Odd Apocalypse (15 page)

Gazing into the cold firebox, as if seeing burning schoolgirls instead of logs or andirons, he shook his head. “No.”

“A movie, a book,” I said, trying to understand him.

He looked up at me. His eyes were lustrous and dark—and no less haunted by something than Roseland was haunted by the spirit rider and her horse.

“You better hide,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s almost nine o’clock. That’s when she comes back.”

“Who?”

“Mrs. Tameed. She comes back at nine o’clock to get my breakfast tray.”

Glancing toward the door, I heard a noise in the hallway.

“You better hide,” the boy repeated. “If they know you’ve seen me, they’ll kill you.”

PAULIE SEMPITERNO HAD SAID HE WANTED TO PUT A bullet in my face because he didn’t like it. Having looked in a mirror often enough, I could understand that motive. But I could not imagine why I should have earned a death sentence merely because I’d seen the boy on the second floor. Although the child was strange, I at once believed his dire warning.

When I fled the parlor through the connecting door to the next room, I saw that the bed was made, which meant Mrs. Tameed might not need to go farther than the front room. But then I spotted the boy’s breakfast tray on a small table, on which also was a stack of books.

Through another doorway, I glimpsed a bathroom. Windows in bathrooms were usually too small to serve as escape routes, which left the tub drain.

As I peered into a walk-in closet, I realized it was no safer than the bathroom. I heard Mrs. Tameed, in the other room, ask the boy if he had finished breakfast, and I stepped into this last possible refuge, leaving the door ajar an inch.

In
Rebecca
, both book and movie, the head housekeeper, Mrs.
Danvers, was a walking hatchet in a long black dress, and you knew the first time she came on scene that eventually she was going to chop someone or set the house on fire.

Mrs. Tameed had not graduated from that school of dour and secretive servants. Six feet tall, blond, solid but not plump, with hands that looked strong enough to massage Kobe cattle after they’d been fed their grain and beer, she had a generous smile and one of those open Scandinavian faces that seemed incapable of expressions that were deceitful. Although you might not have thought her a woman who could keep terrible secrets, you would have seen in her, as I did, something of an Amazon who, handed a dagger and a broadsword, would have known how to use them to deadly effect.

When she entered the boy’s bedroom, she didn’t merely walk but
strode
to the table to collect the breakfast tray, shoulders back and head high, as if even this mundane chore was of great import.

Appearing behind her in the doorway, the boy said, “I want to talk to him about more privileges.”

“He isn’t of a mind to speak with you,” Mrs. Tameed said, and her voice was cool, not dismissive but firm and without a trace of deference, as if the child must be far lower than she was in the social structure of Roseland.

The sweet choirboy voice was a generation younger than the words delivered in it: “He has an obligation, a responsibility. He thinks no rules apply to him, but no one is above everything.”

Tray in hand, the housekeeper said, “Listen to yourself, and you’ll hear why he won’t speak with you.”

“He brought me here. If he won’t speak with me any longer, then he should at least take me back.”

“You know what being taken back would mean. You don’t want that.”

“I might. Why wouldn’t I?”

“If you hope to speak with him, you need to take another tack. He won’t believe for a minute that you want to be taken back.”

When she advanced on him, the boy retreated, and the two of them disappeared into the parlor.

Easing open the closet door, I heard her say to him, “Remember, keep the draperies shut and stay away from the windows.”

“What would it matter if the visitor saw me?”

“It might not matter, but we can’t take any chances,” Mrs. Tameed said. “You talk about responsibilities. If we had to kill him and the woman, you would be responsible for their deaths.”

“Why should I care?” the boy said, sounding petulant and more like a child than he had previously.

“You shouldn’t care. You should be above caring about their kind, as we are. Maybe you’re not. You’re … different, after all.”

“If it’s such a risk to have them here, why did he invite them?” the boy asked, and I knew the man of whom he’d been speaking must be Noah Wolflaw.

“Damn if I know,” Mrs. Tameed said. “None of us understands it. He says the woman intrigues him.”

“What does he want to do to her?” the boy asked, and in his tone was a lascivious insinuation that was too knowing for his age.

“I don’t know that he intends to do anything to her,” said Mrs. Tameed. “But he can do anything he wants to the bitch, as I can, as any of us can, and that’s no business of yours, you runt.”

“Were you always such a snake,” the child asked, “or did you grow into what you are?”

“You little shit. Talk to me too much that way, I’ll stake you out in the fields some night and let the freaks do what they want with you.”

This threat silenced the boy, and I figured that the freaks were the
creatures who magically brought an enveloping darkness with them wherever they went.

Being called a snake inspired the housekeeper to spit out a bit more venom before she left: “Maybe the freaks will bugger you a few times before they chew your face off.”

If there had been a Mr. Tameed and if he had been of a kind with his wife, I imagined that their marriage bed must have been as filled with love as any dog-fighting pit.

Mrs. Tameed got in one last shot, more enigmatic than her other insults: “You’re just a dead boy. You aren’t one of us and you never will be,
dead boy
.”

The door between the parlor and the hallway closed emphatically, but I didn’t at once leave the closet. I waited for the boy to tell me that Mrs. Tameed was definitely gone.

After a couple of minutes, when he didn’t appear, I cautiously returned to the parlor.

In defiance of the housekeeper’s orders, he had drawn aside the draperies at one of the windows and stood gazing out at the southern vista, which included the gardens and the stepped cascades of water leading up to the mausoleum on the hilltop. He did not respond to my return. The color had gone out of his face, which was now as pale as it had been when I’d found him in some kind of trance with his eyes rolled back in his head.

“What did she mean—‘dead boy’?”

He didn’t answer.

“Is it a threat? Do they intend to kill you?”

“No. It’s just the way she is. It doesn’t mean anything.”

“I think it does. And I think
you
know it does. I’m here to help you. What’s your name?”

He shook his head.

“I can help you.”

“No one can.”

“You want out of here,” I said.

He only stared at the distant mausoleum.

“I’ll get you out of Roseland, to the authorities.”

“Impossible.”

“Over the wall. It’s easy.”

He turned his head to look at me. Sorrow didn’t merely pool in his melancholy eyes, but radiated from them, so that in meeting his stare, I felt my heart grow heavier.

“They know where I am at all times,” the boy said, and he drew back the left cuff of his sweater, revealing what looked too much like a manacle to be a wristwatch.

When I went to him and examined the item, I saw that it was locked on his wrist, the keyhole somewhat like that on a handcuff. The bulk was greater than a watch. Considering the slenderness of the wrist that it encircled, the stainless-steel restraint appeared cruel, although his skin was not chafed.

“It’s a GPS monitor,” he said. “If I leave this suite, they’ll be warned immediately by a tone that sounds throughout the house. And at the gatehouse. And through the walkie-talkies the security men carry with them. If I leave the second floor, a different tone sounds, and a third tone if I leave the house.”

“Why are they keeping you here?”

Instead of answering, he said, “They can track my movements on a map of the house and grounds that displays on their cell phones. As soon as I step off the second floor, someone shows up to stay at my side wherever I go.”

More closely studying the tracking device, I said, “Yeah, it looks kind of like a handcuff lock. I know something about them. I can probably pick it with a paper clip.”

“If you try, an alarm goes out, just like when I leave this suite.”

When I raised my eyes to meet his, he stared at me through unshed tears.

“I won’t fail you,” I said, but the promise sounded arrogant, like a challenge to Fate, and I thought I was more likely to fail him than to free him.

I WORRIED THAT RESCUING THIS BOY WOULD BE MORE difficult if he was discovered to have disobeyed his keepers’ instructions. I drew shut the draperies.

“We don’t have to get you out of Roseland. We just have to get the police in. They might think I’m a crank, but I have a good friend who’s the chief of police in Pico Mundo. He’ll believe me, and he’ll get the attention of the authorities here.”

“No. Not the cops. That would be … the end of everything. You don’t understand who I am.”

“So tell me.”

He shook his head. “If you knew, the people here … they’d kill you deader than dead.”

“I’m tougher than I look.”

Maybe he wanted to laugh in my face, but instead he returned to the armchair in which he had been sitting when I first found him.

Once more I sat upon the ottoman. “You told Mrs. Tameed that he brought you here and should at least take you back. Who do you mean?”

“Him. Who else but him? It’s all because of him.”

“Noah Wolflaw?”

“Wolflaw,”
he said, and the contempt with which he spoke the name suggested a lifetime of distilled bitterness that a mere boy should not have accumulated.

“Brought you here. Do you mean kidnapped?”

“Worse than kidnapped.”

He seemed to have taken inscrutability lessons from Annamaria.

Knowing too well the depths of evil to which some human beings can descend, I steeled myself for his answer when I asked, “Why does Wolflaw want you here? What does he … expect from you?”

“I’m his toy. Everyone’s a toy to him.” His voice quavered, and under the contempt that flowed through his words, there seemed to be another quite different river of emotion that was closer to sadness than to anger, a sense of tragic loss.

I remembered Henry Lolam at the gatehouse, suggesting that Noah Wolflaw wanted Annamaria’s baby for “sensation” … for “thrills.”

My chest tightened and my throat seemed thick with phlegm, but it was disgust that choked me, disgust and an aversion to hearing this boy speak of abominations.

“I know what Hell is,” he said, and he seemed to shrink into the depths of the wingback chair. “Hell is Roseland.”

After a hesitation, I asked, “He … touches you?”

“No. It’s not that kind of thing he wants from me.”

I was relieved in one regard but was forced now to consider what might be worse than my worst fear for him.

The boy said, “I’m here because he had one moment of remorse.”

That was an unlikely thing for a child to say, and it was also enigmatic.

Based on our conversation thus far, I doubted that I could squeeze a clarification from him.

Before I could even try to press him for an explanation, he said, “Now he keeps me here to reassure himself that there aren’t any limits to what he can do.”

Frustrated by both the restrictions imposed upon him—and me—by the GPS transponder on his left wrist and by his unwillingness to be forthcoming, I said, “I only want to help you.”

“I only wish you could.”

“Then help me help you. Where did he take you from? How long has he kept you? What’s your name? Do you remember your parents, their names, the address of your house?”

At that moment, his ginger-brown eyes seemed to have remarkable depth, unlike any they had possessed previously, unlike any eyes I’d ever seen, a plumbless lonely deepness into which it seemed dangerous to stare, as if I might see a despair so singular that, like the face of a Gorgon, it would turn me to stone.