Seize the Night

need to know the answer. Let it be a question for the ages.
    The chill had left my hand the instant that I'd withdrawn it from the door, but I was still gasping, and between each convulsive breath, I heard myself repeating the same four-letter word, as if I had been stricken by a terminal case of Tourette's syndrome and would spend the rest of my life unable to stop shouting this single obscenity.
    Advancing through dim bloody light and legions of leaping shadows, like an astronaut returned from a mission to Planet Hell, the Hodgson thing had crossed half the original distance between us. It was twenty feet away, relentlessly dragging itself forward, obviously not offended by my language, driven by a hunger almost as palpable as the stench of hot tar and rotting vegetation that earlier had been borne on the wind from nowhere.
    In frustration, Bobby struck the door with the shotgun barrel.
    That steel plug tolled like a bell.
    He didn't even bother to point the weapon at the Hodgson thing.
    Evidently, he, too, had reached the conclusion that the impact of stray buckshot against the walls of the chamber might energize the place and leave us trapped here longer.
    The light show ended, and over us fell absolute darkness.
    If I could have stilled my storming heart and held my breath, I might have been able to hear the whispery slippage of rubber boot soles over the glassy floor, but I was a one-man percussion section. I probably couldn't have detected the sound of the Hodgson thing's approach if it had been beating a bass drum.
    When the luminous phenomenon in the walls had been extinguished, surely the phantasmagoric engine had shut down altogether, surely we had come all the way back to reality, surely the Hodgson thing had ceased to exist as abruptly as it had appeared, surely—
    Again, Bobby struck the vault door with the shotgun. It didn't toll this time. The tone was flat, less reverberant than before, as if he had slammed a hammer into a block of wood.
    Maybe the door was changing, in the process of dematerializing, but it was still blocking the exit. We couldn't risk trying to leave until we were certain we wouldn't be passing through it while it was in a state of flux and possibly capable of taking some molecules from our bodies with it when it vanished for good.
    I wondered what would happen if the Hodgson thing had a firm grip on me when its very substance began to transform. If, for even a moment, my hand had become one with the steel of the vault door, perhaps part of me would become one with the pressure suit and with the squirming entity inside the suit, a close, too-personal encounter that might destroy my sanity even if, miraculously, I survived with no physical damage.
    Blackness pressed liquidly against my open eyes, as if I were deep underwater. Although I strained to catch the slightest sign of the approaching figure, I was as sightless here as I'd been in the corridor outside the room where I'd found the veve rats.
    Inevitably, I recalled the kidnapper with the white-corn teeth, whose face I'd touched in the blinding dark.
    As then, I now sensed a presence looming before me, and with more reason than I'd had previously.
    After all that had happened in this Mystery Train terminal, this antechamber to Hell, I was no longer inclined to discount my fears as the product of a hyperactive imagination. This time I didn't reach out to prove to myself that my darkest suspicions were groundless, because I knew that my fingertips would slide down the smooth curve of the Plexiglas faceplate.
    “ Chris! ”
    I jerked in surprise before I comprehended that the voice was Bobby's.
    “Your watch,” he said.
    The radiant readouts were visible even in this soot-thick murk.
    The green numbers in those displays were changing, counting forward so rapidly that many hours were falling behind us in a fraction of a second.
    The letters in the day and month windows were passing in a blur of continuously changing abbreviations.
    Time past was giving way to time present.
    Hell, in truth I didn't know exactly what was happening here.
    Maybe I didn't understand this situation at all, and maybe a bend in the fabric of time had nothing to do with what we'd witnessed. Maybe we were entirely delusional because someone had spiked our beer with LSD.
    Maybe I was at home, snug in bed, asleep and dreaming. Maybe up was down, in was out, black was white. I knew only that whatever was happening now felt right , felt a lot better than