Odd Apocalypse
Page 27

Some there be that shadows kiss; / Such have but a shadow’s bliss.
By those words is the prince of Arragon described in The Merchant of Venice when he fails to choose correctly and, by his wrong choice, loses all hope of wedding Portia.
My friend Ozzie Boone, writer of mysteries, used to mock me for having been an indifferent student in school and especially for knowing nothing of Shakespeare. Since leaving Pico Mundo, as time permits, I have immersed myself in the works of the Bard. Initially, I read the plays and the sonnets for the simple pleasure of seeing Ozzie’s pride in me when one day I returned to my hometown. But soon I read them to glimpse a world that was so right in Shakespeare’s time but that has gone so wrong in ours.
His words, written over four hundred years ago, often encourage me and keep my spirits high. But sometimes lines come to me that strum a darker chord, and they pierce as I would much prefer not to be pierced.
Some there be that shadows kiss; / Such have but a shadow’s bliss.
Thirty-eight
THE MASTER OF ROSELAND’S SUITE WAS OFF THE WEST wing. Had the windows not been protected by steel shutters, most rooms would have offered me a view of the land rolling down to the coast and to the sea a mile away.
Cloyce had left burning not just a lamp or two but all the lights, as though when he returned, he didn’t want to have to spend even a moment on the threshold of darkness, fumbling for a switch.
He’d once claimed not to have slept in nine years, but I was sure his assertion was a great exaggeration if not outright nonsense. The truth might be that he’d not slept well in nine years or longer, perhaps because he left the lights on all night, unable to tolerate a room that was as midnight-black as his mind.
His quarters were as sumptuously furnished as any chamber in the house. The Tiffany lamps, the antique bronzes, and the paintings were likely to bring millions.
I found nothing particularly strange until I got to a spacious chamber that I imagine he thought of as his trophy room. On the walls were the mounted heads of a lion, a tiger, a gazelle with magnificent ringed horns, and other specimens he must have shot and shipped back from Africa.
On one wall numerous framed black-and-white eight-by-ten photographs included several taken on safari. A young Constantine Cloyce, surely no older than thirty, was recognizable in spite of his hairstyle, which was of that era, and his lush mustache. He posed with various kills, holding a rifle, solemn and proud in some pictures, grinning and proud in others.
To have had the time and resources to be an adventurer at such a young age, he must have inherited the newspaper fortune that had allowed him later to launch a movie studio. If he was thirty in the photos, the safari dated to 1908, fourteen years before he began to build Roseland.
In some of the photographs, another young man appeared with him. He must have been a pal of Cloyce’s because in two photos, rifles having been set aside, they stood behind the animals they had shot, arms around each other’s shoulders. Henry Lolam looked the same then as now, though back then he must have had another name.
Farther along the wall were photographs of Roseland during its construction. In some of them, Cloyce posed with others.
I saw Nikola Tesla first. He appeared in four pictures, always wearing a business suit and tie when the others dressed casually. In two, he was such a strikingly hawkish figure with such intensity of expression that, by comparison, the people with him seemed to be no more real than those life-size photo cutouts of famous folks that you once could pose with in carnivals and boardwalk arcades. In the other two, those with him looked real enough—although Tesla seemed to be uncomfortable, as if he thought he didn’t belong with his current company.
Mrs. Tameed posed with Cloyce in one shot. She looked forty now, but appeared to be twenty-something in the photo. If there had been a greater age difference, I might not have recognized her except maybe by her height. Hair cut short, wearing a cloche hat, she was dressed in the flapper style of the period—sleeveless dress with a knee-length skirt, a V-neck bodice with cl**vage revealed—that shocked the parents of that free-spirited generation.
I had difficulty imagining that Mrs. Tameed had ever been as frivolous and cheerful as she seemed to be in that picture. I would have thought that she insisted on wearing jackboots from the day she started to walk and that her greatest regret as a young woman had been her inability to grow a mustache to match Hitler’s.
She was in another photo with Cloyce. This time she and Victoria Mors flanked him, both dressed as flappers, both hanging on him. They appeared to be a tipsy and dissolute trio.
In that picture, Victoria looked as young as she did now, tender and elfin and sprightly. I wondered if she maintained herself in a more constant state of youth than did the others. And if she did so—why?
In another shot of Cloyce with four men, dating perhaps before the 1920s, I knew only two of the others. Paulie Sempiterno stood slightly to one side, somewhat but not much younger-looking than he was now, glowering at the camera as if he distrusted the photographer and the very idea of cameras. Jam Diu looked ten years older then than now. He wore white shoes, a white suit, and a white Panama hat; and he boasted a Fu Manchu mustache that dangled two or three inches below his chin.
I had seen everyone currently of Roseland except Chef Shilshom. But if he had been of normal size in those days, I would not have recognized him.
The mounted heads of animals on two walls lent this place none of the men’s-club atmosphere that might have been intended. Instead, at least for me, each head was Death in masquerade, his skeletal face concealed behind animal masks, as in Prince Prospero’s abbey where he had partied in costume. Their presence oppressed me. I imagined that their glass eyes followed me as I toured the room.
I was eager to move on, but I wanted to investigate the contents of a highly polished mahogany cabinet with inlaid geometric patterns of ivory and ebony. Behind its doors were shelves filled with DVDs.
A man given to murder for pleasure might have a collection of films, but I doubted there would be a single Muppet movie among them. No titles were printed on the narrow spines of the cases. Expecting either pornography or tales of extreme violence, I took one from the top shelf and saw taped to the front a photograph of one of the na*ed women in the subcellar of the mausoleum, in the very pose in which he had arranged her in that other trophy room.
I checked a few more on the top shelf. Like the first, they bore photos of the victims in death, each labeled with a name and date. But there were a lot more DVDs here than bodies in the mausoleum.
When I examined some on the bottom shelf, I found that, like those above, they were arranged from left to right and shelved by date. The earliest was labeled 1962.
He must have filmed those early victims in 8 mm, later using a video camera. As technology advanced, he transferred his archives to videotape and later to DVD. His experience in the movie industry and his wealth gave him the knowledge and the means to upgrade the filmed record of the abominations that he committed. Somewhere in the house, he must have a well-equipped little studio where he could edit his films and transfer them to more sophisticated formats as those were invented.
I didn’t count the DVDs. I couldn’t bear to. I’m sure there were more than 150.
I wondered where those other bodies were. I hoped never to find them.
I wanted to set the cabinet on fire. I figured that I knew what was on those discs: each woman alive and afraid, then what he did to her to amuse himself, and finally how he killed her, maybe with Victoria watching as she said he sometimes allowed her. I didn’t think anyone should watch those women in their terror, as they were humiliated and degraded. Not even cops or prosecutors, or juries.
They were gone, and maybe it didn’t matter, but it wasn’t right. These demented home movies reduced each woman’s life to the ordeal in which she was least herself, in which she was broken. And they would all have been broken emotionally and mentally, for Cloyce had so much experience in the tactics and techniques of terror that he would keep at each of them until he succeeded. He had all the time in the world to strip from his victim everything that was essential and momentous about her, and leave her diminished to the point that death would be a relief. All the time in the world.
The DVDs were evidence. Until they would not be needed in order for justice to be done, I could not destroy them.
As I accepted the fact of that, I knew what it meant: To ensure that there would be no need for the filmed evidence, I would have to deliver ultimate justice to everyone in Roseland except the boy, to the women as well as to the men. Seven deaths were warranted.
Subconsciously, I must have known what would be required of me the moment that I’d seen the preserved corpses in the subcellar of the mausoleum. But now I could no longer repress the awareness that my role here was to be a scourge, that I could not merely free the boy and leave with him. I could not restrict my killing to self-defense or to the defense of the child.
My legs felt weak. I sat in a nearby chair.
As usual, the house was hushed. No sound arose to distract me from my grim train of thought.
To spare Cloyce’s victims further indignities to their memory, I must be a scourge. To prevent others from perhaps being infected by Cloyce’s depravity by watching him at work, I must be a scourge. To prevent the time-management technology from falling into the hands of authorities who, if not already corrupt, would be corrupted by it, I must be a scourge.
Scourges aren’t heroes.
I had never imagined myself a hero, but never had I imagined that I would be this.
Scourges assume authority they don’t possess. I assumed the right was mine to spare the memory of the dead women from stain, and I assumed I had the authority to decide that time-management technology inevitably would be used for evil purposes if I didn’t wreck it and destroy those who knew about it.
Scourges transgress against social and sacred order. Prince Hamlet wasn’t the hero of Hamlet. His mission was to be a minister of Truth and perhaps also a scourge. But he couldn’t entirely believe in the first half of that mission, while in the end he embraced the role of scourge.
Scourges always must be scourged themselves.
Hamlet did not survive Hamlet. Moses, having scourged three thousand people, never lived to see the promised land.
A killer like Cloyce was a murderer, killing for wrong reasons but compelled to do so.
A scourge went into darker territory than that. A scourge was not compelled to kill by mental imbalance or emotional confusion or selfish desire. A scourge made a carefully reasoned decision to kill in numbers that exceeded what was absolutely necessary to ensure self-preservation and the defense of the innocent. Even if he killed for a right reason, he was in rebellion against social order and commanding authority.
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.
Thirty-nine
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 he**in 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 he**in 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.