Odd Apocalypse (19 page)

Apparently Mr. Jam Diu worried about something more aggressive than aphids and bark beetles.

The pistols and revolvers were in the bottom two drawers of a highboy. So much for the screwdriver. I put it in the back of the lowest drawer and, from the selection of six handguns, I chose a Beretta Px4 Storm. Double-action 9 mm with a four-inch barrel. Seventeen-round magazine.

He had a spare magazine. I loaded both with copper-jacketed, low-recoil rounds. Through my mind’s eye ran the primate swine in the tall grass, and I dropped a box of twenty rounds in one sports-jacket pocket.

In the drawers were simple, premium-leather, double-thick, concealed-carry, belt-slider holsters custom to each of the handguns, with a built-in spare magazine carrier. My belt threaded easily through the eyelets, and in two minutes, the loaded 9 mm was on my hip, under my jacket.

And so it would soon begin. I hoped that I wouldn’t have to shoot anything but swine—and that the definition of
swine
would remain strictly biological.

Spare linens were kept in the bedroom closet. I took a bath towel and a pillowcase. I wrapped the hacksaw in the towel and put the towel in the pillowcase, which made a good sack.

I intended to do my best not to be seen as I went about the business at hand. But if I encountered someone, I could justify the sack somehow—perhaps by saying that I was going on a picnic in the meadow and that the sack contained my lunch—whereas explaining a hacksaw would be more difficult.

With luck, I wouldn’t run into anyone until I had thought of a better story than the stupid picnic.

In the living room, before leaving, I paused to scan the fifty or so volumes in a bookcase. They were mostly tomes of ponderous philosophy, though there were four thick books of photography too tall for the shelves and laid flat.

Every volume in that quartet was about Hong Kong. The photos presented the city as it had been in the late nineteenth century and on through every decade until the current day.

Jam Diu sounded Vietnamese to me. But I’m just an ignorant psychic fry cook who knows nothing more about Asian cultures than he knows about molecular biology.

Hong Kong had once been a British colony. Now it was a Chinese province. The groundskeeper spoke English without either an Asian or a British accent.

Jam Diu might not be his real name. In fact, if Roseland was as much a nexus of deceptions and conspiracies as it appeared to be, his name was more likely to be Mickey Mouse than Jam Diu. Whatever his name, I thought perhaps he was sometimes homesick for Hong Kong.

I left the building, locking everything behind me, and returned to the cover of the trees and wild fields.

The temptation was to feel safer now that I was well-armed, but I didn’t allow myself to be tempted. Experience had taught me that overconfidence is an invitation to the Fates to bring onstage two or three muscle-bound guys in porkpie hats, who want to lock me in a walk-in freezer until I fully solidify or intend to toss me into the giant revolving drum of a concrete-mixer truck and pour me into the footing of a new sewage-treatment plant.

Guys who wear porkpie hats are always, in my experience, up to no good—and pleased about it. Whether that style of headwear turns previously benign men into sociopaths or whether men who are already sociopaths are drawn to that style is one of those mysteries
that will never be solved, though the Department of Justice has probably funded a score of scientific studies of the issue.

As I headed east-southeast, the clouds coming in from the north loomed at my back. But the sky ahead was so blue and the land so sun-drenched that, under other circumstances, I might have wandered happily through the meadow while singing “The Sound of Music.”

Of course, one must always remember that although
The Sound of Music
is the most feel-good movie musical of all time, it is crammed full of Nazis.

Carrying the hacksaw disguised as a picnic lunch in a pillowcase sack, I approached the mausoleum from the south, first through weedy fields and then across forty or fifty feet of lawn as flawless and lush as that in an erotic dream about a golf course.

The forty-foot-square, windowless limestone megatomb boasted an elaborate cornice and carved panels depicting stylized sunrises and Edenesque landscapes. The entrance, a ribbed bronze door flanked by immense columns, wasn’t on the north side of the building, where it would have faced the house, but here on the south side.

According to Mrs. Tameed, superstition dictated the location of the entrance. The original owner had thought it would be bad luck to be able to look out of any window in the main house and see the door to this house of the dead.

The slab of bronze swung smoothly, soundlessly on ball-bearing hinges. As I eased the door shut behind me, I switched on the lights: three gold-leafed chandeliers and a series of wall sconces.

This enormous empty chamber would have been an ideal ballroom for a really cool Halloween party. Then I flashed on a mental image of people in harlequin masks waltzing with red-eyed primate
swine, and I decided that I’d rather spend that holiday evening alone, with the doors locked and the shades drawn, biting my fingernails to the quick.

Inlaid in the walls were glass-tile murals that re-created famous paintings with spiritual themes. In the spaces between those works of art were niches waiting to receive urns of ashes.

Only three niches were filled. After the founder of Roseland, Constantine Cloyce, and his family died, subsequent owners felt no eternal attachment to the property and chose to have their mortal remains interred elsewhere.

The nameless boy had told me to come here. Before returning to the main house to free him, I thought it wise to heed his advice.

He had urged me to “press the shield that the guardian angel holds high” in one of the mausoleum mosaics. I hadn’t realized until now that all fourteen of those reproductions were of works that included a guardian angel.

No titles of the paintings were given, but inlaid at the bottom of each mosaic was the surname of the artist: Domenichino, Franchi, Bonomi, Berrettini, Zucchi.…

Fortunately, not all of the angels had shields. And only the one in the Franchi piece was held high, to protect a child not from demons but from divine reproach.

The shield was reddish-brown and contained a lot of tiny pieces of colored glass. With a little trepidation, I swept my hand back and forth across the entire shield. Exactly nothing happened.

I rapped my knuckles here and there on the shield, listening for a hollow spot. I didn’t hear one.

As I began to think I had chosen the wrong mosaic, I noticed that one of the larger glass tiles, about an inch square, was not grouted to those that surrounded it. I pressed only that tile, felt it give a little,
pressed harder, harder still, and with a click it abruptly sank an inch into the wall.

Something hissed. And then with a low rumble, an entire section of limestone, seven feet high and four wide, containing the mural, rolled away from me. It retreated about three and a half feet before coming to a halt.

The main wall from which that section detached was eighteen inches thick, leaving a two-foot gap on each side, in which lights had come on automatically. A narrow flight of stairs led down both to the left and to the right.

I should have known that if I survived the challenges of my adventurous life long enough, one day I would have my Indiana Jones moment.

Supposing that these stairs led down to the same space, I chose those on the right. They were steep. I clung to the handrail, acutely aware of how ironic it would be if, after surviving endless assaults by numerous homicidal sociopaths, I stumbled and broke my neck.

Indeed, both sets of stairs descended to a nine-foot-high vault as large as the mausoleum above, which contained the most astonishing mechanical apparatus I had ever seen.

Along the center of the chamber were arrayed seven spheres, each maybe six feet in diameter, connected to the floor and the ceiling by a three-inch pole or pipe. The pipes were fixed, but the huge spheres rotated so fast that their surfaces were golden blurs, and though I knew that, even if hollow, they were solid forms, they almost looked like shining bubbles that might float away.

Along the north wall, except where the stairs terminated, and along the entire south wall, score upon score of bright flywheels in several sizes—some as small as CDs, others as large as ash-can lids—were arrayed atop a series of bell-shaped machine housings, to
which they were linked with gleaming pitmans, sliding blocks, and piston rods. The glimmering crank wrists at the end of the glossy connecting rods turned cranks in shafts, and the wheels spun, spun, spun, this one fast, that one faster, some clockwise, others counterclockwise, yet giving the impression of an intricate synchronization.

Now and then, from this flywheel or that, arising off its outer rim, series of golden sparks flew toward the ceiling. They were not really sparks but something for which I had no name, pulses of golden light shaped like raindrops, and they didn’t shoot out at high speed, like sparks, but glided to the ceiling, where they were absorbed into a mesh of copper wire more intricate in its abstract patterns than the most complex of Persian carpets.

But for the copper ceiling and the concrete walls, everything in the vault, all the visible parts of the strange machines, appeared to have been plated with precious metals, some with gold and others with silver. The vault reminded me of a jewel box, glittering and twinkling and shimmering all around.

The purpose of it all was beyond my comprehension, but perhaps the most amazing thing was that all those moving parts produced no sound, no hum or buzz, not one tick or creak. The only noise that rose from this busy assemblage was the faint whispery whoosh of displaced air as flywheels scooped up a draft and flung it forward, as the big spheres drew in atmospheres to rotate with them.

No parts could be engineered and machined to such perfection that friction was entirely eliminated, nor was any lubricant equal to the job. But no spot of grease or drip of oil could be seen; I detected no scent of them, either, no indication that lubrication was required, and yet no friction heat arose from those mechanisms.

The eeriness of such frantic motion occurring in utter silence can’t be overstated. I felt as though I had stepped into a realm of cosmic machinery between our dimension and another, where the
engine that maintained order in the universe raced on eternally in exquisite balance.

Nevertheless, the vault did not have a futuristic feeling. Some aspects of it struck me as Victorian, and other features had a Deco flavor. Rather than suggest a construct from the next millennium, it seemed antique, or not so much antique as timeless, as though it had existed forever.

The feeling of being watched, which never quite left me as long as I had been in Roseland, now grew more intense.

From the gleaming rims of racing flywheels, like tiny helium balloons, greater showers of honey-colored drops of light rose to the copper tapestry overhead. Their ascent was in contrast to all the rotational motion, and a sudden sense of buoyancy overcame me, not a positive feeling but a queasy expectation that I might drift off my feet and … away.

The deep, accented, disembodied voice that I had heard before dawn, when I approached this mausoleum as it glowed like a lamp, spoke now behind me: “I have seen you—”

I turned, but found no one.

“—where you have not yet been,” he whispered.

When I turned again, I saw a man with a mustache standing at the farther end of this service aisle that led between spheres and flywheels. Tall and gaunt, he wore a dark suit that hung loosely on his bony frame. By his appearance and solemn attitude, he reminded me of an undertaker.

Louder than before, he said, “I depend on you,” and he crossed the end of the room from this aisle to the next, disappearing behind the spheres.

I hurried after him, turned right, and peered into the next aisle. He was gone. I circled through the vault, but he had vanished as if he could walk through walls.

Spirits do not speak. But living men do not dematerialize like ghosts.

As for ghosts, when I turned once more, I came face-to-face with the woman in white, her long blond hair ribboned with fresh blood and tangled as it might have been by wind on the night when she took her last horseback ride.

Blood streaked her nightgown, too, and for the first time she manifested with three entrance wounds in her chest. The one directly over the heart and the one just below it had evidently been fired from close quarters because the fabric of the gown looked scorched around the wounds. The round that shattered her sternum had been fired from a greater distance than the other two; it had probably been the first shot and had most likely killed her instantly. That her murderer fired twice again at point-blank range, into her corpse, suggested rage of a singular intensity.

The weapon had surely been a powerful rifle. The large-caliber, high-velocity ammunition appeared to have caved in her chest.