Odd Apocalypse

Through the night to the stables, under the full moon, mother and son had fled on foot. An accomplished rider with or without a saddle, Madra took no time with tack but stood upon a mounting block, swung astride the horse, and pulled her boy up in front of her, instructing him to cling to the mane. She clung to it with her right hand, her left arm around her son, and they set off for the front gate at a canter, not risking a gallop that might unseat the boy, staying well clear of the main house.

The gatehouse wasn’t manned at night, when no visitors or stable hands needed to be screened for admittance. Madra meant to open the gates herself, ride into town, and perhaps call someone she knew and trusted—or even the authorities—to report that her husband drugged her and that he was engaged in contemptible activities to which their young child had been exposed.

When my hacksaw blade broke, I was snapped out of the mind movie that the boy’s words painted for me.

As I fished a spare blade from the packet that I had brought with the saw, Timothy said, “He was standing na*ed in the driveway, as pale as a ghost in the moonlight. We saw him with his rifle just a moment too late. I never saw him kill my mother that time, because he shot and killed me first.”

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.”

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.