Seize the Night

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.
    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 earlier. 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 chase ways. Painted iron pipe attached to one wall, as a handrail. The air was cold, thick, redolent with