Seize the Night

in a hard hat, brandishing the shotgun at three ghosts that looked as if they would give us trouble, while trying as best I could not to put us in the same space that was about to be occupied by an object materializing from another time, and if you think all that was easy, you're a kak.
    At times we were in a dark and abandoned warehouse, then we were in the murky red light of a time shift, but ten steps later, we were walking through a well-lighted and bustling place populated by busy ghosts as solid as we were. The worst moment was when we passed through a red fog and, though still far from the exit door, found ourselves beyond the warehouse, in a landscape where black masses of fungus rose with vaguely treelike forms and clawed at a red sky in which two dim suns burned low on the horizon. But an instant later, we were among the workmen ghosts again, then in darkness, and finally at the exit.
    Nothing and no one followed us into the night, but we kept running until we had nearly reached the Hummer, where at last we stopped and turned and stared at the hangar, which was caught in a time storm.
    The concrete base of the structure, the corrugated steel walls, and the curve of the Quonset-style roof were pulsing with that red radiance.
    From the high clerestory windows came white beams as intense as those from a lighthouse, jabbing at the sky, carving bright arcs.
    Judging by the sound, you would have thought that a thousand bulls were smashing through a thousand china shops inside the building, that tanks were clashing on battlefields, that mobs of rioters were screaming for blood.
    The ground under our feet was trembling, as though from an earthquake, and I wondered if we were at a safe distance.
    I expected the structure to explode or burst into flames, but instead it began to unravel. The red glow faded, the searchlights spearing from the high windows went dark, and we watched while the huge building flickered as though two thousand days and nights were passing in just two minutes, moon glow alternating with sunshine and darkness, the corrugated walls appearing to flutter in the strobing light. Then suddenly the building began to dismantle itself, as if it were unraveling into time past.
    Workmen swarmed over its surface, all moving backward, scaffolding and construction machinery appeared around it, the roof vanished, and the walls peeled down, and trains of trucks sucked the concrete out of the foundation, back into their mixers, and steel beams were craned out of the ground, like dinosaur bones from a paleontological dig, until all six subterranean floors must have been deconstructed, whereupon a blinding fury of massive dump trucks and excavators replaced the earth that they had once removed, and then after a final crackle of red light passed across the site and winked out, all was still.
    The hangar and everything under it had ceased to exist.
    The spectacle left the kids ecstatic, as if they had met E. T. and ridden on the back of a brontosaurus and taken a quick trip to the moon all in one evening.
    “It's over?” Doogie wondered.
    “As if it never was,” I suggested.
    Sasha said, “But it was .”
    “The residual effect. A runaway residual effect. The whole place imploded into … the past, I guess.”
    “But if it never existed,” Bobby said, “why do I remember being inside the place?”
    “Don't start,” I warned him.
    We packed ourselves into the Hummer—five adults, four excited kids, one shaky dog, and a smug cat—and Doogie drove to the bungalow in Dead Town, where we had to deal with Delacroix's rotting cadaver and the ceilings festooned with frankfurter-size cocoons. An exorcist's work is never done.
    On the way, Aaron Stuart, the troublemaker, reached a solemn conclusion about the blood on my hands. “Mr. Halloway must be dead.”
    “We've done this,” I said impatiently. “He's not dead anymore.”
    “He's dead,” Anson agreed.
    “I may be dead,” Bobby said, “but my pants are dry.”
    “Dead,” Jimmy Wing agreed.
    “Maybe he is dead,” Wendy brooded.
    “What the hell is wrong with you kids?” I demanded, turning in my seat to glare at them. “He's not dead, it's a paradox, but he's not dead! All you've got to do is believe in fairies, clap your hands, and Tinker Bell will live! Is that so hard to understand?”
    “Ice it down, Snowman,” Sasha advised me.
    “I'm cool.”
    I was still glaring at the kids, who were in the third and final seat.
    Orson was in the