Odd Apocalypse (24 page)

The only things this space had in common with the rest of the house were the concrete floor, in which were embedded copper circles etched with elongated eights, and the dustless, ageless quality of a hermetically sealed exhibit in a museum.

As I toured the room, I was suddenly drawn to reconsider the oilcloth-covered windows because I realized there should be none in a basement room. Putting down the pillowcase containing the hacksaw, leaning across one of the desks, I pinched the ring pull and put up the shade.

The view beyond the window stunned me, and I stood paralyzed by disbelief. When I could think to move, I went to the other desk, reached across it, and put up the shade at the second window, as if I hoped to find a different scene or the blank basement wall that should have been there. The same vista greeted me.

In addition to the door by which I’d entered, another waited in
what would be the west wall, flanked by the desks. I went to it, hesitated, opened it, and stepped outside.

The long driveway that sloped down from the main house to the county road was gravel instead of cobblestones as it had been before. At the farther end of that long lane, neither a gatehouse nor gates existed to guard admittance to Roseland.

No stone wall encircled the huge property. The land, which had not yet been excavated and shaped to the needs of the construction team, rolled away to neighboring parcels with nothing between but property-line-marker stakes painted white.

The parklike landscaping did not exist. Instead, fields with waist-high grass and weeds were shaded by many fewer oak trees than those that I had walked among in the past few days.

Distracted by this impossible vista, I walked perhaps thirty feet along the graveled drive before I quite realized that I had moved away from the door.

Turning, I looked back and saw that no palatial residence rose behind me, as if Wolflaw’s great house had vaporized.

Two structures were there instead, the first being a clapboard building with a tar-paper roof and four front windows flanking an open door. This must be the construction shack from which I had stepped a moment earlier.

The second, perhaps a hundred feet to the left of the larger building, was obviously an outhouse.

For most people, reality is as simple as a painting, hanging before them in their frame of reference, understood and unquestioned. I live with the awareness that under the apparent painting are countless layers, previous scenes that have been painted over. Any physicist well-schooled in quantum mechanics or chaos theory knows that reality is a beast of mysterious dimensions and potentials and that the more we learn, the more we realize how much we don’t know.

Because that understanding of reality has shaped my life, I am seldom knocked flat by astonishment. In the absence of Roseland, I was still on my feet, but I felt like Wile E. Coyote after he’d been run down by a bulldozer.

The sense that the architect had structured this place by the application of a new geometry with a mysterious dimension, which I mentioned before, was nothing compared to the shock of this latest discovery. Finding rooms connected in ways I didn’t remember, the feeling that there was always more to any room or passage than the eye could see now seemed prescient.

Distant engine noise drew my attention to the west once more. On the paved but primitive two-lane county road, one coming from the south and one from the north, were what appeared to be two Ford Model T’s, black with open passenger compartments.

As they passed each other about where the gates to Roseland would one day be, other traffic appeared in the north. Laden with bales of hay, a horse-drawn wagon clopped and rattled along.

I stood trembling, not in fear as much as in mystification. My heart knocked out hoofbeats, too, but they were faster than those of the draft horse.

Rowing lazily through rising thermals, three ducks sailed low across the land, as silent as the flywheels and rotating spheres under the mausoleum that did not yet exist here.

If man-made aircraft plied these skies, they would be biplanes, not airliners. Here, no ocean had ever been flown across; and no boot prints marked the soil of the moon.

A breeze whispered in from the north. With it came a fear that if the construction-shack door blew shut, some connection would be broken and I would not be able to open it and return to Roseland in its twenty-first-century grandeur.

I might be stuck here in a world with no penicillin, no polio vaccine,
no Teflon cookware, no John D. MacDonald novels, no music by Paul Simon or Connie Dover or Israel Kamakawiwo’ole, no comfortable athletic shoes, no Velcro.

On the other hand, here I would find no reality TV, no TV of any kind, no nuclear weapons, no road rage, no talking on a cell phone in the movie theater, no tofu turkey.

In the end, as much might be gained as lost—except that this far in the past, most of the friends I’d ever made and loved hadn’t been born.

Hurrying inside, I pulled the door shut against a past in which neither I nor my parents had yet been conceived.

I went to the interior door and opened it. Beyond waited the basement hallway, yet when I turned to look at the windows, I saw Roseland still unrealized.

The construction shack was above ground, the basement below grade. One existed then, the other now. Yet somehow they were linked spatially and chronologically. As an air lock on a spaceship served as a transition chamber between the atmosphere inside the vessel and the vacuum of outer space, this room connected one moment perhaps ninety years past with the present.

I closed the door to the basement, returned to one of the desks, and sat in the antique office chair to calm my nerves and to think.

Generally speaking, just as Sherlock Holmes reasoned his way to solutions with the help of his pipe and violin, I am better able to mull over a complicated problem when I am frying. But I lacked a griddle, a spatula, and something to cook.

After a while, I searched through the desk drawers but learned nothing except that whoever worked here had been obsessed with order and neatness. I learned the same from the drawers of the second desk.

When I returned to the blueprints on the table, I saw more in the
title block of the cover page than had interested me previously. The impressed seal of the architect. His name—James Lee Brock—and his address in Los Angeles. Under the architect’s name were two words and a name—
MECHANICAL SYSTEMS: NIKOLA TESLA
.

All I knew of Nikola Tesla was that he was called the Genius Who Lit the World, and that as the nineteenth century turned to the twentieth, he had nearly as much to do with the electrification of civilization and the associated industrial revolution as did Thomas Edison.

And on my first day in Roseland, chatting with Henry Lolam at the gatehouse, I learned that Constantine Cloyce had been interested in cutting-edge science and in the supernatural, having been friends with an unlikely spectrum of people that included the psychic and medium Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, and at the extreme other end, the famous physicist and inventor Tesla.

Finding Madame Blavatsky’s fabled name on the blueprints would have been strange, but it was nowhere to be seen. Whatever might be going on at Roseland, I suspected now that it might have nothing to do with the supernatural and everything to do with science. Weird science, but science nonetheless.

In the wide, shallow drawers of the map chest, I found many sets of mechanical-systems plans, all signed by Nikola Tesla. Among them were drawings of—and engineering specifics related to—the spheres, the flywheels standing on the bell-shaped machines, the intricate arrangements of gears I’d seen in the subcellars of the mausoleum, and much more.

I felt pretty sure that I knew the identity of the tall, gaunt, mustachioed man who had spoken to me on three occasions. Mr. Nikola Tesla. Considering that he died decades ago but wasn’t a lingering spirit like any I’d previously encountered, I knew
who
he was but not
what
he was.

None of the drawings or engineering details enlightened me as to the purpose of all this exotic machinery. In high school, I was a member of the baseball team, not the science club.

With a renewed sense that time was running out, I retrieved the pillowcase sack with the hacksaw. I returned to the basement hallway, closing the door behind me.

To my right were narrow, enclosed service stairs. I assumed the stairs in the wine cellar went up to the kitchen, but I had no idea where these might lead.

Like every floor and stair tread in this house, these were as tight as if they had been built yesterday. Not one creak betrayed me as I ascended two flights to the main level with the intention of going to the second floor, where the boy was imprisoned.

As I reached the ground floor, however, I heard heavy footsteps above me, descending. Alarmed, I opened the landing door, slipped out of the staircase, and dashed across the immense foyer to another door that, for all I knew, led to a meadow in the Pleistocene epoch, where a herd of mastodons would stomp me into mush.

It was a coat closet.

From the size of the closet—hangers and rod space for maybe two hundred coats—I inferred that Constantine Cloyce intended Roseland to be
the
social locus along this part of the coast. In its early days, the estate might have been just that, but perhaps not for long.

Out in the foyer, a door was flung open with such force that it banged hard against its stop, and footsteps slapped across marble.

A second door opened almost as violently as the first, and other footsteps sounded as Mrs. Tameed said, “I smelled ozone on the second floor.”

Paulie Sempiterno, who had apparently crashed into the foyer through the front door, said, “I started to smell it halfway back from the gatehouse.”

“Then it’s not localized.”

“We don’t know for sure yet.”

“
I
know,” Mrs. Tameed declared.

“It could be just a few eddies.”

“No, it’s finally full tide,” Mrs. Tameed said, except that between the
full
and
tide
, she inserted a crude but alliterative word that I won’t repeat.

“But we haven’t had one in years,” Sempiterno said.

Suddenly I smelled ozone.

They must have smelled it in the foyer, too, because they spat out four crude words, two each, alternating one word at a time, as if they were in a cussing contest.

Their footsteps raced off, seemingly in different directions, and I didn’t hear any doors slamming.

I didn’t know what was meant by full tide, since we were a mile or farther from the ocean. Whatever it meant, I thought that trying to hide from it in a coat closet would probably prove to be a mortal mistake.

After waiting half a minute for the way to clear, I ventured into
the foyer. I moved quickly toward the front door to peer through one of the sidelights, to see if Sempiterno was hulking around out there. He wasn’t.

As I tried to decide whether to dare the service stairs again, where the door stood open, I heard footsteps hurrying down, and Mrs. Tameed shouting—
“Carlo! Carlo, quick!”
—at the top of her voice and in evident panic.

A columned archway separated the foyer from the drawing room, and from that formidable space, out of sight for the moment but not for long, Sempiterno shouted back to her:
“Here! Here! I’m coming!”

Carlo?

If this were a sex farce by a British playwright, hilarious antics would ensue when we all collided in the foyer. The terror in their voices, however, suggested that something big was about to happen, something that would reveal more about Roseland than I had yet learned, more than they would approve of me knowing.

Deciding not to stay for the rest of this act, I stepped outside and closed the front door behind me.

In the circular terminus of the driveway, under the portico, stood the electric all-terrain mini truck with balloon tires. Paulie Sempiterno had earlier been driving it overland.

I went to the vehicle, not with the intention of commandeering it, but to pretend to be admiring it if Sempiterno plunged out of the house. My hope was to distract him from considering that I might have recently been inside and overheard him talking with Mrs. Tameed.

The astringent scent of ozone was mild, not strong enough to burn the nostrils. But I remembered what it previously portended.

Although no early twilight descended, I scanned the grounds and spotted a pack of the piggish things that Mrs. Tameed called freaks. They were far away, acres of north lawn between us, but they were
coming toward the portico with their characteristic determination, in their usual unpleasant mood.

As I started toward the house, steel panels dropped out of the limestone lintels in the window surrounds and snugged down to the sills. A larger sheet of steel whisked over the front door, meeting the threshold so tightly that I couldn’t have slipped even a note of urgent appeal under it.

Now I knew what had taken the place of the window bars when the house had been—per Chef Shilshom—remodeled. Mmmmm? Indeed. There you go.