“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, fu**ed 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.