Seize the Night

Crow Hill.”
    “I went home that night, fully alive for the first time ever, and did what I'd always wanted to do. Blew my father's brains out.”
    He said this as if reporting an achievement that filled him with quiet pride.
    “Cut Mother to pieces. Then my real life began.”
    Doogie was sending the kids out of the room, one after the other, along the tunnel to where Sasha and Roosevelt waited.
    “So many years, so much hard work,” Randolph said with a sigh, as though he were a retiree pleasantly contemplating well-earned leisure. “So much study, learning, striving, thinking . So much self-denial and restraint through so many years.”
    One killing every twelve months.
    “And when it was built , when success was at hand, the cowards back in Washington were scared by what they saw on the videotapes from the unmanned probes.”
    “What did they see?”
    Instead of answering, he said, “They were going to shut us down. Del Stuart was ready right then to pull the plug on my funding.”
    I thought I knew why Aaron and Anson Stuart were in this room. And I wondered if the other kids who had been snatched and killed all over the country were related somehow to other people on the Mystery Train project who had disappointed this man.
    “Then your mother's bug got loose,” Randolph said, “and they wanted to know what the future held, whether there would even be a future.”
    “Red sky?” I asked. “Strange trees?”
    “That's not the future. That's … sideways .”
    From the corner of my eye, I saw the copper wall buckle.
    Horrified, I turned toward where the concave curve had seemed to become convex, but there was no sign of distortion.
    “Now the track is laid,” Randolph said contentedly, “and no one can tear it up. The border is breached. The way is open.”
    “The way to where?”
    “You'll see. We're all going soon,” he said with disconcerting assurance. “The train is already pulling out of the station.” Wendy was the fourth and last child through the gate valve at the entrance to the chamber. Orson followed her, still tottering a little.
    Doogie motioned urgently to me, and I rose to my feet.
    Randolph's pale green eye fixed on me, and he gave me a bloody, broken-toothed, eerily affectionate smile. “Time past, time present, time future, but most important … time sideways . Sideways is the only place I ever wanted to go, and your mother gave me the chance.”
    “But where is sideways?” I asked with considerable frustration as the building shook around us.
    “My destiny,” he said enigmatically.
    Sasha cried out, and her voice was so full of alarm that my heart jolted, raced.
    Doogie looked down the tunnel, aghast, and then shouted, “Chris! Grab one of those chairs!”
    As I snatched up one of the collapsed folding chairs and then my shotgun, John Joseph Randolph said, “Stations on a track, out there sideways in time, like we always knew, always knew but didn't want to believe .”
    I had been right when I'd suspected that truths were hidden in his strange statements, and I wanted to hear him out and understand, but staying there any longer would have been suicidal.
    As I joined Doogie, the half-closed gate valve, which was the door of the chamber, began to slide all the way shut.
    Cursing, Doogie gripped the valve and put all his muscle against it, the arteries in his neck bulging from the effort, slowly forcing the steel disc back into the wall.
    “Go!” Doogie said.
    Because I'm the kind of guy who knows good advice when he hears it, I squeezed past the mambo king and sprinted along the sixteen-foot section of tunnel between the two enormous valves.
    Above a thundering and a wind like shrieking worthy of the final storm on doomsday, I could hear John Joseph Randolph shouting, not with terror but with joy, with passionate conviction: “I believe! I believe! ”
    Sasha, the kids, Mungojerrie, and Orson had already passed through to the next section of tunnel beyond the outer gateway.
    Roosevelt was wedged into the breach, to prevent the valve from sealing Doogie and me in here. I could hear the motor grinding in the wall, trying to drive the steel disc into the fully closed position.
    I jammed the metal folding chair into the gap, above Roosevelt's head, bracing the valve open.
    “Thanks, son,” he said.
    I followed Roosevelt through the gate.
    The others were waiting beyond, with an ordinary flashlight. Sasha looked far more beautiful when she wasn't green.
    The gap in