Seize the Night

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 Gesel. 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