Seize the Night

this?”
    “Way more than dumb enough.”
    “This place has nothing to do with Jimmy and Orson,” I said.
    “How do you know?”
    “They're not here.”
    “But something here may help us find them.”
    “We can't help them if we're dead.”
    “Be a good idiot and turn on your light.”
    “This is nuts.”
    “Fear nothing, bro. Carpe noctem .”
    “Damn,” I said, hung with my own noose.
    I switched on my flashlight.

13
    A riot of fiery lights erupted within the translucent walls around us, and it was easy to imagine that we were in the canyons of a great city stricken by insurrection, bomb throwers and arsonists on every side, blazing rioters ignited by their own torches and now running in terror through the night, cyclones of tempestuous fire whirling along avenues where the pavement was as molten as lava, tall buildings with orange flames seething from the high windows, smoldering chunks of parapets and cornices and ledges trailing comet tails of sparks as they crashed into the streets.
    Yet at the same time, with the slightest shift of perspective, it was also possible to see this panoramic cataclysm not primarily as a series of bright eruptions but as a shadow show, because for every Molotov-cocktail flash, for every roiling mass of hot napalm, for every luminous trail that reminded me of tracer bullets, there was a dark shape in motion, begging interpretation as do the faces and figures in clouds. Ebony capes billowed, black robes swirled, sable serpents coiled and struck, shadows swooped like angry ravens, flocks of crows dived and soared overhead and underfoot, armies of charred skeletons marched with a relentless scissoring of sharp black bones, midnight cats crouched and pounced, sinuous whips of darkness lashed through the bale fires, and iron-black blades slashed.
    In this pandemonium of light and darkness, wholly encapsulated by a chaos of spinning flames and tumbling shadows, I was becoming increasingly disoriented. Though I stood still, with my feet widely planted for balance, I felt as if I were moving, twirling like poor Dorothy aboard the Kansas-to-oz Express. Forward, behind, right, left, up, down—all rapidly became more difficult to define.
    Again, from the corner of my eye, I glimpsed the door. When I looked more directly, it was still there, formidable and gleaming.
    “Bobby.”
    “I see it.”
    “Not good.”
    “Not a real door,” he concluded.
    “You said the place wasn't haunted.”
    “Mirage.”
    The storm of light and shadow gained velocity. It seemed to be escalating toward an ominous crescendo.
    I was afraid that the furious motion, the increasingly spiky and disturbing patterns in the walls, foretold an onrushing event that would translate all this energy into sudden violence. This ovoid room was so strange that I was unable to imagine the nature of the threat rushing at us, couldn't guess even the direction from which it might come.
    For once, my three-hundred-ring imagination failed me.
    The vault door was hinged on this side, therefore, it would swing inward. There was no lock wheel to disengage the ring of thick bolts that were currently seated in holes around the jamb, so the door could be opened only from the short tunnel between this room and the airlock, from the other side, which meant we were trapped here.
    No. Not trapped.
    Striving to resist a surging claustrophobia, I assured myself that the door wasn't real. Bobby was right, It was a hallucination, an illusion, a mirage.
    An apparition.
    My perception of the egg room as a haunted place grew harder to shake off. The luminous forms raging through the walls suddenly seemed to be tortured spirits in a dervish dance of anguish, frantic to escape damnation, as though all around me were windows with views of Hell.
    As my heart pumped nearly hard enough to blow out my carotid arteries, I told myself that I was seeing the egg room not as it was at this moment but as it had been before the industrious gnomes of Wyvern had stripped it—and the entire facility—around it to the bare concrete.
    The massive vault door had been here then, but it was not here now, even though I could see it. The door had been dismantled, hauled away, salvaged, melted down, and recast into soup ladles, pinballs, and orthodontic braces. Now it was purely apparitional, and I could walk through it as easily as I had walked through the spiderweb at the top of the porch steps of the bungalow in Dead Town.
    Not intending to leave, wishing