No. Not trapped.
Striving to resist a surging claustrophobia, I assured myself that the
door wasn’t real. Bobby was right, It was a hallucination, an illusion,
a mirage.
An apparition.
I My perception of the egg room as a haunted place grew harder to shake
off. The luminous forms raging through the walls suddenly seemed to be
tortured spirits in a dervish dance of anguish, frantic to escape
damnation, as though all around me were windows with views of Hell.
As my heart pumped nearly hard enough to blow out my carotid arteries, I
told myself that I was seeing the egg room not as it was at this moment
but as it had been before the industrious gnomes of Wyvern had stripped
it and the entire facility around it to the bare concrete.
The massive vault door had been here then, but it was not here now, even
though I could see it. The door had been dismantled, hauled away,
salvaged, melted down, and recast into soup ladles, pinballs, and
orthodontic braces. Now it was purely apparitional, and I could walk
through it as easily as I had walked through the spiderweb at the top of
the porch steps of the bungalow in Dead Town.
Not intending to leave, wishing 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 pinthe
pintlewhen 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