Seize the Night

pressed only the G button.

Maybe the kids weren’t able to see past us to what lay beyond the cab, but those of us in the front row had a good look, and the sight froze us. A corridor, either stripped to the bare concrete or equipped as it had been in years gone by, should have waited out there past the threshold, but we were facing a panoramic landscape instead. A smoldering red sky. Oily black fungus grew in gnarled, vaguely treelike masses, and thick rivulets of vile dark syrup oozed from puckered pustules on the trunks. From some limbs hung cocoons like those we had seen in the Dead Town bungalow, glossy and fat, pregnant with malignant life.

For a moment, as we stood stunned, no sound or odor issued from this twisted landscape, and I dared to hope it was more a vision than a physical reality. Then movement at the threshold drew my eye, and I saw the red-and-black-mottled tendrils of a ground-hugging vine, as beautiful and evil-looking as a nest of baby coral snakes, questing at the sill of the door, growing as fast as plants in a nature film run at high speed, wriggling into the cab.

“Shut the door!” I urged.

Doogie pressed a button labeled close door and then pushed the G button again, for the ground floor.

The doors didn’t close.

As Doogie jammed his thumb against the button again, something loomed in that otherworldly place, no more than two feet away from us, crossing from the left.

We brought up our guns.

It was a man in a bio-secure suit. Hodgson was stenciled across the brow of his helmet, but his face was that of an ordinary man, not crawling with parasites.

We were in the past and on the other side. Chaos.

The writhing tendrils of the black-and-red vine, the diameter of earthworms, lapped at the elevator carpet.

Orson sniffed them. The tendrils rose like swaying cobras, as if they would strike at his nose, and Orson twitched away from them.

Cursing, Doogie pounded the side of his fist against close door. Then against G.

Hodgson could see us. Amazement pried open his eyes.

The unnatural silence and stillness were broken when wind gusted into the cab. Hot and humid. Reeking of tar and rotting vegetation. Circling us and blowing out again, as if it were a living thing.

Careful to avoid stepping on the vine tendrils, afraid they would bore through the sole of my shoe and then through the sole of my foot, I tugged frantically at the door, trying to pull out the sliding panel on the left. It wouldn’t budge.

With the stench came a faint but chilling sound like thousands of tortured voices, issuing from a distance — and threaded through those screams, also distant, was an inhuman shriek.

Hodgson turned more directly toward us, pointing for the benefit of another man in a bio-secure suit, who hove into view.

The doors began to close. The vine tendrils crunched between the sliding panels. The doors shuddered, almost retreated, but then pinched the vines off, and the cab rose.

Oozing yellow fluid and the bitter scent of sulfur, the severed tendrils curled and twisted with great agitation — and then dissolved into an inert mush.

The building shook as if it were the home of all thunder, the foundry where Thor forged his lightning bolts.

The vibrations were affecting either the elevator motor or the lift cables, perhaps both, because we were rising more slowly than before, grinding upward.

“Mr. Halloway’s pants are dry now,” Aaron Stuart said, picking up the conversation where it had left off, “but I smelled the pee.”

“Me too,” said Anson, Wendy, and Jimmy.

Orson woofed agreement.

“It’s a paradox,” Roosevelt said solemnly, as though to save me the trouble of explaining.

“There’s that word again,” Doogie said. His brow was furrowed, and his gaze remained riveted on the indicator board above the door, waiting for the B-1 bulb to light.

“A time paradox,” I said.

“But how does that work?” Sasha asked.

“Like a toaster oven,” I said, meaning who knows?

Doogie pressed his thumb against G and kept it there. We didn’t want the door to open on B-1. B for bedlam. B for bad news. B for be prepared to die squishily.

Aaron Stuart said, “Mr. Snow?”

I took a deep breath: “Yes?”

“If Mr. Halloway didn’t die, then whose blood is on your hands?”

I looked at my hands. They were sticky-damp with Bobby’s blood, which had gotten on them when I’d dragged his body into the elevator.

“Weird,” I admitted.

Wendy Dulcinea said, “If the body went poof, why didn’t the blood on your hands go poof?”

My mouth was too dry, my tongue too thick, and my throat too tight to allow me to answer her.

The shuddering elevator briefly caught on something in the shaft, tore loose with a ripping-metal sound, and then we groaned to B-1. Where we stopped.

Doogie leaned on close door and on the button for the ground floor.

We didn’t ascend any farther.

The doors slid inexorably open. Heat, humidity, and that fetid stench rolled over us, and I expected the vigorous alien vegetation to grow into the cab and overwhelm us with explosive force.

In our slice of time, we’d risen one level, but William Hodgson was still out there in neverland, where we had left him. Pointing at us.

The man beyond Hodgson — Lumley, according to his helmet — also turned to look at us.

Shrieking, something flew out of that baleful sky, among the black trees: a creature with glossy black wings and whiplike tail, with the muscular, scaly limbs of a lizard, as if a gargoyle had torn itself loose of the stone high on an ancient Gothic cathedral and had taken flight. As it swooped down on Lumley, it appeared to spit out a stream of objects, which looked like large peach pits but were something deadlier, something no doubt full of frenzied life. Lumley twitched and jerked as though he had been hit by machine-gun fire, and several perfectly round holes appeared in his spacesuit, like those we had seen in poor damn Hodgson’s suit in the egg room the previous night.

Lumley screamed as though he were being eaten alive, and Hodgson stumbled backward in terror, away from us.

The elevator doors began to close, but the flying thing abruptly changed directions, streaking straight toward us.

As the doors bumped shut, hard objects rattled against them, and a series of dimples appeared in the steel, as if it had been hit by bullets with almost enough punch to penetrate to the interior of the cab.

Sasha’s face was talcum white.

Mine must have been whiter still, to match my name.

Even Orson seemed to have gone a paler shade of black.

We ascended toward the ground floor through crashes of thunder, the grinding rumble of steel wheels on steel track, harsh whistles, shrieks, and the throbbing electronic hum, but in spite of all those sounds of worlds colliding, we also heard another noise, which was more intimate, more terrifying. Something was on the roof of the elevator cab. Crawling, slithering.

It could have been nothing but a loose cable, which might have explained our quaking, jerky progress toward