“So he must know.”
“He doesn’t understand the house. Even sometimes on ordinary days, it seems … not what it ought to be. But during a full tide like this, it always gets stranger.”
Full tide. Waves of future time washing into this moment of the past.
I wished Roseland were only haunted. I could cope with haunted.
Previously the series of frosted dome lights overhead had properly revealed the passageway to the library. But now that hall was poorly illuminated, as was this previously unnoticed branch. In the longer hall, I saw two doors on the left side, none on the right, and one at the end.
Timothy said, “Jam Diu says it can’t be fully understood, not even by Tesla.”
In the drawing room, the freaks had fallen silent, as had the shotgun. If Sempiterno had killed them, he would quickly reload and come after us.
“I’m scared,” Timothy said.
“Me too.”
Neither the powder room nor the supply room in the short hall, nor the library at the end of it, nor anywhere we could go from the library, seemed to offer us any safety.
I wanted to get to the back service stairs, in the kitchen. They would take us down to the wine cellar.
Letting go of the boy, gripping the Beretta with both hands, I said, “Come on, this way. What do we have to lose?”
Forty-five
THE FIRST DOOR OPENED INWARD TO A SHAFT FILLED with golden radiance. The dimensions of it were difficult to ascertain because the walls were lined with mirrors that deceived the eye with the cunning of a mirror maze in a funhouse.
Shining ranks of spiral forms, similar to the paper decorations people sometimes hang from the ceiling in parties that have an Asian theme, turned at various speeds, although they were not paper. Like drill bits with wide spurs, they bore down through the shaft. No ceiling was apparent; the turning drill bits appeared out of a blur perhaps twenty feet above. They vanished into another blur twenty feet below. If one moment they seemed to be augering down into the earth, the next moment they appeared to be boring upward.
As elsewhere, the machinery operated in perfect silence. What might have been the cutting edges of the spurs glistened like molten gold, and what might have been the flutes between the spurs appeared to be as liquid and silver as mercury.
The sight was dizzying, the spiral forms receding to infinity in the mirrors. I felt a kind of hypnotic attraction to those coils, and I closed the door before I might step in a half trance across the threshold and go spinning down into the blur below.
I glanced back toward the junction of hallways, where we had entered from the drawing room. We hadn’t yet been followed.
I urged the boy ahead, wanting to keep my body between him and the shotgun if Sempiterno should burst in upon us.
When I touched the knob of the second door, it was freezing. My hand nearly stuck to the brass.
The place beyond lay in such deep darkness that it didn’t seem to be either a shaft or a room. Before me lay a void, utterly black, as though it were a view of the nothingness beyond the end of the universe.
The hallway light was dim, but it should have penetrated a few inches into this strange space. The demarcation of light and purest darkness was as straight as a ruled line along the inner edge of the threshold.
Having seen this once before, in distant Pico Mundo, I put my fingertips to what I hoped might be a solid mass, a barrier, but my fingers disappeared into the blackness and then my hand all the way to the wrist. I could see nothing of my fingers, and my arm ended as abruptly as an amputee’s stump.
In the first of these memoirs, I wrote of such a room that I found in the house of a nasty piece of work whom I called Fungus Man. That room had been ordinary on one occasion, like this the next, and then ordinary again.
I won’t recount again what that room in Pico Mundo produced, but I wanted none of it here. I withdrew my hand, closed the door, and looked at the boy, who seemed amazed that I still possessed the hand that I’d put at risk.
“Have you seen this before?” I asked.
“No.”
Sempiterno should have come after us by now. Maybe he had killed the freaks at the expense of his own life. If so, I didn’t intend to send flowers to the funeral.
When I opened the door at the end of the long hallway, which should have led us toward the back of the house, I found ahead of me the library, which should have been toward the front.
Bewildered by this discovery, the boy and I crossed the threshold before I saw Paulie Sempiterno. He was standing with his back to us, surveying the book-lined room, as if he’d just come through the same door ten seconds ahead of us.
Hearing us, he began to turn, the shotgun swinging around.
In this war of men and monsters, there was no reason to think he would side with humanity. He brought women to Roseland so that Cloyce could play with them. Perhaps he played with them, too. Perhaps in some corner of the estate, I would discover a collection of his that would make me wish I were blind. In that glimpse of the future, when I’d seen a blackened tree hung with the skeletons of children, was that a work of Sempiterno’s on which he’d engage in years to come?
I squeezed off shots as fast as the semiauto would fire, and punched him down to his knees with the copper-jacketed hollow-point rounds. The shotgun clattered out of his hands. He fell hard onto his side, spasmed into the fetal position, and froze there, leaving this world in the position in which he had waited for months to enter it.
No satisfaction comes with killing, regardless of how deserving of death your adversary might be. The killing-machine heroes in books and movies, who toss off bon mots as they cut down villains by the score, seem to me to be disturbingly close in character to the freaks of Roseland, saved only by the fact that they are good-looking and can rely on writers to cloak them in charm that reliably distracts the audience’s attention from the fullest meaning of all the blood.
As Sempiterno fell and curled in the womb of Death, I looked at the boy to be sure he was all right. Our eyes met for a moment. Maybe in my stare, he saw far more years than my face revealed, as I saw in his.
Then I turned away from him and stepped to the service door by which we had entered the library. The long, dimly lighted hallway along which we had come was not there. Instead, it was the shorter hall leading directly to the drawing room, well lighted now and leading to no junction with another corridor.
No matter how many freaks might be prowling the grounds of Roseland, we needed to get out of here quickly, before perhaps the house itself became as m
uch of a threat as the yellow-eyed pack.
Forty-six
EVERY CORNER WAS A DANGER, EVERY DOORWAY A threat, the silence pregnant with peril. Maybe three freaks were dead, maybe only two. Maybe three had gotten into the house, maybe six or twelve, or for all I knew, twenty-four. Jam Diu, Mrs. Tameed, and Sempiterno were no longer of this world, and probably also Chef Shilshom. Henry Lolam was trapped in the gatehouse. That left Victoria and Constantine, the pair whose eternal love—as she called it—had matured into a love of murder.
My intuition, usually more reliable than my reason, told me that wherever Timothy and I were going between now and the end of all this would make the Valley of the Shadow of Death seem like a vacation spot. There was killing to be done, of the kill-or-be-killed kind, and I didn’t think the freaks would do me the favor of taking out all three remaining Roselanders.
We made our way through the house, from the library toward the kitchen, keeping to main rooms and hallways, avoiding service halls because I no longer trusted them to lead where they seemed to lead.
I wanted to return to the mausoleum and from there go overland to the guest tower. Since Timothy had told me about the chronosphere, a dangerous idea had pressed itself insistently upon me. At first it had been a half-understood phantom at the back of my mind, but it had come forward in my thoughts until it was fully fleshed and demanding a dialogue.
If I took the course of action I was considering, nothing fine could come of it. I would destroy myself and lose forever that one thing that had given me hope since the worst day of my life in Pico Mundo. But you can’t stand an idea up against a wall and execute it. Neither can you wrap it up in a tissue of your better judgment and tuck it in a box of forgetfulness. An idea can be the most dangerous of all things, especially if it is an idea that promises you the most particular and exquisite happiness for which you’ve long yearned.
By the time Timothy and I arrived in the kitchen, I was steeled for the sight of Shilshom torn asunder, his innards festooning the appliances and his head perched upon the cutting board beside the sink. But the kitchen was not an abattoir. His death cry must have originated from elsewhere in the house.