Odd Apocalypse

Page 32

“Have you seen this before?” I asked.
“No.”
Sempiterno should have come after us by now. Maybe he had killed the freaks at the expense of his own life. If so, I didn’t intend to send flowers to the funeral.
When I opened the door at the end of the long hallway, which should have led us toward the back of the house, I found ahead of me the library, which should have been toward the front.
Bewildered by this discovery, the boy and I crossed the threshold before I saw Paulie Sempiterno. He was standing with his back to us, surveying the book-lined room, as if he’d just come through the same door ten seconds ahead of us.
Hearing us, he began to turn, the shotgun swinging around.
In this war of men and monsters, there was no reason to think he would side with humanity. He brought women to Roseland so that Cloyce could play with them. Perhaps he played with them, too. Perhaps in some corner of the estate, I would discover a collection of his that would make me wish I were blind. In that glimpse of the future, when I’d seen a blackened tree hung with the skeletons of children, was that a work of Sempiterno’s on which he’d engage in years to come?
I squeezed off shots as fast as the semiauto would fire, and punched him down to his knees with the copper-jacketed hollow-point rounds. The shotgun clattered out of his hands. He fell hard onto his side, spasmed into the fetal position, and froze there, leaving this world in the position in which he had waited for months to enter it.
No satisfaction comes with killing, regardless of how deserving of death your adversary might be. The killing-machine heroes in books and movies, who toss off bon mots as they cut down villains by the score, seem to me to be disturbingly close in character to the freaks of Roseland, saved only by the fact that they are good-looking and can rely on writers to cloak them in charm that reliably distracts the audience’s attention from the fullest meaning of all the blood.
As Sempiterno fell and curled in the womb of Death, I looked at the boy to be sure he was all right. Our eyes met for a moment. Maybe in my stare, he saw far more years than my face revealed, as I saw in his.
Then I turned away from him and stepped to the service door by which we had entered the library. The long, dimly lighted hallway along which we had come was not there. Instead, it was the shorter hall leading directly to the drawing room, well lighted now and leading to no junction with another corridor.
No matter how many freaks might be prowling the grounds of Roseland, we needed to get out of here quickly, before perhaps the house itself became as much of a threat as the yellow-eyed pack.
Forty-six
EVERY CORNER WAS A DANGER, EVERY DOORWAY A threat, the silence pregnant with peril. Maybe three freaks were dead, maybe only two. Maybe three had gotten into the house, maybe six or twelve, or for all I knew, twenty-four. Jam Diu, Mrs. Tameed, and Sempiterno were no longer of this world, and probably also Chef Shilshom. Henry Lolam was trapped in the gatehouse. That left Victoria and Constantine, the pair whose eternal love—as she called it—had matured into a love of murder.
My intuition, usually more reliable than my reason, told me that wherever Timothy and I were going between now and the end of all this would make the Valley of the Shadow of Death seem like a vacation spot. There was killing to be done, of the kill-or-be-killed kind, and I didn’t think the freaks would do me the favor of taking out all three remaining Roselanders.
We made our way through the house, from the library toward the kitchen, keeping to main rooms and hallways, avoiding service halls because I no longer trusted them to lead where they seemed to lead.
I wanted to return to the mausoleum and from there go overland to the guest tower. Since Timothy had told me about the chronosphere, a dangerous idea had pressed itself insistently upon me. At first it had been a half-understood phantom at the back of my mind, but it had come forward in my thoughts until it was fully fleshed and demanding a dialogue.
If I took the course of action I was considering, nothing fine could come of it. I would destroy myself and lose forever that one thing that had given me hope since the worst day of my life in Pico Mundo. But you can’t stand an idea up against a wall and execute it. Neither can you wrap it up in a tissue of your better judgment and tuck it in a box of forgetfulness. An idea can be the most dangerous of all things, especially if it is an idea that promises you the most particular and exquisite happiness for which you’ve long yearned.
By the time Timothy and I arrived in the kitchen, I was steeled for the sight of Shilshom torn asunder, his innards festooning the appliances and his head perched upon the cutting board beside the sink. But the kitchen was not an abattoir. His death cry must have originated from elsewhere in the house.
When I opened the door at the head of the back service stairs, I heard heavy footfalls ascending, the snorting and grumbling of more than one freak. A trollish shadow twisted across the landing wall, a step or two ahead of the creature that cast it.
We had no time to flee the kitchen. I stepped to the walk-in pantry, pushed Timothy ahead of me, and followed him, pulling the door shut and holding fast to the knob.
An instant before we entered from the kitchen, Victoria Mors, unbound and ungagged and unhinged, entered from the chef’s office, closing that door, as surprised to see us as we were startled by her. As I raised my Beretta, she seized the boy by his sweater, drew him against her, and pressed the muzzle of her pistol to his neck.
Although my Beretta was aimed at her head from a distance of just six feet, I didn’t dare shoot because it looked as if the trigger of her weapon was halfway through its double action. In the moment of her death spasm, she might reflexively complete the pull and kill Timothy even as I killed her.
On the other hand, if I lowered my pistol, she might try to pop me, even though the shots would tell the freaks where to find us. Stalemate.
Timothy’s eyes were wide with fear, his pale lips pressed tight as though he had determined both to be brave and to survive. But I worried he might arrive at the conclusion that Victoria could do something for him that was akin to what he hoped to achieve with the chronosphere: with one shot end his unnaturally long and depressing childhood, thereby ensuring for him the death, the peace, that was his destiny in 1925.
Snorting, grumbling with suspicion, making inquisitive noises, like the fabled three bears finding their porridge bowls empty after Goldilocks raided their cottage, the freaks arrived in the kitchen. At least two. Maybe three.
In the hand with which she gripped Timothy, Victoria held a key on a stretchy pink plastic coil. “Take this,” she whispered. She was still such an elfin beauty, her pale-blue eyes sparkling as if with the reflections of fairies only she could see, that she seemed to be offering not merely an ordinary key but instead a magic talisman that could give us the power to find a hidden treasure and summon dragons. “The keyhole in the steel plate.”
She let go of the boy for just one second, to toss the key to me, and she clutched him again before he could think to escape.
To catch the key, I had to let go of the doorknob. If one of the freaks tried to inspect the pantry, I wouldn’t be able to hold the door shut for long, anyway.
“A quarter turn to the right, back to vertical, and withdraw it,” she whispered.
The pantry door had no lock. The keyhole she meant was in a small steel plate in the wall beside the door.
To do what she wanted, I would have to look away from her. I asked, “Why?”
In the kitchen, cabinet doors were wrenched open, slammed shut. Something clattered to the floor.
Victoria’s whisper grew fierce. “Damn you! Hurry, before they kill us all!”
Maybe the brutes in the kitchen would find the cheesecake, the almond croissants, a cookie jar if there was one, and be distracted. Or maybe they didn’t like sweets.
Victoria clearly wanted to spit on me again, but her fury was inspired by terror and by my hesitation. I saw no deception in her wrenched face.
I turned away from her long enough to insert the key and do as she had instructed. The moment I withdrew the key, the floor moved beneath my feet.
Startled, I swung the Beretta toward her face.
After a moment of disorientation, I realized that under the pantry must lie a shaft. The floor descended smoothly and silently within it.
After pocketing the key, I took a two-hand grip on the pistol.
As more of the walls appeared, the pantry became a higher space. The shelves laden with canned and packaged food remained above us, growing farther away by the moment.
The deeper we descended, the less well the ever more distant overhead light revealed us to one another. Irrationally but perhaps understandably, given my mood, I expected that we would drop into such depths that the lamp above would be as dim as a star and we would be nearly invisible to one another, in a deep darkness with two guns, one of us having no limits and no rules.
When we had gone down perhaps twenty feet, an opening began to appear in the wall to my right, behind Victoria and the boy. Seconds later, we came to a stop, and the opening proved to be a seven-foot-high, six-foot-wide copper-clad passageway like the one connecting the mausoleum to the house. Evenly spaced fluorescent tubes striped the tunnel with bands of shadow and light. Embedded in the walls were glass tubes through which pulsed those golden flares that seemed to be receding and approaching at the same time.
Almost thirty feet overhead, at the top of the shaft, a pantry door opened. A freak peered in, looked down. It shrieked at us but didn’t want to make the long jump.
Victoria pulled Timothy with her, into the tunnel. When I followed, the pantry floor began to rise through the shaft, lifted by what appeared to be a hydraulic ram, although without the hiss and hum common to such machinery. It ascended past the ceiling of the tunnel, moved out of sight in the shaft, and the shrieking of the freak far above was now muffled.
Forty-seven
THE FREAKS IN THE KITCHEN NOW KNEW THAT THE pantry was a kind of elevator to a subterranean realm, but they didn’t have a key to operate it. We seemed to be safe from them.
Standing in the copper-clad corridor, Victoria Mors and I were, however, not safe from each other, and Timothy wasn’t safe from her.
Pressing the muzzle of her pistol to the boy’s throat with such force that the front sight gouged his flesh, she told me how effing much she hated my effing guts, how effing much she wished I were effing dead with my effing brains blown out of my effing skull.
For a woman who had lived well over a century, she had a sadly limited vocabulary.
In potentially deadly confrontations where I see no easy exit, I tend to think less than talk. I have found that if I say whatever comes into my mind, without calculation, all filters removed, I often talk my way to a solution that I don’t see coming until it arrives. It’s not that I’m opening a spillway to some huge dam of subconscious wisdom. Believe me, no such dam exists.
Maybe it’s just that before anything came the word, and words are the roots of everything that our senses perceive. Nothing can be imagined, nothing can be visualized in our minds, until we have a word for it. Therefore, when I give myself to the free flow of any words that trip off my tongue without predetermination, I am tapping into the primal creative power at the heart of the cosmos.
Or maybe I’m just a bullshit artist.
When Victoria told me how intensely she hated me, I kept the Beretta aimed at her face, but heard myself say, “I don’t hate you. Maybe I detest you. Maybe I abhor you. Maybe I loathe you, but I don’t hate you.”
She called me an effing liar and said, “Hate makes the world go around. Envy and lust and hate.”
“I stopped hating anyone when I realized hating can’t restore to me anything that’s lost.”
“Envy and lust and hate,” she insisted. “Lust for sex, power, control, revenge.”
“Well, I’m just a simple clocker with a simple philosophy.” I suddenly remembered something she’d said in the furnace room, between the times that she spat in my face. “ ‘You bear the whips and scorns, but we don’t and never will.’ ”
“True unless you’ve ruined everything,” she said, twisting the muzzle of the pistol back and forth in the boy’s neck, so that the front sight broke the skin.
Timothy whimpered in protest, and the thinnest thread of blood unraveled along his neck.
“Shakespeare,” I said. “ ‘For who would bear the whips and scorns of time.’ Hamlet.”
“You don’t know anything. Shakespeare, my ass. Constantine. My Constantine.”
I reminded her of something else she’d said: “ ‘Your thoughts are enslaved to a fool, but ours will never be.’ I think that’s from Henry IV, Part 1. It goes … ‘But thought’s the slave of life, and life time’s fool.’ ”
She seemed to think her look of contempt would draw my blood as the front sight of the pistol had drawn the boy’s. “What are you trying to do, you little piss-ant? Play with my head? An ignorant clocker like you?”
“You told me the women he killed were just animals, ‘walking shadows, poor players. Their lives signified nothing.’ ”
“Just as yours signifies nothing. Constantine’s truth stings you, doesn’t it. Doesn’t it?”
“Macbeth,” I said. “ ‘Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more.’ ”
Constantine, the leader of her cult and the poet of her dark heart, was not a poet but instead a plagiarist, cribbing from the best. The sparkle in her pale-blue eyes became a sharper glint. If his poetry was stolen, and not just stolen but also twisted from its original meaning for a wicked purpose, then the wisdom of his philosophy, of his insane gospel of earthly immortality, might also be secondhand and false, a prospect that she dared not contemplate at this late hour in the history of Roseland. She hated me more fervently for this revelation.
I recited the rest of that quotation for her, thrust it at her: “ ‘It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.’ ”
To please my friend Ozzie Boone and to please myself, I have read Shakespeare’s plays, many more than once, and I have memorized some lines. But I’m no dedicated scholar with a photographic memory. The quotations came to me because I gave myself to the free flow of words much as a spirit medium with a pencil and paper might find herself writing voluminous messages that didn’t arise in her own mind. I was no less surprised than Victoria was to hear these things spilling from me.
“You said the foot would be on my neck within the hour,” I reminded her. “You said ‘the inaudible and noiseless foot.’ That’s from All’s Well That Ends Well. ‘The inaudible and noiseless foot of time.’ ”