and even if the hinge could be broken, the vault door would be held in place, because the bolts that secured it were surely snugged into evenly spaced holes around the entire circumference of the steel jamb rather than along one arc of it The screaming. The screaming seemed to have substance, pouring into me through my ears until I was filled to bursting with it and could contain no more. I opened my mouth as if to let the dark energy of those ghostly cries pass out of me.
Struggling to concentrate, squinting to focus more clearly on the door, I realized that a team of professional safe crackers would probably never get through that barrier without explosives. For the purpose of containing mere men, therefore, this door was absurdly over designed.
At last the fearsome truth came within my grasp. The purpose of the redundantly armored door was to contain something in addition to men or atmosphere. Something bigger, stronger, more cunning than a virus.
Some damn thing around which my usually vivid imagination was unable to wrap itself.
Switching off my flashlight, turning away from the vault door, I called to Bobby.
Mesmerized by the fireworks and the shadow show, buffeted by the wind noises and the screams, he didn't hear me, although he was only ten feet away.
"Bobby! " I shouted.
As he turned his head to look at me, the wind abruptly matched sound with force, gusting through the egg room, whipping our hair, flapping my jacket and Bobby's Hawaiian shirt. It was hot, humid, redolent of tar fumes and rotting vegetation.
I couldn't identify the source of the gale, because this chamber had no ventilation ducts in its walls, no breaches whatsoever in its seamless glassy surface, except for the circular exit. If the steel cork plugging that hole were, in fact, nothing but a mirage, perhaps these gusts could have been coming through the tunnel linking the egg room to the airlock, blowing through the nonexistent door, however, the wind blustered from all sides, rather than from one direction.
"Your light! " I shouted. "Shut it off! " Before Bobby could do as I wanted, the reeking wind brought with it another manifestation. A figure came through the curved wall, as if five feet of steel-reinforced concrete were no more substantial than a veil of mist.
Bobby clutched the pistol-grip shotgun with both hands, dropping his flashlight without switching it off.
The spectral visitor was startlingly close, less than twenty feet from us. Because of the swarming lights and shadows, which served as continually changing camouflage, I couldn't at first see the intruder clearly. Glimpsed in flickering fragments, it looked manlike, then more like a machine, and then, crazily, like nothing else but a lumbering rag doll.
Bobby held his fire, perhaps because he still believed that what we were seeing was illusionary, either ghost or hallucination, or some strange combination of the two. I suppose I was clinging desperately to the same belief, because I didn't back away from it when it staggered closer to us.
By the time it had taken three uncertain steps, I could see clearly enough to identify it as a man in a white vinyl, airtight spacesuit.
More likely, the outfit was an adapted version of the standard gear that NASA had developed for astronauts, intended primarily not to shield the wearer from the icy vacuum of interplanetary space but rather to protect him from deadly infection in a biologically contaminated environment.
The large helmet featured an oversize faceplate, but I wasn't able to see the person beyond, because reflections of the whirling light-and shadow show streamed across the Plexiglas. On the brow of the helmet was stenciled a name, HODGSON.
Perhaps because of the fireworks, more likely because he was blinded by terror, Hodgson didn't react as if he saw Bobby and me. He entered screaming and his voice was by far the loudest of those still borne on the foul wind. After staggering a few steps away from the wall, he turned to face it, holding up both hands to ward off an attack by something that was invisible to me.
He jerked as if hit by multiple rounds of high-caliber gunfire.
Though I'd heard no shots, I ducked reflexively.
When he fell to the floor, Hodgson landed on his back. He was propped halfway between a prone and a sitting position by the air tank and by the briefcase-size, waste-purification-and-reclamation system strapped to his back. His arms fell limp at his sides.
I didn't need to examine him to know he was dead. I had no idea what might have killed him, and I didn't have enough curiosity to risk investigating.
If he'd already been a ghost, how could he die again?
Some questions are better left unanswered. Curiosity is one of the engines of human achievement, but it's not much of a survival mechanism if it motivates you to see what the back side of a lion's teeth look like.
Crouching, I scooped up Bobby's flashlight and clicked it off.
An immediate drop in the ferocity of the wind seemed to support the theory that even the minimal energy input from the beams of our flashlights had triggered all this bizarre activity.
The stench of steaming tar and rotting vegetation was also fading.
Rising to my feet again, I glanced at the door. It was still there.
uge and shiny. Too real.
I wanted to get out, but I didn't head for the exit. I was afraid it would actually be there when I reached it, whereupon this waking dream might become a waking nightmare.
In every surface, the pyrotechnics continued undiminished.
Previously, when we'd doused the flashlights, this extraordinary spectacle had been self-perpetuating for a short while, and it would probably power itself even longer this time.
I regarded the walls, the floor, and the ceiling with suspicion.
I expected another figure to coalesce out of the bright, ceaselessly changing cyclorama, something more threatening than the man in the bio-secure gear.
Bobby was approaching Hodgson. Apparently, the disorienting effect of the light show did not affect his equilibrium as it did mine.
"Bro, " I warned.
"Cool."
"Not." He had the shotgun. He believed it was protection.
I, on the other hand, figured that the weapon was potentially as dangerous as the flashlights. Any lead pellets not stopped by the target would most likely ricochet from wall to ceiling to floor to wall with deadly velocity. And every time a bit of lead shot struck any surface in the chamber, the kinetic energy of the impact might be absorbed by that glassy material, further powering these weird phenomena.
The wind subsided to a breeze.
Carnivals and catastrophes still glittered and blazed through every curving surface of the room, Ferris wheels of rotating blue lights and orange-red spouts like volcanic eruptions.
The vault door appeared dauntingly solid.
No ghost had ever looked as real as the body in the spacesuit.
Not Jacob Marley rattling his chains at Scrooge, not the Ghost of Christmas Future, not the White Lady of Avenel, not Hamlet's dad, certainly not Casper.
I was surprised to find my balance restored. Maybe the brief disruption of equilibrium hadn't been a reaction to the spinning lights and shadows, but had been merely another transient effect similar to the pressure that, earlier, had muffled our voices and made breathing difficult.
The hot breeze and the stink it carried disappeared. The air was cool and calm once more. The sound of the winds began to fade, as well.
Next, perhaps, the space suited man on the floor would dissolve into a twist of icy vapor that would rise and vanish like a wraith returning to the spirit world where it belonged. Soon. Before we had to take a close look at it. Please.
Certain that Bobby couldn't be persuaded to retreat, I followed him toward Hodgson's body. He was deep into the same stoked, gonzo mind set with which he surfed twenty-foot, fully macking behemoths, a maximum kamikaze commitment as total as his more characteristic slacker indifference. When he was on this board, he would ride it all the way to the end of the barreland one day straight out of this life.
Because the lights in
the walls were contained within the surface layer of glassy material and shed only a small fraction of their illuminating power into the egg room itself, Hodgson wasn't well revealed.
"Flashlight, " Bobby said.
"Not smart."
"That's me." Reluctantly, steeling myself to take a close look at the back side of the aforementioned lion's teeth, I stepped cautiously to the right of the body as Bobby moved less cautiously to the left. I switched on one flashlight and played it over the far too solid ghost.
Initially the beam jiggled because my hand was shaking, but I quickly steadied it.
The Plexiglas in the helmet was tinted. The single flashlight was not powerful enough to let us see either Hodgson's face or his condition.
Heor possibly she was as still and silent as a headstone, and whether a ghost or not, he seemed indisputably dead.
On the breast of his pressure suit was an American-flag patch, and immediately below the flag was a second patch, featuring a speeding locomotive, an image clearly from the Art Deco period of design, which evidently had been adapted to serve as the logo for this research project Although the image was bold and dynamic, without any element of mystery, I was willing to bet my left lung that this identified Hodgson as a member of the Mystery Train team.
The only other distinguishing features on the front of the suit were six or eight holes across the abdomen and chest. Recalling how Hodgson had turned to face the wall out of which he had appeared, how he had held his hands up defensively, and how he had jerked as if hit by automatic-weapons fire, I at first assumed that these punctures were bullet holes.
On closer inspection, however, I realized that they were too neat to be gunshot wounds. High-velocity lead slugs would have torn the material, leaving rips or starburst punctures rather than these round holes, each as large as a quarter, which looked as though they had been die cut or even bored with a laser. Aside from the fact that we had heard no gunfire, these were far too large to be entry wounds, any caliber of ammunition capable of punching holes that big would have passed directly through Hodgson, killing Bobby or me, or both of us.
I could see no blood.
"Use the other flash, " Bobby said.
Silence had replaced the last murmuring voices of the wind.
Explosive scripts of bright, meaningless calligraphy continued to scroll through the walls, perhaps marginally less dazzling than they had been a minute ago. Experience suggested that this phenomenon, too, was about to wind down, and I was reluctant to stimulate it again.
"Just once, quick, for a clearer look, " he urged.
Against all instincts, I did as Bobby wanted, crouching over the cumbersomely attired figure for a better view.
The tinted Plexiglas still partially obscured what lay beyond, but at once I understood why, with the single flashlight, we hadn't been able to see poor Hodgson's face, Hodgson no longer had a face. Inside the helmet was a wet churning mass that seemed to be feeding voraciously on the remaining substance of the dead man, a sickening pale tangle of seething, squirming, slithering, jittering things that looked somewhat soft-bodied like worms but were not worms, that also looked somewhat chitinous like beetles but were not beetles, a greasy white colony of something unnameable that had invaded his suit and overwhelmed him a r with such rapidity that he had died no less abruptly than if he had been shot straight through the heart. And now these twitching things responded to the flashlight beam by surging against the inner surface of the Plexiglas faceplate, teeming with obscene excitement.
Bolting to my feet, reeling backward, I thought I saw movement in some of the holes in the abdomen and chest of Hodgson's violated pressure suit, as though the things that had killed him were going to boil out of those punctures.
Bobby split without firing the shotgun, which he might easily have done, out of shock and terror. Thank God he didn't pull the trigger.
A shotgun blast or twoor tenwouldn't wipe out even half the hellacious swarm in Hodgson's pressure suit, but it would probably pump them into an even greater killing frenzy.
As I ran, I switched off the flashlights, because the fireworks in the walls were gaining speed and power once more.
Although Bobby had been farther from the exit than I was, he got there ahead of me.
The vault door was as solid as a damn vault door.
What I'd seen from a distance was confirmed close up, There was no wheel or other release mechanism to disengage the lock bolts.
Back toward the center of the room, about forty feet away from the vault door, Hodgson's pressure suit was where we had left it. Because it hadn't collapsed upon itself like a deflated balloon, I assumed that it was still filled out by the nightmare colony and by the remaining odds and ends of Hodgson on which those squirming things were feeding.
Bobby tapped the barrel of the shotgun against the door. The sound was as real as steel striking steel.
"Mirage? " I suggested, tossing his deficient explanation back at him as I shoved one flashlight under my belt and jammed the other into a jacket pocket.
"It's bogus." In reply, I slapped my hand against the door.
"Bogus, " he insisted. "Check your watch." I was less interested in the time than in whether anything might be coming out of Hodgson's pressure suit.
With a shudder, I realized that I was brushing at the sleeves of my jacket, wiping at the back of my neck, scrubbing the side of my face, trying to rid myself of crawling things that weren't really there.
Motivated by a vivid memory of the squirming horde inside the helmet, I hooked my fingers in a groove along the edge of the door and pulled.
I grunted, cursed, and pulled harder, as though I might actually be able to move a few tons of steel by tapping the store of energy I'd laid up from a breakfast of crumb cake and hot chocolate.
"Check your watch, " Bobby repeated.
He had shucked back the sleeve of his cotton pullover to look at his own watch. This surprised me. He had never before worn a timepiece, and now he had one just like mine.
When I consulted the luminous digital readout on the oversize face of my wristwatch, I saw 4,08 P. M. The correct time, of course, was short of four o'clock in the morning.
"Mine, too, " he said, showing me that our watches agreed.
"Both wrong? "
"No. That's what time it is. Here. Now. In this place."
"Witchy."
"Pure Salem." Then I registered the date in a separate window below the digital time display. This was the twelfth of April. My watch claimed it was Mon Feb 19. So did Bobby's.
I wondered what year the watch would reveal if its date window had been four digits wider. Somewhere in the past. A memorably catastrophic afternoon for the big-brow scientists on the Mystery Train team, an afternoon when the feces hit the flabellum.
The speed and brightness of the spiraling-bursting-streaming lights in the walls were slowly but noticeably diminishing.
I looked toward the bio-secure suit, which had proved no more secure against hostile organisms than a porkpie hat and a fig leaf, and I saw that whatever inhabited it was moving, churning restlessly. The arms flopped limply against the floor, and one leg twitched, and the entire body quivered as though a powerful electric current was passing through it.
"Not good, " I decided.
"It'll fade."
"Oh, yeah? "
"The screams did, the voices, the wind.
" I rapped my knuckles against the vault door.
"It'll fade, " Bobby insisted.
Though the light show was diminishing, Hodgsonrather, the Hodgson suit was becoming more active. It drummed the heels of its boots against the floor. It bucked and thrashed its arms.
"Trying to get up, " I said.
"Can't hurt us."
"You serious? " My logic seemed unassailable, "If the vault door is real enough to keep us in here, then that thing's real enough to cause us major grief."
"It'll fade." Apparently not having been informed that all its efforts were point
less, due to its impending fade, the Hodgson suit thrashed and bucked and rocked until it rolled off its air tank and onto its side. I was looking at the dark faceplate again, and I could feel something staring back at me from the other side of that tinted Plexiglas, not simply a mass of worms or beetles, stupidly churning, but a cohesive and formidable entity, a malevolent consciousness, as curious about me as I was terrified of it.
This was not my feverish imagination at work.
This was a perception as unambiguous and valid as the chill I would have felt if I'd held an ice cube to the nape of my neck.
Dean Koontz - Seize The Night Page 20
