Odd Apocalypse

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.

Thirty-six

IN THE MAUSOLEUM, THE MOSAIC OF THE FRANCHI painting remained recessed from the rest of the north wall, exposing the two sets of stairs that led down to the first cellar.

I had assumed that after a delay, the entrance to the secret world below would close automatically behind me. Now, standing to one side, I put a finger to the tile in the angel’s shield that I had pressed to unlock the door, but it remained countersunk, and the slab of stone did not move forward to plug the hole where it belonged.

After searching the wall at the head of one set of stairs and then at the head of the other, I found no switch. Intuition told me that I should waste no more time here. Events in Roseland were rapidly coming to a tipping point.

I went down into the first cellar where, along the center of the chamber, the seven golden spheres were spinning silently on the seven poles. The many flywheels flew without a sound, and from their outer rims, radiant drops of golden light glided to the tapestry of copper wires on the ceiling, where they were absorbed and transmitted along the elaborate patterns until they dimmed and vanished.

With my recent discovery of the primary purpose of the machinery—the management of time—I hoped to understand, if only dimly, how these various devices conspired to perform such an astonishing feat. But I was as mystified as ever.

Neither a gift for frying nor one of a psychic nature requires also that the recipient be a blazing genius. I knew other fry cooks, none of whom was likely to win a Nobel Prize in science. And when you can see the lingering dead and have occasional prophetic dreams, you tend to be too distracted either to become an international chess champion or to create the next Apple Inc.

At the spiral stairs in the corner, I went down again into the subcellar. In that lower space, six arrays of golden gears churned silently and ceaselessly in their silver tracks overhead, and the collection of dead women waited, their pinned-open eyes watchful unto eternity.

Perhaps here in the immediate presence of the machine—or a key part of the machine—the generated stasis was stronger even than it was elsewhere. Seated on the floor, leaning against the walls, the grisly trophies were as freshly dead as when the master of Roseland murdered them.

Corpses in stasis are still just corpses. But I wondered if in the quiet of the night their killer ever fell into a fever of guilt or a morbid despond, and if he then imagined that he might encounter these women on the move, their bloody wounds as compelling as stigmata, their accusing voices rough and half trapped in their necktie-throttled throats.

Anything I might do to him was so much less than he deserved.

Perhaps because the timeless cadavers were not bothered by creatures drawn to carrion, I realized that the house must have been free of insects and rodents when Tesla’s machine was first switched on. I’d seen no immortal spiders weaving infinite webs, no houseflies with an antique look, no rats grown wise from living fifty ratty lifetimes.

If such rats resided behind the wainscoting, there would be no reason to expect them to be sages. Even a lot of human beings grow no wiser past a certain age—or ever.

Constantine Cloyce—now Noah Wolflaw—had been seventy when he apparently faked his death in 1948. Now at the age of 134, he seemed to have learned neither humility nor the wisdom of moral living. And repeatedly telling me to shut up was hardly the sophisticated and amusing banter you expected from a man of his age and experience.

I crossed the subcellar to the door beyond which lay the copper-sheathed passageway that led underground to the main house. Through the glass tubes embedded in the walls, flares of golden light seemed to be moving simultaneously toward and away from the main residence, and I avoided looking at them to spare myself the queasiness and the confusion that I’d felt the first time I had been here.

In the wine cellar under the house, I didn’t proceed into the basement corridor as before. Instead, I took the narrow service stairs up to the ground floor.

I entered the kitchen with caution, in case Chef Shilshom might be preparing a banquet for a celebration worthy of Edgar Allan Poe’s Prince Prospero. In an apocalyptic time threatened by a plague called the Red Death, the prince threw a great party to deny his mortal nature. That hadn’t turned out well. I suspected that the several residents of Roseland would not fare any better than Prospero.

The only illumination came from two lights above the sinks. The windows were covered by steel shutters.

At the moment, no freaks hammered at those defenses, and the house was hushed. Maybe the pull and push of Tesla’s machine had shoved them back to their time, but I doubted it. Something about the silence struck me as ominous.

Off the kitchen lay a room that served as the chef’s office. I stepped inside and quietly closed the door.

Here Chef Shilshom planned menus, prepared shopping lists, and no doubt puzzled over the proper thing to serve the master of the house when next a young woman, resembling the late Mrs. Cloyce, was brought to Roseland to be tortured and murdered. Meals for special occasions are always tricky to plan.

Constantine Cloyce might be the only one whose sense of superiority, arising from his potential immortality, inspired him to murder mere mortal people as sport, but the others in this place were just as insane. Their madness was evidenced by the fact that they assisted him, either to continue to be allowed to live forever or because they saw no crime in killing mortals who would sooner or later die anyway.

None of them had lived so long that longevity itself could have driven them insane. I could imagine that, after a few hundred years, the repetitive character of human experience might lead to a tedium that would leave them chronically depressed or so desperate for new and more extreme sensations that torture and murder became a kind of Valium that relieved anxiety. But Cloyce was only 134, the others most likely younger. Something other than longevity accounted for their descent into one form of madness or another.

In Chef Shilshom’s office, a massive chair had been custom built to accommodate his bulk, its seat as wide as two of me, its castors as big as baseballs. When I sat in it, I felt like Jack in the castle at the top of the beanstalk.

The computer on this desk was the only one I’d seen on the main floor, though there were probably others in the wing that contained the servants’ suites. I switched it on, accessed the Internet, and went looking for Nikola Tesla.

Apparently Serbian, he was born on July 10, 1856, in Smiljan, which seemed to be either in Croatia or in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, or in a place called Lika, or in all three. It sounded sort of off-planet to me, but the problem was most likely just the semicoherence common to biography sites on the Web.

He died on January 7, 1943, in a two-room suite in the New Yorker Hotel, which was in New York and nowhere else. Two thousand people attended his funeral at St. John the Divine cathedral. Tesla was cremated, and his ashes were thereafter kept in a golden sphere at the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade.

More than one online source informed me that a golden sphere was Tesla’s favorite shape.

Hmmmm. Interesting.