Seize the Night

movement in some of the holes in the abdomen and chest of Hodgson's violated pressure suit, as though the things that had killed him were going to boil out of those punctures.
    Bobby split without firing the shotgun, which he might easily have done, out of shock and terror. Thank God he didn't pull the trigger.
    A shotgun blast or two—or ten—wouldn't wipe out even half the hellacious swarm in Hodgson's pressure suit, but it would probably pump them into an even greater killing frenzy.
    As I ran, I switched off the flashlights, because the fireworks in the walls were gaining speed and power once more.
    Although Bobby had been farther from the exit than I was, he got there ahead of me.
    The vault door was as solid as a damn vault door.
    What I'd seen from a distance was confirmed close up, There was no wheel or other release mechanism to disengage the lock bolts.

14
    Back toward the center of the room, about forty feet away from the vault door, Hodgson's pressure suit was where we had left it. Because it hadn't collapsed upon itself like a deflated balloon, I assumed that it was still filled out by the nightmare colony and by the remaining odds and ends of Hodgson on which those squirming things were feeding.
    Bobby tapped the barrel of the shotgun against the door. The sound was as real as steel striking steel.
    “Mirage?” I suggested, tossing his deficient explanation back at him as I shoved one flashlight under my belt and jammed the other into a jacket pocket.
    “It's bogus.”
    In reply, I slapped my hand against the door.
    “Bogus,” he insisted. “Check your watch.”
    I was less interested in the time than in whether anything might be coming out of Hodgson's pressure suit.
    With a shudder, I realized that I was brushing at the sleeves of my jacket, wiping at the back of my neck, scrubbing the side of my face, trying to rid myself of crawling things that weren't really there.
    Motivated by a vivid memory of the squirming horde inside the helmet, I hooked my fingers in a groove along the edge of the door and pulled.
    I grunted, cursed, and pulled harder, as though I might actually be able to move a few tons of steel by tapping the store of energy I'd laid up from a breakfast of crumb cake and hot chocolate.
    “Check your watch,” Bobby repeated.
    He had shucked back the sleeve of his cotton pullover to look at his own watch. This surprised me. He had never before worn a timepiece, and now he had one just like mine.
    When I consulted the luminous digital readout on the oversize face of my wristwatch, I saw 4:08 P.M. The correct time, of course, was short of four o'clock in the morning.
    “Mine, too,” he said, showing me that our watches agreed.
    “Both wrong?”
    “No. That's what time it is. Here. Now. In this place.”
    “Witchy.”
    “Pure Salem.”
    Then I registered the date in a separate window below the digital time display. This was the twelfth of April. My watch claimed it was Mon Feb 19 . So did Bobby's.
    I wondered what year the watch would reveal if its date window had been four digits wider. Somewhere in the past. A memorably catastrophic afternoon for the big-brow scientists on the Mystery Train team, an afternoon when the feces hit the flabellum.
    The speed and brightness of the spiraling-bursting-streaming lights in the walls were slowly but noticeably diminishing.
    I looked toward the bio-secure suit, which had proved no more secure against hostile organisms than a porkpie hat and a fig leaf, and I saw that whatever inhabited it was moving, churning restlessly. The arms flopped limply against the floor, and one leg twitched, and the entire body quivered as though a powerful electric current was passing through it.
    “Not good,” I decided.
    “It'll fade.”
    “Oh, yeah?”
    “The screams did, the voices, the wind.”
    I rapped my knuckles against the vault door.
    “It'll fade,” Bobby insisted.
    Though the light show was diminishing, Hodgson—rather, the Hodgson suit—was becoming more active. It drummed the heels of its boots against the floor. It bucked and thrashed its arms.
    “Trying to get up,” I said.
    “Can't hurt us.”
    “You serious?”
    My logic seemed unassailable, “If the vault door is real enough to keep us in here, then that thing's real enough to cause us major grief.”
    “It'll fade.”
    Apparently not having been informed that all its efforts were pointless, due to its impending fade, the Hodgson suit thrashed and bucked and rocked until it