Seize the Night

chairs, hurtling knickknacks, doors slammed by invisible presences—or the spectral appearance of a moldering and semitransparent corpse glimpsed on a midnight stroll in a graveyard.
    Thinking too much about time-bending force fields and time paradoxes and reality shifts, straining to grasp the logic of it, would only make me crazy, when what I desperately needed to be was cool. Calm.
    Therefore, this structure was just a haunted house. Our best hope of finding our way through its many rooms and back to the safer side of the spook zone was to remember that ghosts can't hurt you unless you yourself give them the power to harm you, unless you feed their substance with your fear. This is the classic theory, well known to spirit channelers and ghost busters all over the world. I think I read it in a comic book.
    The three ghosts were just fifty feet from the turn that would finally take them out of sight, around one arc of the long racetrack corridor.
    They stopped. Stood with their heads together. Talking above the throbbing noise that flooded the building.
    The specter in the jeans and white shirt turned to a door and opened it.
    Then the other two wraiths—the one in the suit, the one in the khakis and lab coat—continued toward the end of the hall.
    As he opened the door, the first spook must have registered us in his peripheral vision. He swung toward us, as though he had seen ghosts.
    He took a couple steps in our direction but then halted, maybe because he noticed our guns.
    He shouted. His words weren't clear, but he wasn't suggesting a tour and complimentary lunch in the cafeteria.
    Anyway, he wasn't calling to us but to the pair of phantasms strolling toward the turn in the corridor. They spun around and gaped at us as though they were stunned sailors gazing at the ghost ship Marie Celeste gliding silently past in a light fog.
    We had spooked them as much as they had spooked us.
    The one in the suit evidently wasn't merely a well-tailored scientist or a project bureaucrat, and certainly not a Jehovah's Witness pushing Watchtower magazine in a tough territory, because he drew a handgun from a holster under his jacket.
    I reminded myself that ghosts couldn't hurt us unless we gave them power by feeding them with our fear—and then I wondered if this rule applied to haunts packing heat. I wished that I could remember the name of the comic book in which I'd chanced upon this wisdom, because if the information had been in Tales from the Crypt , it might be true, but if it was from an issue of Donald Duck adventures, then I was screwed.
    Instead of opening fire on us, the armed apparition pushed past his two phantom friends and disappeared through the door that the one in jeans had opened.
    He was probably running for a telephone, to call security. We were about to be crunched, swept up, bagged, and put out for garbage collection.
    Around us, the corridor rippled , and things changed.
    The white ceramic floor tiles quickly faded beneath us, leaving us standing on bare concrete, although I felt nothing move underfoot.
    Here and there along the hall, patches of tile remained, the edges not sharply defined, feathering into the concrete, as though these were widely scattered puddles of time past that hadn't yet evaporated from the floor of time present.
    The rooms opening along the inner wall of the corridor no longer had doors.
    Shadows swarmed as the fluorescent panels began to disappear from the ceiling. Yet, in an irregular pattern, a few fixtures remained, brightening widely separated sections of the corridor.
    I took off my sunglasses and pocketed them as the grease-pencil scheduling chart dissolved from the wall. The bulletin board still hung unchanged.
    One of the wheeled carts faded away before my eyes. The other cart remained, though a few of the odd instruments racked on it were becoming transparent.
    The ghost in blue jeans and the ghost in a lab coat really looked like spirits now, mere ectoplasmic entities that had congealed out of a white mist. They started hesitantly toward us, then began to run, perhaps because we were fading from their view just as they were disappearing from ours. They covered only half the ground between us before they vanished.
    The suit with the gun returned to the hallway from the office, having raved to security about Vikings in jumpsuits and invading cats, but he was now the weakest of revenants, a shimmering wraith. As he raised his weapon, he departed time present without a