Seize the Night

18

With a second bottle of Mountain Dew in hand, Bobby sat on the cellist’s stool, but he didn’t pick up the bow.

In addition to all the instruments and the composition table, the former dining room contained a music system with a CD player and an antiquated audiotape deck. In fact, there were two decks, which allowed Sasha to duplicate tapes of her own recordings. I powered up the equipment, which added as much feeble illumination to the room as the dreary daylight that seeped in at the edges of the blinds.

Sometimes, after composing a tune, Sasha is convinced that she has unwittingly plagiarized another songwriter. To satisfy herself that her work is original, she spends hours listening to cuts from which she suspects she has borrowed, until finally she’s willing to believe that her creation has, after all, sprung solely from her own talent.

Her music is the only thing about which Sasha exhibits more than a healthy measure of self-doubt. Her cooking, her literary opinions, her lovemaking, and all the other things she does so wonderfully are marked by a wholesome confidence and by no more than a useful amount of second-guessing. In her relationship to her music, however, she is sometimes a lost child; when she’s stricken by this vulnerability, I want more than ever to put my arm around her and to comfort her — though this is when she’s most likely to reject comforting and to rap me across the knuckles with her flute, her scaling ruler, or another handy music-room weapon.

I suppose every relationship can be enriched by a small measure of neurotic behavior. I certainly contribute a half cup of my own to our recipe.

Now I slipped the tape into the player. It was the cassette I’d found in the envelope beside Leland Delacroix’s reeking corpse in the bungalow kitchen in Dead Town.

I turned the chair away from the composition table and, sitting down, used the remote control to switch on the cassette player.

For half a minute, we heard only the hiss of unrecorded magnetic tape passing over the playback head. A soft click and a new hollow quality to the hiss marked the beginning of the recording, which at first consisted only of someone — I assumed it was Delacroix — taking deep, rhythmic breaths, as if engaged in some form of meditation or aromatherapy.

Bobby said, “I was hoping for revelation, not respiration.”

The sound was utterly mundane, with not the least inflection of fear or menace, or any other emotion. Yet the fine hairs stirred on the nape of my neck, as though these exhalations were actually coming from someone standing close behind me.

“He’s trying to get a grip on himself,” I said. “Deep, even breaths to get a grip on himself.”

A moment later, my interpretation proved true when the breathing suddenly grew ragged, then desperate. Delacroix broke down and began to weep, tried to get a grip on himself, but choked on his pain, and let loose with great trembling sobs punctuated by wordless cries of despair.

Although I’d never known this man, listening to him in such violent throes of misery was disturbing. Fortunately, it didn’t last long, because he switched off the recorder.

With another soft click, the recording began again, and though Delacroix’s self-control was tenuous, he managed to speak. His voice was so thick with emotion that sometimes his speech slurred, and when he seemed in danger of breaking down completely, he paused either to take deep breaths or to drink something, presumably whiskey.

I remembered the snapshots arranged beside Delacroix’s corpse. The elfin, gap-toothed little girl. The boy in the blue suit and red bow tie. The pretty blonde with the appealing smile. I suspected that these were the people who, to be saved, were killed.

Delacroix paused again. Got control of his breathing. Took a swallow of whatever he was drinking.

Delacroix swallowed more of his drink. He banged the glass down as though it was empty.

Sobbing, Delacroix switched off the recorder. God knows how long the poor man required to get control of himself. Of course, there was no lengthy blank section of tape, just another soft click as Delacroix hit the record button and continued:

Delacroix switched off the recorder, pausing to get a grip on his emotions.

With the remote control, I stopped the tape. The late Leland Delacroix wasn’t the only one who needed to compose himself.

Without comment, Bobby got up from the cellist’s stool and went into the kitchen.

After a moment, I followed him.

He was emptying his unfinished bottle of Mountain Dew into the sink, flushing it away with cold water.

“Don’t turn it off,” I said.

While Bobby threw the empty soda bottle in the trash can and opened the refrigerator, I went to the sink. I cupped my hands under the faucet, and for at least a minute, I splashed cold water on my face.

After I dried my face on a couple of paper towels, Bobby handed a bottle of beer to me. He had one, too.

I wanted to have a clear head when we returned to Wyvern. But after what I’d heard on the tape, and considering what else remained to be heard, I could probably have downed a six-pack without effect.

“‘That damn place, the other side,’” Bobby said, quoting Leland Delacroix.

“It’s wherever Hodgson went in his spacesuit.”

“And wherever he came back from when we saw him.”

“Did Delacroix just go nuts, hallucinate everything, kill his family for no reason?”

“No.”

“You think the thing he saw in his daughter’s throat, in her eye — that was real?”

“Totally.”

“Me too. Things we saw in Hodgson’s suit…could that be what the fluttering is about?”

“Maybe that. Maybe something worse.”

“Worse,” I said, trying not to imagine it.

“I got the feeling — wherever the other side is, it’s a real zoo over there.”

We returned to the dining room. Bobby to the stool. Me to the chair by the composition table. After a moment of reluctance, I started the tape.

By the time Delacroix had begun to record again, his demeanor had changed. He wasn’t as emotional as he had been. His voice broke now and then, and he needed to pause to collect himself from time to time, but for the most part, he was striving to soldier through what needed to be said.

Delacroix halted in mid-sentence, held his breath as though he were listening for something, and then shut off the recorder.

I stopped the tape. “He didn’t mail the cassette to anyone.”

“Changed his mind. What does he mean — something metaphysical?”

“That was my next question,” I said.

When Delacroix returned to the recorder, his voice was heavier, slower, leaden, as though he had fallen past fear, dropped below grief, and was speaking from a pit of despair.

Delacroix proceeded to list over thirty people, identifying each man or woman as either a civilian scientist or a military officer: Dr. Randolph Josephson, Dr. Sarabjit Sanathra, Dr. Miles Bennell, General Deke Kettleman….

My mother was not among them.

I recognized only two names. The first was William Hodgson, who was no doubt the poor devil we encountered in the bizarre episode in the egg room. The second was Dr. Roger Stanwyk, who lived with his wife, Marie, on my street, just seven houses east of mine. Dr. Stanwyk, a biochemist, had been one of my mother’s many colleagues, associated with the genetic experiments at Wyvern. If the Mystery Train wasn’t the project that grew from my mother’s work, then Dr. Stanwyk had been collecting more than one paycheck and had done more than his fair share to destroy the world.

Delacroix’s voice grew softer and his speech slower during recitation of the last six or eight names, and the final name almost seemed as though it would stick to his tongue and remain unrevealed. I wasn’t sure if he had reached the end of his list or had stopped without finishing it.

He was silent for half a minute. Then, with his voice abruptly energized, he rattled out what seemed to be a few sentences in a foreign language before switching off the recorder.

I stopped the tape and looked at Bobby. “What was that?”

“Wasn’t pig Latin.”

I reversed the tape, and we listened again.

This wasn’t any language I could identify, and though, for all I knew, Delacroix might have been spewing gibberish, I was convinced that it had meaning. It had the cadence of speech, and although no word was recognizable, I found it curiously familiar.

After the thick, slow, depressed voice in which Delacroix had recited the names of people involved in the Mystery Train project, he imbued these sentences with evident emotion, perhaps even passion, which seemed a further indication that he was speaking with purpose and meaning. On the other hand, those in seizures of religious joy, who speak in tongues, also exhibit great emotion, but there is no evident meaning in the tongues they speak.

When Leland Delacroix began to record again, his voice revealed a numbing and dangerous depression: so flat as to be virtually devoid of inflection, so soft that it was barely more than a whisper, the essence of hopelessness.

Delacroix fell silent, and there was only the faint background hiss and pop of the tape.

Veils ripped. Realities intersecting.

I glanced at Bobby. He seemed as clueless as I was.

I looked at Bobby again, and he said, with grim satisfaction, “Time machine.”

Delacroix’s low, leaden voice faded to silence, but he didn’t turn off the recorder.

After a long pause, there was the sound of chair legs scraping-stuttering across a tile floor, probably a kitchen floor, followed by heavy footsteps fading as Delacroix left the room. He dragged his feet slightly, physically weighed down by his extreme depression.

“Red sky,” Bobby said thoughtfully.

A still and awful red, I thought uneasily, remembering the line from Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a favorite poem of mine when I was a young boy of nine or ten, in love with terror and with the idea of remorseless fate. These days, it held no special appeal — for the very reasons that I had liked it so much then.

We listened to the silence on the tape for a while, and then we could hear Delacroix’s voice in the distance, evidently coming from another room.

I cranked up the volume, but I still couldn’t make out what the man was saying.

“Who’s he talking to?” Bobby wondered.

“Himself, maybe.”

“Maybe to his family.”

His dead family.

Delacroix must have been roaming, because his voice rose and fell independent of my use of the volume control.

At one point he cruised past or through the kitchen, and we could hear him clearly enough to determine that he was speaking in that strange language again. He was ranting with considerable emotion, not in the flat dead voice he had last used when sitting at the recorder.

Eventually he fell silent, and a short while later, he came back to the recorder. He switched it off, and I suspected that he rewound it to see where he had interrupted himself. When he began to record again, his voice was low, sluggish, once more crushed flat by depression.

He settled into silence. A gurgle and splash indicated that he was pouring something out of a bottle into a glass. He took a drink of it.

In silence, Bobby and I sucked at our beers.

I wondered if you could get beer in this world of the red sky and the fleshy black trees. Although I like a beer occasionally, I would have no difficulty living without it. Now, however, this bottle of Corona in my hand was the avatar of all the countless humble pleasures of daily life, of all that could be lost through human arrogance, and I held fast to it as though it were more precious than diamonds, which in one sense it was.

Delacroix began to speak in that incomprehensible tongue again, and this time he murmured the same few words over and over, as though chanting in a whisper. As before, though I couldn’t understand one word, there was a familiarity in these syllables and in the cadence of his speech that sent a corkscrew chill through the hollows of my spine.

“He’s drunk or kooking out,” Bobby said. “Maybe both.”

When I began to worry that Delacroix would not continue with his revelations, he switched to English.

Another silence.

Then more rhythmic, whispery chanting.

Bobby said, “There’s your mom, bro. The ‘other project,’ the one that got the top brass scared about the future.”

“So she wasn’t part of the Mystery Train.”

“The train was just…reconnaissance. Or that’s all it was meant to be. But something went way wrong there, too. In fact, maybe what went wrong with the train was the worse of the two.”

I said, “What do you think was on that videotape? The flying thing, I mean.”

“I’m hoping the man is gonna tell us.”

The whispering continued for a minute or more, and in the middle of it, Delacroix hit the stop button.

When he resumed recording, he was in a new location. The sound quality wasn’t as good as before, and there was a steady background noise.

“Car engine,” Bobby said.

Engine noise, a faint whistle of wind, and the hum of tires racing over pavement: Delacroix was on the move.

His driver’s license had given an address in Monterey, a couple hours up the coast. He must have left his family’s bodies there.

A whispering arose. Delacroix was talking to himself in such a low voice that we could barely discern he was speaking in the unknown language. Gradually, the muttering faded away.

After a silence, when he began to speak louder and in English, his voice wasn’t as clear as we would have liked. The microphone wasn’t as close to his mouth as it should have been. The recorder was either on the seat beside him or, more likely, balanced on the dashboard.

His depression had given way to fear again. He spoke faster, and his voice frequently cracked with anxiety.

Delacroix wept.

Bobby said, “He’s losing control.”

“But not the way you mean.”

“Huh?”

“He’s not losing his mind. He’s losing control to…something else.”

As we listened to Delacroix weep, Bobby said, “You mean losing control to…?”

“Yeah.”

“To whatever was fluttering.”

“Yeah.”

Delacroix cried out with sudden pain, as if he’d been stabbed.

The tortured cry was followed by an astonishing spell of violent cursing: every obscenity I had ever heard or read, plus others that either weren’t part of my education or were invented by Delacroix, a vile torrent of rapid-fire vulgarities and blasphemies. This stream of raw filth was venomously ejected, snarled and shouted with a fury so blazing that I felt seared even when exposed to only the recording of it.

Evidently, Delacroix’s vocal outburst was accompanied by erratic driving. His cursing was punctuated by the blaring horns of passing cars and trucks.

The cursing sputtered to a stop. The last of the horns faded. For a while Delacroix’s raggedly drawn breaths were the loudest sounds on the tape. Then:

He drove in silence for a minute or so and then began to murmur to himself in that cryptic language.

Bobby said, “Who’s Kevin?”

“His brother? Earlier, he referred to him as ‘big brother.’ I think Kevin might be a reporter somewhere.”

Still speaking what was gibberish to us, Delacroix shut off the recorder. I was afraid this was the last piece of an incomplete testament, but then he returned.

“Translation capsule,” Bobby said.

“The egg room,” I guessed.

He switched off the recorder. Only four entries remained in his testament, and each was spoken in a more confused, fearful voice. I sensed that these were Delacroix’s few fitful moments of coherence.

Followed by:

Then, with decreasing coherence:

Finally:

The last words on the tape were not in English.

I raised the bottle of Corona to my mouth and discovered that I had already emptied it.

Bobby said, “So this place with the red sky, the black trees — is it your mom’s future, bro?”

“Sideways, Delacroix said.”

“But what does that mean?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did they know?”

“Doesn’t sound like they did,” I said, pressing the rewind button on the remote.

“I’m having some quashingly funky thoughts.”

“The cocoons,” I guessed.

“Whatever spun the cocoons — did they come out of Delacroix?”

“Or through him, like he said. Like he was a doorway.”

“Whatever that means. And either way, does it matter? Out of or through, it’s the same to us.”

“I think if his body hadn’t been there, the cocoons wouldn’t be there, either,” I said.

“Gotta get some angry villagers together and march up to the castle with torches,” he said, his tone of voice more serious than the words he had chosen to express himself.

As the tape rewound and clicked to a stop, I said, “Should we take the responsibility on this one? We don’t know enough. Maybe we should tell someone about the cocoons.”

“You mean like authority types?”

“Like.”

“You know what they’ll do?”

“Screw up,” I said. “But at least it won’t be us screwing up.”

“They won’t burn’em all. They’ll want samples for study.”

“I’m sure they’ll take precautions.”

Bobby laughed.

I laughed, too, with as much bitterness as amusement. “Okay, sign me up for the march on the castle. But Orson and the kids come first. Because once we light that fire, we won’t be as free to move around Wyvern.”

I inserted a blank cassette into the second deck.

Bobby said, “Making a dupe?”

“Can’t hurt.” When the machines started working, I turned to him. “Something you said earlier.”

“You expect me to remember all the crap I say?”

“In that bungalow kitchen, with Delacroix’s body.”

“I can smell it vividly.”

“You heard something. Looked up at the cocoons.”

“Told you. Must’ve been in my head.”

“Right. But when I asked you what you heard, you said, ‘Me.’ What’d you mean by that?”

Bobby still had some beer. He drained the remaining contents of his bottle. “You were putting the cassette in your pocket. We were ready to leave. I thought I heard somebody say stay.”

“Somebody?”

“Several somebodies. Voices. All speaking at once, all saying stay, stay, stay.”

“Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs.”

“So you’re studying to be a jock at KBAY. The thing is…then I realized the voices were all my voice.”

“All your voice?”

“Hard to explain, bro.”

“Evidently.”

“For eight, ten seconds I could hear them. But even later…I felt they were still talking, just at lower volume.”

“Subliminal?”

“Maybe. Something way creepy.”

“Voices in your head.”

“Well, they weren’t telling me to sacrifice a virgin to Satan or assassinate the pope.”

“Just stay, stay, stay,” I said. “Like a thought loop.”

“No, these were like real voices on a radio. At first I thought they were coming…from somewhere in the bungalow.”

“You panned your flashlight over the ceiling,” I reminded him. “The cocoons.”

The faint glow from the audio equipment was reflected in his eyes. He didn’t look away from me, but he didn’t say anything.

I took a deep breath. “Because I’ve been wondering. After I called you from Dead Town, I started to feel vulnerable out in the open. So before I called Sasha, I decide to go into a bungalow, where I wouldn’t be so exposed.”

“Out of all those houses, why did you pick that one? With Delacroix’s body in the kitchen. With the cocoons.”

“That’s what I’ve been wondering,” I said.

“You hear voices, too? Saying, Come in, Chris, come in, sit down, come in, be neighborly, we’ll be hatching soon, come in, join the fun.”

“No voices,” I said. “At least not any I was aware of. But maybe it wasn’t by chance I chose that house. Maybe I was drawn to that place instead of the one next door.”

“Psychic hoodoo?”

“Like the songs that sea nymphs sing to lure unwary sailors to destruction.”

“These aren’t sea nymphs. These are bugs in cocoons.”

“We don’t know they’re bugs,” I said.

“I’m way sure they aren’t puppy dogs.”

“I think maybe we got out of that bungalow just in time.”

After a silence, he said, “It’s crap like this that takes all the fun out of the end of the world.”

“Yeah, I’m starting to feel like a piece of chum in a school of hammerheads.”

The tape was duped. I took the copy to the composition table and, picking up a felt-tip pen, said, “What’s a good neo-Buffett song title?”

“Neo-Buffett?”

“It’s what Sasha’s writing these days. Jimmy Buffett. Tropical bounce, parrothead worldview, fun in the sun — but with a darker edge, a concession to reality.”

“‘Tequila Kidneys,’” he suggested.

“Good enough.”

I printed that title on the label and inserted the cassette nto an empty slot in the rack where Sasha stored her compoitions. There were scores of cassettes that looked just like it.

“Bro,” Bobby said, “if it ever comes to that, you would low my head off, wouldn’t you?”

“Anytime.”

“Wait for me to ask.”

“Sure. And you me?”

“Ask, and you’re dead.”

“The only fluttering I feel is in my stomach,” I said.

“I figure that’s normal right now.”

I heard a hard snap and a series of clicks, followed by the same sounds again — then the unmistakable creak of the back door opening.

Bobby blinked at me. “Sasha?”

I went into the candlelit kitchen, saw Manuel Ramirez in his uniform, and knew the sounds I’d heard had been from a police lock-release gun. He was standing at the kitchen table, staring down at my 9-millimeter Glock, to which he had gone directly, in spite of the dim light. I had put the pistol on the table when Bobby’s news about Wendy Dulcinea’s kidnapping had left me shaky.

“That door was locked,” I said to Manuel, as Bobby entered the kitchen behind me.

“Yeah,” Manuel said. He indicated the Glock. “You buy this legally?”

“My dad did.”

“Your dad taught poetry.”

“It’s a dangerous profession.”

“Where’d he buy this?” Manuel asked, picking up the pistol.

“Thor’s Gun Shop.”

“You have a receipt?”

“I’ll get it.”

“Never mind.”

The door between the kitchen and the downstairs hall swung inward. Frank Feeney, one of Manuel’s deputies, hesitated on the threshold. For an instant, in his eyes, I thought I saw a veil of yellow light billow like curtains at a pair of windows, but it was gone before I could be sure that it had been real. “Found a shotgun and a.38 in Halloway’s Jeep,” Feeney said.

“You boys belong to a right-wing militia or something?” Manuel asked.

“We’re going to sign up for a poetry class,” Bobby said. “You have a search warrant?”

“Tear a paper towel off that roll,” the chief said. “I’ll write one out for you.”

Behind Feeney, at the far end of the hall, in the foyer, backlit by the stained-glass windows, was a second deputy. I couldn’t see him well enough to know who he was.

“How’d you get in here?” I asked.

Manuel stared at me long enough to remind me that he was not a friend of mine anymore.

“What’s going on?” I demanded.

“A massive violation of your civil rights,” Manuel said, and his smile had all the warmth of a stiletto wound in the belly of a corpse.

19

Frank Feeney had a serpent’s face, one without fangs but with no need of fangs because he exuded poison from every pore. His eyes had the fixed, cold focus of a snake’s eyes, and his mouth was a slit from which a forked tongue could have flicked without causing a start of surprise even in a stranger who’d just met him. Before the mess at Wyvern, Feeney had been the rotten apple on the police force, and he was still sufficiently toxic to cast a thousand Snow Whites into comas with a glance.

“You want us to search the place for more weapons, Chief?” he asked Manuel.

“Yeah. But don’t trash it too much. Mr. Snow, here, lost his father a month ago. He’s an orphan now. Let’s show him some pity.”

Smiling as if he had just spied a tender mouse or a bird’s egg that would satisfy his reptilian hunger, Feeney turned and swaggered down the hallway toward the other deputy.

“We’ll be confiscating all firearms,” Manuel told me.

“These are legal weapons. They weren’t used in the commission of any crime. You don’t have any right to seize them,” I protested. “I know my Second Amendment rights.”

To Bobby, Manuel said, “You think I’m out of line, too?”

“You can do what you want,” Bobby said.

“Your boardhead buddy here is smarter than he looks,” Manuel told me.

Testing Manuel’s self-control, trying to determine if there were any limits to the lawlessness in which the police were willing to engage, Bobby said, “An ugly, psychotic asshole with a badge can always do what he wants.”

“Exactly,” Manuel said.

Manuel Ramirez — neither ugly nor psychotic — is three inches shorter, thirty pounds heavier, twelve years older, and noticeably more Hispanic than I am; he likes country music, while I’m born for rock-’n’-roll; he speaks Spanish, Italian, and English, while I’m limited strictly to English and a few comforting mottoes in Latin; he’s full of political opinions, while I find politics boring and sleazy; he’s a great cook, but the only thing I can do well with food is eat it. In spite of all these differences and many others, we once shared a love of people and a love of life that made us friends.

For years he had worked the graveyard shift, the top cop of the night, but since Chief Lewis Stevenson died one month ago, Manuel had been head of the department. In the night world where I had met him and become his friend, he was once a bright presence, a good cop and a good man. Things change, especially here in the new Moonlight Bay, and although he now works the day, he has given his heart to darkness and is not the person I once knew.

“Anyone else here?” Manuel asked.

“No.”

I heard Feeney and the other deputy talking in the foyer — and then footsteps on the stairs.

“Got your message,” Manuel told me. “The license number.”

I nodded.

“Sasha Goodall was at Lilly Wing’s house last night.”

“Maybe it was a Tupperware party,” I said.

Breaking the magazine out of the Glock, Manuel said, “You two showed up just before dawn. You parked behind the garage and came in the back way.”

“We needed some Tupperware,” Bobby said.

“Where were you all night?”

“Studying Tupperware catalogs,” I said.

“You disappoint me, Chris.”

“You think I’m more the Rubbermaid type?”

Manuel said, “I never knew you to be a smartass.”

“I’m a man of countless facets.”

A subdued response to his questioning would be interpreted as fear, and any show of fear would invite harsher treatment. We both knew that the perverse martial law in force during this emergency had never been legally declared, and though it was unlikely that any authority would ever hold Manuel or his men accountable for high crimes or misdemeanors, he couldn’t be certain there would be no consequences for his illegal acts. Besides, he’d once been a by-the-book lawman, and beneath all his self-justification, he still had a conscience. Wiseass remarks were my way — and Bobby’s way — of reminding Manuel that we knew as well as he did that his authority was now mostly illegitimate and that pushed too hard, we would resist it.

“Don’t I disappoint you, too?” Bobby asked.

“I’ve always known what you are,” Manuel said, dropping the pistol magazine into one of his pockets.

“Likewise. You should change brands of face makeup. Shouldn’t he change brands of makeup, Chris?”

“Something that covers better,” I said.

“Yeah,” Bobby said to Manuel, “I can still see the three sixes on your forehead.”

Without responding, Manuel tucked my Glock under his belt.

“Did you check out the license number?” I asked him.

“Useless. The Suburban was stolen earlier in the evening. We found it abandoned this afternoon, near the marina.”

“Any leads?”

“None of this is your business. I’ve got two things to say to you, Chris. Two reasons I’m here. Stay out of this.”

“Is that number one?”

“What?”

“Is that number one of the two? Or is that bonus advice?”

“Two things we can remember,” Bobby said. “But if there’s a lot of bonus advice, we’ll have to take notes.”

“Stay out of this,” Manuel repeated, speaking to me and ignoring Bobby. There was no unnatural luminosity in his eyes, but the hard edge in his voice was as chilling as animal eyeshine. “You’ve used up all the get-out-of-jail-free cards you had any right to expect from me. I mean it, Chris.”

A crash came from upstairs. A heavy piece of furniture had been tipped over.

I started toward the hall door.

Manuel stopped me by drawing his billy club and slamming it hard against the table. The rap was as loud as a gunshot. He said, “You heard me tell Frank not to trash the place too much. Just relax.”

“There aren’t any more guns,” I said angrily.

“Poetry lover like you might have a whole arsenal. For public safety, we have to be sure.”

Bobby was leaning against the counter near the cooktop, arms crossed on his chest. He appeared to be entirely resigned to our powerlessness, willing to ride out this episode, so totally chilled that he might as well have had lumps of coal for eyes and a carrot for a nose. This pose no doubt deceived Manuel, but I knew Bobby so well that I could see he was like a dry-ice bomb about to achieve blast pressure. The drawer immediately to his right contained a set of knives, and I was sure that he had chosen his position with the cutlery in mind.

We couldn’t win a fight here, now, and the important thing was to remain free to find Orson and the missing kids.

When the sound of shattering glass came from upstairs, I ignored it, reined in my anger, and said tightly to Manuel, “Lilly lost her husband. Now, maybe, her only child. Doesn’t that reach you? You of all people?”

“I’m sorry for her.”

“That’s all?”

“If I could bring her boy back, I would.”

His choice of words chilled me. “That sounds like he’s already dead — or somewhere you can’t go to get him.”

With none of the compassion that once had been the essence of Manuel, he said, “I told you — stay out of it.”

Sixteen years ago, Manuel’s wife, Carmelita, died giving birth to their second child. She had been only twenty-four. Manuel, who never remarried, raised a daughter and son with much love and wisdom. His boy, Toby, has Down’s syndrome. As much as anyone and more than some people, Manuel knows suffering; he understands what it means to live with hard responsibilities and limitations. Nevertheless, though I searched his eyes, I couldn’t see the compassion that had made him a first-rate father and policeman.

“What about the Stuart twins?” I asked.

His round face, designed more for laughter than for anger, usually a summer face, was now full of winter and as hard as ice.

I said, “What about Wendy Dulcinea?”

The extent of my knowledge angered him.

His voice remained soft, but he tapped the end of the billy club against his right palm: “You listen to me, Chris. Those of us who know what’s happened — we either swallow it or we choke on it. So just relax and swallow it. Because if you choke on it, then no one is going to be there to apply the Heimlich maneuver. You understand?”

“Sure. Hey, I’m a bright guy. I understand. That was a death threat.”

“Nicely delivered,” Bobby noted. “Creative, oblique, no jarring histrionics — although the bit of business with the club is a cliché. Psychotic-Gestapo-torturer shtick from a hundred old movies. You’ll be a more credible fascist without it.”

“Screw you.”

Bobby smiled. “I know you dream about it.”

Manuel appeared to be one more exchange away from wading into Bobby with the club.

Stepping in front of Bobby so that the two of them wouldn’t be face-to-face, and hoping miraculously to raise guilt from Manuel’s graveyard conscience, I said, “If I try to go public, try to mess where I’m not supposed to mess, who puts the bullet in the back of my head, Manuel? You?”

A look of genuine hurt passed across his features, but it only briefly softened his expression. “I couldn’t.”

“Very broly of you.” Broly is surfer lingo for brotherly. “I’ll be so much less dead if it’s one of your deputies who pulls the trigger instead of you.”

“This isn’t easy for either of us.”

“Seems easier for you than me.”

“You’ve been protected because of who your mother was, what she achieved. And because you were…once a friend of mine. But don’t push your luck, Chris.”

“Four kids snatched in twelve hours, Manuel. Is that the going exchange rate? Four other kids for one Toby?”

Admittedly, I was cruel to accuse him of sacrificing the lives of other children for his son, but there was truth in this cruelty.

His face darkened like settled coals, and in his eyes was the livid fire of hatred. “Yeah. I have a son that I’m responsible for. And a daughter. My mother. A family I’m responsible for. It’s not as easy for me as it is for a smartass loner like you.”

I was sickened that, once friends, we had come to this.

The entire police department of Moonlight Bay had been co-opted by those higher authorities responsible for concealing the terrors spawned at Wyvern. The cops’ reasons for cooperating were numerous: fear foremost; misguided patriotism; wads of hundred-dollar bills in prodigious quantities that only black-budget projects can provide. Furthermore, they had been impressed into the search for the troop of rhesuses and human subjects that escaped the lab more than two years ago, and on that night of violence, most had been bitten, clawed, or otherwise infected; they were in danger of becoming, so they agreed to be participants in the conspiracy, with the hope of being first in line for treatment if a cure for the retrovirus was discovered.

Manuel couldn’t be bought with mere money. His patriotism was not of the misguided variety. Sufficient fear can bring any man to heel, but it wasn’t fear that had corrupted Manuel.

The research at Wyvern had led to catastrophe, but also to positive discoveries. Evidently, some experiments have resulted in genetic treatments that are promising.

Manuel sold his soul for the hope that one of those experimental treatments would transform Toby. And I suspect he dreams of his son achieving intellectual and physical transformation.

The intellectual growth might well be possible. We know that some of the Wyvern work included intelligence-enhancement research and that there were startling successes, as witness Orson.

“How’s Toby doing?” I asked.

As I spoke, I heard a stealthy but telltale sound behind me. A drawer sliding open. The knife drawer.

When I had interposed myself between Bobby and Manuel, I’d meant only to defuse the escalating tension between them, not to provide cover for Bobby to arm himself. I wanted to tell him to chill out, but I didn’t know how to do so without alerting Manuel.

Besides, there are occasions when Bobby’s instincts are better than mine. If he thought this situation was inevitably leading to violence, perhaps he was right.

Apparently, my question about Toby had masked the sound of the drawer, because Manuel gave no indication of having heard it.

A fierce pride, both touching and terrifying, couldn’t drive out his anger; the two emotions were darkly complementary. “He’s reading. Better. Faster. More comprehension. Doing better at math. And what’s wrong with that? Is that a crime?”

I shook my head.

Although some people make fun of Toby’s appearance or shun him, he’s the image of gentleness. With his thick neck, rounded shoulders, short arms, and stocky legs, he reminds me of the good gnomes from the adventure stories that delighted me in childhood. His sloped and heavy brow, low-set ears, and soft features, and the inner epicanthic folds of his eyes, give him a dreamy aspect that matches his sweet and gentle personality.

In spite of his burdens, Toby has always been happy and content. I worry that the Wyvern crowd will raise his intelligence far enough to leave him dissatisfied with his life — but not far enough to give him an average IQ. If they steal his innocence and curse him with a self-awareness that leaves him anguished, trapping him between livable identities, they will destroy him.

I know all about unfulfillable longing, the fruitless yearning to be what one can never be.

And although I find it difficult to believe that Toby could be genetically engineered into a radically new appearance, I fear that if any such attempt were made, he might become something he wouldn’t be able to bear seeing in the mirror. Those who don’t perceive beauty in the face of a Down’s-syndrome person are blind to all beauty or are so fearful of difference that they must at once turn away from every encounter with it. In every face — in even the plainest and the most unfortunate countenances — there is some precious aspect of the divine image of which we are a reflection, and if you look with an open heart, you can see an awesome beauty, a glimpse of something so radiant that it gives you joy. But will this radiance remain in Toby if he is redesigned by Wyvern scientists, if a radical physical transformation is attempted?

“He’s got a future now,” Manuel said.

“Don’t throw your boy away,” I pleaded.

“I’m lifting him up.”

“He won’t be your boy anymore.”

“He’ll finally be what he was meant to be.”

“He already was what he was meant to be.”

“You don’t know the pain,” Manuel said bitterly.

He was speaking about his own pain, not Toby’s. Toby is at peace with the world. Or was.

I said, “You always loved him for what he was.”

His voice was sharp and tremulous. “In spite of what he was.”

“That’s not fair to yourself. I know how you’ve felt about him all these years. You’ve treasured him.”

“You don’t know shit about how I felt, not shit,” he said, and he poked the air in front of me with the club, as if driving home his point.

With sorrow as heavy as a rock on my chest, I said, “If that’s true, if I didn’t understand how you felt about Toby, then I didn’t know you at all.”

“Maybe you didn’t,” he said. “Or maybe you can’t bear to think Toby could end up with a more normal life than yours. We all like to have someone to look down on — don’t we, Chris?”

My heart contracted as if around a thorn. The ferocity of his anger revealed such profound terror and pain that I couldn’t bear to respond to this mean-spirited accusation. We had been friends too long for me to hate him, and I was overcome only by pity.

He was mad with hope. In reasonable measure, hope sustains us. In great excess, it distorts perceptions, dulls the mind, corrupts the heart to no less an extent than does heroin.

I don’t believe I’ve misunderstood Manuel all these years. High on hope, he has forgotten what he loved and, instead, loves the ideal more than the reality, which is the cause of all the misery that the human species creates for itself.

Descending footsteps sounded on the stairs. I looked toward the hall as Feeney and the other deputy appeared in the foyer. Feeney went into the living room, the other man into the study, where they switched on the lights and dialed up the rheostats.

“What’s the second thing you came here to tell me?” I asked Manuel.

“They’re going to get control of this.”

“Of what?”

“This plague.”

“With what?” Bobby asked. “A bottle of Lysol?”

“Some people are immune.”

“Not everyone,” Bobby said as glass shattered in the living room.

Manuel said, “But the immune factor has been isolated. Soon there’ll be a vaccine, and a cure for those already infected.”

I thought of the missing children, but I didn’t mention them. “Some people are still becoming,” I said.

“And we’re learning there’s only so much change they’re able to tolerate.”

I strove to resist the flood of hope that might have swept me away. “Only so much? How much?”

“There’s a threshold…. They become acutely aware of the changes taking place in them. Then they’re overcome by fear. An intolerable fear of themselves. Hatred of themselves. The self-hatred escalates until…they psychologically implode.”

“Psychological implosion? What the hell does that mean?” Then I understood. “Suicide?”

“Beyond suicide. Violent…frenzied self-destruction. We’ve seen…a number of cases. You understand what this means?”

I said, “When they self-destruct, they’re no longer carriers of the retrovirus. The plague is self-limiting.”

Judging by the sound, Frank Feeney was smashing a small table or chair against one of the living-room walls. I guessed that the other deputy was sweeping Sasha’s bottles of vitamins and herbs off the shelves in the study. They were dutifully teaching us a lesson — and respect for the law.

“Most of us will get through this all right,” Manuel said.

But who among us will not? I wondered.

“Animals, too,” I said. “They self-destruct.”

He regarded me with suspicion. “We’re seeing indications. What have you seen?”

I thought of the birds. The veve rats, which had been dead a long time. The pack of coyotes no doubt were nearing the threshold of tolerable change.

“Why’re you telling me this?” I asked.

“So you’ll stay the hell out of the way. Let the right people manage this situation. People who know what they’re doing. People with credentials.”

“The usual big brains,” Bobby said.

Manuel poked the club in our direction. “You may think you’re heroes, but you’ll just be getting in the way.”

“I’m no hero,” I assured him.

Bobby said, “Me, hell, I’m just a surf-smacked, sun-fried, beer-whacked boardhead.”

Manuel said, “There’s too much at stake here for us to allow anyone to have an agenda of his own.”

“What about the troop?” I asked. “The monkeys haven’t self-destructed.”

“They’re different. They were engineered in the lab, and they are what they are. They are what they were made to be, what they were born to be. They can still become if they’re vulnerable to the mutated virus, but maybe they aren’t susceptible. After this is all over, once people are vaccinated and this outbreak self-limits, we’ll track them down and wipe them out.”

“Not much luck at that so far,” I reminded him.

“We’ve been distracted by the bigger problem.”

“Yeah,” Bobby said. “Destroying the world is ass-busting work.”

Ignoring him, Manuel said, “Once we get the rest of this cleaned up, then the troop…their days are numbered.”

Lights flared in the adjacent dining room, where Feeney had proceeded from the living room, and I moved away from the brightness that fell through the connecting doorway.

The second deputy appeared at the hallway door, and he was not anyone I had seen before. I thought I knew all the police in town, but perhaps the financiers behind the Wyvern wizards had recently provided the funding for a larger force.

“Found some boxes of ammo,” the new guy said. “No weapons.”

Manuel called to Frank, who appeared in the dining-room doorway and said, “Chief?”

“We’re done here,” Manuel said.

Feeney looked disappointed, but the new man turned away from the kitchen and immediately headed along the hall toward the front of the house.

With startling speed, Manuel lunged toward Bobby, swinging the baton at his head. Equally quick, Bobby ducked. The club carved the air where Bobby had been, and cracked loudly against the side of the refrigerator.

Bobby came up under the baton, right in Manuel’s face, and I thought he was embracing him, which was weird, but then I saw the gleam of the butcher knife, the point against Manuel’s throat.

The new deputy had raced back to the kitchen, and both he and Frank Feeney had drawn their revolvers, holding the weapons in two-hand grips.

“Back off,” Manuel told his deputies.

He backed off, too, easing away from the point of the knife.

For a crazy moment I thought Bobby was going to shove the huge blade into him, though I know Bobby better than that.

Remaining wary, the deputies retreated a step or two, and they relaxed their arms from a ready-fire position, although neither man holstered his weapon.

The spill of light through the dining-room door revealed more of Manuel’s face than I cared to see. It had been torn by anger and then knitted together by more anger, so the stitches were too tight, pulling his features into strange arrangements, both eyes bulging, but the left eye more than the right, nostrils flaring, his mouth a straight slash on the left but curving into a sneer on the right, like a portrait by Picasso in a crappy mood, all chopped into cubes, geometric slabs that didn’t quite fit together. And his skin was no longer a warm brown but the color of a ham that had been left far too long in the smokehouse, muddy red with settled blood and too much hickory smoke, dark and marbled.

Manuel seethed with a hatred so intense that it couldn’t have been engendered solely by Bobby’s smartass remarks. This hatred was aimed at me, too, but Manuel couldn’t bring himself to strike me, not after so many years of friendship, so he wanted to hurt Bobby because that would hurt me. Maybe some of his wrath was directed at himself, because he had flushed away his principles, and maybe we were seeing sixteen years of pent-up anger at God for Carmelita’s dying in child-birth and for Toby’s being born with Down’s syndrome, and I think-feel-know that some of this was fury he could not — would not, dared not — admit feeling toward Toby, dear Toby, whom he loved desperately but who had so severely limited his life. After all, there’s a reason they say that love is a two-edged sword, rather than a two-edged Wiffle bat or a two-edged Fudgsicle, because love is sharp, it pierces, and love is a needle that sews shut the holes in our hearts, that mends our souls, but it can also cut, cut deep, wound, kill.

Manuel was struggling to regain control of himself, aware that we were all watching him, that he was a spectacle; but he was losing the struggle. The side of the refrigerator was scarred where he had hammered the billy club into it, but an assault on an appliance, even a major appliance, didn’t provide the satisfaction he needed, didn’t relieve the pressure still building in him. A couple minutes earlier, I had thought of Bobby as a dry-ice bomb at the critical-evaporation point, but now it was Manuel who exploded, not at Bobby or at me, but at the glass panels in the four doors of a display cabinet, bashing each pane with the baton, and then he tore open one of the doors and, with the stick, swept out the Royal Worcester china, the Evesham set of which my mother had been so fond. Saucers, cups, bread plates, salad plates, a gravy boat, a butter dish, a sugar-and-cream set crashed onto the countertop and from there to the floor, porcelain shrapnel pinging off the dishwasher, singing off chair legs and cabinetry. The microwave oven was next to the display cabinet, and he hammered the club into it, once, twice, three times, four times, but the view window was evidently made of Plexiglas or something, because it didn’t shatter, though the club switched on the oven and programmed the timer, and if we’d had the foresight to put a bag of Orville Redenbacher’s finest in the microwave earlier, we could have enjoyed popcorn by the time Manuel had worked off his rage. He plucked a steel teapot off the stove and pitched it across the room, grabbed the toaster and threw it to the floor even as the teapot was still bouncing around — tonk, tonk, tonk — with the manic energy of a battered icon in a video game. He kicked the toaster, and it tumbled across the floor, squeaking as though it were a terrified little dog, trailing its cord like a tail, and then he was done.

He stood in the center of the kitchen, shoulders slumped, head thrust forward, eyelids as heavy as if he had just woken from a deep sleep, mouth slack, breathing heavily. He looked around as though slightly confused, as though he were a bull wondering where the hell that infuriating red cape had gone.

Throughout Manuel’s destructive frenzy, I expected to see the demonic yellow light shimmer through his eyes, but I never caught a glimpse of it. Now there was smoldering anger in his gaze, and confusion, and a wrenching sadness, but if he was becoming something less than human, he wasn’t far enough devolved to exhibit eyeshine.

The nameless deputy watched cautiously through eyes as dark as the windows in an abandoned house, but Frank Feeney’s eyes were brighter than those of Halloween pumpkins, full of fiery menace. Although this uncanny glimmer was not constant, coming and going and coming again, the savagery that it betokened burned as steady as a watch fire. Feeney was backlit by the dining-room chandelier, and with his face in shadows, his eyes at times glowed as if the light from the next room were passing straight through his skull and radiating from his sockets.

I had been afraid that Manuel’s violence would trigger outbursts in the deputies, that all three men were becoming, and that a rapidly accelerating dementia would seize them, whereupon Bobby and I would be surrounded by the high-biotech equivalent of a pack of werewolves in the grip of bloodlust. Because we had foolishly neglected to acquire necklaces of wolfsbane or silver bullets, we would be forced to defend ourselves with my mother’s tarnished sterling tea service, which would have to be unpacked from a box in the pantry and perhaps even polished with Wright’s silver cream and a soft cloth to be sufficiently lethal.

Now it appeared that Feeney was the only threat, but a werewolf with a loaded revolver is a lycanthrope of a different caliber, and one like him could be as deadly as an entire pack. He was shaking, glistening with sweat, inhaling with a coarse rasp, exhaling with a thin and eager whine of need. In his excitement, he had bitten his lip, and his teeth and chin were red with his own blood. He held the gun with both hands, aiming it at the floor, while his mad eyes seemed to be looking for a target, his attention flicking from Manuel to me, to the second deputy, to Bobby, to me, to Manuel again, and if Feeney decided that we were all targets, he might be able to kill the four of us even as he was cut down by his fellow officers’ return fire.

I realized that Manuel was talking to Feeney and to the other deputy. The pounding of my heart had temporarily deafened me. His voiced faded in: “…we’re done here, we’re finished, finished with these bastards, come on, Frank, Harry, come on, that’s it, come on, these scumbags aren’t worth it, let’s go, back to work, out of here, come on.”

Manuel’s voice seemed to soothe Feeney, like the rhythmic lines of a prayer, a litany in which his responses were recited silently rather than spoken. The balefire continued to pass in and out of his eyes, though it was absent more than not and dimmer than it had been. He broke his two-hand grip on the revolver, holding it in his right hand, and then finally holstered it. Blinking in surprise, he tasted blood, blotted his lips on his hand, and stared uncomprehendingly at the red smear across his palm.

Harry, the second deputy, to whom Manuel had at last given a name, was already to the foyer by the time Frank Feeney stepped out of the kitchen and entered the hall. Manuel followed Feeney, and I found myself following Manuel, though at a distance.

They had lost their Gestapo aura. They looked weak and weary, like three boys who had been playing cops with great exuberance but were now tuckered out, dragging their butts home to have some hot chocolate and take a nap, and then maybe put on new costumes and play pirates. They seemed to be as lost as the kidnapped children.

In the foyer, as Frank Feeney followed Harry X onto the front porch, I said to Manuel, “You see it, don’t you?”

At the door he stopped and turned to face me, but he didn’t respond. He was still angry, but he also looked stricken. By the second, his rage swam deeper, and his eyes were pools of sorrow.

With light entering the foyer from outside, from the study, and from the living room, I felt more vulnerable here than under the gun and the yellow stare of Feeney in the kitchen, but there was something I needed to say to Manuel.

“Feeney,” I said, though Feeney wasn’t the unfinished business between us. “You see that he’s becoming? You aren’t in denial about that, are you?”

“There’s a cure. We’ll have it soon.”

“He’s on the edge. What if you don’t have a cure soon enough?”

“Then we’ll deal with him.” He realized he was still holding the billy club. He slipped it through a loop on his belt. “Frank is one of ours. We’ll give him peace in our own way.”

“He could have killed me. Me, Bobby, you, all of us.”

“Stay out of this, Snow. I won’t tell you again.”

Snow. Not Chris anymore. Trashing a guy’s house is dotting the final i and crossing the final t in finito.

“Maybe this kidnapper is that guy on the news,” I said.

“What guy?”

“Snatches kids. Three, four, five little kids. Burns them all at once.”

“That’s not what’s happening here.”

“How can you be sure?”

“This is Moonlight Bay.”

“Not all bad guys are bad just because they’re becoming.”

He glared at me, taking my observation personally.

I got to the unfinished business: “Toby’s a great kid. I love him. I worry about what’s happening. There’s such a terrible risk. But in the end, Manuel, I hope everything turns out with him like you think it will. I really do. More than anything.”

He hesitated, but then said, “Stay out of this. I mean it, Snow.”

For a moment I watched him walk away from my vandalized house into a world that was even more broken than my mother’s china. There were two patrol cars at the curb, and he got into one of them.

“Come back anytime,” I said, as if he could hear me. “I’ve still got drinking glasses you can smash, serving dishes. We’ll have a couple beers, you can bash the hell out of the TV, or take an ax to the better pieces of furniture, pee on the carpet if you want. I’ll make a cheese dip, it’ll be fun, it’ll be festive.”

As sullen and gray and dark as the afternoon was, it nonetheless stung my eyes. I closed the door.

When a loved one dies — or as in this case is lost to me for another reason — I invariably make a joke of the pain. Even on the night that my much-loved father succumbed to cancer, I was doing mental stand-up riffs about death, coffins, and the ravages of disease. If I drink too deeply of grief, I’ll find myself in the cups of despair. From despair, I’ll sink into self-pity so deep that I’ll drown. Self-pity will encourage too much brooding about whom I’ve lost, what I’ve lost, the limitations with which I must always live, the restrictions of my strange nightbound existence…and finally I’ll risk becoming the freak that childhood bullies called me. It strikes me as blasphemous not to embrace life, but to embrace it in dark times, I have to find the beauty concealed in the tragic, beauty which in fact is always there, and which for me is discovered through humor. You may think me shallow or even callous for seeking the laughter in loss, the fun in funerals, but we can honor the dead with laughter and love, which is how we honored them in life. God must have meant for us to laugh through our pain, because He stirred an enormous measure of absurdity into the universe when He mixed the batter of creation. I’ll admit to being hopeless in many respects, but as long as I have laughter, I’m not without hope.

I quickly scanned the study to see what damage had been done, switched off the light, and then followed the same routine at the entrance to the living room. They had caused less destruction than Beelzebub on a two-day vacation from Hell, but more than the average poltergeist.

Bobby had already turned off the lights in the dining room. By candlelight, he was addressing the mess in the kitchen, sweeping shattered china into a dustpan and emptying the pan into a large garbage bag.

“You’re very domestic,” I said, assisting with the cleanup.

“I think I was a housekeeper to royalty in a previous life.”

“What royalty?”

“Czar Nicholas of Russia.”

“That ended badly.”

“Then I was reincarnated as Betty Grable.”

“The movie star?”

“The one and only, dude.”

“I loved you in Mother Wore Tights.”

“Gracias. But it’s way good to be male again.”

Tying shut the first garbage bag as Bobby opened another, I said, “I should be pissed off.”

“Why? Because I’ve had all these fabulous lives, while you’ve just been you?”

“He comes here to kick my ass because he really wants to kick his own.”

“He’d have to be a contortionist.”

“I hate to say this, but he’s a moral contortionist.”

“Dude, when you’re angry, you sure do get foul-mouthed.”

“He knows he’s taking an unconscionable risk with Toby, and it’s eating him alive, even if he won’t admit it.”

Bobby sighed. “I feel for Manuel. I do. But the dude scares me more than Feeney.”

“Feeney’s becoming,” I said.

“No shit. But Manuel scares me because he’s become what he’s become without becoming. You know?”

“I know.”

“You think it’s true — about the vaccine?” Bobby asked, returning the battered toaster to the counter.

“Yeah. But will it work the way they think it will?”

“Nothing else did.”

“We know the other part is true,” I said. “The psychological implosion.”

“The birds.”

“Maybe the coyotes.”

“I’d feel totally super-mellow about all this,” Bobby said, returning the butcher knife to the cutlery drawer, “if I didn’t know your mom’s bug is only part of the problem.”

“Mystery Train,” I said, remembering the thing or things inside Hodgson’s suit, Delacroix’s body, the testament on the audiotape, and the cocoons.

The doorbell rang, and Bobby said, “Tell them if they want to come in here and bust things up, we have new rules. A hundred-dollar cover charge, and everyone wears neckties.”

I went into the foyer and peered through one of the clearer panes in a stained-glass sidelight.

The figure at the door was so big that you might have thought one of the oak trees had pulled up its roots, climbed the steps, and rung the bell to request a hundred pounds of fertilizer.

I opened the door and stepped back from the light to let our visitor enter.

Roosevelt Frost is tall, muscular, black, and dignified enough to make the carved faces on Mount Rushmore look like the busts of sitcom stars. Entering with Mungojerrie, a pale gray cat, nestled in the crook of his left arm, he nudged the door shut behind them.

In a voice remarkable for its deep tone, its musicality, and its gentleness, he said, “Good afternoon, son.”

“Thank you for coming, sir.”

“You’ve gotten yourself in trouble again.”

“That’s always a good bet with me.”

“Lots of death ahead,” he said solemnly.

“Sir?”

“That’s what the cat says.”

I looked at Mungojerrie. Draped comfortably over Roosevelt’s huge arm, he appeared to be boneless. The cat was so limp that he might have been a stole or a muffler if Roosevelt had been a man given to wearing stoles and mufflers, except that his green feline eyes, flecked with gold, were alert, riveting, and filled with an intelligence that was unmistakable and unnerving.

“Lots of death,” Roosevelt repeated.

“Whose?”

“Ours.”

Mungojerrie held my gaze.

Roosevelt said, “Cats know things.”

“Not everything.”

“Cats know,” Roosevelt insisted.

The cat’s eyes seemed to be full of sadness.

20

Roosevelt put Mungojerrie on one of the kitchen chairs so the cat wouldn’t cut his paws on the splinters of broken china that still littered the floor. Although Mungojerrie is a Wyvern escapee, bred in the genetics labs, perhaps as smart as good Orson, certainly as smart as the average contestant on Wheel of Fortune, smarter than the majority of the policy advisers to the White House during most of the past century, he was nevertheless sufficiently catlike to be able to curl up and go instantly to sleep even though this was, by his prediction, doomsday eve and though we were unlikely to be alive by dawn. Cats may know things, as Roosevelt says, but they don’t suffer from hyperactive imaginations or prickly-pear nerves like mine.

As for knowing things, Roosevelt himself knows more than a few. He knows football because he was, in the sixties and seventies, a major gridiron star, whom sportswriters dubbed the Sledgehammer. Now, at sixty-three, he’s a successful businessman who owns a men’s clothing store, a minimall, and half-interest in the Moonlight Bay Inn and Country Club. He also knows a lot about the sea and boats, living aboard the fifty-six-foot Nostromo, in the last berth of the Moonlight Bay marina. And, of course, he can talk to animals better than Dr. Dolittle, which is a handy talent to have here in Edgar Allan Disneyland.

Roosevelt insisted on helping us clear up the remaining mess. Although it seemed peculiar to be doing housework side by side with a national monument and heir of Saint Francis, we gave him the vacuum cleaner.

Mungojerrie woke when the vacuum wailed, raised his head long enough to express displeasure with a quick baring of his fangs, and then appeared to go to sleep again.

My kitchen is large, but it seems small when Roosevelt Frost is in it, regardless of whether he’s vacuuming. He stands six feet four, and the formidable dimensions of his neck, shoulders, chest, back, and arms make it difficult to believe that he was formed in anything as fragile as a womb; he seems to have been carved out of a granite quarry or poured in a foundry, or perhaps built in a truck factory. He looks considerably younger than he is, with only a few gray hairs at his temples. He succeeded big time in football not merely because of his size but because of his brains; at sixty-three he is nearly as strong as he ever was and — I’m guessing — even smarter, because he’s a man who’s always learning.

He also vacuums like a sonofabitch. Together, the three of us soon finished setting the kitchen right.

It would never again be entirely right, I’m afraid, not with only one shelf of Royal Worcester, Evesham pattern, remaining in the display cabinet. The empty shelves were a sad sight. My mother had loved those fine dishes: the soft colors of the hand-painted apples and plums on the coffee cups, the blackberries and pears on the salad plates…. My mother’s favorite things were not my mother — they were merely her things — yet, though we like to believe that memories are as permanent as engravings in steel, even memories of love and great kindness are in fact frighteningly ephemeral in their details, and we remember best those that are linked to places and things; memory embeds in the form and weight and texture of real objects, and there it endures to be brought forth vividly with a touch.

There was a second set of dishes, the everyday stuff, and while Roosevelt set the kitchen table with cups and saucers, I brewed a pot of coffee.

In the refrigerator, Bobby discovered a large bakery box crammed full of the pecan-cinnamon buns that are among my all-time-favorite things. “Carpe crustulorum!” he cried.

Roosevelt said, “What was that?”

I said, “Don’t ask.”

“Seize the pastry,” Bobby translated.

I brought a couple of pillows from the living room and put them on one of the chairs, which allowed Mungojerrie — now awake — to sit high enough to be part of the gathering.

As Roosevelt was breaking off bits of a cinnamon bun and soaking them in the saucer of milk that he had poured for the cat, Sasha came home from whatever business she had been about. Roosevelt calls her daughter, the way he sometimes calls me and Bobby son, which is just his way, though he thinks so highly of Sasha that I suspect he would be pleased to adopt her. I was standing behind him when he lifted her and hugged her; as though she were a little girl, she entirely disappeared in his bearish embrace, except for one sneaker-clad foot, which dangled an inch off the floor.

Sasha brought the chair from her composition table in the dining room, positioning it between my chair and Bobby’s. She fingered Bobby’s sleeve and said, “Bitchin’ shirt.”

“Thanks.”

“I’ve seen Doogie,” Sasha said. “He’s putting together a package of equipment, ordnance. It’s now…just past three o’clock. We’ll be ready to go as soon as it’s dark.”

“Ordnance?” Bobby asked.

“Doogie’s got some really fine tech support.”

“Tech support?”

“We’re going to be prepared for contingencies.”

“Contingencies?” Bobby turned to me. “Bro, are you sleeping with G.I. Jane?”

“Emma Peel,” I corrected. To Sasha-Emma, I said, “We may need some ordnance. Manuel and two deputies were here, confiscated our weapons.”

“Broke some china,” Bobby said.

“Smashed some furniture,” I added.

“Kicked the toaster around,” Bobby said.

“We can count on Doogie,” Sasha said. “Why the toaster?”

Bobby shrugged. “It was small, defenseless, and vulnerable.”

We sat down — four people and one gray cat — to eat, drink, and strategize by candlelight.

“Carpe crustulorum,” Bobby said.

Brandishing her fork, Sasha said, “Carpe furcam.”

Raising his cup as if in a toast, Bobby said, “Carpe coffeum.”

“Conspiracy,” I muttered.

Mungojerrie watched us with keen interest.

Roosevelt studied the cat as the cat studied us, and said, “He thinks you’re strange but amusing.”

“Strange, huh?” Bobby said. “I don’t think it’s a common human habit to chase down mice and eat them.”

Roosevelt Frost was talking to animals long before the Wyvern labs gave us four-legged citizens with perhaps more smarts than the people who created them. As far as I’ve seen, his only eccentric belief is that we can converse with ordinary animals, not just those that have been genetically engineered. He doesn’t claim to have been abducted by extraterrestrials and given a proctological exam, doesn’t prowl the woods in search of Big Foot or Babe the blue ox, isn’t writing a novel channeled to him by the spirit of Truman Capote, and doesn’t wear an aluminum-foil hat to prevent microwave control of his thoughts by the American Grocery Workers Union.

He learned animal communication from a woman named Gloria Chan, in Los Angeles, several years ago, after she facilitated a dialogue between him and his beloved mutt, Sloopy, now deceased. Gloria told Roosevelt things about his daily life and habits that she couldn’t possibly know but with which Sloopy was familiar and which apparently the dog revealed to her.

Roosevelt says that animal communication doesn’t require any special talent, that it isn’t a psychic ability. He claims it’s a sensitivity to other species that we all possess but have repressed; the biggest obstacles to learning the necessary techniques are doubt, cynicism, and preconceived notions about what is possible and what isn’t.

After several months of hard work under Gloria Chan’s tutelage, Roosevelt became adept at understanding the thoughts and concerns of Sloopy and other beasts of hearth and field. He’s willing to teach me, and I intend to give it a shot. Nothing would please me more than gaining a better understanding of Orson; my four-footed brother has heard much from me over the last couple years, but I’ve never heard a word from him. Lessons with Roosevelt will either open a door on wonder — or leave me feeling foolish and gullible. As a human being, I’m intimately familiar with foolishness and gullibility, so I don’t have anything to lose.

Bobby used to mock Roosevelt’s tête-à-têtes with animals, though never to his face, attributing them to head injuries suffered on the football field; but lately he seems to have shoved his skepticism through a mental wood-chipper. Events at Wyvern have taught us many lessons, and one of them, for sure, is that while science can improve the lot of humankind, it doesn’t hold all the answers we need: Life has dimensions that can’t be mapped by biologists, physicists, and mathematicians.

Orson had led me to Roosevelt more than a year ago, drawn by a canine awareness that this was a special man. Some Wyvern cats and God knows what other species of lab escapees have also sought him out and talked his ear off, so to speak. Orson is the exception. He visits Roosevelt but won’t communicate with him. Old Sphinx Dog, Roosevelt calls him, mute mutt, the laconic Labrador.

I believe that my mom brought Orson to me — for whatever reason — after falsifying the lab records to account for him as a dead puppy. Perhaps Orson fears being taken by force back to the lab if anyone realizes that he is one of their successes. Whatever the reason, he more often than not plays his I’m-just-a-good-old-dumb-dog game when he’s around anyone other than Bobby, Sasha, and me. While he doesn’t insult Roosevelt with that deception, Orson remains as taciturn as a turnip, albeit a turnip with a tail.

Now, sitting on a chair, raised on a pair of pillows, daintily eating milk-soaked bits of cinnamon bun, Mungojerrie made no pretense to being an ordinary cat. As we recounted the events of the past twelve hours, his green eyes followed the conversation with interest. When he heard something that surprised him, his eyes widened, and when he was shocked, he either twitched or pulled his head back and cocked it as if to say, Man, have you been guzzling catnip cocktails, or are you just a congenital bullshit machine? Sometimes he grinned, which was usually when Bobby and I had to reveal something stupid that we had said or done; it seemed to me that Mungojerrie grinned way too often. Bobby’s description of what we glimpsed through the faceplate of Hodgson’s bio-secure suit seemed to put the feline off his feed for a few minutes, but he was first and foremost a cat, with a cat’s appetite and curiosity, so before we finished the tale, he had solicited and received from Roosevelt another saucer of milk-soaked crustulorum.

“We’re convinced the missing kids and Orson are somewhere in Wyvern,” I said to Roosevelt Frost, because I still felt weird about directly addressing the cat, which is peculiar, considering that I directly address Orson all the time. “But the place is just too big to search. We need a tracker.”

Bobby said, “Since we don’t own a reconnaissance satellite, don’t know a good Indian scout, and don’t keep a bloodhound hanging in the closet for these emergencies…”

The three of us looked expectantly at Mungojerrie.

The cat met my eyes, then Bobby’s, then Sasha’s. He closed his eyes for a moment, as if pondering our implied request, then finally turned his attention to Roosevelt.

The gentle giant pushed aside his plate and coffee cup, leaned forward, propped his right elbow on the table, rested his chin on his fist, and locked gazes with our whiskered guest.

After a minute, during which I tried unsuccessfully to recall the melody of the movie theme song from That Darn Cat, Roosevelt said, “Mungojerrie wonders if you were listening to what I said when we first arrived.”

“‘Lots of death,’” I quoted.

“Whose?” Sasha asked.

“Ours.”

“Who says?”

I pointed at the cat.

Mungojerrie managed to look like a swami.

Bobby said, “We know there’s danger.”

“He’s not just saying it’s dangerous,” Roosevelt explained. “It’s a…sort of prediction.”

We sat in silence, staring at the cat, who favored us with an expression as inscrutable as that on the cats in Egyptian tomb sculptures, and eventually Sasha said, “You mean Mungojerrie’s clairvoyant?”

“No,” Roosevelt said.

“Then what do you mean?”

Still staring at the cat, who was now gazing solemnly at one of the candles as if reading the future in the sinuous dance of the flame upon the wick, Roosevelt said, “Cats know things.”

Bobby, Sasha, and I looked at one another, but none of us could provide enlightenment.

“What, exactly, do cats know?” Sasha asked.

“Things,” Roosevelt said.

“How?”

“By knowing.”

“What is the sound of one hand clapping?” Bobby asked rhetorically.

The cat twitched its ears and looked at him as if to say, Now you understand.

“This cat’s been reading too much Deepak Chopra,” Bobby said.

Frustration pinched Sasha’s face and voice. “Roosevelt?”

When he shrugged his massive shoulders, I could almost feel the cubic yard of displaced air wafting across the table. “Daughter, this animal-communication business isn’t always like talking on the telephone. Sometimes it is just exactly as clear as that. But then sometimes there are…ambiguities.”

“Well,” Bobby said, “does this ball-bearing mousetrap think we have some chance of finding Orson and the kids, then getting back here alive — any chance at all?”

With his left hand, Roosevelt gently scratched the cat behind the ears and stroked its head. “He says there’s always a chance. Nothing is hopeless.”

“Fifty-fifty chance?” I wondered.

Roosevelt laughed softly. “Mr. Mungojerrie says he isn’t a bookmaker.”

“So,” Bobby said, “the worst that can happen is that we all go back there to Wyvern and we all die, get shredded and processed and packaged as lunchmeat. Seems to me, that’s always been the worst that could happen, so nothing’s changed. I’m up for it.”

“Me too,” said Sasha.

Obviously still speaking for the cat, which purred and leaned into his hand as he petted it, Roosevelt said, “What if these kids and Orson are somewhere we can’t go? What if they’re in The Hole?”

Bobby said, “Rule of thumb: Anyplace called The Hole can’t be a good place.”

“That’s what they call the genetic research facility.”

“They?” I asked.

“The people who work in it. They call it The Hole because…” Roosevelt tilted his head, as if listening to a small quiet voice. “Well, one reason, I guess, is that it’s deep underground.”

I found myself addressing the cat. “Then it’s still functioning out there in Wyvern somewhere, like we’ve suspected, still staffed and operational?”

“Yes,” Roosevelt said, stroking the cat under the chin. “Self-contained…secretly resupplied every six months.”

“Do you know where?” I asked Mungojerrie.

“Yes. He knows. It’s where he’s from, after all,” Roosevelt said, sitting back in his chair. “It’s where he escaped from…that night. But if Orson and the children are in The Hole, there’s no way to get to them or get them out.”

We all brooded in silence.

Mungojerrie raised one forepaw and began to lick it, grooming his fur. He was smart, he knew things, he could track, he was our best hope, but he was also a cat. We were entirely reliant on a comrade who, at any moment, might cough up a hairball. The only reason I didn’t laugh or cry was that I couldn’t do both at once, which was what I felt like doing.

Finally Sasha put the issue behind us: “If we have no chance of getting them out of The Hole, then we’ve just got to hope they’re somewhere else in Wyvern.”

“The big question is still the same,” I said to Roosevelt. “Is Mungojerrie willing to help?”

The cat had met Orson only once, aboard the Nostromo, on the night my father died. They had seemed to like each other. They shared, as well, an origin in the intelligence-enhancement research at Wyvern, and if my mother was in some sense Orson’s mother, because he was a product of her heart and mind, then this cat might feel that she was his lost mother, too, his creator, to whom he was in debt for his life.

I sat with my hands clasped tightly around my empty coffee cup, desperate to believe that Mungojerrie would not let us down, mentally listing reasons why the cat must agree to join our rescue effort, preparing to make the incredible and shameless claim that he was my spiritual brother, Mungojerrie Snow, just as Orson was my brother, that this was a family crisis to which he had a special obligation, and I couldn’t help but remember what Bobby had said about this brave new smart-animal world being like a Donald Duck cartoon that for all its wackiness is nevertheless rife with fearsome physical and moral and spiritual consequences.

When Roosevelt said, “Yes,” I was so feverishly structuring my argument against an expected rejection of our request that I didn’t immediately realize what our friend the animal communicator had communicated.

“Yes, we’ll help,” Roosevelt explained in response to my dumb blinking.

We passed smiles, like a plate of crustulorum, around the table.

Then Sasha cocked her head at Roosevelt and said, “‘We’?”

“You’ll need me along to interpret.”

Bobby said, “The mungo man leads, we follow.”

“It might not be that simple,” Roosevelt said.

Sasha shook her head. “We can’t ask you to do this.”

Taking her hand, patting it, Roosevelt smiled. “Daughter, you aren’t asking. I’m insisting. Orson is my friend, too. All these children are the children of my neighbors.”

“‘Lots of death,’” I quoted again.

Roosevelt counter-quoted the feline’s previous equivocation: “Nothing’s hopeless.”

“Cats know things,” I said.

Now he quoted me: “Not everything.”

Mungojerrie looked at us as if to say, Cats know.

I felt that neither the cat nor Roosevelt should finally commit to this dangerous enterprise without first hearing Leland Delacroix’s disjointed, incomplete, at times incoherent, yet compelling final testament. Whether or not we found Orson and the kids, we would return to that cocoon-infested bungalow at the end of the night to set a purging fire, but I was convinced that during our search, we would encounter other consequences of the Mystery Train project, some potentially lethal. If, after hearing Delacroix’s bizarre tale told in his tortured voice, Roosevelt and Mungojerrie reconsidered their commitment to accompany us, I would still try to persuade them to help, but I’d feel that I had been fair with them.

We adjourned to the dining room, where I replayed the original cassette.

The last words on the tape were spoken in that unknown language, and when they faded, Bobby said, “The tune’s good, but it doesn’t have a beat you can dance to.”

Roosevelt stood in front of the tape player, frowning. “When do we leave?”

“First dark,” I said.

“Which is coming down fast,” Sasha said, glancing at the window blinds, against which the press of daylight was less insistent than when Bobby and I had first listened to Delacroix.

“If those kids are in Wyvern,” Roosevelt said, “they might as well be at the gates of Hell. No matter what the risk, we can’t leave them there.”

He was wearing a black crewneck sweater, black chinos, and black Rockports, as though he had anticipated the covert action that lay ahead of us. In spite of his formidable size and rough-hewn features, he looked like a priest, like an exorcist grimly prepared to cast out devils.

Turning to Mungojerrie, who was sitting on Sasha’s composition table, I said, “And what about you?”

Roosevelt crouched by the table, eye-to-eye with the cat.

To me, Mungojerrie appeared to be supremely disinterested, much like any cat when it’s trying to live up to its species’ reputation for cool indifference, mystery, and unearthly wisdom.

Apparently, Roosevelt was viewing this gray mouser through a lens I didn’t possess or was listening to him on a frequency beyond my range of hearing, because he reported, “Mungojerrie says two things. First, he will find Orson and the kids if they’re anywhere in Wyvern, no matter what the risks, no matter what it takes.”

Relieved, grateful to the cat for its courage, I said, “And number two?”

“He needs to go outside and pee.”

21

At twilight, I went into my bathroom, failed to throw up though the urge was there, and instead washed my face twice, once with hot water, once with cold. Then I sat on the edge of the bathtub, clasped my hands on my knees, and endured a siege of the shakes as violent as those that reportedly accompany malaria or an IRS audit.

I wasn’t afraid that the mission into Fort Wyvern would result in the storm of death that our prescient pussycat had predicted — or that I would perish in the night ahead. Rather, I was afraid that I would live through the night but come home without the kids and Orson, or that I would fail in the rescue and also lose Sasha and Bobby and Roosevelt and Mungojerrie in the process.

With friends, this is a cool world; without friends, it would be unbearably cold.

I washed my face a third time, peed to show my solidarity with Mungojerrie, washed my hands (because my mom, would-be destroyer of the world, had taught me hygiene), and returned to the kitchen, where the others were waiting for me. I suspect that, with the exception of the cat, they had been through a ritual similar to mine, in other bathrooms.

Because Sasha — like Bobby — had noticed fishy types all over town and believed something major was soon to go down, she had anticipated that our house would be under surveillance by the authorities, if for no other reason than our connection with Lilly Wing. Therefore, she had arranged for us to meet Doogie Sassman at a rendezvous point far beyond prying eyes.

Sasha’s Explorer, Bobby’s Jeep, and Roosevelt’s Mercedes were parked in front of the house. We would surely be tailed if we drove off in any of them; we would have to leave on foot and with considerable stealth.

Behind our house, beyond our backyard, is a hard-packed dirt footpath that separates our property and those flanking it from a grove of red-gum eucalyptus trees and, beyond the trees, the golf course of the Moonlight Bay Inn and Country Club, of which Roosevelt is half-owner. Surveillance probably extended to the footpath, and there was no chance that the watchers assigned to us could be bought off with invitations to Sunday brunch at the country club.

The plan was to travel backyard to backyard for a few blocks, risking the attention of neighbors and their dogs, until we were beyond the purview of any surveillance teams that might have been assigned to us.

Because of Manuel’s confiscation celebration, Sasha possessed the only weapon, her.38 Chiefs Special, and two speedloaders in a dump pouch. She wouldn’t relinquish the piece to Roosevelt or Bobby, or to me — not even to Mungojerrie. She announced, in a tone brooking no argument, that she would take the risky point position.

“Where do we meet up with Doogie?” I asked as Bobby stowed the sole remaining cinnamon bun in the refrigerator and I finished stacking cups and saucers in the sink.

“Out along Haddenbeck Road,” Sasha said, “just beyond Crow Hill.”

“Crow Hill,” Bobby said. “I don’t like the sound of that.”

Sasha didn’t get it for a moment. Then she did: “It’s just a place. How could it have anything to do with those drawings?”

I was more concerned about the distance. “Man, that’s seven, eight miles.”

“Almost nine,” Sasha said. “With all this new activity, there’s nowhere in town we could meet Doogie without drawing attention.”

“It’s going to take too long to cover that much ground on foot,” I protested.

“Oh,” she said, “we’ll only go a few blocks on foot, just until we’re able to steal a car.”

Bobby smiled at me and winked. “This here is some moll you’ve got, bro.”

“Whose car?” I asked her.

“Any car,” she said brightly. “I’m not concerned about style, just mobility.”

“What if we don’t find a car with keys in it?”

“I’ll hot-wire it,” she said.

“You know how to hot-wire a car?”

“I was a Girl Scout.”

“Daughter’s got herself a car-theft merit badge,” Roosevelt told Mungojerrie.

We locked the back door on the way out, leaving blinds drawn and some lights dialed low.

I didn’t wear my Mystery Train cap. It no longer made me feel close to my mother, and it certainly didn’t seem like a good-luck charm anymore.

The night was mild and windless, bearing a faint scent of salt air and decomposing seaweed.

An overcast as dark as an iron skillet hid the moon. Here and there, reflections of the town lights, like a rancid yellow grease, were smeared across the clouds, but the night was deep and nearly ideal for our purposes.

The silvered-cedar fence surrounding this property is as tall as I am, with no gaps between the vertical pales, so it’s as solid as a wall. A gate opens onto the footpath.

We avoided the gate and went to the east side of the backyard, where my property adjoins that of the Samardian family.

The fence is extremely sturdy, because the vertical pales are fixed to three horizontal rails. These rails also would serve us well as a ladder.

Mungojerrie sprang up the fence as if he were lighter than air. Standing with his hind paws on the uppermost rail, forepaws on the top of the pales, he surveyed the backyard next door.

When the cat glanced down at us, Roosevelt whispered, “Looks like no one’s home.”

One at a time, and with relative silence, we followed the cat over the fence. From the Samardians’ property, we crossed another cedar fence, into the Landsbergs’ backyard. Lights were on in their house, but we passed unseen and stepped over a low picket fence into the Perez family’s yard, from there moving steadily eastward, past house after house, with no problem except Bobo, the Wladskis’ golden retriever, who isn’t a barker but makes every effort to beat you into submission with his tail and then lick you to death.

We scaled a high redwood fence into the yard behind the Stanwyk place, leaving the thankfully barkless Bobo slobbering, wagging his tail with an air-cutting whoosh-whoosh, and dancing on his hind paws in bladder-straining excitement.

I had always thought of Roger Stanwyk as a decent man who had lent his talents to the Wyvern research for the noblest of reasons, in the name of scientific progress and the advancement of medicine, much as my mother had done. His only sin was the same one Mom committed: hubris. Out of pride in his undeniable intelligence, out of misplaced trust in the power of science to resolve all problems and explain all things, he had unwittingly become one of the architects of doomsday.

That was what I’d always thought. Now I wasn’t so sure of his good intentions. As Leland Delacroix’s tape had revealed, Stanwyk was involved in both my mother’s work and the Mystery Train. He was a darker figure than he had seemed previously.

All of us two-legged specimens dodged from shrub to tree across the Stanwyks’ elaborately landscaped domain, hoping no one would be looking out a window. We reached the next fence before we realized that Mungojerrie wasn’t with us.

Panicked, we doubled back, searching among the neatly trimmed shrubs and hedges, whispering his name, which isn’t easy to whisper with a straight face, and we found him near the Stanwyks’ porch. He was a ghostly gray shape on the black lawn.

We squatted around our diminutive team leader, and Roosevelt switched his brain to the Weird Channel to find out what the cat was thinking.

“He wants to go inside,” Roosevelt whispered.

“Why?” I asked.

Roosevelt murmured, “Something’s wrong here.”

“What?” Sasha asked.

“Death lives here,” Roosevelt interpreted.

“He keeps the yard nice,” Bobby said.

“Doogie’s waiting,” Sasha reminded the cat.

Roosevelt said, “Mungojerrie says people in the house need help.”

“How can he tell?” I asked, immediately knew the answer, and found myself repeating it with Sasha and Bobby in a whispered chorus: “Cats know things.”

I was tempted to snatch up the cat, tuck him under my arm, and run away from here with him as if he were a football. He had fangs and claws, of course, and might object. More to the point, we needed to have his willing cooperation in the search ahead of us. He might be disinclined to cooperate if I treated him like a piece of sporting goods, even if I had no intention of drop-kicking him to Wyvern.

Forced to take a closer look at the Victorian house, I realized the place had a Twilight Zone quality. On the upper floor, windows revealed rooms brightened only by the flickering light of television screens, an unmistakable pulsing radiance. Downstairs, the two rooms at the back of the house — probably kitchen and dining room — were lit by the orange, draft-shaken flames of candles or oil lamps.

Our Tonto-with-a-tail sprang to his feet and sprinted to the house. He went boldly up the steps and disappeared into the shadows of the back porch.

Maybe Mr. Mungojerrie, phenomenal feline, has a well-honed sense of civic responsibility. Maybe his moral compass is so exquisitely magnetized that he cannot turn away from those in need. I suspected, however, that his compelling motivation was the well-known curiosity of his species, which so frequently leads to their demise.

The four of us remained squatting in a semicircle for a moment, until Bobby said, “Am I wrong to think this sucks?”

An informal poll showed a hundred percent agreement with the it-sucks point of view.

Reluctantly, stealthily, we followed Mungojerrie onto the back porch, where he was scratching persistently at the door.

Through the four glass panes in the door, we had a clear view of a kitchen so Victorian in its detail and bric-a-brac that I would not have been surprised to see Charles Dickens, William Gladstone, and Jack the Ripper having tea. The room was lit by an oil lamp on the oval table, as though someone within were my brother in XP.

Sasha took the initiative and knocked.

No one answered.

Mungojerrie continued to scratch at the door.

“We get the point,” Bobby told him.

Sasha tried the knob, which turned.

Hoping to be thwarted by a dead bolt, we were dismayed to learn that the door was unlocked. It swung open a few inches.

Mungojerrie squeezed through the narrow gap and vanished inside before Sasha could have second thoughts.

“Death, much death,” Roosevelt murmured, evidently communicating with the mouser.

I wouldn’t have been surprised if Dr. Stanwyk had appeared at the door, dressed in a bio-secure suit like Hodgson, face seething with hideous parasites, a white-eyed crow perched on his shoulder. This man who had once seemed wise and kind — if eccentric — now loomed ominously in my imagination, like the uninvited party guest in Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death.”

The Roger and Marie Stanwyk I had known for years were an odd but nonetheless happy and compatible couple in their early fifties. He sported muttonchops and a lush mustache, and was rarely seen in anything but a suit and tie; you sensed that he longed to wear wing collars and to carry a pocket watch on a fob, but felt these would be eccentricities in excess of those expected of a renowned scientist; nevertheless, he frequently allowed himself to wear quaint vests, and he spent an inordinate amount of time working at his Sherlock-ian pipe with tamp, pick, and spoon. Marie, a plump-cheeked matron with a rosy complexion, was a collector of antique ornamental tea caddies and nineteenth-century paintings of fairies; her wardrobe revealed a grudging acceptance of the twenty-first century, although regardless of what she wore, her longing for button-top shoes, bustles, and parasols was evident. Roger and Marie seemed unsuited to California, doubly unsuited to this century, yet they drove a red Jaguar, had been spotted attending excruciatingly stupid big-budget action movies, and functioned fairly well as citizens of the new millennium.

Sasha called to the Stanwyks through the open kitchen door.

Mungojerrie had crossed the kitchen without hesitation and had disappeared into deeper reaches of the house.

When Sasha got no answer to her third “Roger, Marie, hello,” she drew the.38 from her shoulder holster and stepped inside.

Bobby, Roosevelt, and I followed her. If Sasha had been wearing skirts, we might have happily hidden behind them, but we were more comfortable with the cover provided by the Smith & Wesson.

From the porch, the house had seemed silent, but as we crossed the kitchen, we heard voices coming from the front room. They were not directed at us.

We stopped and listened, not quite able to make out the words. Quickly, however, when music rose, it became apparent that we were hearing not live voices but those on television or radio.

Sasha’s entrance to the dining room was instructive and more than a little intriguing. Both hands on the gun. Arms out straight and locked. The weapon just below her line of sight. She cleared the doorway fast, slid to the left, her back against the wall. After she moved mostly out of view, I could still see just enough of her arms to know she swung the.38 left, then right, then left again, covering the room. Her performance was professional, instinctive, and no less smooth than her on-air voice.

Maybe she’s watched a lot of television cop dramas over the years. Yeah.

“Clear,” she whispered.

Tall, ornate hutches seemed to loom over us, as if tipping away from the walls, porcelain and silver treasures gleaming darkly behind leaded-glass doors with beveled panes. The crystal chandelier wasn’t lit, but reflections of nearby candle flames winked along its strings of beads and off the cut edges of its dangling pendants.

In the center of the dining-room table, surrounded by eight or ten candles, was a large punch bowl half full of what appeared to be fruit juice. A few clean drinking glasses stood to one side, and scattered across the table were several empty plastic pharmacy bottles of prescription medication.

The lighting wasn’t good enough to allow us to read the labels on the bottles, as they lay, and none of us wanted to touch anything. Death lives here, the cat had said, and maybe that was what had given us the idea, from the moment we entered the house, that this was a crime scene. Upon seeing the tableau on the dining-room table, we looked at one another, and it was clear that all of us suspected the nature of the crime, though we didn’t speak its name.

I could have used my flashlight, but I might have drawn unwanted attention. Under the circumstances, any attention would be unwanted. Besides, the name of the medication wasn’t important.

Sasha led us into the large living room, where the illumination came from a television screen nested in an ornate French cabinet with japanned panels. Even in the poor light, I could see that the chamber was as crowded as an automobile salvage yard, not with junked cars but with Victorian excess: deeply carved and intricately painted neo-rococo furniture; richly patterned brocade upholstery; wallpaper with Gothic-style tracery; heavy velvet drapes with cascades of braided fringe, capped with solid pelmets cut in elaborate Gothic forms; an Egyptian settee with beaded-wood spindles and damask seat cushions; Moorish lamps featuring black cherubs in gilded turbans supporting beaded shades; bibelots densely arranged on every shelf and table.

Amidst the layers on layers of decor, the cadavers almost seemed like additional decorative items.

Even in the flickery light of the television, we could see a man stretched out on the Egyptian settee. He was dressed in dark slacks and a white shirt. Before lying down, he’d taken off his shoes and placed them on the floor with the laces neatly tucked in, as though concerned about soiling the upholstery on the seat cushions. Beside the shoes stood a drinking glass identical to those in the dining room — Waterford crystal, judging by appearance — in which remained an inch of fruit juice. His left arm trailed off the settee, the back of the hand against the Persian carpet, palm turned up. His other arm lay across his chest. His head was propped on two small brocade pillows, and his face was concealed beneath a square of black silk.

Sasha was covering the room behind us, less interested in the corpse than in guarding against a surprise assault.

The black veil over the face did not bellow or even flutter. The man under it was not breathing.

I knew that he was dead, knew what killed him — not a contagious disease, but a phenobarbital fizz or its lethal equivalent — yet I was reluctant to remove the silk mask for the same reason that any child, having pondered the possibility of a boogeyman, is hesitant to push back the sheets, rise up on his mattress, lean out, and peek under the bed.

Hesitantly, I pinched a corner of the silk square between thumb and forefinger, and pulled it off the man’s face.

He was alive. That was my first impression. His eyes were open, and I thought I saw life in them.

After a breathless moment, I realized that his stare was fixed. His eyes appeared to be moving only because reflections of images on the TV screen were twitching in them.

The light was just bright enough to allow me to identify the deceased. His name was Tom Sparkman. He was an associate of Roger Stanwyk’s, a professor at Ashdon, also a biochemist, and no doubt deeply involved in Wyvern business.

The body showed no signs of corruption. It couldn’t have been here a long time.

Reluctantly, I touched the back of my left hand to Sparkman’s brow. “Still warm,” I whispered.

We followed Roosevelt to a button-tufted sofa with carved-wood rails at seat and crest, on which a second man lay, with hands folded across his abdomen. This one was wearing his shoes, and his drained glass lay on its side on the carpet, where he’d dropped it.

Roosevelt peeled back the square of black silk that concealed the man’s face. The light was not as good here, the corpse not as close to the television as Sparkman, and I wasn’t able to identify the body.

Two seconds after switching on my flashlight, I clicked it off. Cadaver number two was Lennart Toregard, a Swedish mathematician on a four-year contract to teach one class a semester at Ashdon, which was surely a front for his real work, at Wyvern. Toregard’s eyes were closed. His face was relaxed. A faint smile suggested he was having a pleasant dream — or was in the middle of one when death claimed him.

Bobby slipped two fingers under Toregard’s wrist, feeling for a pulse. He shook his head: nothing.

Batwing shadows swooped along one wall, across the ceiling.

Sasha spun toward the movement.

I reached under my jacket, but there was no shoulder holster, no gun.

The shadows were only shadows, sent flying through the room by a sudden flurry of action on the television screen.

The third corpse was slumped in a huge armchair, legs propped on a matching footstool, arms on the chair arms. Bobby stripped away the silk hood, I flashed the light on and off, and Roosevelt whispered, “Colonel Ellway.”

Colonel Eaton Ellway had been second in command of Fort Wyvern and had retired to Moonlight Bay after the base was closed. Retired. Or engaged in a clandestine assignment in civilian clothes.

With no additional dead men to investigate, I finally registered what was on the television. It was tuned to a cable channel that was running an animated feature film, Disney’s The Lion King.

We stood for a moment, listening to the house.

Other music and other voices came from other rooms.

Neither the music nor the voices were made by the living.

Death lives here.

From the living room — a chamber grossly misnamed — we cautiously crossed the front hall to the study. Sasha and Roosevelt halted at the doorway.

A tambour door was open on an entertainment center incorporated into a wall of bookshelves, and The Lion King was on the television, with the volume low. Nathan Lane and company were singing “Hakuna Matata.”

Inside, Bobby and I found two more members of this suicide club with squares of black silk over their heads. A man sat at the desk, and a woman was slumped in a Morris chair, empty drinking glasses near each of them.

I no longer had the heart to strip away their veils. The black silk might have been cult paraphernalia with a symbolic meaning that was comprehensible only to those who had come together in this ritual of self-destruction. I thought, however, that at least in part, it might be meant to express their guilt at being involved in work that had brought humanity to these straits. If they felt remorse, then their deaths had a degree of dignity, and disturbing them seemed disrespectful.

Before we had left the living room, I had once more covered the faces of Sparkman, Toregard, and Ellway.

Bobby seemed to understand the reason for my hesitancy, and he lifted the veil on the man at the desk, while I used the flashlight with the hope of making an identification. This was no one that either of us knew, a handsome man with a small, well-trimmed gray mustache. Bobby replaced the silk.

The woman reclining in the Morris chair was also a stranger, but when I directed the light at her face, I didn’t immediately switch it off.

With a soft whistle, Bobby sucked air between his teeth, and I muttered, “God.”

I had to struggle to keep my hand from shaking, to keep the light steady.

Sensing bad news, Sasha and Roosevelt came in from the hall, and though neither of them spoke a word, their faces revealed all that needed to be said about their shock and revulsion.

The dead woman’s eyes were open. The left was a normal brown eye. The right was green, and not remotely normal. There was almost no white in it. The iris was huge and golden, the lens a gold-green. The black pupil was not round but elliptical — like the pupil in the eye of a snake.

The socket encircling that terrifying eye was badly misshapen. Indeed, there were subtle but fearsome deformities in the entire bone structure along the right side of her once lovely face: brow, temple, cheek, jaw.

Her mouth hung open in a silent cry. Her lips were peeled back in a rictus, revealing her teeth, which for the most part appeared normal. A few on the right side, however, were sharply pointed, and one eyetooth seemed to have been in the process of reshaping itself into a fang.

I moved the beam of the flashlight down her body, to her hands, which were in her lap. I expected to see more mutation, but both her hands were normal. They were folded tightly together, and clasped in them was a rosary: black beads, silver chain, an exquisite little silver crucifix.

Such desperation was apparent in the posture of her pale hands, such pathos, that I switched off the light, overcome by pity. To stare at this grim evidence of her final distress seemed invasive, indecent.

Upon finding the first body in the living room, in spite of the black silk veils, I’d known that these people had not committed suicide solely out of guilt over their involvement in the research at Wyvern. Perhaps some felt guilty, perhaps all of them did, but they participated in this chemical hara-kiri primarily because they were becoming and because they were deeply fearful of what they were becoming.

To date, as the rogue retrovirus has transferred other species’ DNA into human cells, the effects have been limited. They manifest, if at all, only psychologically, except for telltale animal eyeshine in the most seriously afflicted.

Some of the big brains have been confident that physical change is impossible. They believe that as the cells of the body wear out and are routinely replaced, new cells will not contain the sequences of animal DNA that contaminated the previous generation — not even if stem cells, which control growth throughout the human body, are infected.

This disfigured woman in the Morris chair proved that they were woefully wrong. Hideous physical change clearly can accompany mental deterioration.

Each infected individual receives a load of alien DNA different from the one that anybody else receives, which means that the effect is singular in every case. Some of the infected may not undergo any perceptible change, mentally or physically, because they receive DNA fragments from so many sources that there is no focused cumulative effect other than a general destabilization of the system, resulting in rapidly metastasizing cancers and deadly autoimmune disorders. Others may go mad, psychologically devolve into a subhuman condition, driven by murderous rages, unspeakable needs. Those who, in addition, suffer physical metamorphosis will be radically different from one another: a nightmare zoo.

My mouth seemed to be choked with dust. My throat felt tight and parched. Even my cardiac muscle seemed to have withered, for in my own ears, my heartbeat was juiceless, dry, and strange.

The singing and comic antics of the characters in The Lion King failed to fill me with magic-kingdom joy.

I hoped Manuel knew what he was talking about when he predicted the imminent availability of a vaccine, a cure.

Bobby gently draped the square of silk over the woman’s face, concealing her tortured features.

As Bobby’s hands came close to her, I tensed and found myself repositioning my grip on the extinguished flashlight, as if I might use it as a weapon. I half expected to see the woman’s eyes shift, to hear her snarl, to see those pointed teeth flash and blood spurt, even as she looped the rosary around his neck and pulled him down into a deadly embrace.

I am not the only one with a hyperactive imagination. I saw a wariness in Bobby’s face. His hands twitched nervously as he replaced the silk.

And after we left the study, Sasha hesitated and then returned to the open door to check the room once more. She no longer gripped the.38 in both hands but nonetheless held it at the ready, as though she wouldn’t have been surprised to discover that even a glassful of the Jonestown punch, their version of a Heaven’s Gate cocktail, was not poisonous enough to put down the creature in the Morris chair.

Also on the ground floor were a sewing room and a laundry room, but both were deserted.

In the hallway, Roosevelt whispered Mungojerrie’s name, because we had yet to see the cat since we’d entered the house.

A soft answering meow followed by two more, audible above the competing sound tracks of the Disney movie, drew us forward along the hall.

Mungojerrie was sitting on the newel post at the bottom of the stairs. In the gloom, his radiant green eyes fixed on Roosevelt, then shifted to Sasha when she quietly but urgently suggested that we get the hell out of here.

Without the cat, we had little chance of conducting a successful search of Wyvern. We were hostage to his curiosity — or to whatever it was that motivated him to turn his back to us on the newel post, sprint agilely up the handrail, spring to the stairs, and disappear into the darkness of the upper floor.

“What’s he doing?” I asked Roosevelt.

“Wish I knew. It takes two to communicate,” he murmured.

22

As before, Sasha took the point position as we ascended the stairs. I brought up the rear. The carpeted treads creaked a little underfoot, more than a little under Roosevelt’s feet, but the movie sound track drifting up from the living room and study — and similar sounds coming from upstairs — effectively masked the noises we made.

At the top of the stairs, I turned and looked down. There weren’t any dead people standing in the foyer, with their heads concealed under black silk. Not even one. I had expected five.

Six doors led off the upstairs hall. Five were open, and pulsing light came from three rooms. Competing sound tracks indicated that The Lion King was not the universal choice of entertainment for these condemned.

Unwilling to pass an unexplored room and possibly leave an assailant behind us, Sasha went to the first door, which was closed. I stood with my back to the wall at the hinged edge of the door, and she put her back to the wall on the other side. I reached across, gripped the knob, and turned it. When I pushed the door open, Sasha went through fast and low, the gun in her right hand, feeling for the light switch with her left.

A bathroom. Nobody there.

She backed into the hall, switching off the light but leaving the door open.

Beside the bathroom was a linen closet.

Four rooms remained. Doors open. Light and voices and music coming from three of them.

I emphatically am not a gun lover, having fired one for the first time only a month previously. I still worry about shooting myself in the foot, and would rather shoot myself in the foot than be forced ever again to kill another human being. But now I was seized by a desire for a gun that was probably only slightly down the scale of desperation from the urgency with which a half-starved man craves food, because I couldn’t bear to see Sasha taking all the risks.

At the next room, she cleared the doorway quickly. When there was not an immediate outburst of gunfire, Bobby and I followed her inside, while Roosevelt watched the hall from the threshold.

A bedside lamp glowed softly. On the television was a Nature Channel documentary that might have been soothing, even elegiac, when it had been turned on to provide a distraction for the doomed as they drank their spiked fruit punch; but at the moment a fox was chewing the guts out of a quail.

This was the master bedroom, with an attached bath, and though it was a large chamber, with brighter colors than those downstairs, I felt suffocated by the determined, slathered-on, high-Victorian cheerfulness. The walls, the drapes, the spread, and the canopy on the four-poster bed were all of the same fabric: a cream background heavily patterned with roses and ribbons, explosions of pink, green, and yellow. The carpet featured yellow chrysanthemums, pink roses, and blue ribbons, lots of blue ribbons, so many blue ribbons that I couldn’t help but think of veins and unraveling intestines. The painted and parcel-gilt furniture was no less oppressive than the darker pieces downstairs, and the room contained so many crystal paperweights, porcelains, small bronzes, silver-framed photographs, and other bibelots that, if considered ammunition, they could have been used to stone to death an entire mob of malcontents.

On the bed, atop the gay spread and fully dressed, lay a man and a woman with the de rigueur black silk face coverings, which now began to seem neither cultish nor symbolic but quite Victorian and proper, draped across the awful faces of the dead to spare the sensitivities of those who might discover them. I was sure that these two — on their backs, side by side, holding hands — were Roger and Marie Stanwyk, and when Bobby and Sasha pulled aside the veils, I was proved correct.

For some reason, I surveyed the ceiling, half expecting to see five-inch-long, fat cocoons spun in the corners. None hung over us, of course. I was getting my waking nightmares confused.

Struggling to resist a potentially crippling claustrophobia, I left the room ahead of Bobby and Sasha, joining Roosevelt in the hallway, where I was pleased — though surprised — to find there were still no walking dead people with black silk hoods covering their cold white faces.

The next bedroom was no less gonzo Victorian than the rest of the house, but the two bodies — in the carved mahogany half-tester bed with white muslin and lace hangings — were in a more modern pose than Roger and Marie, lying on their sides, face-to-face, embracing during their last moments on this earth. We studied their alabaster profiles, but none of us recognized them, and Bobby and I replaced the silks.

There was a television set in this room, too. The Stanwyks, for all their love of distant and more genteel times, were typical TV-crazed Americans, for which they were certainly dumber than they otherwise would have been, as it is well known and probably proven that for every television set in a house, each member of the family suffers a loss of five IQ points. The embracing couple on the bed had chosen to expire to a thousandth rerun of an ancient Star Trek episode. At the moment, Captain Kirk was solemnly expounding upon his belief that compassion and tolerance were as important to the evolution and survival of an intelligent species as were eyesight and opposable thumbs, so I had to resist the urge to switch the damn TV to the Nature Channel, where the fox was eating the guts of a quail.

I didn’t want to judge these poor people, because I couldn’t know the angst and physical suffering that had brought them to this end point; but if I were becoming and so distraught as to believe that suicide was the only answer, I would want to expire not while watching the products of Empire Disney, not to an earnest documentary about the beauty of nature’s bloodlust, not to the adventures of the starship Enterprise, but to the eternal music of Beethoven, Johann Sebastian Bach, perhaps Brahms, Mozart; or the rock of Chris Isaak would do, and do handsomely.

As you may perceive from my baroque ranting, by the time I returned to the upstairs hall, with the body count currently at nine, my claustrophobia was getting rapidly worse, my imagination was in full-on hyperdrive, my longing for a handgun had intensified until it was almost a sexual need, and my testicles had retracted into my groin.

I knew that we weren’t all going to get out of this house alive.

Christopher Snow knows things.

I knew.

I knew.

The next room was dark, and a quick check revealed that it was used to store excess Victorian furniture and art objects. In two or three seconds of light, I saw paintings, chairs and more chairs, a column-front cellarette, terra-cotta figures, urns, a Chippendale-style satinwood desk, a breakfront — as if the Stanwyks’ ultimate intention had been to wedge every room of the house so full that no human being could fit inside, until the density and weight of the furnishings distorted the very fabric of space-time, causing the house to implode out of our century and into the more comforting age of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Lord Chesterfield.

Mungojerrie, to all appearances unaffected by this surfeit of death and decor, was standing in the hallway, in the inconstant light that pulsed through the open door of the final room, peering intently past that last threshold. Then suddenly he became way too intent: His back was arched and his hackles were raised, as if he were a witch’s familiar that had just seen the devil himself rising from a bubbling cauldron.

Though gunless, I was not going to let Sasha go through another doorway first, because I believed that whoever entered this next room in the point position would be blown away or chopped like a celery stalk in a Cuisinart. Unless the last four bodies had been mutated in ways concealed by clothing, we had not encountered another refugee from The Island of Dr. Moreau since the woman slumped in the Morris chair downstairs, and we seemed overdue for another close encounter of the bowel-loosening kind. I was tempted to pick up Mungojerrie and pitch him into the room ahead of me, to draw fire, but I reminded myself that if any of us survived, we would need the mouser to lead us through Wyvern, and even if he landed on his feet unscathed, in the great tradition of felines since time immemorial, he was likely thereafter to be uncooperative.

I moved past the cat and crossed the threshold with absolutely no cunning, ad-libbing and adrenaline-driven, hurtling headlong into a deluge of Victoriana. Sasha was close behind me, whispering my name with severe disapproval, as though it really ticked her off to lose her last best opportunity to be killed in this sentimental wonderland of filigree and potpourri.

Amidst a visual cacophony of chintz, in a blizzard of bric-a-brac, a television screen presented the cuddly cartoon creatures of the veld capering through The Lion King. The marketing mavens at Disney ought to turn this into a bonanza, produce a special edition of the film for the terminally distraught, for rejected lovers and moody teenagers, for stockbrokers to keep on the shelf against the advent of another Black Monday, package the videotape or DVD with a square of black silk, a pad and pencil for the suicide note, and a lyrics sheet to allow the self-condemned to sing along with the major musical numbers until the toxins kick in.

Two bodies, numbers ten and lucky eleven, lay on the quilted chintz spread, but they were less interesting than the robed figure of Death, who stood beside the bed. The Reaper, traveling without his customary scythe, was bending over the deceased, carefully arranging squares of black silk to conceal their faces, plucking at specks of lint, smoothing wrinkles in the fabric, surprisingly fussy for Hell’s grim tyrant, as Alexander Pope had called him, although those who rise to the top of their professions know that attention to detail is essential.

He was also shorter than I had imagined Death would be, about five feet eight. He was remarkably heavier than his popular image, too, although his apparent weight problem might be illusory, the fault of the second-rate haberdasher who had put him in a loosely fitted robe that did nothing to flatter his figure.

When he realized that there were intruders behind him, he slowly turned to confront us, and he proved not to be Death, the lord of all worms, after all. He was merely Father Tom Eliot, the rector of St. Bernadette’s Catholic Church, which explained why he wasn’t wearing a hood; the robe was actually a cassock.

Since my brain is pickled in poetry, I thought of how Robert Browning had described Death—“the pale priest of the mute people”—which seemed to fit this lowercase reaper. Even here in the animated African light, Father Tom’s face appeared to be as pale and round as the Eucharistic wafer placed upon the tongue during communion.

“I couldn’t convince them to leave their mortal fate in God’s hands,” Father Tom said, his voice quavering, his eyes brimming with tears. He didn’t bother to remark upon our sudden appearance, as if he had known that someone would catch him at this forbidden work. “It’s a terrible sin, an affront to God, this turning away from life. Rather than suffer in this world any longer, they’ve chosen damnation, yes, I’m afraid that’s what they’ve done, and all I could do was comfort them. My counsel was rejected, though I tried. I tried. Comfort. That was all I could give. Comfort. Do you understand?”

“Yes, we do, we understand,” Sasha said with both compassion and wariness.

In ordinary times, before we had entered The End of Days, Father Tom had been an ebullient guy, devout without being stuffy, sincere about his concern for others. With his expressive and rubbery face, with his merry eyes and quick smile, he was a natural comedian, yet in times of tragedy he served as a reliable source of strength for others. I wasn’t a member of his church, but I knew his parishioners had long adored him.

Lately, things hadn’t gone well for Father Tom, and he himself hadn’t been well. His sister, Laura, had been my mother’s colleague and friend. Tom is devoted to her — and has not seen her for more than a year. There is reason to believe that Laura is far along in her becoming, profoundly changed, and is being held in The Hole, at Wyvern, where she is an object of intense study.

“Four of those here are Catholic,” he said. “Members of my flock. Their souls were in my hands. My hands. The others are Lutheran, Methodist. One is Jewish. Two were atheists until…recently. All their souls mine to save. Mine to lose.” He was talking rapidly, nervously, as if he were aware of a bomb clock relentlessly ticking toward detonation, eager to confess before being obliterated. “Two of them, a misguided young couple, had absorbed incoherent fragments of the spiritual beliefs of half a dozen American Indian tribes, twisting everything in ways the Indians would never have understood. These two, they believed in such a mess of things, such a jumble, they worshipped the buffalo, river spirits, earth spirits, the corn plant. Do I belong in an age where people worship buffalo and corn? I’m lost here. Do you understand? Do you?”

“Yes,” Bobby said, having followed us into the room. “Don’t worry, Father Eliot, we understand.”

The priest was wearing a loose cloth gardening glove on his left hand. As he continued to speak, he worried ceaselessly at the glove with his right hand, plucking at the cuff, tugging at the fingers, as if the fit was not comfortable. “I didn’t give them extreme unction, last rites, didn’t give them the last rites,” he said, voice rising toward a hysterical pitch and pace, “because they were suicides, but maybe I should have given unction, maybe I should have, compassion over doctrine, because all I did for them…the only thing I did for these poor tortured people was give comfort, the comfort of words, nothing but empty words, so I don’t know whether their souls were lost because of me or in spite of me.”

A month ago, the night my father died, I experienced a strange and unsettling encounter with Father Tom Eliot, of which I’ve written in a previous volume of this journal. He’d been even less in control of his emotions on that cruel night than he was here in the Stanwyk mausoleum, and I had suspected he was becoming, though by the end of our encounter, he had seemed to be racked not by anything uncanny but rather by a heart-crushing anguish for his missing sister and by his own spiritual despair.

Now, as then, I searched for unnatural yellow radiance in his eyes, but saw none.

The cartoon colors from the television patterned his face, so I seemed to be looking at him through a constantly changing stained-glass window depicting distorted animal shapes rather than saints. This inadequate and peculiar light flickered in his eyes, as well, but it couldn’t have concealed more than the faintest and the most transient glimmer of animal eyeshine.

Still worrying at the glove, his voice as tight with stress as power lines taut and singing in a storm wind, sweat shining on his face, Father Tom said, “They had a way out, even if it was the wrong way, even if it was the worst sin, but I can’t take their way, I’m too scared, because there’s the soul to think about, there’s always the immortal soul, and I believe in the soul more than in release from suffering, so there’s no way out for me now. I have damning thoughts. Terrible thoughts. Dreams. Dreams full of blood. In the dreams, I feed on beating hearts, chew at the throats of women, and rape…rape small children, and then I wake up sickened but also, but also, also I wake up thrilled, and there’s no way out for me.”

Suddenly he stripped the glove off his left hand. The thing that slid out of the glove, however, wasn’t a human hand. It was a hand in the process of becoming something else, still exhibiting evidence of humanity in the tone and the texture of the skin, and in the placement of the digits, but the fingers were more like finger-size talons, yet not talons precisely, because each appeared to be split — or at least to have begun to split — into appendages resembling the serrated pincers of baby lobster claws.

“I can only trust in Jesus,” the priest said.

His face streamed with tears no doubt as bitter as the vinegar in the sponge that had been offered to his suffering savior.

“I believe. I believe in the mercy of Christ. Yes, I believe. I believe in the mercy of Christ.”

Yellow light flared in his eyes.

Flared.

Father Tom came at me first, perhaps because I was between him and the doorway, perhaps because my mother was Wisteria Jane Snow. After all, though she gave us such miracles as Orson and Mungojerrie, her life’s work also made possible the twitching thing at the end of the priest’s left arm. Though the human side of him surely did believe in the immortal soul and the sweet mercy of Christ, it was understandable if some other, darker part of him placed its faith in bloody vengeance.

No matter what else he was, Father Tom was still a priest, and my folks had not raised me to take punches at priests, or at people insane with despair, for that matter. Respect and pity and twenty-eight years of parental instruction overcame my survival instinct — which made me a disappointment to Darwin — and instead of aggressively countering Father Tom’s assault, I crossed my arms over my face and tried to turn away from him.

He was not an experienced fighter. Like a grade-school boy in a playground brawl, he threw himself wildly against me, using his entire body as a weapon, ramming into me with a lot more force than you would expect from an ordinary priest, even more than you’d expect from a Jesuit.

Driven backward, I slammed hard into a tall armoire. One of the door handles gouged into my back, just below my left shoulder blade.

Father Tom was hammering at me with his right fist, but I was more worried about that weird left appendage. I didn’t know how sharp the serrated edges on those little pincers might be, but more to the point, I didn’t want to be touched by that thing, which looked unclean. Not unclean in a sanitary sense. Unclean in the sense that the cloven hoof or the hairless pink corkscrew tail of a demon might look unclean.

As he pounded on me, Father Tom urgently repeated his statement of religious commitment: “I believe in the mercy of Christ, the mercy of Christ, the mercy, I believe in the mercy of Christ!”

His spittle sprayed my face, and his breath was disconcertingly sweet with the fragrance of peppermint.

This ceaseless chanting wasn’t meant to persuade me or anyone else — not even God — of the priest’s unshaken faith. Rather, he was trying to convince himself of his belief, to remind himself that he had hope, and to use that hope to seize control of himself once more. In spite of the malevolent sulfurous light in his eyes, in spite of the urge to kill that pumped uncanny strength into his undisciplined body, I could see the earnest and vulnerable man of God who struggled to suppress the raging savage within and to find his way back toward grace.

Shouting, cursing, Bobby and Roosevelt clutched at the priest, trying to tear him off me. Even as he clung fast to me, Father Tom kicked at them, drove his elbows backward into their stomachs and ribs.

He hadn’t been a skilled fighter when he launched himself at me, seconds ago, but he seemed to be learning fast. Or perhaps he was losing the struggle to subdue his new becoming self, the savage within, which knew all about fighting and killing.

I felt something pulling at my sweater and was sure that it was the hateful claw. The pincer serrations were snagged in the cotton fabric.

With revulsion thick in my throat, I grabbed the priest’s wrist to restrain him. The flesh under my hand was strangely hot, greasy, and as vile to the touch as might be a corpse in an advanced state of decay. In places, the meat of him was disgustingly soft, although in other places, his skin had hardened into what might have been patches of a smooth carapace.

Until now, our bizarre struggle had been desperate yet at least darkly amusing to me, something that you couldn’t laugh at now but at which you knew you would laugh later, over a beer, on the beach: this roundhouse fight with a chubby clergyman in a chintz-choked bedroom, a Looney Tunes collaboration between Chuck Jones and H. P. Lovecraft. But suddenly a positive outcome didn’t seem as assured as it had a moment ago, and it wasn’t amusing anymore, not slightly, not even darkly.

His wrist joint was no longer like the wrist joint you study on a skeleton chart in a general-biology class, more like something you might see during advanced delirium tremens while drying out from a ten-bottle bourbon binge. The entire hand turned backward on the wrist, as no human hand could do, as if it operated on a ball joint, and the pincers snapped at my fingers, forcing me to let go before he had a chance to cut me.

Although I felt as though I had been struggling with the priest long enough to justify having his name tattooed on my biceps, he had been in this pummeling frenzy for no more than half a minute before Roosevelt tore him off me. Our usually gentle animal communicator communicated to the animal inside Father Tom by lifting him off the floor and throwing him as if he were no heavier than the real Death, who is, after all, nothing but bones in a robe.

Cassock skirt flaring, Father Tom crashed into the footboard of the bed, causing the pair of suicides to bounce as though with postmortem delight, springs singing under them. He toppled facedown to the floor, but instantly sprang to his feet with inhuman agility.

No longer chanting about his faith, now grunting like a boar, spitting, making strange strangled sounds of rage, he seized a walnut chair that featured tie-on cushions in a daffodil print and slip-on daffodil arm protectors, and for an instant it seemed that he would use it to smash everything around him, but then he pitched it at Roosevelt.

Roosevelt spun away just in time to take the chair across his broad back rather than in the face.

From the television came the mellifluous and emotional voice of Elton John, with full orchestral and choral accompaniment, singing “Can You Feel the Love Tonight?”

Even as the chair was cracking against Roosevelt’s back, Father Tom threw a vanity bench at Sasha.

She didn’t dodge quickly enough. The bench clipped her shoulder and knocked her over an ottoman.

As the furniture struck Sasha, the possessed priest was already firing items off the vanity at me, at Bobby, at Roosevelt, and though bestial sounds continued to issue from him, he also snarled a few broken but familiar words, with a vicious glee, to punctuate his attack: a silver hairbrush, an oval hand mirror with mother-of-pearl frame and handle — “in the name of the Father” — a heavy silver clothes brush — “and the Son” — a few decorative enamel boxes — “and the Holy Spirit!” — a porcelain bud vase that hit Roosevelt so hard in the face he dropped as if he’d been smacked with a ball-peen hammer, a silver comb. A perfume bottle sailed past my head and shattered against a distant hulk of furniture, flooding the bedroom with the fragrance of attar of roses.

During this barrage, ducking and dodging, protecting our faces with raised arms, Bobby and I tried to move toward Tom Eliot. I’m not sure why. Maybe we thought that together we could pin him down and hold the pitiable wretch until this seizure passed, until he regained his senses. If he had any senses left. Which seemed less likely by the second.

When the priest fired the last of the clutter from the arsenal atop the vanity, Bobby rushed him, and I went after him, too, just a fraction of a second later.

Instead of retreating, Father Tom launched himself forward, and when they collided, the priest lifted Bobby off the floor. He wasn’t Father Tom at all anymore. He was something unnaturally powerful, with the strength and ferocity of a mad bull. He lunged across the bedroom, knocking over a chair, and slammed-jammed-crushed Bobby into a corner so hard that Bobby’s shoulders should have snapped. Bobby cried out in pain, and the priest leaned into him, punching, clawing at his ribs, digging at him.

Then I was in the melee, too, on Father Tom’s back, slipping my right arm around his neck, gripping my right wrist with my left hand. Got him in a chokehold. Jerked back on his head. Just about crushed his windpipe, trying to pull him away from Bobby.

He retreated from Bobby, all right, but instead of dropping to his knees and capitulating, he seemed not to need the air that I was choking out of him, or the blood supply to the brain that I pinched off. He bucked, trying to throw me over his head and off his back, bucked again and more furiously.

I was aware of Sasha shouting, but I didn’t listen to what she was saying until the priest bucked a fourth time and nearly did pitch me off. My chokehold slipped, and he snarled as if sensing triumph, and I finally heard Sasha saying, “Get out of the way! Chris! Chris, get out of the way!”

Doing what she demanded took some trust, but then it’s always about trust, every time, whether it’s deadly combat or a kiss, so I released my faltering chokehold, and the priest threw me off even before I could scramble away.

Father Tom rose to his full height, and he appeared to be taller than before. I think that must have been an illusion. His demonic fury had attained such intensity, such blazing power, that I expected electric arcs to leap from him to any nearby metal object. Rage made him appear to be larger than he was. His radiant yellow gaze seemed brighter than mere eyeshine, as if inside his skull was not merely a new creature becoming but the elemental nuclear fire of an entire new universe aborning.

I retreated, gasping for breath, stupidly groping for the gun that Manuel had taken from me.

Sasha was holding a bed pillow, which she evidently had jerked out from under the head of one of the suicides. This seemed as crazy as everything else that was happening, as if she intended to smother Father Tom or to batter him into submission with a sack of goose down. But then, as she ordered him to back off and sit down, I understood that the pillow was folded around her.38 Chiefs Special, to muffle the report of the revolver if she was forced to use it, because this bedroom was at the front of the house, where the sound might carry to the street.

You could tell that the priest wasn’t listening to Sasha. Maybe by this time he wasn’t capable of listening to anything except to what was happening inside him, to the internal hurricane-roar of his becoming.

His mouth opened wide, and his lips skinned back from his teeth. An unearthly shriek came from him, then another, more chilling than the first, followed by squeals and cries and wretched groans, which alternately seemed to express pain and pleasure, despair and joy, blind rage and poignant remorse, as if there were multitudes within this one tortured body.

Instead of ordering Father Tom to desist, Sasha was now pleading with him. Maybe because she didn’t want to be forced to use the gun. Maybe because she was afraid his crazed shouting would be heard in the street and draw unwanted attention. Her pleas were tremulous, and tears stood in her eyes, but I could tell that she would be able to do whatever needed to be done.

The shrieking priest raised his arms as if he were calling down the wrath of Heaven upon all of us. He began to shake violently, like one afflicted with Saint Vitus’ dance.

Bobby was standing in the corner where Father Tom had left him, both hands pressed to his left flank, as though stanching the flow of blood from a wound.

Roosevelt blocked the hall door, holding one hand to his face, where he’d been hit by the bud vase.

I could tell from their expressions I wasn’t alone in believing that the priest was building toward an explosion of violence far more fearsome than anything we had witnessed yet. I didn’t expect Father Tom to metamorphose before our eyes, from minister to monster in one minute, like a shape-changing alien in a science-fiction movie, half basilisk and half spider, slashing-snapping-stinging-ripping its way through the four of us, then swallowing Mungojerrie as if the hapless cat were an after-dinner mint. Surely flesh and bone couldn’t be transformed as quickly as popcorn kernels in a microwave oven. On the other hand, such a fantastic change, pastor to predator, would not have surprised me, either.

The priest did surprise me, however, surprised all of us, when he turned his rage against himself; though in retrospect, I realized I should have remembered the birds, the veve rats, and Manuel’s words about psychological implosion. The cleric let out a wail that seemed to oscillate between rage and grief, and though it wasn’t as loud as the preceding cries, it was even more terrifying because it was so devoid of hope. To this marrow-freezing lament, he repeatedly bashed himself in the face with his right fist, and also with the semblance of a fist that he was able to make with his deformed hand, striking such solid blows that his nose crunched and his lips split against his teeth.

Sasha was still pleading with him, though she must have realized that Father Tom Eliot was beyond her reach, beyond the help of anyone in this world.

As if trying to scourge the devil from himself, he began to claw his cheeks, digging his fingernails deep, and with those pincers, he went at his right eye as though to pluck it out of himself.

Feathers suddenly whirled through the air, spinning around the priest, and I was briefly confused, astonished, until I realized that Sasha had fired the.38. The pillow couldn’t have entirely muffled the shot, but I’d heard nothing other than Father Tom’s wail drilling my skull.

The priest jerked from the impact of the slug, but he didn’t drop. He didn’t bite off that skirling lament or stop tearing at himself.

I heard the second shot — whump — and the third.

Tom Eliot crumpled to the floor, lay twitching, briefly kicked his legs as if he were a dog chasing rabbits in his sleep, and then was motionless, dead.

Sasha had relieved him from his agony but had also saved him from the self-destruction that he believed would condemn his immortal soul to eternal damnation.

So much had happened since the priest had thrown the chair at Roosevelt and the vanity bench at Sasha that I was surprised to hear Elton John still singing “Can You Feel the Love Tonight?”

Before dropping the pillow, Sasha turned toward the television and fired one more round, blowing out the screen.

As satisfying as it was to put an end to the inappropriately uplifting music and images of The Lion King, we were all alarmed by the total darkness that claimed the room following a shower of sparks from the terminated TV. We assumed that the becoming priest must be dead, because any of us would be worm food, for sure, with three.38 slugs in the chest, but as Bobby had noted the previous night, there were no rules here on the eve of the Apocalypse.

When I reached for my flashlight, it was no longer snugged under my belt. I must have dropped it during the struggle.

In my imagination, the dead priest had already self-resurrected and had become something that an entire division of marines couldn’t kill.

Bobby switched on one of the nightstand lamps.

The dead man was still nothing more than a man, and still dead, a ruined heap that didn’t bear close inspection.

Holstering the.38, Sasha turned away from the body and stood with her shoulders slumped, head hung, one hand covering her face, collecting herself.

The lamp featured a three-way switch, and Bobby clicked it to the lowest level of light. The shade was rose-colored silk, which left the room still mostly in shadow but bright enough to prevent us from succumbing to an attack of the brain twitches.

I spotted my flashlight on the floor, snatched it up, and jammed it under my belt again.

Trying to quiet my breathing, I went to the nearer of two windows. The drapes were a heavy tapestry, as thick as an elephant’s hide, with a blackout liner. This would have suppressed the sound of gunfire almost as effectively as the plush pillow through which Sasha had fired the revolver.

I pulled aside one drape and peered out at the lamplit street. No one was pointing or running toward the Stanwyk residence. No traffic had stopped in front of the house. In fact, the street appeared to be deserted.

As far as I can recall, none of us said anything until we were all the way downstairs and in the kitchen again, where the solemn cat was waiting for us in the light of the oil lamp. Perhaps we simply didn’t say anything memorable, but I think that we did, indeed, make our way through the house in numbed silence.

Bobby stripped off his Hawaiian shirt and black cotton pullover, which were damp with blood. Along his left side were four slashes, wounds inflicted by the cleric’s teratoid hand.

That was a useful word from my mom’s world of genetic science. It meant something monstrous, described an organism or a portion of an organism deformed because of damaged genetic material. As a kid, I was always interested in my mother’s research and theories, because she was, as she liked to put it, searching for God in the clockworks, which I thought must be the most important work anyone could do. But God prefers to see what we can make of ourselves on our own, and He doesn’t make it easy for us to find Him on this side of death. Along the way, when we think we’ve located the door behind which He waits, it opens not on anything divine but on something teratoid.

In the half bath adjoining the kitchen, Sasha found first-aid supplies and a bottle of aspirin.

Bobby stood at the kitchen sink, using a fresh dishcloth and liquid soap to clean his wounds, hissing between clenched teeth.

“Hurt?” I asked.

“No.”

“Bullshit.”

“You?”

“Bruises.”

The four cuts in his side weren’t deep, but they bled freely.

Roosevelt settled into a chair at the table. He’d gotten some ice cubes from the freezer and wrapped them in a dish towel. He held this compress to his left eye, which was swelling shut. Fortunately, the bud vase hadn’t shattered when it hit him, because otherwise he might have had splinters of porcelain in his eye.

“Bad?” I asked.

“Had worse.”

“Football?”

“Alex Karras.”

“Great player.”

“Big.”

“He run you down?”

“More than once.”

“Like a truck,” I suggested.

“A Mack. This was just a damn vase.”

Sasha saturated a cloth with hydrogen peroxide and pressed it repeatedly to Bobby’s wounds. Every time she took the cloth away, the shallow cuts bubbled furiously with bloody foam.

I couldn’t have ached in more places if I’d spent the past six hours tumbling around in an industrial clothes dryer.

I washed down two aspirin with a few sips of an Orange Crush that I found in the Stanwyks’ refrigerator. The can shook so badly that I drizzled more soda over my chin and clothes than I managed to drink — suggesting that my folks had been misguided when they allowed me to stop wearing a bib at the age of five.

After several applications of the peroxide, Sasha switched to rubbing alcohol and repeated the treatment. Bobby wasn’t bothering to hiss anymore; he was just grinding his teeth to dust. Finally, when he had ground away enough dental surface to be limited to a soft diet for life, she smeared the still-weeping wounds with Neosporin.

This extensive first aid was conducted without comment. We all knew why it was necessary to apply as many antibacteriological agents as possible to his wounds, and talking about it would only scare the crap out of us.

In the weeks and months to come, Bobby would be spending more time than usual in front of a mirror, checking himself out, and not because he was vain. He’d be more aware of his hands, too, watching for something…teratoid.

Roosevelt’s eye was swollen to a slit. Nevertheless, he still believed in the ice.

While Sasha finished wrapping Bobby’s cuts with gauze bandages, I found a chalk message slate and pegboard beside the door connecting the kitchen to the garage. Sets of car keys hung on the pegs. Sasha wouldn’t have to hot-wire a car, after all.

In the garage were a red Jaguar and a white Ford Expedition.

By flashlight, I lowered the rear seat in the Expedition to enlarge the cargo area. This would allow Roosevelt and Bobby to lie down, below window level. We might draw more attention as a group than Sasha would draw if she appeared to be alone.

Because Sasha knew exactly where we were going out on Haddenbeck Road, she would drive.

When Bobby entered the garage with Sasha and Roosevelt, he was wearing his pullover and Hawaiian shirt again, and moving somewhat stiffly.

“You be okay back here?” I asked, indicating the rear of the Expedition.

“I’ll grab some nap time.”

In the front passenger’s seat, when I slumped below the window line in a classic fugitive-on-the-lam posture, I became acutely aware of every contusion, neck to toe. But I was alive. Earlier, I’d been sure we wouldn’t all leave the Stanwyk house with beating hearts and brain activity, but I’d been wrong. When it comes to presentiments of disaster, perhaps cats know things, but Christopher Snow’s hunches can’t necessarily be trusted — which is comforting, actually.

When Sasha started the engine, Mungojerrie scrambled onto the console between the front seats. He sat erect, ears pricked, looking forward, like a misplaced hood ornament.

Sasha used a remote control to put up the electric garage door, and I said, “You okay?”

“No.”

“Good.”

I knew that she was physically unhurt and that her answer referred to her emotional state. Killing Tom Eliot, Sasha had done the only thing she could do, perhaps saving one or more of our lives while sparing the priest from a hideous frenzy of self-destruction, and yet the firing of those three shots had sickened her; now she was living under a grave weight of moral responsibility. Not guilt. She was smart enough to know that no guilt should attend what she’d done. But she also knew that even moral acts can have dimensions that scar the mind and wound the heart. If she had answered my question with a smile and assurances that she was fine, she would not have been the Sasha Goodall that I love, and I would have had reason to suspect that she was becoming.

We rode through Moonlight Bay in silence, each of us occupied with his or her own thoughts.

A couple miles from the Stanwyk house, the cat lost interest in the view through the windshield. He surprised me by stepping down onto my chest and peering into my eyes.

His green gaze was intense and unwavering, and I met it directly for an eerily long time, wondering what he might be thinking.

How radically different his thinking must be from ours, even if he shares our high level of intelligence. He experiences this world from a perspective nearly as unlike ours as our perspective would be unlike that of a being raised on another planet. He faces each day without carrying on his back the weight of human history, philosophy, triumph, tragedy, noble intentions, foolishness, greed, envy, and hubris; it must be liberating to be without that burden. He is both savage and civilized. He is closer to nature than we are; therefore, he has fewer illusions about it, knows that life is hard by design, that nature is beautiful but cold. And although Roosevelt says other cats of Mungojerrie’s breed escaped from Wyvern, their numbers cannot be large; while Mungojerrie isn’t as singular a specimen as Orson seems to be, and while cats by nature are more adaptable to solitude than dogs are, this small creature must at times know a profound loneliness.

When I began to pet him, Mungojerrie broke eye contact and curled up on my chest. He was a small, warm weight, and I could feel his heartbeat both against my body and under my stroking hand.

I am not an animal communicator, but I think I know why he led us into the Stanwyk house. We were not there to bear witness to the dead. We were there solely to do what needed to be done for Father Tom Eliot.

Since time immemorial, people have suspected that some animals have at least one sense in addition to our own. An awareness of things we do not see. A prescience.

Couple that special perception with intelligence, and suppose that with greater intelligence comes a more refined conscience. In passing the Stanwyk house, Mungojerrie might have sensed the mental anguish, the spiritual agony, and the emotional pain of Father Tom Eliot — and might have felt compelled to bring deliverance to that suffering man.

Or maybe I’m full of crap.

The possibility exists that I am both full of crap and right about Mungojerrie.

Cats know things.

23

Haddenbeck Road is a lonely stretch of two-lane blacktop that for a few miles runs due east, paralleling the southern perimeter of Fort Wyvern, but then strikes southeast, serving a score of ranches in the least populated portion of the county. Summer heat, winter rains, and California’s most violent weather — earthquakes — have left the pavement cracked, hoved, and ragged at the edges. Skirts of wild grass and, for a short while here in early spring, an embroidery of wildflowers separate the highway from the sensuously rolling fields that embrace it.

When we had traveled some distance without encountering oncoming headlights, Sasha suddenly braked to a halt and said, “Look at this.”

I sat up in full view, as did Roosevelt and Bobby, and surveyed the night around us in confusion as Sasha rammed the Expedition into reverse and backed up about twenty feet.

“Almost ran over them,” she said.

On the pavement ahead of us, revealed by the headlights, were enough snakes to fill the cages of every reptile house in every zoo in the country.

Leaning forward into the front seat, Bobby whistled softly and said, “Must be an open door to Hell around here somewhere.”

“All rattlers?” Roosevelt asked, taking the ice pack off his swollen eye, squinting for a better look.

“Hard to tell,” Sasha said. “But I think so.”

Mungojerrie stood with hind paws on my right knee, forepaws on the dashboard, head craned forward. He made one of those cat sounds that are half hiss, half growl, and all loathing.

Even from a distance of only twenty-five feet, it was impossible to make an accurate count of the number of serpents in the squirming mass on the highway, and I had no intention of wading in among them to take a reliable census. At a guess, there were as few as seventy or eighty, as many as a hundred.

In my experience, rattlesnakes are lone hunters and do not, as a matter of course, travel in groups. You’ll see them in numbers only if you’re unlucky enough to stumble into one of their nests — and few if any nests would contain this many individuals.

The behavior of these serpents was even stranger than the fact that they were gathering here in the open. They twined over and under and around one another, in a slowly seething sinuous mass, and from among these slippery braids, eight or ten heads rose at any one time, weaving two, three, four feet into the air, with jaws cracked, fangs bared, tongues flickering, then shrank back into the scaly swarm as new and equally wicked-looking heads rose from the roiling multitude, one set of sentinels replacing another.

It was as if the Medusa, of classic Grecian myth, were lying on Haddenbeck Road, napping, while her elaborate coiffure of serpents groomed itself.

“You going to drive through that?” I asked.

“Rather not,” Sasha said.

“Close the vents, crank this buggy up to warp speed,” Bobby said, “and take us for a ride on the rattlesnake road.”

Roosevelt said, “My mama always says, ‘Patience pays.’”

“The snakes aren’t here because we are,” I said. “They don’t care about us. They aren’t blocking us. We just happened to come through here at the wrong time. They’ll move on, probably sooner than later.”

Bobby patted my shoulder. “Roosevelt’s mom is a lot more succinct than you are, dude.”

Every snake that rose into sentry position from the churning host immediately focused its attention on us. Depending on the angle at which the headlamps caught them, their eyes brightened and flared red or silver, less often green, like small jewels.

I assumed that the light drew their interest. Desert rattlers, like most snakes, are nearly as deaf as dirt. Their vision is good, especially at night, when their slit-shaped pupils dilate to expose more of their sensitive retinas. Their sense of smell may not be as powerful as that of a dog, since they’re seldom called upon to track down escaped prisoners or to sniff out dope in smugglers’ luggage; however, in addition to a good nose, a snake has a second organ of smell — Jacobson’s organ, consisting of two pouches lined with sensory tissue — located in the roof of the mouth. That’s why a serpent’s forked tongue flicks ceaselessly: It licks microscopic particles of odor from the air, conveying these clusters of molecules to the pouches in its mouth, to savor and analyze them. Now these rattlers were busily licking the air for our scents to determine if suitably delicious prey might be found behind the headlights.

I’ve learned a great deal about desert rattlesnakes, with which I share the earlier — and warmer — part of the night. In spite of their evil appearance, they possess a compelling beauty.

Weird became weirder when one of the weaving sentries abruptly reared back and struck at another that had risen beside it. The bitten rattler bit back; the two coiled around each other and then dropped to the pavement. The flexuous swarm closed over them, and for a minute, turmoil swept through the braided multitude, which writhed not languorously, as before, but in a frenzy, as supple and quick as lashing whips, twisting and coiling excitedly, as though the urge to bite their own had spread beyond the angry pair we’d seen strike each other, briefly sparking civil war within the colony.

As the slithery horde grew calmer again, Sasha said, “Do snakes usually bite one another?”

“Probably not,” I said.

“Wouldn’t think they’d be vulnerable to their own venom,” said Roosevelt, returning the ice pack to his left eye.

“Well,” Bobby said, “if we’re ever condemned to live through high school again, maybe we can make a science project out of that question.”

Again, one of the rearing rattlers, weaving above the rest and licking the air for prey, struck at another of the sentries, and then a third grew agitated enough to strike the first. The trio raveled down into the swarm, and another siege of spastic thrashing whipped through the undulant masses.

“It’s the birds again,” I said. “The coyotes.”

“The folks at the Stanwyks’,” Roosevelt added.

“Psychological implosion,” Sasha said.

“I don’t suppose a snake has much of a psyche to be logical about,” Bobby said, “but yeah, it sure looks like part of the same phenomenon.”

“They’re moving,” Roosevelt noted.

Indeed, the squirming legions were, so to speak, on the march. They began to move across the two-lane blacktop, across the narrow dirt shoulder, vanishing into the tall grass and wildflowers to the right of the highway.

The complete procession, however, consisted of more than the eighty or one hundred specimens that we had been watching. As scores of snakes disappeared into the grass beyond the right-hand shoulder, scores of others appeared out of the field to the left of Haddenbeck Road, as if they were pouring out of a perpetual-motion, snake-making machine.

Perhaps three or four hundred rattlers, increasingly quarrelsome and agitated, crossed into the southern wilds before the blacktop was clear at last. When they were gone, when not a single wriggling form remained on the highway, we sat in silence for a moment, blinking, as if we had awakened from a dream.

Mom, I love you, and I always will. But what the hell were you thinking?

Sasha shifted gears and drove forward.

Mungojerrie made that sound of loathing again. He changed positions in my lap, so his forepaws were on the door, and he gazed out the side window, at the dark fields into which the serpent horde had slithered toward whatever oblivion it was seeking.

A mile later, we reached Crow Hill, beyond which Doogie Sassman should be waiting for us. Unless the snakes had crossed his path before they crossed ours.

I don’t know why Crow Hill is named Crow Hill. The shape of it in no way suggests the bird, nor do crows tend to flock there more than elsewhere. The name isn’t in honor of a prominent local family or even a colorful scoundrel. Crow Indians are located in Montana, not California. No crowfoot grows there. And history has no record of braggarts regularly trekking to the top of this mound to gloat and boast.

At the crown of the hill, an enormous outcropping of rock rises from the surrounding gentle contours of the loamy land, a solitary gray-white knob like a partially exposed bone in the skeleton of a buried behemoth. Carved on one face of this monument is the figure of a crow, which is not, as I once thought, the source of the name. Crude but intriguing, this carving captures the cockiness of the bird yet somehow has an ominous quality, as though it is the totem of a murderous clan, a warning to travelers to find a route around their territory or risk dire consequences. On a July night forty-four years ago, the image of the crow was scored into the stone by a person — or persons — unknown. Until curiosity had led me to learn the origins of the carving, I’d assumed that it dated from another century, that perhaps it had been chiseled into the rock even before Europeans set foot on this continent. There is a disquieting aspect to the image of the crow, a quality that speaks to mystics, who have been known to travel considerable distances to view and touch it. Old-timers say this place has been called Crow Hill since at least the time of their grandparents, however, and references in time-yellowed public records confirm their claim. The carving seems to embody some primitive knowledge long lost to civilized man, yet the name of the hill predates it, and evidently the anonymous carver meant only to create a pictorial landmark sign.

This image was not like the bird on the message left with Lilly Wing, except that both seemed to radiate malevolence. As Charlie Dai had described them, the crows — or ravens, or blackbirds — left at the scenes of the other abductions were also unlike this carving. Charlie would have remarked on the resemblance if there had been one.

Nevertheless, the coincidence was creepy.

As we approached the crest, the crow in the stone appeared to be watching us. The raised planes of the bird’s body reflected white in the headlights, while shadows filled the deep lines that had been cut by the carver’s tools. This was a colloidal stone, and chips of some shiny aggregate — perhaps nuggets of mica — were scattered through it. The carving had been artfully composed to position the largest of these chips as the eye of the bird, which was now filled with an imitation of animal eyeshine and with a peculiar quality that some visiting mystics insist is forbidden knowledge, although I’ve never understood how an inanimate hunk of rock can have knowledge.

I noticed that everyone in the Expedition, including the cat, regarded the stone crow with an uneasy expression.

As we drove past this figure, the shadows in the chiseled lines should have shrunk from us in the rapidly diminishing light, as the entire carving settled into darkness. But unless my eyes deceived me, for an instant the shadows elongated, violating the laws of physics, as if trying to follow the light. And as the crow disappeared into the night behind us, I could have sworn the shadow pulled loose of the stone and took flight as though it were a real bird.

As we headed down the eastern slope of Crow Hill, I restrained myself from remarking on the unnerving flight of the shadow, but Bobby said, “I don’t like this place.”

“Me neither,” Roosevelt agreed.

“Ditto,” I said.

Bobby said, “Humankind wasn’t meant to travel this far from the beach.”

“Yeah,” Sasha said, “we’re probably getting dangerously close to the edge of the earth.”

“Exactly,” Bobby said.

“You ever see any of those maps from the time when they thought the earth was flat?” I asked.

Bobby said, “Oh, I see, you’re one of those round-earth kooks.”

“The mapmakers actually showed the edge of the earth, the sea just cascading into an abyss, and sometimes they lettered a warning across the void: ‘Here there be monsters.’”

After a brief but deep group silence, Bobby said, “Bad choice of historical trivia, bro.”

“Yeah,” Sasha said, gradually slowing the Expedition as she peered into the dark fields north of Haddenbeck Road, evidently looking for Doogie Sassman. “Don’t you know any amusing anecdotes about Marie Antoinette at the guillotine?”

“That’s the stuff!” Bobby agreed.

Roosevelt darkened the mood by communicating what didn’t need to be communicated: “Mr. Mungojerrie says the crow flew off the rock.”

“With all due respect,” Bobby said, “Mr. Mungojerrie is just a fuckin’ cat.”

Roosevelt seemed to listen to a voice beyond our hearing. Then: “Mungojerrie says he may be just a fuckin’ cat, but that puts him two steps up the social ladder from a boardhead.”

Bobby laughed. “He didn’t say that.”

“No other cat here,” Roosevelt said.

“You said that,” Bobby accused.

“Not me,” Roosevelt said. “I don’t use that kind of language.”

“The cat?” Bobby said skeptically.

“The cat,” Roosevelt insisted.

“Bobby’s only a recent believer in all this smart-animal stuff,” I told Roosevelt.

“Hey, cat,” Bobby said.

Mungojerrie turned in my lap to look back at Bobby.

Bobby said, “You’re all right, dude.”

Mungojerrie raised one forepaw.

After a moment, Bobby caught on. His face bright with wonder, he extended his right hand across the back of my seat. He and the cat gave each other a gentle high five.

Good work, Mom, I thought. Very nice. Let’s just hope when all is said and done, we end up with more smart cats than crazed reptiles.

“Here we are,” Sasha said as we reached the bottom of the hill.

She shifted the Expedition into four-wheel drive and turned north off the highway, driving slowly because she had doused the headlights and was guided only by the much dimmer parking lights.

We crossed a lush meadow, wove through a stand of live oaks, approached the boundary fence surrounding Fort Wyvern, and stopped beside the largest sports utility vehicle I had ever seen. This black Hummer, the civilian version of the military’s Humvee, had undergone customization after being driven off the showroom floor. It featured oversize tires and sat even higher on them than did a standard model, and it had been stretched by the addition of a few feet to its cargo space.

Sasha switched off the lights and the engine, and we got out of the Expedition.

Mungojerrie clung to me as though he thought I might put him down on the ground. I understood his concern. The grass was knee-high. Even in daylight, you’d have difficulty spotting a snake before it struck, especially considering how fast a motivated serpent can move. When Roosevelt reached out, I handed the cat to him.

The driver’s door opened on the Hummer, and Doogie Sassman got out to greet us, like a steroid-hammered Santa Claus climbing out of a Pentagon-designed sleigh. He closed the door behind him to kill the cabin light.

At five feet eleven, Doogie Sassman is five inches shorter than Roosevelt Frost, but he is the only man I’ve ever known who can make Roosevelt appear to be petite. The sass man enjoys no more than a hundred-pound advantage on Roosevelt, but I’ve never seen a hundred pounds used to better effect. He seems to be not merely forty percent larger than Roosevelt, but twice as large, more than twice, and taller even though he isn’t, a true leviathan on land, a guy who might discuss the techniques of city destruction over lunch with Godzilla.

Doogie carries his massive weight with unearthly grace and does not appear to be fat. All right, Doogie does look big, très mondo, mondo maximo, but he’s not soft. You get the impression that he’s made of animate concrete, impervious to arteriosclerosis, bullets, and time. There’s something about Doogie that’s every bit as mystical as the stone crow at the top of Crow Hill.

Maybe his hair and beard contribute to the impression that he’s an incarnation of Thor, the god of thunder and rain once worshipped in ancient Scandinavia, where they now worship cheesy pop stars like everyone else. His untamed blond hair, so thick that it offends the sensibilities of Hare Krishnas, hangs to the middle of his back, and his beard is so lush and wavy that he couldn’t possibly shave it off with anything less than a lawn mower. Great hair can radically enhance a man’s aura of power — as witness those who have been elected to the presidency of the United States with no other qualifications — and I’m sure Doogie’s hair and beard have more than a little to do with the supernatural impression that he makes, though the real mystery of him cannot be explained by hair, size, the elaborate tattoos that cover his body, or his gas-flame blue eyes.

This night he wore a zippered black jumpsuit tucked into black boots, which should have made him look like a Brob-dingnagian baby in Dr. Denton pajamas. Instead, he had the presence of a guy who might be called down to Hell by Satan to unclog a furnace chimney choked with the gnarled and half-burnt contentious souls of ten serial killers.

Bobby greeted him: “Hey, sass man.”

“Bobster,” Doogie replied.

“Cool wheels,” I said admiringly.

“It kicks ass,” he acknowledged.

Roosevelt said, “Thought you were all Harleys.”

“Doogie,” Sasha said, “is a man of many conveyances.”

“I am a wheel-o-maniac,” he admitted. “What happened to your eye, Rosie?”

“In a fight with a priest.”

The eye was better, still swollen but not to such a tight slit. The ice had worked.

“We ought to get moving,” Sasha said. “It’s weird out here tonight, Doogie.”

He agreed. “I’ve been hearing coyotes like no coyotes I’ve ever heard before.”

Bobby, Sasha, and I looked at one another. I recalled Sasha’s prediction that we hadn’t seen the last of the pack that had come out of the canyon beyond Lilly Wing’s house.

The cathedral-quiet fields and hills lay under a shrouded sky, and the breeze from the west was as feeble as the breath of a dying nun. In the live oaks behind us, the leaves whispered only slightly louder than memory, and the tall grass barely stirred.

Doogie led us around to the back of the customized Hummer and opened the tailgate. The interior light was not as bright as usual, because half the fixture was masked with electrician’s black tape, but even the reduced illumination was a beacon in these star-denied, moon-starved grasslands.

Just inside the tailgate were two shotguns. They were pistol-grip, pump-action Remingtons even sweeter than the classic Mossberg that Manuel Ramirez had confiscated from Bobby’s Jeep.

Doogie said, “I don’t think either of you boardheads is likely to shoot a hole in a silver dollar with a handgun, so these suit you better. I know you’re shotgun-familiar. But you’ll be using magnum loads, so be prepared for the kick. With this punch and spread, you buckaroos don’t have to worry about aiming, and you’ll stop just about anything.”

He handed one shotgun to Bobby, the other to me, and also gave each of us a box of ammunition.

“Load up, then distribute the rest of the shells in your jacket pockets,” he said. “Don’t leave any in the box. The last shell can be the one that saves your ass.” He looked at Sasha, smiled, and said, “Like Colombia.”

“Colombia?” I asked.

“We did some business there once,” Sasha said.

Doogie had lived in Moonlight Bay six years, and Sasha had been here two. I wondered if this business trip had been recent or before either of them settled in the Jewel of the Central Coast. I had been under the impression that they had met at KBAY.

“Colombia, the country?” Bobby asked.

“Not the record company,” Doogie assured him.

“Tell me not drugs,” Bobby said.

Doogie shook his head. “Rescue operation.”

Sasha’s smile was enigmatic. “Interested in the past, after all, Snowman?”

“Right now, just the future.”

Turning to Roosevelt, Doogie said, “I didn’t realize you’d be coming, so I don’t have a weapon for you.”

“I’ve got the cat,” Roosevelt said.

“Killer.”

Mungojerrie hissed.

The hiss reminded me of the snakes. I looked around nervously, wondering if the loco reptiles we had seen earlier would give us the courtesy of a warning rattle.

Closing the tailgate, Doogie said, “Let’s rock.”

In addition to the cargo area just inside the tailgate — which contained a pair of five-gallon fuel cans, two cardboard boxes, and a well-stuffed backpack — the customized Hummer provided seating for eight. Behind the pair of bucket-style front seats were two bench seats, each capable of accommodating three grown men, although not three as well grown as Doogie.

Thor Incarnate drove, and Roosevelt rode shotgun, figuratively speaking, holding our long-tailed tracker in his lap. Immediately behind them, I sat with Bobby and Sasha on the first bench seat.

“Why aren’t we going into Wyvern by the river?” Bobby wondered.

“The only way to get down to the Santa Rosita,” Doogie said, “is on one of the levee ramps in town. But tonight the town’s crawling with a bad element.”

“Anchovies,” Bobby translated.

“We’d be spotted and stopped,” Sasha said.

With the way illuminated only by its parking lights, the Hummer passed through a huge hole in the fence, where the ragged edges of the flanking panels of chain-link were as snarled as masses of string left with a playful kitten.

“You cut this open all by yourself?” I asked.

“Shaped charge,” Doogie said.

“Explosives?”

“Just a little boom plastic.”

“Didn’t that draw attention?”

“Shape the charge in a thin line, where you want the links to pop, and you’re using so little it’s like one really big beat on a bass drum.”

“Even if someone’s close enough to hear,” Sasha said, “it’s over so quick, he’d never get a fix on the direction.”

Bobby said, “Radio engineering requires way more cool skills than I thought.”

Doogie asked where we were headed, and I described the cluster of warehouses in the southwest quadrant of the base, where I had last seen Orson. He seemed familiar with the layout of Fort Wyvern, because he needed few directions.

We parked near the big roll-up door. The man-size door beside the larger entrance stood open, as I had left it the previous night.

I got out of the Hummer, carrying my shotgun. Roosevelt and Mungojerrie joined me, while the others waited in the vehicle in order not to distract the cat in his efforts to pick up the trail.

Pooled with shadows, smelling vaguely of oil and grease, home to weeds that sprouted from fissures in the blacktop, littered with empty oil cans and with assorted paper trash and leaves deposited by the previous night’s wind, surrounded by the corrugated-steel facades of the hulking warehouses, this serviceway had never been a festive place, not a prime venue for a royal wedding, but now the atmosphere was downright sinister.

Last night, the stocky abb with the close-cropped black hair, aware that Orson and I were close behind him in the Santa Rosita, must have used a cell phone to call for assistance — perhaps from the tall, blond, athletic guy with the puckered scar on his left cheek, who had snatched the Stuart twins only hours before. He had handed Jimmy off to someone, anyway, and then had led Orson and me into the warehouse, with the intention of killing me there.

From an inside jacket pocket, I withdrew the tightly wadded top of Jimmy Wing’s cotton pajamas, with which the abb had confused the scent trail. To be fair to Orson, who had been briefly baffled but never entirely misled, I was the one suckered into the warehouse by odd noises and a muffled voice.

The garment seemed so small, almost like doll’s clothing.

“I don’t know if this helps,” I said. “Cats aren’t bloodhounds, after all.”

“We’ll see,” Roosevelt said.

Mungojerrie sniffed the pajama top delicately but with interest. Then he took a tour of the immediate area, smelling the pavement, an empty oil can, which made him sneeze, and the tiny yellow flowers on a weed, which made him sneeze again and more vigorously. He returned for a brief inhalation of the garment, and then he tracked a scent along the pavement once more, moving in a widening spiral, from time to time lifting his head to savor the air, all the while appearing suitably quizzical. He padded to the warehouse, where he raised one leg and relieved himself against the concrete foundation, sniffed the deposit he had made, returned for another whiff of the pajama top, spent half a minute investigating an old rusted socket wrench lying on the pavement, paused to scratch behind his right ear with one paw, returned to the weed with the yellow flowers, sneezed, and had just risen to the top of my List of People or Animals I Most Want to Choke Senseless, when he suddenly went rigid, turned his green eyes toward our animal communicator, and hissed.

“He’s got it,” Roosevelt said.

Mungojerrie hurried along the serviceway, and we set out after him. Bobby joined us on foot, armed with his shotgun, while Doogie and Sasha followed in the Hummer.

Taking a different route from the one I’d chosen the previous night, we proceeded along a blacktop road, across an athletic field gone to weeds, across a dusty parade ground, between ranks of badly weathered barracks, through a residential neighborhood of Dead Town that I had never explored, where the cottages and bungalows were identical to those on other streets, and overland again, to another service area. After more than half an hour at a brisk pace, we arrived at the last place I wanted to go: the huge, seven-story, Quonset-roofed hangar, as large as a football field, that stands like an alien temple above the egg room.

As it became clear where we were headed, I decided it wouldn’t be wise to drive up to the entrance, because the Hummer’s engine was noticeably less quiet than the mechanism of a Swiss watch. I waved Doogie toward a passageway between two of the many smaller service buildings that surrounded the giant structure, about a hundred yards from our ultimate destination.

When Doogie killed the engine and the parking lights, the Hummer all but vanished in this nook.

As we gathered behind the vehicle to study the enormous hangar from a distance, the dead night began to breathe. A few miles to the west, the Pacific had exhaled a cool breeze, which now caused a loose sheet-metal panel to vibrate in a nearby roof.

I recalled Roosevelt’s words, relayed from Mungojerrie, outside the Stanwyk house: Death lives here. I was getting identical but much stronger vibes from the hangar. If Death lived at the Stanwyk place, that was only his pied-à-terre. Here was his primary residence.

“This can’t be right,” I said hopefully.

“They’re in that place,” Roosevelt insisted.

“But we were here last night,” Bobby protested. “They weren’t in the damn place last night.”

Roosevelt scooped up the cat, stroked the furry head, chucked the mungo man under the chin, murmured to him, and said, “They were here then, the cat says, and they’re here now.”

Bobby scowled. “This reeks.”

“Like a Calcutta sewer,” I agreed.

“No, trust me,” Doogie said. “A Calcutta sewer is in a class all by itself.”

I decided not to pursue the obvious question.

Instead, I said, “If these kids were snatched just to be studied and tested, snatched because their blood samples indicate they’re somehow immune to the retrovirus, then they must have been taken to the genetics lab. Wherever that may be, it isn’t here.”

Roosevelt said, “According to Mungojerrie, the lab he came from is far to the east, in what appears to be open land, where they once had an artillery range. It’s very deep underground, hidden out there. But Jimmy, at least, is here. And Orson.”

After a hesitation, I said, “Alive?”

Roosevelt said, “Mungojerrie doesn’t know.”

“Cats know things,” Sasha reminded him.

“Not this thing,” Roosevelt said.

As we stared at the hangar, I’m sure each of us was remembering Delacroix’s audiotape testimony about the Mystery Train. Red sky. Black trees. A fluttering within…

Doogie removed the backpack from the Hummer, slipped it over his shoulders, closed the tailgate, and said, “Let’s go.”

During the brief time that the cargo-hold light was on, I saw the weapon he was carrying. It was a wicked-looking piece.

Aware of my interest, he said, “Uzi machine pistol. Extended magazine.”

“Is that legal?”

“It would be if it wasn’t converted to full automatic fire.”

Doogie headed toward the hangar. With the breeze stirring his blond mane and wavy beard, he looked like a Viking warrior leaving a conquered village, heading toward a longboat with a bag of plundered valuables on his back. All he needed to complete the image was a horned helmet.

Into my mind’s eye came an image of Doogie in a tuxedo and such a helmet, leading a supermodel through a perfect tango in a dance competition.

There are two faces to the coin of my rich imagination.

The man-size door, inset in one of the forty-foot-high steel hangar doors, was closed. I couldn’t remember whether Bobby and I had shut it on our way out the night before. Probably not. We hadn’t been in a clean-up-after-yourself, turn-out-the-lights-and-close-the-door mood when we’d fled this place.

At the door, Doogie extracted two flashlights from jumpsuit pockets and gave them to Sasha and Roosevelt, so that Bobby and I would have both hands free for the shotguns.

Doogie tried the door. It opened inward.

Sasha’s crossing-the-threshold technique was even smoother than her on-air patter at KBAY. She moved to the left of the door before she switched on the light and swept the beam across the cavernous hangar, which was too large to be entirely within the reach of any flashlight. But she didn’t shoot at anyone, and no one shot at her, so it seemed likely that our presence was not yet known.

Bobby followed her, shotgun at the ready. With the cat in his arms, Roosevelt entered after Bobby. I followed, and Doogie brought up the rear, quietly closing the door behind us, as we had found it.

I looked expectantly at Roosevelt.

He stroked the cat and whispered, “We’ve got to go down.”

Because I knew the way, I led the group. Second star to the right, and straight on till morning. Watch out for the pirates and the crocodile with the ticking clock inside.

We crossed the vast room under the tracks that once supported a mobile crane, past the massive steel supports that held up these rails, moving cautiously around the deep wells in the floor, where hydraulic mechanisms had once been housed.

As we progressed, swords of shadow and sabers of light leaped off the elevated steel crane rails and silently fenced with one another across the walls and the curved ceiling. Most of the high clerestory windows were broken out, but reflections flared in the remaining few, like white sparks from clashing blades.

Suddenly I was halted by a sense of wrongness I can’t adequately describe: a change in the air too subtle to define; a mild tingle on my face; a quivering of the hairs in my ear canals, as if they were vibrating to a sound beyond my range of hearing.

Sasha and Roosevelt must have felt it, too, because they turned in circles, searching with their flashlights.

Doogie held the Uzi pistol in both hands.

Bobby was near one of the cylindrical steel posts that supported the crane tracks. He reached out, touched it, and whispered, “Bro.”

As I moved to his side, I heard a ringing so faint that I could not hold fast to the sound, which repeatedly came and went. When I put my fingertips against the post, I detected vibrations passing through the steel.

Abruptly, the air temperature changed. The hangar had been unpleasantly cool, almost cold; but from one instant to the next, it became fifteen or twenty degrees warmer. This would have been impossible even if the building had still contained a heating plant, which it did not.

Sasha, Doogie, and Roosevelt joined Bobby and me, instinctively forming a circle to guard against a threat from any direction.

The vibrations in the post grew stronger.

I looked toward the east end of the hangar. The door by which we had entered was about twenty yards away. The flashlights were able to reach that far, though they couldn’t chase away all the shadows. In that direction, I could see to the end of the shorter length of the overhead crane tracks, and all seemed as it had been when we’d first come into the building.

The flashlights were not able to probe to the west end of the structure, however; it lay at least eighty and perhaps as much as a hundred yards away. As far as I could see, there was nothing out of the ordinary.

What bothered me was the unyielding blackness in the last twenty or thirty yards. Not seamless blackness. Many shades of black and deepest grays, a montage of shadows.

I had an impression of a large, looming object concealed in that montage. A towering and complex shape. Something black and gray, so well camouflaged in the gloom that the eye couldn’t quite seize upon the outline of it.

Bobby whispered, “Sasha, your light. Here.”

She directed it where he pointed, at the floor.

The light gleamed off one of the inch-thick steel angle plates anchored to the concrete, where heavy machinery had once been mounted. These prickled up from the floor at many points in the room.

I didn’t understand why Bobby had called our attention to this unremarkable object.

“Clean,” he said.

Then I understood. When we had been here last night — in fact, on every occasion that I had passed through this hangar — these angle plates and the bolts holding them down had been smeared with grease and caked with dirt. This one was shiny, clean, as though someone had recently done maintenance on it.

Holding the cat in one arm, Roosevelt moved his light across the floor, up the steel post, across the tracks above us.

“Everything’s cleaner,” Doogie murmured, and he meant not since last night but just since we had entered the hangar.

Though I’d taken my hand off the post, I knew the vibrations in the steel had increased, because I could hear that faint ringing coming from the entire double colonnade that flanked us and from the tracks that the columns supported.

I looked toward the far, dark end of the building, and I swore that something immense was moving in the gloom.

“Bro!” Bobby said.

I glanced at him.

He was gaping at his wristwatch.

I checked mine and saw the digital readouts racing backward.

Sudden fear, like cold rain, washed through me.

A strange muddy red light rose throughout the hangar, evenly distributed, with no apparent source, as if the very molecules of the air had become radiant. Perhaps it was a dangerous light to an XPer like me, but this seemed the least of my troubles at the moment. The red air shimmered, and though the darkness retreated across the entire building, visibility hardly improved. This odd light cloaked as much as it revealed, and I felt almost as if I were underwater, in a drowned world…in water tinted with blood.

The flashlight beams were no longer effective. The light that they produced seemed to be trapped behind the lenses, pooling there, rapidly growing brighter and brighter, but unable to pass beyond the glass and penetrate the red air.

Here and there beyond the colonnades, dark forms began to quiver into existence where there had been nothing but bare floor. Machines of some kind. They looked real and yet not real, like objects in a mirage. Phantom machines at the moment…but becoming real.

The vibrations were getting louder, and their tone was changing, growing deeper, more ominous. A rumbling.

At the west end of the room, where there had been a troubling darkness, there was now a crane atop the tracks, and hanging from the boom was a massive… something. An engine, perhaps.

Though I could see the shape of the crane in the dire red light, as well as the object that it was lifting, I could also see through them, as if they were made of glass.

In the low rumbling that had grown out of the faint high-pitched ringing in the steel, I recognized the sound of train wheels, steel wheels revolving, grinding along steel tracks.

The crane would have steel wheels. Guide wheels above the track, upstop wheels below to lock it to the rails.

“…out of the way,” Bobby said, and when I looked at him, he was moving, as if in slo-mo, out from beneath the tracks, sliding around a support post with his back pressed to it.

Roosevelt, as wide-eyed as the cat he held, was on the move.

The crane was more solid than it had been a moment ago, less transparent. The big engine — or whatever the crane was transporting — hung from the end of the boom, below the tracks; this payload was the size of a compact car, and it was going to sweep through the space where we were standing as the crane rolled past overhead.

And here it came, moving faster than such a massive piece of equipment could possibly move, because it wasn’t really physically coming toward us; rather, I think that time was running backward to the moment when we and this equipment would be occupying the same space at the same instant. Hell, it didn’t matter whether it was the crane moving or time moving, because either way the effect would be the same: Two bodies can’t occupy the same place at the same time. If they tried, either there would be a fierce release of nuclear energy in a blast heard at least as far away as Cleveland, or one of the competing bodies — me or the car-size object dangling from the crane — would cease to exist.

Although I started to move, grabbing at Sasha to pull her with me, I knew that we had no hope of getting out of harm’s way in time.

Time.

As we reeled toward a moment in the past when the hangar had been filled with functional equipment, just as the oncoming crane appeared about to click into total reality…the temperature suddenly dropped. The muddy red light faded. The rumble of big steel wheels became a higher-pitched ringing.

I expected the crane to retreat, to roll back toward the west end of the building as it grew less substantial. When I looked up, however, it was passing over us, a shimmering mirage of a crane, and the burden that it carried, which was once more as transparent as glass, hit Sasha, then hit me.

Hit isn’t the correct word. I don’t really know what it did to me. The ghost crane swept past overhead, and the ghost payload enveloped me, passed through me, and vanished on the other side of me. A cold wind briefly shook me. But it didn’t even stir my hair. It was entirely internal, an icy breath whistling between my very cells, playing my bones as if they were flutes. For an instant I thought it would blow apart the bonds among the molecules of which I’m composed, dispersing me as though I’d never been anything but dust.

The last of the red light vanished, and the pent-up beams sprang out of the flashlights.

I was still alive, glued together both physically and mentally.

Sasha gasped: “Raw!”

“Killer,” I agreed.

Shaken, she leaned against one of the track-support columns.

Doogie had been standing no more than six feet behind me. He had watched the ghost payload pass through us and vanish before it reached him.

“Time to go home?” he wondered only half jokingly.

“Need a glass of warm milk?”

“And six Prozac.”

“Welcome to the haunted laboratory,” I said.

Joining us, Bobby said, “Whatever was going on in the egg room last night, it’s affecting the entire building now.”

“Because of us?” I wondered.

“We didn’t build the place, bro.”

“But did we start it up last night, by energizing it?”

“I don’t think, just because we used two flashlights, we’re major villains here.”

Roosevelt said, “We’ve got to move fast. The whole place is…coming apart.”

“Is that what Mungojerrie thinks?” Sasha asked.

In ordinary times, Roosevelt Frost could fix you with a solemn look that any undertaker would envy. With one eye still full of dark amazement at what he had just seen, and with the other eye swollen half shut and shot through with blood, he made me think I’d better pack my bags and get ready to meet that glory-bound train.

He said, “It’s not what Mr. Mungojerrie thinks. It’s what he knows. Everything here is going to… come apart. Soon.”

“Then let’s go down and find the kids and Orson.”

Roosevelt nodded. “Let’s go down.”

24

In the southwest corner of the hangar, the empty elevator shaft was as it had been the previous night. But the stainless-steel jamb and threshold at the stairhead doorway — overlooked by salvagers — were free of grease and dust, which they had not been at any time since I first explored this structure, nearly a year earlier. In the beam from Sasha’s flashlight, the first several steps were not covered in dust any longer, and the dead pill bugs were gone.

Either a kindly gnome was preceding us, making the world more pleasing to the eye, or the phenomena that Bobby and I had witnessed in the egg room, one night before, were leaching beyond the walls of that mysterious chamber. My money was not on the gnome.

Mungojerrie stood on the second step, peering down the concrete stairwell, sniffing the air, ears pricked. Then he descended.

Sasha followed the cat.

The stairs were wide enough for two people to walk abreast, with room to spare, and I stayed at Sasha’s side, relieved to be sharing the point-position risk with her. Roosevelt followed, then Doogie with the Uzi. Bobby was our tail gunner, keeping his back to one wall, crabbing sideways down the stairs, to make sure no one crept in behind us.

Aside from being suspiciously clean, the first flight of steps was as it had been on my previous visit. Bare concrete on all sides. Evenly spaced core holes in the ceiling, which had once been the end points of electrical chaseways. Painted iron pipe attached to one wall, as a handrail. The air was cold, thick, redolent with the scent of lime that leached from the concrete.

When we reached the landing and turned toward the second flight, I put one hand on Sasha’s arm, halting her, and to our feline scout I whispered, “Whoa, cat.”

Mungojerrie halted four steps into the next flight and, with an expectant expression, looked up at us.

The ceiling ahead was fitted with fluorescent fixtures. Because these lights weren’t switched on, they posed no danger to me.

But they hadn’t been here before. They had been torn out and carted away when Fort Wyvern shut down. In fact, this particular structure might have been scoured to the bare concrete long before the base was closed, when the Mystery Train ran off the tracks and scared its designers into the realization that their project had been pursued with a truly loco motive.

Time past and time present existed here simultaneously, and our future was here, too, though we could not see it. All time, said the poet T. S. Eliot, is eternally present, leading inexorably to an end that we believe results from our actions but over which our control is mere illusion.

At the moment, that bit of Eliot was too bleak for me. While I studied the fluorescent lights, trying to imagine what might wait ahead of us, I mentally recited the initial couplet of the first-ever poetry about Winnie-the-Pooh—“A bear, however hard he tries / Grows tubby without exercise”—but A. A. Milne failed to drive Eliot from my mind.

We could no more retreat from the dangers below, from this eerie confusion of past and present, than I could return to my childhood. Nevertheless, how lovely it would be to crawl under the covers with my own Pooh and Tigger, and pretend that the three of us would be friends, still, when I was a hundred and Pooh was ninety-nine.

“Okay,” I told Mungojerrie, and we continued our descent.

When we reached the next landing, which was at the doorway to the first of the three subterranean levels, Bobby whispered, “Bro.”

I looked back. The fluorescent-light fixtures above the steps behind us had vanished. The concrete ceiling featured only cored holes from which the fixtures and the wiring had been stripped.

Time present was again more present than time past, at least for the moment.

Scowling, Doogie murmured, “Give me Colombia anytime.”

“Or Calcutta,” Sasha said.

On behalf of Mungojerrie, Roosevelt said, “Got to hurry. Going to be blood if we don’t hurry.”

Led by the fearless cat, we slowly descended four more flights, to the third and final level beneath the hangar.

We found no additional indications of hobgoblins or bugaboos until we reached the bottom of the stairwell. As Mungojerrie was about to lead us into the outer corridor that encircles this entire oval-shaped level of the building, the muddy red light that we had first seen on the ground floor of the hangar pulsed beyond the doorway. It lasted only an instant and then was replaced by darkness.

A general dismay rose from our little group, mostly expressed in whispered expletives, and the cat hissed.

Other voices echoed from somewhere in this sub-subbasement, deep and distorted. They were like the voices on a tape played at too slow a speed.

Sasha and Roosevelt switched off their flashlights, leaving us in gloom.

Beyond the doorway, the bloody glow pulsed again, and then several more times, like the revolving emergency beacon on a police cruiser. Each pulse was longer than the one before it, until the darkness in the hallway retreated entirely and the eerie luminosity finally held fast.

The voices were growing louder. They were still distorted, but almost intelligible.

Curiously, not one scintilla of the malign red light in the corridor penetrated to the space at the bottom of the stairs, where we huddled together. The doorway appeared to be a portal between two realities: utter darkness on this side, the red world on the other side. The line of bloody light along the floor, at the threshold, was as sharp as a knife edge.

As in the hangar upstairs, this radiance brightened the space it filled but did little to illuminate what it touched: a murky light, alive with phantom shapes and movement that could be detected only from the corner of the eye, creating more mysteries than it resolved.

Three tall figures passed the doorway, darker maroon shapes in the red light, perhaps men but possibly something even worse. As these individuals crossed our line of sight, the voices grew louder and less distorted, then faded as the figures moved out of view along the hall.

Mungojerrie padded through the doorway.

I expected him to flare as if sizzled by a death ray, leaving no trace behind except the stink of scorched fur. Instead, he became a small maroon shape, elongated, distorted, not easily identifiable as a cat even though you could tell that he had four feet, a tail, and attitude.

The radiance in the hall began to pulse, now darker than blood, now red-pink, and with each cycle from dark to bright, a throbbing electronic hum swelled through the building, low and ominous. When I touched the concrete wall, it was vibrating faintly, as the steel post had vibrated in the hangar.

Abruptly, the corridor light flashed from red to white. The pulsing stopped. We were looking through the doorway at a hall blazingly revealed under fluorescent ceiling panels.

Instantaneously with the change of light, my ears popped, as if from a sudden decrease in air pressure, and a warm draft gusted into the stairwell, bringing with it a trace of the crisp ozone scent that lingers on a rainy night in the wake of lightning.

Mr. Mungojerrie was in the corridor, no longer a maroon blur, gazing at something off to the right. He was standing not on bare concrete but on clean white ceramic floor tiles that had not been there before.

I peered up the dark stairs behind us, which appeared to be firmly anchored in our time, in the present rather than the past. The building was not phasing entirely in and out of the past; the phenomenon occurred in a crazy-quilt pattern.

I was tempted to sprint up the steps as fast as I could, into the hangar and from there into the night, but we were past the point of no return. We had passed it when Jimmy Wing was kidnapped and Orson disappeared. Friendship required us to venture off the map of the known world, into areas that ancient cartographers couldn’t have imagined when they had inked those words Here there be monsters.

Squinting, I withdrew my sunglasses from an inside jacket pocket and slipped them on. I had no choice but to risk letting the light bathe my face and hands, but the glare was so bright that it would have stung tears from my eyes.

When we moved cautiously into the corridor, I knew beyond doubt that we had stepped into the past, into a time when this facility had not yet been shut down, before it had been stripped of all evidence. I saw a grease-pencil scheduling chart on one wall, a bulletin board, and two wheeled carts holding peculiar instruments.

The throbbing hum had not fallen silent with the disappearance of the red light. I suspected that it was the sound of the egg room in full operation. It seemed to pierce my eardrums, penetrate my skull, and vibrate directly against the surface of my brain.

Metal doors had appeared on the previously doorless rooms that opened off the inner wall of the curving hallway, and the nearest of these was wide open. In the small chamber beyond, two swivel chairs were unoccupied in front of a complex control board, not unlike the mixing board that any radio-station engineer uses. On one side of this board stood a can of Pepsi and a bag of potato chips, proving that even the architects of doomsday enjoy a snack and a refreshing beverage now and then.

To the right of the stairs, sixty or eighty feet farther along the corridor, three men were moving away from us, unaware that we were behind them. One wore jeans and a white shirt, sleeves rolled up. The second was in a dark suit, and the third wore khakis and a white lab coat. They were walking close together, heads bent, as if conferring, but I couldn’t hear their voices over the pulsing electronic hum.

These were surely the three maroon figures that had passed the stairwell in the murky red light, so blurry and distorted that I had not been able to tell whether they were, in fact, human.

I glanced to the left, worrying that someone else might appear and, seeing us, raise an alarm. Currently, however, that length of the corridor was deserted.

Mungojerrie was still watching the departing trio, apparently unwilling to lead us farther until they had rounded the curve in the long racetrack-shaped corridor or entered one of the rooms. This straightaway was five hundred feet long, from curve to curve, and at least a hundred fifty feet remained ahead of the three men before they would turn out of sight.

We were dangerously exposed. We needed to retreat until the Mystery Train staffers were gone. Besides, I was already nervous about the quantity of light that was hammering my face.

I caught Sasha’s attention and gestured toward the stairwell.

Her eyes widened.

When I followed her gaze, I saw that a door blocked access to the stairs. From inside the stairwell, there had been no door; we had seen straight through to the red — and then to the fluorescent-drenched — hallway. We had passed directly from there to here without obstruction. From this side, however, the barrier existed.

I went quickly to the door, yanked it open, and almost crossed the threshold. Fortunately, I hesitated when I sensed a wrongness about the darkness beyond.

Sliding my sunglasses down my nose, peering over the frames, I expected concrete-walled gloom with steps leading up. Instead, before me was a clear night sky, necklaces of stars, and a pendant moon. This skyscape was the only thing out there where the stairs had been, as though this door now opened high above the earth’s atmosphere, in interplanetary space, a long way from the nearest doughnut shop. Or perhaps it opened into a time when the earth no longer existed. No floor lay beyond the threshold, nothing but empty space jeweled with more stars, a cold and infinite drop from the bright corridor in which I stood.

Sharky.

I closed the door. I gripped the shotgun fiercely in both hands, not because I expected to use it but because it was real, solid and unyielding, an anchor in this sea of strangeness.

Sasha was now immediately behind me.

When I turned to face her, I could tell that she had seen the same celestial panorama that had rocked me. Her gray eyes were as clear as ever, but they were darker than before.

Doogie hadn’t glimpsed the impossible sight, because he was holding the Uzi at the ready and watching the three departing men.

Frowning, standing with his fists balled tightly at his sides, Roosevelt studied the cat.

From his position, Bobby couldn’t have seen through the doorway, either, but he knew something was wrong. His face was as solemn as that of a rabbit reading a cookbook recipe for hare soup.

Mungojerrie was the only one of us who didn’t appear to be about to blow out snarled springs like an overwound cuckoo clock.

Trying not to dwell on what I’d seen beyond the stairwell door, I wondered how the cat could find Orson and the kids if they were in a present-time place while we were stuck here in the past. But then I figured that if we could pass from one time period to another, be caught up in the time shifts taking place around us, so could my four-footed brother and the children.

Anyway, from every indication, we hadn’t actually traveled back in time. Rather, the past and present — and perhaps the future — were occurring simultaneously, weirdly pressed together by whatever force or force field the engines of the egg room had generated. And perhaps it was not only one night from the past that was bleeding into our present time; maybe we were experiencing moments from different days and nights when the egg room had been in operation.

The three men were still walking away from us. Ambling. Taking their sweet time.

The rhythmic swell and recession of the electronic sound began to have an odd psychological effect. A mild vertigo overcame me, and the corridor — this entire subterranean floor — seemed to be turning like a carousel.

My grip on the shotgun was too fierce. Unwittingly, I was exerting dangerous pressure on the trigger. I hooked my finger around the trigger guard instead.

I had a headache. It wasn’t a result of being knocked around by Father Tom at the Stanwyk house. I was sustaining a brain bruise from pondering time paradoxes, from trying to make sense of what was happening. This required a talent for mathematics and theoretical physics; but although I can balance my checkbook, I haven’t inherited my mother’s love of math and science. In the most general sense, I understand the theory of leverage that explains the function of a bottle opener, why gravity makes it a bad idea to leap off a high building, and why running headlong into a brick wall will have little effect on the bricks. Otherwise, I trust the cosmos to run itself efficiently without my having to understand it, which is also pretty much my attitude toward electric razors, wristwatches, bread-baking machines, and other mechanical devices.

The only way to deal with these events was to treat them as supernatural occurrences, accept them as you might accept poltergeist phenomena — levitating chairs, hurtling knick-knacks, doors slammed by invisible presences — or the spectral appearance of a moldering and semitransparent corpse glimpsed on a midnight stroll in a graveyard. Thinking too much about time-bending force fields and time paradoxes and reality shifts, straining to grasp the logic of it, would only make me crazy, when what I desperately needed to be was cool. Calm. Therefore, this structure was just a haunted house. Our best hope of finding our way through its many rooms and back to the safer side of the spook zone was to remember that ghosts can’t hurt you unless you yourself give them the power to harm you, unless you feed their substance with your fear. This is the classic theory, well known to spirit channelers and ghostbusters all over the world. I think I read it in a comic book.

The three ghosts were just fifty feet from the turn that would finally take them out of sight, around one arc of the long racetrack corridor.

They stopped. Stood with their heads together. Talking above the throbbing noise that flooded the building.

The specter in the jeans and white shirt turned to a door and opened it.

Then the other two wraiths — the one in the suit, the one in the khakis and lab coat — continued toward the end of the hall.

As he opened the door, the first spook must have registered us in his peripheral vision. He swung toward us, as though he had seen ghosts.

He took a couple steps in our direction but then halted, maybe because he noticed our guns.

He shouted. His words weren’t clear, but he wasn’t suggesting a tour and complimentary lunch in the cafeteria.

Anyway, he wasn’t calling to us but to the pair of phantasms strolling toward the turn in the corridor. They spun around and gaped at us as though they were stunned sailors gazing at the ghost ship Marie Celeste gliding silently past in a light fog.

We had spooked them as much as they had spooked us.

The one in the suit evidently wasn’t merely a well-tailored scientist or a project bureaucrat, and certainly not a Jehovah’s Witness pushing Watchtower magazine in a tough territory, because he drew a handgun from a holster under his jacket.

I reminded myself that ghosts couldn’t hurt us unless we gave them power by feeding them with our fear — and then I wondered if this rule applied to haunts packing heat. I wished that I could remember the name of the comic book in which I’d chanced upon this wisdom, because if the information had been in Tales from the Crypt, it might be true, but if it was from an issue of Donald Duck adventures, then I was screwed.

Instead of opening fire on us, the armed apparition pushed past his two phantom friends and disappeared through the door that the one in jeans had opened.

He was probably running for a telephone, to call security. We were about to be crunched, swept up, bagged, and put out for garbage collection.

Around us, the corridor rippled, and things changed.

The white ceramic floor tiles quickly faded beneath us, leaving us standing on bare concrete, although I felt nothing move underfoot. Here and there along the hall, patches of tile remained, the edges not sharply defined, feathering into the concrete, as though these were widely scattered puddles of time past that hadn’t yet evaporated from the floor of time present.

The rooms opening along the inner wall of the corridor no longer had doors.

Shadows swarmed as the fluorescent panels began to disappear from the ceiling. Yet, in an irregular pattern, a few fixtures remained, brightening widely separated sections of the corridor.

I took off my sunglasses and pocketed them as the grease-pencil scheduling chart dissolved from the wall. The bulletin board still hung unchanged.

One of the wheeled carts faded away before my eyes. The other cart remained, though a few of the odd instruments racked on it were becoming transparent.

The ghost in blue jeans and the ghost in a lab coat really looked like spirits now, mere ectoplasmic entities that had congealed out of a white mist. They started hesitantly toward us, then began to run, perhaps because we were fading from their view just as they were disappearing from ours. They covered only half the ground between us before they vanished.

The suit with the gun returned to the hallway from the office, having raved to security about Vikings in jumpsuits and invading cats, but he was now the weakest of revenants, a shimmering wraith. As he raised his weapon, he departed time present without a trace.

The throbbing electronic noise was less than half as loud as it had been at full power, but like some of the lights and floor tiles, it didn’t fade altogether.

None of us was relieved by this reprieve. Instead, as the past receded into the past where it belonged, we were seized by a greater urgency.

Mr. Mungojerrie was dead right: This place was coming apart. The residual effect of the Mystery Train was gathering power, feeding on itself, extending beyond the egg room, rapidly seeping throughout the structure. The ultimate effect was unknowable but sure to be catastrophic.

I could hear a clock ticking. This wasn’t the timepiece in Captain Hook’s omnivorous crocodile, either, but the reliable clock of instinct telling me that we were on a short countdown to destruction.

With the ghosts gone, the cat sprang into action, padding to the nearby elevator shaft.

“Down,” Roosevelt translated. “Mungojerrie says we have to go farther down.”

“There’s nothing below this floor,” I said, as we all gathered at the elevator. “We’re on the lowest level.”

The cat fixed its luminous green eyes on me, and Roosevelt said, “No, there’re three levels beneath this one. They required an even higher security clearance than these floors, so they were concealed.”

During my explorations, I’d never thought to look into the shaft to see if it served hidden realms that couldn’t be accessed by the stairs.

Roosevelt said, “The lower levels can be approached…from some other building on the base, through a tunnel. Or by this elevator. The steps don’t go down as far.”

This development posed a problem, because the elevator shaft wasn’t empty. We couldn’t simply climb down the service ladder and go where Mungojerrie directed. Like the scattered floor tiles, like the few remaining fluorescent panels, and like the softer but still ominous electronic hum that throbbed through the building, the past maintained tenacious control of the elevator. A pair of stainless-steel sliding doors covered the shaft, and most likely a cab waited beyond them.

“We’ll be quashed if we hang around here,” Bobby predicted, reaching out to press the elevator call button.

“Wait!” I cautioned, stopping his hand before he could do the deed.

Doogie said, “Bobster’s right, Chris. Sometimes fortune favors the foolhardy.”

I shook my head. “What if we get in the elevator, and when the doors close, the damn thing just totally vanishes under us like the floor tiles did?”

“Then we fall to the bottom of the shaft,” Sasha guessed, but that prospect didn’t seem to give her pause.

“Some of us might break our ankles,” Doogie predicted. “Not all of us, necessarily. It’s probably only about forty feet or so, a mean drop but survivable.”

Bobby, a Road Runner cartoon freak, said, “Bro, we could have ourselves a full-on Wile E. Coyote moment.”

“We’ve got to move,” Roosevelt warned, and Mungojerrie scratched impatiently at the stainless-steel doors, which remained stubbornly solid.

Bobby pressed the call button.

The elevator whined toward us. With the oscillating electronic hum continuing to pulse through the building, I couldn’t determine whether the cab was descending or ascending.

The corridor rippled.

The floor tiles began to reappear under my feet.

The elevator doors slowly, slowly slid open.

Fluorescent panels reappeared on the corridor ceiling, and I narrowed my eyes against the glare.

The cab was full of muddy red light, which probably meant the interior of the shaft occupied a different point in time from the place — or places — that we occupied. There were passengers, a lot of them.

We stepped back from the door, expecting the crowd in the elevator to give us trouble.

In the corridor, the throbbing sound grew louder.

I could discern several blurry, distorted, maroon figures inside the cab, but I couldn’t see who or what they were.

A gunshot cracked, then another.

We were under fire not from the elevator but from the end of the corridor where, earlier, the sonofabitch in the suit had drawn down on us with a handgun.

Bobby took a bullet. Something peppered my face. Bobby rocked backward, the shotgun flying out of his hands. He was still dropping as if in slow motion when I realized that hot blood had sprayed my face. Bobby’s blood. Jesus, God. Even as I was swiveling toward the source of the gunfire, I discharged my shotgun and immediately chambered another shell.

Instead of the guy in the dark suit, there were two guards we had never seen before. Uniforms, but not army. No service that I recognized. Project cops. Mystery Train security. Too far away to be anything other than annoyed by my shotgun fire.

Another piece of the past had solidified around us, and Doogie triggered the Uzi as Bobby hit the floor and bounced. The machine pistol settled the dispute totally and abruptly.

Sickened, I looked away from the two dead guards.

The elevator doors had closed before anyone stepped out of the crowded cab.

The gunfire was sure to draw more security.

Bobby lay on his back. Blood was spattered on the white ceramic tile around him. Too much blood.

Sasha stooped at his left side. I knelt at his right.

She said, “Hit once.”

“Got biffed,” Bobby said, biffed meaning smacked hard by a wave.

“Hang in there,” I said.

“Totally thrashed,” he said, and coughed.

“Not totally,” I insisted, more terrified than I had ever been before, but determined not to show it.

Sasha unbuttoned the Hawaiian shirt, hooked her fingers in the bullet-punctured material of Bobby’s black pullover, and ripped the sweater to expose the wound in his left shoulder. The hole was too low in the shoulder, too far to the right, something you would have to call a chest wound, not a shoulder wound, if you were going to be honest, which I was by God not going to be.

“Shoulder wound,” I told him.

The throbbing electronic sound dwindled, the ceramic tiles faded under Bobby, taking the spatters of blood with them, and the overhead fluorescent panels began to vanish, though not all of them. Time past was surrendering to time present again, entering another cycle, which might give us a minute or two before more uniformed abbs with guns showed up.

Rich blood, so deeply red that it was almost black, welled out of the wound. We could do nothing to stop this type of bleeding. Neither a tourniquet nor a compress would help. Neither would hydrogen peroxide, rubbing alcohol, Neosporin, and gauze bandages, even if we’d had any of those things.

“Woofy,” he said.

The pain had washed away his perpetual tan, leaving him not white but jaundice-yellow. He looked bad.

The hallway had fewer lingering fluorescents and the oscillating hum was quieter than during the previous cycle.

I was afraid the past was going to fade entirely out of the present, leaving us with an empty elevator shaft. I wasn’t confident that we could carry Bobby up six flights of stairs without causing him further damage.

Getting to my feet, I glanced at Doogie, whose solemn expression infuriated me, because Bobby was going to be all right, damn it.

Mungojerrie scratched at the elevator doors again.

Roosevelt was either doing as the cat wished or following my own track of reasoning, because he repeatedly jammed his thumb against the call button.

The indicator board above the doors showed only four floors — G, B-1, B-2, and B-3—though we knew there were seven. The cab was supposedly up at the first level, G for ground, which was the hangar above this subterranean facility.

“Come on, come on,” Roosevelt muttered.

Bobby tried to lift his head to reconnoiter, but Sasha gently pressed him back, with one hand on his forehead.

He might go into shock. Ideally, his head should be lower than the rest of him, but we didn’t have any means to elevate his legs and lower body. Shock kills as surely as bullets. His lips were slightly blue. Wasn’t that an early symptom of shock?

The cab was at B-1, the first basement under the hangar floor. We were on B-3.

Mungojerrie was staring at me as if to say, I warned you.

“Cats don’t know shit,” I told him angrily.

Surprisingly, Bobby laughed. It was a weak laugh, but it was a laugh nonetheless. Could he be dying or even slipping into shock if he were laughing? Maybe everything would be okay.

Just call me Pollyanna Huckleberry Holly Golightly Snow.

The elevator reached B-2, one floor above us.

I raised the shotgun, in case passengers were in the elevator, as there evidently had been before.

Already, the pulsing hum of the egg room engines — or whatever infernal machines made the noise — grew louder.

“Better hurry,” Doogie said, because if the wrong moment of the past flowed into the present again, it might wash some angry, armed men with it.

The elevator whined to a stop at B-3, our floor.

The corridor around me grew steadily brighter.

As the elevator doors began to slide open, I expected to see the murky red light in the cab, and then I was suddenly afraid I’d be confronted with that impossible vista of stars and cold black space I’d seen beyond the stairwell door.

The elevator cab was just an elevator cab. Empty.

“Move!” Doogie urged.

Roosevelt and Sasha already had Bobby on his feet, virtually carrying him between them, while trying to minimize the strain on his left shoulder.

I held the elevator door, and as they took Bobby past me, his face twisted with agony. If he had been about to scream with pain, he repressed it and instead said, “Carpe cerevisi.”

“Beer later,” I promised.

“Beer now, party boy,” he wheezed.

Slipping off his backpack, Doogie followed us into the big elevator, which could probably carry fifteen passengers. The cab briefly swayed and jiggled as it adjusted to his weight, and we all tried not to step on Mungojerrie.

“Up and out,” I said.

“Down,” Bobby disagreed.

The control panel had no buttons for the three floors that were supposedly below us. An unlabeled slot for a magnetic card indicated how someone with the proper security clearance could reprogram the existing control buttons to gain access to lower realms. We didn’t have a card.

“There’s no way to get farther down,” I said.

“Always a way,” Doogie demurred, rummaging in his backpack.

The corridor was bright. The loud throbbing sound grew louder.

The elevator doors rolled shut, but we didn’t go anywhere, and when I reached toward the G button, Doogie slapped my hand as though I were a child reaching for a cookie without having asked permission.

“This is nuts,” I said.

“Radically,” Bobby agreed.

He sagged against the back wall of the cab, supported by Sasha and Roosevelt. He was gray now.

I said, “Bro, you don’t have to be a hero.”

“Yeah, I do.”

“No, you don’t!”

“Kahuna.”

“What?”

“If I’m Kahuna, I can’t be a chickenshit.”

“You aren’t Kahuna.”

“King of the surf,” he said. When he coughed this time, blood bubbled on his lips.

Desperate, I said to Sasha, “We’re getting him up and out of here, right now.”

A crack and then a creak sounded behind me. Doogie had picked the lock on the control panel and had swung the cover aside, exposing the wiring. “What floor?” he asked.

“Mungojerrie says all the way down,” Roosevelt advised.

I protested: “Orson, the kids — we don’t even know if they’re alive!”

“They’re alive,” Roosevelt said.

“We don’t know.”

“We know.”

I turned to Sasha for support. “Are you as crazy as the rest of them?”

She said nothing, but the pity in her eyes was so terrible that I had to look away from her. She knew that Bobby and I were as tight as friends can get, that we were brothers in all but blood, as close as identical twins. She knew that a part of me was going to die when Bobby died, leaving an emptiness even she would never fill. She saw my vulnerability; she would have done anything, anything, anything, if she could have saved Bobby, but she could do nothing. In her helplessness, I saw my own helplessness, which I couldn’t bear to contemplate.

I lowered my gaze to the cat. For an instant I wanted to stomp Mungojerrie, crush the life out of him, as if he were responsible for our being here. I had asked Sasha if she was as crazy as the rest of them; in truth, I was the one who was kooking out, shattered by even the prospect of losing Bobby.

With a lurch, the elevator started down.

Bobby groaned.

I said, “Please, Bobby.”

“Kahuna,” he reminded me.

“You’re not Kahuna, you kak.”

His voice was thin, shaky: “Pia thinks I am.”

“Pia’s a dithering airhead.”

“Don’t dis my woman, bro.”

We stopped on the seventh and final level.

The doors opened on darkness. But it wasn’t that view of starry space, merely a lightless alcove.

With Roosevelt’s flashlight, I led the others out of the elevator, into a cold, dank vestibule.

Down here, the oscillating electronic hum was muffled, almost inaudible.

We put Bobby on his back, to the left of the elevator doors. We laid him on my jacket and Sasha’s, to insulate him from the concrete as much as possible.

Sasha fiddled in the control wiring and temporarily disabled the elevator, so it would be here when we returned. Of course, if time past phased completely out of time present, taking the elevator with it, we’d have to climb.

Bobby couldn’t climb. And we could never carry him up a service ladder, not in his condition.

Don’t think about it. Ghosts can’t hurt you if you don’t fear them, and bad things won’t happen if you don’t think them.

I was grasping at all the defenses of childhood.

Doogie emptied stuff out of the backpack. With Roosevelt’s help, he folded the empty bag and wedged it under Bobby’s hips, elevating his lower body at least slightly, though not enough.

When I put the flashlight at Bobby’s side, he said, “I’ll probably be way safer in the dark, bro. Light might draw attention.”

“Switch it off if you hear anything.”

“You switch it off before you leave,” he said. “I can’t.”

When I took his hand, I was shocked at the weakness of his grip. He literally didn’t have the strength to handle the flashlight.

There was no point leaving him a gun for self-defense.

I didn’t know what to say to him. I had never been seriously speechless with Bobby before. I seemed to have a mouth full of dirt, as if I were already lying in my own grave.

“Here,” Doogie said, handing me a pair of oversize goggles and an unusual flashlight. “Infrared goggles. Israeli military surplus. Infrared flashlight.”

“What for?”

“So they won’t see us coming.”

“Who?”

“Whoever’s got the kids and Orson.”

I stared at Doogie Sassman as if he were a Viking from Mars.

Bobby’s teeth chattered when he said, “The dude’s a ballroom dancer, too.”

A rumbling noise rose, like a freight train passing overhead, and the floor shook under us. Gradually, the sound diminished, and the shaking stopped.

“Better go,” Sasha said.

She, Doogie, and Roosevelt were wearing goggles, with the lenses against their foreheads rather than over their eyes.

Bobby had closed his eyes.

Frightened, I said, “Hey.”

“Hey,” he replied, looking at me again.

“Listen, if you die on me,” I said, “then you’re king of the assholes.”

He smiled. “Don’t worry. Wouldn’t want to take the title away from you, bro.”

“We’ll be back fast.”

“I’ll be here,” he assured me, but his voice was a whisper. “You promised me a beer.”

His eyes were inexpressibly kind.

There was so much to be said. None of it could be spoken. Even if we’d had plenty of time, none of what was in my heart could have been spoken.

I switched off his flashlight but left it at his side.

Darkness was usually my friend, but I hated this hungry, cold, demanding blackness.

The fancy eyewear featured a Velcro strap. My hands were so unsteady that I needed a moment to adjust the goggles to my head, and then I lowered the lenses over my eyes.

Doogie, Roosevelt, and Sasha had switched on their infrared flashlights. Without the goggles, I had not been able to see that wavelength of light, but now the vestibule was revealed in various shades and intensities of green.

I clicked the button on my flashlight and played the beam over Bobby Halloway.

Supine on the floor, arms at his sides, glowing green, he might already have been a ghost.

“Your shirt really pops in this weird light,” I said.

“Yeah?”

“Bitchin’.”

The freight-train rumble rose again, louder than before. The steel and concrete bones of the structure were grinding together.

The cat, with no need for goggles, led us out of the vestibule. I followed Roosevelt, Doogie, and Sasha, who might have been three green spirits haunting a catacomb.

The hardest thing I’d ever had to do in my life — harder than attending my mother’s funeral, harder than sitting by my father’s deathbed — was to leave Bobby alone.

25

From the vestibule, a sloping tunnel, ten feet in diameter, descended fifty feet. After reaching the bottom, we followed an entirely horizontal but wildly serpentine course, and with every turn, the architecture and engineering progressed from curious to strange to markedly alien.

The first passageway featured concrete walls, but every tunnel thereafter, while formed of reinforced concrete, appeared to be lined with metal. Even in the inadequately revelatory infrared light, I detected sufficient differences in the appearances of these curved surfaces to be confident that the type of metal changed from time to time. If I’d lifted the goggles and switched on an ordinary UV flashlight, I suspect that I would have seen steel, copper, brass, and an array of alloys that I couldn’t have identified without a degree in metallurgy.

The largest of these metal-lined tunnels were about eight feet in diameter, but we traveled some that were half that size, through which we had to crawl. In the walls of these cylindrical causeways were uncounted smaller openings; some were two or three inches in diameter, others two feet; probing them with the infrared flashlight revealed nothing more than could have been seen by peering into a drainpipe or a gun barrel. We might have been inside an enormous, incomprehensibly elaborate set of refrigeration coils, or exploring the plumbing that served all the palaces of all the gods of ancient myths.

Unquestionably, something had once surged through this colossal maze: liquids or gases. We passed numerous tributaries, in which were anchored turbines with blades that must have been driven by whatever had been pumped through this system. At many junctions, various types of gigantic electrically controlled valves stood ready to cut off, restrict, or redirect the flow through these Stygian channels. All the valves were in open or half-open positions; but as we passed each block point, I worried that if they snapped shut, we would be imprisoned down here.

These tubes had not been stripped to the concrete, as had all the rooms and corridors in the first three floors under the hangar. Consequently, as there were no apparent lighting sources, I assumed that workmen servicing the system had always carried lamps.

Intermittently, a draft stirred along these strange highways, but for the most part the atmosphere was as still as that under a bell jar. Twice, I caught a whiff of smoldering charcoal, but otherwise the air carried only a faint astringent scent similar to iodine, though not iodine, which eventually left a bitter taste and caused a mild burning sensation in my nasal membranes.

The trainlike rumble came and went, lasting longer with each occurrence, and the silences between these assaults of sound grew shorter. With every eruption, I expected the ceiling to collapse, burying us as irrevocably as coal miners are occasionally entombed in veins of anthracite. Another and utterly chilling sound spiraled along the tunnel walls from time to time, a shrill keening that must have had its source in some machinery spinning itself to destruction, or else crawling these byways was a creature that I had never heard before and that I hoped never to encounter.

I fought off attacks of claustrophobia, then induced new bouts by wondering if I were in the sixth circle of Hell or the seventh. But wasn’t the seventh the Lake of Boiling Blood? Or did that come after the Fiery Desert? Neither the blood lake nor the great burning sands would be green, and everything here was relentlessly green. Anyway, Lower Hell couldn’t be far away, just past the luncheonette that serves only spiders and scorpions, around the corner from the men’s shop that offers bramble shirts and shoes with razor-blade in-cushions. Or maybe this wasn’t Hell at all; maybe it was just the belly of the whale.

I think I went a little nuts — and then recovered — before we reached our destination.

For sure, I lost all track of time, and I was convinced that we were ruled by the clock of Purgatory, on which the minute and hour hands turn without ever advancing. Days later, Sasha would claim we had spent less than fifteen minutes in those tunnels. She never lies. Yet, when eventually we prepared to return the way we had come, if she had tried to convince me that retracing our route would require only a quarter of an hour, I would have assumed we were in whatever circle of Hell was reserved for pathological liars.

The final passage — which would lead us to the kidnappers and their hostages — was one of the larger tunnels, and when we entered it, we discovered that the abbs we were seeking — or at least one of them, anyway — had posted a neatly arranged gallery of perverse achievement. Newspaper articles and a few other items were taped to the curved metal wall; the text was not easily readable by the infrared flashlights, but the headlines, subheads, and some of the pictures were clear enough.

We played our lights over the various items, quickly absorbing the exhibition, trying to understand why it was here.

The first clipping was from the Moonlight Bay Gazette, dated July 18, forty-four years earlier. Bobby’s grandfather had been the publisher in those days, before the paper had passed to Bobby’s mother and father. The headline screamed, BOY ADMITS TO KILLING PARENTS, and the subhead read, 12-YEAR-OLD CAN’T BE TRIED FOR MURDER.

The headlines on several additional clippings from the Gazette, dating to that same summer and the following autumn, described the aftermath of these murders, which apparently had been committed by a disturbed boy named John Joseph Randolph. Ultimately, he had been remanded to a juvenile detention center in the northern part of the state, until he achieved the age of eighteen, by which time he would have been psychologically evaluated; if declared criminally insane, he would subsequently be hospitalized for long-term psychiatric care.

The three pictures of young John showed a towheaded boy, tall for his age, with pale eyes, slim but athletic-looking. In all the shots, which appeared to be family photographs taken prior to the homicides, he had a winning smile.

That July night, he’d shot his father in the head. Five times. Then he hacked his mother to death with an ax.

The name John Joseph Randolph was unnervingly familiar, though I couldn’t think why.

On one of the clippings, I spotted a subhead that referred to the arresting police officer: Deputy Louis Wing. Lilly’s father-in-law. Jimmy’s grandfather. Lying now in a coma in a nursing home, after suffering three strokes.

Louis Wing will be my servant in Hell.

Evidently, Jimmy had not been abducted because his blood sample, given at preschool, had revealed an immune factor protecting him from the retrovirus. Instead, old-fashioned vengeance was the motivation.

“Here,” Sasha said. She pointed to another clipping, where the subhead revealed the name of the presiding judge: George Dulcinea. Great-grandfather to Wendy. Fifteen years in the grave.

George Dulcinea will be my servant in Hell.

No doubt, Del Stuart or someone in his family had crossed John Joseph Randolph somewhere, sometime. If we knew the connection, it would expose a motive for vengeance.

John Joseph Randolph. The strangely familiar name continued to worry me. As I followed Sasha and the others along the gallery, I seined my memory but came up with an empty net.

The next clipping dated back thirty-seven years and dealt with the murder-dismemberment of a sixteen-year-old girl in a San Francisco suburb. Police, according to the subhead, had no leads.

The newspaper had published the dead girl’s high-school photo. Across her face, someone had used a felt-tip marker to print four slashing letters: MINE.

It occurred to me that if he hadn’t been diagnosed criminally insane prior to turning eighteen, John Joseph Randolph might have been released from juvenile detention that year — with a handshake, an expunged record, pocket money, and a prayer.

The following thirty-five years were chronicled by thirty-five clippings concerning thirty-five apparently unsolved, savage murders. Two-thirds had been committed in California, from San Diego and La Jolla to Sacramento and Yucaipa; the rest were spread over Arizona, Nevada, and Colorado.

The victims — each photo defaced with the word MINE — presented no easily discernible pattern. Men and women. Young and old. Black, white, Asian, Hispanic. Straight and gay. If all these were the work of the same man, and if that man was John Joseph Randolph, then our Johnny was an equal-opportunity killer.

From a cursory examination of the clippings, I could see only two details linking these numerous murders. First: the horrendous degree of violence with which they had been committed, whether with blunt or sharp instruments. The headlines used words like BRUTAL, VICIOUS, SAVAGE, and SHOCKING. Second: None of the victims was sexually molested; Johnny’s only passions were bashing and slashing.

But only one event per calendar year. When Johnny indulged in his annual murder, he really let himself go, burnt off all his excess energy, poured out every drop of pent-up bile. Nonetheless, for a lifelong serial killer with such a prodigious career, his three hundred and sixty-four days of self-restraint for every single day of maniacal butchery were surely without precedent in the annals of sociopathic homicide. What had he been doing during those days of restraint? Into what had all that violent energy been directed?

In less than two minutes, as I quickly scanned this montage of mementos from Johnny’s scrapbook, my claustrophobia had been pressed out of me by a more fundamental, more visceral terror. The faint but constant electronic hum, the trainlike rumble, and the less frequent but fearsome keening combined to mask any sounds that we made as we approached the killer’s lair, but the same cacophony might screen the sounds that Johnny made as he crept up on us.

I was the last in our procession, and each time I glanced back the way we had come — which was about every ten seconds — I was certain old Johnny Randolph would be there, about to strike at me, slithering snakelike on his belly or crawling spiderlike across the ceiling.

Evidently, he had been a brutal killer all his life. Was he now becoming? Was that why he snatched these kids and squirreled them away in this weird place — in addition to the desire for revenge on those who had proved he’d killed his parents and had locked him away? If a good man like Father Tom could spiral so far down into madness and savagery, how much farther into the heart of darkness could John Randolph descend? What unthinkable beast might he become, considering where he’d started?

In retrospect, I realize that I was encouraging my imagination to spin even further out of control than usual, because as long as it was feverishly conjuring crawly fears of bizarro Johnny, it wasn’t able to taunt me with images of Bobby Halloway alone and helpless, bleeding to death in the elevator alcove.

Following Sasha, Doogie, and Roosevelt, I swiftly played the infrared beam over the final cluster of clippings.

Two years ago, the frequency of these killings increased. Judging by the presentation on this wall, they were occurring every three months. The headlines roared of sensational mass murders, not of solitary victims anymore: three to six souls per pop.

Perhaps this was when Johnny had decided to bring in a partner: the stocky charmer who had so earnestly endeavored to give me some skull exercise in the hallway under the warehouse. Where do tandem killers meet? Probably not at church. How do they decide to divide the labor, or do they just take turns sweeping up after?

With a fun partner, perhaps, Johnny had expanded his territory, and the clippings showed him venturing as far as Connecticut and then south to sunny Georgia. On to Florida. A jaunt over to Louisiana. A long ride up to the Dakotas. Travelin’ man.

Johnny’s weapons of choice had changed: no more hammers, no lengths of iron pipe, no knives, no meat cleavers, no ice picks, no hatchets, not even any labor-saving chain saws or power drills. These days the lad favored fire.

And these days his victims fit a clear, consistent profile. For the past two years, they had all been children.

Were they all the children or grandchildren of people who had once crossed him? Or perhaps until these latest abductions, he’d been motivated solely by the thrill of it.

I was more than ever frightened for the four kids now in John Joseph Randolph’s hands. I took some cold comfort from the knowledge that, according to the clippings in this demonic gallery, when he committed these atrocities against groups of victims, he destroyed them all at once, in a single fire, as if making a burnt offering. Therefore, if one of the kidnapped children was alive, then all were probably still alive.

We had assumed that the disappearances of Jimmy Wing and the other three were related to the gene-swapping retrovirus and to the events at Wyvern. But not all the evil in the world arises directly from my mom’s work. John Joseph Randolph had been busy prepping for Hell from at least his twelfth year, and perhaps what I’d suggested to Bobby last night was true: Randolph might have imprisoned these children here for no other reason than that he had stumbled upon the place and enjoyed the atmosphere, the satanic architecture.

The gallery ended with two startling items.

Taped to the wall was a sheet of art paper bearing the likeness of a crow. The crow. The crow on the rock at the top of Crow Hill. This was an impression that had been made by pressing the paper over the incised stone and rubbing it with graphite until the image appeared.

Beside the crow was a Mystery Train patch of the kind that we’d seen on the breast of William Hodgson’s spacesuit.

Already, then, Wyvern was back in the picture. There was a connection between Randolph and top-secret research conducted on the base, but the link might not be my mother or her retrovirus.

A rock of truth was visible in this sea of confusion, and I strove to get a grip on it, but my mind was exhausted, weak, and the rock was slippery.

John Joseph Randolph wasn’t merely becoming. Maybe he wasn’t becoming at all. His connection to Wyvern was more complex than that.

I dimly remembered a story about a wacko kid killing his folks in a house on the edge of 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 Mobil 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 awestricken, 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 doorlike 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 one was already open approximately as far as Doogie had opened the first; the goggle-defeating UV light issued from the room beyond.

Sasha and Roosevelt remained at the first valve. Armed with the.38, Sasha would make sure that no one came along behind us to block what might be our only exit. Roosevelt, whose left eye was swelling again, stayed with her because he wasn’t armed and because he was our essential link to the cat.

The mouser hung with Sasha and Roosevelt, keeping safely out of the forward action. We hadn’t dropped a trail of bread crumbs on the way in, and we weren’t a hundred percent certain that we could find the route back to Bobby and the elevator without feline guidance.

I followed Doogie to the inner gate valve.

After peering into the space beyond the gate, he raised two fingers to suggest that there were only two people in there about whom we needed to worry. He indicated that he would go first, moving immediately to the right after entering, and that I should follow, going to the left.

As soon as he cleared the doorway, I slipped into the room, with the shotgun thrust in front of me.

The Twilight-of-the-Gods rumble, rattle, bang, and skreek that shook down through the entire facility, from roof to bedrock, was muffled here, and the only light came from an eight-battery storm lamp sitting on a card table.

This chamber was similar in shape to the egg room three floors overhead, though this was much smaller, about thirty feet long and fifteen feet in diameter at its widest point. The curving surfaces were sheathed not in that glassy, gold-flecked substance but in what appeared to be ordinary copper.

My heart soared when I saw the four missing children sitting with their backs to the wall in the shadows at one end of the room. They were exhausted and frightened. Their small wrists and ankles were bound, and their mouths were covered with strips of cloth tape. They were not visibly injured, however, and their eyes widened with amazement at the sight of Doogie and me.

Then I spotted Orson, lying on his side, near the kids, muzzled and restrained. His eyes were open, and he was breathing. Alive. Before my vision could blur, I looked away from him.

In the center of the room, frozen by Doogie’s gun, two men sat in padded folding chairs, facing each other across the card table that held the storm lamp. In this stark tableau, they reminded me of characters in a stripped-down stage set from one of those stultifying minimalist plays about boredom, isolation, emotional disconnection, the futility of modern relationships, and the sobering philosophical implications of the cheeseburger.

The guy on the right was the abb who had tried to brain me with a two-by-four under the warehouse. He was wearing the same clothes he’d been wearing then, and he still had those tiny white teeth, although his smile was considerably more strained than it had been previously, as though he had just discovered a corn worm among that mouthful of white kernels.

I wanted to pump one shot into his mug, because I sensed not just smugness in the geek, but also vanity. After he took a magnum round at such close range, the only word adequate to describe his face would also spur on a dogsled team.

The man on the left was tall, blond, with pale green eyes and a puckered scar, in his mid-fifties. He was the one who had snatched the Stuart twins — and his smile was as winning as it had been when he was a boy of twelve with the blood of his parents on his hands.

John Joseph Randolph was unnervingly self-possessed, as if our arrival neither startled nor concerned him. “How’re you doing, Chris?”

I was surprised he knew my name. I’d never seen him before.

Whispery echoes of his voice were conducted like a current along the copper walls, one word overlaying the next: “Your mother, Wisteria — she was a great woman.”

I couldn’t understand how he knew my mother. Instinct told me that I didn’t want to know. A shotgun blast would silence him, and scour that smile off his face — the smile with which he charmed the innocent and the unwary — turning it into a lipless death’s-head grin.

“She was deadlier than Mother Nature,” he said.

Renaissance men ponder, brood, and analyze the complex moral consequences of their actions, preferring persuasion and negotiation to violence. Evidently, I’d forgotten to renew my membership in the Renaissance Man Club, and they had repossessed my principles, because all I wanted to do was blow away this butchering creep — and with extreme prejudice.

Or maybe I’m just becoming.

It’s the rage these days.

With my heart made brittle by bitterness, I might have pulled the trigger if the kids hadn’t been there to witness the carnage. I was also inhibited because the copper skin on the curved walls was guaranteed to spin deadly ricochets in all directions. My soul was saved not by the purity of my morals but by circumstances, which is a humbling confession.

With the barrel of the Uzi, Doogie gestured at the playing cards in the two men’s hands. “What’s the game?” His voice echoed tinnily around the curved copper walls.

I didn’t like these two men’s watchful calm. I wanted to see fear in their eyes.

Now Randolph turned his hand of cards faceup on the table and replied to Doogie’s question with too much dry amusement. “Poker.”

Before Doogie decided how best to restrain the card-players, he needed to determine, if he could, whether they had guns. They were wearing jackets that could conceal shoulder holsters. With nothing to lose, they might do something reckless — like take wild shots at the kids, rather than at us, before they themselves were cut down, hoping to kill one more tender victim just to go out on a final thrill.

With four children in the room, we didn’t dare make a mistake.

“If not for Wisteria,” Randolph said, addressing me, “Del Stuart would have pulled the plug on my financing long before he did.”

“Your financing?”

“But when she screwed up, they needed me. Or thought they did. To see what the future held.”

Sensing a pending revelation of an ugly truth, I said, “Shut up,” but I spoke in little more than a murmur, perhaps because I knew I needed to hear whatever he had to tell me, even if I’d no desire to hear it.

To Doogie, Randolph said, “Ask me what the stakes are.”

The word stakes spiraled around the ovoid room, still whispering back to us even as Doogie dutifully asked, “What are the stakes?”

“Conrad and I play to see who gets to soak each of these tykes in gasoline.”

Conrad mustn’t have been in possession of a gun in the warehouse the previous night. If he’d had one, he would have shot me dead the moment that I touched his face in the dark.

Moving his hands as if dealing imaginary cards, Randolph said, “Then we play to see who gets to light the match.”

Looking as if he might shoot first and worry about ricochets later, Doogie said, “Why haven’t you killed them already?”

“Our numerology tells us there should be five in this offering. Until recently, we thought we had only four. But now we think…” He smiled at me. “We think the dog is special. We think the dog makes five. When you interrupted, we were playing cards to see who lights the mutt boy.”

I didn’t think that Randolph had a firearm, either. As far as I could remember from my hasty scan of his gallery of hellish achievement, his father was the only victim he’d dispatched with a gun. That was forty-four years ago, probably the first murder he’d committed. Since then, he preferred to have more personal involvement, to get right into the wet of the work. Hammers and knives and the like were his weapons of choice — until he started to make his burnt offerings.

“Your mother,” he said, “was a dice woman. Rolled the dice for the whole human race, and crapped out. But I like cards.”

Pretending to deal cards again, Randolph had moved one hand close to the storm lamp.

“Don’t,” Doogie said.

But Randolph did. He snapped the lamp switch, and suddenly we were blind.

Even as the light went off, Randolph and Conrad were on the move. They got to their feet so fast that they knocked their chairs over, and these hard noises rattled repeatedly around the room like the sharp rat-a-tat produced by a running boy dragging a stick along a picket fence.

I was instantly on the move, too, following the curve of the room toward the children, trying to stay out of Conrad’s way, since he was the one closest to me and would most likely go hard and fast for the place where I had been when the lights went out. Neither he nor Randolph was the type to run for the exit.

As I sidled toward the kids, I slipped the infrared goggles off my forehead, over my eyes. I yanked the special flashlight from my belt, clicked it on, and swept the room where Conrad might be.

He was closer than I’d expected, having intuited my attempt to shield the children. He held a knife in one hand, slashing blindly at the air around him, hoping to get lucky and cut me.

How very strange it is to be a man with sight in the kingdom of the blind. Watching Conrad seeking without finding, flailing in mindless rage, seeing him so confused and frustrated and desperate, I knew one percent of what God must feel like when He watches us at our furious game of life.

I quickly circled Conrad as he ambitiously but ineffectively sought to disembowel me. Employing a technique sure to elicit the righteous indignation of the American Dental Association, I gripped the butt of the flashlight between my teeth, to free both hands for the shotgun, and I slammed the stock of the gun into the back of his head.

He went down and stayed down.

Apparently, neither one-name Conrad nor the inimitable John Joseph Randolph had realized that our goggles were part of infrared sets, because Doogie was almost literally dancing around the most successful serial killer of our time — excluding politicians, who generally hire out the wet work — and beating the crap out of him with a natural-born enthusiasm and with a skill honed as a bouncer in biker bars.

Perhaps because he had a greater concern for dental safety and oral hygiene than I did, or perhaps just because he didn’t like the taste of the flashlight handle, Doogie had simply placed the infrared light on the card table and then herded Randolph into the primary path of the beam with a relentless series of judiciously delivered pokes, punches, and chops with his fists and with the barrel and butt of the Uzi.

Randolph went down twice and got up twice, as though he really believed that he had a chance. Finally he dropped like a load from a dinosaur: prepared to lie there until he fossilized. Doogie kicked him in the ribs. When Randolph didn’t move, Doogie administered the traditional Hell’s Angel first aid, kicking him again.

Unquestionably, Doogie Sassman was a Harley-riding maniac, a man of surprising talents and accomplishments, a true mensch in many ways, a source of valuable if arcane knowledge, perhaps even a font of enlightenment. Nevertheless, no one was likely to structure a new religion around him anytime soon.

Doogie said, “Snowman?”

‘Hey.’

“Handle some real light?”

Slipping off my goggles, I said, “Fade me in.”

He switched on the storm lamp, and the copper-lined room was filled with rust-colored shadows and shiny-penny light.

The pre-cataclysmic rumbles, cracks, squeals, and groans that shook through the vast building continued to be muffled here, more like the embarrassing noises of digestive distress. But we didn’t need a fifty-page directive from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to know that we should vacate the premises as soon as possible.

We quickly determined that the children were not merely bound with rope or shackled. Their wrists had been wired together, as had their ankles. The wires were drawn cruelly tight, and I winced at the sight of bruised skin and dried blood.

I checked Orson. He was breathing, but shallowly. His forepaws were wired together, his hind legs, too. A makeshift muzzle of wire clamped his jaws shut, so he was able to issue only a thin whine.

“Easy, bro,” I said shakily, stroking his flank.

Doogie stepped to the gate valve and shouted along the tunnel to Sasha and Roosevelt: “We got’em. All alive!”

They whooped with delight, but Sasha also urged us to hurry.

“We’re shakin’ and bakin’,” Doogie assured her. “Keep your guard up.” After all, there might be worse than Randolph and Conrad in this labyrinth.

A couple of satchels, backpacks, and a Styrofoam cooler were stacked near the card table. Under the assumption that this gear belonged to the tandem killers, Doogie went in search of pliers or any other tool with which we could free the kids, because the wires had been braided and knotted with such obsessive care that we couldn’t easily unwind them.

I gently pulled the tape off Jimmy Wing’s mouth, and he said he needed to pee-pee, and I told him that I did, too, but that we would both have to hold it for a little while, which shouldn’t be any trouble because we were both brave guys with the right stuff, and this earned his solemn expression of agreement.

The six-year-old Stuart twins — Aaron and Anson — thanked me politely when I untaped their mouths. Anson informed me that the two unconscious kooks on the floor were bad men. Aaron was blunter and less clean-spoken than his brother, calling them “shitheads,” and Anson warned him that if he used that forbidden word in front of their mother, he would be toast.

I had expected tears, but these weeds had cried all they were going to cry, at least over this weird experience. There’s a natural toughness in most kids that we seldom acknowledge, because we usually view childhood through glasses of nostalgia and sentimentality.

Wendy Dulcinea was, at seven, a glorious reflection of her mother, Mary, from whom I’d been unable to learn the piano but with whom I’d once been in deep puppy love. She wanted to give me a kiss, and I was happy to receive it, and then she said, “The doggie is really thirsty — you should give him a drink. They let us drink, but they wouldn’t give him anything.”

The corners of Orson’s eyes were crusted with white matter. He looked sick and weak, because with his mouth wired shut, he had not been able to perspire properly. Dogs sweat not through pores in their skin but largely through their tongues.

“Gonna be okay, bro,” I promised him. “Gonna get out of here. Hold on. Going home. We’re going home. You and me. Out of here.”

Returning from a search of the killers’ gear, Doogie stooped by my side and, using lineman’s pliers with sharp side cutters, snipped the bonds between my brother’s paws, pulled them off, and threw them aside. Cutting the wires around Orson’s jaws required more care and time, during which I continued to babble that everything was going to be cool, primo, sweet, stylin’ and in less than a minute, the hateful muzzle was gone.

Doogie moved to the kids, and though Orson made no effort to sit up, he licked my hand. His tongue was rough and dry.

Empty assurances had poured glibly from me. Now I wasn’t able to speak, because everything I had to say was important and so deeply felt that if I started to let it out, I would be laid low by my own words, emotionally wrecked, and with all the obstacles that remained in the way of our escape and survival, I couldn’t afford tears now, maybe not even later, maybe not ever.

Instead of saying anything, I pressed my hand against his flank, feeling the too-fast but steady beat of his great, good heart, and I kissed his brow.

Wendy had said that Orson was thirsty. His tongue had felt dry and swollen against my hands. Now I saw that his flews, scored from the pressure lines left by the muzzling wire, appeared to be chapped. His dark eyes were slightly filmy, and I saw a weariness in them that scared me, something close to resignation.

Although reluctant to leave Orson’s side, I went to the large Styrofoam cooler beside the card table. It was half full of cold water in which floated a few chips of ice. The killers appeared to be health conscious, because the only drinks they had brought with them were bottles of V8 vegetable juice and Evian water.

I took one bottle of water to Orson. In my absence, he had struggled off his side and was lying on his belly, though he seemed not to have the strength to raise his head.

Cupping my left hand, I poured some Evian into it. Orson lifted his head barely enough to be able to lap the water from my palm, at first listlessly but soon with enthusiasm.

As I repeatedly replenished the water, I reviewed the physical damage he had endured, and my increasing anger ensured that I’d be able to hold back my tears. The cartilage of his left ear appeared to be crushed, and the fur was matted with a lot of dried blood, as though he had sustained a blow to the head with a club or a length of pipe. Blunt instruments were one of Mr. John Joseph Randolph’s specialties. In his left cushion, half an inch from his nose, was a blood-caked cut. A couple of the nails in his right forepaw were broken off, and his toes were sheathed in hardened blood. He had put up a good fight. The pasterns on all four legs were chafed from the wire, and two were bleeding, though not seriously.

Doogie had finished snipping the wires that bound the kids and had moved on to Conrad, who was still out cold. Using a spool of the killers’ wire, he had shackled the man’s feet. Now he was using more wire to cuff his wrists behind his back.

We couldn’t risk taking the two men with us, back through the maze. Because crawling was required in some of the tunnels, we wouldn’t be able to bind even their hands, and without restraints, they would be completely uncontrollable. We would have to send the police back here for them — assuming the entire structure didn’t collapse from the stresses of the time-shifting phenomena occurring overhead.

Although I might have changed my mind later, at that moment I wanted to immobilize them, seal their mouths shut with tape, put a bottle of water where they could see it, and leave them here to die painfully of thirst.

Orson had finished the Evian. He struggled to his feet, wobbly as a baby, and stood panting, blinking the filminess out of his eyes, looking around with interest.

“Poki akua,” I told him, which is Hawaiian for dog of the gods.

He chuffed weakly, as though pleased by the compliment.

A sudden pong, followed by a nerve-jangling squeal, as of metal torquing violently, passed through the copper room. Both Orson and I looked at the ceiling, then around at the walls, but there was no evident distortion of the smooth metal surfaces.

Tick, tick, tick.

I dragged the heavy cooler across the floor to Orson and opened the lid. He looked in at the icy water sloshing among the bottles of Evian and vegetable juice, and he happily began to lap it up.

On his side, curled in the fetal position, Randolph was groaning but not yet conscious.

Doogie clipped off a few feet of wire, all he needed to finish binding Conrad, and passed the spool to me.

I rolled Randolph facedown and hurriedly wired his wrists together behind his back. I was tempted to cinch the bonds as tight as those on the children and Orson, but I controlled myself and made them only tight enough to ensure that he could not free himself.

After securing his ankles, I looped wire from the shackles at his feet to those at his wrists, further limiting his ability to move.

Randolph must have awakened as I began to apply this final restraint, because when I finished, he spoke with a clarity not characteristic of someone just regaining consciousness: “I’ve won.”

I moved out from behind him and hunkered down to look at his face. His head was turned to the side, left cheek against the copper floor. Lips split and bleeding. His right eye was pale green and bright, but I saw no evidence of animal eyeshine.

Curiously, he appeared to be in no distress. He was at peace, as if he weren’t trussed and helpless but were merely resting.

When he spoke, his voice was calm, even slightly euphoric, like that of someone coming out of a light Demerol sleep. I would have felt better if he’d ranted, snarled, and spat. His relaxed demeanor seemed to support his unnerving contention that he had won in spite of his current circumstances. “I’ll be on the other side before the night is gone. They stripped out the engine. That wasn’t a mortal wound. This is a sort of…organic machine. In time, it has healed. Now it powers itself. You can feel it. Feel it in the floor.”

Those rumblings, like passing trains, were louder than before, and the spells of calm between were shorter. Although the effect in this room had been less than elsewhere in the structure, the noise and the vibrations in the floor were at last gaining power here, too.

Randolph said, “Powers itself with the littlest help. A storm lamp in the translation chamber two hours ago — that’s all it took to get it running again. This is no ordinary machine.”

“You worked on this project?”

“Mine.”

“Dr. Randolph Josephson,” I said, suddenly remembering the name of the project leader I’d heard on Delacroix’s tape. John Joseph Randolph, boy killer, had become Randolph Josephson. “What does it do, where does it…go?”

Instead of answering me, he smiled and said, “Did the crow ever appear to you? It never appeared to Conrad. He said it did, but he lies. The crow appeared to me. I was sitting by the rock, and the crow rose out of it.” He sighed. “Formed out of the solid rock that night, in front of my eyes.”

Orson was with the children, accepting their affection. He was wagging his tail. Everything was going to be all right. The world wasn’t going to end, at least not here, at least not tonight. We would get out of here, we would survive, we would live to party, ride the waves again, it was guaranteed, it was a sure thing, it was a done deal, because right here was the omen, the sign of good times coming: Orson was wagging his tail.

“When I saw the crow, I knew I was someone special,” Randolph said. “I had a destiny. Now I’ve fulfilled it.”

Once more, the fearsome twang of torquing metal punctuated the rumble of the ghost train.

“Forty-four years ago,” I said, “you’re the one who carved the crow on 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 windlike 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 the gateway was a tight fit for the sass man, but he popped through, too, and then he wrenched the chair out of the gap, because we were likely to need it again.

We passed the Mystery Train patch and the image of the crow. No draft currently moved through this tunnel. None of the newspaper clippings ahead of us stirred at all. And yet the large sheet of art paper, which featured the graphite rubbing of the carved-stone bird, was fluttering as if a gale-force wind were tearing at it. The loose ends of the paper curled and flapped vigorously. The crow seemed to be pulling angrily at the pieces of tape that fixed it to the curved steel surface, determined to break out of the paper as, according to Randolph, it had once arisen out of rock.

Maybe I was hallucinating this business with the crow, sure, and maybe I was born to be a snake charmer, but I wasn’t going to hang around to see if a real bird morphed out of the paper and took flight, any more than I was going to lie down in a nest of cobras and hum show tunes to entertain them.

On a hunch that I might want proof of what I’d seen down here, I tore a few newspaper clippings from the wall and stuffed them in my pockets.

With the faux crow flapping furiously against the wall behind us, we hurried on, keeping our group together, doing what any sane person would do when the world was coming apart around him and death loomed at every side: We followed the cat.

I tried not to think about Bobby. The first problem was just getting to him. If we got to him, everything would be okay. He would be waiting for us — cold and sore and weak, but waiting by the elevator where we had left him — and he would remind me of my promise by saying, Carpe cerevisi, bro.

The faint iodine odor that had been with us all the way through the labyrinth was sharper now. Threaded through it were whiffs of charcoal, sulfur, rotting roses, and an indescribable, bitter scent unlike anything I had smelled before.

If the time-shifting phenomena were spreading down here into the deepest realms of the structure, we were at greater risk than at any moment since we had entered the hangar. The worst possibility wasn’t that our escape would be delayed or even cut off by the motor-driven valves. Worse, if the wrong moment of the past intersected with the present, as had happened more than once upstairs, we might suddenly be inundated by whatever oceans of liquid or toxic gas had pumped through these tubes, whereupon we would either drown or suffocate in poisonous fumes.

26

One cat, four kids, one dog, one deejay-songwriter, one animal communicator, one Viking, and the poster child for Armageddon — that’s me — ran, crawled, squirmed, ran, fell, got up, ran some more, along the dry beds of steel rivers, brass rivers, copper creeks, one white light flaring off curved walls, brightly spiraling, feathery darkness whirling like wings everywhere that the light didn’t reach, with the rumble of invisible trains all around, and a shrill shrieking like the whistles of locomotives, the iodine smell now chokingly heavy, but now so faint it seemed the previous density had been imagined, currents of the past washing in like a mushy tide, then ebbing out of the present. Terrified by a periodic sound of rushing water, water or something worse, we came at last to the sloping concrete tunnel, and then into the alcove by the elevator, where Bobby lay as we had left him, still alive.

While Doogie reconnected the wires in the elevator control panel, and while Roosevelt, carrying Mungojerrie, shepherded the kids into the cab, Sasha, Orson, and I gathered around Bobby.

He looked like Death on a bad hair day.

I said, “Lookin’ good.”

Bobby spoke to Orson in a voice so weak that it barely carried over the sounds of clashing times, clashing worlds, which I guess is what we were hearing. “Hey, fur face.”

Orson nuzzled Bobby’s neck, sniffed his wound, then looked worriedly at me.

“You did it, XP Man,” Bobby said.

“It was more a Fantastic Five caper than a one-superhero gig,” I demurred.

“You got back in time to make your midnight show,” Bobby told Sasha, and I had the sickening feeling that, in his way, he was saying goodbye to us.

“Radio is my life,” she said.

The building shook, the train rumble became a roar, and concrete dust sifted down from the ceiling.

Sasha said, “We have to get you in the elevator.”

But Bobby looked at me and said, “Hold my hand, bro.”

I gripped his hand. It was ice.

Pain cramped his face, and then he said, “I screwed up.”

“You never.”

“Wet my pants,” he said shakily.

The cold seemed to come out of his hand and up my arm, coiling in my heart. “Nothing wrong with that, bro. Urinophoria. You’ve done it before.”

“I’m not wearing neoprene.”

“So it’s a style issue, huh?”

He laughed, but the tattered laughter frayed into choking.

Doogie announced, “Elevator’s ready.”

“Let’s move you,” Sasha suggested, as tiny chips of concrete joined the fall of dust.

“Never thought I’d die so inelegantly,” Bobby said, his hand tightening on mine.

“You’re not dying,” I assured him.

“Love you…bro.”

“Love you,” I said, and the words were like a key that locked my throat as tight as a vault.

“Total wipeout,” he said, his voice fading until the final syllable was inaudible.

His eyes fixed on something far beyond us, and his hand went slack in mine.

I felt a whole great slab of my heart slide away, like the shaling face of a cliff, down into a hateful darkness.

Sasha put her fingertips to his throat, feeling for a pulse in his carotid artery. “Oh, God.”

“Gotta get out of here now,” Doogie insisted.

In a voice so thick I didn’t recognize it as my own, I said to Sasha, “Come on, let’s get him in the elevator.”

“He’s gone.”

“Help me get him in the elevator.”

“Chris, honey, he’s gone.”

“We’re taking him with us,” I said.

“Snowman—”

“We’re taking him with us!”

“Think of the kids. They—”

I was desperate and crazy, crazy-desperate, a dark whirlpool of grief churning in my mind, sucking away all reason, but I was not going to leave him there. I would die with him, beside him, rather than leave him there.

I grabbed him by the shoulders and started dragging him into the elevator, aware that I was probably frightening the kids, who must already be scared shitless, no matter how contemporary and cool and tough they were. I couldn’t expect them to clap their hands with glee at the prospect of taking an elevator ride up from Hell with a corpse for company, and I didn’t blame them, but that was the way it had to be.

When they saw that I wasn’t going anydamnwhere without Bobby Halloway, Sasha and Doogie helped me drag him into the elevator.

The rumbling, the banshee shrieking, the snap-crackle-pop that seemed to indicate imminent structural implosion all faded suddenly, and the drizzle of concrete chips stopped, but I knew this had to be temporary. We were in the eye of the time hurricane, and worse was coming.

Just as we got Bobby inside, the elevator doors started to close, and Orson slipped in with so little time to spare that he almost caught his tail.

“What the hell?” Doogie said. “I didn’t press a button.”

“Somebody called it, someone upstairs,” Sasha said.

The elevator motor whined, and the cab rose.

Already crazy-desperate, I became crazier when I realized that my hands were slick with Bobby’s blood, and more desperate as I was overcome by the idea that there was something I could do to change all this. The past and the present are present in the future, and the future is contained in the past, as T. S. Eliot wrote; therefore, all time is unredeemable, and what will be will be. What might have been — that’s an illusion, because the only thing that could have happened is what does happen, and there’s not anything we can do to change it, because we’re doomed by destiny, fucked by fate, though Mr. Eliot hadn’t put it in exactly those words. On the other hand, Winnie-the-Pooh, much less of a broody type than Mr. Eliot, believed in the possibility of all things, which might be because he was only a stuffed bear with a head full of nothing, but it also might be the case that Mr. Pooh was, in fact, a Zen master who knew as much about the meaning of life as did Mr. Eliot. The elevator rose — we were at B-5—and Bobby lay dead on the floor, and my hands were slick with blood, and there was nevertheless hope in my heart, which I didn’t understand at all, but as I tried to see clearly the why of my hope, I reasoned that the answer was in combining Mr. Eliot’s insights and those of Mr. Pooh. As we reached B-4, I glanced down at Orson, whom I’d thought was dead but was now alive again, resuscitated just as Tinker Bell had been after she’d drunk the cup of poison to save Peter Pan from the murderous schemes of the homicidal Hook. I was beyond crazy, caught in a wave of totally macking lunacy, sick with terror, sicker with despair, sickest with hope, and I could not stop thinking about good Tink being saved by sheer belief, by all the dreaming kids in the world clapping their small hands to proclaim their belief in fairies. Subconsciously, I must have known where I was going, but when I snatched the Uzi out of Doogie’s hands, I had no conscious idea what I intended to do with it, though judging by the expression on the waltz wizard’s face, I must have looked even crazier than I felt.

B-3.

The elevator doors opened on B-3, and the corridor beyond was filled with muddy red light.

In this mysterious radiance were five tall, blurry, distorted maroon figures. They might have been human, but they might have been something even worse.

With them was a smaller creature, also a maroon blur, with four legs and a tail, which might have been a cat.

In spite of all the might-have-beens, I didn’t hesitate, because only precious seconds remained in which to act. I stepped out of the elevator, into the muddy red glow, but then the corridor was full of fluorescent light when I crossed into it.

Roosevelt, Doogie, Sasha, Bobby, Mungojerrie, and I — me, myself, Christopher Snow — stood in the corridor, facing the elevator doors, looking as if they — we — expected trouble.

A minute ago, down on B-6, just as we had loaded Bobby’s corpse into the elevator, someone up here had pushed the call button. That someone was Bobby, a living Bobby from earlier in the night.

In this strangely afflicted building, time past, time present, and time future were all present here at once.

With my friends — and I myself — gaping at me in astonishment, as if I were a ghost, I turned right, toward the two oncoming security men that the others hadn’t yet seen. One of these guards had fired the shot that killed Bobby.

I squeezed off a burst from the Uzi, and both guards were cut down before they fired a shot.

My stomach twisted with revulsion at what I’d done, and I tried to escape my conscience by taking refuge in the fact that these men would have been killed by Doogie, anyway, after they had shot Bobby. I had only accelerated their fate while changing Bobby’s altogether, for a net saving of one life. But perhaps excuses of that sort make excellent paving stones for the road to Hell.

Behind me, Sasha, Doogie, and Roosevelt rushed into the corridor from the elevator.

The astonishment among all these doppelgängers was as thick as the peanut butter on the banana sandwiches that had ultimately killed Elvis.

I didn’t understand how this could be happening, because it had not happened earlier. We had never met ourselves in this hallway on our way down to find the children. But if we were meeting ourselves now, why didn’t I have a memory of it?

Paradox. Time paradox, I guess. You know me and math, me and physics. I’m more a Pooh guy, an Eliot guy. My head ached. I had changed Bobby Halloway’s fate, which was, to me, a pure miracle, not mere mathematics.

The elevator was full of muddy red light and the blurry maroon figures of the kids. The doors began to slide shut.

“Hold it!” I shouted.

Present-time Doogie blocked the door, half in the fluorescent corridor and half in the murky red elevator.

The throbbing electronic sound swelled louder. It was fearsome.

I remembered John Joseph Randolph’s pleasurable anticipation, his confidence that we would all be going to the other side soon, to that sideways place he wouldn’t name. The train, he’d said, was already beginning to pull out of the station. Suddenly I wondered if he’d meant the whole building might make that mysterious journey — not just whoever was in the egg room, but everyone within the walls of the hangar and the six basements below it.

With a renewed sense of urgency, I asked Doogie to look in the elevator and see if Bobby was there.

“I’m here,” said the Bobby in the hall.

“In there, you’re a pile of dead meat,” I told him.

“No way.”

“Way.”

“Ouch.”

“Maximum.”

I didn’t know why, but I thought it wouldn’t be a good idea to return upstairs to the hangar, beyond this zone of radically tangled time, with both Bobbys, the live one and the dead one.

Still holding the door, present-time Doogie stepped into the elevator, hesitated, then returned to the corridor. “There’s no Bobby in there!”

“Where’d he go?” asked present-time Sasha.

“The kids say he just… went. They’re jazzed about it.”

“The body’s gone because he wasn’t shot here, after all,” I explained, which was about as illuminating as describing a thermonuclear reaction with the words it go boom.

“You said I was dead meat,” the past-time Bobby said.

“What’s happening here?” the past-time Doogie demanded.

“Paradox,” I said.

“What’s that mean?”

“I read poetry,” I said with super-mondo frustration.

“Good work, son,” said both Roosevelts in perfect harmony, and then looked at each other in surprise.

To Bobby, I said, “Get in the elevator.”

“Where are we going?” he asked.

“Out.”

“What about the kids?”

“We got them.”

“What about Orson?”

“He’s in the elevator.”

“Cool.”

“Will you move your ass?” I demanded.

“A little crabby, aren’t we?” he said, stepping forward, patting my shoulder.

“You don’t know what I’ve been through.”

“Wasn’t I the one who died?” he asked, and then disappeared into the murky red elevator, becoming another maroon blur.

The past-time Sasha, Doogie, Roosevelt, and even the past-time Chris Snow looked confused, and the past-time Chris said to me, “What are we supposed to do?”

Addressing myself, I said, “You disappoint me. I’d expect you, at least, to figure it out. Eliot and Pooh, for God’s sake!”

As the oscillating thrum of the egg-room engines grew louder and a faint but ominous rumble passed through the floor, like giant train wheels beginning to turn, I said, “You’ve got to go down and save the kids, save Orson.”

“You already saved them.”

My head was spinning. “But maybe you still have to go down and save them, or it’ll turn out that we didn’t.”

The past-time Roosevelt picked up the past-time Mungojerrie and said, “The cat understands.”

“Then just follow the damn cat!” I said.

All of us present-time types who were still in the corridor — Roosevelt, Sasha, me, Doogie holding the elevator door — stepped back into the red light, but when we were in the cab with the kids, there was no red light at all, just the incandescent bulb in the ceiling.

The corridor, however, was now flooded with red murk, and our past-time selves, minus Bobby, were maroon blurs once more.

Doogie pressed the button for the ground floor, and the doors closed.

Orson squeezed between me and Sasha, to be close to my side.

“Hey, bro,” I said softly.

He chuffed.

We were cool.

As we started upward at an excruciatingly slow pace, I looked at my wristwatch. The luminous LED digits weren’t racing either forward or backward, as I had seen them do previously. Instead, pulsing slowly across the watch were curious squiggles of light, which might have been distorted numbers. With growing dread, I wondered if this meant we were beginning to move sideways in time, heading toward the other side that Randolph was so eager to visit.

“You were dead,” Aaron Stuart said to Bobby.

“So I heard.”

“You don’t remember being dead?” Doogie asked.

“Not really.”

“He doesn’t remember dying because he never died,” I said too sharply.

I was still struggling with grief at the same time that a wild joy was surging in me, a manic glee, which was a weird combination of emotions, like being King Lear and Mr. Toad of Toad Hall at the same time. Plus my fear was feeding on itself, growing fatter. We weren’t out of here yet, and we had more than ever to lose, because if one of us died now, there was no chance that I’d be able to pull another rabbit out of a hat; I didn’t even have a hat.

As we ground slowly up, still short of B-2, a deep rumbling rose through the elevator shaft, as if we were in a submarine around which depth charges were detonating, and the lift mechanism began to creak.

“If it was me, I’d sure remember dying,” Wendy announced.

“He didn’t die,” I said more calmly.

“But he did die,” insisted Aaron Stuart.

“He sure did,” said Anson.

Jimmy Wing said, “You peed your pants.”

“I never,” Bobby denied.

“You told us you did,” said Jimmy Wing.

Bobby looked dubiously at Sasha, and she said, “You were dying, it was excusable.”

On my wristwatch, the luminous squiggles were twisting across the readout window faster than before. Maybe the Mystery Train was pulling out of the station, gathering speed. Sideways.

As we reached B-2, the building began to shake badly enough to cause the elevator cab to rattle against the walls of the shaft, and we grabbed at the handrails and at each other to keep our balance.

“My pants are dry,” Bobby noted.

“Because you didn’t die,” I said tightly, “which means you never wet your pants, either.”

“He did too,” said Jimmy Wing.

Sensing my state of mind, Roosevelt said, “Relax, son.”

Orson put one paw on my shoe, as if to indicate that I should listen to Roosevelt.

Doogie said, “If he never died, why do we remember him dying?”

“I don’t know,” I said miserably.

The elevator seemed to have gotten stuck at B-2, and abruptly the doors opened, though Doogie had pressed only the G button.

Maybe the kids weren’t able to see past us to what lay beyond the cab, but those of us in the front row had a good look, and the sight froze us. A corridor, either stripped to the bare concrete or equipped as it had been in years gone by, should have waited out there past the threshold, but we were facing a panoramic landscape instead. A smoldering red sky. Oily black fungus grew in gnarled, vaguely treelike masses, and thick rivulets of vile dark syrup oozed from puckered pustules on the trunks. From some limbs hung cocoons like those we had seen in the Dead Town bungalow, glossy and fat, pregnant with malignant life.

For a moment, as we stood stunned, no sound or odor issued from this twisted landscape, and I dared to hope it was more a vision than a physical reality. Then movement at the threshold drew my eye, and I saw the red-and-black-mottled tendrils of a ground-hugging vine, as beautiful and evil-looking as a nest of baby coral snakes, questing at the sill of the door, growing as fast as plants in a nature film run at high speed, wriggling into the cab.

“Shut the door!” I urged.

Doogie pressed a button labeled close door and then pushed the G button again, for the ground floor.

The doors didn’t close.

As Doogie jammed his thumb against the button again, something loomed in that otherworldly place, no more than two feet away from us, crossing from the left.

We brought up our guns.

It was a man in a bio-secure suit. Hodgson was stenciled across the brow of his helmet, but his face was that of an ordinary man, not crawling with parasites.

We were in the past and on the other side. Chaos.

The writhing tendrils of the black-and-red vine, the diameter of earthworms, lapped at the elevator carpet.

Orson sniffed them. The tendrils rose like swaying cobras, as if they would strike at his nose, and Orson twitched away from them.

Cursing, Doogie pounded the side of his fist against close door. Then against G.

Hodgson could see us. Amazement pried open his eyes.

The unnatural silence and stillness were broken when wind gusted into the cab. Hot and humid. Reeking of tar and rotting vegetation. Circling us and blowing out again, as if it were a living thing.

Careful to avoid stepping on the vine tendrils, afraid they would bore through the sole of my shoe and then through the sole of my foot, I tugged frantically at the door, trying to pull out the sliding panel on the left. It wouldn’t budge.

With the stench came a faint but chilling sound like thousands of tortured voices, issuing from a distance — and threaded through those screams, also distant, was an inhuman shriek.

Hodgson turned more directly toward us, pointing for the benefit of another man in a bio-secure suit, who hove into view.

The doors began to close. The vine tendrils crunched between the sliding panels. The doors shuddered, almost retreated, but then pinched the vines off, and the cab rose.

Oozing yellow fluid and the bitter scent of sulfur, the severed tendrils curled and twisted with great agitation — and then dissolved into an inert mush.

The building shook as if it were the home of all thunder, the foundry where Thor forged his lightning bolts.

The vibrations were affecting either the elevator motor or the lift cables, perhaps both, because we were rising more slowly than before, grinding upward.

“Mr. Halloway’s pants are dry now,” Aaron Stuart said, picking up the conversation where it had left off, “but I smelled the pee.”

“Me too,” said Anson, Wendy, and Jimmy.

Orson woofed agreement.

“It’s a paradox,” Roosevelt said solemnly, as though to save me the trouble of explaining.

“There’s that word again,” Doogie said. His brow was furrowed, and his gaze remained riveted on the indicator board above the door, waiting for the B-1 bulb to light.

“A time paradox,” I said.

“But how does that work?” Sasha asked.

“Like a toaster oven,” I said, meaning who knows?

Doogie pressed his thumb against G and kept it there. We didn’t want the door to open on B-1. B for bedlam. B for bad news. B for be prepared to die squishily.

Aaron Stuart said, “Mr. Snow?”

I took a deep breath: “Yes?”

“If Mr. Halloway didn’t die, then whose blood is on your hands?”

I looked at my hands. They were sticky-damp with Bobby’s blood, which had gotten on them when I’d dragged his body into the elevator.

“Weird,” I admitted.

Wendy Dulcinea said, “If the body went poof, why didn’t the blood on your hands go poof?”

My mouth was too dry, my tongue too thick, and my throat too tight to allow me to answer her.

The shuddering elevator briefly caught on something in the shaft, tore loose with a ripping-metal sound, and then we groaned to B-1. Where we stopped.

Doogie leaned on close door and on the button for the ground floor.

We didn’t ascend any farther.

The doors slid inexorably open. Heat, humidity, and that fetid stench rolled over us, and I expected the vigorous alien vegetation to grow into the cab and overwhelm us with explosive force.

In our slice of time, we’d risen one level, but William Hodgson was still out there in neverland, where we had left him. Pointing at us.

The man beyond Hodgson — Lumley, according to his helmet — also turned to look at us.

Shrieking, something flew out of that baleful sky, among the black trees: a creature with glossy black wings and whiplike tail, with the muscular, scaly limbs of a lizard, as if a gargoyle had torn itself loose of the stone high on an ancient Gothic cathedral and had taken flight. As it swooped down on Lumley, it appeared to spit out a stream of objects, which looked like large peach pits but were something deadlier, something no doubt full of frenzied life. Lumley twitched and jerked as though he had been hit by machine-gun fire, and several perfectly round holes appeared in his spacesuit, like those we had seen in poor damn Hodgson’s suit in the egg room the previous night.

Lumley screamed as though he were being eaten alive, and Hodgson stumbled backward in terror, away from us.

The elevator doors began to close, but the flying thing abruptly changed directions, streaking straight toward us.

As the doors bumped shut, hard objects rattled against them, and a series of dimples appeared in the steel, as if it had been hit by bullets with almost enough punch to penetrate to the interior of the cab.

Sasha’s face was talcum white.

Mine must have been whiter still, to match my name.

Even Orson seemed to have gone a paler shade of black.

We ascended toward the ground floor through crashes of thunder, the grinding rumble of steel wheels on steel track, harsh whistles, shrieks, and the throbbing electronic hum, but in spite of all those sounds of worlds colliding, we also heard another noise, which was more intimate, more terrifying. Something was on the roof of the elevator cab. Crawling, slithering.

It could have been nothing but a loose cable, which might have explained our quaking, jerky progress toward the ground floor. But it wasn’t a loose cable. That was wishful thinking. This thing was alive. Alive and purposeful.

I couldn’t imagine how anything could have gotten into the shaft with us after the doors had shut, unless the intermingling of these two realities was nearly complete. In which case, at any moment, might not the thing on the roof pass through the ceiling and be among us, like a ghost passing through a wall?

Doogie remained focused on the indicator board above the doors, but the rest of us — animals, kids, and adults — turned our faces up toward the menacing sounds.

In the center of the ceiling was an escape hatch. A way out. A way in.

Borrowing the Uzi from Doogie once more, I aimed at the ceiling. Sasha also covered the trapdoor with her shotgun.

I wasn’t optimistic about the effectiveness of gunfire. Unless I was misremembering, Delacroix had suggested that at least some of the expedition members were heavily armed when they went to the other side. Guns hadn’t saved them.

The elevator groaned-rattled-squeaked upward.

This side of the three-foot-square hatch featured neither hinges nor handles. There was no latch bolt, either. To escape, you had to push the panel up and out. To enable rescue workers to pull it open from the other side, there would be a handle or a recessed groove in which fingers could be hooked.

The flying gargoyle had hands, thick talonlike fingers. Maybe those huge fingers wouldn’t fit in a groove handle.

A hard, frantic scraping noise. Something clawing busily at the steel roof, as if trying to dig through. A creak, a hard pop, a rending sound. Silence.

The kids clutched one another.

Orson growled low in his throat.

So did I.

The walls seemed to press closer to one another, as though the elevator cab were reshaping itself into a group coffin. The air was thick. Each breath felt like sludge in my lungs. The overhead light began to flicker.

With a metallic squeal, the escape hatch sagged toward us as though a great weight were pressing on it. The frame in which it sat would not allow it to open inward.

After a moment, the weight was removed, but the panel didn’t return entirely to normal. It was distorted. Steel plate. Bent like plastic. More force had been required for that task than I cared to think about.

Sweat blurred my vision. I wiped at my eyes with the back of my hand.

“Yes!” Doogie said, as the G bulb lit on the indicator board.

The promise of release was not immediately fulfilled. The doors didn’t open.

The cab began to bob up and down, rising and falling as much as a foot with each sickening bounce, as though the hoist cables and the limit switches and the roller guides and the pulleys were all about to crack apart and send us plunging to the bottom of the shaft in a mass of mangling metal.

On the roof, the gargoyle — or something worse — yanked on the escape hatch. Its prior efforts had tweaked the panel in the frame, and now the trap was wedged shut.

The elevator doors were still shut, too, and Doogie angrily punched the button labeled open doors.

With a shrill bark, the badly distorted rim of the steel trap stuttered in the frame, as the creature above furiously pulled on it.

At last the elevator doors opened, and I spun toward them, sure that we were now surrounded by neverland, that the predator on the roof would have been joined by others.

We were at the ground floor. The hangar was noisier than a New Year’s Eve party in a train station with howling wolves and a punk band with nuclear amplifiers.

But it was recognizably the hangar: no red sky, no black trees, no slithering vines like nests of coral snakes.

Overhead, the warped escape hatch screeched, rattled violently. The surrounding frame was coming apart.

The elevator bobbed worse than ever. The floor of the cab rose and fell in relation to the hangar floor, the way a dock slip moves in relation to a boat deck in choppy seas.

I gave the Uzi to Doogie, snatched up my shotgun, and followed the sass man into the hangar, jumping across the shifting threshold, with Bobby and Orson close behind me.

Sasha and Roosevelt hurried the kids out of the elevator, and Mungojerrie came last, after a final curious glance at the ceiling.

As Sasha turned to cover the cab with her shotgun, the escape hatch was torn out of the ceiling. The gargoyle came down from the roof. The leathery black wings were folded as it dropped, but then they spread to fill the cab. The muscles bulged in the beast’s sleek, scaly limbs as it tensed to spring forward. The tail whipped, lashing against the cab walls. Silver eyes flashed. Its raw mouth appeared to be lined with red velvet, but its long forked tongue was black.

I remembered the seedlike projectiles that it had spat at Lumley and at Hodgson, and as I cried out to Sasha, the gargoyle shrieked. She squeezed off a round from the shotgun, but before she could be riddled with squirming parasites, the elevator broke apart and the cab plunged out of sight with the screaming creature still aboard, trailing cables and counterweights and pulleys and steel beams.

Because the beast had wings, I expected it to rise out of the ruins and soar up the shaft, but then I realized that the shaft no longer existed. Instead, I was looking into the starry void that I had glimpsed earlier in the night, where the stairwell should have been.

Crazily, I thought of a magical wardrobe serving as a doorway to the enchanted land of Narnia, mirrors and rabbit holes leading to a bizarre kingdom ruled by a playing-card queen. This was only a transient madness.

Recovering, I did the Pooh thing and gamely accepted all that I had seen — and was still seeing. I led our intrepid band across the hangar, where super-weird and maximum-sharky stuff was happening, across this neverland of past, present, future, and sideways time, saying hello to a startled ghost workman in a hard hat, brandishing the shotgun at three ghosts that looked as if they would give us trouble, while trying as best I could not to put us in the same space that was about to be occupied by an object materializing from another time, and if you think all that was easy, you’re a kak.

At times we were in a dark and abandoned warehouse, then we were in the murky red light of a time shift, but ten steps later, we were walking through a well-lighted and bustling place populated by busy ghosts as solid as we were. The worst moment was when we passed through a red fog and, though still far from the exit door, found ourselves beyond the warehouse, in a landscape where black masses of fungus rose with vaguely treelike forms and clawed at a red sky in which two dim suns burned low on the horizon. But an instant later, we were among the workmen ghosts again, then in darkness, and finally at the exit.

Nothing and no one followed us into the night, but we kept running until we had nearly reached the Hummer, where at last we stopped and turned and stared at the hangar, which was caught in a time storm. The concrete base of the structure, the corrugated steel walls, and the curve of the Quonset-style roof were pulsing with that red radiance. From the high clerestory windows came white beams as intense as those from a lighthouse, jabbing at the sky, carving bright arcs. Judging by the sound, you would have thought that a thousand bulls were smashing through a thousand china shops inside the building, that tanks were clashing on battlefields, that mobs of rioters were screaming for blood. The ground under our feet was trembling, as though from an earthquake, and I wondered if we were at a safe distance.

I expected the structure to explode or burst into flames, but instead it began to unravel. The red glow faded, the searchlights spearing from the high windows went dark, and we watched while the huge building flickered as though two thousand days and nights were passing in just two minutes, moonglow alternating with sunshine and darkness, the corrugated walls appearing to flutter in the strobing light. Then suddenly the building began to dismantle itself, as if it were unraveling into time past. Workmen swarmed over its surface, all moving backward; scaffolding and construction machinery appeared around it; the roof vanished, and the walls peeled down, and trains of trucks sucked the concrete out of the foundation, back into their mixers, and steel beams were craned out of the ground, like dinosaur bones from a paleontological dig, until all six subterranean floors must have been deconstructed, whereupon a blinding fury of massive dump trucks and excavators replaced the earth that they had once removed, and then after a final crackle of red light passed across the site and winked out, all was still.

The hangar and everything under it had ceased to exist.

The spectacle left the kids ecstatic, as if they had met E.T. and ridden on the back of a brontosaurus and taken a quick trip to the moon all in one evening.

“It’s over?” Doogie wondered.

“As if it never was,” I suggested.

Sasha said, “But it was.”

“The residual effect. A runaway residual effect. The whole place imploded into…the past, I guess.”

“But if it never existed,” Bobby said, “why do I remember being inside the place?”

“Don’t start,” I warned him.

We packed ourselves into the Hummer — five adults, four excited kids, one shaky dog, and a smug cat — and Doogie drove to the bungalow in Dead Town, where we had to deal with Delacroix’s rotting cadaver and the ceilings festooned with frankfurter-size cocoons. An exorcist’s work is never done.

On the way, Aaron Stuart, the troublemaker, reached a solemn conclusion about the blood on my hands. “Mr. Halloway must be dead.”

“We’ve done this,” I said impatiently. “He’s not dead anymore.”

“He’s dead,” Anson agreed.

“I may be dead,” Bobby said, “but my pants are dry.”

“Dead,” Jimmy Wing agreed.

“Maybe he is dead,” Wendy brooded.

“What the hell is wrong with you kids?” I demanded, turning in my seat to glare at them. “He’s not dead, it’s a paradox, but he’s not dead! All you’ve got to do is believe in fairies, clap your hands, and Tinker Bell will live! Is that so hard to understand?”

“Ice it down, Snowman,” Sasha advised me.

“I’m cool.”

I was still glaring at the kids, who were in the third and final seat. Orson was in the cargo space behind them. He cocked his burly head and looked at me over the kids’ heads, as if to say Ice it down.

“I’m mellow,” I assured him.

He sneezed a sneeze of disagreement.

Bobby had been dead. As in dead and gone. As in deader than dead. All right. Time to get over it. Here in Wyvern, life goes on, occasionally even for the deceased. Besides, we were more than half a mile from the beach, so anything that happened here couldn’t be that important.

“Son, the Tinker Bell thing makes perfect sense,” Roosevelt said, either to placate me or because he had gone stark, raving mad.

“Yeah,” said Jimmy Wing. “Tinker Bell.”

“Tinker Bell,” the twins said, nodding in unison.

“Yeah,” Wendy said. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

Mungojerrie meowed. I don’t know what that meant.

Doogie drove over the curb, across the sidewalk, and parked on the front lawn at the bungalow.

The kids stayed in the vehicle with Orson and Mungojerrie.

Sasha, Roosevelt, and Doogie took positions around the Hummer, standing guard.

At Sasha’s suggestion, Doogie had included two cans of gasoline in the provisions. With the criminal intention of destroying still more government property, Bobby and I carried these ten gallons of satisfyingly flammable liquid to the bungalow.

Going back into this small house was even less appealing than submitting to extensive gum surgery, but we were manly men, and so we climbed the steps and crossed the porch without hesitation, though quietly.

In the living room, we set down the gasoline cans with care, as though to avoid waking a quarrelsome sleeper, and I switched on a flashlight.

The cocoons that had been clustered overhead were gone.

At first I thought the residents of those silky tubes had chewed free and were now loose in the bungalow in a form that was sure to prove troublesome. Then I realized that not even one wisp of gossamer filament remained in any corner, and none floated on the floor.

The lone red sock, which might once have belonged to one of the Delacroix children, lay where it had been previously, still caked with dust. In general, the bungalow was as I remembered it.

No cocoons hung in the dining room. None were to be found in the kitchen, either.

Leland Delacroix’s corpse was gone, as were the photographs of his family, the votive-candle glass, the wedding ring, and the gun with which he had killed himself. The ancient linoleum was still cracked and peeling, but I could see no biological stains that would have indicated that a dead body had been rotting here recently.

“The Mystery Train was never built,” I said, “so Delacroix never went to…the other side. Never opened the door.”

Bobby said, “Never got infected — or possessed. Whatever. And he never infected his family. So they’re all alive somewhere?”

“God, I hope so. But how could he not be here when he was here and we remember it?”

“Paradox,” Bobby said, as if he himself were entirely satisfied with that less than illuminating explanation. “So what do we do?”

“Burn it, anyway,” I concluded.

“To be safe, you mean?”

“No, just because I’m a pyromaniac.”

“Didn’t know that about you, bro.”

“Let’s torch this dump.”

As we emptied the gasoline cans in the kitchen, dining room, and living room, I repeatedly paused because I thought I heard something moving inside the bungalow walls. Every time I listened, the elusive sound stopped.

“Rats,” Bobby said.

This alarmed me, because if Bobby heard something, too, then the furtive noises weren’t the work of my imagination. Furthermore, this wasn’t the scuttling-scratching-squeaking of rodents; it was a liquid slithering.

“Humongous rats,” he said with more force but less conviction.

I fortified myself with the argument that Bobby and I were just woozy from gasoline fumes and, therefore, couldn’t trust our senses. Nevertheless, I expected to hear voices echoing inside my head: Stay, stay, stay, stay….

We escaped the bungalow without being munched.

Using the last half gallon of gasoline, I poured a fuse across the front porch, down the steps, and along the walkway.

Doogie pulled the Hummer into the street, to a safer distance.

Moonlight mantled Dead Town, and every silent structure seemed to harbor hostile watchers at the windows.

After setting the empty fuel can on the porch, I hurried out to the Hummer and asked Doogie to back it up until one of the rear tires was weighing down the manhole. The monkey manhole.

When I returned to the front yard, Bobby lit the fuse.

As the blue-orange flame raced up the walkway and climbed the front steps, Bobby said, “When I died…”

“Yeah?”

“Did I scream like a stuck pig, blubber, and lose my dignity?”

“You were cool. Aside from wetting your pants, of course.”

“They’re not wet now.”

The fuse flame reached the gasoline-soaked living room, and a firestorm blew through the bungalow.

Basking recklessly in the orange light, I said, “When you were dying…”

“Yeah?”

“You said, I love you, bro.”

He grimaced. “Lame.”

“And I said it was mutual.”

“Why did we have to do that?”

“You were dying.”

“But now here I am.”

“It’s awkward,” I agreed.

“What we need here is a custom paradox.”

“Like?”

“Where we remember everything else but forget my dying words.”

“Too late. I’ve already made arrangements with the church, the reception hall, and the florist.”

“I’ll wear white,” Bobby said.

“That would be a travesty.”

We turned away from the burning bungalow and walked out to the street. Harried by the witchy firelight, twisted tree shadows capered across the pavement.

As we drew near the Hummer, a familiar angry squeal tortured the night, followed by a score of other shrill voices, and I looked left to see the troop of Wyvern monkeys, half a block away, loping toward us.

The Mystery Train and all its associated terrors might be gone as if they had never been, but the life’s work of Wisteria Jane Snow still had its consequences.

We piled into the Hummer, and Doogie locked all the doors with a master switch on the console, just as the rhesuses swarmed over the vehicle.

“Go, move, woof, meow, get outta here!” everyone was shouting, though Doogie needed no encouragement.

He floored the accelerator, leaving part of the troop screaming in frustration as the rear bumper slipped from under their grasping hands.

We weren’t in the clear yet. Monkeys were clinging tenaciously to the luggage rack on the roof.

One nasty specimen was hanging by its hind legs, upside down at the tailgate, shrieking what must have been simian obscenities and furiously slapping its hands against the window. Orson snarled to warn it away, face-to-face at the glass, while struggling to stay on his feet as Doogie resorted to slalom maneuvers to try to shake the primates loose.

Another monkey slid down from the roof, directly in front of the windshield, glaring in at Doogie, blocking his view. With one hand it gripped the armature of one windshield wiper, to keep from tumbling off the Hummer, and in its other hand was a small stone. It hammered the stone against the windshield, but the glass didn’t break, so it swung again, and this time the stone left a starburst scratch.

“Hell with this,” Doogie said, switching on the wipers.

The moving armature pinched the monkey’s hand, and the whisking blade startled it. The beast squealed, let go, tumbled across the hood, and fell off the side of the Hummer.

The Stuart twins cheered.

In the front seat, forward of Sasha, Roosevelt rode shotgun, sans shotgun but with cat. Something cracked against the window beside him, loud enough to make Mungojerrie yelp with surprise.

A monkey was hanging there, too, also upside down, but this one had a combination wrench in its right hand, gripping it by the box end, using the open end as a hammer. It was the wrong tool for the job, but it was a lot better than the stone, and when the precocious primate swung it again, the tempered glass crazed.

As thousands of tiny fissures laid an instant crackle glaze across the side window, Mungojerrie sprang out of Roosevelt’s lap, onto the backrest of the front seat, onto the seat between Bobby and me, up and over and into the third row, taking refuge with the kids.

The cat moved so fast that it was landing among the children even as the sparking, gummy sheet of tempered glass collapsed onto Roosevelt’s lap. Doogie needed both hands for the wheel, and none of the rest of us could take a shot at the invader without blowing off our animal communicator’s head, which seemed counterproductive. Then the monkey was inside, swarming across Roosevelt, snapping its teeth at him and swinging the wrench when he tried to seize it, so fast that it might have been a cat, out of the front seat and into the middle seat, where I was sitting between Sasha and Bobby.

Surprisingly, it went for Bobby, perhaps because it mistook him for the boychick of Wisteria Jane Snow. Mom was its creator, which in monkey circles made me the son of Frankenstein. I heard the wrench ring dully off the side of Bobby’s skull, though not a fraction as hard as the rhesus would have liked, because it hadn’t been able to get in a good, solid swing as it was leaping.

Then somehow Bobby had it by the neck, both hands around its small throat, and the beast let go of the wrench to pry at Bobby’s choking hands. Only an extremely reckless monkey hater would have attempted to use a gun in these close quarters, and so as Doogie continued to slalom from curb to curb, Sasha put down the window at her side, and Bobby held the invader toward me. I slipped my hands around its neck, under Bobby’s hands, and got a strangulation grip as he let go. Though this all happened fast, too fast to think about what we were doing, the snarling-gagging-spitting rhesus made its presence felt, kicking and thrashing with surprising strength, considering that it wasn’t getting any breath and the blood supply to its brain was zero, twenty-five pounds of pissed-off primate, grabbing at our hair, determined to gouge our eyes, tear off our ears, lashing its tail, twisting fiercely as it tried to pull free. Sasha turned her head aside, and I leaned across her, trying to choke the monkey senseless but, more important, trying to shove it out of the Hummer, and then it was through the window, and I let it go, and Sasha cranked the glass up so fast that she almost pinched my hands.

Bobby said, “Let’s not do that again.”

“Okay.”

Another screeching fleabag swung down from the roof, intending to enter through the broken window, but Roosevelt whacked it with a sledgehammer-size fist, and it flew away into the night as though it had been fired out of a catapult.

Doogie was still putting the Hummer through quick serpentine maneuvers, and at the tailgate, the monkey hanging upside down from the roof rack swung back and forth across the unbroken window, as if it were a clock pendulum. Orson tumbled off his feet but sprang up at once, snarling and snapping his teeth to remind the rhesus of the price it would pay if it tried to get inside.

Looking beyond the tick-tock monkey, I saw that the rest of the troop continued to give chase. Doogie’s slalom trick, while shaking loose some of the attackers, had slowed us down, and the bright-eyed nasties were gaining on us.

Then the sass man stopped swerving, accelerated, and rounded a corner so fast that he almost stood us on end when he had to jam the brake pedal to the floorboard to avoid plowing through a pack of coyotes.

The monkey at the tailgate shrieked at either the sight or the smell of the pack. It dropped off the Hummer and ran for its life.

The coyotes, fifty or sixty of them, parted like a stream and flowed around the vehicle.

I was afraid they would try to come through the broken window. With their wicked teeth, they would be harder to hold off than mere monkeys. But they showed no interest in canned people meat, racing past, closing ranks again behind us.

The pursuing troop rounded the corner and met the pack. Monkeys shot into the air with such surprise that you would have thought they were on a trampoline. Being smart monkeys, they retreated without hesitation, and the coyotes went after them.

The kids turned backward in their seats, cheering the coyotes.

“It’s a Barnum and Bailey world,” Sasha said.

Doogie drove us out of Wyvern.

The clouds had cleared while we’d been underground, and the moon hung high in the sky, as round as time.

27

With midnight still ahead of us, we took each of the kids home, and that was totally fine. Tears are not always bitter. As we made our rounds, the tears on the faces of the children’s parents were as sweet as mercy. When Lilly Wing looked at me, with Jimmy in her arms, I saw in her eyes something that I had once yearned to see, but now what I saw was less fulfilling for me here in time present than it might have been in time past.

When we got back to my house, Sasha, Bobby, and I were prepared to party, but Roosevelt wanted to get his Mercedes, drive home to his handsome Bluewater cruiser at the marina, and craft a pirate’s patch out of filet mignon to cover his swollen eye. “Children, I’m getting old. You go celebrate, and I’ll go sleep.”

Because he was off duty at the radio station, Doogie had made a midnight date, as if he’d never doubted that he would come 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 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 Gensel. 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 gave me the Mystery Train cap.

“This can’t exist,” I said.

If the entire building that housed the project had unraveled from existence, why would the cap have been made in the first place?

“It doesn’t exist,” he said. “But something else does.”

Baffled, I turned the cap in my hands, to look at the words above the bill. The ruby-red stitching didn’t form Mystery Train anymore. Instead, the two words were Tornado Alley.

“What’s Tornado Alley?” I asked.

“You find it a little…”

“Not uncreepy?”

“Yeah.”

“Maximo weird,” I said.

Maybe Randolph and Conrad and others were out there in Wyvern or some other part of the world, working on the same project, which now had a different name. No closure.

“Gonna wear it?” Bobby asked.

“No.”

“Good idea.”

“Another thing,” he said. “What did happen to the dead me?”

“Here we go again. He ceased to exist, that’s all.”

“Because I didn’t die.”

“I’m no Einstein.”

He frowned. “What if I wake up some morning, and beside me in bed is that dead me, all rotting and oozing slime?”

“You’ll have to buy new sheets.”

When we were packed and ready to party, we drove out to the point of the southern horn of the bay, on which Bobby’s cottage — a beautiful structure of weathered teak and glass — is the only residence.

On the way, Sasha stopped at a pay phone, disguised her voice by doing a Mickey Mouse imitation — God knows why Mickey Mouse, when any of the characters from The Lion King would have been more apt — and tipped the police to the scene at the Stanwyk house.

When we were on the move again, Bobby said, “Bro?”

“Yo.”

“Who left that Mystery Train cap for you in the first place? And who slipped Delacroix’s security badge under the windshield wiper on the Jeep last night?”

“No proof.”

“But a suspicion?”

“Big Head.”

“You serious?”

“I think it’s way smarter than it looks.”

“It’s some mutant freak,” Bobby insisted.

“So am I.”

“Good point.”

At Bobby’s place, we changed from street clothes into wet suits, then loaded a cooler full of beer and a variety of snacks into the Explorer.

Before we could party, however, we needed to resolve one issue — so we could stop glancing nervously at the windows, looking for the crazy conductor of the Mystery Train.

The oversize video displays at the computer workstations in Bobby’s home office were ablaze with colorful maps, bar graphs, photos of the earth taken from orbit only minutes ago, and flow charts of dynamic weather conditions worldwide. Here — and with the help of his employees in the Moonlight Bay offices of Surfcast — Bobby predicted surf conditions for subscribers in over twenty countries.

As I am not computer compatible, I stood back while Bobby settled into one of the workstations, rattled his fingers across the keyboard, went on-line, and searched a database listing all the leading American scientists of our time. Logic insisted that a mad genius obsessed with the possibility of time travel, determined to prove that parallel worlds existed alongside our own and that these lands could be reached by a lateral movement across time, would have to become a physicist, and a damned good one, enormously well funded, if he had any hope of applying his theories effectively.

Bobby found Dr. Randolph Josephson in three minutes. He was associated with a university in Nevada, and he lived in Reno.

Mungojerrie sprang onto the workstation to peer intently at the data on the screen. There was even a photo. It was our mad scientist, all right.

In spite of the widespread base closures that had followed the end of the Cold War, Nevada had been left with a few sprawling facilities. It was reasonable to assume that on at least one of them, top-secret research projects in the Wyvern vein were still being undertaken.

“He might have moved up there to Reno after Wyvern closed,” Sasha said. “That doesn’t mean he’s still alive. He could have come back here to snatch these kids — and died when that building…came apart.”

“But maybe he never worked at Wyvern at all. If the Mystery Train never happened, then maybe he’s been up there in Reno all along — building Tornado Alley or something else.”

Bobby called directory assistance in Reno and obtained a listed number for Dr. Randolph Josephson. With a felt-tip pen, he jotted it on a notepad.

Though I knew my imagination was to blame, the ten digits seemed to have an 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 tideline. 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 offshore 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 monkeys, at least, were out there somewhere, and not feeling kindly about us.

Using the first-aid kit that Sasha had brought, I gently cleaned Orson’s abraded pasterns with antiseptic and then coated the shallow cuts with Neosporin. The laceration on his left cushion, near his nose, was not as bad as it had first looked, but his ear was a mess. In the morning, I would have to try to get a vet to come to the house and give us an opinion about the possibility of repairing the broken cartilage.

Although the antiseptic must have stung, Orson never complained. He is a good dog and an even better person.

“I love you, bro,” I told him.

He licked my face.

I realized that, from time to time, I was looking left and right along the beach, half expecting monkeys but even more prepared for the sight of Johnny Randolph strolling toward me. Or Hodgson in his spacesuit, face churning with parasites. After reality had been so thoroughly cut to pieces, perhaps it could never again be stitched back together in the old, comfortable pattern. I couldn’t shake the feeling that, from now on, anything could happen.

I opened a beer for me and one for Orson. I poured his into a bowl and suggested he share some of it with Mungojerrie, but the cat took one taste and spat with disgust.

The night was mild, the sky was deep with stars, and the rumble of the point-break surf was like the beating of a mighty heart.

A shadow passed across the fat moon. It was only a hawk, not a gargoyle.

That creature with black leather wings and a whiplike tail had also been graced with two horns, cloven hooves, and a face that was hideous largely because it was human, too human to have been plugged into that otherwise grotesque form. I’m pretty sure drawings of such creatures can be found in books that date back as far as books have been printed, and under most if not all of those drawings, you will find the same caption: demon.

I decided not to think about that anymore.

After a while, Sasha came out of the surf, panting happily, and Orson panted back at her as though he thought she was trying to converse.

She dropped on the blanket beside me, and I opened a beer for her.

Bobby was still thrashing the night waves.

“See that ship out there?” she asked.

“Big.”

“We paddled a little farther out than we needed to. Got just a little closer look. It’s U.S. Navy.”

“Never saw a battleship anchored around here before.”

“Something’s up.”

“Something always is.”

A chill of premonition passed through me. Maybe a cure and a vaccine were forthcoming. Or maybe the big brains had decided the only way to cover up the fiasco at Wyvern and obscure the source of the retrovirus was to scrub the former base and all of Moonlight Bay off the map. Scrub it away with a thermonuclear brush that even viruses couldn’t survive. Might the wider public believe, if properly prepared, that any nuclear event obliterating Moonlight Bay was the work of terrorists?

I decided not to think about that anymore.

“Bobby and I are going to set a date,” I said. “Gotta get married now, you know.”

“Mandatory, once he said he loved you.”

“That’s the way we feel.”

“Who’s the bridesmaid?” she asked.

“Orson,” I said.

“We’re deep into gender confusion.”

“Want to be best man?” I asked.

“Sure, unless, when the time comes, I’m up to my ass in angry monkeys or something. Take some waves, Snowman.”

I got to my feet, picked up my board, said, “I’d leave Bobby standing at the altar in a minute, if I thought you’d marry me instead,” and headed for the surf.

She let me get about six steps before she shouted, “Was that a proposal?”

“Yes!” I shouted.

“Asshole!” she shouted.

“Is that an acceptance?” I called back to her as I waded into the sea.

“You don’t get off that easy. You owe me a lot of romancing.”

“So it was an acceptance?” I shouted.

“Yes!”

With surf foaming around my knees, I turned to look back at her as she stood there in the light of the Coleman lantern. If Kaha Huna, goddess of the surf, walked the earth, she was here this night, not in Waimea Bay, not living under the name Pia Klick.

Orson stood beside her, sweeping his tail back and forth, obviously looking forward to being a bridesmaid. But then his tail abruptly stopped wagging. He trotted closer to the water, raised his head, sniffed the air, and gazed at the warship anchored outside the mouth of the bay. I could see nothing different about the vessel, but some change evidently had drawn Orson’s attention — and concern.

The waves, however, were too choice to resist. Carpe diem. Carpe noctem. Carpe aestus — seize the surf.

The night sea rolled in from far Tortuga, from Tahiti, from Bora Bora, from the Marquesas, from a thousand sundrenched places where I will never walk, where high tropical skies burn a blue that I will never see, but all the light I need is here, with those I love, who shine.