Seize the Night

already nervous about the quantity of light that was hammering my face.
    I caught Sasha's attention and gestured toward the stairwell.
    Her eyes widened.
    When I followed her gaze, I saw that a door blocked access to the stairs. From inside the stairwell, there had been no door, we had seen straight through to the red—and then to the fluorescent-drenched hallway.
    We had passed directly from there to here without obstruction. From this side, however, the barrier existed.
    I went quickly to the door, yanked it open, and almost crossed the threshold. Fortunately, I hesitated when I sensed a wrongness about the darkness beyond.
    Sliding my sunglasses down my nose, peering over the frames, I expected concrete-walled gloom with steps leading up. Instead, before me was a clear night sky, necklaces of stars, and a pendant moon. This sky scape was the only thing out there where the stairs had been, as though this door now opened high above the earth's atmosphere, in interplanetary space, a long way from the nearest doughnut shop. Or perhaps it opened into a time when the earth no longer existed. No floor lay beyond the threshold, nothing but empty space jeweled with more stars, a cold and infinite drop from the bright corridor in which I stood.
    Sharky.
    I closed the door. I gripped the shotgun fiercely in both hands, not because I expected to use it but because it was real , solid and unyielding, an anchor in this sea of strangeness.
    Sasha was now immediately behind me.
    When I turned to face her, I could tell that she had seen the same celestial panorama that had rocked me. Her gray eyes were as clear as ever, but they were darker than before.
    Doogie hadn't glimpsed the impossible sight, because he was holding the Uzi at the ready and watching the three departing men.
    Frowning, standing with his fists balled tightly at his sides, Roosevelt studied the cat.
    From his position, Bobby couldn't have seen through the doorway, either, but he knew something was wrong. His face was as solemn as that of a rabbit reading a cookbook recipe for hare soup.
    Mungojerrie was the only one of us who didn't appear to be about to blow out snarled springs like an overwound cuckoo clock.
    Trying not to dwell on what I'd seen beyond the stairwell door, I wondered how the cat could find Orson and the kids if they were in a present-time place while we were stuck here in the past. But then I figured that if we could pass from one time period to another, be caught up in the time shifts taking place around us, so could my four-footed brother and the children.
    Anyway, from every indication, we hadn't actually traveled back in time.
    Rather, the past and present—and perhaps the future—were occurring simultaneously, weirdly pressed together by whatever force or force field the engines of the egg room had generated. And perhaps it was not only one night from the past that was bleeding into our present time, maybe we were experiencing moments from different days and nights when the egg room had been in operation.
    The three men were still walking away from us. Ambling. Taking their sweet time.
    The rhythmic swell and recession of the electronic sound began to have an odd psychological effect. A mild vertigo overcame me, and the corridor—this entire subterranean floor—seemed to be turning like a carousel.
    My grip on the shotgun was too fierce. Unwittingly, I was exerting dangerous pressure on the trigger. I hooked my finger around the trigger guard instead.
    I had a headache. It wasn't a result of being knocked around by Father Tom at the Stanwyk house. I was sustaining a brain bruise from pondering time paradoxes, from trying to make sense of what was happening. This required a talent for mathematics and theoretical physics, but although I can balance my checkbook, I haven't inherited my mother's love of math and science. In the most general sense, I understand the theory of leverage that explains the function of a bottle opener, why gravity makes it a bad idea to leap off a high building, and why running headlong into a brick wall will have little effect on the bricks.
    Otherwise, I trust the cosmos to run itself efficiently without my having to understand it, which is also pretty much my attitude toward electric razors, wristwatches, bread-baking machines, and other mechanical devices.
    The only way to deal with these events was to treat them as supernatural occurrences, accept them as you might accept poltergeist phenomena—levitating