Odd Apocalypse

Page 13

“He brought me here. If he won’t speak with me any longer, then he should at least take me back.”
“You know what being taken back would mean. You don’t want that.”
“I might. Why wouldn’t I?”
“If you hope to speak with him, you need to take another tack. He won’t believe for a minute that you want to be taken back.”
When she advanced on him, the boy retreated, and the two of them disappeared into the parlor.
Easing open the closet door, I heard her say to him, “Remember, keep the draperies shut and stay away from the windows.”
“What would it matter if the visitor saw me?”
“It might not matter, but we can’t take any chances,” Mrs. Tameed said. “You talk about responsibilities. If we had to kill him and the woman, you would be responsible for their deaths.”
“Why should I care?” the boy said, sounding petulant and more like a child than he had previously.
“You shouldn’t care. You should be above caring about their kind, as we are. Maybe you’re not. You’re … different, after all.”
“If it’s such a risk to have them here, why did he invite them?” the boy asked, and I knew the man of whom he’d been speaking must be Noah Wolflaw.
“Damn if I know,” Mrs. Tameed said. “None of us understands it. He says the woman intrigues him.”
“What does he want to do to her?” the boy asked, and in his tone was a lascivious insinuation that was too knowing for his age.
“I don’t know that he intends to do anything to her,” said Mrs. Tameed. “But he can do anything he wants to the bitch, as I can, as any of us can, and that’s no business of yours, you runt.”
“Were you always such a snake,” the child asked, “or did you grow into what you are?”
“You little shit. Talk to me too much that way, I’ll stake you out in the fields some night and let the freaks do what they want with you.”
This threat silenced the boy, and I figured that the freaks were the creatures who magically brought an enveloping darkness with them wherever they went.
Being called a snake inspired the housekeeper to spit out a bit more venom before she left: “Maybe the freaks will bugger you a few times before they chew your face off.”
If there had been a Mr. Tameed and if he had been of a kind with his wife, I imagined that their marriage bed must have been as filled with love as any dog-fighting pit.
Mrs. Tameed got in one last shot, more enigmatic than her other insults: “You’re just a dead boy. You aren’t one of us and you never will be, dead boy.”
The door between the parlor and the hallway closed emphatically, but I didn’t at once leave the closet. I waited for the boy to tell me that Mrs. Tameed was definitely gone.
After a couple of minutes, when he didn’t appear, I cautiously returned to the parlor.
In defiance of the housekeeper’s orders, he had drawn aside the draperies at one of the windows and stood gazing out at the southern vista, which included the gardens and the stepped cascades of water leading up to the mausoleum on the hilltop. He did not respond to my return. The color had gone out of his face, which was now as pale as it had been when I’d found him in some kind of trance with his eyes rolled back in his head.
“What did she mean—‘dead boy’?”
He didn’t answer.
“Is it a threat? Do they intend to kill you?”
“No. It’s just the way she is. It doesn’t mean anything.”
“I think it does. And I think you know it does. I’m here to help you. What’s your name?”
He shook his head.
“I can help you.”
“No one can.”
“You want out of here,” I said.
He only stared at the distant mausoleum.
“I’ll get you out of Roseland, to the authorities.”
“Impossible.”
“Over the wall. It’s easy.”
He turned his head to look at me. Sorrow didn’t merely pool in his melancholy eyes, but radiated from them, so that in meeting his stare, I felt my heart grow heavier.
“They know where I am at all times,” the boy said, and he drew back the left cuff of his sweater, revealing what looked too much like a manacle to be a wristwatch.
When I went to him and examined the item, I saw that it was locked on his wrist, the keyhole somewhat like that on a handcuff. The bulk was greater than a watch. Considering the slenderness of the wrist that it encircled, the stainless-steel restraint appeared cruel, although his skin was not chafed.
“It’s a GPS monitor,” he said. “If I leave this suite, they’ll be warned immediately by a tone that sounds throughout the house. And at the gatehouse. And through the walkie-talkies the security men carry with them. If I leave the second floor, a different tone sounds, and a third tone if I leave the house.”
“Why are they keeping you here?”
Instead of answering, he said, “They can track my movements on a map of the house and grounds that displays on their cell phones. As soon as I step off the second floor, someone shows up to stay at my side wherever I go.”
More closely studying the tracking device, I said, “Yeah, it looks kind of like a handcuff lock. I know something about them. I can probably pick it with a paper clip.”
“If you try, an alarm goes out, just like when I leave this suite.”
When I raised my eyes to meet his, he stared at me through unshed tears.
“I won’t fail you,” I said, but the promise sounded arrogant, like a challenge to Fate, and I thought I was more likely to fail him than to free him.
Seventeen
I WORRIED THAT RESCUING THIS BOY WOULD BE MORE difficult if he was discovered to have disobeyed his keepers’ instructions. I drew shut the draperies.
“We don’t have to get you out of Roseland. We just have to get the police in. They might think I’m a crank, but I have a good friend who’s the chief of police in Pico Mundo. He’ll believe me, and he’ll get the attention of the authorities here.”
“No. Not the cops. That would be … the end of everything. You don’t understand who I am.”
“So tell me.”
He shook his head. “If you knew, the people here … they’d kill you deader than dead.”
“I’m tougher than I look.”
Maybe he wanted to laugh in my face, but instead he returned to the armchair in which he had been sitting when I first found him.
Once more I sat upon the ottoman. “You told Mrs. Tameed that he brought you here and should at least take you back. Who do you mean?”
“Him. Who else but him? It’s all because of him.”
“Noah Wolflaw?”
“Wolflaw,” he said, and the contempt with which he spoke the name suggested a lifetime of distilled bitterness that a mere boy should not have accumulated.
“Brought you here. Do you mean kidnapped?”
“Worse than kidnapped.”
He seemed to have taken inscrutability lessons from Annamaria.
Knowing too well the depths of evil to which some human beings can descend, I steeled myself for his answer when I asked, “Why does Wolflaw want you here? What does he … expect from you?”
“I’m his toy. Everyone’s a toy to him.” His voice quavered, and under the contempt that flowed through his words, there seemed to be another quite different river of emotion that was closer to sadness than to anger, a sense of tragic loss.
I remembered Henry Lolam at the gatehouse, suggesting that Noah Wolflaw wanted Annamaria’s baby for “sensation” … for “thrills.”
My chest tightened and my throat seemed thick with phlegm, but it was disgust that choked me, disgust and an aversion to hearing this boy speak of abominations.
“I know what Hell is,” he said, and he seemed to shrink into the depths of the wingback chair. “Hell is Roseland.”
After a hesitation, I asked, “He … touches you?”
“No. It’s not that kind of thing he wants from me.”
I was relieved in one regard but was forced now to consider what might be worse than my worst fear for him.
The boy said, “I’m here because he had one moment of remorse.”
That was an unlikely thing for a child to say, and it was also enigmatic.
Based on our conversation thus far, I doubted that I could squeeze a clarification from him.
Before I could even try to press him for an explanation, he said, “Now he keeps me here to reassure himself that there aren’t any limits to what he can do.”
Frustrated by both the restrictions imposed upon him—and me—by the GPS transponder on his left wrist and by his unwillingness to be forthcoming, I said, “I only want to help you.”
“I only wish you could.”
“Then help me help you. Where did he take you from? How long has he kept you? What’s your name? Do you remember your parents, their names, the address of your house?”
At that moment, his ginger-brown eyes seemed to have remarkable depth, unlike any they had possessed previously, unlike any eyes I’d ever seen, a plumbless lonely deepness into which it seemed dangerous to stare, as if I might see a despair so singular that, like the face of a Gorgon, it would turn me to stone.
“Your hair is dark, but your mother was a blonde.”
He stared at me but said nothing.
“She had a great black Friesian that she adored. And she rode it well.”
“Whoever you are, maybe you already know too much,” the boy said, seeming to confirm what the spirit had conveyed to me. “You better not speak of her to any of them. Leave while he still might let you go. Which isn’t much longer. If you think there’s no danger to you … then go to the mausoleum. In the mosaic, press the shield that the guardian angel holds high.”
His eyes rolled up into his head until his gaze was as blind as that of a white-marble statue. His hands slid off the arms of the chair and turned palms-up in his lap.
Perhaps he could fall away into this trance state by an act of will or perhaps this condition overcame him like a seizure comes upon an unmedicated epileptic. I suspected, however, that he had chosen to voyage inward—if that was where his attention went—and thereby to dismiss me.
For a while, I watched him. He was not going to return by his choice, and it seemed pointless to shake him out of his trance and try to force him to cooperate with me.
I had not imagined that when I found the person who desperately needed me, he would reject my help.
Before leaving, I inspected the bedroom more thoroughly than I had been able to do when rushing to hide from Mrs. Tameed. Like the parlor, this chamber seemed to be furnished and decorated for a grown man. The theme was hunting and hounds. No toys. No comic books. No movie posters. No video-game console. No television.
Hardcover books were stacked not only on the breakfast table from which the housekeeper had retrieved the tray, but also on one nightstand and on the dresser. The authors were not those in which a nine-year-old would immerse himself: Faulkner, Balzac, Dickens, Hemingway, Graham Greene, Somerset Maugham.…
My immediate suspicion was that these weren’t the child’s private quarters, that he lived here with someone. But the walk-in closet and the dresser contained clothing only for a young boy. In the bathroom, a single toothbrush, as well as the lack of an electric razor and other adult-grooming aids, supported what I had found in the bedroom.
In the parlor once more, I stood over him, as baffled as I was worried. He looked so vulnerable, and I knew that I must help him, but he seemed to be as jealous of his secrets as were all the others in Roseland.
To encourage me and Annamaria to leave the estate sooner than later, he had given me a clue to follow at the mausoleum.
Suddenly I recalled something that Paulie Sempiterno had said after he decided not to shoot me in the face: Whatever you’re looking for in Roseland, you’ll find its opposite. If you want to live, look for death.
I intended to go directly to the mausoleum, where the only dead were neatly packaged as ashes in urns. Or so I thought.
Eighteen
CAUTIOUSLY I MADE MY WAY DOWN THROUGH THE great house to the kitchen again, but I might as well have gone singing and dancing, because no one seemed to be in residence. Chef Shilshom had not yet returned to his potatoes, and I wondered if the conference in Noah Wolflaw’s quarters was still under way.
Outside, as I crossed the south terrace toward the arc of steps that led up to the fountain, I saw the groundskeeper, Mr. Jam Diu, farther up the slope, on the lawn between the stepped cascades. A stocky man with the smooth pleasant face of a Buddha, he might have been Vietnamese, but I didn’t know for sure because we’d spoken only once and briefly, when I complimented him on the landscaping and he complimented me on having the taste to recognize his perfect work.
Mr. Diu possessed perhaps the only sense of humor among the residents of Roseland, and if the events of the day became steadily more grim—which was a good bet—I might seek him out in hope of a laugh or two.
At the moment, he had no wheelbarrow or gardening tools. He appeared to be studying the carpet-smooth lawn, perhaps looking for a tuft of crabgrass to annihilate.
I was free to visit the mausoleum, which I’d done before, but I did not at this point want Mr. Diu to engage me in conversation and possibly follow me inside. With him in tow, I wouldn’t be free to press the angel’s shield in the glass-tile mural, which the boy had suggested that I do.
Departing the terrace, I initially headed east, then changed course once I was out of view of the groundskeeper and the house. I intended to approach the mausoleum from the south.
No sooner had I put them both out of sight than I was halted by the realization that during the previous two days and so far in this one, I’d never seen Mr. Jam Diu performing any landscape maintenance. Neither had I seen a single member of what I assumed must be a full-time crew of six or seven landscape-maintenance personnel.
Not once had I heard a lawn mower. Or a leaf blower.
I recalled the immaculate interior of the house—where the only apparent housekeepers were Mrs. Tameed and Victoria Mors, who never seemed to be engaged in housework.
Those facts were connected. They meant something. For the moment, however, the meaning was no clearer to me than would have been a document written in braille.
Ahead of me, bordered on three sides by California live oaks, lay a long grassy fairway. At the midpoint stood a big lead sculpture of Enceladus, one of the Titans from classical mythology. He gazed into the sky and raised one fist in defiance.