Odd Apocalypse (40 page)

“Under the lines,” he said.

I had so little purpose in this encounter that I felt not like a fifth wheel on a cart but rather like a fifth wheel on a tricycle.

I was suddenly distracted from their conversation by a ruckus outside, a clang and clatter that drew me to one of the windows. I pulled aside the drapery and pressed my forehead to the glass, the better to see down.

One story below, agitated freaks swarmed around the base of the guest tower, both the hideous kind and the more hideous. I heard them grunting and snorting, and then came the loud clang again as one of them swung an axe hard against the iron bars that protected a ground-floor window directly below the one at which I stood.

Even if they were to chop away at the masonry in which the iron was anchored and were to pry loose those bars, the windows were too small for them to squeeze through. These beasts were primitive, emotionally volatile, mentally unstable, one deep-fried pork rind short of a full bag, but they were not so stupid or so rabidly mad that they would continue futilely attacking the windows when the front door awaited them.

That door was ironbound, not entirely ironclad. Edged with iron, banded with iron, it nevertheless offered swaths of oak at which to
chop. And though it was exceedingly thick and though the hardware was forged to withstand a siege by dumb brutes that, at best, might try battering it down, it hadn’t been installed to withstand an assault by freaks armed with axes and hammers.

Victoria Mors had said the freaks were never armed like this before, that they had carried nothing but simple clubs until this full tide. She’d said they were getting smarter.

One of them saw me at the second-floor window and began to shriek at me and shake one fisted hand. His rage infected the others, and they all faced me, howling for blood and brandishing both fists and weapons.

I thought of Enceladus and the Titans, crushed under the stones that they had piled high in order to reach the heavens and make war with the gods. But I was not one of the gods, and the second floor of the tower wasn’t as far away as the heavens.

Turning from the window, I interrupted Annamaria and Timothy in their half-scrutable conversation. “The freaks are here. As soon as they decide to come at the door, we’ll have ten minutes at most.”

“Then we’ll worry about it eight minutes after that,” Annamaria said, as if the mob outside was nothing more than an Avon lady eager to show us a new line of personal-care products.

“No, no, no. You don’t know what the freaks are,” I told her. “We haven’t had time to talk about them.”

“And we don’t have time now,” she said. “What I have to discuss with Tim takes precedence.”

The boy and the dogs seemed to agree with her. They all smiled at me, amused by my nervous excitement about the arrival of a few overwrought pigs with a reverse luau on their minds.

“We have to go up to the third floor,” I said. “The only way out of here is the way Tim and I came in.”

“You go ahead now, young man. We’ll follow just as soon as we’re done here.”

I knew better than to press her further on the issue. She would respond to each of my urgent arguments either with a few words of quiet reassurance or with an enigmatic line I would not understand for maybe three years, if ever.

“Okay,” I said, “all right, fine, okay, I’ll go up to the third floor and just wait for you, for the freaks, for a ghost horse, for a marching band, whoever wants to come, anyone, everyone, I’ll just go wait.”

“Good,” Annamaria said, and returned to her conversation with Timothy.

I left her suite, closing the door behind me, and I ran down the stairs rather than up. In the vestibule between the outer door and the door to my suite, I could hear the freaks milling around out there, making a variety of piggish noises and some that were human enough to give me the creeps big-time. They seemed to be pumping up one another, like members of a team psyching themselves for the next big play.

In my suite, from the highest shelf in the bedroom closet, I retrieved the plastic-wrapped brick of money that had been given to me by the elderly actor Hutch Hutchison before I’d left Magic Beach just a few days earlier. If I shut down Roseland forever and fled, Annamaria and I would need this bankroll.

During my weeks in Magic Beach, I had worked for Mr. Hutchison, and we had become friends. I didn’t want his money, but he insisted with such grace and kindness that refusing it one more time would have been the basest kind of insult.

When Mr. Hutchison had been nine years old, a lot of banks had failed in the Great Depression. Consequently, he didn’t entirely trust such institutions. He concealed bricks of cash in his freezer, wrapped
tightly in pieces of white-plastic trash bags and sealed with plumbing tape.

Each package was labeled with code words. If the label read
BEEF TONGUE
, the brick contained twenty-dollar bills. S
WEETBREADS
identified a fifty-fifty split between twenties and hundreds. When Hutch gave me one such package in a pink hostess-gift bag with little yellow birds flying all over it, he wouldn’t tell me how much money it contained, and thus far I hadn’t looked.

I’d forgotten the code word on the label of this brick. When I retrieved it from the closet, I saw that it said
PORK RIND
. At the center of the universe is someone who has a sense of humor.

Clutching Mr. Hutchison’s gift, I left my suite and locked the door behind me.

The freaks had not yet begun to chop at the front door.

I hurried up the winding stairs, past Annamaria’s suite, to the third-floor door, where I’d stuffed two dollars in the receiving hole for the latch bolt.

When I entered the high chamber, Constantine Cloyce stepped out from behind the door and slammed the butt of his pistol-grip shotgun in my face.

I was in Auschwitz again, terrified of dying twice. I was not digging fast enough to please the guard. He kicked me once, twice, a third time. The steel toe of his boot ripped my left cheek. Out of me poured not blood but instead powdery gray ashes, and as the ashes flowed, I felt my face beginning to collapse inward, as if I were not a real man but merely the inflatable figure of a man, a hollow man stuffed with straw that had turned to ash and soot without my being aware. And in the ground where I was digging with inadequate speed there appeared a chair on which sat T. S. Eliot, the poet, who read to me two lines from a book of his verse: “This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper.”

I woke on the copper floor of the high room, for a moment not sure how I had gotten there. But then I remembered Wolflaw.… No, Cloyce. Constantine Cloyce. His eyes the gray of brushed steel, his matinee-idol chin thrust forward, his jaws clenched, his small, full-lipped mouth twisted in a sneer of contempt as he drove the butt of the shotgun into me.

My face hurt. I tasted blood. My vision was blurry. When I
blinked rapidly, I couldn’t see any better, but each blink caused my head to throb painfully.

I could hear him singing softly. At first I couldn’t identify the song, but then I realized it was an American standard, Cole Porter’s “Let’s Misbehave.”

Hesitant to move for fear I would draw his attention before I could see well enough to defend myself, I remained facedown, head turned to my right, for perhaps a minute until my vision cleared.

On the floor, about two feet from me, was the brick of money wrapped in plastic. Whatever my pathetic treasure might amount to, it wouldn’t buy my life from a murderer who was a billionaire.

Beyond the package of cash rose the chronosphere. I couldn’t see Cloyce’s feet moving anywhere in that glimmering construction, only the inner gimbal mounting as it silently carved lazy eights in the air, the arms of it moving impossibly but ceaselessly. And in the golden light that arose equally in every cubic inch of the chamber, my enemy cast no telltale shadow.

I was lying with my right arm trapped under me. When I moved the fingers of that hand, I could feel the swell of leather that was the belt-slider holster. Slowly, taking care not to move otherwise, I wormed my hand to the Beretta—and found that it had been taken from me.

On the floor between me and the brick of money lay a tooth. I searched my mouth with my tongue and found not one hole but two. The way the blood thickened in my throat and the taste of it were beginning to sicken me.

Judging by his voice, he was behind me, several steps removed.

Lacking a weapon, my best hope seemed to be to get up fast and rush away from him, around the chronosphere, try to keep it between him and me until I got to either the copper door or the stainless-steel stairs.

I thrust up, but dizziness and pain stalled me when I got as far as my hands and knees. Cloyce kicked my left arm out from under me, and I fell facedown again.

Now he was softly singing a different Cole Porter number: “I Get a Kick Out of You.”

His choice of songs alerted me to what was coming next, but I was powerless to escape it. He kicked me in the hip, in my left side, again in my side, and I felt a rib crack.

He jammed one boot on my back, put his weight on me, and the cracked rib seemed to catch fire and burn through my flesh.

I now understood my dream:

What the Nazis hoped to do to the Jews they killed, to the Gypsies and the Catholics they killed, was to kill them twice. It is what all tyrants hope to do, those armed with the mighty power of the state, like Hitler, and those with lesser power, like Cloyce. Mere physical destruction does not satisfy them. They use fear to wither your spirit, continuous propaganda and cruel mockery to confuse you, torture and forced labor to break more than just your body. They want to reduce you, if they can, to the condition of a frightened animal who has lost any faith that might have sustained him, who accepts his humiliation as deserved, who descends into such depression that he forsakes all belief that justice is attainable, that truth exists, or meaning. After they first kill your soul, they are then satisfied to kill your body, and if in fact they have succeeded, you cooperate meekly in your own physical—second—death. They are all in the army of the damned, and if they have a stronger faith in the righteousness of evil than their victims have in the reality and power of good, they cannot lose.

The only responses we can have to their viciousness are the courage to fight back or the cowardice to acquiesce. Well, one other option might be the pretense of acquiescence.

As the broken rib burned in my side and as waves of pain swelled through my battered face, I begged him not to hurt me any more, not to kill me. I pleaded, beseeched, implored, and groveled with my face pressed to the floor. The tears were easy to produce because the pain squeezed them from me, but he could mistake them for tears of terror and self-pity if he wished.

He grabbed me by the back of my sports-jacket collar. Commanding me to get up, he hauled me to my feet. He slammed me against the wall so hard that the pain in my chest seemed to drive a spike all the way into my skull to puncture awareness and let darkness flood my mind once more. I barely held on to consciousness, but the black wave passed.

Now Cloyce was singing “Anything Goes.” Not singing it so much as muttering it, snarling the words, his face right in mine. He was a tall man, muscular, strong. Having surprised the fight out of me with the shotgun butt, he was going to enjoy beating me to death with his fists. His breath smelled of something sour and vile. He grabbed a fistful of my hair and a handful of my crotch, and between words of the song, he suggested I should submit to him sexually as all the terrified women had done before he killed them.

My right hand fumbled its way into that pocket of my sports jacket, though there was nothing in there but a few spare rounds of ammunition and the pantry key on the stretchy pink plastic coil.

Suddenly Tesla loomed beside us, his gaunt face wild with rage. He reached for Cloyce but reached through him,
passed
through him as he had passed through me.

Perhaps thinking that I had hoped to be saved, Cloyce said, “It can’t help you. It’s not him. Just an aspect of him. Spun off in an experiment, bouncing around in time because it doesn’t belong anywhere.”

Twisting my hair, twisting a handful of my crotch, Cloyce began
laughing at me, highly amused by the tears that streamed down my face and by the helplessness they seemed to represent.

Pinching the bow of the key between thumb and forefinger, with all my strength I drove the serrated blade of it into the soft tissue behind his chin, as deep as it could go, perhaps into the underside of his tongue, and then twisted it violently.

As a gush of warm blood spilled over my hand, Cloyce reeled backward, clutching at his throat, keening in pain, probably sure that I had shoved a knife into him.

Before he might comprehend that he would survive the wound, I staggered away from him, snatched the shotgun off the floor, turned, pumped a round into the chamber, and delivered to him his second death.