Odd Apocalypse (39 page)

Together we had found our way to that crossroads of self-love and self-loathing that is the modern madness most in vogue. She assumed that the very fact I recognized this place in the mind and heart must mean that I was as enthralled by it as she was, that I was ready to live a life that would be a deathwork.

Sometimes not to take a risk is to embrace failure. I took the risk of holstering my Beretta.

She held Timothy against her, arm around his neck, muzzle of the gun against his temple.

In his eyes, I thought I saw both fear and relief, and the latter saddened me.

Victoria released him. She lowered her weapon, muzzle toward the floor.

“When I spat on your mouth,” she said, favoring me with that elfin smile, “you must have liked the taste of it.”

I drew my pistol and shot her point-blank twice in the chest before she could raise her gun arm.

EXCEPT FOR THE WOUNDS, THE BLOOD, VICTORIA ON the passageway floor was an elfin loveliness, shorn now of the spirit that didn’t measure up to the beauty of her material form.

I said to the boy, “Don’t look at her.”

“I’ve seen worse.”

“Just the same,” I said, “don’t look. Go on up the tunnel a little ways. I’ll join you in a minute.”

He did as I asked.

My nausea had abated. The cause of it hadn’t been the pulsing lights in the walls. The cause had been the recognition of what I would do to her if, by deception, I could win her trust.

I owed this woman nothing other than what I’d given her, and in spite of how young she appeared to be, her death was not untimely. Yet death is always first and foremost death even when it might also be something else, like justice.

In spite of what she was and what she had done, once very long ago she’d been someone else who had not yet cast aside all innocence. In respect of the better girl who had once been, I wished that
I had a blanket to drape over her rather than leave her exposed in the indignity of death.

My sports coat would cover only her head and torso, which would somehow seem a mockery.

Her 9-mm pistol lay on the floor. Because I was so rapidly going through my supply of ammunition, I picked up the weapon. I ejected the magazine—and discovered it was empty. The chamber didn’t contain a round, either.

Having exhausted her ammunition before we even encountered each other, she’d not been an immediate threat either to me or to Timothy.

I snapped the magazine back into her pistol and put the gun on the floor beside her.

Nothing could have been different. What happened was the only thing that could have happened. Nevertheless, that moment was far from a high point in my life.

I turned my back to her and replenished the ammunition in the magazine of my Beretta.

When I joined Timothy farther along the passageway, I said, “Are you all right?”

“No. Last time I was all right, my mother was still alive.”

I put a hand on his shoulder. “You said no one can go from the present to the past and have any effect on what happened to make the present what it is.”

“They tell me that Tesla said so, and it turns out to be true.”

“Your father brought you back from 1925, from minutes before he accidentally shot you, but your dead body was still on the lawn with your mother’s and the horse.”

“Yeah. My life ended when he shot me.”

“But here you are, a paradox. Alive … though never changing.”

“Because I have no life—no destiny—to grow into.”

I settled on one knee, to be at his height. “If we brought your mother back from before he shot her, she would be like you.”

“Like me. Never changing physically. Haunted by the future. Never able to leave Roseland.” He glanced toward Victoria’s body. “Except by being killed again.”

This was news to me. “You can’t leave Roseland?”

“They say … they think I’d cease to exist if I did. I’m out of time, out of
my
time, here in a century where I don’t belong. Maybe I’m sustained only by the energy field, Tesla’s field, that encircles Roseland.”

If that turned out to be true, I had saved him only to sentence him to death, one way or another.

The freaks had taken out Jam Diu and Mrs. Tameed and perhaps even Constantine Cloyce, sparing me from dispatching as many people as I had thought I would be called upon to kill, perhaps even sparing me from being the scourge that I dreaded being. And if I shut down the estate and put an end to the last of the Outsiders, which might be Henry Lolam, I had perhaps saved the lives of all the women and children upon whom this demented cult would have preyed in the decades to come. That was a good day’s work, especially for a fry cook who was out of a job.

But this perpetual child, grown wise from books and seasoned by his suffering, was such a survivor that I was distressed by the thought that I could help him only by putting an end to him. After all that he had endured here, after the terrible things he had seen and heard, he still held fast to his innocence, at least in the sense that he was blameless, guileless, harmless, uncorrupted. He deserved better than a second death.

If his fate had been mine to craft, I would have given him life,
hope, and happiness. I am, however, without such godlike power. I am only an itinerant janitor these days, going where I have to go, cleaning up one kind of mess or another, and then moving on to the next toxic spill.

When he revealed that he would cease to exist as soon as he walked outside the gates of the estate, I didn’t know what to say to him. I could only put my arms around him, hug him, hold him tight. I guess that must have been the right thing to do, because he hugged me, too, and for a moment we took strength from each other, deep in Roseland’s maze, while freaks stalked through other passageways and also through the sunlit world above, feeding on human flesh with the enthusiasm of the Minotaur prowling the labyrinth under ancient Crete.

As we set out to find the branching tunnels of which Victoria Mors had spoken, I said, “There’s someone I want you to meet.”

He shook his head. “I just want to be sent back. To be one Timothy again, not two, just one and finished in 1925, like I was meant to be.”

“Maybe that’s best,” I admitted. “But often what we want
isn’t
what’s best. There’s this friend of mine in the guest tower. She’s a nice lady. I want to see what she thinks before we decide what to do.”

“Who is she?”

“I sure would give just about anything to be able to answer that one, Tim.”

Where the copper-clad passageway forked, far beneath the manicured acres of Roseland, we turned right, toward the guest tower.

I’d been so distracted by Timothy’s revelation that he would cease to exist beyond the walls of the estate, I only now registered the importance of something else that he had said. I quoted him: “ ‘Haunted by the future.’ ”

“In the past, I’m dead. And having died there, I don’t belong to the present. Yet I’m alive. My mind is both in and outside of time. So maybe that’s why … I see things that might come to pass.”

“The future?”

“I guess it is.”

“Earlier, I came into your room. You were sitting in the big chair. Eyes rolled back in your head. Were you in a trance?”

“I can enter it when I want. But sometimes it comes over me when I don’t want it.”

“You said something about their faces melting off their skulls, they turned to soot, blew away.… You mean that’s something you saw happening someday?”

“Blasts of bright white light,” he said, “turn everything to soot and dust.”

“The schoolgirls in uniforms and kneesocks. Their clothes and hair on fire, flames flying out of their mouths. You mean … war.”

“I see different things at different times. I don’t know which just might happen and which
will
happen.”

After a hesitation, I asked, “Do you see some good things, some might-happens that we’d want to live in?”

“Not many.”

“If the future isn’t set … why do the freaks keep showing up here over the years? Why doesn’t some other, alternate future bleed into Roseland now and then?”

“Maybe because in
most
of the possible futures, like eighty or ninety percent of them, the freaks are created and the whole world is wrecked by war.”

“But that’s not inevitable?”

“No. We’ve seen some things change from full tide to full tide.”

“Like what?”

“Like there didn’t used to be those giant bats.”

“That’s a change for the worse,” I said.

“Yeah. But if there can be a change for the worse, there can be a change for the better.”

We walked the rest of the way in silence.

The passageway ended at a spiral stainless-steel staircase that was tightly wound. I led the way up perhaps fifty feet. At the top, I knew by the copper dome forty feet overhead that we were on the third floor of the guest tower.

The entire large chamber—even the floor—had been clad in bright copper. Patterns of what appeared to be silver discs were inlaid in the copper, each bearing the symbol for infinity.

The chronosphere was the most spectacular but not the most astonishing thing in the room. I felt at once a strange quality to the light. Neither too dim nor too bright, bathing us in the warm golden radiance reminiscent of candleglow but without the flicker, it lent the room a welcoming ambiance that made even this bizarre space seem familiar, although it was like nothing I had ever experienced before. I needed the better part of a minute to realize that the light was strange because it had no source. No lamps, no sconces, no overhead fixtures. End to end, top to bottom, the room was evenly illuminated, no spot darker or brighter than any other. It seemed that the light must be as integral to the space as the air, and beyond saying that, I am at a loss to better describe the effect.

I remembered that in his Colorado laboratory, in 1899, Nikola Tesla had lighted two hundred lamps at a distance of twenty-five miles, without wires. He transmitted electricity through the air. Always a font of new ideas, he had quickly moved on to other tasks, and today the technology behind that feat is lost.

The difference between the Colorado experiment and this tower chamber was the lack of light bulbs. The entire room seemed to serve as a bulb, though it was not a vacuum and lacked a filament.
Timothy and I could breathe, and we were not affected by an electric current. No shock. No faintest tingle. The fine hairs on the backs of my hands did not bristle with static.

Timothy and I cast no shadows. Neither did the chronosphere or anything else. Being universal, the source and the brightness of the light defeated shadows.

The chronosphere will be no less difficult to describe.

The outermost part of it was a giant gimbal mounting, every arm of which was curved and plated in silver. This measured approximately eighteen feet wide and twenty-seven feet from base to crown, leaving a four-to-five-foot walkaround.

Centered in this first and larger gimbal mounting was another, this one plated in gold. And within the second mounting was the wheel of a gyroscope, except that instead of a wheel it was a golden egg about eight feet end to end and six feet in diameter at its widest point. I suppose the egg didn’t make the exotic construction exactly a gyroscope, but something without a name, at least without one in my vocabulary.

In ways that defeated the eye, the gracefully curved arms of the inner mounting were attached to the outer in some fashion that allowed them to turn smoothly, silently, describing lazy-eight arcs in the air. Those arcs seemed to intersect and therefore to conflict with one another, but the continuously moving arms of the mounting never collided. At the center of this smaller mounting was the egg, at the moment rotating on an axis that kept its narrowest end at the top.

The magically turning arms of the elaborate inner gimbal didn’t cast shadows. But along their edges, the air—or the light itself—rippled faintly.

Pointing to the egg, Timothy said, “That’s the capsule. That’s what moves in time—and out of it. It can carry one or two people.
You can send me back alone, and if it’s not set on
PARK
, it’ll return here empty.”

I had a lot of questions, but this wasn’t the time for them. I spotted a copper door in the copper wall, and taking Timothy by the hand, I led him around the chronosphere to the exit.

Beyond lay the curve of stairs that would take us down to the second floor, where Annamaria waited.

I didn’t have a key to this upper chamber. I took a pair of dollar bills from my wallet, wadded them, and stuffed them into the receiving hole in the striker plate on the door frame, so that the latch bolt could not engage and we could return when we wished. Millions of years of the past were mine for just two dollars.