Odd Apocalypse (21 page)

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.

In the case of the thirty-three who were naked, on the floor between their spread legs were hand-printed index cards, evidently to assist the killer’s memory. As a little girl will name her dolls, so each victim in this sick man’s collection was named, although I assumed these were the names with which they had lived.

Reluctantly, I went to one knee before the second corpse, trying not to look at her, to focus only on the index card. The killer had
printed
TAMMY VANALETTI
and beside the name had drawn four neat little stars, which perhaps suggested how much he had enjoyed his time with her.

My revulsion didn’t abate, nor my sadness. But now a dark fog of anger, which doesn’t come easily to me, rose as if from the marrow in my bones and spread through my inner landscape.

Each of these women was someone’s daughter, someone’s sister, someone’s friend, perhaps someone’s mother. They weren’t toys. What he’d done to them was not a sport that could be scored with a system of stars. Precious in and of themselves, every one of them might also have been as precious to someone as Stormy had been to me.

Anger is a violent emotion, vindictive, and as dangerous to he who is driven by it as to anyone on whom it is turned. If anger is personal and selfish—and it usually is—it clouds your thinking and therefore puts you at risk. I had to remain clearheaded to deal with what would come next. I needed to keep Stormy Llewellyn out of this, to take this cruelty less personally, to trade anger for righteous indignation, which despises evil acts solely because they are evil. Anger is a red mist through which you see the world, but wrath is clarity. The angry man shoots too often from the hip and misses his target or hits the wrong one, while a wrathful man proceeds without malice but with a thirst for justice.

A date was printed under Tammy Vanaletti’s name. It couldn’t be her birthday because it was only eight years earlier, and she looked to be in her early twenties. The most logical conclusion was that he had murdered her on that date.

Tammy had been stabbed. The blood on the lips of her wounds appeared fresh.

I had no idea how this could be the case more than eight years after her murder. But I sensed that the part of my mind that never
slept or rested was, like a loom, weaving all the seemingly disparate threads of Roseland into a fabric.

I went corpse to corpse, reading each card but not touching it. The date of each death was nearer the present than the one before it. Ginger Harkin, the most recent victim, had been killed less than a month earlier.

Of the thirty-three whose death dates were provided, all had been killed in the past eight years. The periodicity of the killer’s murderous urge seemed to be less than three months. Four victims per annum, year after year, with now and then an extra.

This much murder couldn’t be called a homicidal impulse or even a psychotic compulsion. This was the man’s work, his occupation, his
calling
.

When I turned again to the nameless spirit, I said, “Was it Noah Wolflaw who killed you?”

After a hesitation, she nodded:
Yes
.

“Were you his lover?”

Another hesitation.
Yes
.

Before I could ask a third question, she raised one hand to display an engagement ring and wedding band, which of course were not real but only the
idea
of the nuptial jewelry that she’d once worn in this world.

“His wife?”

Yes
.

“You want him brought to justice.”

She nodded vigorously and placed both hands over her heart, as if to say that justice was her fondest desire.

“I’ll bring him down. I’ll see him in jail.”

She shook her head and drew one index finger across her throat in the universal gesture that meant
Kill him
.

“I’ll probably have to,” I said. “He won’t go easily.”

THE LINGERING DEAD DON’T ALWAYS PROVIDE HELPFUL information, and even those who want to assist me are hampered by their psychology in death as in life. In fact, because they are lost between this world and the next, their reason is often bent by fear, by confusion, and perhaps by other emotions too complex for me to imagine. As a result, they’re likely at times to behave irrationally, hindering me when they mean only to help, turning away from me when they should turn toward.

Eager to get as much from Wolflaw’s murdered wife as I could before she might become less cooperative, I said, “There’s a boy in the house. Just as you suggested.”

She nodded vigorously. Her eyes welled with tears, because even spirits can weep, although their tears do not water anything in this world.

Because the boy had said that he’d been taken from someplace and that he wanted to be taken back, I had assumed he was no relation to Noah Wolflaw and didn’t belong in Roseland. But the woman’s tears forced me to reconsider my assumption.

“Your son.”

Yes
.

“Is Noah Wolflaw his father?”

After another hesitation and a look of frustration, she replied in the affirmative.
Yes
.

“I assume you don’t know much more about me, just that I can see you and others who haven’t crossed over. But I want you to know that I’ve been drawn here because of your son. I’m meant to help him, and I will try my best.”

She appeared hopeful but also uncertain. Her maternal anxiety, carried with her even into death, made her a pitiable figure.

“He says he wants to be taken back, but I don’t know where he was brought from. Was he living somewhere else for a while, maybe with his grandparents?”

No
.

“With an aunt or uncle?”

No
.

“I promise you, I’ll take him back.”

To my surprise, she reacted with alarm, adamantly shaking her head.
No, no, no
.

“But he wants to go back, he wants it more than anything, and he’ll have to go somewhere when this is over.”

Obviously distressed, the late Mrs. Wolflaw pressed her hands to her head as though she was mentally tortured by the thought of her boy being taken anywhere.

“Serial killing isn’t the entire story of Roseland. Something damn strange is going on here, and it won’t end well. There’s not going to be a Roseland anymore, or if there is, then it’ll surely be notorious, a magnet for the morally confused, the mentally unhinged, cultists, freaks of all kinds. The boy will have to go back wherever it is that he wants to go.”

Fear twisted her lovely face, but anger caused her to swing a fist at me.

The lingering dead can touch me—and be felt—when the intention is benign. But when they mean to harm, their blows pass through me with no effect, confirming their immaterial nature.

Why this should be, I don’t have a clue. I didn’t make the rules, and if I were allowed to rewrite them, I would impose a number of changes.

I don’t even know why
I
should be, just that I am.

Again Mrs. Wolflaw swung at me, and a third time. Her failure to connect dismayed her so that desperation wrenched her face, and she let out a plaintive howl to which I was deaf and the world unheeding.

She was frightened and frustrated more than angry. I didn’t think that she could work up the white-hot fury that alone can transform a harmless ghost into a dangerous, furniture-slinging poltergeist.

She proved me right by turning away from me, rushing past the dead women, and vanishing as she reached her own bullet-riddled body.

Sometimes it seems that I am dreaming when I am in fact awake, my reality as unreal as the lands I walk in sleep.

Alone except for the convocation of the dead, I looked up at the six arrays of golden gears. Shining teeth meshed, bit without rending, chewed without consuming, revolved without a sound, moving across the room from wall to wall, as if they were the clockworks in Hell by which the devil measured progress toward eternity.

IN THE CLOCKWORK CRYPT, THE TIMELESS DEAD GAVE silent testimony to the human potential for evil. To meet their sightless eyes would be to weep. This was no more a time for weeping than it was a time for laughter, and I moved back toward the spiral stairs, rich in wrath but without anger.

Ozzie Boone, the best-selling mystery writer who lives in Pico Mundo, is my four-hundred-pound mentor, friend, and surrogate father. He has appeared in some volumes of these memoirs, and his advice on writing shapes them all.

He told me that I must keep the tone light because the material is often so dark. Without the leavening of humor, Ozzie says, I will be writing for a small audience of bitter nihilists and dedicated depressives, and I will fail to reach those readers who might be lifted by the hope that lies at the heart of my story.

My writing can’t be published while I’m alive, if only because I would be besieged by people who would mistakenly conclude that I can
control
my sixth sense. They would expect me to serve as a medium between them and their loved ones on the Other Side. Others
would even more completely misunderstand my gift and come to me to be healed of everything from cancer to bunions.

And here, beyond the limits of Pico Mundo, I must consider the police and the courts, where I would not likely find a sympathetic ear for my story of another world within the world they know, of a more complex reality within the reality of all things material. I would be called guilty, and the guilty on whom I turned my wrath in defense of the innocent would be declared innocent victims. My best hope would be prison, my likely destination a madhouse, and during the years that I waited for that decision, I would not be able to use my gift to help anyone because I would be woven immobile in a web of lawyers.

At the stairs, I registered something that I had seen before but not considered: a door in the farther wall. From here the stairs went up to rooms I’d already visited, but the door led to something new.

New isn’t always better. iPhones are better than rotary-dial models, but not so many years ago, some maniacs had a big new idea that they should announce their grievances by flying airliners into skyscrapers.

Nevertheless, carrying the pillowcase containing the hacksaw, I crossed to the door, hesitated, and opened it. Beyond lay a down-sloping tunnel approximately six feet wide and seven high.

As I was at the north side of the mausoleum and as the main house stood north of this building, I assumed the tunnel led under the stepped cascades, under the lawn, under the terrace, terminating in the basement of the residence.