Odd Apocalypse (37 page)

THE FIRST DOOR OPENED INWARD TO A SHAFT FILLED with golden radiance. The dimensions of it were difficult to ascertain because the walls were lined with mirrors that deceived the eye with the cunning of a mirror maze in a funhouse.

Shining ranks of spiral forms, similar to the paper decorations people sometimes hang from the ceiling in parties that have an Asian theme, turned at various speeds, although they were not paper. Like drill bits with wide spurs, they bore down through the shaft. No ceiling was apparent; the turning drill bits appeared out of a blur perhaps twenty feet above. They vanished into another blur twenty feet below. If one moment they seemed to be augering down into the earth, the next moment they appeared to be boring
upward
.

As elsewhere, the machinery operated in perfect silence. What might have been the cutting edges of the spurs glistened like molten gold, and what might have been the flutes between the spurs appeared to be as liquid and silver as mercury.

The sight was dizzying, the spiral forms receding to infinity in the mirrors. I felt a kind of hypnotic attraction to those coils, and I closed
the door before I might step in a half trance across the threshold and go spinning down into the blur below.

I glanced back toward the junction of hallways, where we had entered from the drawing room. We hadn’t yet been followed.

I urged the boy ahead, wanting to keep my body between him and the shotgun if Sempiterno should burst in upon us.

When I touched the knob of the second door, it was freezing. My hand nearly stuck to the brass.

The place beyond lay in such deep darkness that it didn’t seem to be either a shaft or a room. Before me lay a void, utterly black, as though it were a view of the nothingness beyond the end of the universe.

The hallway light was dim, but it should have penetrated a few inches into this strange space. The demarcation of light and purest darkness was as straight as a ruled line along the inner edge of the threshold.

Having seen this once before, in distant Pico Mundo, I put my fingertips to what I hoped might be a solid mass, a barrier, but my fingers disappeared into the blackness and then my hand all the way to the wrist. I could see nothing of my fingers, and my arm ended as abruptly as an amputee’s stump.

In the first of these memoirs, I wrote of such a room that I found in the house of a nasty piece of work whom I called Fungus Man. That room had been ordinary on one occasion, like this the next, and then ordinary again.

I won’t recount again what that room in Pico Mundo produced, but I wanted none of it here. I withdrew my hand, closed the door, and looked at the boy, who seemed amazed that I still possessed the hand that I’d put at risk.

“Have you seen this before?” I asked.

“No.”

Sempiterno should have come after us by now. Maybe he had killed the freaks at the expense of his own life. If so, I didn’t intend to send flowers to the funeral.

When I opened the door at the end of the long hallway, which should have led us toward the back of the house, I found ahead of me the library, which should have been toward the front.

Bewildered by this discovery, the boy and I crossed the threshold before I saw Paulie Sempiterno. He was standing with his back to us, surveying the book-lined room, as if he’d just come through the same door ten seconds ahead of us.

Hearing us, he began to turn, the shotgun swinging around.

In this war of men and monsters, there was no reason to think he would side with humanity. He brought women to Roseland so that Cloyce could play with them. Perhaps he played with them, too. Perhaps in some corner of the estate, I would discover a collection of his that would make me wish I were blind. In that glimpse of the future, when I’d seen a blackened tree hung with the skeletons of children, was that a work of Sempiterno’s on which he’d engage in years to come?

I squeezed off shots as fast as the semiauto would fire, and punched him down to his knees with the copper-jacketed hollow-point rounds. The shotgun clattered out of his hands. He fell hard onto his side, spasmed into the fetal position, and froze there, leaving this world in the position in which he had waited for months to enter it.

No satisfaction comes with killing, regardless of how deserving of death your adversary might be. The killing-machine heroes in books and movies, who toss off bon mots as they cut down villains by the score, seem to me to be disturbingly close in character to the freaks of Roseland, saved only by the fact that they are good-looking and
can rely on writers to cloak them in charm that reliably distracts the audience’s attention from the fullest meaning of all the blood.

As Sempiterno fell and curled in the womb of Death, I looked at the boy to be sure he was all right. Our eyes met for a moment. Maybe in my stare, he saw far more years than my face revealed, as I saw in his.

Then I turned away from him and stepped to the service door by which we had entered the library. The long, dimly lighted hallway along which we had come was not there. Instead, it was the shorter hall leading directly to the drawing room, well lighted now and leading to no junction with another corridor.

No matter how many freaks might be prowling the grounds of Roseland, we needed to get out of here quickly, before perhaps the house itself became as much of a threat as the yellow-eyed pack.

EVERY CORNER WAS A DANGER, EVERY DOORWAY A threat, the silence pregnant with peril. Maybe three freaks were dead, maybe only two. Maybe three had gotten into the house, maybe six or twelve, or for all I knew, twenty-four. Jam Diu, Mrs. Tameed, and Sempiterno were no longer of this world, and probably also Chef Shilshom. Henry Lolam was trapped in the gatehouse. That left Victoria and Constantine, the pair whose eternal love—as she called it—had matured into a love of murder.

My intuition, usually more reliable than my reason, told me that wherever Timothy and I were going between now and the end of all this would make the Valley of the Shadow of Death seem like a vacation spot. There was killing to be done, of the kill-or-be-killed kind, and I didn’t think the freaks would do me the favor of taking out all three remaining Roselanders.

We made our way through the house, from the library toward the kitchen, keeping to main rooms and hallways, avoiding service halls because I no longer trusted them to lead where they seemed to lead.

I wanted to return to the mausoleum and from there go overland to the guest tower. Since Timothy had told me about the chronosphere,
a dangerous idea had pressed itself insistently upon me. At first it had been a half-understood phantom at the back of my mind, but it had come forward in my thoughts until it was fully fleshed and demanding a dialogue.

If I took the course of action I was considering, nothing fine could come of it. I would destroy myself and lose forever that one thing that had given me hope since the worst day of my life in Pico Mundo. But you can’t stand an idea up against a wall and execute it. Neither can you wrap it up in a tissue of your better judgment and tuck it in a box of forgetfulness. An idea can be the most dangerous of all things, especially if it is an idea that promises you the most particular and exquisite happiness for which you’ve long yearned.

By the time Timothy and I arrived in the kitchen, I was steeled for the sight of Shilshom torn asunder, his innards festooning the appliances and his head perched upon the cutting board beside the sink. But the kitchen was not an abattoir. His death cry must have originated from elsewhere in the house.

When I opened the door at the head of the back service stairs, I heard heavy footfalls ascending, the snorting and grumbling of more than one freak. A trollish shadow twisted across the landing wall, a step or two ahead of the creature that cast it.

We had no time to flee the kitchen. I stepped to the walk-in pantry, pushed Timothy ahead of me, and followed him, pulling the door shut and holding fast to the knob.

An instant before we entered from the kitchen, Victoria Mors, unbound and ungagged and unhinged, entered from the chef’s office, closing that door, as surprised to see us as we were startled by her. As I raised my Beretta, she seized the boy by his sweater, drew him against her, and pressed the muzzle of her pistol to his neck.

Although my Beretta was aimed at her head from a distance of just six feet, I didn’t dare shoot because it looked as if the trigger of
her weapon was halfway through its double action. In the moment of her death spasm, she might reflexively complete the pull and kill Timothy even as I killed her.

On the other hand, if I lowered my pistol, she might try to pop me, even though the shots would tell the freaks where to find us. Stalemate.

Timothy’s eyes were wide with fear, his pale lips pressed tight as though he had determined both to be brave and to survive. But I worried he might arrive at the conclusion that Victoria could do something for him that was akin to what he hoped to achieve with the chronosphere: with one shot end his unnaturally long and depressing childhood, thereby ensuring for him the death, the peace, that was his destiny in 1925.

Snorting, grumbling with suspicion, making inquisitive noises, like the fabled three bears finding their porridge bowls empty after Goldilocks raided their cottage, the freaks arrived in the kitchen. At least two. Maybe three.

In the hand with which she gripped Timothy, Victoria held a key on a stretchy pink plastic coil.
“Take this,”
she whispered. She was still such an elfin beauty, her pale-blue eyes sparkling as if with the reflections of fairies only she could see, that she seemed to be offering not merely an ordinary key but instead a magic talisman that could give us the power to find a hidden treasure and summon dragons.
“The keyhole in the steel plate.”

She let go of the boy for just one second, to toss the key to me, and she clutched him again before he could think to escape.

To catch the key, I had to let go of the doorknob. If one of the freaks tried to inspect the pantry, I wouldn’t be able to hold the door shut for long, anyway.

“A quarter turn to the right, back to vertical, and withdraw it,”
she whispered.

The pantry door had no lock. The keyhole she meant was in a small steel plate in the wall beside the door.

To do what she wanted, I would have to look away from her. I asked, “Why?”

In the kitchen, cabinet doors were wrenched open, slammed shut. Something clattered to the floor.

Victoria’s whisper grew fierce.
“Damn you! Hurry, before they kill us all!”

Maybe the brutes in the kitchen would find the cheesecake, the almond croissants, a cookie jar if there was one, and be distracted. Or maybe they didn’t like sweets.

Victoria clearly wanted to spit on me again, but her fury was inspired by terror and by my hesitation. I saw no deception in her wrenched face.

I turned away from her long enough to insert the key and do as she had instructed. The moment I withdrew the key, the floor moved beneath my feet.

Startled, I swung the Beretta toward her face.

After a moment of disorientation, I realized that under the pantry must lie a shaft. The floor descended smoothly and silently within it.

After pocketing the key, I took a two-hand grip on the pistol.

As more of the walls appeared, the pantry became a higher space. The shelves laden with canned and packaged food remained above us, growing farther away by the moment.

The deeper we descended, the less well the ever more distant overhead light revealed us to one another. Irrationally but perhaps understandably, given my mood, I expected that we would drop into such depths that the lamp above would be as dim as a star and we would be nearly invisible to one another, in a deep darkness with two guns, one of us having no limits and no rules.

When we had gone down perhaps twenty feet, an opening began
to appear in the wall to my right, behind Victoria and the boy. Seconds later, we came to a stop, and the opening proved to be a seven-foot-high, six-foot-wide copper-clad passageway like the one connecting the mausoleum to the house. Evenly spaced fluorescent tubes striped the tunnel with bands of shadow and light. Embedded in the walls were glass tubes through which pulsed those golden flares that seemed to be receding and approaching at the same time.