and the moment I completed each inhalation, I was overwhelmed by a
frantic urge to get this stuff out, to eject it, convinced that I was
drowning in it, but each exhalation had to be forced, almost as if I
were regurgitating.
Pressure.
In spite of my rising panic, I remained clearheaded enough to figure out
that the air was not being alchemized into a liquid but that, instead,
the air pressure was drastically increasing, as if the depth of the
earth’s atmosphere above us were doubling, tripling, and pushing down on
us with crushing force. My eardrums fluttered, my sinuses began to
throb, I felt phantom fingertips pressing hard against my eyeballs, and
at the end of each inhalation, my nostrils pinched shut.
My knees began to quiver and then buckle. My shoulders bent under an
invisible weight. Straight as plumb bobs, my arms were hanging at my
sides. My hands could no longer grip the flashlight, and it clattered to
the floor at my feet. It bounced silently on the glassy surface, for now
there was no sound whatsoever, not even the flutter of my eardrums or
the thud of my own heart.
Abruptly, all returned to normal.
The pressure lifted in an instant.
I heard myself gasping for air. Bobby was gasping, too.
He had dropped his flashlight but had managed to hold tight to the
shotgun.
“Shit! ” he said explosively.
“Yeah.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah.”
“What was that? ”
“Don’t know.”
“Ever happen before? ”
“No.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah, ” I said, reveling in the ease with which I could draw cool, deep
breaths.
Though our flashlights were at rest on the floor, an increasing number
of Roman candles and pinwheels and serpents and sparklers and spirals of
light spread across the floor and up the walls.
“This place isn’t shut down, ” Bobby said.
“But it is. You saw.”
“Nothing’s what it seems in Wyvern, ” he said, quoting me.
“Every room we passed, every hallway stripped, abandoned.”
“What about the two floors above this? ”
“Just bare rooms.”
“And there’s nothing below? ”
“No.”
“There’s something.”
“Not that I’ve found.
” We picked up our flashlights, and as the beams moved across the floors
and walls, the flamboyant eruptions of light in the deep glassy surface
multiplied threefold, fourfold, a dazzling profusion of fiery blooms. We
might have been in a Fourth of July extravaganza, suspended from a hot
air balloon, with barrages of rockets bursting around us, whiz-bangs and
cracker bonbons and fountains and fizgigs, but all silent, all marvelous
glistering light and no bang, yet so reminiscent of Independence Day
displays that you could almost smell the saltpeter and the sulfur and
the charcoal, almost hear a stirring John Philip Sousa march, almost
taste hot dogs with mustard and chopped onions.
Bobby said, “Something’s still happening.”
“Split? ”
“Wait.” He studied the ceaselessly changing and increasingly colorful
patterns of light as though they held a meaning as explicit as that in a
paragraph of prose on a printed page, if only he could learn to read
them.
Although I doubted that the astonishingly luminous refractive bursts
were casting off any more UV rays than the flashlight beams that
produced them, I was not accustomed to such brightness. Radiant whorls
and drizzles and rivulets streamed across my exposed face and hands, a
storm of scintillant tattoos, and even if this rain of light was washing
a little death into me, the spectacle was irresistible, exhilarating. My
heart was racing, powered partly by fear but mostly by wonder.
Then I saw the door.
I was turning, so enthralled by the carnival of light around me that my
gaze traveled past the door, distracted by the pyrotechnics, before I
realized what I had seen. Massive, five feet in diameter, of
matte-finish steel surrounded by a polished-steel architrave, It was
similar to what you would expect to see at the entrance to a bank vault,
and no doubt it established an airtight seal.
Startled, I swung back toward the door but it was gone. Through a
pandemonium of gazelle-quick lights and pursuing shadows, I saw that the
circular hole in the wall was as it had been when we entered through it,