Odd Apocalypse

Page 17

Supposing that these stairs led down to the same space, I chose those on the right. They were steep. I clung to the handrail, acutely aware of how ironic it would be if, after surviving endless assaults by numerous homicidal sociopaths, I stumbled and broke my neck.
Indeed, both sets of stairs descended to a nine-foot-high vault as large as the mausoleum above, which contained the most astonishing mechanical apparatus I had ever seen.
Along the center of the chamber were arrayed seven spheres, each maybe six feet in diameter, connected to the floor and the ceiling by a three-inch pole or pipe. The pipes were fixed, but the huge spheres rotated so fast that their surfaces were golden blurs, and though I knew that, even if hollow, they were solid forms, they almost looked like shining bubbles that might float away.
Along the north wall, except where the stairs terminated, and along the entire south wall, score upon score of bright flywheels in several sizes—some as small as CDs, others as large as ash-can lids—were arrayed atop a series of bell-shaped machine housings, to which they were linked with gleaming pitmans, sliding blocks, and piston rods. The glimmering crank wrists at the end of the glossy connecting rods turned cranks in shafts, and the wheels spun, spun, spun, this one fast, that one faster, some clockwise, others counterclockwise, yet giving the impression of an intricate synchronization.
Now and then, from this flywheel or that, arising off its outer rim, series of golden sparks flew toward the ceiling. They were not really sparks but something for which I had no name, pulses of golden light shaped like raindrops, and they didn’t shoot out at high speed, like sparks, but glided to the ceiling, where they were absorbed into a mesh of copper wire more intricate in its abstract patterns than the most complex of Persian carpets.
But for the copper ceiling and the concrete walls, everything in the vault, all the visible parts of the strange machines, appeared to have been plated with precious metals, some with gold and others with silver. The vault reminded me of a jewel box, glittering and twinkling and shimmering all around.
The purpose of it all was beyond my comprehension, but perhaps the most amazing thing was that all those moving parts produced no sound, no hum or buzz, not one tick or creak. The only noise that rose from this busy assemblage was the faint whispery whoosh of displaced air as flywheels scooped up a draft and flung it forward, as the big spheres drew in atmospheres to rotate with them.
No parts could be engineered and machined to such perfection that friction was entirely eliminated, nor was any lubricant equal to the job. But no spot of grease or drip of oil could be seen; I detected no scent of them, either, no indication that lubrication was required, and yet no friction heat arose from those mechanisms.
The eeriness of such frantic motion occurring in utter silence can’t be overstated. I felt as though I had stepped into a realm of cosmic machinery between our dimension and another, where the engine that maintained order in the universe raced on eternally in exquisite balance.
Nevertheless, the vault did not have a futuristic feeling. Some aspects of it struck me as Victorian, and other features had a Deco flavor. Rather than suggest a construct from the next millennium, it seemed antique, or not so much antique as timeless, as though it had existed forever.
The feeling of being watched, which never quite left me as long as I had been in Roseland, now grew more intense.
From the gleaming rims of racing flywheels, like tiny helium balloons, greater showers of honey-colored drops of light rose to the copper tapestry overhead. Their ascent was in contrast to all the rotational motion, and a sudden sense of buoyancy overcame me, not a positive feeling but a queasy expectation that I might drift off my feet and … away.
The deep, accented, disembodied voice that I had heard before dawn, when I approached this mausoleum as it glowed like a lamp, spoke now behind me: “I have seen you—”
I turned, but found no one.
“—where you have not yet been,” he whispered.
When I turned again, I saw a man with a mustache standing at the farther end of this service aisle that led between spheres and flywheels. Tall and gaunt, he wore a dark suit that hung loosely on his bony frame. By his appearance and solemn attitude, he reminded me of an undertaker.
Louder than before, he said, “I depend on you,” and he crossed the end of the room from this aisle to the next, disappearing behind the spheres.
I hurried after him, turned right, and peered into the next aisle. He was gone. I circled through the vault, but he had vanished as if he could walk through walls.
Spirits do not speak. But living men do not dematerialize like ghosts.
As for ghosts, when I turned once more, I came face-to-face with the woman in white, her long blond hair ribboned with fresh blood and tangled as it might have been by wind on the night when she took her last horseback ride.
Blood streaked her nightgown, too, and for the first time she manifested with three entrance wounds in her chest. The one directly over the heart and the one just below it had evidently been fired from close quarters because the fabric of the gown looked scorched around the wounds. The round that shattered her sternum had been fired from a greater distance than the other two; it had probably been the first shot and had most likely killed her instantly. That her murderer fired twice again at point-blank range, into her corpse, suggested rage of a singular intensity.
The weapon had surely been a powerful rifle. The large-caliber, high-velocity ammunition appeared to have caved in her chest.
As if she saw that the violence committed against her distressed me, the wounds and the blood faded, and she appeared as she looked before the trigger had been squeezed. Lovely. The hint of a strong will in her posture and expression. Her gaze direct and, it seemed to me, honest.
She turned, walked away, and paused after three steps to glance over her shoulder.
Realizing that she wished to lead me to something, I followed this beauty to the end of the vault. In one corner, a tight spiral staircase led to a yet-lower level of the mausoleum.
She wanted me to go with her into that deeper place.
Twenty-three
SPIRALING IRON TWISTED DEEPER INTO A DARKNESS that was not the absence of light but the absence of hope, for the light below was as golden as that in the vault of spheres and flywheels above.
I had dreamed of Auschwitz and in the dream had been afraid of dying twice. Annamaria had assured me that I would die once and only once, and that it would be “the death that doesn’t matter.”
In all our lives, however, there are many days when we die a little, when we are wounded by loss or failure, or by fear, or by seeing the suffering of others for whom we are able to offer only pity, for whom we are powerless to offer aid, who are beyond mercy.
The spiral stairs were like an auger bit boring sharply down through the layers of Roseland. When a well-driller cores earth and rock in search of water, he occasionally pulls to the surface fossils or fragments thereof. Some are bizarre creatures with eyes on stalks and whip tails and many-jointed legs, things that crawled the floors of ancient seas long gone. The sight of them impressed in stone can make Earth seem less known than unknown, and the nip that twitches through your blood is the chill of the sudden suspicion that you are a stranger in a strange land. The sole sound in the subcellar of the mausoleum was my footsteps on iron treads, and in the silence at the bottom of the stairs, I came upon a scene so outré, so bleak that I could have found nothing more horrifying on an alien planet orbiting a distant star.
This space was higher than the first cellar, maybe eleven feet. Later, I would take in the parallel arrays of gold-plated gears in the three feet immediately under the ceiling, embraced above and below by shallow silver-plated tracks. They were not fixed in the tracks, were not merely receiving and transmitting force and motion, but were themselves moving across the chamber, out of a hole in one wall and into a hole in the opposite wall. The first, third, and fifth arrays were churning east to west; the second, fourth, and sixth moved west to east. Teeth meshed with teeth, and by the biting of one another, the gleaming wheels turned as relentlessly and as silently as the flywheels in the upper cellar. I couldn’t understand what they were meant to achieve, what they might be driving, if they were driving anything more than themselves.
But the mystery of the gears mattered not at all in light of the dead women who sat on the floor with their backs against the walls.
As I have said in at least one other volume of this continuing memoir, I will not tell everything that I saw. The tableau in the subcellar was as grossly indecent as it was horrific. The innocent dead deserve their dignity.
Numbers do not define the degree of this villainy, for each of these women was a special soul, as is each person ever born. What had been done to each was an injustice and an iniquity so monstrous that the mind rebelled and the heart sank at the wickedness of it, and any one victim was sufficient to require the execution, with extreme prejudice, of whoever had done this to her. Later, when I counted them, I found there were thirty-four.
Yet the room was as odorless as it was hushed … and that was not the most puzzling thing about the scene.
They were all naked, seated side by side on the floor, their backs against the concrete wall. Although each of their souls had been unique, they were physically of a type. All were blondes of one shade or another, a few with shorter hair, most with hair that fell shoulder-length or longer. Some might have been as young as sixteen; none appeared to be older than her late twenties. They had once been lovely, with refined features. Their eyes were blue or blue-gray, or blue-green, and they stared wide-eyed, some because death had caught them that way and others because pins had been used to keep their eyelids from closing.
As the quiet spirit of the nightgowned rider led me through the subcellar, with the silently meshing-churning golden gears two feet overhead, the resemblance between her and the dead women became ever more marked.
My first assumption was that she had been the first victim, and that her murderer wasn’t satisfied to kill her once. He found surrogates who resembled her, and he killed them as if to kill her again.
Evidently, none of these dead women clung stubbornly to this world, because I had seen no lingering spirits in Roseland except that of the rider and her faithful horse. I was grateful for their haste in crossing over, because if the subcellar had been crowded with their anguished and beseeching ghosts, I might have been incapable of coping.
Although most of them had been tortured in one way or another, I will not say with what techniques or what instruments. With some the brute had worked on their hands, with others their feet, their breasts. But except for the straight pins in the eyelids, which the lack of blood suggested were inserted postmortem, their faces were untouched.
The murderer wanted always to be able to see the stallion rider’s face in each of theirs. Maybe he came here to review his collection, to feel their stares upon him, to lord over them the fact that he lived and even flourished in spite of what he’d done to them.
That this subcellar full of corpses remained free of any whiff of decomposition perplexed me less than did the condition of the thirty-four dead women. They looked as if every one of them had been killed that very morning.
Twenty-four
SUCH FLAWLESS PRESERVATION WAS IMPOSSIBLE. THESE women were not embalmed, not mummified. Besides, mummies don’t have the smooth skin of maidens, silken hair, clear eyes. And even embalmed bodies deteriorate.
I assumed that Noah Wolflaw must have murdered them. He’d bought Roseland from the second owner, the reclusive South American mining heir, in 1988, twenty-four years earlier. If this macabre collection had come with the property, Wolflaw would have called the police and would have been eager to have the cadavers removed.
Considering that the riding ring and the exercise yard for horses had been weed-choked for many years, considering that the strangely spotless stables offered no speck of evidence that animals had been kept there in several decades, I believed the bareback rider and her stallion must have been murdered many years before Wolflaw purchased the place. Chef Shilshom had seemed to confirm the long absence of horses from Roseland.
But when the rider’s spirit led me around this crypt to the last of the thirty-four bodies—more likely the first in order of death—it proved to be hers. The condition of the cadaver argued that her spirit must have departed it less than an hour previously. If this was Wolflaw’s work, then there had been at least one stallion stabled in Roseland after he purchased the estate.
Hers was the only body that wasn’t naked, and it wore the long white silk-and-lace nightgown in which her spirit manifested. Of the thirty-four, she alone had not been tortured, which seemed to confirm that she indeed had been the first to be murdered and that her killer had acted on that one occasion in the heat of passion; thereafter, he chose his victims with patient calculation, abusing them sexually and physically in an almost ritual fashion before finally taking their lives.
The shock of this discovery diminished slowly, but the horror grew moment by moment. In my short life, I have seen many detestable things, and I have been called upon to do repugnant things that have for a while broken me. But nothing in my experience had weighed upon me with greater power than the grievous scene in that subcellar of the mausoleum.
For a while, I had to close my eyes to such abundant evidence of evil, as if to look upon it too long would invite infection.
My legs felt weak. I swayed in my self-imposed darkness. Locked my knees. Steadied myself.
A comforting hand on my shoulder had to be that of the spirit rider. I am able to feel the touch of the lingering dead, though usually they don’t attempt to reassure me.
A life of supernatural encounters has put a keener edge on my imagination, which has been sharp since birth. The rider’s hand had been on my shoulder mere seconds when I became convinced that it wasn’t she who touched me but instead someone or something with less sympathetic intentions.
Opening my eyes, I discovered that the hand belonged, after all, to my spirit companion. I held her gaze for a moment and then met the stare of her seated corpse.
I am amazed that there are still nights when I sleep well.
The bullet wounds in the cadaver’s chest were hideous. I didn’t want to dwell on them.
Nevertheless, after a hesitation, I knelt beside the body and touched the gore-stained nightgown to confirm what I suspected. Yes. The blood that had soaked into the fabric was still tacky—and it looked wet and liquid in the wounds, which made no sense.
The murderer had staged the victims in his obscene collection as if they were dolls with which he’d played and which he discarded when he grew bored with them. They sat with their legs splayed, their slender arms limp at their sides, palms turned up as if in supplication.
Except for the woman in the nightgown—which was rucked up past her knees—his other dolls were accessorized with nothing more than the instruments of their destruction. Some had been strangled with neckties, which were still cinched so deeply in the flesh of their throats that the murderer must have been not merely enraged but in the ferocious grip of a sour and festered malignity, implacable rancor. Some had been stabbed two or three times, others much more often, and in each case the knife remained in the last wound administered.