Seize the Night

hatches, like those in the bulkheads between watertight compartments in a submarine or like bank-vault doors, and that this connecting module was, in fact, an airlock.
    Although I am certain that these were not biological-research labs, one of the functions of the airlock might have been to prevent bacteria, spores, dust, and other contaminants from being carried into or out of the chamber that I call the egg room. Perhaps those personnel going to and from that inner sanctum were subjected to powerful sprays of sterilizing solution as well as to microbe-killing spectrums of ultraviolet radiation.
    My hunch, however, is that the egg room was pressurized and that this airlock served the same purpose as one aboard a spaceship. Or perhaps it functioned as a decompression chamber of the type deep-sea divers resort to when at risk of the bends.
    In any event, this transitional chamber was designed either to prevent something from getting into the egg room—or to prevent something from getting out.
    Standing in the airlock with Bobby, I trained my flashlight on the raised, curved threshold of the inner portal and swept it around the entire rim of this aperture to reveal the thickness of the egg-room wall, five feet of poured-in-place, steel-reinforced concrete.
    The entryway is so deep, in fact, that it is essentially a five-foot-long tunnel.
    Bobby whistled softly. “Bunker architecture.”
    “No question, it's a containment vessel. Meant to restrain something.”
    “Like what?”
    I shrugged. “Sometimes gifts are left for me here.”
    “Gifts? You found that cap here, right? Mystery Train?”
    “Yeah. It was on the floor, dead center of the egg room. I don't think I found it, exactly. I think it was left there to be found, which is different. And on another night, while I was in the next room, someone left a photograph of my mother here in the airlock.”
    “Airlock?”
    “Doesn't it seem like one?”
    He nodded. “So who left the photo?”
    “I don't know. But Orson was with me at the time, and he didn't realize someone had entered this space behind us.”
    “And he's got the nose of noses.”
    Warily, Bobby directed his flashlight through the first circular hatchway, into the corridor along which we had just come. It was still deserted.
    I went through the inner portal, the short tunnel, crouching because only someone under five feet could pass this way without stooping.
    Bobby followed me into the egg room, and for the first time in our seventeen years of friendship, I saw him stricken with awe. He turned slowly in a circle, sweeping his flashlight across the walls, and though he tried to speak, he couldn't initially produce a sound.
    This ovoid chamber is a hundred twenty feet long and slightly less than sixty feet in diameter at its widest point, tapering toward each end.
    The walls, ceiling, and floor are curved to form a single continuous plane, so you seem to be standing in the empty shell of an enormous egg.
    All surfaces are coated in a milky, vaguely golden, translucent substance that, judging by the profile around the entry hatchway, is nearly three inches thick and is bonded so securely to the concrete that the two appear to be fused.
    The beams of our flashlights shimmered over this highly polished coating, but they also penetrated the exotic material, quivering and flickering to the depths of it, flaring off whorls of glittering golden dust that were suspended like miniature galaxies within. The substance was highly refractive, but light did not shatter through it in hard prismatic lines as it might through crystal, rather, buttery bright currents, as warm and sinuous as candle flames seduced by a draft, flowed and rippled through the thick, glossy surface plating, imparting to it the appearance of a liquid, purling away from us into the farther, darker corners of the room, there to dissipate like pulses of heat lightning behind summer thunderheads. Gazing down at the floor, I could almost believe that I was standing on a pool of pale-amber oil.
    Marveling at the unearthly beauty of this spectacle, Bobby walked farther into the room.
    Although this lustrous material appears to be as slick as wet porcelain, it is not at all slippery. In fact, at times—but not always—the floor seems to grip at your feet, as if it is gluey or exerts a mild magnetic attraction even on objects that contain no iron.
    “Strike it,” I said softly.
    My words spiraled along the walls and ceiling and floor, and a