Seize the Night (16 page)

I went through the inner portal, the short tunnel, crouching because only someone under five feet could pass this way without stooping.

Bobby followed me into the egg room, and for the first time in our seventeen years of friendship, I saw him stricken with awe. He turned slowly in a circle, sweeping his flashlight across the walls, and though he tried to speak, he couldn’t initially produce a sound.

This ovoid chamber is a hundred twenty feet long and slightly less than sixty feet in diameter at its widest point, tapering toward each end. The walls, ceiling, and floor are curved to form a single continuous plane, so you seem to be standing in the empty shell of an enormous egg.

All surfaces are coated in a milky, vaguely golden, translucent substance that, judging by the profile around the entry hatchway, is nearly three inches thick and is bonded so securely to the concrete that the two appear to be fused.

The beams of our flashlights shimmered over this highly polished coating, but they also penetrated the exotic material, quivering and flickering to the depths of it, flaring off whorls of glittering golden dust that were suspended like miniature galaxies within. The substance was highly refractive, but light did not shatter through it in hard prismatic lines as it might through crystal; rather, buttery bright currents, as warm and sinuous as candle flames seduced by a draft, flowed and rippled through the thick, glossy surface plating, imparting to it the appearance of a liquid, purling away from us into the farther, darker corners of the room, there to dissipate like pulses of heat lightning behind summer thunderheads. Gazing down at the floor, I could almost believe that I was standing on a pool of pale-amber oil.

Marveling at the unearthly beauty of this spectacle, Bobby walked farther into the room.

Although this lustrous material appears to be as slick as wet porcelain, it is not at all slippery. In fact, at times—but not always—the floor seems to grip at your feet, as if it is gluey or exerts a mild magnetic attraction even on objects that contain no iron.

“Strike it,” I said softly.

My words spiraled along the walls and ceiling and floor, and a cascade of whispery echoes returned to my ears from more than one direction.

Bobby blinked at me.

“Go ahead. Go on. With the barrel of the shotgun,” I prompted. “Strike it.”

“It’s glass,” Bobby protested.

The extended sibilant at the end of his second word returned to us in a wash of echoes as susurrant as gently foaming surf.

“If it’s glass, it’s not breakable.”

Hesitantly, he gave the floor near his feet a gentle tap with the muzzle of the shotgun.

A quiet ringing, like chimes, seemed to arise simultaneously from every corner of the huge chamber, then faded into a silence that was curiously pregnant with suspense, as if the bells had announced the approach of some power or person of great import.

“Harder,” I said.

When he rapped the steel barrel harder against the floor, the ringing was louder and of a different character, like that of tubular bells: euphonious, charming, yet as strange as any music that might be performed on a world at some far end of the universe.

As the sound drained into another suspenseful silence, Bobby squatted in order to smooth one hand across the floor where he had rapped the shotgun barrel.

“Not chipped.”

I said, “You can bang on it with a hammer, scrape at it with a file, chop at it with an ice pick, and you won’t leave the slightest scratch.”

“You tried all that?”

“And a hand drill.”

“You’re a destructive imp.”

“It runs in my family.”

Pressing his hand to the floor at a few different points around him, Bobby said, “It’s slightly warm.”

Even on hot summer nights, the deep concrete structures of Fort Wyvern are as cool as caverns, cool enough to serve as wine cellars, and the chill sinks deeper into your bones the longer you haunt these places. All other surfaces within these warrens, other than those in this ovoid room, are cold to the touch.

“The stuff is always warm,” I said, “yet the room itself isn’t warm, as if the heat doesn’t translate to the air. And I don’t see how this material could retain heat more than eighteen months after they abandoned this place.”

“You can almost feel…an energy in it.”

“There’s no electrical power here, no gas. No furnaces, no boilers, no generators, no machinery. All stripped away.”

Bobby rose from a squat and walked deeper into the chamber, playing his flashlight over the floor, walls, and ceiling.

Even with two flashlights and the unusually high refractivity of the mysterious material, shadows ruled the room. Tracers, blooms, girandoles, pinwheels, lady ferns, and fireflies of light swarmed across the curving surfaces, mostly in shades of gold and yellow but some red and others sapphire, fading to oblivion in far dark corners, like fireworks licked up and swallowed by a night sky, dazzling but illuminating little.

Bobby said wonderingly, “It’s as big as a concert hall.”

“Not really. But it seems even bigger than it is because of how every surface curves away from you.”

As I spoke, a change occurred in the acoustics of the chamber. The whispery echoes of my words faded away, swiftly became inaudible, and then my words themselves diminished in volume. The air felt as if it had thickened, transmitting sound less efficiently than before.

“What’s happening?” Bobby asked, and his voice, too, sounded suppressed, muffled, as though he were speaking from the other end of a bad telephone connection.

“I don’t know.” Although I raised my voice almost to a shout, it remained muffled, precisely as loud as when I’d spoken in a normal tone.

I would have thought I was imagining the increased density of the air if I hadn’t suddenly begun experiencing difficulty breathing. Although not suffocating, I was afflicted severely enough to have to concentrate to draw and expel breath. I was swallowing reflexively with each inhalation; the air was virtually a liquid that I had to force down. Indeed, I could feel it sliding along my throat like a drink of cold water. Each shallow breath felt heavy in my chest, as if it had more substance than ordinary air, as though my lungs were filling with fluid, and the moment I completed each inhalation, I was overwhelmed by a frantic urge to get this stuff out, to eject it, convinced that I was drowning in it, but each exhalation had to be forced, almost as if I were regurgitating.

Pressure.

In spite of my rising panic, I remained clearheaded enough to figure out that the air was not being alchemized into a liquid but that, instead, the air pressure was drastically increasing, as if the depth of the earth’s atmosphere above us were doubling, tripling, and pushing down on us with crushing force. My eardrums fluttered, my sinuses began to throb, I felt phantom fingertips pressing hard against my eyeballs, and at the end of each inhalation, my nostrils pinched shut.

My knees began to quiver and then buckle. My shoulders bent under an invisible weight. Straight as plumb bobs, my arms were hanging at my sides. My hands could no longer grip the flashlight, and it clattered to the floor at my feet. It bounced silently on the glassy surface, for now there was no sound whatsoever, not even the flutter of my eardrums or the thud of my own heart.

Abruptly, all returned to normal.

The pressure lifted in an instant.

I heard myself gasping for air. Bobby was gasping, too.

He had dropped his flashlight but had managed to hold tight to the shotgun.

“Shit!”
he said explosively.

“Yeah.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah.”

“What was that?”

“Don’t know.”

“Ever happen before?”

“No.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah,” I said, reveling in the ease with which I could draw cool, deep breaths.

Though our flashlights were at rest on the floor, an increasing number of Roman candles and pinwheels and serpents and sparklers and spirals of light spread across the floor and up the walls.

“This place isn’t shut down,” Bobby said.

“But it is. You saw.”

“Nothing’s what it seems in Wyvern,” he said, quoting me.

“Every room we passed, every hallway—stripped, abandoned.”

“What about the two floors above this?”

“Just bare rooms.”

“And there’s nothing below?”

“No.”

“There’s something.”

“Not that I’ve found.”

We picked up our flashlights, and as the beams moved across the floors and walls, the flamboyant eruptions of light in the deep glassy surface multiplied threefold, fourfold: a dazzling profusion of fiery blooms. We might have been in a Fourth of July extravaganza, suspended from a hot-air balloon, with barrages of rockets bursting around us, whiz-bangs and cracker bonbons and fountains and fizgigs, but all silent, all marvelous glistering light and no bang, yet so reminiscent of Independence Day displays that you could almost smell the saltpeter and the sulfur and the charcoal, almost hear a stirring John Philip Sousa march, almost taste hot dogs with mustard and chopped onions.

Bobby said “Something’s still happening.”

“Split?”

“Wait.”

He studied the ceaselessly changing and increasingly colorful patterns of light as though they held a meaning as explicit as that in a paragraph of prose on a printed page, if only he could learn to read them.

Although I doubted that the astonishingly luminous refractive bursts were casting off any more UV rays than the flashlight beams that produced them, I was not accustomed to such brightness. Radiant whorls and drizzles and rivulets streamed across my exposed face and hands, a storm of scintillant tattoos, and even if this rain of light was washing a little death into me, the spectacle was irresistible, exhilarating. My heart was racing, powered partly by fear but mostly by wonder.

Then I saw the door.

I was turning, so enthralled by the carnival of light around me that my gaze traveled past the door, distracted by the pyrotechnics, before I realized what I had seen. Massive, five feet in diameter, of matte-finish steel, surrounded by a polished-steel architrave: It was similar to what you would expect to see at the entrance to a bank vault, and no doubt it established an airtight seal.

Startled, I swung back toward the door—but it was gone. Through a pandemonium of gazelle-quick lights and pursuing shadows, I saw that the circular hole in the wall was as it had been when we entered through it: open, with a dark concrete tunnel beyond, leading to what had once been an airlock.

I took a couple of steps toward the opening before I realized that Bobby was speaking to me. As I turned toward him, I glimpsed the door again, this time from the corner of my eye. But when I looked directly at the damn thing, it wasn’t there.

“What’s happening?” I asked nervously.

Bobby had extinguished his flashlight. He pointed at mine. “Douse it.”

I did as he asked.

The fireworks in the glassy surface of the room should have at once vanished into absolute darkness. Instead, colorful star shells and chrysanthemums and glittering pinwheels continued to arise within this magical material, swarmed around the chamber, casting off a farrago of lights and shadows, and then faded away as new eruptions replaced them.

“It’s running by itself,” Bobby said.

“Running?”

“The process.”

“What process?”

“The room, the machine, the process, whatever it is.”

“It can’t be running by itself,” I insisted, in full-on denial of what was happening around me.

“The beam energy?” he wondered.

“What?”

“The flashlight beams?”

“Can you be any more obscure?”

“Way more, bro. But I mean, that’s what must’ve powered it up. The energy in the flashlight beams.”

I shook my head. “Doesn’t make sense. That’s almost no energy at all.”

“This stuff soaked in the light,” he insisted, sliding one foot back and forth on the radiant floor, “spun it into more power, used what it absorbed to generate more energy.”

“How?”

“Somehow.”

“That’s not science.”

“I’ve heard worse on
Star Trek.
”

“It’s sorcery.”

“Science or sorcery, it’s real.”

Even if what Bobby said was true—and obviously there was at least some truth in it—the phenomenon was not perpetually self-sustaining. The number of bright eruptions began to decline, as did both the richness of the colors and the intensity of the lights.

My mouth had gone so dry that I needed to work up some saliva before I could say, “Why didn’t this happen before?”

“Were you ever here with two flashlights?”

“I’m a one-flashlight guy.”

“So maybe there’s a critical mass, a critical amount of energy input, needed to start it.”

“Critical mass is two lousy flashlights?”

“Maybe.”

“Bobby Einstein.” With my concern not in the least allayed by the subsidence of the light show, I looked toward the exit. “Did you see that door?”

“What door?”

“Totally massive vault, like a blast door in a nuclear-missile silo.”

“Are you feeling that beer?”

“It was there and not there.”

“The door?”

“Yeah.”

“This isn’t a haunted house, bro.”

“Maybe it’s a haunted laboratory.”

I was surprised that the word
haunted
felt so right and true, resonating loudly in the tuning fork of instinct. This wasn’t the requisite decaying house of many gables and creaking floorboards and inexplicable cold drafts, but I sensed unseen presences nonetheless, malevolent spirits pressing against an invisible membrane between my world and theirs, the air of expectancy preceding the imminent materialization of a hateful and violent entity.

“The door was there and not there,” I insisted.

“It’s almost a Zen koan. What’s the sound of one hand clapping? Where does a door lead if it’s there and not there?”

“I don’t think we have time for meditation just now.”

Indeed, I was overcome by the feeling that time was running out for us, that a cosmic clock was rapidly ticking toward the stop point. This premonition was so powerful that I almost bolted for the exit.