Odd Apocalypse

Page 36

I knew instantly when the capsule slipped sideways, out of time. My heart no longer beat, and I drew no air into my lungs. Neither the ebb and flow of breath nor the rush of blood was required to sustain life in this timeless realm.
I wished the capsule had windows, that I might see what lay around me, but no sooner had this thought occurred to me than I realized how wrong and dangerous it was. Whatever might lie outside of time, it would astonish and amaze. It would inspire a sense of wonder beyond conception. But the awe aroused by the sight might be of an intensity so exhilarating and so terrifying, so profound, that no living person was ever meant to see it—or could remain sane and go on living after having seen it.
The shift back into time set my heart beating again, and once more the bellows of my lungs labored automatically.
I hadn’t needed to press the RETURN button to come back to the present, because I had never pressed PARK. I had not gone back to a time when Stormy Llewellyn was still alive, but only back one day, not to grow that much younger, but to reverse the damage that Constantine Cloyce had inflicted on me, just as the Roselanders had used the machine to reverse the aging process.
Stormy believed that this life is boot camp, preparing us for a life of service and great adventure that comes between this world and our third and final one, which some call Heaven. Although she was Catholic, her theology was certainly not orthodox. But if she might indeed be engaged now in some grand exploit, my love for her, even as deep and enduring as it was, did not give me the right to disturb the time line of her life and thereby possibly diminish, in ways I could not fathom, the joy she might take from that adventure in which she currently found herself.
When it seemed that the egg had come to a rest, out of curiosity I attempted to set the destination calendar to a future year. But as I expected, it wouldn’t allow me to do so.
Because we have free will, our tomorrows are never determined until we make them day by day. I couldn’t travel into the future because one didn’t exist, only many possible ones. The past is as locked in stone as a Jurassic fossil, but by our daily actions, we continuously change the future.
As the hatch lifted, before I could get up, I was startled by the appearance of someone in the seat beside me. Tesla. His hawkish face, his proud nose, his eyes as penetrating as radiation.
“Sir,” I said, in such awe of him that no other words occurred to me.
“A great and terrible mistake, all of this,” he declared, and then he went into a rant, though a solemn and dignified one. “But J. P. Morgan, Westinghouse, all the financiers, they underfund your research, nevertheless make fortunes from it, then penny-pinch the budget on your next project! There are no visionaries among them!”
“Sir,” I said.
In the high room, past the swooping arms of the inner gimbal mounting, Annamaria appeared with Timothy.
“No visionaries whatsoever! They seek nothing more than profit, not knowledge, not wonder, not the secrets of God! Cloyce and Chiang presented themselves as visionaries, and they had all the money in the world. But they were thugs, liars, mental midgets!”
“Sir,” I said.
From behind Annamaria and the boy, a booming arose as blows were struck at the copper-clad door. The freaks must have gotten into the tower. They were trying to chop down the door of our final redoubt.
“Mental midgets,” Tesla repeated, “nothing but superstitious fools. Perverts! They were perverts, fiends! We must pull the master switch.”
“Sir, the pigs are coming.”
He tried to open the lid of the console between our seats. His hand passed through it. “Great Caesar’s ghost! I am a carbon-copy Tesla, rolled through the platen of time’s typewriter! Spun off in one of the first experiments with the chronosphere, ricocheting through the years, belonging nowhere, effective nowhere, useless!”
I opened the console box and found what looked like one of those sports-car gearshifts that offers a full-hand grip instead of a knob. It was labeled MASTER SWITCH.
“Pull it!” Tesla urged. “Put an end to this and me.”
Before I pulled it, I said, “I would have liked to know you, Mr. Tesla.”
“Likewise. From what I’ve seen of you here and there, you’re a righteous lad with the pluck and the brains to do great things.”
“Not really, sir. I just make it up as I go along.”
He shrugged. “Who doesn’t?”
When I pulled back hard on the master switch, Tesla vanished. Beyond the capsule, the inner gimbal mounting, previously in silent and unceasing motion, came to a halt with a great grinding noise.
The freaks broke down the door.
Fifty-two
I SCRAMBLED OUT OF THE EGG AND JOINED ANNAMARIA and Tim under the great golden rib cage of the dead machine.
The boy had snatched up my Beretta from the floor where Cloyce had discarded it after taking it from me. Following my encounter with Victoria in the tunnel, I had replenished the magazine.
Four freaks were in the room, however, and seventeen rounds might not be sufficient. I didn’t think they would be sporting enough to allow me time to reload.
I had expected the full tide to end instantly upon throwing the master switch. I didn’t know why the freaks failed to vanish like Tesla, and at that moment it didn’t seem to matter worth a damn that I had an excellent pancake recipe.
Annamaria and Tim and I stood with our backs to one another, so that we could watch the four beasts as they warily circled the chronosphere, beyond the first gimbal mounting. They grumbled and snarled and didn’t seem to trust the machine. They snorted, grimaced, and shook their heads as though they smelled something disagreeable, and they blew gouts of mucus from their fleshy snouts into their hands and wiped their hands on their flanks, as if they wanted to disgust us as much as they wanted to terrify us.
Beads of sweat stippled my brow.
“If they rush us all at once,” I said, “you two drop low, so I can turn in a circle and fire over your heads.”
“They won’t rush us,” Annamaria assured me. “This unpleasantness is almost over.”
“They might rush us,” I disagreed.
“You worry too much, odd one.”
“Ma’am, I don’t mean this to sound harsh, but you don’t worry enough.”
“What does worry accomplish except to breed more worry?”
We might have gotten into our first argument then, although a genteel one, but the largest of the four freaks changed the subject when it spoke in a low rough voice that caused spiders of dread to skitter up my spine: “Woman with baby.”
Until this moment, there had been no indication that these monsters had the capacity for language, let alone that they could speak English.
“Give me baby,” the thing said.
The speaker had a larger head than the others, with a brow less sloped. Maybe it was the only one of them that could talk.
“Give me baby,” it repeated.
I was sweating worse by the moment. I was sweating like, well, a pig.
“You may not make demands of me,” Annamaria told the talking freak. “You have no power here.”
“We kill,” it said. “We eat baby.”
“Be gone from here,” she said. “Know your place and be there.”
The four of them began to move slowly toward us, as shadowless as we were, pale skin and tufts of gray wiry hair, but nevertheless four figures of darkness, as if their shadows had slithered within them to nest and then had multiplied into legions to fill them with blackest hate. Three had axes, and one carried a hammer.
Taking a two-hand grip on the Beretta, I aimed at one of the three who hadn’t yet spoken.
The chatty one said, “I was born to eat baby, your baby, that baby.”
“This is not your time,” she said calmly, “nor will there be any time for you to kill me or to touch this baby. Go now. Go to your misery.”
Maybe it was just me, just the state of my mind at that moment, which wasn’t good, but it seemed that something more was going on here than I quite understood. I often had that feeling when in the company of my mysterious companion, but never more so than at that moment.
“Go to your misery,” she repeated.
They rushed us—as I knew they would—but in the rushing, they rippled, as if approaching us through thermals of heat rising from the floor, and vanished.
“It’s getting really hot in here,” Tim said.
I had attributed the heat to the pressure of the confrontation, but it proved not to be a subjective reaction to stress. The room was rapidly growing hotter.
Remembering what Timothy had told me earlier, that the time-management machinery was secondarily the power plant for Roseland, harnessing the thermodynamic consequences of its primary purpose, I suddenly wondered if Tesla might have been wise enough to provide a master switch that not only turned off the machine but also destroyed it with its own stored heat.
“We better get out of here,” I said. “This place is gonna blow.”
“Worry only breeds more worry,” Annamaria reminded me.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,” I said, and I hustled them around the chronosphere, keeping them away from Cloyce’s body, snatched up the plastic-wrapped bundle of money, and followed them across the broken-down door into the stairwell.
Freaks on the landings faded away as we approached them, and freaks in the yard brandished weapons at us and howled and might have assaulted us if they, too, hadn’t shimmered away on the receding tide of displaced time.
Raphael and Boo suddenly sprinted past us, ears flat to their heads and tails tucked.
As we hurried along the path through the eucalyptus grove, I heard something collapsing high in the tower, a colossal noise that rang like a carillon of tuneless bells. When I glanced back, every pane shattered and golden dust blew out of every window. The walls shook, and stones began to rain down through the trees.
When we escaped the eucalyptuses and reached the long slope of lawn that led up to the main house, we found the dogs frozen with their hackles raised. They were focused on the long green fairway that was the Enceladus lawn leading off to the south, away from the house, but it was not the distant statue of the Titan that caused Raphael and Boo to bare their teeth.
Something moved in the cloaking shadows beneath the live oaks that bordered the west side of that lawn. At first it was only an immense paleness, a heaving shapeless mass that surged insistently through the grove, snapping a few lower limbs where they impeded its progress, shuddering the trees. From it came the eerie, silvery cry, sewn through with sorrow and longing, that had awakened me each morning during our visit to Roseland, the cry that never had been that of a loon. Such a poignant sound issuing from a creature so large was more chilling than it had been when it came from an unknown source in the night. This thing, if it could be better seen, might have been the size of an elephant, although it was nothing that had ever walked the Earth before. For a moment it loomed at the edge of the woods, a sickly white behemoth, its thick cankered folds of flesh revealing extreme malformation, enough like a swine to be related to the freaks, but even more bizarre than the most badly deformed of those smaller beasts. Given a few minutes, perhaps it would have surged fully into the sunlight, or maybe it would have continued to shelter in the shadows in the same way that the worst monsters of our nightmares never quite reveal themselves. The things in dreams are often aspects of ourselves that we cannot face directly, and perhaps this land leviathan, aware of its horrific nature, could not bear to fully expose itself to itself, and needed shadows the way that any guilty soul needs its justifications.
As the time-management machinery self-destructed, the full tide receded from the shores of our time. The creature in the woods faded away into the future where the sky lowered yellow and was shot through with rivers of soot.
Across the vast lawns, the topography changed as underground rooms and passageways collapsed upon themselves. The steel shutters flew up at all the doors and windows of the main house as we hurried toward it. Windows burst and glittered down upon the terraces.
The original carriage house, separate from the main residence, was remodeled in 1926, as it became clear how rapidly the automobile would come to rule the highways. The keys to the various estate vehicles hung on a Peg-Board.
I chose a Cadillac Escalade. Boo leaped through the closed tailgate, and after I opened it, Raphael followed him.
To Annamaria, I said, “What happens to Tim when we’re past the walls of the estate?”
The boy clung to her as she said, “Nothing happens. He lives and thrives.”
“But he said—”
“What was is not anymore, young man. And now we shall see what will be.”
Now was not the time to have one of our baffling conversations. I slid behind the wheel, and she got into the backseat with the boy.
As we drove past the house, it began to implode and to collapse into its foundations, into whatever secret rooms might lie beneath it, and thick plumes of smoke rose from some deep fire.
Perhaps following the final effects of the disintegrating machinery, no more would remain of Roseland than could be found of the House of Usher after it sank into its fetid marsh.
As we drove past the portico at the front of the house, Mr. Hitchcock was standing beside the driveway. He waved at me, and I waved back. I almost stopped to tell him that I was ready for him now, but I really wasn’t quite yet.
He smiled broadly at the sight of Roseland in ruins. Cloyce must have been as nasty a studio chief as he was a nasty human being.
The gatehouse had fallen into a hole of its own, most likely taking Henry Lolam with it.
I was about to get out of the Escalade to throw open the gates, when the perimeter walls began to collapse and seemed also to melt in upon themselves. The gates tore loose of the molten stone and crashed to the ground. I drove over them and away, as fast as I dared, eager to be gone but equally eager not to draw the attention of any police I might pass.
Before I’d traveled fifty yards, Madra raced past me on the magnificent stallion, white nightgown flowing over the horse’s black flanks. She glanced back once, and I saw her smile before she and the Friesian galloped out of this world into the next.
Ancient oaks flanked the two-lane road. Through the gaps in the great black limbs, rain abruptly fell in torrents from the clouds that had been gathering all day. For a moment, fear gripped me again as the world blurred away beyond the windshield, but when I turned on the wipers, the world was still there.
I drove down through the hills to the Coast Highway and turned south. The gray sea folded up into the gray sky at the horizon, which was obscured by mist, and silver rain slanted through the day, as the tires sizzled across the puddled pavement.