Seize the Night

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