and Sasha, to be close to my side.

“Hey, bro,” I said softly.

He chuffed.

We were cool.

As we started upward at an excruciatingly slow pace, I looked at my wristwatch. The luminous LED digits weren’t racing either forward or backward, as I had seen them do previously. Instead, pulsing slowly across the watch were curious squiggles of light, which might have been distorted numbers. With growing dread, I wondered if this meant we were beginning to move sideways in time, heading toward the other side that Randolph was so eager to visit.

“You were dead,” Aaron Stuart said to Bobby.

“So I heard.”

“You don’t remember being dead?” Doogie asked.

“Not really.”

“He doesn’t remember dying because he never died,” I said too sharply.

I was still struggling with grief at the same time that a wild joy was surging in me, a manic glee, which was a weird combination of emotions, like being King Lear and Mr. Toad of Toad Hall at the same time. Plus my fear was feeding on itself, growing fatter. We weren’t out of here yet, and we had more than ever to lose, because if one of us died now, there was no chance that I’d be able to pull another rabbit out of a hat; I didn’t even have a hat.

As we ground slowly up, still short of B-2, a deep rumbling rose through the elevator shaft, as if we were in a submarine around which depth charges were detonating, and the lift mechanism began to creak.

“If it was me, I’d sure remember dying,” Wendy announced.

“He didn’t die,” I said more calmly.

“But he did die,” insisted Aaron Stuart.

“He sure did,” said Anson.

Jimmy Wing said, “You peed your pants.”

“I never,” Bobby denied.

“You told us you did,” said Jimmy Wing.

Bobby looked dubiously at Sasha, and she said, “You were dying, it was excusable.”

On my wristwatch, the luminous squiggles were twisting across the readout window faster than before. Maybe the Mystery Train was pulling out of the station, gathering speed. Sideways.

As we reached B-2, the building began to shake badly enough to cause the elevator cab to rattle against the walls of the shaft, and we grabbed at the handrails and at each other to keep our balance.

“My pants are dry,” Bobby noted.

“Because you didn’t die,” I said tightly, “which means you never wet your pants, either.”

“He did too,” said Jimmy Wing.

Sensing my state of mind, Roosevelt said, “Relax, son.”

Orson put one paw on my shoe, as if to indicate that I should listen to Roosevelt.

Doogie said, “If he never died, why do we remember him dying?”

“I don’t know,” I said miserably.

The elevator seemed to have gotten stuck at B-2, and abruptly the doors opened, though Doogie had