Odd Apocalypse

Page 14

The Titans had warred with the gods. They were crushed under the rocks that they piled high in an attempt to reach the heavens.
Ambition and stupidity are a dangerous combination.
Something about Enceladus struck me as wrong. When I drew close, I saw that he cast two opposing shadows, one darker and shorter than the other.
Not good. When this inexplicable condition had occurred before, at the stable, an impossible nightfall had brought forth a mob of the creatures that Mrs. Tameed called freaks.
Galleons of dark clouds were sailing in from the north, but most of the sky remained clear. The sun was well short of high noon.
I shaded my eyes with one hand and studied the shadows among the surrounding trees, expecting to see something of fantastic form and hostile intent. As usual, I felt watched. But any observers, if they existed, were well concealed.
As I watched, the east-leaning shadow shrank back into the Titan, leaving only the darker and shorter shadow. Having begun to slip into disorder, Nature had now set itself right.
I can live with the lingering dead as long as they don’t haunt and embarrass me while I’m in the bathroom. I’m more rattled by that occasional apparently supernatural event that is outside of my usual experiences, because I’m concerned that it will become a continuous part of my life. If I can’t depend on sunrise and sunset to follow a reliable schedule, if everything at all times casts two opposed shadows, then perhaps tomorrow birds will bark and dogs will fly, and then certainly, a week from now, I will be one totally loco fry cook talking to pancakes on the griddle and expecting them to answer.
Leaving Enceladus, the Titan, who had been crushed like road-kill on the highway to Heaven, I continued to the end of that cul-de-sac of lawn.
Before entering the woods, I looked around, hoping that the ghost rider might appear and either assure me that the way was safe or warn me off. But my spirit guide lacked the reliability of Tonto as surely as I lacked the striking wardrobe and the sexy mask of the Lone Ranger.
I walked among the crowded oaks, where the shade was so deep that no underbrush or grass could grow. Gold coins of sunshine were scattered on the dark woodland floor, and on that bare and stoneless soil my footsteps were as nearly silent as those of a sneak thief.
The quiet halted me. The bare earth puzzled me. The doubloons of light made me realize there should also have been a wealth of dead leaves all around me.
I recalled the crunch-and-crackle of the mob of freaks rushing this way and that in the other hurst of oaks.
Live oaks are perpetually green, but they drop their small oval leaves all year, and in profusion. Even if Mr. Jam Diu and a crew of industrious elves had that very morning raked up, bagged, and carried away all that the trees had shed, a few score of recently cast-off dead leaves would already have littered the ground, but not one snapped underfoot. And there were no elves. And speculating from all available evidence, I didn’t think that Jam Diu, in his position as groundskeeper, ever broke a sweat.
This grove of trees was associated with the formal landscaping of Roseland, which accounted for less than twenty of the fifty-two acres, and the other grove was in the wild fields of the estate. I could see no other difference between them that might explain this neatly swept earth.
The most important issue at hand, however, was not how the groundskeeper maintained the grove in such pristine condition or even why he felt it necessary to do so. I had to keep uppermost in mind the imprisoned boy.
Beyond the oaks, I climbed a meadow where the wild grass was in places waist-high. It had been bleached white-gold by the heat of the past summer. The rainy season had thus far been so dry that no storms had either beaten down the stiff parched grass or brought forth fresh green shoots.
At the top of the hill, I paused, looking southwest toward the mausoleum, which lay a few hundred yards away. After a moment to rest, I would have headed toward that building if movement at the periphery of vision hadn’t drawn my attention.
From the crest of the hill, the land in general descended. But the ground fell and rose and fell again in a series of waves, like a golden sea frozen in one moment of motion after a storm, when the worst turbulence had passed but the swells remained formidable and the troughs were still deep.
Half concealed by the waist-high grass and foreshortened by the angle at which I viewed them, further camouflaged by virtue of being grub-white in the white-gold pasture, they came along a crest two waves of land below me. They numbered no fewer than twenty, no more than thirty, and they passed in a peculiar gait, swift yet shambling.
Some of them were hunchbacked, their heads thrust forward and seemingly deformed, though at that distance it was difficult to tell if the asymmetric appearance of their skulls was real or a trick of light and shadow. Their arms seemed improperly jointed, flailing almost spasmodically at the tall grass, like the long limbs of agitated orangutans.
The majority were erect, without humps between their shoulders, heads held high, skulls sleeker than those of their awkward brethren. These specimens appeared to move with greater grace and might have proceeded even more rapidly if not for the malformed individuals scattered among them, who by their very presence were a hindrance.
Most might have been about six feet, some taller, some shorter. From a distance they seemed to be muscular, brutish, and I had no doubt that they would be deadly adversaries.
This time they brought no twilight with them, but they seemed to see as well in sunshine as in the pitch dark. I was certain that these were the same creatures from which I’d hidden in the feed bin and high in the oak. At this remove, I couldn’t hear them, but they looked as their growling and grunting and squealing had suggested that they might.
They disappeared off the crest, into a swale, moving away, and I let out a pent-up breath, relieved that it was my good fortune to have escaped their notice. I should have backed off the highest hill, on which I stood, but I was transfixed, waiting for another glimpse of them.
Fear slipped down my spine along vertebrae of ice. My mind seemed frozen with astonishment at what I’d seen, and my thoughts wouldn’t thaw, wouldn’t flow forward from the memory of that pack.
They appeared on another rise, heading toward a farther crest. They were now at sufficient distance that they had the quality of a mirage, and so they might not really have faded away as they seemed to, but might only have disappeared into yet taller grass.
Although I had not seen them close enough to be sure of their appearance, I had certain impressions on which I felt that I could rely. The impression of long flat heads and blunt fleshy snouts. The impression of arms, and therefore of hands unseen. They were walking upright, in fact running, but they were not animals that should be able to run on fewer than four legs. Only primates could stand that erect—men, apes, gibbons, monkeys.… These creatures belonged to none of those species. I also thought I had seen short, pointed tusks that were dark against their pale faces, sharp tusks with which to wound and eviscerate, which made me think of wild boars. Boars, hogs, swine of some kind, their bodies recast in rough primate molds, their faces tortured and sick with violence. The malformed and crookbacked individuals were no doubt accepted because every member of their tribe, malformed or not, was to one degree or another an abomination.
They didn’t reappear on the far slope, as if they dematerialized the way that ghosts sometimes do. But they were neither spirits nor figments of my imagination. Whether they were native to Roseland or were visitors who arrived and departed through some veil between this place and another realm beyond my understanding, they were surely to be avoided at all costs. They seemed to be perpetually on the move, like sharks, continually feeding, perhaps able to smell blood even when it was still safely circulating in the veins of their prey.
Nineteen
I DECIDED THAT A VISIT TO THE MAUSOLEUM MUST BE delayed. I backtracked down the sloped meadow, through the oaks where no leaf had yet been shed, and across the long yard, past Enceladus not yet crushed.
If I might die here this day, which seemed ever more likely, there was something in my bedroom that I needed to carry with me into death.
At the eucalyptus grove, I hurried along the flagstone path and arrived at the tower just as Noah Wolflaw was leaving. I can’t say which of us looked the most alarmed, but he was the only one of us carrying a shotgun.
In ordinary times, if there ever were any in Roseland, Wolflaw was Mount Vesuvius in a quiet phase, a solid figure of such calm demeanor that he seemed as enduring as any lofty cloud-capped peak of granite. But you sensed his power, volcanic and always pending, the energy that had made him such a successful and wealthy man.
Tall, large-boned, with flesh forged to his frame as if by a maker of armor, he was imposing even when he wasn’t carrying a short-barreled, pistol-grip 12-gauge. The planes of his face were bold geometry, gray eyes set deep in perfectly elliptical sockets, nose a great isosceles wedge, chin a jutting plinth from which his jawbones rose like buttresses. His thick dark hair was a mane that any stallion or lion might have coveted. Only his mouth, full-lipped and yet seeming smaller than it should have been, encouraged you to imagine that inside this strong man might be a weak one.
“Thomas!” he declared upon seeing me.
He addressed me that way not with an imperious refusal to grant me a mister, but because he found my first name so peculiar that he felt uncomfortable using it. On the day we met, he informed me that he would treat my surname as my first because “ ‘Odd’ makes me feel as if I’m spitting on you.” He didn’t seem to be a man of such delicate sensibilities that my name should trouble him, but perhaps he found himself uncharacteristically chivalrous and courtly in the company of Annamaria, who enchanted everyone she met.
Wolflaw’s shotgun alarmed me nearly as much as had the recent encounter with the primate swine, but he didn’t threaten me with it, as I half expected that he would.
Instead, he said, “How does she do what she does? And what is it that she does? I always talk to her with clear intent, and she answers in the most gracious way, yet I wind up bewildered, having either forgotten or abandoned my intentions.”
He was speaking of Annamaria, of course, and I could only say, “Yes, sir, I sympathize. But I always have the feeling there’s truth in everything she says and that I’ll understand it in time. Maybe not tomorrow, maybe not next month, maybe not next year, but eventually.”
“She’s got that regal graciousness Grace Kelly used to have, though Grace Kelly was a real looker. You’re probably so young you never heard of Grace Kelly.”
“She was an actress. Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, To Catch a Thief. She married the prince of Monaco.”
“You’re not the clueless pup that some might take you for.”
This was how he talked to me—and pretty much to everyone—when Annamaria wasn’t present. “Thank you, sir.”
As he spoke, he warily surveyed the eucalyptus grove around us, which was ribboned with shadows and sunshine that fashioned a kind of camouflage in which something might lurk and be difficult to see. “I came here to tell her the two of you have to leave. Today. Within the hour. Now. Do you know what she said to me?”
“I’m sure it was memorable.”
His gray eyes were made for glaring, like stainless-steel blades going for the bone. “She told me that what I wish to see come to pass would not happen if the two of you left now, that you would leave in the morning at the earliest, when my purpose in bringing you here was fulfilled.”
“Yes, that sounds like her.”
“I’ve never before had a guest refuse to leave when told to.” Anger creased his beetled brow, and when he leaned toward me, a beam of sunlight piercing the eucalyptuses seemed to lay a sharper edge on his steely stare. His voice was buttered with menace, and the threat slipped from him without hesitation: “If you presume to tell your host when you’ll leave, maybe you’ll never leave when all is said and done.”
I didn’t take his meaning to be that he feared we would stay forever. I took his meaning to be a promise of an urn and a niche in the mausoleum.
That was an extraordinary and revealing thing for him to have said. Pressure was building in Vesuvius.
“Who the hell does she think she is?”
“Did you ask her that, sir?” I wondered, because her answer was of interest to me, as well.
The steel went out of his eyes, the menace out of his voice, and he looked around the fragrant woods again, not as if worried that a pack of mutant swine was closing in this time, but as if he couldn’t quite recall how he had wound up here.
“No. She did this trick with a flower, like an illusionist’s act in Vegas or something.” He seemed rattled by the memory of her bit of magic. “Have you ever seen her do the trick with the flower?”
Before I could reply, he rolled on.
“Suddenly, I hear myself telling her that of course she could stay, the two of you, stay as long as necessary, if that’s what she wanted. I said I was just concerned about your welfare, you know, with the mountain lion on the prowl. And I apologized for being so thoughtless. I think I might even have kissed her hand. I never in my life kissed a woman’s hand. Why would I kiss a woman’s hand?”
He inhaled deeply, blew out a long exhalation of frustration, and shook his head as if astonished by his behavior.
He continued: “So she says you’ll both leave when what I wish to see come to pass has happened, when my purpose for bringing you here is fulfilled—but what the hell purpose is she talking about?”
“Your purpose, sir.”
“Don’t be a smart-ass, Thomas.”
“No, sir.”
“I don’t know why I brought her here. It was a crazy thing to do. Reckless. I don’t want her. I told Paulie that I might want her, just as an excuse, because I didn’t know how to explain myself, but he knew she wasn’t my type.”
“Mr. Sempiterno is very insightful.”
“Shut up.”
“Yes, sir. We’ll be gone tomorrow,” I promised.
Now he seemed to be talking more to himself than to me: “I don’t want her. She’s disgusting, repellent, knocked up and bloated like a cow. Nothing to get a man’s sap rising. I don’t want anything to do with her, and I never will.”
“We’ll be gone tomorrow,” I repeated.
His attention returned to me, and his too-small mouth puckered with distaste, as if I were something he would never want to find stuck to the sole of his shoe, let alone talking to him face-to-face. “You told Henry Lolam you met the one who calls himself Kenny. No one’s seen him in years. You told Chef Shilshom you saw bears with red eyes.”