gutters and down spouts as though they were icy flutes.
When I heard the first words in the choir of winds, I thought that I
must be imagining them, but they swiftly grew louder, clearer.
Men’s voices, half a dozen, maybe more. Tinny, hollow, as if spoken from
the far end of a long steel pipe. The words came in clusters separated
by bursts of static, issuing from walkie-talkies or perhaps a radio.
” … here somewhere, right here …”
” … hurry, for Christ’s sake! ”
” .. give … don’t …”
” … Gimme cover.
Jackson.
gimme cover …” The rising cacophony of wind was almost as
disorienting as the stroboscopic lights and the shadows that kited like
legions of bats in a feeding – frenzy. I couldn’t discern from which
direction the voices came.
” … group … here … group and defend.”
” … position to translate …”
” … group, hell … move, haul ass.”
translate now! ”
” … cycle, cycle it …” Ghosts. I was listening to ghosts. They
were dead men now, had been dead since before this facility had been
abandoned, and these were the last words they had spoken immediately
before they perished.
I didn’t know exactly what was about to happen to these doomed men, but
as I listened, I had no doubt that some terrible fate had overcome them,
which was now being replayed on some spiritual plane.
Their voices grew more urgent, and they began to speak over one another,
” … cycle it! ”
” … hear em? Hear em coming? ”
” … hurry … what the hell …”
” .. wrong … Jesus … what’s wrong? ” They were shouting now, some
hoarse and others shrill, every voice raw with panic, “Cycle it open!
Cycle it! ”
“Get us out!”
“Oh, God, God, oh, God! ”
“GET US OUT OF HERE! ” Instead of words in the wind, there were screams
such as I had never heard before and hoped never to hear again, the
cries of men dying but not dying quickly or mercifully, shrieks that
conveyed the intensity of their prolonged agony but that also expressed
a chilling depth of despair, as though their anguish was as much
spiritual as physical.
Judging by their screams, they weren’t just being killed, they were
being butchered, torn apart by something that knew where the soul
inhabits the body. I could hear or, more likely, imagined I could hear a
mysterious predator clawing the spirit out of the flesh and greedily
devouring this delicacy before feeding on the mortal remains.
My heart was pounding so fiercely that my vision throbbed when I looked
at the door again. From the design of that armored hinge, a frightening
truth could be deduced, but because of the distracting bedlam of sound
and light, it remained frustratingly just beyond my grasp.
If the barrel of the hinge had been left unshielded, you would still
have needed an array of heavy-duty power tools, diamond-tipped drill
bits, and a lot of time to fracture those knuckles and jack out the
pintle In every surface of the room, the war between light and darkness
raged more furiously, battalions of shadows clashing with armies of
light in ever more frenzied assaults, to the harrowing
shriek-hiss-whistle of the unfelt winds and the ceaseless, ghastly
screaming.
and even if the hinge could be broken, the vault door would be held in
place, because the bolts that secured it were surely snugged into evenly
spaced holes around the entire circumference of the steel jamb rather
than along one arc of it The screaming. The screaming seemed to have
substance, pouring into me through my ears until I was filled to
bursting with it and could contain no more. I opened my mouth as if to
let the dark energy of those ghostly cries pass out of me.
Struggling to concentrate, squinting to focus more clearly on the door,
I realized that a team of professional safe crackers would probably
never get through that barrier without explosives. For the purpose of
containing mere men, therefore, this door was absurdly over designed.
At last the fearsome truth came within my grasp. The purpose of the