Odd Apocalypse

Seventeen

I worried that rescuing this boy would be more difficult if he was discovered to have disobeyed his keepers’ instructions. I drew shut the draperies.

“We don’t have to get you out of Roseland. We just have to get the police in. They might think I’m a crank, but I have a good friend who’s the chief of police in Pico Mundo. He’ll believe me, and he’ll get the attention of the authorities here.”

“No. Not the cops. That would be … the end of everything. You don’t understand who I am.”

“So tell me.”

He shook his head. “If you knew, the people here … they’d kill you deader than dead.”

“I’m tougher than I look.”

Maybe he wanted to laugh in my face, but instead he returned to the armchair in which he had been sitting when I first found him.

Once more I sat upon the ottoman. “You told Mrs. Tameed that he brought you here and should at least take you back. Who do you mean?”

“Him. Who else but him? It’s all because of him.”

“Noah Wolflaw?”

“Wolflaw,” he said, and the contempt with which he spoke the name suggested a lifetime of distilled bitterness that a mere boy should not have accumulated.

“Brought you here. Do you mean kidnapped?”

“Worse than kidnapped.”

He seemed to have taken inscrutability lessons from Annamaria.

Knowing too well the depths of evil to which some human beings can descend, I steeled myself for his answer when I asked, “Why does Wolflaw want you here? What does he … expect from you?”

“I’m his toy. Everyone’s a toy to him.” His voice quavered, and under the contempt that flowed through his words, there seemed to be another quite different river of emotion that was closer to sadness than to anger, a sense of tragic loss.

I remembered Henry Lolam at the gatehouse, suggesting that Noah Wolflaw wanted Annamaria’s baby for “sensation” … for “thrills.”

My chest tightened and my throat seemed thick with phlegm, but it was disgust that choked me, disgust and an aversion to hearing this boy speak of abominations.

“I know what Hell is,” he said, and he seemed to shrink into the depths of the wingback chair. “Hell is Roseland.”

After a hesitation, I asked, “He … touches you?”

“No. It’s not that kind of thing he wants from me.”

I was relieved in one regard but was forced now to consider what might be worse than my worst fear for him.

The boy said, “I’m here because he had one moment of remorse.”

That was an unlikely thing for a child to say, and it was also enigmatic.

Based on our conversation thus far, I doubted that I could squeeze a clarification from him.

Before I could even try to press him for an explanation, he said, “Now he keeps me here to reassure himself that there aren’t any limits to what he can do.”

Frustrated by both the restrictions imposed upon him — and me — by the GPS transponder on his left wrist and by his unwillingness to be forthcoming, I said, “I only want to help you.”

“I only wish you could.”

“Then help me help you. Where did he take you from? How long has he kept you? What’s your name? Do you remember your parents, their names, the address of your house?”

At that moment, his ginger-brown eyes seemed to have remarkable depth, unlike any they had possessed previously, unlike any eyes I’d ever seen, a plumbless lonely deepness into which it seemed dangerous to stare, as if I might see a despair so singular that, like the face of a Gorgon, it would turn me to stone.

“Your hair is dark, but your mother was a blonde.”

He stared at me but said nothing.

“She had a great black Friesian that she adored. And she rode it well.”

“Whoever you are, maybe you already know too much,” the boy said, seeming to confirm what the spirit had conveyed to me. “You better not speak of her to any of them. Leave while he still might let you go. Which isn’t much longer. If you think there’s no danger to you … then go to the mausoleum. In the mosaic, press the shield that the guardian angel holds high.”

His eyes rolled up into his head until his gaze was as blind as that of a white-marble statue. His hands slid off the arms of the chair and turned palms-up in his lap.

Perhaps he could fall away into this trance state by an act of will or perhaps this condition overcame him like a seizure comes upon an unmedicated epileptic. I suspected, however, that he had chosen to voyage inward — if that was where his attention went — and thereby to dismiss me.

For a while, I watched him. He was not going to return by his choice, and it seemed pointless to shake him out of his trance and try to force him to cooperate with me.

I had not imagined that when I found the person who desperately needed me, he would reject my help.

Before leaving, I inspected the bedroom more thoroughly than I had been able to do when rushing to hide from Mrs. Tameed. Like the parlor, this chamber seemed to be furnished and decorated for a grown man. The theme was hunting and hounds. No toys. No comic books. No movie posters. No video-game console. No television.

Hardcover books were stacked not only on the breakfast table from which the housekeeper had retrieved the tray, but also on one nightstand and on the dresser. The authors were not those in which a nine-year-old would immerse himself: Faulkner, Balzac, Dickens, Hemingway, Graham Greene, Somerset Maugham.…

My immediate suspicion was that these weren’t the child’s private quarters, that he lived here with someone. But the walk-in closet and the dresser contained clothing only for a young boy. In the bathroom, a single toothbrush, as well as the lack of an electric razor and other adult-grooming aids, supported what I had found in the bedroom.

In the parlor once more, I stood over him, as baffled as I was worried. He looked so vulnerable, and I knew that I must help him, but he seemed to be as jealous of his secrets as were all the others in Roseland.

To encourage me and Annamaria to leave the estate sooner than later, he had given me a clue to follow at the mausoleum.

Suddenly I recalled something that Paulie Sempiterno had said after he decided not to shoot me in the face: Whatever you’re looking for in Roseland, you’ll find its opposite. If you want to live, look for death.

I intended to go directly to the mausoleum, where the only dead were neatly packaged as ashes in urns. Or so I thought.