Seize the Night

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 super model 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 montage 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