Odd Apocalypse

Forty-one

Previously I mentioned my high-school yearbook photo in which I looked foolish and clueless. With Timothy’s revelation, I felt my features settling into that too-familiar expression.

Earlier in the day, in the boy’s suite, when Mrs. Tameed didn’t know that I was hiding in the next room, she reminded him that he was different from the rest of them, and she called him “dead boy.” I had thought those words were a threat. I didn’t realize she meant them literally.

“His first round shot me off the horse, killed me instantly. The second took down Magic but didn’t kill him. I’m told my mother rode the horse to its knees as he lined up his third shot, with which he killed her. Then he walked to the stallion and finished it. He shot her twice again, too, though she was dead.”

I didn’t dare allow myself to be distracted by any revelation, no matter how stunning, even if it struck me as an impossible claim. The searchers would soon be descending to the basement, if they were not there already, just a few minutes away from discovering Victoria Mors.

It now occurred to me, in light of the bondage games she played with Cloyce, that Victoria might perversely have enjoyed it when I punched her, bound her, and ultimately gagged her.

I know that she enormously enjoyed repeatedly spitting in my face.

Removing the broken blade from the hacksaw, I watched my hands trembling as I said, “Dead. I don’t understand. You can’t be dead. You’re here alive.”

That bell-clear, choirboy voice was characterized again by a solemnity too grave for a child. “Did you go to the mausoleum, as I told you to?”

“Yes. Down into the cellar … the subcellar.”

Even in the warm light of the lamp, his face was ashen and his lips were pale. “So you have seen.”

“Yes.”

“Do you know about Nikola Tesla?”

“Yeah. Built under the estate, into the property wall … some machine that … manages time.”

“The buildings and the grounds,” Timothy said, “are kept in a state of — well, you could call it suspended animation, though it isn’t that.”

“Stasis,” I offered.

“But the current that sustains the estate doesn’t keep the people young. When they grow older than they wish to be, they have to use another part of the machine in the top of—”

“—the guest tower,” I said as I fitted the new blade to the pins of the hacksaw. “I haven’t seen it. That was just a guess.”

My tremors made the work harder than it should have been, and I wondered at the reason for them. Nothing Timothy had told me was worse than the things that I had previously discovered in Roseland.

He said, “They call that part of the machine the chronosphere. If you think of the past as the depths of time and the present as the surface, then the thing moves through time like a bathysphere moves in the ocean. At least it does in one direction.”

I adjusted the tension on the new blade. My hands shook worse than ever, as if I had succumbed to the confusion of time in Roseland and had aged to the point where I was afflicted with Parkinson’s disease.

“When they ride it back in time,” the boy continued, “the years fall away from them. Their bodies grow young and fit because bodies are material things. And though the effects of age on their brains are repaired as well, their personalities and knowledge and memories are unaffected because the mind is incorporeal.”

“So why don’t they age when they return to the present?”

“Because they don’t return through time. They return outside of time. The chronosphere isn’t just a time machine that travels back and then forward, but it also moves to the side, through the membrane that separates time and what lies outside of time. I don’t pretend to understand it. I don’t think any of them do. Only Tesla knew, and he might be the only one capable of understanding. And Einstein.”

From the back of my mind, a half-formed dark idea beckoned to me like a phantom haunting the far end of a room. I tried to close a mental door on it, fearful of engaging it because I sensed that if I gave this idea consideration, I would inevitably act upon it, and by doing so would destroy myself and everything that mattered to me. Now I knew the reason for my tremors.

The ageless boy said, “They just ride the machine back and then return. It isn’t advisable to get out of it in some other time.”

“But it’s possible to do so?”

“You can set the controls so the chronosphere will park in some other year. You can get out to explore any point in the past. But it isn’t done.”

“Why not?”

“The ramifications of time touring are beyond knowing. Better not to take risks. It seems clear, from what Nikola Tesla discovered, that you can’t change anything about the past because it’s set. What you do there can’t change your future. What has happened will happen. Any change you make back there is undone by … call it fate. But the unknown risks are still considered too great.”

I overcame my tremors and slid the new blade into the score line on the bracelet. “But your father used the machine in just that way.”

“He didn’t intend to kill me, only my mother. Once the shooting was done, he had one moment of remorse.”

Sawing at the bracelet, I said, “He rode the chronosphere back to some point before he killed you. He parked there.”

“Shortly after it happened, he went back in time. He was waiting in the stable when my mother arrived with me. He took a handgun with him and shot her to death in front of me.”

Earlier, speaking of the moment that his mother had been shot while riding Magic, the boy had said, I never saw him kill my mother that time.

That time.

“He didn’t shoot Magic, only her. But when he brought me back with him to present-time Roseland, the stallion was still dead on the front lawn. And so was my mother. And so was I.”

I raised the hacksaw from the bracelet.

Each time I looked directly into the boy’s bottomless eyes, I was profoundly disquieted to see such a deeply wounded soul gazing out at me from the prison of his ageless body. Nevertheless, I was compelled to look, so he might see in my eyes that I understood his terrible anguish, without my having to speak of it.

“ ‘What has happened will happen,’ ” I said, repeating his words to me. “ ‘Call it fate.’ ”

By taking his son out of the settled history of the past, by taking him outside of time and then back to the present, Constantine Cloyce had created a paradox. I knew all about time paradoxes from movies and books, but none the equal of this one. If you thought too much about it, your mind would tie itself into a Gordian knot that could be neither untied nor cut.

Timothy said, “They put my mother’s body in the subcellar of the mausoleum, so he could look at her whenever he wanted, for reasons only his twisted mind can fathom. Sempiterno and Lolam — whose names then were Carlo Luca and James Durnan — worked through the night with Chiang to get the horse off the lawn and into a grave in the meadow.”

Setting to work with the hacksaw again, I said, “And your body? I mean … the body of that other Timothy?”

“The bullet had passed through. There was no way to know with what weapon I … he had been shot. So they jammed the corpse into the footspace in front of the passenger’s seat in my mother’s car. Glenda drove it very far south along the Coast Highway and parked it in a lay-by that was a lonely place back in those days. Sondra followed in another vehicle. They smeared my mother’s blood on the driver’s seat and floorboards, and left her car there with the doors wide open.”

“An attempted kidnapping gone wrong?”

“That’s what the cops were meant to assume.”

“The bad guys took your mother but then she died on them before a ransom could be demanded.”

“Something like that.”

“And the cops bought it?”

“My father was widely respected. Besides, certain authorities could be bought then, just like certain of them can be bought now. He knew who, and how to do the buying.”

“It must have been a big story.”

“Not as big as you think. Remember, he owned lots of newspapers. He reined in his editors. And he had enough dirt on his competitors to rein them in, too. He had no political enemies, as William Hearst did, and when he withdrew into Roseland in apparent grief and became to all appearances a depressed recluse, they let him alone.”

“Your ashes … the other Tim’s ashes are in an urn in the wall of the mausoleum.”

“Yes.”

“Whose ashes are in her urn?”

“No one’s. Officially, her body was never found. Her interment was strictly symbolic. Of course there aren’t ashes in my father’s urn, either.”

The blade sawed through the last of the link, and the monitoring bracelet slipped off his wrist.

“For years, I was kept under lock and key, or literally on a leash, until technology developed that allowed them to monitor me like this.”

I dropped the saw and got to my feet.

As he rose from the armchair, Timothy said, “I’m dead. Yet I’m alive. The thread of my life was cut off that night, yet here I am. My mind has grown complex, mature, but physically I never change. I’ve lived as an adolescent and as an adult only through books, only by reading about life beyond nine. I’m a boy forever, and already I’ve been a boy longer than I can bear.”