Seize the Night

condition.
    Don't think about it. Ghosts can't hurt you if you don't fear them, and bad things won't happen if you don't think them.
    I was grasping at all the defenses of childhood.
    Doogie emptied stuff out of the backpack. With Roosevelt's help, he folded the empty bag and wedged it under Bobby's hips, elevating his lower body at least slightly, though not enough.
    When I put the flashlight at Bobby's side, he said, “I'll probably be way safer in the dark, bro. Light might draw attention.”
    “Switch it off if you hear anything.”
    “You switch it off before you leave,” he said. “I can't.” When I took his hand, I was shocked at the weakness of his grip.
    He literally didn't have the strength to handle the flashlight.
    There was no point leaving him a gun for self-defense.
    I didn't know what to say to him. I had never been seriously speechless with Bobby before. I seemed to have a mouth full of dirt, as if I were already lying in my own grave.
    “Here,” Doogie said, handing me a pair of oversize goggles and an unusual flashlight. “Infrared goggles. Israeli military surplus. Infrared flashlight.”
    “What for?”
    “So they won't see us coming.”
    “Who?”
    “Whoever's got the kids and Orson.” I stared at Doogie Sassman as if he were a Viking from Mars.
    Bobby's teeth chattered when he said, “The dude's a ballroom dancer, too.”
    A rumbling noise rose, like a freight train passing overhead, and the floor shook under us. Gradually, the sound diminished, and the shaking stopped.
    “Better go,” Sasha said.
    She, Doogie, and Roosevelt were wearing goggles, with the lenses against their foreheads rather than over their eyes.
    Bobby had closed his eyes.
    Frightened, I said, “Hey.”
    “Hey,” he replied, looking at me again.
    “Listen, if you die on me,” I said, “then you're king of the assholes.”
    He smiled. “Don't worry. Wouldn't want to take the title away from you, bro.”
    “We'll be back fast.”
    “I'll be here,” he assured me, but his voice was a whisper. “You promised me a beer.” His eyes were inexpressibly kind.
    There was so much to be said. None of it could be spoken. Even if we'd had plenty of time, none of what was in my heart could have been spoken.
    I switched off his flashlight but left it at his side.
    Darkness was usually my friend, but I hated this hungry, cold, demanding blackness.
    The fancy eye wear featured a Velcro strap. My hands were so unsteady that I needed a moment to adjust the goggles to my head, and then I lowered the lenses over my eyes.
    Doogie, Roosevelt, and Sasha had switched on their infrared flashlights.
    Without the goggles, I had not been able to see that wavelength of light, but now the vestibule was revealed in various shades and intensities of green.
    I clicked the button on my flashlight and played the beam over Bobby Halloway.
    Supine on the floor, arms at his sides, glowing green, he might already have been a ghost.
    “Your shirt really pops in this weird light,” I said.
    “Yeah?”
    “Bitchin'.”
    The freight-train rumble rose again, louder than before. The steel and concrete bones of the structure were grinding together.
    The cat, with no need for goggles, led us out of the vestibule.
    I followed Roosevelt, Doogie, and Sasha, who might have been three green spirits haunting a catacomb.
    The hardest thing I'd ever had to do in my life—harder than attending my mother's funeral, harder than sitting by my father's deathbed—was to leave Bobby alone.

25
    From the vestibule, a sloping tunnel, ten feet in diameter, descended fifty feet. After reaching the bottom, we followed an entirely horizontal but wildly serpentine course, and with every turn, the architecture and engineering progressed from curious to strange to markedly alien.
    The first passageway featured concrete walls, but every tunnel thereafter, while formed of reinforced concrete, appeared to be lined with metal. Even in the inadequately revelatory infrared light, I detected sufficient differences in the appearances of these curved surfaces to be confident that the type of metal changed from time to time. If I'd lifted the goggles and switched on an ordinary UV flashlight, I suspect that I would have seen steel, copper, brass, and an array of alloys that I couldn't have identified without a degree in metallurgy.
    The largest of these metal-lined tunnels were about eight feet in diameter, but we traveled some that were half that size, through which we had