Odd Apocalypse (28 page)

“What is is. It doesn’t matter why.”

“You’re not only a thinker, you’re a philosopher.”

He growled with disgust. “I wish some sonofabitch porkers would show up so I could shoot ’em.”

“Way in the future, huh? Sir, do you mean you have a time machine?”

He told me that he didn’t need any fornicating time machine, except that he didn’t use the term
fornicating
. Then he said, “It just happens. But only in Roseland. Never anywhere else. Sometimes I look up, sky’s blue for a minute, other times for a few hours, and the world’s not all crap like it has been most of my life. I’m here where the world’s not crap yet, instead of there.”

“Just look up and it happens?”

“Or turn around. Next thing, the blue goes away, the sky’s as yellow as a cat’s diarrhea, and everything’s screwed up again. It’s like something pulls me here, but then it pushes me back where I came from. It probably does the same with the porkers—pulls ’em here but then pushes ’em away.”

“That can’t be what Tesla built the machine to do.”

“What machine?”

“The pulling and pushing must be a side effect. The porkers in your time—are they just in your Roseland?”

“Hell, no. They keep popping up everywhere. They’re worse than cockroaches.”

“Why is your sky yellow?” I asked.

“Why is yours blue?”

I said, “It’s supposed to be blue.”

“Not where I come from.”

As we walked, he took the slung rifle off his shoulder and carried it at the ready.

Drawing my pistol, I said, “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing yet. Relax.”

After a while, I said, “If the sky’s yellow and your future is crawling with porker freaks, it must be a pretty hostile place.”

“You think?”

“Something must have happened between now and then.”

“What happens happens.”

“But what is the what that did?”

“Who knows? Maybe the war.”

“Nuclear war?”

“A few of ’em were nukes.”

“A
few
nuclear wars?”

“They were little ones.”

“How can a nuclear war be little?”

“And bio. Maybe that was worse.”

“Biological warfare?”

“And what they called the nano swarms.”

“What are nano swarms?”

“I didn’t go to any sonofabitch college, you know. And I don’t hang out with a bunch of candy-ass techno geeks. Whatever the nano swarms were, the sonsofbitches ate themselves in the end.”

“Ate themselves?”

“Well, after they ate a lot of other stuff.”

I mulled that over.

He said, “And those professors.”

“What professors?”

“The sonsofbitches doing experiments.”

“What kind of experiments?”

“With pigs.”

“Nukes, viruses, nano swarms, pigs,” I said.

“Vampire bats. Nobody knows where
they
came from. Some say the Chinese made ’em as a weapon. Or maybe it was that weirdo billionaire in Nebraska. Then there was the big government solar-energy thing.”

“What government solar-energy thing?”

“The project that blew up in space.”

“Why would that matter if it was in space?”

“Because it was big.”

“How big could it have been?”

“Really big.”

After we walked a minute in silence, Kenny said, “You feel better knowing all that?”

“No,” I admitted.

When he looked smug, one snaggle tooth overhung his lower lip. “So now it’s in your head, what’re you going to do?”

“Drink myself brainless.”

“It’s the best thing,” Kenny said.

We arrived at the mini truck with the depleted battery. In the vale below, maybe twenty carrion crows gathered on the dead porker.

As I took the pillowcase sack out of the vehicle, I said, “What do you do in your Roseland?”

“I work security for this honcho, he’s one lunatic sonofabitch.”

“Lunatic how?”

“He thinks in Roseland he’ll live forever.”

After a hesitation, I said, “Is his name Noah Wolflaw?”

“Wolflaw? No. Calls himself Constantine Cloyce.”

Kenny’s green eyes sparkled with sunlight, but there didn’t seem to be any deception in his direct gaze.

Suddenly he said, “Yellow sky.”

I glanced up, but the heavens were blue.

When I looked back to Kenny, he was gone, and in the place where he had been, the air shimmered for a moment.

So as I stood by the defunct mini truck, swapping the Beretta’s half-depleted magazine for the fully loaded spare, as then I plucked seven bullets from the extra ammunition that I carried in a sports-coat pocket and replenished the first magazine, I brooded about the discovery that the secret of Roseland had something to do with time. If some kind of localized disorder in time was a side effect of what was going on here, my sense that I was running
out
of time might be true in ways I couldn’t yet comprehend.

Before encountering the porkers, I’d been on my way to the guesthouse to make sure Annamaria remained safe. Now I recalled a thing that happened in Magic Beach a few days earlier, when we encountered a pack of coyotes that boldly stalked us and seemed about to attack. Annamaria had spoken to them as if they understood her—and with only words she got them to retreat. Whatever the nature of the gift that she possessed, she had nothing to fear from animals, probably not even from the porkers; if she was killed, her murderer would be a man driven not by an animal nature but by the worst of his very human impulses. With Roseland counting down to
some kind of detonation, I had to trust in Annamaria to take care of herself for now.

Carrying the pillowcase sack in one hand and the pistol in the other, taking my bearings from hilltop after hilltop, alert for more of the bacon brigade, I made my way to the statue of Enceladus, the Titan. From there I ventured into the oak grove that surrounded that lawn. As before, not a single fallen leaf littered the earth under the trees.

I put down the pillowcase and, from one of the low branches, I selected a twig with three leaves. I snapped it off and threw it on the ground.

As if I were watching a time-lapse film of a few weeks’ growth, the tree sprouted a new twig at the break point, leafed out exactly as it had been, and fully restored itself in less than a minute.

When I thought to look on the ground where I’d thrown the broken twig, it wasn’t there.

Finally, almost twenty-two, I got my haunted house, for which I was singularly well prepared, and it was a country house, as was the one in
The Turn of the Screw
, and it had a history of perversity, like the place in
Hell House
, and in it might be people who should be dead but were not, as in
The Fall of the House of Usher
, and there was an imprisoned child in jeopardy, as in
Poltergeist
. The only ghost in Roseland, however, was the rider of the spirit stallion, and she was neither menacing nor truly at the center of the problem that I, as an unofficial exorcist, needed to resolve.

Instead of flailing poltergeists and phantoms from the grave, with which I might have easily contended, I faced a threat consisting of swine things, cosmic clockworks, a thoroughly insane movie mogul, and the conspirators that he had drawn around him with the power that he wielded, power given to him, perhaps unwittingly, by the
late great Nikola Tesla, who, although long dead and although not a ghost, nevertheless ricocheted like an immaterial pinball in and out of the scene, who said that he had seen me where I’d not yet been, and who encouraged me to throw the master switch, wherever that might be.

Some days I just want to go back to bed and pull the covers over my head.

Instead, from the tree, I broke off the same twig that I’d broken before and held it in the open palm of my left hand. Within a minute, the tree repaired itself, and the twig vanished even though, at the last moment, I closed my fist around it.

Roseland didn’t need a platoon of gardeners. In the landscaped portion of the grounds—as opposed to the wild fields—the trees and the shrubs and the flowers and the grass were in a kind of stasis, neither growing nor dying, somehow maintained in exactly the same condition in which they had been since … Perhaps since one day in the early 1920s.

The residents of Roseland were not outside of time. Clocks still ticked and hours passed. Sunrises and sunsets came and went. Weather changed, as did the seasons. Time did not stand still within these estate walls.

Evidently, by the transmission of a current of some exotic energy through root and trunk and limb and leaf, through every blade of grass and every flower petal, all remained as it had been. Wind might strip some leaves from the trees, but new growth appeared even as the torn leaves fell and, upon the ground, ceased to exist. Or perhaps the new leaves were in fact the old ones, and perhaps each damaged tree or plant—but nothing adjacent to it—slipped back in time to a moment just before the leaves had been plucked from it, and then rejoined the present.

If I dug down into the earth, I would most likely find some kind
of metal mesh or those copper rods embedded in the foundations of the buildings. Suddenly I knew what the elongated 8 represented when you read it horizontally rather than vertically: It was the symbol for infinity.

I felt dizzy. I wished I were as good at not thinking as Kenny claimed to be.

I returned to that peninsula of flawless lawn in which Enceladus raised a fist to challenge the gods, and I followed it to the acres of grass surrounding the main residence. From a distance, I could see that the windows and doors of the house were still covered with steel panels.

Around one corner of the mansion came a ragtag mob of freaks in a violent frenzy because they had not been invited inside for lunch. They were overturning patio furniture and pounding on the shutters.

I retreated into the Enceladus lawn, screened from the house by the time-frozen oaks. I stood by the Titan, trying to get my mind around the ramifications of the theory that Roseland was not a time machine—no, nothing that simple—but a machine that could
manage
time, reverse or retard its effects, and ensure against the otherwise inevitable decline of all things, which is the way of Nature.

In the main house, as in the guest tower, everything appeared to be immaculate, pristine, as if nothing ever wore out or broke down or produced dust. Wooden floors and steps were as tight and squeak-free as the day that they were installed. No cracks in the marble or limestone.

The kitchen appliances were new; but most likely they had been replaced not because those of the 1920s didn’t still work but because newer ovens and refrigerators offered features and conveniences that the older models did not.

Out of nowhere, as if conjured, a hundred or more bats with
seven-foot wingspans appeared at the tree-encircled end of the long lawn. They flew toward me, in such tight formation that they appeared to be a solid mass, a tidal flow two feet above the grass, abroad in daylight as bats should never be.

The urge to flee was countered by the recognition that I could move at only a fraction of their speed. Perhaps they didn’t see well in daylight. Like most predators, they must track their prey by scent. But maybe their natural guidance system, echolocation, also played a role in identifying food, in which case absolute stillness might be wiser than movement. The enormous lead statue, in the shadow of which I stood, might mask me from detection.

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.