Seize the Night (25 page)

Delacroix’s voice grew softer and his speech slower during recitation of the last six or eight names, and the final name almost seemed as though it would stick to his tongue and remain unrevealed. I wasn’t sure if he had reached the end of his list or had stopped without finishing it.

He was silent for half a minute. Then, with his voice abruptly energized, he rattled out what seemed to be a few sentences in a foreign language before switching off the recorder.

I stopped the tape and looked at Bobby. “What was that?”

“Wasn’t pig Latin.”

I reversed the tape, and we listened again.

This wasn’t any language I could identify, and though, for all I knew, Delacroix might have been spewing gibberish, I was convinced that it had meaning. It had the cadence of speech, and although no word was recognizable, I found it curiously familiar.

After the thick, slow, depressed voice in which Delacroix had recited the names of people involved in the Mystery Train project, he imbued these sentences with evident emotion, perhaps even passion, which seemed a further indication that he was speaking with purpose and meaning. On the other hand, those in seizures of religious joy, who speak in tongues, also exhibit great emotion, but there is no evident meaning in the tongues they speak.

When Leland Delacroix began to record again, his voice revealed a numbing and dangerous depression: so flat as to be virtually devoid of inflection, so soft that it was barely more than a whisper, the essence of hopelessness.

“There’s no point in making this tape. You can’t do anything to change what’s happened. There’s no going back. Everything’s out of balance now. Veils ripped. Realities intersecting.”

Delacroix fell silent, and there was only the faint background hiss and pop of the tape.

Veils ripped. Realities intersecting.

I glanced at Bobby. He seemed as clueless as I was.

“Temporal relocator. That’s what they called it.”

I looked at Bobby again, and he said, with grim satisfaction, “Time machine.”

“We sent test modules through, instrument packages. Some came back. Some didn’t. Intriguing but mysterious data. Data so strange the argument was for a far future terminus, a lot farther than anyone expected. How far forward these packages went, no one could say or wanted to guess. Videocams were included in later tests, but when they came back, the tape counters were still at zero. Maybe they taped…then, coming back, they rewound, erased. But finally we got visuals. The instrument package was supposed to be mobile. Like the Mars rovers. This one must’ve been hung up on something. The package itself didn’t move, but the videocam panned back and forth across the same narrow wedge of sky, framed by overhanging trees. There were eight hours of tape, back and forth, eight hours and not one cloud. The sky was red. Not streaky red like a sky at sunset. An even shade of red, as the sky we know is an even shade of blue, but with no increase or diminishment of light, none at all, over eight hours.”

Delacroix’s low, leaden voice faded to silence, but he didn’t turn off the recorder.

After a long pause, there was the sound of chair legs scraping-stuttering across a tile floor, probably a kitchen floor, followed by heavy footsteps fading as Delacroix left the room. He dragged his feet slightly, physically weighed down by his extreme depression.

“Red sky,” Bobby said thoughtfully.

A still and awful red,
I thought uneasily, remembering the line from Coleridge’s
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,
a favorite poem of mine when I was a young boy of nine or ten, in love with terror and with the idea of remorseless fate. These days, it held no special appeal—for the very reasons that I had liked it so much then.

We listened to the silence on the tape for a while, and then we could hear Delacroix’s voice in the distance, evidently coming from another room.

I cranked up the volume, but I still couldn’t make out what the man was saying.

“Who’s he talking to?” Bobby wondered.

“Himself, maybe.”

“Maybe to his family.”

His dead family.

Delacroix must have been roaming, because his voice rose and fell independent of my use of the volume control.

At one point he cruised past or through the kitchen, and we could hear him clearly enough to determine that he was speaking in that strange language again. He was ranting with considerable emotion, not in the flat dead voice he had last used when sitting at the recorder.

Eventually he fell silent, and a short while later, he came back to the recorder. He switched it off, and I suspected that he rewound it to see where he had interrupted himself. When he began to record again, his voice was low, sluggish, once more crushed flat by depression.

“Computer analysis revealed that the red sky was an accurate color. Not an error in the video system. And the trees that framed the view of the sky…they were gray and black. Not in shadow. That was the true color. Of the bark. The leaves. Mostly black mottled with gray. We called them trees not because they looked like trees as we know them, but because they were more analogous to trees than to anything else. They were sleek…succulent…less like vegetation than like flesh. Maybe some form of fungus. I don’t know. Nobody knew. Eight hours of unchanging red sky and the same black trees—and then something in the sky. Flying. This thing. Flying low. So fast. Only a few frames of it, the image blurred because of its speed. Enhanced it, of course. With the computers. It still wasn’t entirely clear. Clear enough. There were lots of opinions. Lots of interpretations. Arguments. Debates. I knew what it was. I think most of us knew, on some deep level, the moment we saw it enhanced. We just couldn’t accept it. Psychological block. We argued our way right through the truth, until the truth was behind us and we didn’t have to see it anymore. I deluded myself, like all the rest, but I don’t delude myself anymore.”

He settled into silence. A gurgle and splash indicated that he was pouring something out of a bottle into a glass. He took a drink of it.

In silence, Bobby and I sucked at our beers.

I wondered if you could get beer in this world of the red sky and the fleshy black trees. Although I like a beer occasionally, I would have no difficulty living without it. Now, however, this bottle of Corona in my hand was the avatar of all the countless humble pleasures of daily life, of all that could be lost through human arrogance, and I held fast to it as though it were more precious than diamonds, which in one sense it was.

Delacroix began to speak in that incomprehensible tongue again, and this time he murmured the same few words over and over, as though chanting in a whisper. As before, though I couldn’t understand one word, there was a familiarity in these syllables and in the cadence of his speech that sent a corkscrew chill through the hollows of my spine.

“He’s drunk or kooking out,” Bobby said. “Maybe both.”

When I began to worry that Delacroix would not continue with his revelations, he switched to English.

“Should never have sent a manned expedition across. Wasn’t on the schedule. Not for years, maybe not ever. But there was another project at Wyvern, one of many others, where something went wrong. I don’t know what. Something big. Most of the projects, I think…they’re just money-burning machines. But something went too right in this one. The top brass were scared shitless. Lot of pressure came down on us, pressure for the Mystery Train to speed up. They wanted a good look at the future. To see whether there was any future. They didn’t quite put it that way, but everyone involved with the train thought that was their motivation. To see whether this screwup on the other project was going to have major consequences. So against everyone’s better judgment, or almost everyone’s, we put together the first expedition.”

Another silence.

Then more rhythmic, whispery chanting.

Bobby said, “There’s your mom, bro. The ‘other project,’ the one that got the top brass scared about the future.”

“So she wasn’t part of the Mystery Train.”

“The train was just…reconnaissance. Or that’s all it was meant to be. But something went way wrong there, too. In fact, maybe what went wrong with the train was the worse of the two.”

I said, “What do you think was on that videotape? The flying thing, I mean.”

“I’m hoping the man is gonna tell us.”

The whispering continued for a minute or more, and in the middle of it, Delacroix hit the
stop
button.

When he resumed recording, he was in a new location. The sound quality wasn’t as good as before, and there was a steady background noise.

“Car engine,” Bobby said.

Engine noise, a faint whistle of wind, and the hum of tires racing over pavement: Delacroix was on the move.

His driver’s license had given an address in Monterey, a couple hours up the coast. He must have left his family’s bodies there.

A whispering arose. Delacroix was talking to himself in such a low voice that we could barely discern he was speaking in the unknown language. Gradually, the muttering faded away.

After a silence, when he began to speak louder and in English, his voice wasn’t as clear as we would have liked. The microphone wasn’t as close to his mouth as it should have been. The recorder was either on the seat beside him or, more likely, balanced on the dashboard.

His depression had given way to fear again. He spoke faster, and his voice frequently cracked with anxiety.

“I’m on Highway 1, driving south. I sort of remember getting in the car but not…not driving this far. I poured gasoline over them. Set them on fire. I half remember doing it. Don’t know why I didn’t…why I didn’t kill myself. Took the rings off her finger. Brought some pictures from the album. It didn’t want me to. I took the time…anyway. And the recorder. It didn’t want me to. I guess I know where I’m going. I guess I know, all right.”

Delacroix wept.

Bobby said, “He’s losing control.”

“But not the way you mean.”

“Huh?”

“He’s not losing his mind. He’s losing control to…something else.”

As we listened to Delacroix weep, Bobby said, “You mean losing control to…?”

“Yeah.”

“To whatever was fluttering.”

“Yeah.”

“Everyone died. Everyone on the first expedition. Three men, one woman. Blake, Jackson, Chang, and Hodgson. And only one came back. Only Hodgson came back. Except it wasn’t Bill Hodgson in the suit.”

Delacroix cried out with sudden pain, as if he’d been stabbed.

The tortured cry was followed by an astonishing spell of violent cursing: every obscenity I had ever heard or read, plus others that either weren’t part of my education or were invented by Delacroix, a vile torrent of rapid-fire vulgarities and blasphemies. This stream of raw filth was venomously ejected, snarled and shouted with a fury so blazing that I felt seared even when exposed to only the recording of it.

Evidently, Delacroix’s vocal outburst was accompanied by erratic driving. His cursing was punctuated by the blaring horns of passing cars and trucks.

The cursing sputtered to a stop. The last of the horns faded. For a while Delacroix’s raggedly drawn breaths were the loudest sounds on the tape. Then:

“Kevin, maybe you remember, you once told me that science alone couldn’t give us meaningful lives. You said science would actually make life unlivable if it ever explained everything to us and robbed the universe of mystery. We desperately need our mystery, you said. In the mystery is the hope. That’s what you believe. Well, what I saw over on the other side…. Kevin, what I saw over there is more mystery than a million years of scientists can explain. The universe is stranger than we ever conceived…and yet, at the same time, it’s eerily like our most primitive concepts of it.”

He drove in silence for a minute or so and then began to murmur to himself in that cryptic language.

Bobby said, “Who’s Kevin?”

“His brother? Earlier, he referred to him as ‘big brother.’ I think Kevin might be a reporter somewhere.”

Still speaking what was gibberish to us, Delacroix shut off the recorder. I was afraid this was the last piece of an incomplete testament, but then he returned.

“Pumped cyanide gas into the translation capsule. That didn’t kill Hodgson, or what had come back in Hodgson’s place.”

“Translation capsule,” Bobby said.

“The egg room,” I guessed.

“We pumped all the atmosphere out. The capsule was a giant vacuum tube. Hodgson was still alive. Because this isn’t life…not as we think of life. This is anti-life. We kept the capsule operative, powered it to a new cycle, and Hodgson, or whatever it was, went back where it came from.”

He switched off the recorder. Only four entries remained in his testament, and each was spoken in a more confused, fearful voice. I sensed that these were Delacroix’s few fitful moments of coherence.

“Eight of us on the second expedition. Four came back alive. Me among them. Not infected. The doctors declared us free of all infection. But now…”

Followed by:

“…infected or possessed? Virus? Parasite? Or something more profound? Am I just a carrier…or a doorway? Is something in me…or coming through me? Am I…being unlocked…opened…opened like a door?”

Then, with decreasing coherence:

“…never went forward…went sideways. Didn’t even realize there was a sideways. Because we all long ago…we stopped thinking about…stopped believing in a sideways….”

Finally:

“…will have to abandon the car…walk in…but not where it wants me to go. Not to the translation capsule. Not if I can help it. The house. To the house. Did I tell you they all died? The first expedition? When I pull the trigger…will I be closing the door…or opening it to them? Did I tell you what I saw? Did I tell you who I saw? Did I tell you about their suffering? Do you know what flies and crawls? Under that red sky? Did I tell you? How did I get…here? Here?”

The last words on the tape were not in English.

I raised the bottle of Corona to my mouth and discovered that I had already emptied it.