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 Mobile 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