Seize the Night

totally macking lunacy, sick with terror, sicker with despair, sickest with hope, and I could not stop thinking about good Tink being saved by sheer belief by all the dreaming kids in the world clapping their small hands to proclaim their belief in fairies. Subconsciously, I must have known where I was going, but when I snatched the Uzi out of Doogie's hands, I had no conscious idea what I intended to do with it, though judging by the expression on the waltz wizard's face, I must have looked even crazier than I felt.
    B-3.
    The elevator doors opened on B-3, and the corridor beyond was filled with muddy red light.
    In this mysterious radiance were five tall, blurry, distorted maroon figures. They might have been human, but they might have been something even worse.
    With them was a smaller creature, also a maroon blur, with four legs and a tail, which might have been a cat.
    In spite of all the might-have-beens , I didn't hesitate, because only precious seconds remained in which to act. I stepped out of the elevator, into the muddy red glow, but then the corridor was full of fluorescent light when I crossed into it.
    Roosevelt, Doogie, Sasha, Bobby, Mungojerrie, and I—me, myself, Christopher Snow—stood in the corridor, facing the elevator doors, looking as if they—we—expected trouble.
    A minute ago, down on B-6, just as we had loaded Bobby's corpse into the elevator, someone up here had pushed the call button. That someone was Bobby, a living Bobby from earlier in the night.
    In this strangely afflicted building, time past, time present, and time future were all present here at once.
    With my friends—and I myself—gaping at me in astonishment, as if I were a ghost, I turned right, toward the two oncoming security men that the others hadn't yet seen. One of these guards had fired the shot that killed Bobby.
    I squeezed off a burst from the Uzi, and both guards were cut down before they fired a shot.
    My stomach twisted with revulsion at what I'd done, and I tried to escape my conscience by taking refuge in the fact that these men would have been killed by Doogie, anyway, after they had shot Bobby.
    I had only accelerated their fate while changing Bobby's altogether, for a net saving of one life. But perhaps excuses of that sort make excellent paving stones for the road to Hell.
    Behind me, Sasha, Doogie, and Roosevelt rushed into the corridor from the elevator.
    The astonishment among all these doppelgangers was as thick as the peanut butter on the banana sandwiches that had ultimately killed Elvis.
    I didn't understand how this could be happening, because it had not happened earlier. We had never met ourselves in this hallway on our way down to find the children. But if we were meeting ourselves now, why didn't I have a memory of it?
    Paradox. Time paradox, I guess. You know me and math, me and physics.
    I'm more a Pooh guy, an Eliot guy. My head ached. I had changed Bobby Halloway's fate, which was, to me, a pure miracle, not mere mathematics.
    The elevator was full of muddy red light and the blurry maroon figures of the kids. The doors began to slide shut.
    “Hold it!” I shouted.
    Present-time Doogie blocked the door, half in the fluorescent corridor and half in the murky red elevator.
    The throbbing electronic sound swelled louder. It was fearsome.
    I remembered John Joseph Randolph's pleasurable anticipation, his confidence that we would all be going to the other side soon, to that sideways place he wouldn't name. The train, he'd said, was already beginning to pull out of the station. Suddenly I wondered if he'd meant the whole building might make that mysterious journey—not just whoever was in the egg room, but everyone within the walls of the hangar and the six basements below it.
    With a renewed sense of urgency, I asked Doogie to look in the elevator and see if Bobby was there.
    “I'm here,” said the Bobby in the hall.
    “In there, you're a pile of dead meat,” I told him.
    “No way.”
    “Way.”
    “Ouch.”
    “Maximum.”
    I didn't know why, but I thought it wouldn't be a good idea to return upstairs to the hangar, beyond this zone of radically tangled time, with both Bobbys, the live one and the dead one.
    Still holding the door, present-time Doogie stepped into the elevator, hesitated, then returned to the corridor. “There's no Bobby in there!”
    “Where'd he go?” asked present-time Sasha.
    “The kids say he just … went . They're jazzed about it.”
    “The body's gone