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.
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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.
I didn’t stop to leap out of the truck and do a victory lap around it, but instead angled east-southeast. I intended to circle the developed part of the estate and return to the guest tower, to see if Annamaria might be under siege.
On that rolling land, the big tires and apparently customized suspension provided a ride that was less like bounding over rough territory than like being on a boat as it slid up the face of a wave, down the back, and wallowed through a trough toward the next wall of water.
I weltered along a glen, searching for an easy way up the next slope, which was thick with brush in some places and rocky in others. Abruptly the landscape all around me rippled vertically, as if snakes of heat were rising from it again, though the air remained cool.
Paulie Sempiterno and Mrs. Tameed had spoken of eddies and a full tide. They hadn’t been talking about the sea, but about this phenomenon.
As I squinted at the way ahead, resisting a greasy nausea, the quality of the light changed, although not as dramatically as when morning had turned to night in a minute. The pale grass became a darker gold, the silver weeds tarnished. Racing shadows swelled and withered and swelled and slithered across the land.
I slowed, braked to a halt, and reluctantly looked up.
For a moment, I saw again the yellow sky that frightened me more than did the primate swine. These were not merely Earth’s heavens in the throes of Armageddon. An apocalypse is a revelation, and this was an apocalyptic sky, in the sense that it revealed what humankind, by its arrogance and reckless certitude, would bring down upon itself.
The quivering thermals that had brought the fearsome skyscape now shimmered it away. The heavens became mostly blue again, with an armada of ordinary storm clouds still threatening in the north, where they had been all morning, as if riding at anchor.
I hadn’t imagined those hostile yellow heavens any more than I had dreamed that I’d stepped through a doorway into a time prior to Roseland’s existence. Both moments had been as real as the warm saliva that Ms. Victoria Mors had spat in my face.
I sat in the landscaper’s truck, in the glen between two hills, letting my heart quiet itself. Usually I can knit clues into a theory while on my feet and dodging anything thrown at me, but in this case I needed a moment of stillness to make sure that I didn’t drop a stitch.
The massive wall around Roseland, perhaps housing fantastical machinery like that I had seen in the cellars of the mausoleum, not only physically isolated the estate but also set it apart in other ways. These acres were an island of the irrational in the sea of everyday reality.
Whatever the intention had been behind Roseland’s creation, the dire events of the moment were side effects that no one had expected. After the fact, they had taken steps to defend against those side effects: the bars on windows, the steel shutters, all the guns and stores of ammunition.
The freaks might be only an infrequent threat. Nevertheless, to live in this bedlam, the people here must have believed that whatever benefit they received from the system they created was worth the cost of nightly wariness and occasional full assaults by creatures that seemed to belong here less than to some other time or place.
I thought that I knew what the benefit might be, why they didn’t simply pull the master switch and eliminate the mortal threat of the freaks.
And I suspected that the benefit was simultaneously a curse. It led to their conviction that they were far superior to anyone not of Roseland. Not merely superior. They saw themselves as gods and the rest of us as animals.
Men and women who seek to become gods must first lose their humanity.
Noah Wolflaw’s homicides and the complicity of the others in his crimes seemed neither insane nor criminal to them, any more than I would consider myself mad or criminal for hooking a fish, gutting it, and cooking it for dinner. I satisfied a hunger. Wolflaw would say that he merely satisfied a more exotic appetite. To him, my fish was as far below me on the ladder of species as the women he killed were below him.
Wolflaw had not merely lost his humanity. He had thrown it away with all the force that he could muster.
My next step, after checking on Annamaria, would be to find out who the people of Roseland really were. They were either not who they claimed to be or not only who they claimed to be.
I am one megasuspicious pretty-boy, pathetic, stupid cocker.
The time-out had served me well. I drove farther along the glen, looking for a place where the hillside was navigable.
Suddenly he was standing forty feet in front of me. I could have driven straight through him, but I braked to a halt.
There in the wild grass, he wore a three-piece suit and a necktie. From five feet in front of the trucklet, he regarded me with that deadpan look that had once been famous.
He was portly, with a round face and full cheeks and two chins, but not immense like Chef Shilshom. Unlike the chef, he had come by his physique not by indulgence but because of genetics, having been stout as a small child. His lower lip protruded far past the upper, as if he were pondering how best to deal with a problematic person whom he wished to be rid of but did not wish to insult.
“This is not a good time,” I told him. “My plate is full. My cup runneth over. I’m sorry. I don’t usually speak in clichés. And those weren’t references to your weight. I’m just frazzled. I’m not able to deal with one more complication.”
Among some of the lingering dead who have come to me for help, a couple have been famous performers in their lifetimes. In spite of what you might think if you closely follow the entertainment-news programs on TV and the Internet, celebrities do have souls.
In the first three of my memoirs, I have written about my rather long relationship with Mr. Elvis Presley’s spirit. He appeared to me when I was in high school, and we hung around together for quite a few years. For reasons he was slow to make clear to me, the King of Rock ’n’ Roll was reluctant to move on to the Other Side, though he wanted to be there. The problem was not anything as simple as that he was worried there would be no deep-fried peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches in the next life. Eventually I helped him cross over.
Then came Mr. Frank Sinatra. His spirit was my companion only for a few weeks. They were memorable days. As a poltergeist, as in life, Mr. Sinatra could throw a heck of a hard punch when you needed backup.
I don’t know why I assumed that if the spirit of another famous person were to come to me, seeking assistance in moving on from this world, he or she would have been a renowned singer.
The gentleman in the suit walked around to the passenger side of the mini truck. He had an unusual aura of authority because it was in no way stern or superior and because it was twined with an air of congeniality.
“Sir, I am honored, I really am, that you would come to me for assistance. I’m an admirer. If I survive this, I’ll do what I can for you. But, see, there’s so much going on in Roseland that my head will explode if I have to think about one more thing.”
He put his hands to his head and then flung them away, fingers wide, as if depicting the consequences of a detonating skull.
“Yes, exactly. I’m sorry about this. Never say no to a spirit in need. That’s my motto. Well, it’s not my motto, but it’s a principle of mine. I don’t have a motto. Unless maybe ‘If it’s worth eating, it’s worth frying.’ I’m babbling, aren’t I? That’s because I’m such a fan. I really am. I guess you hear that all the time. Or did when you were alive. I guess you don’t hear it as often since you’re dead.”
The dire situation in Roseland was not so much the reason for my nervous babbling. And I was not rattled by the fact that I really was an admirer of his work. Those were both causes, but I was also intimidated by that deadpan expression, which suggested that he had the patience to outwait me until my resistance wilted, and because it reminded me of the wit and intelligence that were behind it. Elvis? Piece of cake. Sinatra? Mostly easy. But I was out of my league with this one, who was probably smarter than me by a factor of ten.
“You’ve waited a long time to cross over,” I said. “Must be thirty years. Give me another day. Then we’ll talk. Or I’ll talk, since you can’t. But just now, you know, there’s all these bad people. And dead bodies. The woman on the horse. The imprisoned boy. And a ticking clock. You know all about ticking clocks. Who knows more about ticking clocks than you? And I’ve got pigs to deal with! They’re big, mean, walkin’-tall pigs, sir. You never had to deal with primate swine. I’d be no good for you right now.”
He smiled and nodded. He waved me on.
As he turned away, before he dematerialized, I said, “Wait. Mr. Hitchcock.”
He faced me once more.
“You weren’t … you didn’t … I mean, you didn’t die here, did you?”
He grimaced and shook his head. No.
“Did you ever visit Roseland when you were alive?”
He shook his head again.
“Back in the day, did you ever do business with Constantine Cloyce’s movie studio?”
He nodded, and his expression was uncharacteristically fierce.