, 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 scienti stand 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 Randolphaka 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 Gesel. No doubt he was the stocky bastard
with the cropped black hair, yellow-brown eyes, and doll’s teeth.
Perhaps he was one of the temponauts who had traveled to the other side,
one of the few who had come back alive. Maybe he had glimpsed a destiny
of his own in that world of the red sky, or had been driven quietly mad