by Dean Koontz
“He’s got it,” Roosevelt said.
Mungojerrie hurried along the serviceway, and we set out after him. Bobby joined us on foot, armed with his shotgun, while Doogie and Sasha followed in the Hummer.
Taking a different route from the one I’d chosen the previous night, we proceeded along a blacktop road, across an athletic field gone to weeds, across a dusty parade ground, between ranks of badly weathered barracks, through a residential neighborhood of Dead Town that I had never explored, where the cottages and bungalows were identical to those on other streets, and overland again, to another service area. After more than half an hour at a brisk pace, we arrived at the last place I wanted to go: the huge, seven-story, Quonset-roofed hangar, as large as a football field, that stands like an alien temple above the egg room.
As it became clear where we were headed, I decided it wouldn’t be wise to drive up to the entrance, because the Hummer’s engine was noticeably less quiet than the mechanism of a Swiss watch. I waved Doogie toward a passageway between two of the many smaller service buildings that surrounded the giant structure, about a hundred yards from our ultimate destination.
When Doogie killed the engine and the parking lights, the Hummer all but vanished in this nook.
As we gathered behind the vehicle to study the enormous hangar from a distance, the dead night began to breathe. A few miles to the west, the Pacific had exhaled a cool breeze, which now caused a loose sheet-metal panel to vibrate in a nearby roof.
I recalled Roosevelt’s words, relayed from Mungojerrie, outside the Stanwyk house: Death lives here. I was getting identical but much stronger vibes from the hangar. If Death lived at the Stanwyk place, that was only his pied-à-terre. Here was his primary residence.
“This can’t be right,” I said hopefully.
“They’re in that place,” Roosevelt insisted.
“But we were here last night,” Bobby protested. “They weren’t in the damn place last night.”
Roosevelt scooped up the cat, stroked the furry head, chucked the mungo man under the chin, murmured to him, and said, “They were here then, the cat says, and they’re here now.”
Bobby scowled. “This reeks.”
“Like a Calcutta sewer,” I agreed.
“No, trust me,” Doogie said. “A Calcutta sewer is in a class all by itself.”
I decided not to pursue the obvious question.
Instead, I said, “If these kids were snatched just to be studied and tested, snatched because their blood samples indicate they’re somehow immune to the retrovirus, then they must have been taken to the genetics lab. Wherever that may be, it isn’t here.”
Roosevelt said, “According to Mungojerrie, the lab he came from is far to the east, in what appears to be open land, where they once had an artillery range. It’s very deep underground, hidden out there. But Jimmy, at least, is here. And Orson.”
After a hesitation, I said, “Alive?”
Roosevelt said, “Mungojerrie doesn’t know.”
“Cats know things,” Sasha reminded him.
“Not this thing,” Roosevelt said.
As we stared at the hangar, I’m sure each of us was remembering Delacroix’s audiotape testimony about the Mystery Train. Red sky. Black trees. A fluttering within…
Doogie removed the backpack from the Hummer, slipped it over his shoulders, closed the tailgate, and said, “Let’s go.”
During the brief time that the cargo-hold light was on, I saw the weapon he was carrying. It was a wicked-looking piece.
Aware of my interest, he said, “Uzi machine pistol. Extended magazine.”
“Is that legal?”
“It would be if it wasn’t converted to full automatic fire.”
Doogie headed toward the hangar. With the breeze stirring his blond mane and wavy beard, he looked like a Viking warrior leaving a conquered village, heading toward a longboat with a bag of plundered valuables on his back. All he needed to complete the image was a horned helmet.
Into my mind’s eye came an image of Doogie in a tuxedo and such a helmet, leading a supermodel through a perfect tango in a dance competition.
There are two faces to the coin of my rich imagination.
The man-size door, inset in one of the forty-foot-high steel hangar doors, was closed. I couldn’t remember whether Bobby and I had shut it on our way out the night before. Probably not. We hadn’t been in a clean-up-after-yourself, turn-out-the-lights-and-close-the-door mood when we’d fled this place.
At the door, Doogie extracted two flashlights from jumpsuit pockets and gave them to Sasha and Roosevelt, so that Bobby and I would have both hands free for the shotguns.
Doogie tried the door. It opened inward.
Sasha’s crossing-the-threshold technique was even smoother than her on-air patter at KBAY. She moved to the left of the door before she switched on the light and swept the beam across the cavernous hangar, which was too large to be entirely within the reach of any flashlight. But she didn’t shoot at anyone, and no one shot at her, so it seemed likely that our presence was not yet known.
Bobby followed her, shotgun at the ready. With the cat in his arms, Roosevelt entered after Bobby. I followed, and Doogie brought up the rear, quietly closing the door behind us, as we had found it.
I looked expectantly at Roosevelt.
He stroked the cat and whispered, “We’ve got to go down.”
Because I knew the way, I led the group. Second star to the right, and straight on till morning. Watch out for the pirates and the crocodile with the ticking clock inside.
We crossed the vast room under the tracks that once supported a mobile crane, past the massive steel supports that held up these rails, moving cautiously around the deep wells in the floor, where hydraulic mechanisms had once been housed.
As we progressed, swords of shadow and sabers of light leaped off the elevated steel crane rails and silently fenced with one another across the walls and the curved ceiling. Most of the high clerestory windows were broken out, but reflections flared in the remaining few, like white sparks from clashing blades.
Suddenly I was halted by a sense of wrongness I can’t adequately describe: a change in the air too subtle to define; a mild tingle on my face; a quivering of the hairs in my ear canals, as if they were vibrating to a sound beyond my range of hearing.
Sasha and Roosevelt must have felt it, too, because they turned in circles, searching with their flashlights.
Doogie held the Uzi pistol in both hands.
Bobby was near one of the cylindrical steel posts that supported the crane tracks. He reached out, touched it, and whispered, “Bro.”
As I moved to his side, I heard a ringing so faint that I could not hold fast to the sound, which repeatedly came and went. When I put my fingertips against the post, I detected vibrations passing through the steel.
Abruptly, the air temperature changed. The hangar had been unpleasantly cool, almost cold; but from one instant to the next, it became fifteen or twenty degrees warmer. This would have been impossible even if the building had still contained a heating plant, which it did not.
Sasha, Doogie, and Roosevelt joined Bobby and me, instinctively forming a circle to guard against a threat from any direction.
The vibrations in the post grew stronger.
I looked toward the east end of the hangar. The door by which we had entered was about twenty yards away. The flashlights were able to reach that far, though they couldn’t chase away all the shadows. In that direction, I could see to the end of the shorter length of the overhead crane tracks, and all seemed as it had been when we’d first come into the building.
The flashlights were not able to probe to the west end of the structure, however; it lay at least eighty and perhaps as much as a hundred yards away. As far as I could see, there was nothing out of the ordinary.
What bothered me was the unyielding blackness in the last twenty or thirty yards. Not seamless blackness. Many shades of black and deepest grays, a monta
ge of shadows.
I had an impression of a large, looming object concealed in that montage. A towering and complex shape. Something black and gray, so well camouflaged in the gloom that the eye couldn’t quite seize upon the outline of it.
Bobby whispered, “Sasha, your light. Here.”
She directed it where he pointed, at the floor.
The light gleamed off one of the inch-thick steel angle plates anchored to the concrete, where heavy machinery had once been mounted. These prickled up from the floor at many points in the room.
I didn’t understand why Bobby had called our attention to this unremarkable object.
“Clean,” he said.
Then I understood. When we had been here last night—in fact, on every occasion that I had passed through this hangar—these angle plates and the bolts holding them down had been smeared with grease and caked with dirt. This one was shiny, clean, as though someone had recently done maintenance on it.
Holding the cat in one arm, Roosevelt moved his light across the floor, up the steel post, across the tracks above us.
“Everything’s cleaner,” Doogie murmured, and he meant not since last night but just since we had entered the hangar.
Though I’d taken my hand off the post, I knew the vibrations in the steel had increased, because I could hear that faint ringing coming from the entire double colonnade that flanked us and from the tracks that the columns supported.
I looked toward the far, dark end of the building, and I swore that something immense was moving in the gloom.
“Bro!” Bobby said.
I glanced at him.
He was gaping at his wristwatch.
I checked mine and saw the digital readouts racing backward.
Sudden fear, like cold rain, washed through me.
A strange muddy red light rose throughout the hangar, evenly distributed, with no apparent source, as if the very molecules of the air had become radiant. Perhaps it was a dangerous light to an XPer like me, but this seemed the least of my troubles at the moment. The red air shimmered, and though the darkness retreated across the entire building, visibility hardly improved. This odd light cloaked as much as it revealed, and I felt almost as if I were underwater, in a drowned world…in water tinted with blood.
The flashlight beams were no longer effective. The light that they produced seemed to be trapped behind the lenses, pooling there, rapidly growing brighter and brighter, but unable to pass beyond the glass and penetrate the red air.
Here and there beyond the colonnades, dark forms began to quiver into existence where there had been nothing but bare floor. Machines of some kind. They looked real and yet not real, like objects in a mirage. Phantom machines at the moment…but becoming real.
The vibrations were getting louder, and their tone was changing, growing deeper, more ominous. A rumbling.
At the west end of the room, where there had been a troubling darkness, there was now a crane atop the tracks, and hanging from the boom was a massive…something. An engine, perhaps.
Though I could see the shape of the crane in the dire red light, as well as the object that it was lifting, I could also see through them, as if they were made of glass.
In the low rumbling that had grown out of the faint high-pitched ringing in the steel, I recognized the sound of train wheels, steel wheels revolving, grinding along steel tracks.
The crane would have steel wheels. Guide wheels above the track, upstop wheels below to lock it to the rails.
“…out of the way,” Bobby said, and when I looked at him, he was moving, as if in slo-mo, out from beneath the tracks, sliding around a support post with his back pressed to it.
Roosevelt, as wide-eyed as the cat he held, was on the move.
The crane was more solid than it had been a moment ago, less transparent. The big engine—or whatever the crane was transporting—hung from the end of the boom, below the tracks; this payload was the size of a compact car, and it was going to sweep through the space where we were standing as the crane rolled past overhead.
And here it came, moving faster than such a massive piece of equipment could possibly move, because it wasn’t really physically coming toward us; rather, I think that time was running backward to the moment when we and this equipment would be occupying the same space at the same instant. Hell, it didn’t matter whether it was the crane moving or time moving, because either way the effect would be the same: Two bodies can’t occupy the same place at the same time. If they tried, either there would be a fierce release of nuclear energy in a blast heard at least as far away as Cleveland, or one of the competing bodies—me or the car-size object dangling from the crane—would cease to exist.
Although I started to move, grabbing at Sasha to pull her with me, I knew that we had no hope of getting out of harm’s way in time.
Time.
As we reeled toward a moment in the past when the hangar had been filled with functional equipment, just as the oncoming crane appeared about to click into total reality…the temperature suddenly dropped. The muddy red light faded. The rumble of big steel wheels became a higher-pitched ringing.
I expected the crane to retreat, to roll back toward the west end of the building as it grew less substantial. When I looked up, however, it was passing over us, a shimmering mirage of a crane, and the burden that it carried, which was once more as transparent as glass, hit Sasha, then hit me.
Hit isn’t the correct word. I don’t really know what it did to me. The ghost crane swept past overhead, and the ghost payload enveloped me, passed through me, and vanished on the other side of me. A cold wind briefly shook me. But it didn’t even stir my hair. It was entirely internal, an icy breath whistling between my very cells, playing my bones as if they were flutes. For an instant I thought it would blow apart the bonds among the molecules of which I’m composed, dispersing me as though I’d never been anything but dust.
The last of the red light vanished, and the pent-up beams sprang out of the flashlights.
I was still alive, glued together both physically and mentally.
Sasha gasped: “Raw!”
“Killer,” I agreed.
Shaken, she leaned against one of the track-support columns.
Doogie had been standing no more than six feet behind me. He had watched the ghost payload pass through us and vanish before it reached him.
“Time to go home?” he wondered only half jokingly.
“Need a glass of warm milk?”
“And six Prozac.”
“Welcome to the haunted laboratory,” I said.
Joining us, Bobby said, “Whatever was going on in the egg room last night, it’s affecting the entire building now.”
“Because of us?” I wondered.
“We didn’t build the place, bro.”
“But did we start it up last night, by energizing it?”
“I don’t think, just because we used two flashlights, we’re major villains here.”
Roosevelt said, “We’ve got to move fast. The whole place is…coming apart.”
“Is that what Mungojerrie thinks?” Sasha asked.
In ordinary times, Roosevelt Frost could fix you with a solemn look that any undertaker would envy. With one eye still full of dark amazement at what he had just seen, and with the other eye swollen half shut and shot through with blood, he made me think I’d better pack my bags and get ready to meet that glory-bound train.
He said, “It’s not what Mr. Mungojerrie thinks. It’s what he knows. Everything here is going to…come apart. Soon.”
“Then let’s go down and find the kids and Orson.”
Roosevelt nodded. “Let’s go down.”
24
In the southwest corner of the hangar, the empty elevator shaft was as it had been the previous night. But the stainless-steel jamb and threshold at the stairhead doorway—overlooked by salvagers—were free of grease and dust, which they had not been at any time since I first explored this structure, nearly a year earli
er. In the beam from Sasha’s flashlight, the first several steps were not covered in dust any longer, and the dead pill bugs were gone.
Either a kindly gnome was preceding us, making the world more pleasing to the eye, or the phenomena that Bobby and I had witnessed in the egg room, one night before, were leaching beyond the walls of that mysterious chamber. My money was not on the gnome.
Mungojerrie stood on the second step, peering down the concrete stairwell, sniffing the air, ears pricked. Then he descended.
Sasha followed the cat.
The stairs were wide enough for two people to walk abreast, with room to spare, and I stayed at Sasha’s side, relieved to be sharing the point-position risk with her. Roosevelt followed, then Doogie with the Uzi. Bobby was our tail gunner, keeping his back to one wall, crabbing sideways down the stairs, to make sure no one crept in behind us.
Aside from being suspiciously clean, the first flight of steps was as it had been on my previous visit. Bare concrete on all sides. Evenly spaced core holes in the ceiling, which had once been the end points of electrical chaseways. Painted iron pipe attached to one wall, as a handrail. The air was cold, thick, redolent with the scent of lime that leached from the concrete.
When we reached the landing and turned toward the second flight, I put one hand on Sasha’s arm, halting her, and to our feline scout I whispered, “Whoa, cat.”
Mungojerrie halted four steps into the next flight and, with an expectant expression, looked up at us.
The ceiling ahead was fitted with fluorescent fixtures. Because these lights weren’t switched on, they posed no danger to me.
But they hadn’t been here before. They had been torn out and carted away when Fort Wyvern shut down. In fact, this particular structure might have been scoured to the bare concrete long before the base was closed, when the Mystery Train ran off the tracks and scared its designers into the realization that their project had been pursued with a truly loco motive.
Time past and time present existed here simultaneously, and our future was here, too, though we could not see it. All time, said the poet T. S. Eliot, is eternally present, leading inexorably to an end that we believe results from our actions but over which our control is mere illusion.
