“Just once, quick, for a clearer look,” he urged.
Against all instincts, I did as Bobby wanted, crouching over the cumbersomely attired figure for a better view.
The tinted Plexiglas still partially obscured what lay beyond, but at once I understood why, with the single flashlight, we hadn’t been able to see poor Hodgson’s face: Hodgson no longer had a face. Inside the helmet was a wet churning mass that seemed to be feeding voraciously on the remaining substance of the dead man: a sickening pale tangle of seething, squirming, slithering, jittering things that looked somewhat soft-bodied like worms but were not worms, that also looked somewhat chitinous like beetles but were not beetles, a greasy white colony of something unnameable that had invaded his suit and overwhelmed him with such rapidity that he had died no less abruptly than if he had been shot straight through the heart. And now these twitching things responded to the flashlight beam by surging against the inner surface of the Plexiglas faceplate, teeming with obscene excitement.
Bolting to my feet, reeling backward, I thought I saw 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 rucked 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 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 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 would a sudden embrace from the thing in Hodgson’s suit.
If, in fact, we had been more than two years in the past, if we were now racing forward to the April night on which we had begun this bizarre adventure, I thought I ought to have felt some change within myself—a singing in my bones, a fever from the friction of the frantically passing hours, a sense of growing back to my real age, something. But a descent on a slow elevator would have had a greater physical effect than this express ride along the rails of time.