"It'll fade, " Bobby repeated, and the thin note of dread in his voice revealed that he, too, was aware of being observed.
I was not comforted by the fact that the Hodgson thing was forty feet away from us. I wouldn't have felt safe if the distance had been forty miles and if I'd been studying this spastic apparition through a telescope.
The pyrotechnics had lost perhaps a third of their power.
The door was still cold and hard under my hand.
As the light show proceeded toward a final flourish, visibility declined, but even in the slowly deepening gloom, I could see the Hodgson thing rolling off its side, lying facedown on the floor, and then struggling to get to its hands and knees.
If I'd correctly interpreted the gruesome sight I'd glimpsed through the faceplate, hundreds or even thousands of individual creatures infested the pressure suit, flesh-eating multitudes that constituted a nest or hive. A colony of beetles might operate under a sophisticated structure of divisional labor, maintain a high degree of social order, and work together to survive and prosper, but even if Hodgson's skeleton remained to provide an armature, I couldn't believe that the colony would be able to form itself into a manlike shape and function with such superb coordination, interlocked form, and strength that it could walk around in a spacesuit, climb steps, and drive heavy machinery.
The Hodgson thing rose to its feet.
"Nasty, " Bobby murmured.
Under the flat of my damp palm, I felt a short-lived vibration pass through the vault door. More peculiar than a vibration. More pronounced.
It was a faint, undulant ... tremor. The door didn't simply hum with it, the steel quivered briefly, for a second or two, as though it were not steel at all, as though it were gelatin, and then it became solid and seemingly impregnable once more.
The thing in the pressure suit swayed like a toddler unsure of its balance. It slid its left foot forward, hesitated, and dragged its right foot after the left. The scraping of its boots against the glassy floor produced only a whispery sound.
Left foot, right foot.
Coming toward us.
Perhaps more of Hodgson survived than just his skeleton. Maybe the colony had not completely devoured the man, had not even killed him, but had bored into him, nestling deep into his flesh and bones, into his heart and liver and brain, establishing a hideous symbiotic relationship with his body, while taking firm control of his nervous system from the brain to the thinnest efferent fiber.
As the fireworks in the walls darkened into amber and umber and blood red, the Hodgson thing slid its left foot forward, hesitated, then dragged its right. The old Imhotep two-step, invented by Boris Karloff in 1932.
Under my hand, the vault door quivered again and suddenly turned mushy.
I gasped when a painful coldness, sharper than needles, pierced my right hand, as if I had plunged it into something considerably more frigid than ice water. From wrist to fingertips, I appeared to be one with the vault door. Although the egg-room light was rapidly fading, I could see that the steel had become semitransparent, like a lazy whirlpool, circular currents were turning within it. And in the gray substance of the vault door were the paler gray shapes of my fingers.
Startled, I yanked my hand out of the door and had no sooner extracted it than the steel regained its solidity.
I remembered how the door had first been visible only out of the corner of my eye, not when I looked directly. It had acquired substance by degrees, and it was likely to dematerialize not in a wink but in installments.
Bobby must have seen what had happened, because he took a step backward, as though the steel might suddenly become a whirling vortex and suck him out of this place into oblivion.
If I hadn't extracted my hand in time, would it have broken off at the joining point, leaving me with a neatly severed but spurting stump?
I didn't need to know the answer. Let it be a question for the ages.
The chill had left my hand the instant that I'd withdrawn it from the door, but I was still gasping, and between each convulsive breath, I heard myself repeating the same four-letter word, as if I had been stricken by a terminal case of Tourette's syndrome and would spend the rest of my life unable to stop shouting this single obscenity.
Advancing through dim bloody light and legions of leaping shadows, like an astronaut returned from a mission to Planet Hell, the Hodgson thing had crossed half the original distance between us. It was twenty feet away, relentlessly dragging itself forward, obviously not offended by my language, driven by a hunger almost as palpable as the stench of hot tar and rotting vegetation that earlier had been borne on the wind from nowhere.
In frustration, Bobby struck the door with the shotgun barrel.
That steel plug tolled like a bell.
He didn't even bother to point the weapon at the Hodgson thing.
Evidently, he, too, had reached the conclusion that the impact of stray buckshot against the walls of the chamber might energize the place and leave us trapped here longer.
The light show ended, and over us fell absolute darkness.
If I could have stilled my storming heart and held my breath, I might have been able to hear the whispery slippage of rubber boot soles over the glassy floor, but I was a one-man percussion section. I probably couldn't have detected the sound of the Hodgson thing's approach if it had been beating a bass drum.
When the luminous phenomenon in the walls had been extinguished, surely the phantasmagoric engine had shut down altogether, surely we had come all the way back to reality, surely the Hodgson thing had ceased to exist as abruptly as it had appeared, surely Again, Bobby struck the vault door with the shotgun. It didn't toll this time. The tone was flat, less reverberant than before, as if he had slammed a hammer into a block of wood.
Maybe the door was changing, in the process of dematerializing, but it was still blocking the exit. We couldn't risk trying to leave until we were certain we wouldn't be passing through it while it was in a state of flux and possibly capable of taking some molecules from our bodies with it when it vanished for good.
I wondered what would happen if the Hodgson thing had a firm grip on me when its very substance began to transform. If, for even a moment, my hand had become one with the steel of the vault door, perhaps part of me would become one with the pressure suit and with the squirming entity inside the suit, a close, too-personal encounter that might destroy my sanity even if, miraculously, I survived with no physical damage.
Blackness pressed liquidly against my open eyes, as if I were deep underwater. Although I strained to catch the slightest sign of the approaching figure, I was as sightless here as I'd been in the corridor outside the room where I'd found the ve ve rats.
Inevitably, I recalled the kidnapper with the white-corn teeth, whose face I'd touched in the blinding dark.
As then, I now sensed a presence looming before me, and with more reason than I'd had previously.
After all that had happened in this Mystery Train terminal, this antechamber to Hell, I was no longer inclined to discount my fears as the product of a hyperactive imagination. This time I didn't reach out to prove to myself that my darkest suspicions were groundless, because I knew that my fingertips would slide down the smooth curve of the Plexiglas faceplate.
"Chris! " I jerked in surprise before I comprehended that the voice was Bobby's.
"Your watch, " he said.
The radiant readouts were visible even in this soot-thick murk.
The green numbers in those displays were changing, counting forward so rapidly that many hours were falling behind us in a fraction of a second.
The letters in the day and month windows were passing in a blur of continuously changing abbreviations.
Time past was giving way to time present.
Hell, in truth I didn't know exactly what was happening here.
Maybe I didn't understand this situation at all, and maybe a bend in the fabric of time had nothing to do with what we'd witnessed. Maybe we were entirely de
lusional because someone had spiked our beer with LSD.
Maybe I was at home, snug in bed, asleep and dreaming. Maybe up was down, in was out, black was white. I knew only that whatever was happening now felt right, felt a lot better than would a sudden embrace from the thing in Hodgson's suit.
If, in fact, we had been more than two years in the past, if we were now racing forward to the April night on which we had begun this bizarre adventure, I thought I ought to have felt some change within myselfa singing in my bones, a fever from the friction of the frantically passing hours, a sense of growing back to my real age, something.
But a descent on a slow elevator would have had a greater physical effect than this express ride along the rails of time.
On my wristwatch, the month suddenly stopped at Apr. A second later, the day and date froze, and immediately thereafter, the time display registered a clear, steady 3,58 A. M. We were home, minus Toto.
"Cool, " Bobby said.
"Sweet, " I agreed.
The big question was whether we had a fellow traveler with us, a wormy-faced companion in a pressure suit, like nothing Auntie Em or anyone else in Kansas had ever seen.
Logic argued that the Hodgson thing was lost in the past.
It might be delusional, however, to assume that logic applied within this singular situation.
I withdrew the flashlight from under my belt.
Didn't want to switch it on.
Switched it on.
The Hodgson thing wasn't face-to-face with me, as I had feared.
A quick sweep of the light revealed that Bobby and I were alone at least in that portion of the egg room into which the flashlight beam would reach.
The vault door was gone. I couldn't see it either when I looked directly at the exit tunnel or when I relied on my peripheral vision.
Apparently, the room had become so sensitized to light that once again, generated by the single beam, faint luminous whorls began to pulse and wheel in the floor, walls, and ceiling.
I immediately switched off the flashlight and jammed it under my belt.
"Go, " I urged.
"Going." As darkness descended once more, I heard Bobby scrambling over the raised threshold, feeling his way forward through the short, five-foot-high tunnel.
"Clear, " he said.
Crouching, I followed him into what had once been the airlock.
I didn't turn on the flashlight again until we were out of the airlock and in the corridor, where not one stray beam could find its way back to the glassy material that lined the egg room.
"Told you it would fade, " Bobby said.
"Why do I ever doubt you? " Neither of us spoke another word all the way up through the three stripped subterranean floors of the facility, through the hangar, to the Jeep, which stood under a sky from which clotting clouds had purged all stars.
We drove southwest across Fort Wyvern, through Dead Town, past the warehouses where I had confronted the kidnapper, switching off the headlights as we reached the Santa Rosita, down the access ramp along the levee wall, onto the dry riverbed, obeying not a single stop sign along the way, ignoring every posted speed limit, with a loaded shotgun in a moving vehicle, a concealed weapon in my shoulder holster even though I possessed no license to carry, a cooler of beer between my feet, trespassing in flagrant violation of the federal government's Defense Base Closure and Realignment Act, while holding numerous politically incorrect attitudes, of which a few might well be against the law. We were two Clydes without a Bonnie.
Bobby had so expanded the gap in the river-spanning fence that we drove through with room to spare. He parked immediately outside the grounds of the military base, and together we got out of the Jeep and lowered the flaps of chain-link, which he had rolled up and hooked to the top of the fence.
A close inspection would reveal the breach. From a distance greater than fifteen feet, however, the violation of the fence could not be seen.
We didn't want to announce that we had trespassed. Without doubt we would soon be returning by this same route, and we would need easy access.
The tire tracks leading through the fence betrayed us, but there wasn't a way to erase them quickly and effectively. We had to hope that the breeze would become a wind and obliterate our trail.
In a few hours, we had seen more than we could process, analyze, and apply to our problem things that we ardently wished we'd never seen.
We would have preferred to avoid another sortie onto the base, but until we found Jimmy Wing and Orson, duty required us to revisit this nest of nightmares.
We were leaving now because we were temporarily at a dead end, not sure where to continue the search, and we had to strategize. Besides, more than two of us would be needed to comb even the known warrens of wern.
In addition, dawn was little more than an hour away, and I had not worn my Elephant Man cloak, with hood and veil.
The Suburban, which the kidnapper had parked at the fence, was gone. I was not surprised to see that it was missing. Fortunately, I had memorized the license-plate number.
Bobby drove to the snarl of driftwood and tumbleweed that lay sixty feet from the fence. I retrieved my bicycle from concealment and loaded it into the back of the Jeep.
Passing through the dark tunnel under Highway 1, without headlights, Bobby accelerated. Engine noise, like barrages from ack-ack guns, rattled back to us from the concrete walls.
I remembered the mysterious figure that I had seen earlier on the sloping buttress at the west end of this passage, and my tension grew rather than diminished as the farther end became the nearer end.
When we raced into the open, I tensed, half expecting an assault, but nothing was waiting for us.
A hundred yards west of the highway, Bobby braked to a halt and switched off the engine.
We had not spoken since the corridor outside the egg room. Now he said, "Mystery Train."
"All aboard."
"Name of a research project, huh? "
"According to Leland Delacroix's security badge." I fished that object from a jacket pocket, fingering it in the dark, thinking about the dead man surrounded by photographs of his family, the wedding ring in a votive-candle holder.
"So the Mystery Train project was what gave us the troop, the retrovirus, all these mutations. Your mom's little tea-and-doomsday society."
"Maybe."
"I don't think so."
"Then what? "
"She was a theoretical geneticist, right? "
"My mom, apprentice god."
"Virus designer, creature creator." I "Medically valuable little creatures, benign viruses, " I said.
"Except for one."
"Your folks are no prize, " I reminded him.
With a note of insincere pride, he said, "Hey, they would've destroyed the world long before your mom ever did, if they'd just been given a fair chance." They owned the only newspaper in the county, the Moonlight Bay Gazette, and their religion was politics, their god was power.
They were people with a plan, with an unlimited faith in the righteousness of their beliefs. Bobby didn't share their spooky vision of utopia, so they had written him off ten years ago. Apparently, utopia requires the absolute uniformity of thought and purpose exhibited by bees in a hive.
"The point is, " he said, "that wacko palace of the weird back there.
.. They weren't doing biological research, bro."
"Hodgson was in an airtight suit, not tennis shorts, " I reminded him.
"He was in typical bio-secure gear. To protect him from being infected by something."
"Totally obvious, yeah. But you said yourself, the place wasn't built for mucking around with germs."
"Not laid out for essential sterilization procedures, " I agreed.
"No decontamination modules, except maybe for that one airlock.
And the floor plan is too open for high-security bio labs."
"That madhouse, that hyped-up lava lamp, wasn't a lab."
"The egg room."<
br />
"Call it what you want. It was never a lab with Bunsen burners, petri dishes, and cages full of cute little white mice with scalp scars from brain surgery. You know what that was, bro. We both know."
"I've been brooding about it."
"That was transport, " Bobby said.
"Transport."
"They pumped mondo energy into that room, maybe a nuke's worth of energy, maybe more, and when it was fully powered, really revving, it took Hodgson somewhere. Hodgson and a few others. We heard them screaming for help."
"Took them where? " Instead of answering me, he said, "Carpe cerevisi."
Dean Koontz - Seize The Night Page 21