Odd Apocalypse (17 page)

“She’s got that regal graciousness Grace Kelly used to have, though Grace Kelly was a real looker. You’re probably so young you never heard of Grace Kelly.”

“She was an actress.
Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, To Catch a Thief
. She married the prince of Monaco.”

“You’re not the clueless pup that some might take you for.”

This was how he talked to me—and pretty much to everyone—when Annamaria wasn’t present. “Thank you, sir.”

As he spoke, he warily surveyed the eucalyptus grove around us, which was ribboned with shadows and sunshine that fashioned a kind of camouflage in which something might lurk and be difficult to see. “I came here to tell her the two of you have to leave. Today. Within the hour. Now. Do you know what she said to me?”

“I’m sure it was memorable.”

His gray eyes were made for glaring, like stainless-steel blades going for the bone. “She told me that what I wish to see come to pass would not happen if the two of you left now, that you would leave in the morning at the earliest, when my purpose in bringing you here was fulfilled.”

“Yes, that sounds like her.”

“I’ve never before had a guest refuse to leave when told to.” Anger creased his beetled brow, and when he leaned toward me, a beam of sunlight piercing the eucalyptuses seemed to lay a sharper edge on his steely stare. His voice was buttered with menace, and the threat slipped from him without hesitation: “If you presume to tell your host when you’ll leave, maybe you’ll
never
leave when all is said and done.”

I didn’t take his meaning to be that he feared we would stay forever. I took his meaning to be a promise of an urn and a niche in the mausoleum.

That was an extraordinary and revealing thing for him to have said. Pressure was building in Vesuvius.

“Who the hell does she think she is?”

“Did you ask her that, sir?” I wondered, because her answer was of interest to me, as well.

The steel went out of his eyes, the menace out of his voice, and he looked around the fragrant woods again, not as if worried that a pack of mutant swine was closing in this time, but as if he couldn’t quite recall how he had wound up here.

“No. She did this trick with a flower, like an illusionist’s act in Vegas or something.” He seemed rattled by the memory of her bit of magic. “Have you ever seen her do the trick with the flower?”

Before I could reply, he rolled on.

“Suddenly, I hear myself telling her that of course she could stay, the two of you, stay as long as necessary, if that’s what she wanted. I said I was just concerned about your welfare, you know, with the mountain lion on the prowl. And I apologized for being so thoughtless. I think I might even have kissed her hand. I never in my life kissed a woman’s hand. Why would I kiss a woman’s hand?”

He inhaled deeply, blew out a long exhalation of frustration, and shook his head as if astonished by his behavior.

He continued: “So she says you’ll both leave when what I wish to see come to pass has happened, when my purpose for bringing you here is fulfilled—but what the hell purpose is she talking about?”

“
Your
purpose, sir.”

“Don’t be a smart-ass, Thomas.”

“No, sir.”

“I don’t
know
why I brought her here. It was a crazy thing to do. Reckless. I don’t want her. I told Paulie that I might want her, just as an excuse, because I didn’t know how to explain myself, but he knew she wasn’t my type.”

“Mr. Sempiterno is very insightful.”

“Shut up.”

“Yes, sir. We’ll be gone tomorrow,” I promised.

Now he seemed to be talking more to himself than to me: “I don’t want her. She’s disgusting, repellent, knocked up and bloated like a cow. Nothing to get a man’s sap rising. I don’t want anything to do with her, and I never will.”

“We’ll be gone tomorrow,” I repeated.

His attention returned to me, and his too-small mouth puckered with distaste, as if I were something he would never want to find stuck to the sole of his shoe, let alone talking to him face-to-face. “You told Henry Lolam you met the one who calls himself Kenny. No one’s seen him in years. You told Chef Shilshom you saw bears with red eyes.”

“Maybe not bears, sir. Just something.”

He swept the woods with his gaze again. Even with his hard but handsome face and steely eyes, he didn’t look as strong as before, because a tremor worked his mouth.

“You see any of them in broad daylight?”

“No, sir,” I lied.

“Night’s one thing, daylight’s a whole different ball game.” He focused on me once more. “You’re always picking at people, Thomas, always trying to get information out of them, picking and picking.”

“I’m just a curious guy, sir. I always have been.”

“Shut up.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Nothing here is any of your damn business. Do you hear me, Thomas?”

“Yes, sir. I’m sorry. I’ve abused your hospitality.”

His scowl was even more impressive than his glare. “Are you being funny?”

“No, sir. If I say so myself, when I’m actually being funny, you’d find it hard not to laugh.”

“When I say shut up, I mean shut up. Shut up.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Until you leave tomorrow, stay in the guest tower.”

In consideration of the shotgun, I nodded.

“Stay in the tower, lock the doors, lock the windows, draw the draperies, and wait until morning.”

I nodded.

Seeing my attention on the shotgun, he realized belatedly that he needed to explain it. “Thought I might do some skeet shooting.”

He pushed past me on the flagstone path, and I started toward the tower door.

He said, “One other thing.”

Turning to him, I was happy to see that the shotgun cradled in his arm was still pointed at the ground.

“There aren’t phones in your rooms, but you’ve probably got a cell phone. I want you to understand, there’s nothing here that the police would be interested in. You understand?”

I nodded. I didn’t have a cell phone because I never needed to play video games or surf the Net, or exchange nude photos with a congressman.

“I’m well connected with the local authorities,” Wolflaw said. “Better connected than you are with your own pecker. A couple of them were former security guards here. I’ve done a lot for them. I’ve done more for them than you could ever guess, and I can assure you that they won’t take kindly to some worthless drifter bad-mouthing me. Is that clear?”

I nodded.

“You suddenly a dumb mute or something?”

“I understand, sir. About the cops. Stay in the tower, lock the doors, lock the windows, draw the draperies, don’t call the cops or even the fire department if the place is burning down, but just wait
until morning and then, come sunrise, keep on keepin’ on right out the front gate.”

He glared at me, his girly mouth puckered in contempt, and I figured that he might soon feel comfortable calling me Odd instead of Thomas, because he said, “You really are a shithead.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll tell Annamaria you said so.”

We stared at each other, plenty of animosity on his end, mere curiosity on my end, until at last he said, “Listen … I’d rather you didn’t.”

“Didn’t what?”

“I’d rather you didn’t tell her. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. This is crazy. Does she have me hypnotized or something? Why the hell should I care if you tell her or don’t tell her that I called you a shithead?”

“Then I’ll tell her.”

“Don’t,” he said at once. “I don’t care what she thinks of me, she’s nothing to me, she’s as plain as a powdered doughnut without the powder. I don’t want to do anything with a woman like her, but I’d rather you didn’t tell her about my outburst.”

“Strange, the way she affects people,” I said.

“Extremely strange.”

“I won’t tell her.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

I watched him walk away through the eucalyptuses and up the vast sunlit lawn toward the main house. Even in the open, where nothing could sneak up on him, Wolflaw nervously looked left and right, and glanced back repeatedly. He was probably on guard for the mountain lion, listening for the cry of the loon, alert to the possibility that he might suddenly be confronted by the Jabberwock with eyes of flame and the frumious Bandersnatch.

When Stormy Llewellyn and I were sixteen, we spent an evening at a carnival. In an arcade tent, we came across a fortune-telling machine the size of a phone booth, about seven feet tall. The lower three feet were enclosed, and in the glass case atop that base sat what a plaque claimed to be the mummified remains of a Gypsy woman, a dwarf who had been famous for her prognostications.

The withered, spooky figure—possibly a construct of plaster, paper, wax, and latex rather than a preserved corpse—was all tricked up in Gypsy gear. For a quarter she dispensed a small printed card in answer to your question. A quarter doesn’t seem like much to charge for a life-changing prediction, but the dead can work cheap because they don’t have to buy food or subscribe to cable TV.

A young couple who visited the machine ahead of us had asked if they would have a long and happy marriage. Although they gave Gypsy Mummy eight quarters, they never received an answer that seemed clear to them. Stormy and I heard the potential groom, Johnny, read all the answers to his girl, and although the fortune-teller’s responses were oblique, they were perfectly clear to us. One
of them was this:
The orchard of blighted trees produces poisonous fruit
. The others were no more encouraging.

After Johnny and his bride-to-be left in a snit, we asked Gypsy Mummy the question that the other couple had posed. Into the brass tray slid a card that read
YOU ARE DESTINED TO BE TOGETHER FOREVER
.

Stormy framed it behind glass and hung it above her bed, where it remained for a few years. Now it was in a smaller frame on the nightstand in my guest-tower bedroom.

When I lost Stormy, I never considered destroying the card in anger. I have no anger. I have never raged at man or God about what happened. Sorrow is my legacy from that terrible day, and as well a humbling awareness of my inadequacies, which are beyond counting.

To keep the sorrow from overwhelming me, I remain focused on the beauty of this world, which is everywhere to be seen in rich variety, from the smallest wildflowers and the iridescent hummingbird that feeds on them to the night sky diamonded with fiery stars.

And because I am able to see the lingering dead, I know that something lies outside of time, a place to which they belong and to which one day I will go. The prediction of Gypsy Mummy, therefore, has not proved finally wrong; it may yet be fulfilled, and I keep sorrow in check by anticipating the fulfillment of that much-desired destiny.

Since leaving Pico Mundo, I had taken the fortune-teller’s card with me when I traveled where my intuition propelled me. But for fear of losing it in some moment of desperate action, I didn’t carry it on my person all day, every day.

Recent events had led me to believe that the evil in Roseland was of an unprecedented nature. Annamaria was a help to me but not a
shield, and my chances of surviving until morning didn’t seem to be good. I had no silly notion that as long as Gypsy Mummy’s seven words were in my possession, I would be invulnerable. But I felt, perhaps foolishly, that were I to die and step out of time, the powers that be on the Other Side would feel more obliged to lead me directly to Stormy if I carried with me evidence of the promised destiny.

I don’t mind being considered foolish. I’m as much a fool as anyone, more so than some, and keeping that truth always in mind prevents me from becoming cocky. Cockiness gets you killed.

I pried up the fasteners on the back of the frame, removed the rectangle of chipboard, and retrieved the card. I put it in one of the plastic windows in my wallet.

Otherwise, those windows were empty. I carried no photo of Stormy because I had no need of it. Her face, her smile, her form, the beauty of her graceful hands, her voice were all vivid in my mind, indelible. In memory, she lived and moved and laughed, but all that a photograph could offer was one frozen moment of a life.

Over my sweater, I put on a sports jacket that I had bought during my shopping trip to town. I wasn’t trying to spiff up my image. A sports jacket provided pockets and concealment.

As Noah Wolflaw had instructed, I locked the narrow, barred windows and drew shut the draperies. I turned on all the lamps so that much later, when nightfall came, the light leaking around the draperies would suggest that I was in residence.

After locking my suite of rooms, I climbed the winding stone stairs from the vestibule to the second floor. The knuckles of my right hand chased the door as it swung open before they could quite rap the wood.

Raphael, the golden retriever we’d rescued in Magic Beach, was lying on the floor, holding a Nylabone in his forepaws, gnawing it
with gusto. He thumped his tail in greeting, but the Nylabone was at the moment of greater interest to him than any chest scratch or tummy rub he might get from me.

Boo was either elsewhere in the suite or had gone out to explore Roseland. As a spirit dog, he could walk through walls if he wished and do any of the usual ghosty things. But I had previously observed that, like any living dog, he had considerable curiosity and enjoyed exploring new places.