Odd Apocalypse

Page 4

“He’s a fine chef,” she said.
“He’s a great chef, but he’s not as innocent as he pretends.”
“No one is,” she said, her smile so subtle and nuanced that Mona Lisa, by comparison, would appear to be guffawing.
From the moment I encountered Annamaria on a pier in Magic Beach, I had known that she needed a friend and that she was somehow different from other people, not as I am different with my prophetic dreams and spirit-seeing, but different in her own way.
I knew little about this woman. When I had asked where she was from, she had answered “Far away.” Her tone and her sweetly amused expression suggested that those two words were an understatement.
On the other hand, she knew a great deal about me. She had known my name before I told it to her. She knew that I see the spirits of the lingering dead, though I have revealed that talent only to a few of my closest friends.
By now I understood that she was more than merely different. She was an enigma so complex that I would never know her secrets unless she chose to give me the key with which to unlock the truth of her.
She was eighteen and appeared to be seven months pregnant. Until we joined forces, she had been for a while alone in the world, but she had none of the doubts or worries of other girls in her position.
Although she had no possessions, she was never in need. She said that people gave her what she required—money, a place to live—though she never asked for anything. I had been witness to the truth of this claim.
We had come from Magic Beach in a Mercedes on loan from Lawrence Hutchison, who had been a famous film actor fifty years earlier, and who was now a children’s book author at the age of eighty-eight. For a while, I worked for Hutch as cook and companion, before things in Magic Beach got too hot. I had arranged with Hutch to leave the car with his great-nephew, Grover, who was an attorney in Santa Barbara.
At Grover’s office, in the reception lounge, we encountered Noah Wolflaw, a client of the attorney, as he was departing. Wolflaw was at once drawn to Annamaria, and after a brief chat as perplexing as conversations with her often were, he invited us to Roseland.
Her powerful appeal was not sexual. She was neither beautiful nor ugly, but neither was she merely plain. Petite but not fragile, with a perfect but pale complexion, she was a compelling presence for reasons that I had been struggling to understand but that continued to elude me.
Whatever there might be between us, romance was not part of it. The effect she had upon me—and upon others—was more profound than desire, and curiously humbling.
A century earlier, the word charismatic might have applied to her. But in an age when shallow movie stars and the latest crop of reality-TV specimens were said to have charisma, the word meant nothing anymore.
Anyway, Annamaria did not ask anyone to follow her as might some cult leader. Instead she inspired in people a desire to protect her.
She said that she had no last name, and although I didn’t know how she could escape having one, I did not doubt her. She was often inscrutable; however, as one believes in anything that requires hard faith rather than easy proof, I believed that Annamaria never lied.
“I think we should leave Roseland at once,” I declared.
“May I not even finish my tea? Must I spring up this instant and race to the front gate?”
“I’m serious. There’s something very wrong here.”
“There will be something very wrong with any place we go.”
“But not as wrong as this.”
“And where would we go?” she asked.
“Anywhere.”
Her gentle voice never acquired a pedantic tone, although I felt that I was usually on the receiving end of Annamaria’s patient and affectionate instruction. “Anywhere includes everywhere. If it does not matter where we go, then surely there can be no point in going.”
Her eyes were so dark that I could see no difference between the irises and the pupils.
She said, “You can only be in one place at a time, odd one. So it’s imperative that you be in the right place for the right reason.”
Only Stormy Llewellyn had called me “odd one,” until Annamaria.
“Most of the time,” I said, “it seems you’re speaking to me in riddles.”
Her gaze was as steady as her eyes were dark. “My mission and your sixth sense brought us here. Roseland was a magnet to us. We could have gone nowhere else.”
“Your mission. What is your mission?”
“In time you will know.”
“In a day? A week? Twenty years?”
“As it will be.”
I inhaled the peachy fragrance of the tea, exhaled with a sigh, and said, “The day we met in Magic Beach, you said countless people want to kill you.”
“They have been counted, but they are so many that you don’t need to know the figure any more than you need to know the number of hairs on your head in order to comb them.”
She wore sneakers, khaki pants, and a baggy beige sweater with sleeves too long for her. The bulk of the sweater’s rolled cuffs emphasized the delicacy of her slender wrists.
Having left Magic Beach with nothing but the clothes she wore, Annamaria was at Roseland just one day when the head housekeeper, Mrs. Tameed, purchased a suitcase, filled it with a few changes of clothes, and left it in the guesthouse, though she had not been asked to provide a wardrobe.
I, too, had come with no clothes other than those I was wearing. No one bought me as much as a pair of socks. I’d had to leave the estate for a couple of hours, go into town, and purchase jeans, sweaters, underwear.
I said, “Four days ago, you asked me if I would keep you alive. You’re making the job harder for me than it has to be.”
“No one at Roseland wants to murder me.”
“How can you be sure?”
“They don’t realize what I am. If I am killed, my murderers will be those who know what I am.”
“And what are you?” I asked.
“In your heart, you know.”
“When will my brain figure it out?”
“You have always known since you first saw me on that pier.”
“Maybe I’m not as smart as you think.”
“You’re better than smart, Oddie. You’re wise. But also afraid of me.”
Surprised, I said, “I’m afraid of a lot of things, but not of you.”
Her amusement was tender, without condescension. “In time, young man, you’ll acknowledge your fear, and then you’ll know what I am.”
Occasionally she called me “young man,” though she was eighteen and I was nearly twenty-two. It should have sounded strange, but it didn’t.
She said, “I’m safe in Roseland for now, but there’s someone here who’s in great danger and desperately needs you.”
“Who?”
“Trust in your talent to lead you.”
“You remember the woman on the horse that I told you about. Last evening, I had a close encounter of the spooky kind with her. She was able to tell me that her son is here. Nine or ten years old. And in danger, though I don’t know what or how, or why. Is it him that I’m meant to help?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know all things.”
I finished my tea. “I don’t believe you ever lie, but somehow you never answer me directly, either.”
“Staring at the sun too long can blind you.”
“Another riddle.”
“It’s not a riddle. It’s a metaphor. I speak truth to you by indirection, because to speak it directly would pierce you as the brightness of the sun can burn the retina.”
I pushed my chair back from the table. “I sure hope you don’t turn out to be some New Age bubblehead.”
She laughed softly, as musical a sound as I had ever heard.
Because the beauty of her laughter made my comment seem rude by comparison, I said, “No offense intended.”
“None taken. You always speak from your heart, and there’s nothing wrong with that.”
As I rose from my chair, the dogs began to thump their tails again, but neither moved to accompany me.
Annamaria said, “And by the way, there is no need for you to be afraid of dying twice.”
If she wasn’t referring to my nightmare of being in Auschwitz, the coincidence of her statement was uncanny.
I said, “How can you know my dreams?”
“Is dying twice a fear that haunts your dreams?” she asked, managing once more to avoid a direct answer. “If so, it shouldn’t.”
“What does it even mean—dying twice?”
“You’ll understand in time. But of all the people in Roseland, in this city, in this state and nation, you are perhaps the last who needs to be concerned about dying twice. You will die once and only once, and it will be the death that doesn’t matter.”
“All death matters.”
“Only to the living.”
You see why I strive to keep my life simple? If I were, say, an accountant, my mind full of the details of my clients’ finances, and if I saw the spirits of the lingering dead, and had to try to make sense of Annamaria’s conversation, my head would probably explode.
The pattern of the yellow-rose lamp petaled her face.
“Only to the living,” she repeated.
Sometimes, when I met her eyes, something made me look away, my heart quickening with fear. Not fear of her. Fear of … something that I couldn’t name. I felt a helpless sinking of the heart.
My gaze shifted now from Annamaria to the dogs lounging on the sofa.
“I’m safe for now,” she said, “but you are not. If you should doubt the justice of your actions, you could die in Roseland, die your one and only death.”
Unconsciously, I had raised my right hand to my chest to feel the shape of the pendant bell beneath my sweater.
When I had first met her on the pier in Magic Beach, Annamaria had worn an exquisitely crafted silver bell, the size of a thimble, on a silver chain around her neck. It had been the only bright thing in a sunless gray day.
In a moment stranger than any other with this woman, four days before we came to Roseland, she had taken the bell from around her neck, had held it out to me, and had asked, “Will you die for me?”
Stranger still, though I hardly knew her, I had said yes and had accepted the pendant.
More than eighteen months before, in Pico Mundo, I would have given my life to save my girl, Stormy Llewellyn. Without hesitation I would have taken the bullets that she took, but Fate didn’t grant me the chance to make that sacrifice.
Since then, I have often wished that I had died with her.
I love life, love the beauty of the world, but without Stormy to share it, the world in all its wonder will for me be always incomplete.
I will never commit suicide, however, or wittingly put myself in a position to be killed, because self-destruction would be the ultimate rejection of the gift of life, an unforgivable ingratitude.
Because of the years that Stormy and I so enjoyed together, I cherish life. And it is my abiding hope that if I lead the rest of my days in such a way as to honor her, we eventually will be together again.
Perhaps that is why I so readily agreed to protect Annamaria from enemies still unknown to me. With each life I save, I might be sparing a person who is, to someone else, as precious as Stormy was to me.
The dogs rolled their eyes at each other and then looked at me as if embarrassed that I was unable to withstand Annamaria’s stare.
I found the nerve to meet her eyes again as she said, “The hours ahead may test your will and break your heart.”
Although this woman inspired in me—and others—the desire to protect her, I sometimes thought that she might be the one offering protection. Petite and waiflike in spite of her third-trimester tummy, perhaps she had crafted an image of vulnerability to evoke sympathy and to bring me to her that she might keep me safely under her wing.
She said, “Do you feel it rushing toward you, young man, an apocalypse, the apocalypse of Roseland?”
Pressing the bell hard against my chest, I said, “Yes.”
Five
IF SOMEONE IN ROSELAND WAS IN GREAT DANGER AND desperately needed me, as Annamaria had said, perhaps it might be the son of the long-dead woman on the horse, though surely he could not be as young as the spirit imagined that he still was. But if it wasn’t her child, I nevertheless suspected that the endangered person must be somehow related to her. Intuition told me that her murder was the mystery that, if solved, would be the slip string with which I could loosen the knots of all the mysteries in Roseland. If her murderer still lived all these years later, the person who needed me might be his next intended victim.
The two stables were not as vast or as ornate as the stables at the palace at Versailles, not so fabulously ostentatious as to inspire revolutionary multitudes to cease watching reruns of Dancing with the Stars and enthusiastically dismember all the occupants of Roseland, but they weren’t typical board-and-shingle structures, either. The two buff-brick buildings with dark slate roofs featured leaded-glass windows with carved-limestone surrounds, implying that only a better class of horse had been wanted here.
No stalls opened directly to the outside. At each end of each building was a large bronze door that rolled on recessed tracks into a pocket in the wall. The doors must have weighed two tons each, but they were so expertly balanced, their wheels so well lubricated, that little effort was required to open or to close them.
Embossed on each door, three stylized Art Deco horses sprinted left to right. Under the horses was the word ROSELAND.
The waist-high weeds grew shorter as I drew closer to the first stable. They withered away altogether ten feet from the building.
I might not have perceived the wrongness in the scene if I’d been among the weeds instead of on bare earth. But something seemed incongruous, and I halted six feet short of the bronze door.
Before the call of the not-loon had pierced my first night on this estate, before I’d seen the ghost horse and his comely rider, long before I’d seen the creatures of the yellow sky, Roseland struck me as a place that was and was not what it seemed to be. Grand, yes, but not noble. Luxurious but not comfortable. Elegant but, in its excess, not chaste.
Every beautiful facade seemed to conceal rot and ruin that I could almost see. The estate and its people asserted the normality of Roseland, but in every corner and every encounter, I sensed deception, deformity, and deep strangeness waiting to be revealed.
On that patch of bare earth before the stable door, additional evidence of Roseland’s profoundly unnatural character abruptly appeared before me. The sun was but half an hour into the eastern sky to my left, and therefore my morning shadow was a long lean silhouette to my right, reaching westward. But the stable cast two shadows. The first fell to the west; however, it was not as dark as mine, gray instead of black. The structure’s second shadow was shorter but black like mine, and it tilted to the east, as if the sun were several degrees beyond its apex, perhaps an hour past noon.