Seize the Night

merely to test the mirage hypothesis, I headed toward the exit. In two steps, I was reeling. I almost collapsed, facedown, in a free fall that would have broken my nose and cracked enough teeth to make a dentist smile. Regaining my balance at the penultimate moment, I spread my legs wide and planted my feet hard against the floor, as though trying to make the rubber soles of my shoes grip as firmly as a squid's suckers.
    The room was not moving, even if it felt like a ship wallowing in rough seas. The movement was a subjective perception, a symptom of my increasing disorientation.
    Staring at the vault door in a futile attempt to will it out of existence, trying to decide whether I should drop to my knees and crawl, I registered an odd detail of its design. The door was suspended on one long barrel hinge that must have been eight or ten inches in diameter.
    The knuckles of the barrel, which would move around the center pin—the pintle—when the door was pushed open or drawn shut, were exposed in most hinges, but not in this one. The knuckles were covered by a solid length of armoring steel, and the head of the pintle was recessed in this shield, as though to hamper anyone who might try to get through the locked door from this side by prying or hammering at the elements of the hinge. If the door could have swung outward, they would not have put the hinge inside the egg room, but because the walls were five feet thick, the door at this end of the entry tunnel could only swing inward.
    This ovoid chamber and the adjoining airlock might have been designed to contain a greater number of atmospheres of pressure and possible biological contaminants, but all evidence supported the conclusion that it had also been constructed with the intention, at least under certain circumstances, of imprisoning someone.
    Thus far, the kaleidoscopic displays in the walls had not been accompanied by sound. Now, though the air remained dead calm, there arose a hollow and mournful moaning of wind, as it might strike the ear when blowing off barren alkaline flats.
    I looked at Bobby. Even through the tattoos of light and shadow that melted across his face, I could see that he was worried.
    “You hear that?” I asked.
    “Treacherous.”
    “Fully,” I agreed, not liking the sound any more than he did.
    If this noise was a hallucination, as the door apparently was, at least we shared it. We could enjoy the comfort—cold as it might be—of going insane together.
    The unfelt wind grew louder, speaking with more than one voice.
    The hollow wail continued, but with it came a rushing sound as of a northwester blowing through a grove of trees in advance of rain, fierce and full of warnings. Groaning, gibbering, soughing, keening. And the lonely tuneless whistling of a blustery winter storm playing rain gutters and down spouts as though they were icy flutes.
    When I heard the first words in the choir of winds, I thought that I must be imagining them, but they swiftly grew louder, clearer.
    Men's voices, half a dozen, maybe more. Tinny, hollow, as if spoken from the far end of a long steel pipe. The words came in clusters separated by bursts of static, issuing from walkie-talkies or perhaps a radio.
    “ … here somewhere, right here … ”
    “ … hurry, for Christ's sake! ”
    “ … give … don't … ”
    “ … Gimme cover. Jackson. Gimme cover … ”
    The rising cacophony of wind was almost as disorienting as the stroboscopic lights and the shadows that kited like legions of bats in a feeding-frenzy. I couldn't discern from which direction the voices came.
    “ … group … here … group and defend. ”
    “ … position to translate … ”
    “ … group, hell … move, haul ass. ”
    “ … translate now! ”
    “ … cycle, cycle it … ”
    Ghosts. I was listening to ghosts. They were dead men now, had been dead since before this facility had been abandoned, and these were the last words they had spoken immediately before they perished.
    I didn't know exactly what was about to happen to these doomed men, but as I listened, I had no doubt that some terrible fate had overcome them, which was now being replayed on some spiritual plane.
    Their voices grew more urgent, and they began to speak over one another:
    “ … cycle it! ”
    “ … hear em? Hear em coming? ”
    “ … hurry … what the hell … ”
    “ … wrong … Jesus … what's wrong? ”
    They were shouting now, some hoarse and others shrill, every voice raw with