Odd Apocalypse (32 page)

Who scourges will be scourged. In fulfilling this dark role in Roseland, I would bring about my own death.

Yet I knew that I would not retreat from my decision.

I sat there under the glassy-eyed animal heads, reluctant to get up and go on with it.

I got up and went on. The last of Constantine Cloyce’s private quarters was the bedroom with en-suite bath.

Although the bedroom looked ordinary, it might have been where he tortured and killed them over the years. I couldn’t know unless I watched some of the DVDs, but I would never play them.

His bed was stripped of linens. I suppose those sheets were in the laundry that I had not permitted Victoria Mors to finish.

Opposite the bed, in high contrast to the antique furniture, a large plasma-screen TV hung on the wall. I could imagine what he most liked to watch at night as he waited for sleep to overtake him.

Then I realized that before he did anything to a new captive woman, he might preview for her what she could expect by playing a couple of his favorite DVDs.

The day in Pico Mundo when I lost Stormy will forever be the worst day of my life, although since then each place I go seems in one way or another to be darker than the place before it.

I shivered and could not stop shivering.

On a counter in the spacious bathroom stood several antique apothecary jars with glass stoppers so well made that they seated as
tightly as rubber plugs. The jars contained white powders of subtly different consistencies.

I have never considered escaping the weight of my gift through the buoyancy of drugs. I see enough strange things without teasing hallucinations from my mind. And I have witnessed others demonstrate by their addictions that chemically induced euphoria is subject to something quite like the law of gravity: What goes up must eventually come crashing down.

Although I would not be able to tell by smell or by taste which of the powders was cocaine, which heroin or something else, I didn’t doubt they were drugs. For one thing, on a silver tray beside the jars was a short silver straw of the kind with which the more stylish users of coke inhaled it. Also on the tray were a deep-bowled spoon, a half-melted candle, and hypodermic syringes in sealed packages.

Cloyce was such an imposing figure, always with the posture and the carriage of an aristocrat who expected to be noticed and admired, so square-shouldered and muscular, so sharp-eyed and keenly alert, that I wouldn’t have imagined that he might be a heavy user of drugs. But if by some simple act he could, at will, use Tesla’s machine to roll back the years and be as young again as he wished, then perhaps he could also reverse the long-term debilitating effects of heroin and such.

If they could periodically undo all consequences of destructive drug use, maybe all seven of them were junkies. Self-imprisoned in Roseland, determined to escape death but with ever less experience of life to fill their time, they would have every reason—and no reason not—to pop pills, snort coke, or shoot whatever into their veins. Ever less given to travel, the trips they made were courtesy of narcotics, stimulants, and hallucinogens.

In the medicine cabinet were numerous bottles of prescription
drugs. None of them appeared to be for the treatment of any disease or medical condition. They were for recreational purposes.

The chill of which I couldn’t rid myself grew colder, until I felt as if I must have bits of ice in my blood.

Considering that these people were without moral inhibitions, that they expected to live for centuries, that they had divorced themselves from all human sympathies, that they believed there would be no consequences for anything they did, considering that their potential for brutality was not that of mere men and women but that of the heartless gods whom primitive men had first imagined, they would be unspeakably
vicious
and relentless in pursuit of their darkest desires.

To all that, add the effect of drugs, and their cruelty would make the pitiless predations of vampires seem genteel. By comparison, the people of Roseland were surely greater monsters than the freaks that Kenny called porkers.

What I had imagined the DVDs contained would be a fraction as horrendous as what actually had been recorded on them.

And suddenly I knew that Victoria had lied to me when she said that, although the others assisted Cloyce in acquiring women for his pleasure, they did not share his interest in torture and murder. If they didn’t participate in Cloyce’s bloody revelries, it was because they had horrific desires of their own to fulfill.

I had thought the secrets of Roseland were at last known to me, but now I understood that there were more and worse to be uncovered. I wouldn’t search for them. I didn’t need to know. I couldn’t
stand
to know. Witnessing things demonic too intimately for too long would be to invite madness and worse into my heart.

Stepping out of the bathroom, I thought that I was finished here, but I found myself drawn across the bedroom toward a corner desk
on which stood a computer. Intuition cast a line, hooking me and reeling me toward a sheaf of papers lying on the desk.

They were facedown, and when I turned them over, I saw that they were printouts of news stories that Cloyce had gotten off the Internet. Not recent news. They concerned the young fry cook who had brought down the killers committing mass murder at a mall in Pico Mundo, California, more than eighteen months earlier. Forty-one were wounded. Nineteen died. The police said that if the young fry cook hadn’t acted, hundreds would have been killed. The so-called hero did not think himself a hero and wouldn’t talk to the media. The only picture of him in the press reports was his high-school yearbook photo in which he looked foolish and clueless.

Cloyce had thought he needed to know me.

Knowing me, he suspected Victoria’s disappearance must be my handiwork.

Now that I was known and being sought as surely as they were seeking Victoria, freeing the boy and escaping from Roseland would be just this side of impossible.

A hand clasped my shoulder, and I thought I felt my hair turn white. But it wasn’t Cloyce. It was Mr. Hitchcock. He gave me the OK sign, as if to assure me everything would be all right.

I said, “Well, I hope so.”

He gave me two thumbs up and considerately faded away.

Standing around the corner in the west wing, I listened to the searchers as they finished with the rooms off the long south hallway. They operated in pairs, and neither pair strayed far from the other.

If not afraid, they were at least damn worried. They assumed that Victoria might be dead. If she’d been killed, her ticket to physical immortality had been invalidated. And if she could be killed within the fortress walls of Roseland, so could the rest of them.

As they gathered at the end of the south wing, I heard them agree to go together to the ground floor by way of the back service stairs and then work forward from the kitchen. When the thumping of descending footsteps faded, I stepped into the south wing and hurried toward the boy’s room.

The house was huge, and their caution would ensure they made slow progress, but before long they would find Victoria Mors bound and gagged behind the boilers in the furnace room. And then they would know that I was in the house, in spite of the evidence to the contrary. Victoria and the chef would join in the hunt. Henry Lolam, stuck in the gatehouse as long as the freaks were roaming the estate,
would be the only one who wouldn’t have the pleasure of putting a bullet in me.

At the boy’s room, I entered without knocking.

If he had been in one of his trances, eyes rolled back in his head, his father and the others had startled him out of it when they searched his room. He sat in his armchair, surrounded by the books through which he tried to live a life otherwise constrained.

He looked small and miserable. Evidently, I hadn’t convinced him that I could be counted upon to return.

Sitting on the ottoman in front of his chair, I said, “Timothy. That’s your name. Timothy Cloyce.”

“They’re looking for you,” he said.

“Not yet. They’re looking for Victoria, but when they find her, then they’ll start looking for me.”

“Sondra,” he said.

“What?”

“Her name back then was Sondra. I don’t remember her last name. I don’t think I ever heard it.”

“You knew her?”

“Her and Glenda—who calls herself Valerie Tameed these days. They were his mistresses. They enjoyed threesomes—you know, going at each other in the same bed.”

His understanding of sexual matters unsettled me, though I knew he wasn’t the nine-year-old boy that he appeared to be. According to the plaque in the mausoleum, he had been born in September 1916. He was now ninety-five years old. He had the knowledge of a well-read man of those years, though none of the experience.

As on my previous visit, I was again struck by his ginger-brown eyes, by a quality that might have been loneliness so profound as to be despair, suggesting an interior landscape that was cheerless and
dismal though perhaps not yet desolate. I had never met another pair of eyes that by their stare alone could fill me with such sadness.

Considering how long he had lived like this, it was a triumph for him not to have gone mad. Perhaps it was whatever part of his mind remained that of a child, with a child’s wonder and stubborn hope, that kept him going.

Removing the towel from the pillowcase sack, unwrapping the hacksaw, I hesitated to ask about Madra, but I reminded myself that Timothy was not a fragile child—or at least not only a child.

“Your father shot your mother. Why?”

“She was supposed to stay with me on the Malibu estate, where he spent half his time. The other half, he was here. It was supposed to be
his
getaway, strictly for him and his buddies. My mother was sweet … and too submissive. Maybe she suspected he kept women, but she let him have his retreat. She never came here … until he took her favorite horse from the stables in the Malibu estate and brought it to Roseland.”

I said, “A great black stallion. A Friesian.”

“Its name was Black Magic, but they called it only Magic. He bought Magic for her. When it became her favorite horse, he decided it was his favorite, too. He was always giving her things and then taking them away.”

Holding Timothy’s right hand, I pushed back the sleeve of his sweater, and exposed the GPS transponder.

“She drove all the way up to Roseland unannounced, to get her horse back. She brought me because she thought he might refuse her, but not both of us.”

I placed his arm on the arm of the chair and explained how he needed to grip the upholstery to keep the monitoring bracelet from sliding around under the hacksaw.

“It was a long trip in those days, four hours in a Model T, an amazing adventure, especially for a woman alone with a young boy. I still remember it, how thrilling it was.”

The bracelet was just loose enough that I was able to press a corner of the towel between it and Timothy’s wrist. When the hacksaw cut through the last of the steel, the barrier of cloth would prevent it from drawing his blood.

He said, “She wasn’t surprised to find Paulie Sempiterno at the gatehouse. He was my father’s bodyguard for a long time. Paulie warned my father by phone before sending the two of us up to the main house.”

Undoubtedly I had at least fifteen minutes, probably twenty or more, before Cloyce and his crew would locate Victoria Mors—once Sondra.

“Mother couldn’t believe the grandness of Roseland. She knew he meant to make a first-rate retreat, but she didn’t know it was this spectacular. He had kept the plans from her. He was domineering. And as I said, she was submissive … to a point.”

After testing the tension on the blade, I adjusted the wing nut.

“Sondra and Glenda were living in the guest wing. My father told Mother that it was the servants’ wing, and they dutifully played the part of maids for the short while she would be at Roseland. Of course it was neither the guest wing nor the servants’ wing. It was really the whores’ wing.”

I might never grow accustomed to things like that coming from an apparent nine-year-old. I got up from the ottoman and leaned toward the boy to begin the job of freeing him.