And with a pistol that had suddenly appeared in his grasp, Raiff fired two shots at the bank of switches he’d flipped moments before. Sparks fizzled on the first shot, and on the second the lights in his carousel house died altogether. It was pitch black now except for the eyes of the hundreds of bobbing creatures, all of which were luminescent, providing plenty of light for someone already familiar with the cluttered terrain.
Raiff stuffed his gun back in his belt and led them on through the maze-like confines. Dipping and darting, twisting and turning, and never letting go of either Alex or Sam, as if the three of them were dancing together through the glowing eyes that looked like monsters ready to swallow them.
But these weren’t the real monsters, Sam reminded herself. The real monsters were already here, with more on the way.
Raiff found the door, shouldered it ajar, and they slid through as it sealed as quickly as it had opened. They found themselves dashing down a long winding hall that seemed identical in every way to the one that had brought Alex and Sam to Raiff’s lair.
“As for where we go from here—” he started, when they reached a ladder at the end leading up to a hatch.
“I already know where we go from here,” Sam said, between pounding breaths, before he could finish. “The professor pretty much told me.”
84
WAITING
FOR DR. THOMAS DONATI, EVERYTHING was on hold, including, it seemed, the world itself. He felt as if he’d been frozen in a form of suspended animation, waiting for the phone to ring, buzzer to chime, or team to show up. Of course, he more than anyone should’ve known this day was coming; its inevitability, he supposed, had been sealed eighteen years before in Bishop Ranch.
He hadn’t told the faceless voice grids he’d been speaking with over the course of the past day the entire truth, not even most of it. And now he was left to wonder how much of what was happening, and about to happen, was his fault. Because if the wormhole was about to open again …
Donati didn’t complete the thought; he couldn’t. The prospects were just too real and terrifying. He imagined that’s why he’d missed the warning signs a high school student, a NASA intern, had found. He missed them because he’d wanted to, unable to bear the thought that the inevitable was upon him, perhaps ultimately of his own making from trying to reach what no man was ever meant to touch.
He was glad the faceless voice grids couldn’t read his mind, couldn’t see into his memory to the moments that had followed the first shrill emergency alarm sounding before the destruction of Laboratory Z. How’d he raced down to the basement sublevel containing the massive tubular chamber he and Orson Wilder had constructed, essentially a particle accelerator and mini-supercollider that formed a potential doorway to other worlds. The testing had only been in the most rudimentary and fundamental stages. Expectations were low; in point of fact, nobody knew what to expect and most familiar with the project expected nothing at all.
As a boy, Donati had been obsessed with model trains and, later, with the transcontinental railroad’s construction. Even then, before his interest in space exploration had turned obsessively into his life’s work, he’d been fascinated by the idea of all that wilderness, all that untamed frontier, being linked together. Worlds connected. Impossible journeys made possible.
For Donati, Laboratory Z was an extension of that same romantic adventure where man expanded his horizons by forging routes between worlds. Back then it had merely been east and west, north and south, while today it involved roads built to connect planets and galaxies. His and Orson Wilder’s early work trying to theoretically construct a transworld was similarly about creating connections that just a decade or so before had been unthinkable. And they’d been wrong and right at the same time.
Right, because they had indeed opened the door.
Wrong, because something was waiting on the other side.
And now the day of reckoning for their oversight and myopic vision had come. Ever since that day eighteen years ago, he had ceased seeking other life forms in order to build bridges; he sought them instead to prevent those bridges from ever being built. The very real danger the prospects of such contact created had already been demonstrated, proof enough for him.
But that wasn’t the problem at this point. The problem at this point was that the signs, the pattern, were reoccurring, which could only mean one thing.
They were coming back, perhaps through a wormhole entirely of their own creation. And right now he had to find Samantha Dixon before someone else did.
Or some thing.
But her phone was going straight to voicemail and she’d returned none of his e-mails or texts, the latter being a practice Donati utterly deplored but knew teenagers these days normally preferred.
Donati’s phone rang and he jerked it to his ear, answering it quickly.
“Yes. Donati here.”
“It’s Samantha, Dr. Donati.”
“Who?”
“Dixon, Samantha Dixon, Doctor. I think we need to talk.”
ELEVEN
REBELS
Awake, arise or be for ever fall’n.
—JOHN MILTON, PARADISE LOST
85