Odd Apocalypse

Page 5

On the dusty ground, a rock and a crumpled Coke can cast their images only westward, as I did.
Between the two stables lay an exercise yard about forty feet wide, bristling with weeds and wild grass seared brown during the autumn. I crossed to the second stable and saw that this building also cast two shadows: a longer, paler one to the west, a shorter black one to the east, just like the first structure.
I could imagine only one reason that a building might throw two opposing shadows like these, one paler than the other: Two suns would have to occupy the sky, a weaker one recently risen and a brighter one working its way down the heavens toward the western horizon.
Overhead, of course, shone a single sun.
In the center of the exercise yard stood a sixty-foot-tall Wakehurst magnolia, leafless at this time of year. The tree limbs flung a net of inky shadows westward, across the wall and the roof of the first stable, as should have been the case this early in the day.
Only the two buildings were under the influence of both the sun that I saw above me and a phantom sun.
Twice before, during my rambles, I had come here. I was certain that I had not simply overlooked this phenomenon on previous visits. The two opposing shadows were unique to this moment.
If the exterior of the structure could stand before me in this impossible condition, I wondered what surprises might await inside. In my unusual life, few surprises are of the lottery-winning kind, but instead involve sharp teeth either literal or figurative.
Nevertheless, I rolled the door aside far enough to slip inside. I stepped to my left, bronze behind me, to avoid being backlighted by the sun.
Five roomy stalls lay along the east wall, five along the west, with half doors of mahogany or teak. The center aisle was twelve feet wide and, like the floors of the stalls, paved in tightly set stones.
At the farther end, on the left, was a tack room, and opposite it a storage locker for food, both long empty.
The previous stables of my experience had earthen floors, but the flat stone pavers were not the only curious detail here.
At the back of each stall was a three-by-four-foot window. Most of the leaded-glass pieces were three-inch squares except for those shaped to surround an oval pane in the center. Embedded within the oval of glass, a cord of braided copper wires formed a figure eight laid on its side.
The glass itself had a coppery cast and imparted a ruddy color to the incoming daylight. Some might have felt that the Victorian quality of the windows gave the stable the cozy glow of a hearthside, although my imagination conjured up Captain Nemo, as if the stable were the submarine Nautilus making way through a sea of blood and fire. But, hey, that’s just me.
I didn’t immediately switch on the stable lamps, which were primarily brass sconces on the posts that flanked the stall doors. Instead, I remained very still in the coppery light and the iron-dark shadows, waiting and listening for I knew not what.
After a minute, I decided that in spite of the double shadows outside, the building was the same inside as ever. Now, as always, the temperature was a comfortable sixty-five degrees, which I felt sure the big thermometer on the tack-room door would confirm. The air had that odorless, just-after-a-blizzard purity. The hush was almost uncanny: no settling noises, no rustle of a scurrying mouse, and no sound from without, as if beyond these walls waited a barren and weatherless world.
I flicked the wall switch, and the sconces brightened. The stable appeared as pristine as the odorless air promised.
Although it was difficult to believe that horses were ever kept here, photos and paintings of Constantine Cloyce’s favorites could still be found in the halls of the main house. Mr. Wolflaw felt they were an important part of Roseland’s history.
Thus far I hadn’t seen displayed a photo or a painting of the blood-soaked woman in the white nightgown. She seemed to me to be at least as important a part of Roseland’s history as were the horses, but not everyone thinks murder is as big a deal as I do.
Of course I might soon encounter a hallway lined with portraits of blood-soaked young women in all manner of dress, displaying mortal wounds. Considering that I’d yet to find a single rosebush anywhere in Roseland, perhaps that part of the estate’s name referred to the flowers of womanhood who were chopped up and buried here.
Those hairs on the nape of my neck were quivering again.
As I had done on previous visits, I walked the length of the stable, studying the inch-diameter copper discs inset between many of the quartzite pavers. They formed gleaming, sinuous lines the length of the building. Depending on the angle from which you viewed it, in each shiny disc was engraved either the number eight or a lazy eight lying on its side, as was embedded in every window.
I couldn’t imagine the purpose of those copper discs, but it seemed unlikely that even a press baron and movie mogul with money to burn, like the late Constantine Cloyce, would have had them installed in a stable simply for decoration.
“Who the hell are you?”
Startled, I turned, only to be startled again by a giant with a shaved head, a livid scar from his right ear to the corner of his mouth, another livid scar cleaving his forehead from the top of his brow to the bridge of his nose, teeth so crooked and yellow that he would never be asked to anchor the evening news on any major TV network, a cold sore on his upper lip, a holstered revolver on one hip, a holstered pistol on the other, and a compact fully automatic carbine, perhaps an Uzi, in both hands.
He stood six feet five, weighed maybe two hundred fifty pounds, and looked like a spokesman for the consumption of massive quantities of steroids. White letters on his black T-shirt announced DEATH HEALS. The behemoth’s biceps and forearms bore tattoos of what seemed to be screaming hyenas, and his wrists might have been as thick as my neck.
His khaki pants featured many zippered pockets and were tucked into red-and-black carved-leather cowboy boots, but those fashion statements failed to give him a jaunty look. He had a gun belt of the kind police officers wore, with dump pouches full of speedloaders for the revolver and spare magazines for the pistol. Some of the zippered pockets bulged, perhaps with more ammo or with hunting trophies like human ears and noses.
I said, “Nice weather for February.”
In Othello, jealousy is referred to as the green-eyed monster. Shakespeare was at least a thousand times smarter than I am. I would never question the brilliance of his figures of speech. But this green-eyed monster looked like he had no patience for petty emotions like jealousy and kindness, being preoccupied with hatred, rage, and bloodlust. He was too nasty a piece of work even for a role in Macbeth.
He took another step into the stable, thrusting the Uzi at me. “ ‘Nice weather for February.’ What’s that supposed to mean?” Before I could reply, he said, “What the”—imagine an ugly word for copulation—“is that supposed to mean, butthead?”
“It doesn’t mean anything, sir. It’s just an icebreaker, you know, a conversation starter.”
His scowl deepened to such an extent that his eyebrows met over the bridge of his nose, closing the quarter-inch gap between them. “What’re you—stupid or something?”
Sometimes, in a tight situation, I have found it wise to pretend to be intellectually disadvantaged. For one thing, it can be a useful technique for buying time. Besides, it comes naturally to me.
I was willing to play dumb for this brute if that was what he wanted, but before I could give him a performance of Lennie from Of Mice and Men, he said, “The problem with the world is it’s full of stupid”—imagine an ugly word for the very end of the colon—“who screw it up for everyone else. Kill all the stupid people, the world would be a better place.”
To suggest that I was too smart for the world to do without me, I said, “In Shakespeare’s King Henry VI, Part 2, the rebel Dick says, ‘The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.’ ”
The eyebrows knitted further together, and the green eyes looked as hot as methane fires. “What are you, some kind of smart-ass?”
I just couldn’t win with this guy.
Closing the space between us, poking my chest with the muzzle of the Uzi, he said, “Give me one reason I shouldn’t blow you away right now, you smart-ass trespasser.”
Six
WHEN SOME GUY HAS A GUN AND I DON’T, AND HE ASKS me for one good reason why he shouldn’t kill me, I assume that he has no intention of blowing my head off because otherwise he would just do it. He either wants a reason to stand down or he’s so sadly unimaginative that he’s playing the scene the way he’s watched it unfold on TV and in movies.
Old Green Eyes, however, seemed like a different caliber of thug to me. His demeanor suggested that he didn’t need a reason to kill someone, only a strong desire, and his appearance argued that he was imaginative enough to think of a score of bloody ways to end this.
I was acutely aware of how far away the stables were from any inhabited buildings in Roseland.
Hoping there was nothing he would find incendiary in these nine words, I said, “Well, sir, I’m an invited guest, not a trespasser.”
His expression was not that of a man convinced. “Invited guest? Since when do they let candy-ass punk boys through the gate?”
I decided not to be offended by his unkind characterization of me. “I’m staying in the tower in the eucalyptus grove. Been there three nights, two days.”
He pressed the muzzle of the Uzi into my chest. “Three days and nobody told me? You think I’m dumb enough to eat crap on toast?”
“No, sir. Not on toast.”
His nostrils flared so wide that I feared his brain might fall out through one nostril or the other. “What’s that mean, candy-ass?”
“It means you’re way smarter than me, or otherwise I wouldn’t be on this end of the gun. But it’s true. I’ve been here almost three days. Of course, it wasn’t my charm that got us invited, it was the girl I’m with. Nobody can say no to her.”
I believed that I saw a sudden sympathy in his expression at the mention of a girl. Maybe he thought that I meant a child. Even some of the most hard-case violence junkies can have a soft spot for children.
“Now that makes sense,” he said. “You bring in some super-hot piece of tail, and nobody wants Kenny to know about her.”
Instead of appealing to Kenny’s compassion gland, I had inflamed other glands best left unconsidered and undisturbed. “Well, sir, no. No, that’s not exactly the situation.”
“What isn’t?”
“She’s very sweet, kind of spiritual, not hot at all, kind of dowdy, seven months pregnant, not that much to look at, but everybody likes her, you know, because it’s such a sad case, a girl alone with nothing and a baby on the way, it tugs at your heart.”
Kenny stared at me as if I had suddenly begun speaking in a foreign language. A foreign language, the sound of which offended him so much that he might shoot me just to shut me up.
To change the subject, I put one finger to my upper lip, at the same spot at which a cold sore blazed on Kenny’s lip. “That’s got to hurt.”
I didn’t think he could bristle any further, but he seemed to swell with umbrage. “You saying I’m diseased?”
“No. Not at all. You look as healthy as a bull. Any bull should be happy to be as healthy as you. I’m just saying that one little thing you’ve got there, it must hurt.”
His quills relaxed a little. “Hurts like a sonofabitch.”
“What’re you doing for it?”
“Nothing you can do for a sonofabitch canker. Sonofabitch has to heal itself.”
“That’s not a canker. It’s a cold sore.”
“Everybody says it’s a canker.”
“Cankers are inside the mouth. They look different. How long have you had it?”
“Been six days. Sonofabitch makes me want to scream sometimes.”
I winced to express sympathy. “Before you got it, was there a tingling in your lip, just where it eventually showed up?”
“That’s exactly right,” Kenny said, his eyes widening as if I had proven to be clairvoyant. “A tingle.”
Casually pushing the barrel of the Uzi away from me, I said, “Within twenty-four hours before the tingle, were you out in very hot sun or cold wind?”
“Wind. Week before last, we had a cold snap. Blew in from the northwest like a sonofabitch.”
“You got a little windburn. Too much hot sun or a cold wind can trigger a sore like that. Now that you’ve got it, dab just a little Vaseline on it and stay out of the sun, out of the wind. If you stop irritating the thing, it’ll close up fast enough.”
Kenny touched his tongue to the sore, saw that I disapproved, and said, “You some kind of doctor?”
“No, but I’ve known a couple doctors pretty well. You’re on the security team, I guess.”
“Do I look like I’m the entertainment director?”
I took a chance that we had bonded enough for me to laugh warmly and say, “I suspect you’d be entertaining as hell over a few beers.”
Full of crooked dark-yellow teeth, his cold-sore grin was as appealing as a possum run down by an eighteen-wheeler. “Everybody says old Kenny’s a hoot when you pour some beers in him. Only problem is, after about ten of ’em, I stop feeling hilarious and start tearing things up.”
“Me too,” I claimed, though I’d never had more than two beers in the same day. “But I have to say, with some regret, I doubt that I can do such a handsome amount of damage to a place as you can.”
I had plucked a perfect note from his pride.
“I have committed some memorable ruination, for sure,” he said, and his fearsome facial scars grew a brighter red, as if the memory of past rampages raised the temperature of his self-esteem.
Gradually I had become aware that the quality of light in the stable was changing. Now I glanced to my right and saw that the eastern windows were still aglow with sunlight made ruddy by the coppery tint of the glass, but were not as bright as they had been.
Pointing the Uzi at the floor or perhaps at my feet, Kenny said, “So, kid, what’s your name?”
I tensed a little and returned my attention fully to the giant, whom I had by no means yet won over.
“Listen,” I said, “don’t think I’m shining you on or anything, this really is my name, strange as it might sound. My name is Odd. Odd Thomas.”
“Nothing wrong with the Thomas part.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“And, you know, Odd isn’t as bad as some things parents do to kids. Parents can wreck you, man. My parents were the nastiest—”