Seize the Night

town, out along Haddenbeck Road, a lot of years ago, but if I'd ever known his name, I'd long forgotten it.
    Moonlight Bay was a conservative community, assiduously well groomed for tourists, the citizens preferred to talk up the fine scenery and the seductively easy lifestyle, while playing down the negatives.
    Johnny Randolph, self-made orphan, would never have been featured in the chamber of commerce literature or written up in the Mobile Guide under local historical figures.
    If he'd returned to Moonlight Bay as an adult, long before the recent child snatchings, to work or live here, that would have been major news The past would have been dredged up, and I would have known all the gossip.
    He might, of course, have come back under a new name, having legally changed from John Joseph Randolph with the sanction of the doting therapists at the facility where he'd been incarcerated, in the interest of putting his troubled past behind him and starting his life anew, with a healed heart and enhanced self-esteem and blah-blah-blah.
    Fully grown, no longer recognizable as the infamous dad-blasting, mom-chopping twelve-year-old, he might have walked unknown on the streets of his hometown. He might have gone to work at Fort Wyvern in some capacity associated with the Mystery Train.
    John Joseph Randolph.
    The name still gnawed at me.
    Now, as Mungojerrie led us along the final length of this tunnel, which appeared to be a dead end, I took one last look at the gallery and thought I grasped the purpose of it.
    Initially it had seemed to be a bragging wall, the equivalent of a star athlete's trophy case, a display that would make Johnny tuck his thumbs in his armpits, puff out his chest, and strut. Homicidal sociopaths are proud of their handiwork but can seldom risk opening their scrapbooks and grisly souvenir collections for the admiration of family and neighbors, they are forced to preen privately.
    Then I had thought the gallery was nothing more than pornography to titillate a radically twisted mind. To this freak, the newspaper headlines might be the equivalent of obscene dialogue. The victim and crime-scene photographs might get him off more readily than any triple-X adult film ever made.
    But now I saw that the display was an offering. His whole life was an offering. The murder of his parents, the single killing every twelve months, his three hundred sixty-four days of stern self-denial each year, and recently the storm of child murders. Burnt offerings. As I studied the vile gallery, I didn't know to whom these terrible gifts were made, or for what purpose, although even at that point, I would have been willing to hazard a guess.
    The tunnel ended at a fully deployed, eight-foot-diameter gate valve, which had once been operated by an electric motor.
    When Doogie set aside his machine pistol and hooked his fingers into a groove on the face of the valve, without the aid of a motor he was able to roll the barrier aside almost as easily as he would have retracted a sliding door. Although unused for more than two years, it traveled in its recessed tracks with only a little noise, which was, in any case, lost in the increasingly ominous sounds that rumbled and squealed through these drained guts of the “temporal relocator.” Oddly enough, I thought of the awe stricken, shipwrecked seamen who had been rescued by Captain Nemo in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and then given a tour of the labyrinthine mechanical bowels of the megalomaniac's Nautilus . Eventually they might have felt enough at home aboard that leviathan of a submarine to break out the hornpipe, play a tune, and dance a sprightly jig, but even the most gregarious and adaptable of folks, left to prowl the seemingly endless metal intestines here below the egg room, would forever feel that they were in alien and hostile territory.
    Although Doogie opened the door like valve only three feet, lamplight poured through from a space beyond, flaring with blinding power in my infrared lenses.
    I raised the goggles to my brow, switched off the infrared flashlight and jammed it under my belt. The lamplight wasn't as bright as I had expected, the lenses had exaggerated it, because they weren't meant to function in the ultraviolet spectrum. The others pulled up their goggles, too.
    Beyond the gate valve was a fourteen- or sixteen-foot length of tunnel, clad in seamlessly butted sleeves of brushed stainless steel, terminating in a second valve, identical to the first. This