Seize the Night

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. Every one 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