steel.
Abruptly, the air temperature changed. The hangar had been unpleasantly
cool, almost cold, but from one instant to the next, it became fifteen
or twenty degrees warmer. This would have been impossible even if the
building had still contained a heating plant, which it did not.
Sasha, Doogie, and Roosevelt joined Bobby and me, instinctively forming
a circle to guard against a threat from any direction.
The vibrations in the post grew stronger.
I looked toward the east end of the hangar. The door by which we had
entered was about twenty yards away. The flashlights were able to reach
that far, though they couldn’t chase away all the shadows. In that
direction, I could see to the end of the shorter length of the overhead
crane tracks, and all seemed as it had been when we’d first come into
the building.
The flashlights were not able to probe to the west end of the structure,
however, it lay at least eighty and perhaps as much as a hundred yards
away. As far as I could see, there was nothing out of the ordinary.
What bothered me was the unyielding blackness in the last twenty or
thirty yards. Not seamless blackness. Many shades of black and deepest
grays, a montage of shadows.
I had an impression of a large, looming object concealed in that
montage. A towering and complex shape. Something black and gray, so well
camouflaged in the gloom that the eye couldn’t quite seize upon the
outline of it.
Bobby whispered, “Sasha, your light. Here.” She directed it where he
pointed, at the floor.
The light gleamed off one of the inch-thick steel angle plates anchored
to the concrete, where heavy machinery had once been mounted.
These prickled up from the floor at many points in the room.
I didn’t understand why Bobby had called our attention to this
unremarkable object.
“Clean, ” he said.
Then I understood. When we had been here last nigh tin fact, on every
occasion that I had passed through this hangar these angle plates and
the bolts holding them down had been smeared with grease and caked with
dirt. This one was shiny, clean, as though someone had recently done
maintenance on it.
Holding the cat in one arm, Roosevelt moved his light across the floor,
up the steel post, across the tracks above us.
“Everything’s cleaner, ” Doogie murmured, and he meant not since last
night but just since we had entered the hangar.
Though I’d taken my hand off the post, I knew the vibrations in the
steel had increased, because I could hear that faint ringing coming from
the entire double colonnade that flanked us and from the tracks that the
columns supported.
I looked toward the far, dark end of the building, and I swore that
something immense was moving in the gloom.
“Bro! ” Bobby said.
I glanced at him.
He was gaping at his wristwatch.
I checked mine and saw the digital readouts racing backward.
Sudden fear, like cold rain, washed through me.
A strange muddy red light rose throughout the hangar, evenly
distributed, with no apparent source, as if the very molecules of the
air had become radiant. Perhaps it was a dangerous light to an XPER like
me, but this seemed the least of my troubles at the moment. The red air
shimmered, and though the darkness retreated across the entire building,
visibility hardly improved. This odd light cloaked as much as it
revealed, and I felt almost as if I were underwater, in a drowned world
… in water tinted with blood.
The flashlight beams were no longer effective. The light that they
produced seemed to be trapped behind the lenses, pooling there, rapidly
growing brighter and brighter, but unable to pass beyond the glass and
penetrate the red air.
– Here and there beyond the colonnades, dark forms began to quiver into
existence where there had been nothing but bare floor.
Machines of some kind. They looked real and yet not real, like objects
in a mirage.
Phantom machines at the moment … but becoming real.
The vibrations were getting louder, and their tone was changing, growing
deeper, more ominous. A rumbling.