Odd Apocalypse

Fourteen

All in white and immense, like an array of taut mainsails and topsails and staysails, Chef Shilshom seemed about to glide away wherever the wind might carry him. But the kitchen, of course, was windless, and the chef was intent upon adding to a pile of eyes on the cutting board beside the sink, where he was blinding several pounds of potatoes before peeling them.

My morning had been exhausting, especially as I’d eaten nothing but an almond croissant, and I needed to fill my fuel tank. “Sir, I don’t want to bother you, but Roseland is taking a lot out of me today. I could use some protein.”

“Mmmmm,” he said, and pointed to a warm quiche on a cooling rack and to a fresh cheesecake to which the lemon glaze had recently been applied.

As a guest granted kitchen privileges, I could have made a ham sandwich or searched out a leftover chicken breast. Instead I cut and plated a wedge of the quiche and a slice of the cheesecake, and poured a glass of milk.

I don’t worry about cholesterol. Considering my gift and the limited life expectancy it almost certainly ensures, my arteries will be as squeaky-clean as those of a newborn when I die, even if I eat nothing but ice cream at every meal.

Sitting on a stool at the island nearest to the chef, I watched him carve the faults out of the potatoes with an intensity that was a little disturbing. Tip of the tongue pinched between his teeth, plump cheeks rosier than usual, eyes slitted as if with contempt, and a fine dew of perspiration on his forehead all seemed to indicate that in his imagination he was cutting the eyes from something potentially more responsive than potatoes.

Since coming to Roseland, my attempts to get information out of Chef Shilshom had been relatively subtle, my approach for the most part oblique. That strategy hadn’t gotten me anywhere. Earlier, over the croissant, I had been a bit bolder, and although I hadn’t pushed him so hard as to make him spill a single secret, I had rattled him enough to expose his concealed hostility when his reflection in the window revealed him glaring at me behind my back.

Halfway through my wedge of quiche, I said, “Sir, do you recall earlier when I asked you about the horse I sometimes see?”

“Mmmmm.”

“A black stallion, a Friesian.”

“If you say so.”

“Since Mr. Wolflaw keeps no horses, I thought it might belong to a neighbor, and you said perhaps it did.”

“There you go.”

“But I wonder, sir, how did the horse get through the front gate, with a guard there and everything?”

“How indeed?”

“Perhaps it climbed over the estate wall.”

The chef could not easily pretend distraction when taunted with such absurdity. He glanced at me but then preferred to talk to the current potato that he was mutilating. “There haven’t been horses here in many years.”

“Then what did I see?”

“I wonder.”

I finished the rest of my quiche and said, “Sir, did you notice an eclipse of the sun a short while ago?”

Now peeling the potatoes, he said, “Eclipse?”

“Day turning to night. Like a few thousand years ago people thought God was turning off the sun as punishment, so they went mad with fear and tore their hair out and sacrificed babies and lashed themselves with brambles and promised never to fornicate again, because they were ignorant, though that wasn’t really their fault, considering that there wasn’t either the History Channel or NatGeo back then, and maybe some of them tried to Google ‘sun goes out’ to learn what was happening, but they were way too far ahead of their time.”

Peeling determinedly, Chef Shilshom said, “I don’t understand you, Mr. Thomas.”

“You aren’t the first,” I assured him.

I tried the cheesecake. It was delicious.

“Sir,” I continued, “putting the mystery horse aside for a moment, do you know of an animal in these parts that is at least the size of a man, perhaps larger, with crimson eyes that glow in the dark and a really horrendous odor?”

The chef had been taking the skin off a potato in a single long ribbon, as if he collected spud peels the same way that some people collected string in giant balls that grew as big as automobiles. But partway through my question, his hand faltered, and a prematurely severed peel unraveled into the sink.

I doubt that Sherlock Holmes was my great-grandfather, but I deduced that the incident of the severed peel indicated Chef Shilshom knew the stinky animals to which I referred. He appeared alarmed by what I’d said, and intent on concealing his concern.

He at once continued peeling, but he took so long to decide on his response that his anxiety became more apparent. Finally he said, “Horrendous odor?”

“Very stinky, sir.”

“As large as a man?”

“Yes, sir. Maybe larger.”

“What did they look like?”

“I only ran into them in the dark.”

“But still you must have seen something of them.”

“No, sir. It was very dark.”

He relaxed a little. “We have no animals that big in these parts.”

“What about bears?”

“Well.”

“California black bears?”

He said, “Mmmmm.”

“Maybe the bears climbed the estate wall to kill and eat all the mountain lions.”

The slippery potato popped out of his hand and thumped around the stainless-steel sink.

“Could it be bears?” I pressed, though I knew it hadn’t been anything as cuddly as the killing machine that is a bear.

Having retrieved the potato, the chef began to peel again, but he lacked the composure with which he’d begun the chore. He hacked clumsily at that example of Idaho’s finest, and I felt embarrassed for him.

“Maybe you should stay in at night, Mr. Thomas.”

After skinning the rest of the potato in a most unfortunate manner, the chef dropped it in a large pot half filled with water.

I said, “The first time I ran into them was in the stable, this morning, about half an hour after dawn.”

He picked up another spud and went at it as though he despised everything Idahoan and was particularly infuriated by potatoes.

“The second time,” I said, “was just twenty minutes ago, in a grove of oak trees, where it got so dark I thought there must be an eclipse.”

“That doesn’t make sense, Mr. Thomas.”

“It didn’t make sense to me, either.”

“There was no eclipse.”

“No, sir, I guess not. But there was something.”

Watching him, I finished the slice of cheesecake.

Dropping the second potato in the pot, putting down the peeler, Chef Shilshom said, “My medication.”

“Sir?”

“I forgot to take it,” he said, and he left the kitchen by the hallway door.

At the back sink, I rinsed my plate, fork, and glass. I put them in the dishwasher.

The food lay heavy in my stomach, and I felt as if I had eaten my last meal.

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

Mentally reciting Annamaria’s words, hoping to engage my psychic magnetism as I had tried to do before I’d been warned into the tree by the mute rider on the spirit horse, I wandered across the kitchen and left it by one of the two swinging doors that served the butler’s pantry.

I passed through the formal dining room, the cozy informal drawing room that was a fraction the size of the main drawing room, and along a paneled hallway, past closed doors that I had no impulse to open.

More than once in the past couple of days, the layout of the great house had confused me, not merely because of its size but also because its architect seemed to have invented a new geometry with a previously unknown dimension that frustrated my memory. Rooms proved to be connected in ways that repeatedly surprised me.

By the time I arrived at the library, by a route that I would not have thought could bring me there, two things puzzled me: the depth of the silence in the great house, and the absence of staff. No vacuum cleaner in a distant room. No voices. No one mopping limestone floors or polishing mahogany floors, or dusting furniture.

The previous day, I had for the first time availed myself of the invitation to treat the ground level of the house as my own home, and had spent some time in both the card room and the fully equipped gym. I had encountered only the head housekeeper, Mrs. Tameed, and a maid named Victoria Mors.

Now, as I stood on the threshold of the library, wondering at the stillness in the house, I realized that neither the housekeeper nor the maid had been engaged in any obvious labor when I had come upon them. They had been standing in the card room, in the middle of an intense conversation. Although I apologized for interrupting them in their work and intended to leave, they assured me that they had finished the task at hand and had chores elsewhere. They had left at once, but I hadn’t considered, until this moment, that neither had with her any cleaning supplies or even as much as a dust rag.

A house as large as this one — with its ornate moldings, carved-marble fireplaces, richness of architectural details, and room after room of antique furnishings — should keep Mrs. Tameed and half a dozen maids bustling from morning till night. Yet although the house was immaculate, I had encountered only the two of them, and I had yet to see either woman working.

Crossing the threshold, I found the library deserted. The large, rectangular room was wrapped by laden bookshelves except for a few windows covered with heavy brocade draperies. I didn’t pause to read the titles on any of the thousands of spines, didn’t settle in an armchair. Guided by psychic magnetism, I went directly to the open staircase in the middle of the room.

Twenty feet overhead, the mahogany ceiling was deeply coffered. A five-foot-wide mezzanine encircled the room twelve feet above the floor.

The bronze spiral staircase featured a railing in which the balusters were wound through by beautifully wrought vines with gilded leaves. Perhaps it was meant to represent the tree of knowledge.

At the top of the stairs, a bridge connected the two longest sides of the mezzanine. Without hesitation, I went to the left. Upon reaching the end of the bridge, I turned right.

In the southwest corner of the mezzanine, set at an angle between the bookshelves, a heavy wooden door stood under a pediment surmounted by a bronze torch with a gilded flame. I passed through the door into a junction of second-floor hallways.

The invitation to enjoy the public rooms of the main house did not include the second floor. I was abusing the privilege granted to me. I didn’t hesitate to do so. I don’t think I’m really bad, but I’ll admit to being naughty.

Considering that the head of security, Paulie Sempiterno, had so recently expressed the sincere desire to put a bullet in my face, my violation of Mr. Wolflaw’s privacy might result in something worse than a stern lecture about good manners. Caution seemed essential.

As if the very thought of Sempiterno conjured him, his rough voice rose from behind one of the closed doors along the west wing, to my right.

Another voice, more worried and less angry than the security chief’s, was unquestionably that of Chef Shilshom. He evidently had not gone to fetch a forgotten medication in his little apartment in the servants’ wing on the ground floor.

A third voice, quieter than the other two, might have been that of Noah Wolflaw. His bedroom suite lay in the west wing.

I was able to hear only the louder words, but the tenor of the conversation was clearly argumentative. I imagined that Sempiterno wanted to grind me up in a wood-chipper, Shilshom wanted to roast me with onions and carrots before serving me as a peace offering to whatever red-eyed animals prowled Roseland, and Wolflaw couldn’t bring himself to assent to my being either chipped or cooked because he was still enchanted by Annamaria for reasons that even he could not explain.

Although I was tempted to listen at the door, prudence and psychic magnetism turned me away from the voices. I proceeded along the south hallway, in the first half of which all the doors were on the right. Staying on the carpet runner, treading quietly, I was grateful that whatever power guided my feet had never required me to break into a lively dance.

Just before the south wing met the south end of the east wing, I was compelled to a door on the right. I hesitated with my hand on the knob, listening, but I heard no slightest sound beyond.

Entering, I discovered a parlor that was part of a bedroom suite. In a wingback chair sat a boy with wide, staring, all-white eyes that seemed blinded by thick cataracts.