As Sasha turned to cover the cab with her shotgun, the escape hatch was torn out of the ceiling. The gargoyle came down from the roof. The leathery black wings were folded as it dropped, but then they spread to fill the cab. The muscles bulged in the beast’s sleek, scaly limbs as it tensed to spring forward. The tail whipped, lashing against the cab walls. Silver eyes flashed. Its raw mouth appeared to be lined with red velvet, but its long forked tongue was black.
I remembered the seedlike projectiles that it had spat at Lumley and at 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 seen—and was still seeing. I led our intrepid band across the hangar, where super-weird and maximum-sharky stuff was happening, across this neverland 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, moonglow 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.
The spectacle left the kids ecstatic, as if they had met E.T. and ridden on the back of a brontosaurus and taken a quick trip to the moon all in one evening.
“It’s over?” Doogie wondered.
“As if it never was,” I suggested.
Sasha said, “But it was.”
“The residual effect. A runaway residual effect. The whole place imploded into…the past, I guess.”
“But if it never existed,” Bobby said, “why do I remember being inside the place?”
“Don’t start,” I warned him.
We packed ourselves into the Hummer—five adults, four excited kids, one shaky dog, and a smug cat—and Doogie drove to the bungalow in Dead Town, where we had to deal with Delacroix’s rotting cadaver and the ceilings festooned with frankfurter-size cocoons. An exorcist’s work is never done.
On the way, Aaron Stuart, the troublemaker, reached a solemn conclusion about the blood on my hands. “Mr. Halloway must be dead.”
“We’ve done this,” I said impatiently. “He’s not dead anymore.”
“He’s dead,” Anson agreed.
“I may be dead,” Bobby said, “but my pants are dry.”
“Dead,” Jimmy Wing agreed.
“Maybe he is dead,” Wendy brooded.
“What the hell is wrong with you kids?” I demanded, turning in my seat to glare at them. “He’s not dead, it’s a paradox, but he’s not dead! All you’ve got to do is believe in fairies, clap your hands, and Tinker Bell will live! Is that so hard to understand?”
“Ice it down, Snowman,” Sasha advised me.
“I’m cool.”
I was still glaring at the kids, who were in the third and final seat. Orson was in the cargo space behind them. He cocked his burly head and looked at me over the kids’ heads, as if to say Ice it down.
“I’m mellow,” I assured him.
He sneezed a sneeze of disagreement.
Bobby had been dead. As in dead and gone. As in deader than dead. All right. Time to get over it. Here in Wyvern, life goes on, occasionally even for the deceased. Besides, we were more than half a mile from the beach, so anything that happened here couldn’t be that important.
“Son, the Tinker Bell thing makes perfect sense,” Roosevelt said, either to placate me or because he had gone stark, raving mad.
“Yeah,” said Jimmy Wing. “Tinker Bell.”
“Tinker Bell,” the twins said, nodding in unison.
“Yeah,” Wendy said. “Why didn’t I think of that?”
Mungojerrie meowed. I don’t know what that meant.
Doogie drove over the curb, across the sidewalk, and parked on the front lawn at the bungalow.
The kids stayed in the vehicle with Orson and Mungojerrie.
Sasha, Roosevelt, and Doogie took positions around the Hummer, standing guard.
At Sasha’s suggestion, Doogie had included two cans of gasoline in the provisions. With the criminal intention of destroying still more government property, Bobby and I carried these ten gallons of satisfyingly flammable liquid to the bungalow.
Going back into this small house was even less appealing than submitting to extensive gum surgery, but we were manly men, and so we climbed the steps and crossed the porch without hesitation, though quietly.
In the living room, we set down the gasoline cans with care, as though to avoid waking a quarrelsome sleeper, and I switched on a flashlight.
The cocoons that had been clustered overhead were gone.
At first I thought the residents of those silky tubes had chewed free and were now loose in the bungalow in a form that was sure to prove troublesome. Then I realized that not even one wisp of gossamer filament remained in any corner, and none floated on the floor.
The lone red sock, which might once have belo
nged to one of the Delacroix children, lay where it had been previously, still caked with dust. In general, the bungalow was as I remembered it.
No cocoons hung in the dining room. None were to be found in the kitchen, either.
Leland Delacroix’s corpse was gone, as were the photographs of his family, the votive-candle glass, the wedding ring, and the gun with which he had killed himself. The ancient linoleum was still cracked and peeling, but I could see no biological stains that would have indicated that a dead body had been rotting here recently.
“The Mystery Train was never built,” I said, “so Delacroix never went to…the other side. Never opened the door.”
Bobby said, “Never got infected—or possessed. Whatever. And he never infected his family. So they’re all alive somewhere?”
“God, I hope so. But how could he not be here when he was here and we remember it?”
“Paradox,” Bobby said, as if he himself were entirely satisfied with that less than illuminating explanation. “So what do we do?”
“Burn it, anyway,” I concluded.
“To be safe, you mean?”
“No, just because I’m a pyromaniac.”
“Didn’t know that about you, bro.”
“Let’s torch this dump.”
As we emptied the gasoline cans in the kitchen, dining room, and living room, I repeatedly paused because I thought I heard something moving inside the bungalow walls. Every time I listened, the elusive sound stopped.
“Rats,” Bobby said.
This alarmed me, because if Bobby heard something, too, then the furtive noises weren’t the work of my imagination. Furthermore, this wasn’t the scuttling-scratching-squeaking of rodents; it was a liquid slithering.
“Humongous rats,” he said with more force but less conviction.
I fortified myself with the argument that Bobby and I were just woozy from gasoline fumes and, therefore, couldn’t trust our senses. Nevertheless, I expected to hear voices echoing inside my head: Stay, stay, stay, stay….
We escaped the bungalow without being munched.
Using the last half gallon of gasoline, I poured a fuse across the front porch, down the steps, and along the walkway.
Doogie pulled the Hummer into the street, to a safer distance.
Moonlight mantled Dead Town, and every silent structure seemed to harbor hostile watchers at the windows.
After setting the empty fuel can on the porch, I hurried out to the Hummer and asked Doogie to back it up until one of the rear tires was weighing down the manhole. The monkey manhole.
When I returned to the front yard, Bobby lit the fuse.
As the blue-orange flame raced up the walkway and climbed the front steps, Bobby said, “When I died…”
“Yeah?”
“Did I scream like a stuck pig, blubber, and lose my dignity?”
“You were cool. Aside from wetting your pants, of course.”
“They’re not wet now.”
The fuse flame reached the gasoline-soaked living room, and a firestorm blew through the bungalow.
Basking recklessly in the orange light, I said, “When you were dying…”
“Yeah?”
“You said, I love you, bro.”
He grimaced. “Lame.”
“And I said it was mutual.”
“Why did we have to do that?”
“You were dying.”
“But now here I am.”
“It’s awkward,” I agreed.
“What we need here is a custom paradox.”
“Like?”
“Where we remember everything else but forget my dying words.”
“Too late. I’ve already made arrangements with the church, the reception hall, and the florist.”
“I’ll wear white,” Bobby said.
“That would be a travesty.”
We turned away from the burning bungalow and walked out to the street. Harried by the witchy firelight, twisted tree shadows capered across the pavement.
As we drew near the Hummer, a familiar angry squeal tortured the night, followed by a score of other shrill voices, and I looked left to see the troop of Wyvern monkeys, half a block away, loping toward us.
The Mystery Train and all its associated terrors might be gone as if they had never been, but the life’s work of Wisteria Jane Snow still had its consequences.
We piled into the Hummer, and Doogie locked all the doors with a master switch on the console, just as the rhesuses swarmed over the vehicle.
“Go, move, woof, meow, get outta here!” everyone was shouting, though Doogie needed no encouragement.
He floored the accelerator, leaving part of the troop screaming in frustration as the rear bumper slipped from under their grasping hands.
We weren’t in the clear yet. Monkeys were clinging tenaciously to the luggage rack on the roof.
One nasty specimen was hanging by its hind legs, upside down at the tailgate, shrieking what must have been simian obscenities and furiously slapping its hands against the window. Orson snarled to warn it away, face-to-face at the glass, while struggling to stay on his feet as Doogie resorted to slalom maneuvers to try to shake the primates loose.
Another monkey slid down from the roof, directly in front of the windshield, glaring in at Doogie, blocking his view. With one hand it gripped the armature of one windshield wiper, to keep from tumbling off the Hummer, and in its other hand was a small stone. It hammered the stone against the windshield, but the glass didn’t break, so it swung again, and this time the stone left a starburst scratch.
“Hell with this,” Doogie said, switching on the wipers.
The moving armature pinched the monkey’s hand, and the whisking blade startled it. The beast squealed, let go, tumbled across the hood, and fell off the side of the Hummer.
The Stuart twins cheered.
In the front seat, forward of Sasha, Roosevelt rode shotgun, sans shotgun but with cat. Something cracked against the window beside him, loud enough to make Mungojerrie yelp with surprise.
A monkey was hanging there, too, also upside down, but this one had a combination wrench in its right hand, gripping it by the box end, using the open end as a hammer. It was the wrong tool for the job, but it was a lot better than the stone, and when the precocious primate swung it again, the tempered glass crazed.
As thousands of tiny fissures laid an instant crackle glaze across the side window, Mungojerrie sprang out of Roosevelt’s lap, onto the backrest of the front seat, onto the seat between Bobby and me, up and over and into the third row, taking refuge with the kids.
The cat moved so fast that it was landing among the children even as the sparking, gummy sheet of tempered glass collapsed onto Roosevelt’s lap. Doogie needed both hands for the wheel, and none of the rest of us could take a shot at the invader without blowing off our animal communicator’s head, which seemed counterproductive. Then the monkey was inside, swarming across Roosevelt, snapping its teeth at him and swinging the wrench when he tried to seize it, so fast that it might have been a cat, out of the front seat and into the middle seat, where I was sitting between Sasha and Bobby.
Surprisingly, it went for Bobby, perhaps because it mistook him for the boychick of Wisteria Jane Snow. Mom was its creator, which in monkey circles made me the son of Frankenstein. I heard the wrench ring dully off the side of Bobby’s skull, though not a fraction as hard as the rhesus would have liked, because it hadn’t been able to get in a good, solid swing as it was leaping.
Then somehow Bobby had it by the neck, both hands around its small throat, and the beast let go of the wrench to pry at Bobby’s choking hands. Only an extremely reckless monkey hater would have attempted to use a gun in these close quarters, and so as Doogie continued to slalom from curb to curb, Sasha put down the window at her side, and Bobby held the invader toward me. I slipped my hands around its neck, under Bobby’s hands, and got a strangulation grip as he let go. Though this all happened fast, too fast to think about what we were d
oing, the snarling-gagging-spitting rhesus made its presence felt, kicking and thrashing with surprising strength, considering that it wasn’t getting any breath and the blood supply to its brain was zero, twenty-five pounds of pissed-off primate, grabbing at our hair, determined to gouge our eyes, tear off our ears, lashing its tail, twisting fiercely as it tried to pull free. Sasha turned her head aside, and I leaned across her, trying to choke the monkey senseless but, more important, trying to shove it out of the Hummer, and then it was through the window, and I let it go, and Sasha cranked the glass up so fast that she almost pinched my hands.
Bobby said, “Let’s not do that again.”
“Okay.”
Another screeching fleabag swung down from the roof, intending to enter through the broken window, but Roosevelt whacked it with a sledgehammer-size fist, and it flew away into the night as though it had been fired out of a catapult.
Doogie was still putting the Hummer through quick serpentine maneuvers, and at the tailgate, the monkey hanging upside down from the roof rack swung back and forth across the unbroken window, as if it were a clock pendulum. Orson tumbled off his feet but sprang up at once, snarling and snapping his teeth to remind the rhesus of the price it would pay if it tried to get inside.
Looking beyond the tick-tock monkey, I saw that the rest of the troop continued to give chase. Doogie’s slalom trick, while shaking loose some of the attackers, had slowed us down, and the bright-eyed nasties were gaining on us.
Then the sass man stopped swerving, accelerated, and rounded a corner so fast that he almost stood us on end when he had to jam the brake pedal to the floorboard to avoid plowing through a pack of coyotes.
The monkey at the tailgate shrieked at either the sight or the smell of the pack. It dropped off the Hummer and ran for its life.
The coyotes, fifty or sixty of them, parted like a stream and flowed around the vehicle.
I was afraid they would try to come through the broken window. With their wicked teeth, they would be harder to hold off than mere monkeys. But they showed no interest in canned people meat, racing past, closing ranks again behind us.
The pursuing troop rounded the corner and met the pack. Monkeys shot into the air with such surprise that you would have thought they were on a trampoline. Being smart monkeys, they retreated without hesitation, and the coyotes went after them.