Seize the Night

more electricity than a small nuclear reactor but like every one of us, he has his limitations.
    In the blackness, I moved to the hole in the wall. Blindly gripping one of the steel fittings that had secured the missing bookcase to a wall-mounted track, I pulled myself up until I was crouching with both feet on the sturdy two-by-six bolted across the opening. I reached into the shaft, fumbled for a steel rung, snared one, and swung off the two-by-six onto the service ladder.
    Admittedly, I am less quiet than a cat, but by a degree that only a mouse would appreciate. I don't mean to imply that I have a paranormal ability to race across a carpet of crisp autumn leaves without raising a crackle. My stealth is largely a consequence of three things, first, the profound patience that XP has taught me, second, the confidence with which I have learned to move through the bleakest night, third, and not least important, decades spent observing the nocturnal animals and birds and other creatures with whom I share my world. Every one of them is a master of silence when it needs to be, and more often than not it desperately needs to be, because the night is a kingdom of predators, in which every hunter is also the hunted.
    I descended from darkness into darkness distilled, wishing that I didn't need both hands for the ladder and could, instead, swing downward like an ape, swift and nimble, gripping with my left hand and both feet, holding the pistol ready. But then if I were an ape, I would have been too wise to put myself in this precarious position.
    Before I reached the first basement, I began to wonder how my quarry had gone down the ladder while encumbered with the boy. Across his shoulder in a fireman's carry? Jimmy would have to have been bound at ankles and wrists to prevent him from making a movement, either intentionally or out of panic, that might dislodge his abductor. Even then, although the boy was small, he'd have been a considerable burden and a relentless backward drag that had to be diligently resisted every time the kidnapper moved a hand from one rung to the next.
    I decided that the man I was pursuing must be as strong, agile, and confident as he was psychotic. So much for my fond hope that I was chasing a soft-bellied librarian who, dazed and confused, had been driven to this insane act by the stress of converting from the Dewey decimal system to a new computerized inventory.
    Even in the lightless murk, I knew when I had reached the gap in the shaft where the basement elevator doors had once been, one floor below the warehouse office. I can't explain how I could know, any more than I can explain the plot line of the average Jackie Chan movie, though I love Jackie Chan movies. Perhaps there was a draft or a scent or a resonance so subtle that I was only subconsciously aware of it.
    I couldn't be sure this was the level to which the kidnapper had taken the boy. He might have gone farther down.
    Listening intently, hoping to hear again the troll-deep voice or another sound that would guide me, I hung like a spider on an obsessively well organized web. I had no intention of gobbling up unwary flies and moths, but the longer I remained suspended in the gloom, the more I felt that I was not the spider, after all, not the diner but the dinner, and that a mutant tarantula as big as an elevator cab was ascending from the pit below, its sharp mandibles silently scissoring.
    My dad was a professor of poetry, and throughout my childhood, he read to me from the entire history of verse, Homer to Dr. Seuss, Donald Justice to Ogden Nash, which makes him partly responsible for my baroque imagination. Blame the rest of it on that aforementioned snack of cheese, onion bread, and jalapeńos.
    Or blame it on the eerie atmosphere and the realities of Fort Wyvern, for here even a rational man might have legitimate reasons to entertain thoughts of giant ravenous spiders. The impossible was once made possible in this place. If the hideous arachnid in my mind's eye was the fault of just my dad and my diet, then my imagination would have conjured not a simple spider but an image of the grinning Grinch climbing toward me.
    As I hung motionless on the ladder, the grinning Grinch rapidly became an inexpressibly more terrifying image than any spider could have been, until another hard crash boomed through the building, shaking me back to reality. It was identical to the first crash, which had drawn me this far, a steel door slamming in a