Odd Apocalypse (33 page)

“Mother saw the grooms and the trainer who came in daily to care for the horses but didn’t live on the grounds. Yet she wondered how just two maids, a chef, and a few security men could care for
such a large place. And where were the gardeners for all those lawns and flowers?”

The bracelet had three parallel rows of links, like the band of a wristwatch. If the rows had been aligned, I could have sawn through the weaker recessed connection between them. The center row, however, was offset from those bracketing it. I would need to cut through somewhat more than a quarter-inch thickness.

“Father told her that it was the gardeners’ day off, the whole crew on the same day, though it was Tuesday. He said a large team of housekeepers came in three days a week, but that Sondra and Glenda were the only full-time maids.”

Bearing down on the hacksaw to let the teeth get a bite of steel, not so hard as to snap the blade, I made a long easy stroke.

“I don’t know what all he told Mother, but I think she must have known they were lies.”

I sawed only with forward strokes at first, until a score line could be cut deep enough to hold the blade as it slid thereafter in both directions.

“That afternoon, he agreed to let her have Magic. But she insisted on traveling with the horse when it was taken back to Malibu, and it was too late to arrange transport. We stayed for dinner and the night.”

The necessity to make a single score line and then to keep the blade within it required me to focus, and when I did not so much as glance at Timothy, his voice inspired images in my mind, so that I felt as if I were watching unfold the tale he told.

That fateful night, he was provided with blankets and pillows for a sofa in the parlor of his father’s west-wing quarters. His parents retired to the bedroom in the same suite.

Although tired, Timothy was also excited about being in a new place—and uneasy for reasons he couldn’t quite explain. He slept
only lightly and was awakened during the night when his father, wearing slippers and a bathrobe, passed through the parlor to the door and went out into the hall.

A fan of mystery shows on the radio, the boy suspected some plot must be afoot, and he determined that he would fill the role of detective. He got off the sofa, hurried to the door, quietly opened it, and slipped into the hallway.

With excitement but also with stealth, he followed his father down through the house, keeping at such a distance that he twice almost lost track of his quarry, and then he
did
lose him. Timothy wandered the mazelike mansion, making his way mostly by the full moon that pressed its ghost light through the big windows.

After a while, he came without knowing it to the guest wing on the ground floor, where hallway lights were aglow. He heard people in one of the rooms, a woman’s soft laughter and another woman whimpering.

Listening at the door, occasionally catching a muffled word along with urgent cries and groans, both male and female, that might have been sounds either of pleasure or of pain, young Timothy grew convinced that something terribly strange and of enormous importance was taking place in there.

The radio-serial heroes whom he admired were clever, bold, and intrepid. They never feared for themselves and never retreated. And because they always seized the moment, they always triumphed.

He dared to ease open the door.

Beyond lay a shadowy sitting room brightened only by what light came through the open door to the adjoining bedroom.

As by a magnet drawn, the boy found himself moving across the outer room, toward the glow of two bedside lamps with pleated-silk shades that cast a peach-colored light.

Near the threshold of the inner room, he was halted by the sight
of his father in there, on the bed with Sondra and Glenda. He was too young, in that more innocent era, to know quite what he was seeing, but he might have understood if the scene had not been made more mysterious by the bondage game that featured Sondra in a dog collar, bound to bedposts with black silken cords.

Equally as weird as all that was the presence of Chiang Pu-yi, who was known these days as Jam Diu. Timothy had seen him in Cloyce’s company several times over the previous couple of years.

Later he would learn that Chiang Pu-yi was a very wealthy man with interests in Hong Kong and England. Chiang and Constantine had met in London, where both spent some days with Aleister Crowley, the practitioner of magic and the cult leader who called himself the Beast from Revelations. Each found in the other a reflection of himself, a will to power that would not be thwarted.

That night in 1925, Chiang Pu-yi sat on a chair, on the farther side of the bed from the open door, watching the threesome. He was dressed oddly. Timothy could not remember what Chiang wore because he was most struck by the fact that the man, who was much older than Constantine, looked like himself but many years younger than he had been the last time the boy encountered him.

Bewildered, Timothy stood in the thinner shadows just before the threshold for no longer than a minute, simultaneously repelled and attracted, fear growing by the moment, though fear of what, he did not know.

And then it seemed to him that Chiang’s stare had shifted from the people on the bed to Timothy. When Chiang smiled, the boy was certain he had been seen, and he fled at once.

By the time he got back to the second-floor bedroom where his mother lay sleeping, the eerie allure of the scene in the guest wing had given way to terror. Although Sondra had not seemed to be afraid, the boy thought maybe they had been killing her.

He had some difficulty waking his mother, which he would later learn was because his father had slipped her a sedative after dinner. These hours later, it still had some effect. But he did wake her and convey to her, in his childish way, much of what he had seen.

Realizing that her clouded thinking must be the consequence of a drug, Madra determined that they must leave quickly. If her husband could do such a thing to her—and be part of what the boy had seen—there might be no offense that he was incapable of committing. In the years since their wedding, she had glimpsed a disturbing fierceness in him, which he tried to conceal. Without delay, she grabbed only the boy’s coat and hurried with him downstairs.

When they left the house by the front door and did not find her Model T in the driveway, Madra didn’t know where to look for it, as there was no obvious garage. And then she realized that even if she found the car, the key might not be with it.

She knew where the stables were, however, and where to find her beloved Friesian, Magic. And the stallion didn’t require a key.

Although young Timothy was by now shaking and weak with fear and though his mother was struggling to clarify her thoughts, they were aware enough to know that Constantine should have by that time come looking for them. Later, the boy would learn that Chiang Pu-yi had been stoned and, though having seen the young snoop, had not for a while realized the implications; his mind had instead wandered into a sick fantasy about what role the nine-year-old might want to play in this debauchery.

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 naked 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.”

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.”