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, Hodgsonrather, 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
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