Odd Apocalypse (29 page)

If I dug down into the earth, I would most likely find some kind
of metal mesh or those copper rods embedded in the foundations of the buildings. Suddenly I knew what the elongated 8 represented when you read it horizontally rather than vertically: It was the symbol for infinity.

I felt dizzy. I wished I were as good at not thinking as Kenny claimed to be.

I returned to that peninsula of flawless lawn in which Enceladus raised a fist to challenge the gods, and I followed it to the acres of grass surrounding the main residence. From a distance, I could see that the windows and doors of the house were still covered with steel panels.

Around one corner of the mansion came a ragtag mob of freaks in a violent frenzy because they had not been invited inside for lunch. They were overturning patio furniture and pounding on the shutters.

I retreated into the Enceladus lawn, screened from the house by the time-frozen oaks. I stood by the Titan, trying to get my mind around the ramifications of the theory that Roseland was not a time machine—no, nothing that simple—but a machine that could
manage
time, reverse or retard its effects, and ensure against the otherwise inevitable decline of all things, which is the way of Nature.

In the main house, as in the guest tower, everything appeared to be immaculate, pristine, as if nothing ever wore out or broke down or produced dust. Wooden floors and steps were as tight and squeak-free as the day that they were installed. No cracks in the marble or limestone.

The kitchen appliances were new; but most likely they had been replaced not because those of the 1920s didn’t still work but because newer ovens and refrigerators offered features and conveniences that the older models did not.

Out of nowhere, as if conjured, a hundred or more bats with
seven-foot wingspans appeared at the tree-encircled end of the long lawn. They flew toward me, in such tight formation that they appeared to be a solid mass, a tidal flow two feet above the grass, abroad in daylight as bats should never be.

The urge to flee was countered by the recognition that I could move at only a fraction of their speed. Perhaps they didn’t see well in daylight. Like most predators, they must track their prey by scent. But maybe their natural guidance system, echolocation, also played a role in identifying food, in which case absolute stillness might be wiser than movement. The enormous lead statue, in the shadow of which I stood, might mask me from detection.

Perhaps, maybe, might be, might: With such qualifications did I stand paralyzed in hope that I would not be devoured alive.

Their wings beat in unison so many times per second that the thrum of them became almost a buzz, and their orchestral timing was no less impressive than it was fearsome. Heads as big as grapefruits, they approached with chins dropped, mouths open, curved incisors bared, flat noses sifting from the air the scents of blood, sweat, minute particles of dander shed by skin or fur or feathers, and the pheromones of fear.

I could not breathe as they rushed past so low that I looked down on the soft brown fur that covered their bodies and on their membranous wings. In the passing, they vanished through a sudden shimmering in the air, as if through a curtain between my time and theirs.

Limp with relief, I climbed onto the granite plinth on which the huge Titan stood. I sat with my back against his left calf, knees drawn up, shoes pressed against his right foot, not sure if the lead from which he was cast had afforded me some protection, but taking shelter there with my usual persistent optimism.

As my heartbeat returned to normal, I brooded again about Roseland. About time past, time present, and time future …

The stasis evident in the landscaped grounds, in the house, and in the furniture that stood in its rooms apparently did not extend to less place-fixed objects like bed linens and cake pans and cutlery. Linens and clothes didn’t launder themselves as the oak repaired the broken-off twig, and dirty dishes didn’t revert to a time when they were clean. The current that moved strongly through the structure—call it the Methuselah current—flowed secondarily through things that stood on the house’s floors and hung on its walls; but it must not be able to invade and maintain items that were smaller and less stationary.

What of the people who lived here?

In Kenny’s grim and tumultuous future, the owner of Roseland called himself Constantine Cloyce, perhaps because in the chaos of that time, he no longer needed to conceal his true identity behind false ones. Perhaps people in that coming age were so preoccupied with defending and feeding their families and themselves that they had no curiosity about the past. If there was no Internet or TV or radio possible under that turbulent yellow sky, and if what public records existed were moldering in the drawers of buildings gone to ruins, he did not have to periodically change his name and to some degree his appearance. He didn’t have to pretend to be Noah Wolflaw or a South American heir to a mining fortune. He could be in name who he had always been in fact: Constantine Cloyce.

Logic insisted that the residents of Roseland were even less place-fixed than were tableware and clothes, and therefore weren’t guaranteed immortality merely by living within those walls. They must age normally and, perhaps every few decades, have to undertake some regimen or undergo some process to revert to their youth.

Dropping thirty or forty years overnight, losing gray hair and wrinkles and weight and the effects of gravity on the face that came with age, they would appear to be new people, nearly unrecognizable as who they had been. They would need to do hardly more than change their names and hairstyles to pass for new residents of Roseland, especially as they were reclusive, having little contact with locals.

I remembered Victoria Mors saying that she never did anything dangerous, and now I understood why. Maybe they were able to undo the effects of aging and reverse the ravages of disease, but they were not invulnerable. They could be shot and killed or they could perish in an accident.

For the same reason, Henry Lolam took three of his eight weeks of vacation and then returned to Roseland. He felt safer within its walls. Immortality made him a prisoner of Roseland, and he was his own jailer.

Although I had scores of questions, I had fewer now than just an hour earlier. Those for which I most urgently wanted answers all involved the nameless boy.

If Noah Wolflaw was in fact Constantine Cloyce, then the spirit rider of the stallion was Madra Cloyce, his wife from the 1920s, which was when she must have been shot and killed, back when there had been horses on the estate.

I remembered how she had hesitated and seemed frustrated when, in the subcellar of the mausoleum, among the corpses, I asked her if she was Noah Wolflaw’s wife. With her answers limited to a nod or a shake of the head, she could not tell me that Wolflaw was Cloyce, and that she was therefore the wife of both.

The nameless boy was no longer nameless. He was the son of Madra and Constantine, who was supposed to be dead. He had died young. His name—Timothy—was on a plaque beneath the burial
niche in the mausoleum wall where his ashes were supposedly interred, but obviously he was alive.

From where had Noah Wolflaw—Cloyce—taken him, and why did the boy want more than anything to be taken back there? If he was nine-year-old Timothy, why was he
still
nine all these decades later? Why didn’t they let him grow up and then maintain himself as did the rest of them?
Had they kept him a child for almost ninety years?

The answers couldn’t be found in the shadow of Enceladus. They waited to be discovered in the main house.

From the northwest, caissons of dark clouds rolled in on silent wheels, though I expected that they would raise some thunder before the day was done. The pending storm had conquered a third of the sky, and it was moving faster than before to secure the heavens from horizon to horizon.

For some reason, anticipating the storm, I thought of Victor Frankenstein at work high in the old mill that, in the movie though not the book, served as his laboratory, harnessing bolts of lightning to bring his creation to life, the shambling thing with a criminal’s brain and a merciless graveyard heart.

The only route by which I could return to the barricaded house was through the mausoleum, by way of the mural based on Franchi’s painting of a guardian angel and child.

Alert for the thrum of bat wings, motivated to move fast by the memory of those curved incisors, I sprinted across the lawn, hurried through the grove of oaks in stasis, and ran overland through fields and hills where plants still waxed and waned as Nature intended.

En route, I found that the vision of Frankenstein’s old mill came repeatedly into my mind’s eye. I didn’t at first know why the image nagged at me.

As I approached the mausoleum from the south, that mind’s eye
blinked, and the old mill assaulted by lightning became the guest tower in the eucalyptus grove at Roseland. The bronze dome atop that stone structure featured an unusual finial resembling a giant version of the stem, crown, and case bow of an old pocket watch. And the secret of Roseland had to do with
time
.…

My apartment and Annamaria’s occupied the lower twenty feet of that sixty-foot tower. The winding stairs leading from the ground floor to the second also led to a third and final level. The keys we’d been given did not unlock the door at the top of those stairs.

Being ever curious, I’d tried and failed to learn what occupied those upper forty feet. I’m not one of those snoops with an unhealthy inquisitiveness that Big Brother hires by the tens of thousands these days. But I have learned that when my gift draws me to a new place where I am needed, my chances of survival increase if, upon arrival, I scope the territory for trapdoors, deadfalls, and hidden snares.

Now I halted on the south lawn of the mausoleum, out of sight of the main house, considering whether I should return to the guest tower, after all. On the way, I could stop by Jam Diu’s place and borrow an axe from the unused landscaping tools. The events of the day had put me in a mood to chop something, even if it had to be only a door.

After a hesitation, I felt drawn toward the main house more than to the guest tower. Time was surely out of joint in both places, but if the hands on the clock of apocalypse were spinning toward a catastrophe, I needed to get to the boy soon.

IN THE MAUSOLEUM, THE MOSAIC OF THE FRANCHI painting remained recessed from the rest of the north wall, exposing the two sets of stairs that led down to the first cellar.

I had assumed that after a delay, the entrance to the secret world below would close automatically behind me. Now, standing to one side, I put a finger to the tile in the angel’s shield that I had pressed to unlock the door, but it remained countersunk, and the slab of stone did not move forward to plug the hole where it belonged.

After searching the wall at the head of one set of stairs and then at the head of the other, I found no switch. Intuition told me that I should waste no more time here. Events in Roseland were rapidly coming to a tipping point.

I went down into the first cellar where, along the center of the chamber, the seven golden spheres were spinning silently on the seven poles. The many flywheels flew without a sound, and from their outer rims, radiant drops of golden light glided to the tapestry of copper wires on the ceiling, where they were absorbed and transmitted along the elaborate patterns until they dimmed and vanished.

With my recent discovery of the primary purpose of the machinery—the
management of time—I hoped to understand, if only dimly, how these various devices conspired to perform such an astonishing feat. But I was as mystified as ever.

Neither a gift for frying nor one of a psychic nature requires also that the recipient be a blazing genius. I knew other fry cooks, none of whom was likely to win a Nobel Prize in science. And when you can see the lingering dead and have occasional prophetic dreams, you tend to be too distracted either to become an international chess champion or to create the next Apple Inc.

At the spiral stairs in the corner, I went down again into the subcellar. In that lower space, six arrays of golden gears churned silently and ceaselessly in their silver tracks overhead, and the collection of dead women waited, their pinned-open eyes watchful unto eternity.

Perhaps here in the immediate presence of the machine—or a key part of the machine—the generated stasis was stronger even than it was elsewhere. Seated on the floor, leaning against the walls, the grisly trophies were as freshly dead as when the master of Roseland murdered them.

Corpses in stasis are still just corpses. But I wondered if in the quiet of the night their killer ever fell into a fever of guilt or a morbid despond, and if he then imagined that he might encounter these women on the move, their bloody wounds as compelling as stigmata, their accusing voices rough and half trapped in their necktie-throttled throats.

Anything I might do to him was so much less than he deserved.

Perhaps because the timeless cadavers were not bothered by creatures drawn to carrion, I realized that the house must have been free of insects and rodents when Tesla’s machine was first switched on. I’d seen no immortal spiders weaving infinite webs, no houseflies with an antique look, no rats grown wise from living fifty ratty lifetimes.