Hodgson, and as I cried out to Sasha, the gargoyle shrieked. She
squeezed off a round from the shotgun, but before she could be riddled
with squirming parasites, the elevator broke apart and the cab plunged
out of sight with the screaming creature still aboard, trailing cables
and counterweights and pulleys and steel beams.
Because the beast had wings, I expected it to rise out of the ruins and
soar up the shaft, but then I realized that the shaft no longer existed.
Instead, I was looking into the starry void that I had glimpsed earlier
in the night, where the stairwell should have been.
Crazily, I thought of a magical wardrobe serving as a doorway to the
enchanted land of Narnia, mirrors and rabbit holes leading to a bizarre
kingdom ruled by a playing-card queen. This was only a transient
madness.
Recovering, I did the Pooh thing and gamely accepted all that I had see
nand was still seeing. I led our intrepid band across the hangar, where
super-weird and maximum-sharky stuff was happening, across this never
land of past, present, future, and sideways time, saying hello to a
startled ghost workman in a hard hat, brandishing the shotgun at three
ghosts that looked as if they would give us trouble, while trying as
best I could not to put us in the same space that was about to be
occupied by an object materializing from another time, and if you think
all that was easy, you’re a kak.
At times we were in a dark and abandoned warehouse, then we were in the
murky red light of a time shift, but ten steps later, we were walking
through a well-lighted and bustling place populated by busy ghosts as
solid as we were. The worst moment was when we passed through a red fog
and, though still far from the exit door, found ourselves beyond the
warehouse, in a landscape where black masses of fungus rose with vaguely
treelike forms and clawed at a red sky in which two dim suns burned low
on the horizon. But an instant later, we were among the workmen ghosts
again, then in darkness, and finally at the exit.
Nothing and no one followed us into the night, but we kept running until
we had nearly reached the Hummer, where at last we stopped and turned
and stared at the hangar, which was caught in a time storm.
The concrete base of the structure, the corrugated steel walls, and the
curve of the Quonset-style roof were pulsing with that red radiance.
From the high clerestory windows came white beams as intense as those
from a lighthouse, jabbing at the sky, carving bright arcs.
Judging by the sound, you would have thought that a thousand bulls were
smashing through a thousand china shops inside the building, that tanks
were clashing on battlefields, that mobs of rioters were screaming for
blood.
The ground under our feet was trembling, as though from an earthquake,
and I wondered if we were at a safe distance.
I expected the structure to explode or burst into flames, but instead it
began to unravel. The red glow faded, the searchlights spearing from the
high windows went dark, and we watched while the huge building flickered
as though two thousand days and nights were passing in just two minutes,
moon glow alternating with sunshine and darkness, the corrugated walls
appearing to flutter in the strobing light. Then suddenly the building
began to dismantle itself, as if it were unraveling into time past.
Workmen swarmed over its surface, all moving backward, scaffolding and
construction machinery appeared around it, the roof vanished, and the
walls peeled down, and trains of trucks sucked the concrete out of the
foundation, back into their mixers, and steel beams were craned out of
the ground, like dinosaur bones from a paleontological dig, until all
six subterranean floors must have been deconstructed, whereupon a
blinding fury of massive dump trucks and excavators replaced the earth
that they had once removed, and then after a final crackle of red light
passed across the site and winked out, all was still.
– The hangar and everything under it had ceased to exist.