Seize the Night

government's salvage operation had stripped away items of value from only limited areas of the base.
    Perhaps, in the middle of the process, the Department of Defense accountants had decided that the effort was more expensive than the liquidation value of the salvaged goods.
    To my left, the corridor wall was unbroken. Along the right side lay rooms waiting behind a series of unpainted, stainless-steel doors without markings of any kind.
    Even though I was currently unable to consult with my clever canine brother, I was capable of deducing on my own that the slamming of two of these doors must have produced the crashes that had drawn me down here.
    The corridor was so long that my flashlight couldn't reveal the end of it. I wasn't able to see how many rooms it served, whether fewer than six or more than sixty, but I suspected that the boy and his abductor were in one of them.
    The flashlight was beginning to feel hot in my hand, but I knew the heat wasn't real. The beam was not intense, and it was directed away from me, I was keeping my fingers well back from the bright lens.
    Nevertheless, I was so accustomed to avoiding light that, by holding this source of it too long, I began to feel something of what hapless Icarus must have felt when, flying too near the sun, he'd detected the stink of burning feathers.
    Instead of a knob, the first door featured a lever, and instead of a keyhole, there was a slot for the insertion of a magnetic card.
    Either the electronic locks would have been disabled when the base was abandoned or they would have disengaged automatically when the power was shut off.
    I put one ear to the door. There was no sound whatsoever from within.
    Gingerly, I pressed down on the lever. At best I expected a thin, betraying skreek and at worst the “Hallelujah Chorus” from Handel's Messiah . Instead, the lever worked as noiselessly as if it had been installed and oiled only yesterday.
    With my body, I pushed open the door, holding the Glock in one hand and the flashlight in the other.
    The room was large, about forty feet wide by eighty feet long.
    I could only guess at the precise dimensions, because my small flashlight barely reached the width of the space and could not penetrate the entire depth.
    As far as I could see, no machinery or furniture or supplies had been left behind. Most likely, everything had been hauled off to the fog wreathed mountains of Transylvania to re-equip Victor Frankenstein's laboratory.
    Strewn across the vast gray tile floor were hundreds of small skeletons.
    For an instant, perhaps because of the frail-looking rib cages, I thought these were the remains of birds—which made no sense, as there is no feathered species with a preference for subterranean flight. As I played the flashlight over a few calcimine skulls and as I registered both the size of them and then the lack of wing structures, I realized that these must be the skeletons of rats. Hundreds of rats.
    The majority of the skeletons lay alone, each separate from all the others, but in places there were also piles of bones, as though a score of hallucinating rodents had suffocated one another while competing for the same imaginary hunk of cheese.
    Strangest of all were the patterns of skulls and bones that I noted here and there. These remains appeared to be curiously arranged—not as though the rats had perished at random dropping points, but as though they had painstakingly positioned themselves with an intricacy similar to the elaborate lines in a Haitian priest's voodoo veves .
    I know all about veves because my friend Bobby Halloway once dated an awesomely beautiful surfer, Holly Keene, who was into voodoo.
    The relationship didn't last.
    A veve is a design that represents the figure and power of an astral force. The voodoo priest prepares five large copper bowls, each containing a different substance, white flour, cornmeal, red brick powder, powdered charcoal, and powdered tannis root. He makes the sacred designs on the floor with these substances, allowing each to dribble in a measured flow from his cupped hand. He must be able to draw hundreds of complex veves freehand, from memory. For even the least ambitious ritual, several veves are needed to force the attention of the gods to the Oumphor , the temple, where the rites are conducted.
    Holly Keene was a practitioner of good magic, a self-proclaimed Hougnon , rather than a black-magic Bocor . She said it was maximum uncool to create zombies by