Seize the Night

he crept up on us.
    I was the last in our procession, and each time I glanced back the way we had come—which was about every ten seconds—I was certain old Johnny Randolph would be there, about to strike at me, slithering snakelike on his belly or crawling spider like across the ceiling.
    Evidently, he had been a brutal killer all his life. Was he now becoming? Was that why he snatched these kids and squirreled them away in this weird place—in addition to the desire for revenge on those who had proved he'd killed his parents and had locked him away? If a good man like Father Tom could spiral so far down into madness and savagery, how much farther into the heart of darkness could John Randolph descend? What unthinkable beast might he become, considering where he'd started?
    In retrospect, I realize that I was encouraging my imagination to spin even further out of control than usual, because as long as it was feverishly conjuring crawly fears of bizarro Johnny, it wasn't able to taunt me with images of Bobby Halloway alone and helpless, bleeding to death in the elevator alcove.
    Following Sasha, Doogie, and Roosevelt, I swiftly played the infrared beam over the final cluster of clippings.
    Two years ago, the frequency of these killings increased.
    Judging by the presentation on this wall, they were occurring every three months.
    The headlines roared of sensational mass murders, not of solitary victims anymore, three to six souls per pop.
    Perhaps this was when Johnny had decided to bring in a partner, the stocky charmer who had so earnestly endeavored to give me some skull exercise in the hallway under the warehouse. Where do tandem killers meet? Probably not at church. How do they decide to divide the labor, or do they just take turns sweeping up after?
    With a fun partner, perhaps, Johnny had expanded his territory, and the clippings showed him venturing as far as Connecticut and then south to sunny Georgia. On to Florida. A jaunt over to Louisiana. A long ride up to the Dakotas. Travelin' man.
    Johnny's weapons of choice had changed, no more hammers, no lengths of iron pipe, no knives, no meat cleavers, no ice picks, no hatchets, not even any labor-saving chain saws or power drills. These days the lad favored fire.
    And these days his victims fit a clear, consistent profile. For the past two years, they had all been children.
    Were they all the children or grandchildren of people who had once crossed him? Or perhaps until these latest abductions, he'd been motivated solely by the thrill of it.
    I was more than ever frightened for the four kids now in John Joseph Randolph's hands. I took some cold comfort from the knowledge that, according to the clippings in this demonic gallery, when he committed these atrocities against groups of victims, he destroyed them all at once, in a single fire, as if making a burnt offering.
    Therefore, if one of the kidnapped children was alive, then all were probably still alive.
    We had assumed that the disappearances of Jimmy Wing and the other three were related to the gene-swapping retrovirus and to the events at Wyvern. But not all the evil in the world arises directly from my mom's work. John Joseph Randolph had been busy prepping for Hell from at least his twelfth year, and perhaps what I'd suggested to Bobby last night was true, Randolph might have imprisoned these children here for no other reason than that he had stumbled upon the place and enjoyed the atmosphere, the satanic architecture.
    The gallery ended with two startling items.
    Taped to the wall was a sheet of art paper bearing the likeness of a crow. The crow. The crow on the rock at the top of Crow Hill.
    This was an impression that had been made by pressing the paper over the incised stone and rubbing it with graphite until the image appeared.
    Beside the crow was a Mystery Train patch of the kind that we'd seen on the breast of William Hodgson's spacesuit.
    Already, then, Wyvern was back in the picture. There was a connection between Randolph and top-secret research conducted on the base, but the link might not be my mother or her retrovirus.
    A rock of truth was visible in this sea of confusion, and I strove to get a grip on it, but my mind was exhausted, weak, and the rock was slippery.
    John Joseph Randolph wasn't merely becoming. Maybe he wasn't becoming at all. His connection to Wyvern was more complex than that.
    I dimly remembered a story about a wacko kid killing his folks in a house on the edge of