Odd Apocalypse (36 page)

She shot at Timothy and me again. At a distance of sixty feet, especially in a cluttered and shadowy environment, you have to be a good marksman to plug your target. She missed.

I couldn’t hit her from sixty feet, especially because guns are always a last resort with me, even if I am often given no choice but to use them.

Her third shot buzzed wasplike past my right ear, an inch from a bad sting.

Turning my back on the Amazon, expecting her to put a lucky shot through my spine, I pulled Timothy with me toward the second service door that was nearly hidden in the paneling, which I had used before when I’d gone to the library. As we approached it, the door started to open, and I drew the boy at once toward the hinge side, so that we were concealed behind it as it swung wide.

Although I couldn’t immediately see who had entered, a low growl identified the newcomer as one of the yellow-eyed pack. When it took two steps into the room, its immense muscular back was toward us.

The door began ever so slowly to ease shut, further exposing the boy and me. Because it was a door intended not to disrupt the lines of the paneling, it had no knob or lever that I could easily grasp to prevent it from arcing away from us. When you wanted to open it, you pushed on it to disengage a touch latch, and you pulled it open with a finger groove concealed under a strip of molding.

The freak stopped where it was and stared across the drawing room at Mrs. Tameed, whom I could still see in the shadowy distance. Muttering to itself, the beast brandished its hatchet at her.

Mrs. Tameed fired two more rounds. She seemed to be aiming at me rather than at the brute that should have been of more concern to her.

The slugs cracked into the wood paneling. I supposed that no sooner had the wounds in the wall opened than the Methuselah current began rewinding the damage.

The freak issued a noisy challenge, half bleat and half roar.

Mrs. Tameed began shouting at it, calling it a stupid pig, though she tossed the F word in both before and after
stupid
. She shouted at it to look behind itself and encouraged it to “Get the bastard, get him, gut him.”

I never imagined that the freaks could understand English, and I
guess they couldn’t, because this one just shrieked at her again and raised its hatchet high.

The wide-set eyes on its long skull provided it with excellent peripheral vision. If Timothy or I made the slightest move, the creature might become aware of us.

In that case, I would need a lot of luck to take it down before it could fully turn and swing the hatchet at me. Its arms were long enough to reach me if it lunged just one step.

Slowly, so the movement might not draw its attention, hoping to shoot it before it sensed us, I raised the Beretta.

The service door that had been drifting shut was suddenly thrust open. A second freak entered behind the first. This one didn’t entirely clear the door, which rested against its flank.

The new arrival was so close that I could have touched it without completely extending my arm. I had no hope of killing both of them before one of them could kill us.

If the excitement of the recent slaughter hadn’t caused the creatures to mutter continuously and to growl low in their throats, they would have heard me trying—and failing—not to breathe.

Mrs. Tameed fired another round, perhaps this time at one of the freaks.

The brute in the lead threw his hatchet at her with such force and accuracy that it spun across the drawing room and embedded its blade in her chest.

Mrs. Tameed’s claim to immortality and the absolute license of a god had been declared invalid. Her death came so suddenly that she didn’t have a chance to cry out in protest.

As the woman dropped, the hatchet-throwing freak loped toward her, shrieking in triumph as it crossed the drawing room. There was something apelike about it, too, perhaps because it moved rather like a man but was not a man, though also because its emotions were
always at the surface and instantly expressed in action, as were those of the lower primates. And it had an apelike capacity for violence so extreme that each of its killings was also an atrocity that made Constantine Cloyce’s murders seem like the work of a prim and proper villain in an Agatha Christie mystery.

Watching the thing caper toward the body of Mrs. Tameed, I was reminded of that unspeakably awful news story a few years back, the one about the innocent woman who was attacked by her friend’s large and enraged pet chimpanzee. It bit off her fingers, plucked out her eyes, and tore off her face all in a frenzied half minute.

The second freak remained within arm’s reach of us, the door against it and half concealing it. Although shadows swaddled the boy and me, light from the service hallway behind the beast revealed the side of its head, a hideous profile. This was the face of something
designed
to strike fear in the hearts of all who saw it,
designed
to terrorize and kill. By the mutilation and desecration of its victims, it left survivors with the demoralizing thought that human beings were nothing but meat, just another animal in a world where there was no natural law, where the only virtues were strength, power, cruelty, and ferocity.

Pressed against me, Timothy shuddered uncontrollably. I held fast to him with one hand, worried that the proximity of the freak would at some point make him reckless with fear, and that he would bolt.

Maybe he really did want to be taken back into the past and no longer be a perpetual boy, to have his life ended on the night that his father shot him. But no matter the depth of his despondency, he couldn’t want to fall into the hands of one of the freaks, look into those yellow eyes as the talons tore him open and the teeth bit into his face.

To die that way would be perhaps to die twice
, the first death
being that of the soul, of the sense that there was anything unique and sacred about humanity, the second death being merely physical.

The creature at the door hissed and gnashed its teeth as it watched its companion make its way through the groups of furniture, knocking a lamp off a table, overturning a chair.

At the farther end of the drawing room, the triumphant beast set upon the body of Mrs. Tameed. Shrieking in glee, it rended her as a furious child might rend a doll. The killing itself was not satisfying enough and must be followed by one outrage after another.

We were in Poe territory again, this time “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” where the ape in the night, straight razor in hand, does not find murder alone sufficiently rewarding and must visit some indignity on the bodies of its victims.

The brutal sounds of dismemberment caused Timothy to shake more violently than ever. If he began to sob again, as he had done when listening to Shilshom’s protracted death scream, he would reveal our presence and assure that we would go the way of Mrs. Tameed.

Warily, I prepared to empty half of the seventeen-round magazine into the freak at point-blank range. I was all but certain that the thing would survive long enough to lash out punishingly at us in its death throes.

Abruptly abandoning its position at the door, the demonic creature loped across the drawing room, holding high a claw hammer. It was unable to resist the urge to express its hatred and contempt by joining its comrade in the profane mutilation of the dead woman’s remains.

From out of the foyer, hurrying with a combat shotgun at the ready, Paulie Sempiterno moved toward the two beasts. He glimpsed Timothy and me, and judging by the hitch in his step when he saw us, I suspected that he would as soon cut us down as kill the freaks.
But he knew what he needed to save his ammunition for, and he continued past Pan toward the blood-crazed pair.

The boy and I quickly slipped out of the drawing room, into the narrow service hall. The door eased shut and the latch clicked behind us.

I could have sworn this narrow hallway led only directly ahead, past a powder room and a supply closet, to a secondary entrance to the library. But we had stepped into a junction with a short length of hallway ahead and a longer one to our right.

That particular confusion overcame me again, the feeling that a unique geometry had been applied to the construction of Roseland, that what I saw before me was not all that lay there.

If Tesla’s glittering machinery could harness time and put it to the purposes of which I already had become aware, there might be other effects that I couldn’t imagine, effects so abstruse as to be almost mystical and far beyond my understanding even if I was to experience them.

As Sempiterno opened fire with his shotgun in the drawing room and the wounded freaks began to scream, I said, “Tim, where does this hall lead, here to our right?”

“I don’t know every place in the house.”

“But you’ve lived here all these years.”

“Nobody knows every place in the house.”

“Nobody? Your father must know. He built it.”

“He put up the money for it. He and Jam Diu.”

“So he must know.”

“He doesn’t understand the house. Even sometimes on ordinary days, it seems … not what it ought to be. But during a full tide like this, it always gets stranger.”

Full tide. Waves of future time washing into this moment of the past.

I wished Roseland were only haunted. I could cope with haunted.

Previously the series of frosted dome lights overhead had properly revealed the passageway to the library. But now that hall was poorly illuminated, as was this previously unnoticed branch. In the longer hall, I saw two doors on the left side, none on the right, and one at the end.

Timothy said, “Jam Diu says it
can’t
be fully understood, not even by Tesla.”

In the drawing room, the freaks had fallen silent, as had the shotgun. If Sempiterno had killed them, he would quickly reload and come after us.

“I’m scared,” Timothy said.

“Me too.”

Neither the powder room nor the supply room in the short hall, nor the library at the end of it, nor anywhere we could go from the library, seemed to offer us any safety.

I wanted to get to the back service stairs, in the kitchen. They would take us down to the wine cellar.

Letting go of the boy, gripping the Beretta with both hands, I said, “Come on, this way. What do we have to lose?”

The first door opened inward to a shaft filled with golden radiance. The dimensions of it were difficult to ascertain because the walls were lined with mirrors that deceived the eye with the cunning of a mirror maze in a funhouse.

Shining ranks of spiral forms, similar to the paper decorations people sometimes hang from the ceiling in parties that have an Asian theme, turned at various speeds, although they were not paper. Like drill bits with wide spurs, they bore down through the shaft. No ceiling was apparent; the turning drill bits appeared out of a blur perhaps twenty feet above. They vanished into another blur twenty feet below. If one moment they seemed to be augering down into the earth, the next moment they appeared to be boring
upward
.

As elsewhere, the machinery operated in perfect silence. What might have been the cutting edges of the spurs glistened like molten gold, and what might have been the flutes between the spurs appeared to be as liquid and silver as mercury.

The sight was dizzying, the spiral forms receding to infinity in the mirrors. I felt a kind of hypnotic attraction to those coils, and I closed
the door before I might step in a half trance across the threshold and go spinning down into the blur below.

I glanced back toward the junction of hallways, where we had entered from the drawing room. We hadn’t yet been followed.

I urged the boy ahead, wanting to keep my body between him and the shotgun if Sempiterno should burst in upon us.

When I touched the knob of the second door, it was freezing. My hand nearly stuck to the brass.

The place beyond lay in such deep darkness that it didn’t seem to be either a shaft or a room. Before me lay a void, utterly black, as though it were a view of the nothingness beyond the end of the universe.

The hallway light was dim, but it should have penetrated a few inches into this strange space. The demarcation of light and purest darkness was as straight as a ruled line along the inner edge of the threshold.

Having seen this once before, in distant Pico Mundo, I put my fingertips to what I hoped might be a solid mass, a barrier, but my fingers disappeared into the blackness and then my hand all the way to the wrist. I could see nothing of my fingers, and my arm ended as abruptly as an amputee’s stump.

In the first of these memoirs, I wrote of such a room that I found in the house of a nasty piece of work whom I called Fungus Man. That room had been ordinary on one occasion, like this the next, and then ordinary again.

I won’t recount again what that room in Pico Mundo produced, but I wanted none of it here. I withdrew my hand, closed the door, and looked at the boy, who seemed amazed that I still possessed the hand that I’d put at risk.

“Have you seen this before?” I asked.

“No.”

Sempiterno should have come after us by now. Maybe he had killed the freaks at the expense of his own life. If so, I didn’t intend to send flowers to the funeral.