night, it’s affecting the entire building now.”
“Because of us? ” I wondered.
“We didn’t build the place, bro.”
“But did we start it up last night, by energizing it? ”
“I don’t think, just because we used two flashlights, we’re major
villains here.” Roosevelt said, “We’ve got to move fast. The whole place
is .
..
coming apart.”
“Is that what Mungojerrie thinks? ” Sasha asked.
In ordinary times, Roosevelt Frost could fix you with a solemn look that
any undertaker would envy. With one eye still full of dark amazement at
what he had just seen, and with the other eye swollen half shut and shot
through with blood, he made me think I’d better pack my bags and get
ready to meet that glory-bound train.
He said, “It’s not what Mr. Mungojerrie thinks. It’s what he knows.
Everything here is going to … come apart. Soon.”
“Then let’s go down and find the kids and Orson.” Roosevelt nodded.
“Let’s go down.
” In the southwest corner of the hangar, the empty elevator shaft was as
it had been the previous night. But the stainless-steel jamb and
threshold at the stairhead doorway overlooked by salvagers were free of
grease and dust, which they had not been at any time since I first
explored this structure, nearly a year earlier. In the beam from Sasha’s
flashlight, the first several steps were not covered in dust any longer,
and the dead pill bugs were gone.
Either a kindly gnome was preceding us, making the world more pleasing
to the eye, or the phenomena that Bobby and I had witnessed in the egg
room, one night before, were leaching beyond the walls of that
mysterious chamber. My money was not on the gnome.
Mungojerrie stood on the second step, peering down the concrete
stairwell, sniffing the air, ears pricked. Then he descended.
Sasha followed the cat.
The stairs were wide enough for two people to walk abreast, with room to
spare, and I stayed at Sasha’s side, relieved to be sharing the point
position risk with her. Roosevelt followed, then Doogie with the Uzi.
Bobby was our tail gunner, keeping his back to one wall, crabbing
sideways down the stairs, to make sure no one crept in behind us.
Aside from being suspiciously clean, the first flight of steps was as it
had been on my previous visit. Bare concrete on all sides.
Evenly spaced core holes in the ceiling, which had once been the end
points of electrical chase ways. Painted iron pipe attached to one wall,
as a handrail. The air was cold, thick, redolent with the scent of lime
that leached from the concrete.
When we reached the landing and turned toward the second flight, I put
one hand on Sasha’s arm, halting her, and to our feline scout I
whispered, “Whoa, cat.” Mungojerrie halted four steps into the next
flight and, with an expectant expression, looked up at us.
The ceiling ahead was fitted with fluorescent fixtures. Because these
lights weren’t switched on, they posed no danger to me.
But they hadn’t been here before. They had been torn out and carted away
when Fort Wyvern shut down. In fact, this particular structure might
have been scoured to the bare concrete long before the base was closed,
when the Mystery Train ran off the tracks and scared its designers into
the realization that their project had been pursued with a truly loco
motive.
Time past and time present existed here simultaneously, and our future
was here, too, though we could not see it. All time, said the poet T. S.
Eliot, is eternally present, leading inexorably to an end that we
believe results from our actions but over which our control is mere
illusion.
At the moment, that bit of Eliot was too bleak for me. While I studied
the fluorescent lights, trying to imagine what might wait ahead of us, I
mentally recited the initial couplet of the first-ever poetry about
Winniethe-Pooh’a bear, however hard he tries / Grows tubby without
exercise’ but A. A. Milne failed to drive Eliot from my mind.
We could no more retreat from the dangers below, from this eerie
confusion of past and present, than I could return to my childhood.