The gardener had dropped his benign Zen persona along with his pretense of being a gardener. Hatred pulled his round face long, and in his eyes reflections of the overhead lights seemed to flicker like serpent tongues.
“If I had my way, boy, I’d slit you open and let you die trying to stuff your intestines back in yourself. And then I’d bring you back from ten minutes ago and do it all over again.”
“Well,” I said, because this didn’t seem to be one of those disagreeable conversations that was likely to take a positive turn.
Perhaps realizing that the years of his imprisonment might be only the prelude to the horrors that an inventive man like this could visit upon him, Timothy sidled closer to me.
“One last chance to put the gun down, fry cook. Otherwise I blow you away and maybe bring both of you back for more.”
“Killing me once will be enough, sir. I don’t want to put you to any trouble.”
Because I couldn’t think of anything else to do, I bent my knees slightly and began to lower the adored Beretta to the floor, doing it slow and easy, as he had suggested, in fact so slow and so easy that I might live to see another birthday before I finally released the weapon.
I was hoping that some brilliant maneuver would occur to me and that I would astonish him as Jackie Chan astonished his foes in those martial-arts movies. But I’m no Jackie Chan, and as it turned out, the porkers pulled my bacon from the fire.
Twenty feet behind Jam Diu, the wine-cellar door flew open, and one of the freaks raged into the corridor. It wasn’t a hunchback with a misshapen head and too-long arms, but was instead one of those that might be called a normal specimen of their kind. In the hoggish head: a leering mouth of rending teeth, the fleshy nostrils in the dripping snout, the yellow eyes like the fevered glare of something crawling through the moss-hung darkness of a swamp dream.
The beast had evidently discovered the guardian-angel door in the mausoleum wall, which I had been unable to close. It had found its way through cellar, subcellar, and tunnel to this moment of reckoning.
Jam Diu swung toward the door when it crashed open, but the swine thing was quicker than it appeared to be. It seized his right arm and snapped it like a dry stick. As Jam Diu, prince of time and a god among mere men, screamed, the buckshot tore harmlessly into the ceiling.
While this was happening, I shouted to Timothy to run, but he was already on the move. I chased after him, thankful that I hadn’t put down the Beretta, although in these close quarters and against these beasts, a 9-mm pistol promised to be about as effective as fighting a T. rex with a set of lawn darts.
Two-thirds of the way to the west service stairs, down which we had come in more halcyon times, three minutes earlier, I glanced back and saw Jam Diu coming apart in ways I refuse to remember. Behind the first freak, a second entered the corridor, and behind the second came a third.
Forty-three
AFTER RACING UP TWO FLIGHTS OF THE FRONT SERVICE stairs, Timothy apparently thought, as I did, that going to the second floor would be a mistake. He flung open the stairwell door and hurried into the foyer, in the center of which he halted, looking around, unsure what to do next.
With three freaks in the house plus five heavily armed members of the self-improvement club called the Outsiders, all of them on the hunt, we were not likely to find a quiet corner where we could have tea and discuss literature undisturbed. And the sooner we went to the top floor, the sooner we would have nowhere left to go.
The freaks weren’t brainiacs, weren’t likely to spend a lot of time in a huddle strategizing their next move. They weren’t stupid, either, and weren’t entirely impulsive, but I didn’t think they would linger in the basement when so much more meat could be found upstairs.
Although I didn’t hear grunting and snorting and three-hundred-pound footfalls on the front service stairs, I figured they were coming. I pulled Timothy out of the foyer and into the main drawing room.
The giant goatish Pan still stood on the plinth under the central chandelier, and I knew whose side he’d be on in any battle between me and a wild boar with pretensions. We stayed to the shadowy perimeter of the room and stopped at the sofa behind which earlier I had hidden. Alert. Listening. We would probably smell them coming before we heard them.
After searching the basement, Cloyce and his crew had stationed Jam Diu there in case I got around behind them. But I doubted the freaks were well enough disciplined for one of them to be willing to remain below while the others were upstairs having all the fun. If we could stay alive for a few minutes, and if all of the freaks came upstairs, we could slip down again and leave as we originally intended, although I wasn’t keen on having to plod through the remains of Mr. Diu.
I suddenly realized that we had been fearfully close to the invading freaks in the basement corridor but hadn’t smelled them.
“They didn’t stink,” I whispered. “You always know they’re nearby because of their stink.”
“It’s only the deformed ones that stink,” Timothy said.
That was unfair. If they didn’t stink, maybe they could be quiet, too, when they wanted to be. I wasn’t prepared for odorless, stealthy freaks that might abruptly loom out of nowhere.
In some distant part of the house, a shotgun discharged. The first cry was as much a bellow of rage as it was a squeal of pain, unquestionably issuing from a swine’s throat.
But the second cry, fast on the heels of the first, was the most wretched human scream imaginable, the like of which I hoped never to hear again. It went on for half a minute or longer, an excruciating expression of terror and agony, so chilling that it brought to mind that horrific painting by Goya titled Saturn Devouring His Children, which is even more bloodcurdling than its title suggests.
Although none of the residents of Roseland was Timothy’s friend, not even his father, the tormented screaming affected him so deeply that he began to shudder and to sob quietly.
Because a scream shares the character of the person’s usual voice, I was certain that we had just heard the end of Chef Shilshom.
The limits imposed by reality on all of us were now apparent even to those here who believed that they lived with no limits, no rules, no fear.
I could not pity them, because true pity is joined with a desire to help. I had no intention of putting myself and Timothy at risk for any of them.
But I was unexpectedly moved by the despairing recognition of the inescapable void, which was a note that twisted through the long, tortured death cry. The worst and best of humanity stand in the same cold shadow, and even a deserved death can send a shiver of sympathy through me from skin to marrow.
In the wake of the scream, the silence in the house pooled deep.
If we were contending only with the Outsiders, we might try to hide somewhere exceedingly clever for a few minutes, until it seemed that all the freaks must have ascended in the house, and then return to the basement. But the swine things would probably smell us out everywhere except in the airtight walk-in refrigerator off the kitchen.
Besides the possibility of being trapped inside the walk-in, I didn’t want to hide in a refrigerator for the same reason I wouldn’t have hidden in the communal cookpot in a village of cannibals.
To Timothy, I whispered, “Freaks inside the house, there’s no longer any reason not to go outside, more places to run. Where are the controls for the security shutters?”
“I d-don’t know.”
“Any guess at all?”
“No,” he said. “N-n-none.”
He reached for me. I took his hand. It was small
and cold and damp with sweat.
In the ninety-five years of his singular existence, he had read thousands of books, which together comprised most of his experience. Thousands of lives in thousands of books, lived vicariously, plus so many years of grim familiarity with the many horrors of Roseland, yet he not only kept his sanity but also, in some part of his mind and heart, he remained a little boy, having held tightly to a kernel of innocence. Under the most oppressive and depressing circumstances, he had preserved at least a measure of the purity with which he was born.
I could not have done as much in his position, and I dreaded failing him, which I had been certain I would since that trusting smile he had given me on the service stairs.
The continuing silence seemed both to invite us to get moving and to warn us against rash action.
Diagonally across the vast room, near the southeast corner, the hidden service door in the paneling opened, and Mrs. Tameed entered like an experienced cop clearing a threshold: staying low, pistol in a two-hand grip, sweeping the muzzle left to right.
Although we were at the farther end of the room and in shadow, she saw us, and I could almost feel her fury before she spoke.
“You scum-sucking sonofabitch,” she hissed, perhaps so chastened by the current peril that she felt obliged to clean up her language at least to some extent. “You let them into the house.”
As I’d done with Timothy in the basement, I held a finger to my lips to convey my belief in the desirability of silence, because no matter how much we might despise each other, trading insults right now might bring upon us the fate of Jam Diu and Shilshom.
She took a shot at me.
Forty-four