Odd Apocalypse

Twenty-three

Spiraling iron twisted deeper into a darkness that was not the absence of light but the absence of hope, for the light below was as golden as that in the vault of spheres and flywheels above.

I had dreamed of Auschwitz and in the dream had been afraid of dying twice. Annamaria had assured me that I would die once and only once, and that it would be “the death that doesn’t matter.”

In all our lives, however, there are many days when we die a little, when we are wounded by loss or failure, or by fear, or by seeing the suffering of others for whom we are able to offer only pity, for whom we are powerless to offer aid, who are beyond mercy.

The spiral stairs were like an auger bit boring sharply down through the layers of Roseland. When a well-driller cores earth and rock in search of water, he occasionally pulls to the surface fossils or fragments thereof. Some are bizarre creatures with eyes on stalks and whip tails and many-jointed legs, things that crawled the floors of ancient seas long gone. The sight of them impressed in stone can make Earth seem less known than unknown, and the nip that twitches through your blood is the chill of the sudden suspicion that you are a stranger in a strange land. The sole sound in the subcellar of the mausoleum was my footsteps on iron treads, and in the silence at the bottom of the stairs, I came upon a scene so outré, so bleak that I could have found nothing more horrifying on an alien planet orbiting a distant star.

This space was higher than the first cellar, maybe eleven feet. Later, I would take in the parallel arrays of gold-plated gears in the three feet immediately under the ceiling, embraced above and below by shallow silver-plated tracks. They were not fixed in the tracks, were not merely receiving and transmitting force and motion, but were themselves moving across the chamber, out of a hole in one wall and into a hole in the opposite wall. The first, third, and fifth arrays were churning east to west; the second, fourth, and sixth moved west to east. Teeth meshed with teeth, and by the biting of one another, the gleaming wheels turned as relentlessly and as silently as the flywheels in the upper cellar. I couldn’t understand what they were meant to achieve, what they might be driving, if they were driving anything more than themselves.

But the mystery of the gears mattered not at all in light of the dead women who sat on the floor with their backs against the walls.

As I have said in at least one other volume of this continuing memoir, I will not tell everything that I saw. The tableau in the subcellar was as grossly indecent as it was horrific. The innocent dead deserve their dignity.

Numbers do not define the degree of this villainy, for each of these women was a special soul, as is each person ever born. What had been done to each was an injustice and an iniquity so monstrous that the mind rebelled and the heart sank at the wickedness of it, and any one victim was sufficient to require the execution, with extreme prejudice, of whoever had done this to her. Later, when I counted them, I found there were thirty-four.

Yet the room was as odorless as it was hushed … and that was not the most puzzling thing about the scene.

They were all naked, seated side by side on the floor, their backs against the concrete wall. Although each of their souls had been unique, they were physically of a type. All were blondes of one shade or another, a few with shorter hair, most with hair that fell shoulder-length or longer. Some might have been as young as sixteen; none appeared to be older than her late twenties. They had once been lovely, with refined features. Their eyes were blue or blue-gray, or blue-green, and they stared wide-eyed, some because death had caught them that way and others because pins had been used to keep their eyelids from closing.

As the quiet spirit of the nightgowned rider led me through the subcellar, with the silently meshing-churning golden gears two feet overhead, the resemblance between her and the dead women became ever more marked.

My first assumption was that she had been the first victim, and that her murderer wasn’t satisfied to kill her once. He found surrogates who resembled her, and he killed them as if to kill her again.

Evidently, none of these dead women clung stubbornly to this world, because I had seen no lingering spirits in Roseland except that of the rider and her faithful horse. I was grateful for their haste in crossing over, because if the subcellar had been crowded with their anguished and beseeching ghosts, I might have been incapable of coping.

Although most of them had been tortured in one way or another, I will not say with what techniques or what instruments. With some the brute had worked on their hands, with others their feet, their breasts. But except for the straight pins in the eyelids, which the lack of blood suggested were inserted postmortem, their faces were untouched.

The murderer wanted always to be able to see the stallion rider’s face in each of theirs. Maybe he came here to review his collection, to feel their stares upon him, to lord over them the fact that he lived and even flourished in spite of what he’d done to them.

That this subcellar full of corpses remained free of any whiff of decomposition perplexed me less than did the condition of the thirty-four dead women. They looked as if every one of them had been killed that very morning.