Odd Apocalypse

Thirty-five

So as I stood by the defunct mini truck, swapping the Beretta’s half-depleted magazine for the fully loaded spare, as then I plucked seven bullets from the extra ammunition that I carried in a sports-coat pocket and replenished the first magazine, I brooded about the discovery that the secret of Roseland had something to do with time. If some kind of localized disorder in time was a side effect of what was going on here, my sense that I was running out of time might be true in ways I couldn’t yet comprehend.

Before encountering the porkers, I’d been on my way to the guesthouse to make sure Annamaria remained safe. Now I recalled a thing that happened in Magic Beach a few days earlier, when we encountered a pack of coyotes that boldly stalked us and seemed about to attack. Annamaria had spoken to them as if they understood her — and with only words she got them to retreat. Whatever the nature of the gift that she possessed, she had nothing to fear from animals, probably not even from the porkers; if she was killed, her murderer would be a man driven not by an animal nature but by the worst of his very human impulses. With Roseland counting down to some kind of detonation, I had to trust in Annamaria to take care of herself for now.

Carrying the pillowcase sack in one hand and the pistol in the other, taking my bearings from hilltop after hilltop, alert for more of the bacon brigade, I made my way to the statue of Enceladus, the Titan. From there I ventured into the oak grove that surrounded that lawn. As before, not a single fallen leaf littered the earth under the trees.

I put down the pillowcase and, from one of the low branches, I selected a twig with three leaves. I snapped it off and threw it on the ground.

As if I were watching a time-lapse film of a few weeks’ growth, the tree sprouted a new twig at the break point, leafed out exactly as it had been, and fully restored itself in less than a minute.

When I thought to look on the ground where I’d thrown the broken twig, it wasn’t there.

Finally, almost twenty-two, I got my haunted house, for which I was singularly well prepared, and it was a country house, as was the one in The Turn of the Screw, and it had a history of perversity, like the place in Hell House, and in it might be people who should be dead but were not, as in The Fall of the House of Usher, and there was an imprisoned child in jeopardy, as in Poltergeist. The only ghost in Roseland, however, was the rider of the spirit stallion, and she was neither menacing nor truly at the center of the problem that I, as an unofficial exorcist, needed to resolve.

Instead of flailing poltergeists and phantoms from the grave, with which I might have easily contended, I faced a threat consisting of swine things, cosmic clockworks, a thoroughly insane movie mogul, and the conspirators that he had drawn around him with the power that he wielded, power given to him, perhaps unwittingly, by the late great Nikola Tesla, who, although long dead and although not a ghost, nevertheless ricocheted like an immaterial pinball in and out of the scene, who said that he had seen me where I’d not yet been, and who encouraged me to throw the master switch, wherever that might be.

Some days I just want to go back to bed and pull the covers over my head.

Instead, from the tree, I broke off the same twig that I’d broken before and held it in the open palm of my left hand. Within a minute, the tree repaired itself, and the twig vanished even though, at the last moment, I closed my fist around it.

Roseland didn’t need a platoon of gardeners. In the landscaped portion of the grounds — as opposed to the wild fields — the trees and the shrubs and the flowers and the grass were in a kind of stasis, neither growing nor dying, somehow maintained in exactly the same condition in which they had been since … Perhaps since one day in the early 1920s.

The residents of Roseland were not outside of time. Clocks still ticked and hours passed. Sunrises and sunsets came and went. Weather changed, as did the seasons. Time did not stand still within these estate walls.

Evidently, by the transmission of a current of some exotic energy through root and trunk and limb and leaf, through every blade of grass and every flower petal, all remained as it had been. Wind might strip some leaves from the trees, but new growth appeared even as the torn leaves fell and, upon the ground, ceased to exist. Or perhaps the new leaves were in fact the old ones, and perhaps each damaged tree or plant — but nothing adjacent to it — slipped back in time to a moment just before the leaves had been plucked from it, and then rejoined the present.

If I dug down into the earth, I would most likely find some kind of metal mesh or those copper rods embedded in the foundations of the buildings. Suddenly I knew what the elongated 8 represented when you read it horizontally rather than vertically: It was the symbol for infinity.

I felt dizzy. I wished I were as good at not thinking as Kenny claimed to be.

I returned to that peninsula of flawless lawn in which Enceladus raised a fist to challenge the gods, and I followed it to the acres of grass surrounding the main residence. From a distance, I could see that the windows and doors of the house were still covered with steel panels.

Around one corner of the mansion came a ragtag mob of freaks in a violent frenzy because they had not been invited inside for lunch. They were overturning patio furniture and pounding on the shutters.

I retreated into the Enceladus lawn, screened from the house by the time-frozen oaks. I stood by the Titan, trying to get my mind around the ramifications of the theory that Roseland was not a time machine — no, nothing that simple — but a machine that could manage time, reverse or retard its effects, and ensure against the otherwise inevitable decline of all things, which is the way of Nature.

In the main house, as in the guest tower, everything appeared to be immaculate, pristine, as if nothing ever wore out or broke down or produced dust. Wooden floors and steps were as tight and squeak-free as the day that they were installed. No cracks in the marble or limestone.

The kitchen appliances were new; but most likely they had been replaced not because those of the 1920s didn’t still work but because newer ovens and refrigerators offered features and conveniences that the older models did not.

Out of nowhere, as if conjured, a hundred or more bats with seven-foot wingspans appeared at the tree-encircled end of the long lawn. They flew toward me, in such tight formation that they appeared to be a solid mass, a tidal flow two feet above the grass, abroad in daylight as bats should never be.

The urge to flee was countered by the recognition that I could move at only a fraction of their speed. Perhaps they didn’t see well in daylight. Like most predators, they must track their prey by scent. But maybe their natural guidance system, echolocation, also played a role in identifying food, in which case absolute stillness might be wiser than movement. The enormous lead statue, in the shadow of which I stood, might mask me from detection.

Perhaps, maybe, might be, might: With such qualifications did I stand paralyzed in hope that I would not be devoured alive.

Their wings beat in unison so many times per second that the thrum of them became almost a buzz, and their orchestral timing was no less impressive than it was fearsome. Heads as big as grapefruits, they approached with chins dropped, mouths open, curved incisors bared, flat noses sifting from the air the scents of blood, sweat, minute particles of dander shed by skin or fur or feathers, and the pheromones of fear.

I could not breathe as they rushed past so low that I looked down on the soft brown fur that covered their bodies and on their membranous wings. In the passing, they vanished through a sudden shimmering in the air, as if through a curtain between my time and theirs.

Limp with relief, I climbed onto the granite plinth on which the huge Titan stood. I sat with my back against his left calf, knees drawn up, shoes pressed against his right foot, not sure if the lead from which he was cast had afforded me some protection, but taking shelter there with my usual persistent optimism.

As my heartbeat returned to normal, I brooded again about Roseland. About time past, time present, and time future …

The stasis evident in the landscaped grounds, in the house, and in the furniture that stood in its rooms apparently did not extend to less place-fixed objects like bed linens and cake pans and cutlery. Linens and clothes didn’t launder themselves as the oak repaired the broken-off twig, and dirty dishes didn’t revert to a time when they were clean. The current that moved strongly through the structure — call it the Methuselah current — flowed secondarily through things that stood on the house’s floors and hung on its walls; but it must not be able to invade and maintain items that were smaller and less stationary.

What of the people who lived here?

In Kenny’s grim and tumultuous future, the owner of Roseland called himself Constantine Cloyce, perhaps because in the chaos of that time, he no longer needed to conceal his true identity behind false ones. Perhaps people in that coming age were so preoccupied with defending and feeding their families and themselves that they had no curiosity about the past. If there was no Internet or TV or radio possible under that turbulent yellow sky, and if what public records existed were moldering in the drawers of buildings gone to ruins, he did not have to periodically change his name and to some degree his appearance. He didn’t have to pretend to be Noah Wolflaw or a South American heir to a mining fortune. He could be in name who he had always been in fact: Constantine Cloyce.

Logic insisted that the residents of Roseland were even less place-fixed than were tableware and clothes, and therefore weren’t guaranteed immortality merely by living within those walls. They must age normally and, perhaps every few decades, have to undertake some regimen or undergo some process to revert to their youth.

Dropping thirty or forty years overnight, losing gray hair and wrinkles and weight and the effects of gravity on the face that came with age, they would appear to be new people, nearly unrecognizable as who they had been. They would need to do hardly more than change their names and hairstyles to pass for new residents of Roseland, especially as they were reclusive, having little contact with locals.

I remembered Victoria Mors saying that she never did anything dangerous, and now I understood why. Maybe they were able to undo the effects of aging and reverse the ravages of disease, but they were not invulnerable. They could be shot and killed or they could perish in an accident.

For the same reason, Henry Lolam took three of his eight weeks of vacation and then returned to Roseland. He felt safer within its walls. Immortality made him a prisoner of Roseland, and he was his own jailer.

Although I had scores of questions, I had fewer now than just an hour earlier. Those for which I most urgently wanted answers all involved the nameless boy.

If Noah Wolflaw was in fact Constantine Cloyce, then the spirit rider of the stallion was Madra Cloyce, his wife from the 1920s, which was when she must have been shot and killed, back when there had been horses on the estate.

I remembered how she had hesitated and seemed frustrated when, in the subcellar of the mausoleum, among the corpses, I asked her if she was Noah Wolflaw’s wife. With her answers limited to a nod or a shake of the head, she could not tell me that Wolflaw was Cloyce, and that she was therefore the wife of both.

The nameless boy was no longer nameless. He was the son of Madra and Constantine, who was supposed to be dead. He had died young. His name — Timothy — was on a plaque beneath the burial niche in the mausoleum wall where his ashes were supposedly interred, but obviously he was alive.

From where had Noah Wolflaw — Cloyce — taken him, and why did the boy want more than anything to be taken back there? If he was nine-year-old Timothy, why was he still nine all these decades later? Why didn’t they let him grow up and then maintain himself as did the rest of them? Had they kept him a child for almost ninety years?

The answers couldn’t be found in the shadow of Enceladus. They waited to be discovered in the main house.

From the northwest, caissons of dark clouds rolled in on silent wheels, though I expected that they would raise some thunder before the day was done. The pending storm had conquered a third of the sky, and it was moving faster than before to secure the heavens from horizon to horizon.

For some reason, anticipating the storm, I thought of Victor Frankenstein at work high in the old mill that, in the movie though not the book, served as his laboratory, harnessing bolts of lightning to bring his creation to life, the shambling thing with a criminal’s brain and a merciless graveyard heart.

The only route by which I could return to the barricaded house was through the mausoleum, by way of the mural based on Franchi’s painting of a guardian angel and child.

Alert for the thrum of bat wings, motivated to move fast by the memory of those curved incisors, I sprinted across the lawn, hurried through the grove of oaks in stasis, and ran overland through fields and hills where plants still waxed and waned as Nature intended.

En route, I found that the vision of Frankenstein’s old mill came repeatedly into my mind’s eye. I didn’t at first know why the image nagged at me.

As I approached the mausoleum from the south, that mind’s eye blinked, and the old mill assaulted by lightning became the guest tower in the eucalyptus grove at Roseland. The bronze dome atop that stone structure featured an unusual finial resembling a giant version of the stem, crown, and case bow of an old pocket watch. And the secret of Roseland had to do with time.…

My apartment and Annamaria’s occupied the lower twenty feet of that sixty-foot tower. The winding stairs leading from the ground floor to the second also led to a third and final level. The keys we’d been given did not unlock the door at the top of those stairs.

Being ever curious, I’d tried and failed to learn what occupied those upper forty feet. I’m not one of those snoops with an unhealthy inquisitiveness that Big Brother hires by the tens of thousands these days. But I have learned that when my gift draws me to a new place where I am needed, my chances of survival increase if, upon arrival, I scope the territory for trapdoors, deadfalls, and hidden snares.

Now I halted on the south lawn of the mausoleum, out of sight of the main house, considering whether I should return to the guest tower, after all. On the way, I could stop by Jam Diu’s place and borrow an axe from the unused landscaping tools. The events of the day had put me in a mood to chop something, even if it had to be only a door.

After a hesitation, I felt drawn toward the main house more than to the guest tower. Time was surely out of joint in both places, but if the hands on the clock of apocalypse were spinning toward a catastrophe, I needed to get to the boy soon.