Odd Apocalypse (42 page)

Annamaria and Tim and I stood with our backs to one another, so that we could watch the four beasts as they warily circled the chronosphere, beyond the first gimbal mounting. They grumbled and snarled and didn’t seem to trust the machine. They snorted, grimaced, and shook their heads as though they smelled something disagreeable, and they blew gouts of mucus from their fleshy snouts
into their hands and wiped their hands on their flanks, as if they wanted to disgust us as much as they wanted to terrify us.

Beads of sweat stippled my brow.

“If they rush us all at once,” I said, “you two drop low, so I can turn in a circle and fire over your heads.”

“They won’t rush us,” Annamaria assured me. “This unpleasantness is almost over.”

“They might rush us,” I disagreed.

“You worry too much, odd one.”

“Ma’am, I don’t mean this to sound harsh, but you don’t worry enough.”

“What does worry accomplish except to breed more worry?”

We might have gotten into our first argument then, although a genteel one, but the largest of the four freaks changed the subject when it spoke in a low rough voice that caused spiders of dread to skitter up my spine: “Woman with baby.”

Until this moment, there had been no indication that these monsters had the capacity for language, let alone that they could speak English.

“Give me baby,” the thing said.

The speaker had a larger head than the others, with a brow less sloped. Maybe it was the only one of them that could talk.

“Give me baby,” it repeated.

I was sweating worse by the moment. I was sweating like, well, a pig.

“You may not make demands of me,” Annamaria told the talking freak. “You have no power here.”

“We kill,” it said. “We eat baby.”

“Be gone from here,” she said. “Know your place and be there.”

The four of them began to move slowly toward us, as shadowless as we were, pale skin and tufts of gray wiry hair, but nevertheless
four figures of darkness, as if their shadows had slithered within them to nest and then had multiplied into legions to fill them with blackest hate. Three had axes, and one carried a hammer.

Taking a two-hand grip on the Beretta, I aimed at one of the three who hadn’t yet spoken.

The chatty one said, “I was born to eat baby, your baby,
that
baby.”

“This is not your time,” she said calmly, “nor will there be any time for you to kill me or to touch this baby. Go now. Go to your misery.”

Maybe it was just me, just the state of my mind at that moment, which wasn’t good, but it seemed that something more was going on here than I quite understood. I often had that feeling when in the company of my mysterious companion, but never more so than at that moment.

“Go to your misery,” she repeated.

They rushed us—as I
knew
they would—but in the rushing, they rippled, as if approaching us through thermals of heat rising from the floor, and vanished.

“It’s getting really hot in here,” Tim said.

I had attributed the heat to the pressure of the confrontation, but it proved not to be a subjective reaction to stress. The room was rapidly growing hotter.

Remembering what Timothy had told me earlier, that the time-management machinery was secondarily the power plant for Roseland, harnessing the thermodynamic consequences of its primary purpose, I suddenly wondered if Tesla might have been wise enough to provide a master switch that not only turned off the machine but also destroyed it with its own stored heat.

“We better get out of here,” I said. “This place is gonna blow.”

“Worry only breeds more worry,” Annamaria reminded me.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,” I said, and I hustled them around the
chronosphere, keeping them away from Cloyce’s body, snatched up the plastic-wrapped bundle of money, and followed them across the broken-down door into the stairwell.

Freaks on the landings faded away as we approached them, and freaks in the yard brandished weapons at us and howled and might have assaulted us if they, too, hadn’t shimmered away on the receding tide of displaced time.

Raphael and Boo suddenly sprinted past us, ears flat to their heads and tails tucked.

As we hurried along the path through the eucalyptus grove, I heard something collapsing high in the tower, a colossal noise that rang like a carillon of tuneless bells. When I glanced back, every pane shattered and golden dust blew out of every window. The walls shook, and stones began to rain down through the trees.

When we escaped the eucalyptuses and reached the long slope of lawn that led up to the main house, we found the dogs frozen with their hackles raised. They were focused on the long green fairway that was the Enceladus lawn leading off to the south, away from the house, but it was not the distant statue of the Titan that caused Raphael and Boo to bare their teeth.

Something moved in the cloaking shadows beneath the live oaks that bordered the west side of that lawn. At first it was only an immense paleness, a heaving shapeless mass that surged insistently through the grove, snapping a few lower limbs where they impeded its progress, shuddering the trees. From it came the eerie, silvery cry, sewn through with sorrow and longing, that had awakened me each morning during our visit to Roseland, the cry that never had been that of a loon. Such a poignant sound issuing from a creature so large was more chilling than it had been when it came from an unknown source in the night. This thing, if it could be better seen, might have been the size of an elephant, although it was nothing
that had ever walked the Earth before. For a moment it loomed at the edge of the woods, a sickly white behemoth, its thick cankered folds of flesh revealing extreme malformation, enough like a swine to be related to the freaks, but even more bizarre than the most badly deformed of those smaller beasts. Given a few minutes, perhaps it would have surged fully into the sunlight, or maybe it would have continued to shelter in the shadows in the same way that the worst monsters of our nightmares never quite reveal themselves. The things in dreams are often aspects of ourselves that we cannot face directly, and perhaps this land leviathan, aware of its horrific nature, could not bear to fully expose itself to itself, and needed shadows the way that any guilty soul needs its justifications.

As the time-management machinery self-destructed, the full tide receded from the shores of our time. The creature in the woods faded away into the future where the sky lowered yellow and was shot through with rivers of soot.

Across the vast lawns, the topography changed as underground rooms and passageways collapsed upon themselves. The steel shutters flew up at all the doors and windows of the main house as we hurried toward it. Windows burst and glittered down upon the terraces.

The original carriage house, separate from the main residence, was remodeled in 1926, as it became clear how rapidly the automobile would come to rule the highways. The keys to the various estate vehicles hung on a Peg-Board.

I chose a Cadillac Escalade. Boo leaped through the closed tailgate, and after I opened it, Raphael followed him.

To Annamaria, I said, “What happens to Tim when we’re past the walls of the estate?”

The boy clung to her as she said, “Nothing happens. He lives and thrives.”

“But he said—”

“What was is not anymore, young man. And now we shall see what will be.”

Now was not the time to have one of our baffling conversations. I slid behind the wheel, and she got into the backseat with the boy.

As we drove past the house, it began to implode and to collapse into its foundations, into whatever secret rooms might lie beneath it, and thick plumes of smoke rose from some deep fire.

Perhaps following the final effects of the disintegrating machinery, no more would remain of Roseland than could be found of the House of Usher after it sank into its fetid marsh.

As we drove past the portico at the front of the house, Mr. Hitchcock was standing beside the driveway. He waved at me, and I waved back. I almost stopped to tell him that I was ready for him now, but I really wasn’t quite yet.

He smiled broadly at the sight of Roseland in ruins. Cloyce must have been as nasty a studio chief as he was a nasty human being.

The gatehouse had fallen into a hole of its own, most likely taking Henry Lolam with it.

I was about to get out of the Escalade to throw open the gates, when the perimeter walls began to collapse and seemed also to melt in upon themselves. The gates tore loose of the molten stone and crashed to the ground. I drove over them and away, as fast as I dared, eager to be gone but equally eager not to draw the attention of any police I might pass.

Before I’d traveled fifty yards, Madra raced past me on the magnificent stallion, white nightgown flowing over the horse’s black flanks. She glanced back once, and I saw her smile before she and the Friesian galloped out of this world into the next.

Ancient oaks flanked the two-lane road. Through the gaps in the great black limbs, rain abruptly fell in torrents from the clouds that
had been gathering all day. For a moment, fear gripped me again as the world blurred away beyond the windshield, but when I turned on the wipers, the world was still there.

I drove down through the hills to the Coast Highway and turned south. The gray sea folded up into the gray sky at the horizon, which was obscured by mist, and silver rain slanted through the day, as the tires sizzled across the puddled pavement.

We abandoned the Escalade in a supermarket parking lot, and we rented a three-bedroom cottage by the month in a quiet town along the coast. Yellow bougainvillea draped half the roof, and the front porch faced the sea.

Of other renters, the owner would have required identification, but Annamaria’s smile, her touch, and cold cash charmed us into our new home.

Roseland started as a big story but quickly became less of one as Homeland Security seemed to exercise authority that was definitely unconstitutional. Rumors on the Internet pegged the place as a den of terrorists bent on some nefarious plot. The military personnel and scientists that were camped out on the grounds and probing through the ruins lent credence to that theory.

During the first month in our new haven, I slept in my room, and Tim stayed with Annamaria, afraid to sleep alone. He was not the same person as he had been. He was still the boy who had read thousands of books and been formed by them, but he never spoke of Roseland, as if he had no memory of it. He spoke sometimes of his
mother, of how he missed her, but he seemed to think she had died in a fall from a horse, and of his father he knew nothing.

I didn’t ask Annamaria how this change in Tim had been effected because I was afraid that she would tell me, at length, and that I would not understand a word she said. As time goes by, I find that I am increasingly satisfied not to chase mysteries that my sixth sense does not absolutely require me to chase.

Tim was excited to discover that his hair was growing. He said that it had never grown before, though he admitted that was a strange assertion. We made a celebration of his first trip to a barber by following it with a session at an arcade, and ice cream.

After that, he slept alone in his room.

Here by the sea, I wrote these memoirs in what psychologists call a flow state. The words spilled from me as though I were taking dictation.

The dogs do the usual doggy things. Because Raphael can see Boo as clearly as I can, he has a playmate, but my ghost dog has all the advantages in their games.

I dream no more of Auschwitz and do not fear dying twice.

I dream of Stormy, of the years we had together, which were years rich in experience, and of how it might be when at last we are together again, though that is a thing that can only be seen in dreams.

My journey isn’t yet at an end. Sooner than later, I will be called to the road again. I learn by going where I have to go.

Annamaria says I’ll know when we must move on because I will wake in the night to hear the ringing of the pendant bell that I wear around my neck.

She is now in her eighth month, but she’s grown no larger. When I worry that she should have prenatal care, she tells me that she has
been pregnant a long time and will be pregnant longer still, whatever that means.

Two nights ago, at dinner, in the center of the table, one of those large, waxy-petaled flowers floated in a shallow green bowl. She said she plucked it from a tree in the neighborhood, but though I’ve gone on a few long walks in search of it, I’ve not yet found that tree.

I asked her to show me the trick with the flower. As it turns out, she showed it to Tim back in Roseland. But she says it is not merely a trick, and the time for her to show it to me will come when I know the real name for it. Go figure.

Our friend Blossom, from Magic Beach, who calls herself the Happy Monster, phoned to say she will join us in another week. She was gravely disfigured as a child, when her drunken father set her on fire. Why so often children, and why so often their parents? I guess it’s just the nature of this long, long war. Anyway, I can’t wait to see Blossom, for she is beautiful in her disfigurement.