Odd Apocalypse

Forty-two

I’d pretty much had enough. Enough death. Enough crazy. Enough surprises of the kind that didn’t come with a party hat. Enough weirdness. Enough of Roseland. If they ever turned this place into a bed-and-breakfast, they weren’t going to get an endorsement from me.

I led Timothy cautiously into the south hall on the second floor. The house was so quiet that I might have thought I’d gone deaf if my intestines hadn’t been grumbling about my indulgence in Shilshom’s quiche and cheesecake.

According to Timothy, Nikola Tesla’s uncannily silent machinery not only managed time but, harnessing the thermodynamic consequences that arose from that management, also produced all of the power that the estate needed. It was in essence a perpetual-motion machine, a perfect example of green energy. Well, except for the humanoid pigs hell-bent on killing anything that crossed their path.

Also according to Timothy, several years usually passed between those occasions when the fantastical machinery for some reason pulled moments of the future into the present, though sometimes it happened more frequently. I was just lucky enough to arrive at the height of the season, which was way more exciting than being in Vermont when the trees put on their autumn colors.

Until the visitors from Kenny Mountbatten’s hideous future were no longer phasing in and out of this current moment in Roseland’s history, until the steel shutters went up, the only way out of the main house was the way that I had sneaked into it.

After Constantine Cloyce and his crew found Victoria behind the boilers in the furnace room, the lot of them would come charging up from the basement in unrighteous indignation, looking for a fry cook to kill. We had to be in position to get past them and out through the copper-clad tunnel to the mausoleum.

I didn’t like the open sweep of the main stairs. I didn’t like the complete exposure of the spiral bronze stairs in the library. I didn’t like either set of service stairs because they were the ones most likely to be used by a spitting-mad Victoria Mors and her kinky coconspirators.

The only thing I liked was being beamed wherever we wanted to go, as in Star Trek, but such a convenient mode of travel hadn’t been invented yet. With pistol in hand, I led the boy to the farther end of the south hallway, past the entrance to the library mezzanine, and along the west wing to the front service stairs.

I may not be able to chew gum and play basketball at the same time or even play basketball without gum, but I can think fast on my feet. I have to, because I never plan ahead. There’s no point to planning ahead when any damn crazy thing can happen around me at any moment. Since I tend to make it up as I go along, I have got to be quick about making decisions when the crunch comes.

Unlike me, Timothy had a plan. He’d given his situation a lot of thought. He wanted to be taken to the chronosphere, to travel not to the night his mother was murdered, but instead to a time in 1915 that was certain to be before he had been conceived in her womb. He hoped that, entering time before he had existed, he would cease to exist.

Over the years, in his most despondent moments, he considered suicide but opted against it because he didn’t believe his father would let him go that easily. If Constantine had ever loved his son, he had not loved him for many decades. But the elder Cloyce was ever passionate about his wealth, his possessions, his toys, and he would not tolerate having anything of his taken from him. By Constantine’s way of thinking, the boy was his property, and he would surely try to undo the suicide by going back in time to just before the event, and bring to the present a Timothy who had not yet self-destructed. Then they would keep the boy in even more restricted circumstances, and his existence would be more intolerable than ever.

I was sure he was right about that. But I wasn’t sure he could know what would happen if he traveled back to a time before he had been conceived. The paradox he now represented might be a fraction as complicated as the one he would create with his plan.

Besides, even if his destiny had been to die at nine, back in 1925, and even if the prospect of living as a perpetual child was intolerable to him, I was disturbed about helping him to commit, via the chronosphere, what might be at best a passive suicide. I wanted hope for him, and hope lay in freedom, not in surrender.

Thinking on my feet as we descended the front service stairs, I decided that before we went to the third floor of the guest tower, we would go to the second. Annamaria might be as enigmatic as any character Alice met on the other side of the looking glass, but I knew she would be wiser about Timothy than I would be, considering the pathetic Odd Thomas Standard of Wisdom that she had to exceed.

When we reached the ground floor without being shot or spat upon, I chose to continue down to the basement, though the search team might still be on that level. The point of reconnoitering is to discover what lies ahead, and the danger of reconnoitering is being discovered by what lies ahead before you discover it.

Going down, I glanced back a couple of times, to be sure the boy was staying close, which he was. The second time, he smiled at me to acknowledge my concern, the first smile of his I’d seen. He might be ninety-five and counting, but he was boy enough and vulnerable enough to break your heart with that smile.

Right then, I knew that I would fail him.

His trusting smile was significant in the way that, during some buddy-cop movies, it is reliably significant when in Act 2 the lesser star tells the bigger star that he is going to ask the lesser female lead to marry him. No more than three scenes later, he will be as dead as dead gets, and the bigger star will have the motivation he needs to walk safely through a hailstorm of bullets, slaughter twenty gangsters, and become teary-eyed without anyone thinking that he’s a sissy.

The vast majority of movies aren’t concerned about imitating life, because life avoids the clichés that make for big box office. But sometimes life imitates movies, usually to devastating effect and without the compensation of popcorn.

At the bottom of the stairwell, the door stood wide open to the basement corridor. I hesitated on the last step, listening.

Nobody here but us chickens. I never have fully understood that saying. Chickens can’t talk, and even if they could talk, to whom would they say such a thing?

The air contained a faint ozone scent, as it had for the past few hours. I could smell nothing else — and could hear nothing at all.

I motioned for Timothy to stay where he was while I eased through the open door.

On the farther side of the hallway, doors stood wide or half open, as if the searchers had been in too much of a hurry to bother closing up behind themselves.

To the right, the length of the corridor was deserted all the way to the wine cellar.

Immediately to my left, the door to the construction shack that linked the house of the present to the undeveloped land of 1921 stood mostly open, and I could see the draftsman tables, the desks, the old wooden filing cabinets.

If the searchers were still working the basement, they would have been making noise. The deep silence suggested they had found Victoria, freed her, and returned upstairs to hunt down and smack down one ignorant clocker who didn’t know his place in the scheme of things.

I glanced back at Timothy, still in the stairwell, and motioned for him to join me. I wanted him at my side, so that I could grab him and move him with me quickly if suddenly we needed to get out of sight in a room either to the left or right.

Long corridors are dangerous places. If well-armed people are looking for you, you’re exposed to gunfire from one end to the other, in a space that, for the shooter, has all the benefits of an indoor target range.

The best thing you can do is to cover the territory in a timely manner, though it’s not easy to move fast and be silent. The tendency is to adopt the Sylvester-the-Cat-stalking-Tweety-Bird exaggerated, high-speed tiptoe, which makes you look ridiculous and, anyway, never works that well for Sylvester.

I instructed Timothy to strive for quiet by cleverly raising one finger to my lips, and then side by side we walked quickly from the west end of the hallway toward the wine cellar at the farther end. The laundry was the next-to-last room on the right, and as we passed it, I saw that the door was open, though I had left it closed, which meant the searchers had been here and gone.

The door to the furnace room stood open as well, but before we quite got to it, Jam Diu stepped out of there, in front of us, his shotgun leveled at me.

My pistol was aimed at the concrete floor, so that my best hope of wounding him was with a calculated ricochet that not even Annie Oakley would have expected to pull off.

“Drop it,” Jam Diu demanded as we came to a halt.

There was no doubt that he could squeeze the trigger of the 12-gauge and chop us with buckshot before I could bring up the Beretta and fire. But if I dropped the weapon, we were finished anyway. They would return Timothy to his prison, and the nicest thing Constantine Cloyce would do to me was carve me up like he did those women and put my body in the subcellar of the mausoleum, even though I wasn’t his preferred gender.

“I said drop it,” Jam Diu reminded me, as though he thought I had the shortest attention span in the world.

“Well,” I said.

Frowning, he said, “Is that my Beretta?”

Conversation was better than blasting at each other. You never know when even a most disagreeable conversation might take a positive turn.

“Yes, sir. Yes, it is. It’s your Beretta.”

“You stole my Beretta.”

“No, sir. I’m no thief. I borrowed it.”

With rough affection, he said, “That is a wonderful pistol. I adore that pistol.”

“Well, to be honest, I don’t even like guns. But the way things have been going, I thought I might need one sooner than later. Like now.”

“You broke into my rooms,” he said, clearly offended that I had so little respect for his privacy.

“No, sir. I used a key.”

“Constantine is a flaming idiot.”

“That was Mr. Sempiterno’s opinion earlier today.”

“Why would Constantine bring you and that … that woman here?”

I shared with him one of my main theories: “Subconsciously he may be weary of all this and want someone to bring it to an end.”

“Don’t Freud me, fry cook. Freud is a load of horseshit.”

“Well, there’s also the fact Annamaria is uncannily persuasive.”

“I don’t find the bitch in the least persuasive.”

“With all due respect, sir, you’ve not spoken to her. Give her a chance, and you’ll see.”

“Put down the pistol nice and easy.”

Now that he recognized the gun as his, he didn’t want me just to drop it. Apparently, even extremely wealthy immortals have a strong attachment to their stuff.

“Well,” I said.

Timothy said, “Chiang, just let us go to the chronosphere. Let me go back where I belong.”

I thought “let us go to the chronosphere” sounded like it should have been an old David Bowie song. Even in moments of peril, my mind takes curious detours.

The gardener had dropped his benign Zen persona along with his pretense of being a gardener. Hatred pulled his round face long, and in his eyes reflections of the overhead lights seemed to flicker like serpent tongues.

“If I had my way, boy, I’d slit you open and let you die trying to stuff your intestines back in yourself. And then I’d bring you back from ten minutes ago and do it all over again.”

“Well,” I said, because this didn’t seem to be one of those disagreeable conversations that was likely to take a positive turn.

Perhaps realizing that the years of his imprisonment might be only the prelude to the horrors that an inventive man like this could visit upon him, Timothy sidled closer to me.

“One last chance to put the gun down, fry cook. Otherwise I blow you away and maybe bring both of you back for more.”

“Killing me once will be enough, sir. I don’t want to put you to any trouble.”

Because I couldn’t think of anything else to do, I bent my knees slightly and began to lower the adored Beretta to the floor, doing it slow and easy, as he had suggested, in fact so slow and so easy that I might live to see another birthday before I finally released the weapon.

I was hoping that some brilliant maneuver would occur to me and that I would astonish him as Jackie Chan astonished his foes in those martial-arts movies. But I’m no Jackie Chan, and as it turned out, the porkers pulled my bacon from the fire.

Twenty feet behind Jam Diu, the wine-cellar door flew open, and one of the freaks raged into the corridor. It wasn’t a hunchback with a misshapen head and too-long arms, but was instead one of those that might be called a normal specimen of their kind. In the hoggish head: a leering mouth of rending teeth, the fleshy nostrils in the dripping snout, the yellow eyes like the fevered glare of something crawling through the moss-hung darkness of a swamp dream.

The beast had evidently discovered the guardian-angel door in the mausoleum wall, which I had been unable to close. It had found its way through cellar, subcellar, and tunnel to this moment of reckoning.

Jam Diu swung toward the door when it crashed open, but the swine thing was quicker than it appeared to be. It seized his right arm and snapped it like a dry stick. As Jam Diu, prince of time and a god among mere men, screamed, the buckshot tore harmlessly into the ceiling.

While this was happening, I shouted to Timothy to run, but he was already on the move. I chased after him, thankful that I hadn’t put down the Beretta, although in these close quarters and against these beasts, a 9-mm pistol promised to be about as effective as fighting a T. rex with a set of lawn darts.

Two-thirds of the way to the west service stairs, down which we had come in more halcyon times, three minutes earlier, I glanced back and saw Jam Diu coming apart in ways I refuse to remember. Behind the first freak, a second entered the corridor, and behind the second came a third.