Odd Apocalypse
Page 21

I might be stuck here in a world with no penicillin, no polio vaccine, no Teflon cookware, no John D. MacDonald novels, no music by Paul Simon or Connie Dover or Israel Kamakawiwo’ole, no comfortable athletic shoes, no Velcro.
On the other hand, here I would find no reality TV, no TV of any kind, no nuclear weapons, no road rage, no talking on a cell phone in the movie theater, no tofu turkey.
In the end, as much might be gained as lost—except that this far in the past, most of the friends I’d ever made and loved hadn’t been born.
Hurrying inside, I pulled the door shut against a past in which neither I nor my parents had yet been conceived.
I went to the interior door and opened it. Beyond waited the basement hallway, yet when I turned to look at the windows, I saw Roseland still unrealized.
The construction shack was above ground, the basement below grade. One existed then, the other now. Yet somehow they were linked spatially and chronologically. As an air lock on a spaceship served as a transition chamber between the atmosphere inside the vessel and the vacuum of outer space, this room connected one moment perhaps ninety years past with the present.
I closed the door to the basement, returned to one of the desks, and sat in the antique office chair to calm my nerves and to think.
Generally speaking, just as Sherlock Holmes reasoned his way to solutions with the help of his pipe and violin, I am better able to mull over a complicated problem when I am frying. But I lacked a griddle, a spatula, and something to cook.
After a while, I searched through the desk drawers but learned nothing except that whoever worked here had been obsessed with order and neatness. I learned the same from the drawers of the second desk.
When I returned to the blueprints on the table, I saw more in the title block of the cover page than had interested me previously. The impressed seal of the architect. His name—James Lee Brock—and his address in Los Angeles. Under the architect’s name were two words and a name—MECHANICAL SYSTEMS: NIKOLA TESLA.
All I knew of Nikola Tesla was that he was called the Genius Who Lit the World, and that as the nineteenth century turned to the twentieth, he had nearly as much to do with the electrification of civilization and the associated industrial revolution as did Thomas Edison.
And on my first day in Roseland, chatting with Henry Lolam at the gatehouse, I learned that Constantine Cloyce had been interested in cutting-edge science and in the supernatural, having been friends with an unlikely spectrum of people that included the psychic and medium Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, and at the extreme other end, the famous physicist and inventor Tesla.
Finding Madame Blavatsky’s fabled name on the blueprints would have been strange, but it was nowhere to be seen. Whatever might be going on at Roseland, I suspected now that it might have nothing to do with the supernatural and everything to do with science. Weird science, but science nonetheless.
In the wide, shallow drawers of the map chest, I found many sets of mechanical-systems plans, all signed by Nikola Tesla. Among them were drawings of—and engineering specifics related to—the spheres, the flywheels standing on the bell-shaped machines, the intricate arrangements of gears I’d seen in the subcellars of the mausoleum, and much more.
I felt pretty sure that I knew the identity of the tall, gaunt, mustachioed man who had spoken to me on three occasions. Mr. Nikola Tesla. Considering that he died decades ago but wasn’t a lingering spirit like any I’d previously encountered, I knew who he was but not what he was.
Thirty
NONE OF THE DRAWINGS OR ENGINEERING DETAILS ENLIGHTENED me as to the purpose of all this exotic machinery. In high school, I was a member of the baseball team, not the science club.
With a renewed sense that time was running out, I retrieved the pillowcase sack with the hacksaw. I returned to the basement hallway, closing the door behind me.
To my right were narrow, enclosed service stairs. I assumed the stairs in the wine cellar went up to the kitchen, but I had no idea where these might lead.
Like every floor and stair tread in this house, these were as tight as if they had been built yesterday. Not one creak betrayed me as I ascended two flights to the main level with the intention of going to the second floor, where the boy was imprisoned.
As I reached the ground floor, however, I heard heavy footsteps above me, descending. Alarmed, I opened the landing door, slipped out of the staircase, and dashed across the immense foyer to another door that, for all I knew, led to a meadow in the Pleistocene epoch, where a herd of mastodons would stomp me into mush.
It was a coat closet.
From the size of the closet—hangers and rod space for maybe two hundred coats—I inferred that Constantine Cloyce intended Roseland to be the social locus along this part of the coast. In its early days, the estate might have been just that, but perhaps not for long.
Out in the foyer, a door was flung open with such force that it banged hard against its stop, and footsteps slapped across marble.
A second door opened almost as violently as the first, and other footsteps sounded as Mrs. Tameed said, “I smelled ozone on the second floor.”
Paulie Sempiterno, who had apparently crashed into the foyer through the front door, said, “I started to smell it halfway back from the gatehouse.”
“Then it’s not localized.”
“We don’t know for sure yet.”
“I know,” Mrs. Tameed declared.
“It could be just a few eddies.”
“No, it’s finally full tide,” Mrs. Tameed said, except that between the full and tide, she inserted a crude but alliterative word that I won’t repeat.
“But we haven’t had one in years,” Sempiterno said.
Suddenly I smelled ozone.
They must have smelled it in the foyer, too, because they spat out four crude words, two each, alternating one word at a time, as if they were in a cussing contest.
Their footsteps raced off, seemingly in different directions, and I didn’t hear any doors slamming.
I didn’t know what was meant by full tide, since we were a mile or farther from the ocean. Whatever it meant, I thought that trying to hide from it in a coat closet would probably prove to be a mortal mistake.
After waiting half a minute for the way to clear, I ventured into the foyer. I moved quickly toward the front door to peer through one of the sidelights, to see if Sempiterno was hulking around out there. He wasn’t.
As I tried to decide whether to dare the service stairs again, where the door stood open, I heard footsteps hurrying down, and Mrs. Tameed shouting—“Carlo! Carlo, quick!”—at the top of her voice and in evident panic.
A columned archway separated the foyer from the drawing room, and from that formidable space, out of sight for the moment but not for long, Sempiterno shouted back to her: “Here! Here! I’m coming!”
Carlo?
If this were a sex farce by a British playwright, hilarious antics would ensue when we all collided in the foyer. The terror in their voices, however, suggested that something big was about to happen, something that would reveal more about Roseland than I had yet learned, more than they would approve of me knowing.
Deciding not to stay for the rest of this act, I stepped outside and closed the front door behind me.
In the circular terminus of the driveway, under the portico, stood the electric all-terrain mini truck with balloon tires. Paulie Sempiterno had earlier been driving it overland.
I went to the vehicle, not with the intention of commandeering it, but to pretend to be admiring it if Sempiterno plunged out of the house. My hope was to distract him from considering that I might have recently been inside and overheard him talking with Mrs. Tameed.
The astringent scent of ozone was mild, not strong enough to burn the nostrils. But I remembered what it previously portended.
Although no early twilight descended, I scanned the grounds and spotted a pack of the piggish things that Mrs. Tameed called freaks. They were far away, acres of north lawn between us, but they were coming toward the portico with their characteristic determination, in their usual unpleasant mood.
As I started toward the house, steel panels dropped out of the limestone lintels in the window surrounds and snugged down to the sills. A larger sheet of steel whisked over the front door, meeting the threshold so tightly that I couldn’t have slipped even a note of urgent appeal under it.
Now I knew what had taken the place of the window bars when the house had been—per Chef Shilshom—remodeled. Mmmmm? Indeed. There you go.
Because the pack was somewhat slowed by its deformed members, I might be able to outrun them. For a while. Although upright, these things were reminiscent of wild boars, which are relentless predators. And though I don’t mean this in a braggadocious way, I’m sure that I smelled singularly delicious to them.
I ran to the mini truck, which had a roll bar instead of a roof and no doors to close out either sunshine or a pack of freaks. The keys were in the ignition. I got behind the wheel.
The electric motor was so quiet that, as I put the vehicle in gear, I could hear the distant snarling and squealing of the primate swine even though they were still the better part of a football field away from me.
An electric vehicle doesn’t serve for a high-speed chase as well as anything with an internal-combustion engine. Try to picture Steve McQueen in Bullitt, pursuing his quarry through the streets of San Francisco in a Chevy Volt. Right.
Instead of daring to lead the pack on a chase across the fields and hills of Roseland, I cruised out of the portico and west on the driveway, toward the gatehouse. The windows there were barred. Henry Lolam had a sidearm, a shotgun, and a rifle. We could hole up for the duration and read poetry to each other while the hogs threw themselves furiously at the ironbound oak door.
The balloon tires made a flabby budda-budda-budda sound on the cobblestone pavement. I could no longer hear the freaks.
When I glanced back, I discovered that they had come to a halt. They stood on the north lawn, heads held high—except for those that were humpbacked and otherwise twisted—looking at me, at the house, at me, as if making a choice might flummox them.
They were like creatures from an apocalyptic revelation, not only hideous in appearance but also an embodiment of the foul and pitiless forces that, since time immemorial, have haunted the world. Pale, brutish, powerful, they seemed to have come from some level of the inferno that Dante had overlooked. Several of them appeared to be wearing ragged garments, though I supposed that I must have been mistaking the shaggy coat of a boar for clothing.
Their indecision allowed me to open a considerable lead, and I grew confident of achieving the comparative safety of the gatehouse. I parked by the covered stoop and hopped out of the trucklet, leaving the motor running just in case.
Henry wasn’t sitting on the stoop, reading poetry. He stood at a barred window, peering out at me.
I tried the door. Locked. I knocked. “Henry, let me in.”
Still at the window to the left of the door, his voice muffled and distorted by the glass, Henry said, “Go away.”
His boyish face was eerily without expression, although his green eyes appeared as anguished as ever.
“Freaks, Henry. You know about the freaks. Open the door.”
I thought he said, “You’re not one of us.”
Glancing east, I discovered the freaks had decided on a course of action. They hustled along the driveway, toward the gatehouse.
“Henry, I’m sorry I needled you about aliens and colonoscopies. I should be open-minded. Let me in. I promise I’ll believe in them.”
Through the closed window, I heard some of his words: “There … no aliens … wish … were.”
“It’s a big universe, Henry. Anything’s possible.”
“Aliens … can’t free me … Roseland.”
“Maybe they can free you, Henry. Let me in. We’ll talk.”
His face hardened into hatred that I’d never before seen in him. I thought he said, “You’re … nothing … pathetic cocker.”
I recalled Victoria Mors calling me a stupid cocker as I was trying to shove the gag in her mouth.
The pack was two hundred feet away, but shambling faster. Most did indeed wear ragged, filthy clothing, obviously not for modesty or even for warmth as much as for decoration. Here a head scarf, there a winding of fabric around an arm. This one with multiple necklaces of braided cloth. That one with a ropey arrangement of loops and tassels around its waist.
Ozone scented the day, and the air shimmered as it does on a hot summer afternoon when heat rises off scorching pavement in wriggling thermals. This was a California February, however, the weather mild, even slightly cool.
Although they looked fierce enough to kill with hands, with tusks and teeth, some of the advancing creatures carried weapons. They favored three-foot lengths of pipe secured to their wrists with lanyards, but I also saw a sickle. Pickax. Billhook. Hatchet.
Tall, bodies slabbed with muscle, bristling with ratty patches of wiry white and gray hair, heads thrust forward, they were grunting in unison now, suddenly more organized than before, coming along the driveway like the phalanxes of a nightmare army, like orcs out of Mordor, and there was no wizard to help me defend against them. Most had porcine faces fitted with wolfish grins. Others wore asymmetric faces, eyes at different levels, skulls badly misshapen by irregular growths of bone, and their limbs were ill-jointed, awkwardly long. Here were all the ideologies of violence distilled and given material form, animalistic but not merely animals, for they had an implacable aggressive intent that seemed disturbingly human.
The air between me and them, in fact all around me, writhed as if tortured with heat, and I thought the pack might shimmer away like a mirage. But the thermals—or whatever they were—raveled back into the earth, the air stabilized, and the freaks were so close that I could smell them.
I sprang into the mini truck, popped the brake, and fled.
Thirty-one
THE ELECTRIC MOTOR ACCELERATED A BIT QUICKER than an arthritic grandfather getting up from his favorite armchair. I turned left between the gatehouse and the gate. Racing south across a wide lawn in the mini truck, I glanced back after fifty yards. They were still coming, but they weren’t gaining ground. Fifty yards farther, when I looked, they were falling behind.
The flawless lawn gave way to Nature’s plan. I trucked on, ascending a gentle slope for about two hundred yards, while various insects leaped and flew out of the tall grass in front of me, like terrified pedestrians throwing themselves out of the path of a drunk driver.
At the top, as I turned east to drive around rather than through a grove of oaks, I looked back and saw that the freaks had not chased after me into the meadow. They were heading toward the main house.