And so it would soon begin. I hoped that I wouldn’t have to shoot anything but swine—and that the definition of swine would remain strictly biological.
Spare linens were kept in the bedroom closet. I took a bath towel and a pillowcase. I wrapped the hacksaw in the towel and put the towel in the pillowcase, which made a good sack.
I intended to do my best not to be seen as I went about the business at hand. But if I encountered someone, I could justify the sack somehow—perhaps by saying that I was going on a picnic in the meadow and that the sack contained my lunch—whereas explaining a hacksaw would be more difficult.
With luck, I wouldn’t run into anyone until I had thought of a better story than the stupid picnic.
In the living room, before leaving, I paused to scan the fifty or so volumes in a bookcase. They were mostly tomes of ponderous philosophy, though there were four thick books of photography too tall for the shelves and laid flat.
Every volume in that quartet was about Hong Kong. The photos presented the city as it had been in the late nineteenth century and on through every decade until the current day.
Jam Diu sounded Vietnamese to me. But I’m just an ignorant psychic fry cook who knows nothing more about Asian cultures than he knows about molecular biology.
Hong Kong had once been a British colony. Now it was a Chinese province. The groundskeeper spoke English without either an Asian or a British accent.
Jam Diu might not be his real name. In fact, if Roseland was as much a nexus of deceptions and conspiracies as it appeared to be, his name was more likely to be Mickey Mouse than Jam Diu. Whatever his name, I thought perhaps he was sometimes homesick for Hong Kong.
I left the building, locking everything behind me, and returned to the cover of the trees and wild fields.
The temptation was to feel safer now that I was well-armed, but I didn’t allow myself to be tempted. Experience had taught me that overconfidence is an invitation to the Fates to bring onstage two or three muscle-bound guys in porkpie hats, who want to lock me in a walk-in freezer until I fully solidify or intend to toss me into the giant revolving drum of a concrete-mixer truck and pour me into the footing of a new sewage-treatment plant.
Guys who wear porkpie hats are always, in my experience, up to no good—and pleased about it. Whether that style of headwear turns previously benign men into sociopaths or whether men who are already sociopaths are drawn to that style is one of those mysteries that will never be solved, though the Department of Justice has probably funded a score of scientific studies of the issue.
As I headed east-southeast, the clouds coming in from the north loomed at my back. But the sky ahead was so blue and the land so sun-drenched that, under other circumstances, I might have wandered happily through the meadow while singing “The Sound of Music.”
Of course, one must always remember that although The Sound of Music is the most feel-good movie musical of all time, it is crammed full of Nazis.
Twenty-two
CARRYING THE HACKSAW DISGUISED AS A PICNIC LUNCH in a pillowcase sack, I approached the mausoleum from the south, first through weedy fields and then across forty or fifty feet of lawn as flawless and lush as that in an erotic dream about a golf course.
The forty-foot-square, windowless limestone megatomb boasted an elaborate cornice and carved panels depicting stylized sunrises and Edenesque landscapes. The entrance, a ribbed bronze door flanked by immense columns, wasn’t on the north side of the building, where it would have faced the house, but here on the south side.
According to Mrs. Tameed, superstition dictated the location of the entrance. The original owner had thought it would be bad luck to be able to look out of any window in the main house and see the door to this house of the dead.
The slab of bronze swung smoothly, soundlessly on ball-bearing hinges. As I eased the door shut behind me, I switched on the lights: three gold-leafed chandeliers and a series of wall sconces.
This enormous empty chamber would have been an ideal ballroom for a really cool Halloween party. Then I flashed on a mental image of people in harlequin masks waltzing with red-eyed primate swine, and I decided that I’d rather spend that holiday evening alone, with the doors locked and the shades drawn, biting my fingernails to the quick.
Inlaid in the walls were glass-tile murals that re-created famous paintings with spiritual themes. In the spaces between those works of art were niches waiting to receive urns of ashes.
Only three niches were filled. After the founder of Roseland, Constantine Cloyce, and his family died, subsequent owners felt no eternal attachment to the property and chose to have their mortal remains interred elsewhere.
The nameless boy had told me to come here. Before returning to the main house to free him, I thought it wise to heed his advice.
He had urged me to “press the shield that the guardian angel holds high” in one of the mausoleum mosaics. I hadn’t realized until now that all fourteen of those reproductions were of works that included a guardian angel.
No titles of the paintings were given, but inlaid at the bottom of each mosaic was the surname of the artist: Domenichino, Franchi, Bonomi, Berrettini, Zucchi.…
Fortunately, not all of the angels had shields. And only the one in the Franchi piece was held high, to protect a child not from demons but from divine reproach.
The shield was reddish-brown and contained a lot of tiny pieces of colored glass. With a little trepidation, I swept my hand back and forth across the entire shield. Exactly nothing happened.
I rapped my knuckles here and there on the shield, listening for a hollow spot. I didn’t hear one.
As I began to think I had chosen the wrong mosaic, I noticed that one of the larger glass tiles, about an inch square, was not grouted to those that surrounded it. I pressed only that tile, felt it give a little, pressed harder, harder still, and with a click it abruptly sank an inch into the wall.
Something hissed. And then with a low rumble, an entire section of limestone, seven feet high and four wide, containing the mural, rolled away from me. It retreated about three and a half feet before coming to a halt.
The main wall from which that section detached was eighteen inches thick, leaving a two-foot gap on each side, in which lights had come on automatically. A narrow flight of stairs led down both to the left and to the right.
I should have known that if I survived the challenges of my adventurous life long enough, one day I would have my Indiana Jones moment.
Supposing that these stairs led down to the same space, I chose those on the right. They were steep. I clung to the handrail, acutely aware of how ironic it would be if, after surviving endless assaults by numerous homicidal sociopaths, I stumbled and broke my neck.
Indeed, both sets of stairs descended to a nine-foot-high vault as large as the mausoleum above, which contained the most astonishing mechanical apparatus I had ever seen.
Along the center of the chamber were arrayed seven spheres, each maybe six feet in diameter, connected to the floor and the ceiling by a three-inch pole or pipe. The pipes were fixed, but the huge spheres rotated so fast that their surfaces were golden blurs, and though I knew that, even if hollow, they were solid forms, they almost looked like shining bubbles that might float away.
Along the north wall, except where the stairs terminated, and along the entire south wall, score upon score of bright flywheels in several sizes—some as small as CDs, others as large as ash-can lids—were arrayed atop a series of bell-shaped machine housings, to which they were linked with gleaming pitmans, sliding blocks, and piston rods. The glimmering crank wrists at the end of the glossy connecting rods turned cranks in shafts, and the wheels spun, spun, spun, this one fast, that one faster, some clockwise, others counterclockwise, yet giving the impression of an intricate synchronization.
Now and then, from this flywheel or that, arising off its outer rim, series of golden sparks flew toward the ceiling. They were not really sparks but something for which I had no na
me, pulses of golden light shaped like raindrops, and they didn’t shoot out at high speed, like sparks, but glided to the ceiling, where they were absorbed into a mesh of copper wire more intricate in its abstract patterns than the most complex of Persian carpets.
But for the copper ceiling and the concrete walls, everything in the vault, all the visible parts of the strange machines, appeared to have been plated with precious metals, some with gold and others with silver. The vault reminded me of a jewel box, glittering and twinkling and shimmering all around.
The purpose of it all was beyond my comprehension, but perhaps the most amazing thing was that all those moving parts produced no sound, no hum or buzz, not one tick or creak. The only noise that rose from this busy assemblage was the faint whispery whoosh of displaced air as flywheels scooped up a draft and flung it forward, as the big spheres drew in atmospheres to rotate with them.
No parts could be engineered and machined to such perfection that friction was entirely eliminated, nor was any lubricant equal to the job. But no spot of grease or drip of oil could be seen; I detected no scent of them, either, no indication that lubrication was required, and yet no friction heat arose from those mechanisms.
The eeriness of such frantic motion occurring in utter silence can’t be overstated. I felt as though I had stepped into a realm of cosmic machinery between our dimension and another, where the engine that maintained order in the universe raced on eternally in exquisite balance.
Nevertheless, the vault did not have a futuristic feeling. Some aspects of it struck me as Victorian, and other features had a Deco flavor. Rather than suggest a construct from the next millennium, it seemed antique, or not so much antique as timeless, as though it had existed forever.
The feeling of being watched, which never quite left me as long as I had been in Roseland, now grew more intense.
From the gleaming rims of racing flywheels, like tiny helium balloons, greater showers of honey-colored drops of light rose to the copper tapestry overhead. Their ascent was in contrast to all the rotational motion, and a sudden sense of buoyancy overcame me, not a positive feeling but a queasy expectation that I might drift off my feet and … away.
The deep, accented, disembodied voice that I had heard before dawn, when I approached this mausoleum as it glowed like a lamp, spoke now behind me: “I have seen you—”
I turned, but found no one.
“—where you have not yet been,” he whispered.
When I turned again, I saw a man with a mustache standing at the farther end of this service aisle that led between spheres and flywheels. Tall and gaunt, he wore a dark suit that hung loosely on his bony frame. By his appearance and solemn attitude, he reminded me of an undertaker.
Louder than before, he said, “I depend on you,” and he crossed the end of the room from this aisle to the next, disappearing behind the spheres.
I hurried after him, turned right, and peered into the next aisle. He was gone. I circled through the vault, but he had vanished as if he could walk through walls.
Spirits do not speak. But living men do not dematerialize like ghosts.
As for ghosts, when I turned once more, I came face-to-face with the woman in white, her long blond hair ribboned with fresh blood and tangled as it might have been by wind on the night when she took her last horseback ride.
Blood streaked her nightgown, too, and for the first time she manifested with three entrance wounds in her chest. The one directly over the heart and the one just below it had evidently been fired from close quarters because the fabric of the gown looked scorched around the wounds. The round that shattered her sternum had been fired from a greater distance than the other two; it had probably been the first shot and had most likely killed her instantly. That her murderer fired twice again at point-blank range, into her corpse, suggested rage of a singular intensity.
The weapon had surely been a powerful rifle. The large-caliber, high-velocity ammunition appeared to have caved in her chest.
As if she saw that the violence committed against her distressed me, the wounds and the blood faded, and she appeared as she looked before the trigger had been squeezed. Lovely. The hint of a strong will in her posture and expression. Her gaze direct and, it seemed to me, honest.
She turned, walked away, and paused after three steps to glance over her shoulder.
Realizing that she wished to lead me to something, I followed this beauty to the end of the vault. In one corner, a tight spiral staircase led to a yet-lower level of the mausoleum.
She wanted me to go with her into that deeper place.
Twenty-three
SPIRALING IRON TWISTED DEEPER INTO A DARKNESS that was not the absence of light but the absence of hope, for the light below was as golden as that in the vault of spheres and flywheels above.
I had dreamed of Auschwitz and in the dream had been afraid of dying twice. Annamaria had assured me that I would die once and only once, and that it would be “the death that doesn’t matter.”
In all our lives, however, there are many days when we die a little, when we are wounded by loss or failure, or by fear, or by seeing the suffering of others for whom we are able to offer only pity, for whom we are powerless to offer aid, who are beyond mercy.
The spiral stairs were like an auger bit boring sharply down through the layers of Roseland. When a well-driller cores earth and rock in search of water, he occasionally pulls to the surface fossils or fragments thereof. Some are bizarre creatures with eyes on stalks and whip tails and many-jointed legs, things that crawled the floors of ancient seas long gone. The sight of them impressed in stone can make Earth seem less known than unknown, and the nip that twitches through your blood is the chill of the sudden suspicion that you are a stranger in a strange land. The sole sound in the subcellar of the mausoleum was my footsteps on iron treads, and in the silence at the bottom of the stairs, I came upon a scene so outré, so bleak that I could have found nothing more horrifying on an alien planet orbiting a distant star.
This space was higher than the first cellar, maybe eleven feet. Later, I would take in the parallel arrays of gold-plated gears in the three feet immediately under the ceiling, embraced above and below by shallow silver-plated tracks. They were not fixed in the tracks, were not merely receiving and transmitting force and motion, but were themselves moving across the chamber, out of a hole in one wall and into a hole in the opposite wall. The first, third, and fifth arrays were churning east to west; the second, fourth, and sixth moved west to east. Teeth meshed with teeth, and by the biting of one another, the gleaming wheels turned as relentlessly and as silently as the flywheels in the upper cellar. I couldn’t understand what they were meant to achieve, what they might be driving, if they were driving anything more than themselves.
But the mystery of the gears mattered not at all in light of the dead women who sat on the floor with their backs against the walls.
As I have said in at least one other volume of this continuing memoir, I will not tell everything that I saw. The tableau in the subcellar was as grossly indecent as it was horrific. The innocent dead deserve their dignity.
Numbers do not define the degree of this villainy, for each of these women was a special soul, as is each person ever born. What had been done to each was an injustice and an iniquity so monstrous that the mind rebelled and the heart sank at the wickedness of it, and any one victim was sufficient to require the execution, with extreme prejudice, of whoever had done this to her. Later, when I counted them, I found there were thirty-four.
Yet the room was as odorless as it was hushed … and that was not the most puzzling thing about the scene.
They were all naked, seated side by side on the floor, their backs against the concrete wall. Although each of their souls had been unique, they were physically of a type. All were blondes of one shade or another, a few with shorter hair, most with hair that fell shoulder-length or longer. Some might have been as young as sixteen; none appeared to be older than her late twen
ties. They had once been lovely, with refined features. Their eyes were blue or blue-gray, or blue-green, and they stared wide-eyed, some because death had caught them that way and others because pins had been used to keep their eyelids from closing.
As the quiet spirit of the nightgowned rider led me through the subcellar, with the silently meshing-churning golden gears two feet overhead, the resemblance between her and the dead women became ever more marked.
My first assumption was that she had been the first victim, and that her murderer wasn’t satisfied to kill her once. He found surrogates who resembled her, and he killed them as if to kill her again.
Evidently, none of these dead women clung stubbornly to this world, because I had seen no lingering spirits in Roseland except that of the rider and her faithful horse. I was grateful for their haste in crossing over, because if the subcellar had been crowded with their anguished and beseeching ghosts, I might have been incapable of coping.
Although most of them had been tortured in one way or another, I will not say with what techniques or what instruments. With some the brute had worked on their hands, with others their feet, their breasts. But except for the straight pins in the eyelids, which the lack of blood suggested were inserted postmortem, their faces were untouched.
The murderer wanted always to be able to see the stallion rider’s face in each of theirs. Maybe he came here to review his collection, to feel their stares upon him, to lord over them the fact that he lived and even flourished in spite of what he’d done to them.
That this subcellar full of corpses remained free of any whiff of decomposition perplexed me less than did the condition of the thirty-four dead women. They looked as if every one of them had been killed that very morning.
Twenty-four
SUCH FLAWLESS PRESERVATION WAS IMPOSSIBLE. THESE women were not embalmed, not mummified. Besides, mummies don’t have the smooth skin of maidens, silken hair, clear eyes. And even embalmed bodies deteriorate.