Together we had found our way to that crossroads of self-love and self-loathing that is the modern madness most in vogue. She assumed that the very fact I recognized this place in the mind and heart must mean that I was as enthralled by it as she was, that I was ready to live a life that would be a deathwork.
Sometimes not to take a risk is to embrace failure. I took the risk of holstering my Beretta.
She held Timothy against her, arm around his neck, muzzle of the gun against his temple.
In his eyes, I thought I saw both fear and relief, and the latter saddened me.
Victoria released him. She lowered her weapon, muzzle toward the floor.
“When I spat on your mouth,” she said, favoring me with that elfin smile, “you must have liked the taste of it.”
I drew my pistol and shot her point-blank twice in the chest before she could raise her gun arm.
Forty-eight
EXCEPT FOR THE WOUNDS, THE BLOOD, VICTORIA ON the passageway floor was an elfin loveliness, shorn now of the spirit that didn’t measure up to the beauty of her material form.
I said to the boy, “Don’t look at her.”
“I’ve seen worse.”
“Just the same,” I said, “don’t look. Go on up the tunnel a little ways. I’ll join you in a minute.”
He did as I asked.
My nausea had abated. The cause of it hadn’t been the pulsing lights in the walls. The cause had been the recognition of what I would do to her if, by deception, I could win her trust.
I owed this woman nothing other than what I’d given her, and in spite of how young she appeared to be, her death was not untimely. Yet death is always first and foremost death even when it might also be something else, like justice.
In spite of what she was and what she had done, once very long ago she’d been someone else who had not yet cast aside all innocence. In respect of the better girl who had once been, I wished that I had a blanket to drape over her rather than leave her exposed in the indignity of death.
My sports coat would cover only her head and torso, which would somehow seem a mockery.
Her 9-mm pistol lay on the floor. Because I was so rapidly going through my supply of ammunition, I picked up the weapon. I ejected the magazine—and discovered it was empty. The chamber didn’t contain a round, either.
Having exhausted her ammunition before we even encountered each other, she’d not been an immediate threat either to me or to Timothy.
I snapped the magazine back into her pistol and put the gun on the floor beside her.
Nothing could have been different. What happened was the only thing that could have happened. Nevertheless, that moment was far from a high point in my life.
I turned my back to her and replenished the ammunition in the magazine of my Beretta.
When I joined Timothy farther along the passageway, I said, “Are you all right?”
“No. Last time I was all right, my mother was still alive.”
I put a hand on his shoulder. “You said no one can go from the present to the past and have any effect on what happened to make the present what it is.”
“They tell me that Tesla said so, and it turns out to be true.”
“Your father brought you back from 1925, from minutes before he accidentally shot you, but your dead body was still on the lawn with your mother’s and the horse.”
“Yeah. My life ended when he shot me.”
“But here you are, a paradox. Alive … though never changing.”
“Because I have no life—no destiny—to grow into.”
I settled on one knee, to be at his height. “If we brought your mother back from before he shot her, she would be like you.”
“Like me. Never changing physically. Haunted by the future. Never able to leave Roseland.” He glanced toward Victoria’s body. “Except by being killed again.”
This was news to me. “You can’t leave Roseland?”
“They say … they think I’d cease to exist if I did. I’m out of time, out of my time, here in a century where I don’t belong. Maybe I’m sustained only by the energy field, Tesla’s field, that encircles Roseland.”
If that turned out to be true, I had saved him only to sentence him to death, one way or another.
The freaks had taken out Jam Diu and Mrs. Tameed and perhaps even Constantine Cloyce, sparing me from dispatching as many people as I had thought I would be called upon to kill, perhaps even sparing me from being the scourge that I dreaded being. And if I shut down the estate and put an end to the last of the Outsiders, which might be Henry Lolam, I had perhaps saved the lives of all the women and children upon whom this demented cult would have preyed in the decades to come. That was a good day’s work, especially for a fry cook who was out of a job.
But this perpetual child, grown wise from books and seasoned by his suffering, was such a survivor that I was distressed by the thought that I could help him only by putting an end to him. After all that he had endured here, after the terrible things he had seen and heard, he still held fast to his innocence, at least in the sense that he was blameless, guileless, harmless, uncorrupted. He deserved better than a second death.
If his fate had been mine to craft, I would have given him life, hope, and happiness. I am, however, without such godlike power. I am only an itinerant janitor these days, going where I have to go, cleaning up one kind of mess or another, and then moving on to the next toxic spill.
When he revealed that he would cease to exist as soon as he walked outside the gates of the estate, I didn’t know what to say to him. I could only put my arms around him, hug him, hold him tight. I guess that must have been the right thing to do, because he hugged me, too, and for a moment we took strength from each other, deep in Roseland’s maze, while freaks stalked through other passageways and also through the sunlit world above, feeding on human flesh with the enthusiasm of the Minotaur prowling the labyrinth under ancient Crete.
As we set out to find the branching tunnels of which Victoria Mors had spoken, I said, “There’s someone I want you to meet.”
He shook his head. “I just want to be sent back. To be one Timothy again, not two, just one and finished in 1925, like I was meant to be.”
“Maybe that’s best,” I admitted. “But often what we want isn’t what’s best. There’s this friend of mine in the guest tower. She’s a nice lady. I want to see what she thinks before we decide what to do.”
“Who is she?”
“I sure would give just about anything to be able to answer that one, Tim.”
Where the copper-clad passageway forked, far beneath the manicured acres of Roseland, we turned right, toward the guest tower.
I’d been so distracted by Timothy’s revelation that he would cease to exist beyond the walls of the estate, I only now registered the importance of something else that he had said. I quoted him: “ ‘Haunted by the future.’ ”
“In the past, I’m dead. And having died there, I don’t belong to the present. Yet I’m alive. My mind is both in and outside of time. So maybe that’s why … I see things that might come to pass.”
“The future?”
“I guess it is.”
“Earlier, I came into your room. You were sitting in the big chair. Eyes rolled back in your head. Were you in a trance?”
“I can enter it when I want. But sometimes it comes over me when I don’t want it.”
“You said something about their faces melting off their skulls, they turned to soot, blew away.… You mean that’s something you saw happening someday?”
“Blasts of bright white light,” he said, “turn everything to soot and dust.”
“The schoolgirls in uniforms and kneesocks. Their clothes and hair on fire, flames flying out of their mouths. You mean … war.”
“I see different things at different times. I don’t know which just might happen and which will happen.”
After a hesitation, I asked, “Do you see some good things, some might-happens
that we’d want to live in?”
“Not many.”
“If the future isn’t set … why do the freaks keep showing up here over the years? Why doesn’t some other, alternate future bleed into Roseland now and then?”
“Maybe because in most of the possible futures, like eighty or ninety percent of them, the freaks are created and the whole world is wrecked by war.”
“But that’s not inevitable?”
“No. We’ve seen some things change from full tide to full tide.”
“Like what?”
“Like there didn’t used to be those giant bats.”
“That’s a change for the worse,” I said.
“Yeah. But if there can be a change for the worse, there can be a change for the better.”
We walked the rest of the way in silence.
The passageway ended at a spiral stainless-steel staircase that was tightly wound. I led the way up perhaps fifty feet. At the top, I knew by the copper dome forty feet overhead that we were on the third floor of the guest tower.
The entire large chamber—even the floor—had been clad in bright copper. Patterns of what appeared to be silver discs were inlaid in the copper, each bearing the symbol for infinity.
The chronosphere was the most spectacular but not the most astonishing thing in the room. I felt at once a strange quality to the light. Neither too dim nor too bright, bathing us in the warm golden radiance reminiscent of candleglow but without the flicker, it lent the room a welcoming ambiance that made even this bizarre space seem familiar, although it was like nothing I had ever experienced before. I needed the better part of a minute to realize that the light was strange because it had no source. No lamps, no sconces, no overhead fixtures. End to end, top to bottom, the room was evenly illuminated, no spot darker or brighter than any other. It seemed that the light must be as integral to the space as the air, and beyond saying that, I am at a loss to better describe the effect.
I remembered that in his Colorado laboratory, in 1899, Nikola Tesla had lighted two hundred lamps at a distance of twenty-five miles, without wires. He transmitted electricity through the air. Always a font of new ideas, he had quickly moved on to other tasks, and today the technology behind that feat is lost.
The difference between the Colorado experiment and this tower chamber was the lack of light bulbs. The entire room seemed to serve as a bulb, though it was not a vacuum and lacked a filament. Timothy and I could breathe, and we were not affected by an electric current. No shock. No faintest tingle. The fine hairs on the backs of my hands did not bristle with static.
Timothy and I cast no shadows. Neither did the chronosphere or anything else. Being universal, the source and the brightness of the light defeated shadows.
The chronosphere will be no less difficult to describe.
The outermost part of it was a giant gimbal mounting, every arm of which was curved and plated in silver. This measured approximately eighteen feet wide and twenty-seven feet from base to crown, leaving a four-to-five-foot walkaround.
Centered in this first and larger gimbal mounting was another, this one plated in gold. And within the second mounting was the wheel of a gyroscope, except that instead of a wheel it was a golden egg about eight feet end to end and six feet in diameter at its widest point. I suppose the egg didn’t make the exotic construction exactly a gyroscope, but something without a name, at least without one in my vocabulary.
In ways that defeated the eye, the gracefully curved arms of the inner mounting were attached to the outer in some fashion that allowed them to turn smoothly, silently, describing lazy-eight arcs in the air. Those arcs seemed to intersect and therefore to conflict with one another, but the continuously moving arms of the mounting never collided. At the center of this smaller mounting was the egg, at the moment rotating on an axis that kept its narrowest end at the top.
The magically turning arms of the elaborate inner gimbal didn’t cast shadows. But along their edges, the air—or the light itself—rippled faintly.
Pointing to the egg, Timothy said, “That’s the capsule. That’s what moves in time—and out of it. It can carry one or two people. You can send me back alone, and if it’s not set on PARK, it’ll return here empty.”
I had a lot of questions, but this wasn’t the time for them. I spotted a copper door in the copper wall, and taking Timothy by the hand, I led him around the chronosphere to the exit.
Beyond lay the curve of stairs that would take us down to the second floor, where Annamaria waited.
I didn’t have a key to this upper chamber. I took a pair of dollar bills from my wallet, wadded them, and stuffed them into the receiving hole in the striker plate on the door frame, so that the latch bolt could not engage and we could return when we wished. Millions of years of the past were mine for just two dollars.
Forty-nine
THE DOOR OPENED AS I PREPARED TO KNOCK ON IT, and Annamaria stood in the middle of the room, facing us, as if a moment earlier some public-address system had announced, “Odd Thomas has entered the building.”
To her left stood the golden retriever, Raphael. To her right, my ghost dog, Boo.
Draperies covered the windows, and the Tiffany lamps were dark. The only light came from three glass vessels like squat long-necked vases, one clear and two the color of brandy, in each of which a burning wick floated on a pool of oil.
Annamaria held out her right hand, and Timothy at once went to her, as if he knew her. When he took her offered hand, she bent to kiss his forehead.
In Magic Beach, the day I met her, Annamaria had preferred oil rather than electric lamps. She said that sunshine grows plants, the plants express essential oils, and years later those oils fire the lamps—giving back “the light of other days,” which she found more appealing than electric light.
No oil lamps were provided with my guest suite. Perhaps she had asked for these. Maybe Constantine Cloyce himself had brought them to her.
She led Timothy to the sofa, and they sat in the middle of it. Raphael leaped aboard, curled up, and put his head in the boy’s lap. Boo cuddled beside Annamaria.
One of the lamps stood on the coffee table. Directly above it, a few watery circles of light and shadow quivered on the ceiling, reflections of the glass vessel.
She held the boy’s right hand in both of hers. They smiled at each other.
On the small dining table stood another oil lamp, likewise projecting tremulous suggestions of its form on the ceiling.
Also on that table, in the large shallow blue dish floated one huge waxy-petaled flower where before there had been three.
“Who do you see when you look at me?” Annamaria asked the boy.
He said, “My mother.”
“But I’m not your mother, am I?”
“No,” Timothy said. “Not my mother. Or maybe you could be.”
“Could I be?”
“That would be nice,” he said, for the first time sounding more like a child than like an old man in a child’s body.
With one hand, she gently smoothed the hair back from his brow and pressed her palm to his forehead as if to determine if he might have a fever.
Something important was happening here, but I didn’t have a clue what it might be.
The third oil lamp, the clear-glass one, stood on the counter in the kitchenette. Impurities in the wick caused the flame to flutter and to elongate until it slithered for a moment into the long, narrow neck of the vessel before raveling back to the pool of oil on which it fed.
Taking Timothy’s hand in both of hers once more, Annamaria said, “How have you kept yourself as yourself all these years?”
“Books,” the boy said. “Thousands of books.”
“They must have been the right books.”
“Some were, some weren’t. You figure out which are which.”
“How do you figure it out?”
“At first by how you feel.”
“And later?”
“By reading what’s ther
e on the page and also what’s not.”
“Between the lines,” she said.
“Under the lines,” he said.
I had so little purpose in this encounter that I felt not like a fifth wheel on a cart but rather like a fifth wheel on a tricycle.
I was suddenly distracted from their conversation by a ruckus outside, a clang and clatter that drew me to one of the windows. I pulled aside the drapery and pressed my forehead to the glass, the better to see down.
One story below, agitated freaks swarmed around the base of the guest tower, both the hideous kind and the more hideous. I heard them grunting and snorting, and then came the loud clang again as one of them swung an axe hard against the iron bars that protected a ground-floor window directly below the one at which I stood.
Even if they were to chop away at the masonry in which the iron was anchored and were to pry loose those bars, the windows were too small for them to squeeze through. These beasts were primitive, emotionally volatile, mentally unstable, one deep-fried pork rind short of a full bag, but they were not so stupid or so rabidly mad that they would continue futilely attacking the windows when the front door awaited them.
That door was ironbound, not entirely ironclad. Edged with iron, banded with iron, it nevertheless offered swaths of oak at which to chop. And though it was exceedingly thick and though the hardware was forged to withstand a siege by dumb brutes that, at best, might try battering it down, it hadn’t been installed to withstand an assault by freaks armed with axes and hammers.
Victoria Mors had said the freaks were never armed like this before, that they had carried nothing but simple clubs until this full tide. She’d said they were getting smarter.
One of them saw me at the second-floor window and began to shriek at me and shake one fisted hand. His rage infected the others, and they all faced me, howling for blood and brandishing both fists and weapons.
I thought of Enceladus and the Titans, crushed under the stones that they had piled high in order to reach the heavens and make war with the gods. But I was not one of the gods, and the second floor of the tower wasn’t as far away as the heavens.