Seize the Night

rolled off its air tank and onto its side. I was looking at the dark faceplate again, and I could feel something staring back at me from the other side of that tinted Plexiglas, not simply a mass of worms or beetles, stupidly churning, but a cohesive and formidable entity, a malevolent consciousness, as curious about me as I was terrified of it.
    This was not my feverish imagination at work.
    This was a perception as unambiguous and valid as the chill I would have felt if I'd held an ice cube to the nape of my neck.
    “It'll fade,” Bobby repeated, and the thin note of dread in his voice revealed that he, too, was aware of being observed.
    I was not comforted by the fact that the Hodgson thing was forty feet away from us. I wouldn't have felt safe if the distance had been forty miles and if I'd been studying this spastic apparition through a telescope.
    The pyrotechnics had lost perhaps a third of their power.
    The door was still cold and hard under my hand.
    As the light show proceeded toward a final flourish, visibility declined, but even in the slowly deepening gloom, I could see the Hodgson thing rolling off its side, lying facedown on the floor, and then struggling to get to its hands and knees.
    If I'd correctly interpreted the gruesome sight I'd glimpsed through the faceplate, hundreds or even thousands of individual creatures infested the pressure suit, flesh-eating multitudes that constituted a nest or hive. A colony of beetles might operate under a sophisticated structure of divisional labor, maintain a high degree of social order, and work together to survive and prosper, but even if Hodgson's skeleton remained to provide an armature, I couldn't believe that the colony would be able to form itself into a manlike shape and function with such superb coordination, interlocked form, and strength that it could walk around in a spacesuit, climb steps, and drive heavy machinery.
    The Hodgson thing rose to its feet.
    “Nasty,” Bobby murmured.
    Under the flat of my damp palm, I felt a short-lived vibration pass through the vault door. More peculiar than a vibration. More pronounced.
    It was a faint, undulant … tremor. The door didn't simply hum with it, the steel quivered briefly, for a second or two, as though it were not steel at all, as though it were gelatin, and then it became solid—and seemingly impregnable—once more.
    The thing in the pressure suit swayed like a toddler unsure of its balance. It slid its left foot forward, hesitated, and dragged its right foot after the left. The scraping of its boots against the glassy floor produced only a whispery sound.
    Left foot, right foot.
    Coming toward us.
    Perhaps more of Hodgson survived than just his skeleton. Maybe the colony had not completely devoured the man, had not even killed him, but had bored into him, nestling deep into his flesh and bones, into his heart and liver and brain, establishing a hideous symbiotic relationship with his body, while taking firm control of his nervous system from the brain to the thinnest efferent fiber.
    As the fireworks in the walls darkened into amber and umber and blood red, the Hodgson thing slid its left foot forward, hesitated, then dragged its right. The old Imhotep two-step, invented by Boris Karloff in 1932.
    Under my hand, the vault door quivered again and suddenly turned mushy .
    I gasped when a painful coldness, sharper than needles, pierced my right hand, as if I had plunged it into something considerably more frigid than ice water. From wrist to fingertips, I appeared to be one with the vault door. Although the egg-room light was rapidly fading, I could see that the steel had become semitransparent, like a lazy whirlpool, circular currents were turning within it. And in the gray substance of the vault door were the paler gray shapes of my fingers.
    Startled, I yanked my hand out of the door—and had no sooner extracted it than the steel regained its solidity.
    I remembered how the door had first been visible only out of the corner of my eye, not when I looked directly. It had acquired substance by degrees, and it was likely to dematerialize not in a wink but in installments.
    Bobby must have seen what had happened, because he took a step backward, as though the steel might suddenly become a whirling vortex and suck him out of this place into oblivion.
    If I hadn't extracted my hand in time, would it have broken off at the joining point, leaving me with a neatly severed but spurting stump?
    I didn't