Seize the Night (42 page)

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 doing, 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.

The kids turned backward in their seats, cheering the coyotes.

“It’s a Barnum and Bailey world,” Sasha said.

Doogie drove us out of Wyvern.

The clouds had cleared while we’d been underground, and the moon hung high in the sky, as round as time.

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.

I cut open the package of frankfurters, spread the sausages on a plate, headed for the microwave oven, but stopped in the middle of the room, pondering the imponderable.

“In fact,” I said, “isn’t it possible that some people—genuine psychics, mystics—have actually at times looked through the barrier between time streams? Had visions of these parallel worlds? Maybe that’s where our concepts of the afterlife come from.”

Bobby had entered the kitchen from the garage as I’d launched into my latest monologue. He listened to me for a moment, but then he fell in behind Mungojerrie and Orson, pacing circles around me.

“And what if we
do
move on from this world when we die, sideways into one of those parallel to us? Are we talking religion or science here?”

“
We’re
not talking anything,” Bobby said. “You’re talking your head off about religion and science and pseudoscience, but we’re just thinking hot dogs.”

Taking the hint, I put the plate in the microwave. When the hot dogs were warm, I gave two to Mungojerrie. I gave six to Orson, because when I had lifted the cut chain-link and urged him to enter Wyvern the previous night, I had promised him frankfurters, and I always keep my promises to my friends, just as they always keep their promises to me.

I didn’t give any to Bobby, because he’d been a smartass.

“Look what I found,” he said, as I was washing the frankfurter grease from my hands.

My fingers were dripping when he gave me the Mystery Train cap.

“This can’t exist,” I said.

If the entire building that housed the project had unraveled from existence, why would the cap have been made in the first place?

“It doesn’t exist,” he said. “But something else does.”

Baffled, I turned the cap in my hands, to look at the words above the bill. The ruby-red stitching didn’t form
Mystery Train
anymore. Instead, the two words were
Tornado Alley
.

“What’s Tornado Alley?” I asked.

“You find it a little…”

“Not uncreepy?”

“Yeah.”

“Maximo weird,” I said.

Maybe Randolph and Conrad and others were out there in Wyvern or some other part of the world, working on the same project, which now had a different name. No closure.

“Gonna wear it?” Bobby asked.

“No.”

“Good idea.”

“Another thing,” he said. “What
did
happen to the dead me?”

“Here we go again. He ceased to exist, that’s all.”

“Because I didn’t die.”

“I’m no Einstein.”

He frowned. “What if I wake up some morning, and beside me in bed is that dead me, all rotting and oozing slime?”

“You’ll have to buy new sheets.”

When we were packed and ready to party, we drove out to the point of the southern horn of the bay, on which Bobby’s cottage—a beautiful structure of weathered teak and glass—is the only residence.

On the way, Sasha stopped at a pay phone, disguised her voice by doing a Mickey Mouse imitation—God knows why Mickey Mouse, when any of the characters from
The Lion King
would have been more apt—and tipped the police to the scene at the Stanwyk house.

When we were on the move again, Bobby said, “Bro?”

“Yo.”

“Who left that Mystery Train cap for you in the first place? And who slipped Delacroix’s security badge under the windshield wiper on the Jeep last night?”

“No proof.”

“But a suspicion?”

“Big Head.”

“You serious?”

“I think it’s way smarter than it looks.”

“It’s some mutant freak,” Bobby insisted.

“So am I.”

“Good point.”

At Bobby’s place, we changed from street clothes into wet suits, then loaded a cooler full of beer and a variety of snacks into the Explorer.

Before we could party, however, we needed to resolve one issue—so we could stop glancing nervously at the windows, looking for the crazy conductor of the Mystery Train.

The oversize video displays at the computer workstations in Bobby’s home office were ablaze with colorful maps, bar graphs, photos of the earth taken from orbit only minutes ago, and flow charts of dynamic weather conditions worldwide. Here—and with the help of his employees in the Moonlight Bay offices of Surfcast—Bobby predicted surf conditions for subscribers in over twenty countries.

As I am not computer compatible, I stood back while Bobby settled into one of the workstations, rattled his fingers across the keyboard, went on-line, and searched a database listing all the leading American scientists of our time. Logic insisted that a mad genius obsessed with the possibility of time travel, determined to prove that parallel worlds existed alongside our own and that these lands could be reached by a lateral movement
across
time, would have to become a physicist, and a damned good one, enormously well funded, if he had any hope of applying his theories effectively.

Bobby found Dr. Randolph Josephson in three minutes. He was associated with a university in Nevada, and he lived in Reno.

Mungojerrie sprang onto the workstation to peer intently at the data on the screen. There was even a photo. It was our mad scientist, all right.

In spite of the widespread base closures that had followed the end of the Cold War, Nevada had been left with a few sprawling facilities. It was reasonable to assume that on at least one of them, top-secret research projects in the Wyvern vein were still being undertaken.

“He might have moved up there to Reno after Wyvern closed,” Sasha said. “That doesn’t mean he’s still alive. He could have come back here to snatch these kids—and died when that building…came apart.”

“But maybe he never worked at Wyvern at all. If the Mystery Train never happened, then maybe he’s been up there in Reno all along—building Tornado Alley or something else.”