by Dean Koontz
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.
S
asha 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.