Seize the Night (3 page)

Recently, I’ve preferred to keep to the surface. Like everyone born into this world, I’ll take up permanent residence underground soon enough.

Now, after we passed another culvert without being assaulted, Orson suddenly picked up his pace. The trail had gotten hot.

As the riverbed rose toward the east, it gradually grew narrower, until it was only forty feet wide where it passed under Highway 1. This tunnel was more than a hundred feet long, and although faint silvery moonlight glimmered at the farther end, the way ahead was dauntingly dark.

Apparently, Orson’s reliable nose didn’t detect any danger. He wasn’t growling.

On the other hand, he didn’t sprint confidently into the gloom, either. He stood at the entrance, his tail still, his ears pricked, alert.

For years I have traveled the night with only a modest amount of cash for the infrequent purchases I make, a small flashlight for those rare instances when darkness might be more of an enemy than a friend, and a compact cell phone clipped to my belt. Recently, I’d added one other item to my standard kit: a 9-millimeter Glock pistol.

Under my jacket, the Glock hung in a supple shoulder holster. I didn’t need to touch the gun to know that it was there; the weight of it was like a tumor growing on my ribs. Nevertheless, I slipped one hand under the coat and pressed my fingertips against the grip of the pistol as a superstitious person might touch a talisman.

In addition to the black leather jacket, I was dressed in black Rockports, black socks, black jeans, and a black long-sleeve cotton pullover. The black-on-black is not because I style myself after vampires, priests, ninja assassins, or Hollywood celebrities. In this town, at night, wisdom requires you to be well armed but also to blend with the shadows, calling as little attention to yourself as possible.

Leaving the Glock in the holster, still straddling my bike but with both feet on the ground, I unclipped the small flashlight from the handlebars. My bicycle doesn’t have a headlamp. I have lived so many years in the night and in rooms lit mostly by candles that my dark-adapted eyes don’t often need assistance.

The beam penetrated perhaps thirty feet into the concrete tunnel, which had straight walls but an arched ceiling. No threat lurked in the first section of that passage.

Orson ventured inside.

Before following the dog, I listened to the traffic roaring south and north on Highway 1, far above. To me, as always, this sound was simultaneously thrilling and melancholy.

I’ve never driven a car and probably never will. Even if I protected my hands with gloves and my face with a mask, the ceaseless oncoming headlights would pose a danger to my eyes. Besides, I couldn’t go any significant distance north or south along the coast and still return home before sunrise.

Relishing the drone of the traffic, I peered up the broad concrete buttress in which the river tunnel was set. At the top of this long incline, headlights flared off the steel guardrails that defined the shoulder of the highway, but I couldn’t see the passing vehicles.

What I did see—or thought I saw—from the corner of my eye, was someone crouched up there, to the south of me, a figure not quite as black as the night around him, fitfully backlit by the passing traffic. He was on the buttress cap just this side of the guardrails, barely visible yet with an aura as menacing as a gargoyle at the corner of a cathedral parapet.

When I turned my head for a better look, the lights from a dense cluster of speeding cars and trucks caused shadows to leap like an immense flock of ravens taking flight in a lightning storm. Among those swooping phantoms, an apparently more solid figure raced diagonally downward, moving away from me and from the buttress, south along the grassy embankment.

In but a flicker of time, he was beyond the reach of the strobing headlights, lost in the deeper darkness and also blocked from view by the levee walls that towered twenty feet above me. He might be circling back to the edge of the channel, intending to enter the riverbed behind me.

Or he might not be interested in me at all. Though it would be comforting to think that galaxies revolve around me, I am not the center of the universe.

In fact, this mysterious figure might not even exist. I’d gotten such a brief glimpse of it that I couldn’t be absolutely certain it was more than an illusion.

Again I reached under my coat and touched the Glock.

Orson had padded so far into the passageway beneath Highway 1 that he was almost beyond the reach of my flashlight.

After glancing at the channel behind me and seeing no stalker, I followed the dog. Instead of riding my bike, I walked beside it, guiding it with my left hand.

I didn’t like having my right hand—my gun hand—occupied with the flashlight. Besides, the light made me easy to follow and easy to target.

Although the riverbed was dry, the walls of the tunnel gave off a not unpleasant damp odor, and the cool air was scented with a trace of lime from the concrete.

From the roadbed high above, the rumble-hum of passing cars and trucks translated all the way down through layers of steel, concrete, and earth, echoing across the vault overhead. Repeatedly, in spite of the screening thrum of the traffic, I thought I heard someone stealthily approaching. Each time I swung toward the sound, the flashlight revealed only the smooth concrete walls and the deserted river behind me.

The tire tracks continued through the tunnel into another open stretch of the Santa Rosita, where I switched off the flashlight, relieved to rely on ambient light. The channel curved to the right, out of sight, leading east-southeast away from Highway 1, rising at a steeper grade than before.

Although houses still stippled the surrounding hills, we were nearing the edge of town.

I knew where we were going. I had known for some time but was disturbed by the prospect. If Orson was on the right trail and if Jimmy Wing’s abductor was driving the vehicle that had left these tracks, then the kidnapper had fled with the boy into Fort Wyvern, the abandoned military base that was the source of many of Moonlight Bay’s current problems.

Wyvern, which covers 134,456 acres—far more territory than our town—is surrounded by a high chain-link fence supported by steel posts sunk in concrete caissons, topped with helixes of razor wire. This barrier bisected the river, and as I rounded the curve in the channel, I saw a dark-colored Chevrolet Suburban parked in front of it, at the end of the tracks we had been following.

The truck was about sixty feet away, but I was reasonably sure no one was in it. Nevertheless, I intended to approach it with caution.

Orson’s low growl indicated a wariness of his own.

Turning to the terrain we had crossed, I could see no sign of the creeping gargoyle that I had glimpsed on the east side of Highway 1. Nonetheless, I felt as though I were being watched.

I concealed my bike on the ground, behind a snarl of driftwood that had gotten its teeth into a few dead tumbleweeds.

After tucking the flashlight under my belt, at the small of my back, I drew the Glock from my holster. It is a safe-action pistol with only internal safety devices: no little levers that need thumbing to ready the gun for use.

This weapon has saved my life more than once, yet although it’s a reassurance to me, I am not entirely comfortable with it. I suspect I’ll never be able to handle it with complete ease. The weight and design of the piece have nothing to do with my aversion to the feel of it; this is a superb handgun. As a boy roaming the town at night, however, I was subjected to some memorable verbal and physical abuse from bullies—mostly kids but also some adults old enough to know better—and although their harassment motivated me to learn how to defend myself and taught me never to let an injustice pass without a firm response, these experiences also instilled in me a loathing of violence as an easy solution. To protect myself and those I love, I will use lethal force when I must, but I’ll never enjoy it.

With Orson at my side, I approached the Suburban. No driver or passenger waited inside. The hood was still warm with engine heat; the truck had been parked here only minutes.

Footprints led from the driver’s door around to the front door on the passenger’s side. From there, they continued toward the nearby fence. They appeared to be similar—if not identical—to the prints in the planting bed under Jimmy Wing’s bedroom window.

The silver-coin moon was rolling slowly toward the dark purse of the western horizon, but its glow remained bright enough to allow me to read the license plate on the back of the vehicle. I quickly memorized the number.

I found where a bolt cutter had been used to breach the chain-link fence. Evidently, this was accomplished some time ago, before the most recent rain, because the water-smoothed silt was not heavily disturbed, as it would have been by someone doing all that work.

Several culverts also link Moonlight Bay to Wyvern. Usually, when I explore the former army base, I enter by one of those more discreet passages, where I have used my own bolt cutter.

On this river-spanning fence—as elsewhere along the entire perimeter and throughout the sprawling grounds of Wyvern—a sign with red and black lettering warned that although this facility had been shut down at the recommendation of the Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission, as a consequence of the end of the Cold War, trespassers would nevertheless be prosecuted, fined, and possibly imprisoned under a list of relevant federal statutes so long that it occupied the bottom third of the notice. The tone of the warning was stern, uncompromising, but I wasn’t deterred by it. Politicians also promise us peace, perpetual prosperity, meaning, and justice. If their promises are ever fulfilled, perhaps then I’ll have more respect for their threats.

Here, at the fence, the kidnapper’s tracks were not the only marks in the riverbed. The gloom prevented me from positively identifying the new impressions.

I risked using the flashlight. Hooding it with one hand, I flicked it on for only a second or two, which was long enough for me to figure out what had happened here.

Although the breach in the fence apparently had been made well ahead of time, in preparation for the crime, the kidnapper had not left a gaping hole. He’d created a less obvious pass-through, and tonight he had needed only to pull the loosely hanging flap of chain-link out of his way. To free both hands for this task, he had put down his captive, ensuring against an escape attempt either by paralyzing Jimmy with vicious threats or by tethering the boy.

The second set of tracks was considerably smaller than the first. And shoeless. These were the prints of a child who had been snatched barefoot from his bed.

In my mind’s eye, I saw Lilly’s anguished face. Her husband, Benjamin Wing, a power-company lineman, had been electrocuted almost three years ago in a work-related accident. He’d been a big, merry-eyed guy, half Cherokee, so full of life that it had seemed as if he would never run short of it, and his death had stunned everyone. As strong as Lilly was, she might be broken if she had to suffer this second and even more terrible loss so soon after the first.

Although she and I had long ago ceased to be lovers, I still loved her as a friend. I prayed that I’d be able to bring her son back to her, smiling and unharmed, and see the anguish vanish from her face.

Orson’s whine was filled with worry. He was quivering, eager to give pursuit.

After tucking the small flashlight under my belt once more, I peeled up the flap of fence. A soft twang of protest sang through the steel links.

I promised, “Frankfurters for the brave of heart,” and Orson shot through the gap.

3

As I followed the dog into the forbidden zone, the ragged edge of one of the cut fence links snared my cap and pulled it from my head. I snatched it off the ground, dusted it against my jeans, and put it on again.

This navy-blue, billed cap has been in my possession about eight months. I found it in a strange concrete chamber, three stories underground, deep in the abandoned warrens of Fort Wyvern.

Above the visor, embroidered in red, were the words
Mystery Train
. I had no idea to whom the cap once belonged, and I didn’t know the meaning of the ruby-red needlework.

This simple headgear had little intrinsic value, but of all my material possessions, it was in some ways the most precious. I had no proof that it was related to my mother’s work as a scientist, to any project of which she was a part—at Fort Wyvern or elsewhere—but I remained convinced that it was. Though I already knew some of Wyvern’s terrible secrets, I also believed that if I were able to discover the meaning of the embroidered words, more astonishing truths would be revealed. I had vested a lot of faith in this cap. When I wasn’t wearing it, I kept it close, because it reminded me of my mother and, therefore, comforted me.

Except for the cleared area immediately beyond the breach in the chain-link, driftwood and tumbleweed and trash were piled against the sifting fence. Otherwise, the bed of the Santa Rosita was as well made on the Wyvern side as it was on the other.

Again the only footprints were those of the kidnapper. He had resumed carrying the boy from this point.

Orson raced along the trail, and I ran close behind him. Soon we came to another access road that sloped up the north wall of the river, and Orson ascended without hesitation.

I was breathing harder than the dog when I reached the top of the levee, even though, in canine years, fur face was pretty much my age.

How fortunate I’ve been to live long enough to recognize the subtle but undeniable fading of my youthful stamina and spryness. To hell with those poets who celebrate the beauty and the purity of dying young, all powers intact. In spite of xeroderma pigmentosum, I’d be grateful to survive to relish the sweet decrepitude of my eightieth year, or even the delicious weakness of one whose birthday cake is ablaze with a hundred dangerous candles. We are the most alive and the closest to the meaning of our existence when we are most vulnerable, when experience has humbled us and has cured the arrogance which, like a form of deafness, prevents us from hearing the lessons that this world teaches.

As the moon hid its face behind a veil of clouds, I looked both directions along the north bank of the Santa Rosita. Jimmy and his abductor were not in sight.

Nor did I see a hunched gargoyle moving on the riverbed below or along either side of the channel. Whatever it had been, the figure from the highway embankment was not interested in me.

Without hesitation, Orson trotted toward a group of massive warehouses fifty yards from the levee. These dark structures appeared mysterious in spite of their mundane purpose and in spite of the fact that I was somewhat familiar with them.

Although enormous, these are not the only warehouses on the base, and although they would cover a few square blocks in any city, they represent an insignificant percentage of the buildings within these fenced grounds. At its peak of activity, Fort Wyvern was staffed by 36,400 active-duty personnel. Nearly thirteen thousand dependents and more than four thousand civilian personnel were also associated with the facility. On-base housing alone consisted of three thousand single-family cottages and bungalows, all of which remain standing, though in disrepair.

In a moment we were among the warehouses, and Orson’s nose guided him swiftly through a maze of serviceways to the largest structure in the cluster. Like most of the surrounding buildings, this one was rectangular, with thirty-foot-high corrugated-steel walls rising from a concrete foundation to a curved metal roof. At one end was a roll-up door big enough to admit cargo-laden trucks; it was closed, but beside it, a man-size door stood wide open.

Previously bold, Orson became hesitant as he approached this entrance. The room past the threshold was even darker than the serviceway around us, which itself was illuminated only by starlight. The dog seemed not entirely to trust his nose to detect a threat in the warehouse, as if the scents on which he relied were filtered beyond detection by the very thickness of the murk inside the place.

Keeping my back to the wall, I sidled along the building to the doorway. I stopped just short of the jamb, with my pistol raised and the muzzle pointed at the sky.

I listened, holding my breath, nearly as silent as the dead—except for the faint gurgle of my stomach, which continued to work on a pre-midnight snack of jack cheese, onion bread, and jalapeño peppers. If anyone waited to ambush me just inside the entrance, he must actually have been dead, because he was even quieter than I was. Whether he was dead or not, his breath was no doubt sweeter than mine.

Though Orson was as difficult to see as a flow of ink across wet black silk, I watched as he stopped short of the entrance. After a hesitation that struck me as being full of puzzlement, he turned away from the door and ventured a few steps across the serviceway toward the next building.

He, too, was silent—no tick of claws on paving, no panting, not even any digestive noises—as though he were only the ghost of a dog. He peered intently back the way we’d come, his eyes dimly revealed by a reflection of starshine; the faint white points of his bared teeth were like the unsettling phosphorescent grin of an apparition.

I didn’t feel that his hesitancy was caused by fear of what lay ahead of us. Instead, he no longer seemed to be certain where the trail led.

I consulted my wristwatch. Each faintly blinking second marked not only the passage of time but the fading of Jimmy Wing’s life force. Almost certainly not taken for ransom, he had been seized to satisfy dark needs, perhaps including savageries that didn’t bear consideration.

I waited, struggling to suppress my vivid imagination, but when Orson finally turned again to the open door of the warehouse without indicating any greater confidence that our quarry was inside, I decided to act. Fortune favors the bold. Of course, so does Death.

With my left hand, I reached for the flashlight tucked against the small of my back. Crouching, I entered the doorway, crossed the threshold, and scuttled quickly to the left. Even as I switched on the flash, I rolled it across the floor, a simple and perhaps foolish ruse to draw gunfire away from me.

No gunfire erupted, and when the flashlight rolled to a stop, the stillness in the warehouse was as deep as the silence of a dead planet with no atmosphere. Somewhat to my surprise, when I tried to breathe, I could.

I retrieved the flashlight. Most of the warehouse was given over to a single room of such length that the beam didn’t penetrate from one end to the other; it even failed to reach halfway across the much narrower width of the building to illuminate either side wall.

As I scythed away the shadows, they regrew immediately after the beam passed, lusher and blacker than ever. At least no looming adversary was revealed.

Looking more doubtful than suspicious, Orson padded into the light and, after a hesitation, seemed to dismiss the warehouse with a sneeze. He headed toward the door.

A muffled
clang
broke the silence elsewhere in the building. The cold acoustics caused the sound to resonate along the walls of this cavernous chamber, lingering until the initial hard metallic quality softened into an eerie, whispery ringing like the voices of summer insects.

I switched off the flashlight.

In the blinding dark, I felt Orson return to my side, his flank brushing against my leg.

I wanted to
move
.

I didn’t know
where
to move.

Jimmy must be near—and still alive, because the kidnapper hadn’t yet reached the dark altar where he would play his ritualistic games and sacrifice the lamb. Jimmy, who was small and frightened and alone. Whose dad was dead like mine. Whose mother would be forever withered by grief if I failed her.

Patience. That is one of the great virtues God tries to teach us by refusing to show Himself in this world. Patience.

Orson and I stood still and vigilant until well after the final echo of the noise faded. Just as the subsequent silence grew long enough to make me wonder if what we’d heard had any significance, a voice arose, deep-toned and angry, as muffled as the
clang
had been. One voice. Not a conversation. A monologue. Someone talking to himself—or to a small, frightened captive who dared not reply. I couldn’t make out the meaning, but the voice was as hollow and grumbly as that of a troll in a fairy tale.

The speaker was neither approaching nor retreating, and clearly he was not in this chamber with Orson and me. Before I was able to determine the direction from which the growled words came, the troll fell silent.

Fort Wyvern has been closed only nineteen months, so I haven’t had time to learn each niche of it as thoroughly as I’ve acquainted myself with every cranny of Moonlight Bay. Thus far, I’ve confined most of my explorations to the more mysterious precincts of the base, where I’m most likely to encounter strange and intriguing sights. Of this warehouse, I knew only that it was like the others in this cluster: three stories high, with an open-beam ceiling, and composed of four spaces—the main room, in which we stood, one office in the far right corner, a matching room in the far left corner, and an open loft above those offices. I was sure that neither the sudden noise nor the voice had come from any of those places.

I turned in a circle, frustrated by the impenetrable darkness. It was as pitiless and unremitting as the black pall that will fall over me if, one day, cumulative light damage plants the seeds of tumors in my eyes.

A louder noise than the first, a resounding crash of metal against metal, boomed through the building, giving rise to echoes that rolled like a distant cannonade. This time I felt vibrations in the concrete floor, suggesting that the source of the disturbance might be below the main level of the warehouse.

Under certain buildings on the base lie secret realms that were apparently unknown to the vast majority of the soldiers who conducted the ordinary, reputable army business of Wyvern. Doors, once cunningly disguised, led from basements down to subbasements, to deeper cellars, to vaults far below the cellars. Many of these subterranean structures are linked to others throughout the base by staircases, elevators, and tunnels that would have been far less easy to detect before the facility, prior to abandonment, was stripped of all supplies and equipment.

Indeed, even with some of Wyvern’s secrets left exposed by its departing stewards, my best discoveries would not have been possible without the aid of my clever canine companion. His ability to detect even the faintest fragrant drafts wafting through cracks from hidden rooms is as impressive as his talent for riding a surfboard, though perhaps not as impressive as his knack for occasionally wheedling a second beer from his friends, like me, who know full well that he is incapable of handling more than one.

Without question, this sprawling base harbors more installations that remain well hidden, waiting to be revealed; nevertheless, as interesting as my explorations have been, I’ve periodically refrained from them. When I spend too much time in the shadowland under Fort Wyvern, its disturbing atmosphere grows oppressive. I have seen enough to know that this netherworld was the site of wide-ranging clandestine operations of dubious wisdom, that numerous and diverse “black-budget” research projects were surely conducted here, and that some of those projects were so ambitious and exotic as to defy understanding based on the few enigmatic clues that were left behind.

This knowledge alone, however, isn’t what makes me uncomfortable in Wyvern’s underworld. More distressing is a perception—little more than an intuition but nonetheless powerful—that some of what happened here was not merely well-intentioned foolishness of a high order, not merely science in the service of mad politics, but pure wickedness. When I spend more than a couple of nights in a row under Wyvern, I’m overcome by the conviction that unknown evils were loosed in its buried warrens and that some still roam those byways, waiting to be encountered. Then it isn’t fear that drives me to the surface. Rather, it’s a sense of moral and spiritual suffocation—as though, by remaining too long in those realms, I will acquire an ineradicable stain on my soul.

I hadn’t expected these ordinary warehouses to be so directly linked to the hobgoblin neighborhoods below ground. In Fort Wyvern, however, nothing is as simple as it first appears to be.

Now I switched on the flashlight, reasonably confident that the kidnapper—if that’s who I was following—was not on this level of the building.

It seemed odd that a psychopath would bring his small victim here rather than to a more personal and private place, where he would be entirely comfortable while he fulfilled whatever perverse needs motivated him. On the other hand, Wyvern had a mysterious allure akin to that of Stonehenge, to that of the great pyramid at Giza, to that of the Mayan ruins at Chichén Itzá. Its malevolent magnetism would surely appeal to a deranged man who, as was frequently true in these cases, got his purest thrill not from molesting the innocent but from torturing and then brutally murdering them. These strange grounds would draw him as surely as would a deconsecrated church or a crumbling old house on the outskirts of town where, fifty years ago, a madman had chopped up his family with an ax.

Of course, there was always the possibility that this kidnapper was not insane at all, not a pervert, but a man working in a bizarre but nonetheless official capacity in regions of Wyvern that perhaps remained secretly active. This base, even shuttered, is a breeding ground of paranoia.

With Orson remaining close at my side, I hurried toward the offices at the far end of the main room.