Seize the Night

27

With midnight still ahead of us, we took each of the kids home, and that was totally fine. Tears are not always bitter. As we made our rounds, the tears on the faces of the children’s parents were as sweet as mercy. When Lilly Wing looked at me, with Jimmy in her arms, I saw in her eyes something that I had once yearned to see, but now what I saw was less fulfilling for me here in time present than it might have been in time past.

When we got back to my house, Sasha, Bobby, and I were prepared to party, but Roosevelt wanted to get his Mercedes, drive home to his handsome Bluewater cruiser at the marina, and craft a pirate’s patch out of filet mignon to cover his swollen eye. “Children, I’m getting old. You go celebrate, and I’ll go sleep.”

Because he was off duty at the radio station, Doogie had made a midnight date, as if he’d never doubted that he would come back from neverland and feel like dancing. “Good thing I have time to shower,” he said. “I think I smell like monkey.”

While Bobby and Sasha loaded my and Sasha’s surfboards into her Explorer, I washed my bloodstained hands. Then Mungojerrie and Orson and I went into the dining room, now Sasha’s music room, to listen to the tape that I had heard twice before. Leland Delacroix’s testament.

It was not in the machine where I had left it when I’d played it for Sasha, Roosevelt, and Mungojerrie. Apparently, it had vanished like the building that had housed the Mystery Train. If Delacroix had never killed himself, had never worked on the train, had never gone to the other side, then no tape had ever been made.

I went to the rack in which Sasha stores audiotapes of all her compositions. The dupe of Delacroix’s testament, labeled “Tequila Kidneys,” was where I had put it.

“It’ll be blank,” I said.

Orson regarded me quizzically. The poor battered boy needed to be bathed, treated with antiseptics, and bandaged. Sasha was probably one step ahead of me, already packing a first-aid kit into the truck.

Mungojerrie was waiting at the tape player when I returned with the cassette.

I popped it into the machine and pressed the play button.

The hiss of magnetic tape. A soft click. Rhythmic breathing. Then ragged breathing, weeping, great miserable sobs. Finally, Delacroix’s voice: “This is a warning. A testament.”

I pressed stop. I could not understand how the original tape could cease to exist, while this copy remained intact. How could Delacroix be making this testament if he’d never ridden the Mystery Train?

“Paradox,” I said.

Orson nodded in agreement.

Mungojerrie looked at me and yawned, as if to say that I was full of crap.

I switched the machine on and fast-forwarded until I came to the place on the tape at which Delacroix listed as many of the personnel on the project as he’d known, citing their titles. The first name was, as I had remembered, Dr. Randolph Josephson. He was a civilian scientist — and head of the project.

Dr. Randolph Josephson.

John Joseph Randolph.

On leaving juvenile detention at the age of eighteen, Johnny Randolph had surely become Randolph Josephson. In this new identity, he had acquired an education, apparently one hell of an education, driven to fulfill a destiny that he had imagined for himself after seeing a crow emerge from solid rock.

Now, if you want, you can believe that the devil himself paid a visit to twelve-year-old Johnny Randolph, in the form of a talking crow, urging him to kill his parents and then develop a machine — the Mystery Train — to open the door between here and Hell, to let out the legions of dark angels and demons who are condemned to live in the Pit.

Or you can believe that a homicidal boy read a similar scenario in, oh, say it was a moldering comic book, and then borrowed the plot for his own pathetic life, built it into a grand delusion that motivated him to create that infernal machine. It might seem unlikely that a slashing-chopping-hacking sociopath could become a scientist of such stature that billions of dollars in black-budget government money would be lavished on his work, but we know he was an unusually self-controlled sociopath, who limited his killings to one a year, pouring the rest of his murderous energy into his career. And, of course, most of those who decide how to spend black-budget billions are probably not as well balanced as you and I. Well, not as well balanced as you, since anyone reading these volumes of my Moonlight Bay journal will be justified in questioning my balance. The keepers of our communal coffers often seek out insanely ambitious projects, and I would be surprised if John Joseph Randolph — aka Dr. Randolph Josephson — was the only raving lunatic who was showered with our tax money.

I wondered if Randolph could be dead back there in Fort Wyvern, buried alive under the thousands of tons of earth that, in the manic reversal of time, had been returned by dump trucks and excavators to the hole where the egg room and associated chambers had once existed. Or had he never gone to Wyvern in the first place, never developed the Mystery Train? Was he alive elsewhere, having spent the past decade working on another — and similar — project?

The three-hundred-ring circus of my imagination abruptly set up its tent, and I became convinced that John Joseph Randolph was at the dining-room window, staring at me this very moment. I spun around. The pleated shade was down. I crossed the room, grabbed the pull cord, yanked the shade up. Johnny wasn’t there.

I listened to a little more of the tape. The eighteenth name on Delacroix’s list was Conrad Gensel. No doubt he was the stocky bastard with the cropped black hair, yellow-brown eyes, and doll’s teeth. Perhaps he was one of the temponauts who had traveled to the other side, one of the few who had come back alive. Maybe he had glimpsed a destiny of his own in that world of the red sky, or had been driven quietly mad by what he’d seen and had found himself self-destructively drawn to that nightmare place. In any case, he and Randolph hadn’t met at a church supper or a strawberry festival.

The skin was still crawling on the nape of my neck. Although the Mystery Train building had been deconstructed down to the last chip of concrete and the final scrap of steel, I didn’t feel that we’d reached closure in this matter.

John Joseph Randolph hadn’t been at the window; however, now I was sure Conrad Gensel had his nose pressed to the pane. Because I had lowered the blind after checking for mad Johnny, I crossed the room again. Hesitated. Yanked up the shade. No Conrad.

The dog and the cat were watching me with interest, as if they were being highly entertained.

“The big question,” I said to Mungojerrie and Orson, as I led them into the kitchen, “is whether the door Johnny opened was really a door into Hell or a door to somewhere else.”

He wouldn’t have submitted a grant application with the promise of building a bridge to Beelzebub. He’d have been more discreet. I’m sure the cloak-and-dagger financiers believed that they were funding research and experiments in time travel; and because they are all comfortable in their lunacy, that seemed rational.

As I took a package of frankfurters out of the freezer, I said, “And from what he was ranting in that copper room, I guess it must have been time travel of a sort. Forward, back — but mostly what he called sideways.”

I stood pondering the problem, holding the frozen hot dogs.

Orson started pacing in circles around me.

“Suppose there are worlds out there in time streams that flow beside ours, parallel worlds. According to quantum physics, an infinite number of shadow universes exist simultaneously with ours, as real as ours. We can’t see them. They can’t see us. Realities never intersect. Except maybe at Wyvern. Where the Mystery Train, like a giant blender, whipped realities together for a while.”

Mungojerrie was now pacing around me, too, following Orson.

“Isn’t it possible that one of those shadow universes is so terrible that it might as well be Hell? For that matter, maybe there’s a parallel world so glorious we couldn’t distinguish it from Heaven.”

The pacing pooch and the pacing cat were so focused on the hot dogs, in such a solid trance, that if Orson had suddenly stopped, Mungojerrie would have walked halfway up his butt before realizing where he was.