Seize the Night

evil aura, as if this was the phone number at which soul-selling politicians could reach Satan twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, holidays included, collect calls accepted.
    “You're the only one of us who's heard his voice,” Bobby said.
    He rolled his chair aside, so I could reach the telephone at the workstation. “I've got caller-ID block and trace-call block, so if you make him curious, he can't find us.”
    When I picked up the handset, Orson put his forepaws on the workstation and gently clamped his jaws around my wrist, as if to suggest that I should put the phone down without making the call.
    “Got to do it, bro.”
    He whined.
    “Duty,” I told him.
    He understood duty, and so he released me.
    Although the fine hairs on the back of my neck were dueling with one another, I keyed in the number. As I listened to it ring, I told myself that Randolph was dead, buried alive in the hole where that copper-lined room had been.
    He answered on the third ring. I recognized his voice at once, from the single word hello .
    “Dr. Randolph Josephson?” I asked.
    “Yes?”
    My mouth was so dry that my tongue stuck to my palate almost as securely as Velcro to Velcro.
    “Hello? Are you there?” he asked.
    “Is this the Randolph Josephson formerly known as John Joseph Randolph?”
    He did not answer. I could hear him breathing.
    I said, “Did you think your juvenile record was expunged? Did you really think you could kill your parents and have the facts erased forever?” I hung up, dropping the handset so fast that it rattled in the cradle.
    “Now what?” Sasha asked.
    Getting up from the workstation chair, Bobby said, “Maybe in this version of his life, the kook didn't get funding for his project as quickly as he found it at Wyvern, or maybe not enough funding. He might not yet have started up another model of the Mystery Train.”
    “But if that's true,” Sasha said, “how do we stop him? Drive over to Reno and put a bullet in his brain?”
    “Not if we can avoid it,” I said. “I tore some clippings off the wall of his murder gallery, in that tunnel under the egg room. They were still in my pockets when I got home. They hadn't just vanished like … Bobby's corpse. Which must mean those are killings Randolph's still committed. His annual thrill. Maybe tomorrow I should make anonymous calls to the police, accusing him of the murders. If they look into it, they might find his scrapbook or other mementos.”
    “Even if they nail him,” Sasha said, “his research could go on without him. The new version of the Mystery Train might be built, and the door between realities might be opened.”
    I looked at Mungojerrie.
    Mungojerrie looked at Orson. Orson looked at Sasha. Sasha looked at Bobby. Bobby looked at me and said, “Then we're doomed.”
    “I'll tip the cops tomorrow,” I said. “It's the best we can do. And if the cops can't convict him …”
    Sasha said, “Then Doogie and I will drive over to Reno one day and waste the creep.”
    “You have a way about you, woman,” Bobby said.
    Time to party.
    Sasha drove the Explorer across the dunes, through shore grass silvered with moonlight, and down a long embankment, parking on the beach of the southern horn, just above the tide line. Driving this far onto the strand isn't legal, but we had been to Hell and back, so we figured we could survive virtually any punishment meted out for this violation.
    We spread blankets on the sand, near the Explorer, and fired up a single Coleman lantern.
    A large ship was stationed just beyond the mouth of the bay, north and west of us. Although the night shrouded it, and though the porthole lights were not sufficient to entirely define the vessel, I was sure that I had never seen anything quite like it in these parts.
    It made me uneasy, though not uneasy enough to go home and hide under my bed.
    The waves were tasty, six to eight feet from trough to crest.
    The off shore flow was just strong enough to carve them into modest barrels, and in the moonlight, the foam glimmered like mermaids' pearl necklaces.
    Sasha and Bobby paddled out to the break line, and I took the first watch on shore, with Orson and Mungojerrie and two shotguns.
    Though the Mystery Train might not exist any longer, my mom's clever retrovirus was still at work. Perhaps the promised vaccine and cure were on the way, but people in Moonlight Bay were still becoming. The coyotes couldn't have crunched up the entire troop, a few Wyvern