Odd Apocalypse (10 page)

Noah Wolflaw didn’t seem like a guy who would play Santa Claus to his employees, but I didn’t remark on the generosity of a two-month vacation.

Henry gazed now at the falcon as it circled lazily, patient in its quest for prey. Subtle but unmistakable, his look of desolation was so unsuited to his boyish face, I suspected that he was in some emotional distress and that, into my silence, he might say something revealing and useful to me.

“I spent two weeks in Hawaii and just couldn’t stand it anymore. Flew to San Francisco for a week, and that was no better.”

The peregrine glided silently, and I as well felt falconish, in my mind circling above the guard, waiting patiently for him to speak words that might be meat to me.

“It wasn’t those particular places,” Henry continued. “Wherever you go these days, it’s all wrong, isn’t it? I don’t know why, but it is.”

I didn’t believe that he wanted any comment from me. He seemed to be thinking out loud.

“People are so different from how they used to be. So fast. There’s an endless opening of possibilities.”

Fearing that he might wax as cryptic as Annamaria, I sought a little clarification: “You mean the Internet, technology, and all that?”

“Technology changes nothing. People were people before and after the steam engine, before and after the airplane. But … not quite now. Walls. That’s what it is. The problem is walls.”

I waited, but he said nothing more, and at last, with some exasperation of which I’m not proud, I said, “Walls. Yes. How true. We have to have walls, don’t we? Or maybe we don’t? You start with walls, and then you need a ceiling. And floors. And doors. It just never stops. Tents. That might be the answer.”

If he heard my words, he didn’t detect my sarcasm. “Five weeks of vacation left, but I just couldn’t stand being out there anymore. I hate the wall around Roseland, but the gate in it is a gate to nowhere.”

When after a while he didn’t continue, I prodded him by saying, “Well, as I see it, that gate is a gate to
everywhere
. The whole world’s beyond it.”

I figured he was ruminating on my sage comment, but he wasn’t. He flew off on what seemed to be another line of thought.

“ ‘Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.’ ”

Although I recognized those words, I didn’t at once know from what source he was quoting.

Before I could ask, Henry recited the famous lines of poetry about the falcon and the falconer, a metaphor for man and God, the former flying ever farther from the latter, the pagan cruelty of the human heart breaking loose from civilizing tradition.

“Yeats,” I said, naming the poet, and might have been pleased with myself if I had understood what the hell he was talking about.

“I hate it here, this Roseland without roses, but at least there’s a wall, and with a wall the center might still hold.”

He wasn’t hysterical, just enigmatic, but I really wanted to slap him until he made sense, the way the hero sometimes slaps the raving hysteric in the movies. But no matter how frustrated I may be, I never slap a man who is carrying a pistol in a shoulder holster under a blazer tailored to allow a quick draw.

Henry shifted his attention from the falcon to me. In his Huck Finn face, his eyes were as bleak as those of Hamlet.

His vulnerability could not have been more obvious. I sensed that the ease with which he opened himself to me was an indication that he was friendless, sought friendship, and could be cultivated to such an extent as to reveal secrets of Roseland that would help me understand why I was here and what I must do.

True friendship, however, is a sacred relationship even if it doesn’t involve formal vows. The friends I’ve made in Pico Mundo and everywhere I’ve gone since leaving home have kept me from despair, have nurtured hope. When I considered how I might
cultivate
Henry, I meant
manipulate
. There’s nothing wrong with manipulating bad men in pursuit of truth, but I didn’t think Henry Lolam was bad or deserved the contempt that manipulation represented. To pretend friendship here would be to devalue all the real friendships in my life.

While I hesitated, the moment of opportunity passed, and Henry said, “Guests in Roseland are rare.”

“The lady I’m traveling with seems to have … charmed Mr. Wolflaw.”

“She’s not his type. She’s not low or flashy, or cheap.”

By insulting his employer, Henry raised my hopes that he might treat me as a confidant without requiring that I fake friendship.

Silence seemed to serve me best, and after a moment, Henry said, “You’re not her lover.”

“No.”

“What are you to her?”

“A friend. She’s alone. She needs protection.”

He held my stare as if he meant for the intensity of his gaze to drive his next words deep: “He doesn’t want her. It may be the baby.”

“Mr. Wolflaw? What would he want with the baby?”

Having raised the issue, he retreated from exploring it. “Who can say? Maybe he needs … something new.”

I could tell that he didn’t mean anything as innocent as that the baby was a new experience, a novelty, so I said, “New? New what?”

“Sensation,” he said, looking away from me to the hunter gliding in the high blue day. “Thrills.”

Those two words evoked such an array of horrifying possibilities that I meant to press him for an explanation.

Before I could speak, he held up one hand to stop me. “I’ve said far too much and not enough. If you want to protect her, you should leave now. This is … an unhealthy place.”

I couldn’t tell him that my supernatural gift and Annamaria’s mission—whatever that might be—had brought us here. To reveal my sixth sense to anyone but a friend of long acquaintance might cause considerable trouble.

According to Annamaria, someone in Roseland was in great danger,
perhaps the boy about whom the dead blonde worried. I didn’t feel the endangered person was Henry. I still had to find who needed my help.

“We can’t leave today,” I said. “But soon, I hope.”

“If it’s money, I can give you some.”

“That’s very kind of you, sir. But it’s not money.”

“I tell you it’s an unhealthy place, and you aren’t surprised.”

“A little surprised.”

“Not at all. What are you, I wonder?”

“Just a fry cook.”

“But you have no job.”

I shrugged. “This rotten economy.”

He looked away from me and shook his head.

Like an angel suddenly thrown down and remembering its wings only at the penultimate moment, the peregrine plunged, with its fearsome talons seized a smaller bird in flight, and swooped up, away, toward a tree where it could perch in feathered splendor to feed upon its terrified, feathered catch.

Henry gave me a meaningful look that seemed to ask if I dared recognize that the falcon had been a sign that portended my fate if I remained long in Roseland. “I know you’re not stupid, Odd Thomas. But are you a fool?”

“Less than some folks, sir, but more than others.”

“Surely you fear death.”

“Not really. Not death. Just how it might happen. Like being locked in a garage with a hungry crocodile and being eaten alive. Or being chained to dead men and dropped in a lake. Or having a hole drilled in my skull, and then the guy who drilled it drops a bunch of fire ants through the hole, into my brain.”

I don’t know whether Henry punctuated every conversation with reflective silences or if only I inspired that response.

He shifted restlessly in his chair and searched the sky, as if hoping for another sign that might convince me to leave Roseland.

Finally I got around to the reason I had come. “Sir, is there a guy named Kenny on the security team?”

“We don’t have a Kenny, no.”

“Tall, muscular guy with bad scars on the face, wears a T-shirt that says ‘Death heals.’ ”

The slow turning of Henry’s head, the long look before he spoke, told me that Kenny was known here even if not by name.

“You’ve been warned to stay inside, behind locked doors, between dusk and dawn.”

“Yes, sir, but I was warned about mountain lions, nothing else. Anyway, I didn’t run into him at night. It was this morning.”

“Not after sunrise.”

“More than half an hour after. Up at the stables. Who is he if he’s not a guard?”

Henry rose from his chair, went to the gatehouse door, opened it, and glanced back at me. “Take her and leave. You don’t know what kind of place this is.”

Getting to my feet, I said, “So tell me.”

He went inside and closed the door behind him.

Through a window, I saw him picking up the telephone.

If I had come to Roseland alone, perhaps I would have left, as Henry advised. But Annamaria, on her mysterious mission, would not leave, and I could not abandon her to the mercy of … Of who knew what?

ACCOMPANIED BY THE BUZZ OF BUMBLEBEES, BY DARTING wrens that sang complex songs in high tinkling trills, by bright butterflies that seemed out of season, and for a while by a pair of scampering squirrels, I felt like a character in a Disney movie, and I half expected the squirrels to start talking as I followed the property line south from the gatehouse.

That gave me no comfort. Bad things happen to good animals in some Walt Disney movies. Think of Bambi’s mother and Old Yeller, the former shot down in front of her child, the latter foaming at the mouth with rabies and killed by the boy who loved him. People don’t always fare better. Even the sweetest of princesses get poisoned by witches. There was a touch of Quentin Tarantino in Uncle Walt.

Henry Lolam had said that he hated Roseland but nonetheless returned to it because, with its encircling masonry, “the center might still hold.” I knew what the poet, Yeats, had intended by his lines, but I didn’t know what the security guard meant.

The high, wide structure was reminiscent of a fortification, but it wasn’t, after all, the Great Wall of China. It wouldn’t hold back the
Mongol hordes or their equivalent. A determined man could easily climb over it, either to enter or to leave.

Even in the early 1920s, such a massive construction project would have been costly. The income tax had been new and low in those days, and Constantine Cloyce had been an incredibly wealthy man. But if his purpose was to define his fifty-two acres, building the wall two-thirds this height and half this width would have done the job as well at a fraction of the cost.

Until now, I hadn’t given any thought to this rampart. But the conversation with Henry pricked my curiosity.

Although I followed the property line, I gave no indication that the wall intrigued me. Always at Roseland, I felt watched, but now more than usual. Certainly, Henry must be keeping an eye on me from the gatehouse. He had seemed to wish me well; perhaps he still did. But his attitude changed when I mentioned the giant with the scars.

After a hundred yards, the manicured lawn and flower gardens gave way to wild grass, and two hundred yards after that, I ascended a gentle slope and passed through a stand of California live oaks ranging in size from sixty to ninety feet in height. The wildlife had abandoned me except for nuthatches whistling in the majestic branches of the black-trunked trees.

Screened from the gatehouse and the main house, I went to the wall. The stones provided toeholds, handholds, and I scaled those nine feet with alacrity.

Atop the palisade, on hands and knees, I discovered what I might have unconsciously expected. Set in the grout lines among the dark stones were serpentine patterns of the bright copper coins on each of which was engraved the slightly elongated figure eight that I had seen elsewhere.

Dappled with sunshine and oak-branch shadows, the cap was of the same material as the wall, sawn into flags and set in an irregular but fitted pattern. With my palms flat on the cool stone, I could feel the faintest vibrations, as though buried within this massive rampart must be machinery of some kind.

Leaning forward, I put my left ear to the stone, but I could hear no noise arising from inside the wall.

If those rapid, small-arc oscillations produced a sound, it would not be a heavy throb or thrum, but instead a high-pitched hum or even a whine.

The longer I considered those vibrations, the less they seemed to be the product of laboring machinery and the more the source struck me as electronic.

I got to my knees, fished in a pocket of my jeans, and extracted a penknife that I had purchased when I’d gone into town to buy some clothes. I had gotten the small knife specifically to pry one of the copper discs from its mortar bed, though I hadn’t taken one from the stable or from the mausoleum—where they also decorated the floor—because I assumed that if the vandalism was noticed, I would be the first suspect to whom they turned.

More important, they might realize the missing copper disc was not a case of vandalism but a consequence of investigation. If they suspected that I was more than a mere guest enjoying the pleasures of Roseland, I might learn the secrets of this place suddenly and violently.

A full nine feet above the ground, atop the wall, a missing bit of copper would not readily be noticed. When I set to work with the penknife, digging out the mortar, I soon discovered that the copper would not readily be
removed
, either. By the time I burrowed down an inch, when the blade of the penknife snapped, I realized that the discs were not as thin as coins but were instead the blunt ends of
inch-diameter copper rods. For all I knew, they extended the entire depth of the wall and into its concrete footing.