Odd Apocalypse (11 page)

The hand holding the pistol had long, blunt fingers and bristles of wiry black hair between the knuckles, and the guy to whom the hand belonged had a face to match his fist: hard, clenched features and a beard shadow that would not be shaved away even with a wood-chipper.

Paulie Sempiterno was chief of the Roseland security team, and in neatly pressed gray slacks, white polo shirt, and handsome blue blazer, he still looked as if he spent most of his time in alleyways breaking people’s knees with a baseball bat and decorating their faces with chain patterns.

He said, “I don’t like you, pretty boy,” and his rough voice chilled the whistling nuthatches to silence in the trees behind him.

Although I had met him only once before and had done nothing to offend him, I believed that he was sincere, that he disliked me in fact intensely. Even if he hadn’t said a word, I could read his contempt in the way that his thick purple lips sneered back from teeth that looked formidable enough to crunch up a pork chop, bones and all. The gun in my face was another clue.

He said, “Wolflaw’s a flaming idiot, he’s always been an idiot, but
I didn’t expect
this
, not even from him. Houseguests! And not just overnight. What the hell is he thinking? Why stop there? Why not have a wedding for you and your knocked-up sweetie? Invite a hundred of your inbred moron relatives, hire an orchestra, ask the governor to stop taking bribes long enough to come down from Sacramento and officiate.”

Stocky, barrel-chested, thick-necked, antisocial, Sempiterno would have been a classic strong-and-silent type if he could have shut up for a minute. But he had a mad-on, and he wanted me to know he had a mad-on, and he evidently thought I was so slow-witted that I wouldn’t understand his position until he had used a thousand words to paint a picture of it.

He said, “Anyway, you’re not just some houseguest, pretty boy. Looking here, looking there, snooping around, up to the stables, talking to Shilshom about a horse when there isn’t any horse, haven’t been horses here for a long time, now walking on the wall. Who the hell walks on top of a nine-foot wall? Nobody, that’s who. Except you. Why the hell were you walking on the wall?”

When he paused for longer than one quick inhalation, I figured I was being invited to reply. “Well, sir, the view’s nice from up there. You can see so much farther.”

Thrusting the pistol closer to my left eye, just in case I had forgotten about it, he said, “How’s
this
view. You like
this
view? More dramatic than the Grand Canyon. I don’t know what you’re up to, wall-walker, but you’re up to something. I don’t like people who are up to something. You know how much tolerance I have for people who are up to something?”

“None?” I guessed, pretty sure that my answer had won a prize, if there was a prize to be won.

“Less than none. What’re you up to?”

“I’m not up to anything, sir. To be frank, I’m just freeloading off
Mr. Wolflaw. He’s charmed by the girl I’m with, and I’m along for the ride. Could you put the gun away? I’m harmless. I really am.”

He glared at me. His glare could melt a polar bear’s testicles.

If he’d had a cold sore on his lip, we would have been friends by now.

“I know you’re going to be major trouble,” he said. “I’d really like to put a bullet in your face.”

“Yes, sir, I know you would. I appreciate that. But you really don’t have a reason to put a bullet in my face.”

“The reason is I don’t like it.”

“Besides, if you kill me, the girl I’m with will be upset, and Mr. Wolflaw is so charmed by her that he’ll be upset, too, and there goes your job. Not to mention prison, gang rape, and the loss of your right to vote.”

Even the prospect of being turned away from the ballot box didn’t seem to faze him. “The girl’s not his type. She’s nobody’s type. The bitch creeps me out.”

“Ah, sir, that’s just mean. She’s not a Victoria’s Secret model, but she’s pretty in her way.”

“I’m not talking about how she looks. With this face, I’m gonna make fun of how other people look?”

“Good point.”

At last lowering the pistol, he said, “It’s how she stared at me the very first time I saw her. Like she’s a speed-reader and my whole story’s no longer than the list of ingredients on a cereal box.”

I nodded. “She seems to look straight into your heart.”

“Wasn’t any damn romance-novel moment,” Sempiterno said. “It was like I went through airport security and in ten seconds flat came out scoped, poked, and naked.”

If you’re open to it, a smile can find you at the most unlikely times. “I like the way you say things, sir.”

Again he favored me with that bruin-emasculating glare. “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing. Just that you have a way of putting things.”

“I say what I say. I don’t care what you think.” He holstered his pistol. “If Noah Wolflaw, the idiot, wants you here, I can’t make you leave. But you better understand, pretty boy, he doesn’t love the girl and he doesn’t like you, he’s all about himself. And whatever he wants from you two—when he takes it, you’re going to wish to hell you’d listened to me and been long gone.”

As he turned away from me, I said, “I’m thinking we’ll probably leave in the morning.”

Having taken only two steps, he halted, facing me again. “Leave today. Don’t stay the night. Leave now.”

“Maybe after lunch.”

He stared at me as if, with his willpower alone, he could cause me to spontaneously combust. After a silence, he said, “Maybe I know after all why Wolflaw wants you here.”

“Why?”

Instead of answering me, he said, “Whatever you’re looking for in Roseland, you’ll find its opposite. If you want to live, look for death.”

He turned away again and strode toward the conclave of massive oaks. At his approach, the whistling nuthatches in the aviary of branches all fell silent again. When he stepped into the shadows of the trees, the flock flew, wings rattling through the veils of oval leaves, and flung themselves into the sky, at risk of falcons.

Among the trees I saw a battery-powered mini truck, a vehicle often used by landscapers, which was longer than a golf cart, smaller than a pickup, roofless, with two seats and an open cargo area. This one was jacked up on fat tires that, with other alterations, made it pretty much an all-terrain vehicle.

Paulie Sempiterno got behind the wheel. Purring softly, the trucklet
seemed almost to float among the trees, out into the golden meadow, and toward the rise beyond which stood the main house.

I don’t take offense at any rude names that I am called. I did find
pretty boy
sad, however, because I’m as ordinary looking as any actor who has ever played Tom Cruise’s pal in a movie and whose primary job is, by his very ordinariness, to make the star look even more extraordinary than he does in real life.

When he sneered those two words, Mr. Sempiterno wasn’t mocking me; successful mockery must be based on at least a grain of truth. You can’t mock a dog for being a dog, but in trying to do so, you make yourself a person worthy of mockery. The security chief thought me a pretty boy only by comparison to himself, suggesting that his assessment of his somewhat unfortunate appearance was far too harsh, and that was where the sadness lay.

In this case, the term
pretty boy
might also mean other than what it seemed to mean. People sometimes speak in code, often without realizing they are doing so, as much a mystery to themselves as to others. Considering my average-guy looks, perhaps I enjoyed some other blessing that Mr. Sempiterno recognized but lacked—and that he envied. If I could puzzle out what that might be, maybe I would have a valuable clue to the truth of Roseland.

As the security chief receded across the meadow, I decided to continue following the property line but also to surrender myself to the third and final aspect of my extrasensory perception.

In addition to an occasional prophetic dream and my ability to see the spirits of the lingering dead, I have what Stormy Llewellyn called psychic magnetism. If I need to locate someone whose current whereabouts I don’t know, I concentrate on his name or face, give myself to impulse and intuition, wandering as whim takes me—on foot, on skateboard, in a car, whatever—until I find him. More often than not, I am brought to my quarry within half an hour.

The search is usually but not always successful, and I can’t either control or foresee where or when the encounter will occur. If my paranormal abilities had been purchased from a store, the vendor more likely would have been Dollar Mart than Tiffany.

In this case, I didn’t have either a name or a face on which to focus. I could only allow Annamaria’s words to run over and over through my mind in a memory loop—
there’s someone here who’s in great danger and desperately needs you
—and hope that I would be drawn sooner than later to that individual.

With everyone warning me to leave and giving me such curious advice as to look for death if I wanted to live, I suspected that what time I might have to save the nameless someone was pouring away like sand out of a fractured hourglass. I have in the past failed some people, including she whom I loved more than life itself. Every failure hollows out my heart a little further, and no success is able to refill any of that emptiness. I seem to be less likely to die at the hands of some villain than to fall dead when the walls of my heart collapse into the emptiness that they enclose. I couldn’t bear another failure; therefore, if time was running out, I would have to be faster than time.

… there’s someone here who’s in great danger and desperately needs you
.…

I returned to the property line, moving toward the place where the oaks overhung the stone wall.

Out of those tree shadows, the great black stallion suddenly rushed, reared over me, and carved the air with its hooves.

Astride the horse, the barefoot blonde pointed down at me as she had done the previous night. Instead of anguish, her face was now contorted with fear.

However afraid she might be to cross over to the Other Side, she had nothing to fear anymore in this world. I knew, therefore, that
her terror must be for me, and that she had come to warn me of some threat more imminent than the vague danger of which Henry Lolam and Paulie Sempiterno had spoken.

As the jet-black stallion settled to all fours and whipped its long tail soundlessly from side to side, the woman shifted her attention from me to something behind me. Her face now seemed to be wrenched more with revulsion than with fear, and her mouth opened in a silent cry of horror.

I looked behind me, but I saw nothing more than the knee-high wild dry grass fired by morning sun and as golden as the woman’s hair, the land sloping down to the north, and the first grove of oaks, this side of which I had earlier climbed the estate wall.

But the creepiest feeling possessed me, similar to the sensation that shivers through any of us upon discovering a letter from the IRS in the mail. I was overcome by the conviction that if only I tilted my head at a certain angle or possessed eyeglasses of precisely the right prescription, or could peer through the current sunlight to glimpse the dusk that was still many hours away, I would see what the ghost saw.

When I turned to the horse and its rider again, they no longer loomed over me. They were twenty feet away, at the edge of the woods. The woman gazed back at me, waving me toward her with her right arm, her gesture and her posture urgent.

No one knows better than I that reality is more complex than the five senses can discern. Our world with all its mysteries is a moon to another bigger and more mysterious world unseen, orbiting so close to the larger sphere that perhaps sometimes the curve of one passes through the curve of the other with no damage to either, but with strange effects.

Not daring to take the time to look back again, I ran toward the horse and rider.

The vaulted ceiling of the cathedral of oaks was reminiscent of church windows, although there was more leading than stained glass, more darkness than light, in the sun-gold and leaf-green patterns that might have been an abstract depiction of Eden.

Trotting among the huge trees, the black horse almost vanished, revealed only by the sheen of its coat as drizzles of light quivered across it. As I chased after her, the woman remained easy to see, the white silk gown blooming brightly when touched by sun, still softly radiant even where gloom prevailed.

I don’t know why shadow and light should play across spirits, alternately obscuring and revealing them, in the same way that they affect living people and all things of this world. Ghosts have no substance either to reflect light or to provide a surface onto which shadows could fall.

A psychiatrist might say that this quality of the apparitions proves that they are not otherworldly. He might suggest instead that they must be psychotic delusions and that I merely lack the wit to imagine
them unaffected by light and shadows, which real spirits—supposing they existed—would surely be.

I wonder sometimes why those who theorize about the human mind can so easily believe in the existence of things they cannot see or measure, or in any meaningful way confirm as real—such as the id, the ego, the unconscious I—but nevertheless dismiss as superstitious those who believe the body has a soul.