Odd Apocalypse

Thirty-seven

A frightened, angry, four-hundred-pound, antisocial chef with a combat shotgun never leads to anything good.

I slipped away from the door between Chef Rambo’s office and the pantry. Eased through the dark. Found the other door by the thin line of light that glowed at the bottom of it. Entered the kitchen. Left the kitchen. I crept along a hallway where one door or another might suddenly be flung open by a Roselander, whereupon I’d be discovered and sternly reprimanded for not remaining behind locked doors in the guest tower — or shot.

When I reached a side hall and then a discreet service door to the main drawing room, I ducked into that vast space, which felt like a stately common room on some exceedingly formal luxury liner from a distant era, which in the movies are peopled by beautiful women in glamorous gowns and men in tuxedos and platoons of waiters in white jackets serving drinks on silver trays. Islands of Persian carpets offered several arrangements of furniture, armchairs and side chairs and sofas and chaises enough to seat a quarter of high society’s top four hundred.

The windows were shuttered. None of the Tiffany lamps glowed. Of the five chandeliers, only the one in the center of the room provided light.

Directly under that glitteration of candle-shaped lamp bulbs and pendant crystals stood a circular banquette that surrounded a twice-life-size statue of the Greek god Pan. Pan had the head and chest and arms of a man, the ears and horns and legs of a goat, and he was badly in need of a fig leaf.

The periphery of the room was curtained with shadow. The corners folded away in the dark.

My intention was to slip around the darker part of the chamber, staying well away from horny Pan, until I came to another service door, hidden in the wall paneling, catercorner from the one through which I had entered. That would take me to a short hallway that also served the library, where I hoped to climb the circular bronze stairs to the second floor.

I was still about six acres away from my destination when I heard hurried footsteps on marble. Through the deep, columned archway that separated the drawing room from the better-lighted foyer, I saw Noah Wolflaw — alias Cloyce — and Paulie Sempiterno, both with shotguns, coming this way.

Allergic as I am to buckshot, I dropped to my hands and knees and hid behind a sofa.

Even as the madman and his chief lieutenant arrived in the drawing room, a door opened toward the farther end of the chamber, perhaps the one I had used. Others joined Cloyce and Sempiterno at the center of the big room, under the lit chandelier, beside the shameless Pan.

Peering warily around the end of the sofa and over a forest of furniture, I discovered that Jam Diu and Mrs. Tameed had arrived. The gardener carried a shotgun. Mrs. Tameed, almost a foot taller than Mr. Diu, wore a gun belt with a holster on each hip, and in her right hand she held one of a pair of door-buster handguns, aimed at the ceiling.

The pistol-packing Swede could have kicked a lion in the butt and made it mewl like a frightened kitten. Jam Diu looked like Buddha gone bad.

The room had excellent acoustics, and I could hear everything they said. Victoria Mors had gone missing. She wasn’t in her private rooms, and she didn’t answer when called on her Talkabout, which was evidently a walkie-talkie that they all carried to keep in touch in the immense house. They were certain she’d been in the main residence when the shutters went down.

Not in the least embarrassed to declare the obvious, Paulie Sempiterno said, “Something’s wrong.”

That something was me.

Mrs. Tameed said, “Where’s that phony [expletive deleted] little [expletive deleted] bastard?”

Again, that would be me.

“Henry called from the gatehouse earlier,” Cloyce said, “after the shutters fell here. Thomas was pounding on the door down there, trying to get in. The freaks were after him.”

“Then he’s dead,” Jam Diu said.

Mrs. Tameed said, “Probably he’s dead. But don’t underestimate the [expletive deleted], [expletive deleted], [hyphenated expletive deleted] creep.”

Considering that Mrs. Tameed was far older than she appeared, I wondered if, under another name, she had worked in the Nixon White House.

“If he was out of the house when the shutters went down,” said Jam Diu, “then he can’t have gotten in again. Let’s not waste time worrying about him. He’s just an ignorant clocker.”

Clocker. Not cocker.

“Even a clocker can catch a lucky break now and then,” Paulie Sempiterno said.

“I’m more concerned there might have been a shutter breach,” Jam Diu said.

“There’s no shutter breach,” Cloyce assured him. “Whatever has happened to her, it’s not a freak that’s gotten her.”

They agreed to search the house for Victoria Mors, working in teams of two, always staying on the same floor, starting at the top of the house.

“She’s not in my suite,” Cloyce said. “But there’s a lot of other territory to search. Every damn closet, every corner. Let’s move.”

They all left the drawing room through the columned arch and, from the foyer, took the stairs to the second floor.

I settled from my hands and knees onto my side behind the sofa, and then rolled onto my back. Spears and daggers and darts of light, cast up from the pendant crystals of the chandelier, were frozen in bright violent patterns on the center of the plaster ceiling, but darkness bled away to the walls.

Clocker. I was a clocker because I was certain to age and die, at the mercy of the ticking clock. Being able somehow periodically to restore their youthful appearance and health, they were what Victoria had called “Outsiders, with no limits, no rules, no fears.”

They were also delusional. Reality imposes limits whether we choose to recognize them or not. These so-called Outsiders might be as bright as the prismatic reflections that the faceted crystals threw on the ceiling, but they were no less surrounded by darkness than were those spear-point patterns of light.

Perhaps these people did live without rules, at least in the sense that they acknowledged no natural law, but I had seen how fear circumscribed their lives. Victoria Mors would do nothing risky, lest she die by accident. Henry Lolam could not bear to be long outside the walls of the estate, because proximity to Tesla’s machinery and the Methuselah current was his best insurance of great longevity.

I could see now why Henry fantasized about having a close encounter of the third kind, during which aliens would grant him immortality. He wanted to live forever, but without the bonds that tied him so tightly to Roseland. They were all to one degree or another prisoners of this estate, psychologically if not physically.

The longer that they lived, the longer they wanted to live. And the longer they lived, the more their world shrank. Their spectrum of experience grew narrower year by year. Their sociopathic arrogance, their sense of godlike power, and their contempt for clockers were continuously distilled into an ever more poisonous brew.

I wondered who these people were with whom Constantine Cloyce formed the deranged community of Roseland. Did all of them date back to the 1920s, were they his servants then? What had been the original names that they had outlived?

If they were all from that time, I suspected that they must be far more insane than I yet knew. The gauntlet I must run to save the boy would be bristling with more and sharper spears than the arsenal of prismatic lights on the ceiling.

Thoughts of longevity brought me inevitably to memories of Stormy Llewellyn, who had died so young. Of necessity, I had come to be at peace with my loss, to live with a certain emptiness but not with a constant anguish. Now a melancholy ache weighed me to the floor longer than I intended to lie there. It seemed to me that if Nikola Tesla could have defeated Death by inventing a fantastical machine, I should have defeated the Reaper by being smarter and quicker than I was on that desperate day in Pico Mundo when I became the eternal lover of a woman I could never again kiss in this world.

Having given the four searchers plenty of time to ascend to the second floor and to proceed away from Cloyce’s suite of rooms, I got to my feet, drew the pistol from my holster, picked up the pillowcase sack, and slipped shadowlike along the dark perimeter of the drawing room.

Some there be that shadows kiss; / Such have but a shadow’s bliss.

By those words is the prince of Arragon described in The Merchant of Venice when he fails to choose correctly and, by his wrong choice, loses all hope of wedding Portia.

My friend Ozzie Boone, writer of mysteries, used to mock me for having been an indifferent student in school and especially for knowing nothing of Shakespeare. Since leaving Pico Mundo, as time permits, I have immersed myself in the works of the Bard. Initially, I read the plays and the sonnets for the simple pleasure of seeing Ozzie’s pride in me when one day I returned to my hometown. But soon I read them to glimpse a world that was so right in Shakespeare’s time but that has gone so wrong in ours.

His words, written over four hundred years ago, often encourage me and keep my spirits high. But sometimes lines come to me that strum a darker chord, and they pierce as I would much prefer not to be pierced.

Some there be that shadows kiss; / Such have but a shadow’s bliss.