She said, “No. That’s not it at all. Not at all. It goes … ‘And so, from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe, and then, from hour to hour, they rot and rot.’ They rot, you rot, you ignorant clockers rot and rot, not us.”
Unshed tears stood in her eyes, although they didn’t move me. I thought those salty waters must be as poisonous as a viper’s venom.
“You vicious little shit. You’ve ruined everything,” she said with such bitterness that I knew she meant I’d ruined more than their depraved life at Roseland, that I had as well sowed at least a seed of doubt about whatever philosophy and mythos Constantine Cloyce had conjured up to justify their life of no limits, no rules, no fear. And I’d sawn a thin score line in the cord of “eternal love” that she had claimed bonded her to the master of Roseland.
She looked as if she might take her chances, kill the boy and then hope to shoot me before I shot her, just for the thrill of spite.
By doing so, she would be acting on her dearest principles. Envy and lust and hate. Sex, power, control, revenge.
I heard myself declare, “I haven’t ruined everything. Not yet. We can still put everything right, if you’re willing.”
Although I wasn’t sure where I meant those words to take me, I knew I didn’t dare glance at Timothy again. Victoria would interpret any look that passed from me to him as an assurance that I was still his protector and her enemy.
“Nothing can be put right,” she said. “They’re dead. You let the freaks into the house, and they killed everyone.”
“I didn’t let them in,” I said, which wasn’t exactly a lie. I certainly hadn’t intended to let them inside. “Anyway, not everyone is dead. You’re still alive. Henry Lolam in the gatehouse. And Constantine, for all I know. You and Roseland can go on … if I get what I want.”
“Let me tell you what I want.” She said she wanted to see me effing dead, effing beheaded, my effing reproductive organs cut off and stuffed in my effing mouth.
Although I wasn’t looking directly at the glass tubes in which flares of light seemed to travel in opposite directions at the same time, the display behind the woman was playing more games with my head than I was playing with hers. I felt as if the tunnel might be in fact a long boxcar, racing underground, rocking back and forth ever so slightly, as a train tends to do. She was more familiar with this effect and probably unaffected by it. I grew increasingly queasy. If queasiness developed into full-blown nausea, the stalemate might end the instant she saw that I was disoriented.
Suddenly, in response to her F-word storm, I found myself playing a bad boy, pretending that my previous persona had been as phony as the name Victoria Mors. “You’re a hot-looking piece, but you’re a stupid bitch. Of course we want the same thing. Everybody wants the same thing. You said it yourself.”
“Don’t screw with me.”
“Someday you’ll beg me to screw with you,” Bad Odd said. “Next time I tie you up, bitch, it’ll be on a bed. Now shake the stupid out of that pretty head and let me shove some smart in your empty skull. If we don’t work together, none of us is going to survive.”
She was suspicious, but I could see that Bad Odd made more sense to her than the Odd she had known until this moment.
I said, “I need to know some stuff, Vicky. How long will this full tide last, before we’re rid of the freaks?”
She glared at me for a moment, but then said, “As little as another hour, at most two or three.”
“How often do the full tides come?”
“We never know. A year, three years, five. It starts with eddies in the night a couple of days before. The ozone. That cry.”
“The loon,” I said.
She shuddered. “It’s no loon.”
“The freaks, the porkers—they’ve never gotten into the house before?”
“No. They’ve never carried axes and hatchets before, either. Just clubs. They’re getting smarter.”
The lights raced to and fro in the tubes, and a sourness rose in the back of my throat.
I swallowed hard, hoping she didn’t notice, and said, “Where does this tunnel go?”
Reverting to type, she told me that she wasn’t my effing tour guide. She moved her left arm up to encircle Timothy’s neck, and she shifted the muzzle of the pistol to his right temple.
Bad Odd didn’t respond well to backtalk. I took a step toward her, so that the muzzle of the Beretta was about two feet from her face. “Listen, you stupid slut, I’d just as soon blow your brains out. If you think I care about the boy, you don’t understand the situation. The only person I care about is me. If I’m the only one who walks out of here, I’m happy with that. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Where does this tunnel go?”
She studied me for a moment, and then relented. “It runs east for a ways, then branches northeast and south.”
“Northeast to what?”
“The machine rooms under the stables.”
“And south?”
“To the guest tower.”
“That’s what I wanted to hear. So the two other security guards you said were on vacation. They don’t exist, do they?”
“Maybe they do.”
“Yeah, and maybe Santa Claus does, too. So here’s the way it’s got to be, Vicky. Annamaria and I are staying in Roseland. I like the lifestyle. I can get used to being rich. And the idea of being young forever. I killed Sempiterno. I’ll take his place. We’ll beef up the defenses here. We’ll be ready for the freaks, whether it’s a year from now or ten years.”
“This isn’
t going to happen,” she said.
“Like hell it isn’t. If there’s only three of you now, you’ll need backup on the next full tide.”
My stomach seemed to turn like an eel twining lazily about itself, and I concentrated intently on Victoria’s face.
She said, “Constantine won’t let you stay.”
“You forget that Constantine invited us. Besides, we have a gift for him that he really wants.”
“What gift?”
“Annamaria’s baby.”
The horrific implications of my statement didn’t faze her. Her eyes looked as without depth as those of a doll, one of those dolls that, in movies, comes alive and reveals a keen interest in cutlery. “That’s not Constantine. That’s more Paulie’s kind of thing.”
My dark mood darkened as I wondered what, other than machinery, might wait to be discovered in the machine rooms under the stables. I did not intend to find out.
I said, “Remember, Paulie’s dead. As for Constantine … tastes change, become more sophisticated. If that’s not your thing, you and I can invent some new game. You look like you’d be a lot of fun when you let your hair down.”
“You said you detested, abhorred, and loathed me.”
“No. I said maybe I did. But don’t you see? Don’t you agree that the greatest thrill of all might be giving yourself to what you detest, abhor, and loathe? The freedom of not caring.”
Bad Odd was beginning to scare me.
Victoria’s tongue tasted her lips. “Living here, being freed from time’s oppression does something to you.”
“What something?”
“It’s like a fever in the blood, not an illness, an exhilarating liberation. We call it dispossession fever.”
“Dispossession of what?”
“We are dispossessed of all impossibilities, of everything that seemed once beyond doing. Every desire can be fulfilled as easily as it was conceived. And every desire eventually gives way to one more deliciously outrageous. The possibilities before us are infinite.”