clean white ceramic floor tiles that had not been there before.
I peered up the dark stairs behind us, which appeared to be firmly
anchored in our time, in the present rather than the past. The building
was not phasing entirely in and out of the past, the phenomenon occurred
in a crazy-quilt pattern.
I was tempted to sprint up the steps as fast as I could, into the hangar
and from there into the night, but we were past the point of no return.
We had passed it when Jimmy Wing was kidnapped and Orson disappeared.
Friendship required us to venture off the map of the known world, into
areas that ancient cartographers couldn’t have imagined when they had
inked those words Here there be monsters.
Squinting, I withdrew my sunglasses from an inside jacket pocket and
slipped them on. I had no choice but to risk letting the light bathe my
face and hands, but the glare was so bright that it would have stung
tears from my eyes.
When we moved cautiously into the corridor, I knew beyond doubt that we
had stepped into the past, into a time when this facility had not yet
been shut down, before it had been stripped of all evidence. I saw a
grease-pencil scheduling chart on one wall, a bulletin board, and two
wheeled carts holding peculiar instruments.
The throbbing hum had not fallen silent with the disappearance of the
red light. I suspected that it was the sound of the egg room in full
operation. It seemed to pierce my eardrums, penetrate my skull, and
vibrate directly against the surface of my brain.
Metal doors had appeared on the previously doorless rooms that opened
off the inner wall of the curving hallway, and the nearest of these was
wide open. In the small chamber beyond, two swivel chairs were
unoccupied in front of a complex control board, not unlike the mixing
board that any radio-station engineer uses. On one side of this board
stood a can of Pepsi and a bag of potato chips, proving that even the
architects of doomsday enjoy a snack and a refreshing beverage now and
then.
To the right of the stairs, sixty or eighty feet farther along the
corridor, three men were moving away from us, unaware that we were
behind them. One wore jeans and a white shirt, sleeves rolled up. The
second was in a dark suit, and the third wore khakis and a white lab
coat. They were walking close together, heads bent, as if conferring,
but I couldn’t hear their voices over the pulsing electronic hum.
These were surely the three maroon figures that had passed the stairwell
in the murky red light, so blurry and distorted that I had not been able
to tell whether they were, in fact, human.
I glanced to the left, worrying that someone else might appear and,
seeing us, raise an alarm. Currently, however, that length of the
corridor was deserted.
Mungojerrie was still watching the departing trio, apparently unwilling
to lead us farther until they had rounded the curve in the long
racetrack-shaped corridor or entered one of the rooms. This straightaway
was five hundred feet long, from curve to curve, and at least a hundred
fifty feet remained ahead of the three men before they would turn out of
sight.
We were dangerously exposed. We needed to retreat until the Mystery
Train staffers were gone. Besides, I was already nervous about the
quantity of light that was hammering my face.
I caught Sasha’s attention and gestured toward the stairwell.
Her eyes widened.
When I followed her gaze, I saw that a door blocked access to the
stairs. From inside the stairwell, there had been no door, we had seen
straight through to the redand then to the fluorescent-drenched hallway.
We had passed directly from there to here without obstruction. From this
side, however, the barrier existed.
I went quickly to the door, yanked it open, and almost crossed the
threshold. Fortunately, I hesitated when I sensed a wrongness about the
darkness beyond.
Sliding my sunglasses down my nose, peering over the frames, I expected
concrete-walled gloom with steps leading up. Instead, before me was a