Although they were to one degree or another eccentric, everyone else at Roseland tried to maintain an air of normalcy. This colorful giant, this walking armory with screaming-hyena tattoos snarling on his massive arms, made no such effort. I found it all but impossible to see him working with the other members of the estate-security team whom I ha
d met. The safest assumption was that he was not a Roseland guard and not to be trusted for a second.
He took another deep breath, blew it out, opened his eyes, and said, “My born first name was Jack. They named me Jack Keister.”
“That’s just cruel, sir.”
“Sonofabitch bastards,” he said, which I inferred to be a less infuriated reference to his parents. “I got teased from day one in preschool, the little sonsofbitches couldn’t even wait till first grade. Minute I turned eighteen, I went to court to change my name.”
I almost said To Kenny Keister? but fortunately held my tongue.
“Kenneth Randolph Fitzgerald Mountbatten,” he said, rolling the names across his tongue with all the authority of the finest British stage actor.
“Impressive,” I declared, “and may I say, exactly fitting.”
He almost blushed with pleasure. “They’re names I always liked, so I strung ’em together.”
Unfortunately, I couldn’t think of anything more to say to him. Unless Kenny Mountbatten proved to be a more gifted raconteur than all the evidence thus far indicated, we had reached the conclusion of our conversation.
I would not have been surprised if he punctuated his final line of dialogue by shooting me in the gut.
Instead, he glanced left and then right, suddenly aware of the rapid change in the quality of light at the windows. An expression of such alarm came over him that in spite of his grievous scars, hideous teeth, and crocodilian eyes, I could see in his face a bit of the tormented little boy he had once been.
“I’m late,” he said, a tremor of distress in his voice, “late, late, late.”
He turned away from me and ran to the door through which we had both entered. Still repeating that word, he fled the building less like the Terminator that he had seemed to be and more like the White Rabbit frightened of what discipline might be imposed if he were late for tea with the Mad Hatter.
On the east side of the stable, the windows allowed in far less light than seemed possible for a morning that had so recently dawned nearly cloudless. Every pane of the western windows, however, glowed like a bright ruby.
A rapidly incoming overcast might have explained the declining light at the east windows, but not the fiery glow at those to the west. The possibility of a wildfire occurred to me, masses of dark smoke to the east, flames roaring to the west, but I didn’t smell smoke, and surely no fire could have gone from an arsonist’s match to a roaring inferno in mere minutes.
Not wanting to tread on Kenny’s heels, much preferring that he forget all about me, I hesitated before going to the door by which he had departed. It now stood open about three feet.
At the threshold, I hesitated, for the world outside wasn’t as it ought to have been.
Ten feet of bare earth lay past the door, as before, although not the rock and not the crumpled Coke can, each of which had earlier cast a single shadow, just as I did. The weeds rose beyond the barren zone, and at some distance a familiar copse of live oaks spread black limbs.
But it was all bathed in the ominous light out of which had flown the hellish bats bigger than eagles. Directly overhead and to the west, high-altitude rivers of ash and soot serpentined through a yellow sky. The eastern heavens were dark mustard fading to black. The night brimmed the mountains and the foothills, on the verge of spilling toward me, a night in which no starlight could pierce the apocalyptic mantle encircling the world.
Minutes ago, the morning was fresh, and now the day was creeping toward its bed in the far Pacific. The mystery of the building’s two shadows still played out, but I was not a good enough detective to deduce the meaning of them or to predict the resolution that seemed to be rushing toward me.
Intuition warned me, however, that to venture into this sudden yellow twilight would be dangerous if not suicidal. Beyond lay a Roseland somehow terribly different from the estate that I knew. And whatever the nature of that difference, it would not be anything as benign as that this Roseland would have roses.
I rolled the bronze door shut and could find no way to lock it. For fear of fire, perhaps no one locked in horses. And from the time when Roseland had been built, in the 1920s, there had been no gangs of horse thieves in California who needed to be locked out.
As I retreated along the stone- and copper-decorated aisle to the center of the building, the sconces on the stall posts began to dim. And then the lights went out.
Seven
NIGHT APPROACHED THE EASTERN WINDOWS, AND every leaded pane of coppery glass to the west seemed to offer a view into a furnace. The interior of the stable was char-black except where grids of faux fire smouldered red-orange on posts and stall doors.
In the gloom, I couldn’t discern if Nature’s rule of a single shadow for each object still held within the building or whether instead extra, inexplicable shadows fell to all sides of everything.
Curiously devoid of any scent to this point, the stable now smelled of ozone, the bleachlike odor that lightning often flenses from the air and that lingers sometimes hours after the thunder has rolled away and the storm has wrung itself dry. But there was no rain in this day nor any threat of rain.
I didn’t know for what I was waiting, but I knew it wouldn’t be the Welcome Wagon lady with free gifts from local merchants. In retrospect, Kenny’s abrupt departure—“Late, late, late!”—seemed less that of someone tardy for an appointment than that of a man terrified of being caught here after nightfall. A massive, tough, heavily armed man. Spooked like a little boy.
The unscheduled twilight, so soon after dawn, had such cosmic implications that my heart seemed to shrivel. It raced like that of a rabbit when the peaceable bunny sees the eye shine of the night-prowling wolf.
Terror can inebriate quicker than whiskey. Evidently I was about to receive a double-shot chaser, and I needed to get a grip, stay sober, steady.
To the east, the leaded windows were now full of night—except for the lazy eight embedded in the center of each. Those copper figures glowed without transmitting their luminescence through the dark glass, and I didn’t think their brightness was just a reflection of the red—and increasingly sullen—light that burned through the western windows opposite them.
Following Kenny’s hasty exit, a hush at first lay over the stable, but suddenly I heard something bumping softly outside, against the western wall. More than one thing. Several. At various points along that flank of the building.
A figure rose at a reddened window, but it was without detail, silhouetted against the drowning sun. I had an impression of a head, a flailing arm, a grasping hand.
At first I assumed that it was a man. Although head and arm and hand were misshapen, the extreme angle of the sun and imperfections in the thick glass might have been the cause of the distortions.
As the scarlet sunset purpled, shadows loomed at other windows, less distinct, more deformed, perhaps half a dozen individuals. By the second, I was less inclined to believe that those knocking and scraping their way along the wall of the stable were human.
For one thing, they seemed not to care about the noise they made, yet no voices were raised. Even with the intention to be quiet, human beings seldom can restrain from comment or at least grumbled cursing; we are the chattering species, as much as we are anything else.
Furthermore, those at the wall were not testing its sturdiness or announcing their arrival. They were fumbling their way along it, no doubt seeking a door, but not as ordinary men would seek it. The descending night did not fully reign. The land was light enough for a man to find his way. Their halting, thumping progress suggested that, if people, they were blind or lame, or both.
I couldn’t believe that a legion of the disabled had crossed the fields of Roseland to explore the stable or to confront me—for what reason?—as I huddled in it.
Whatever creatures threw their twisted shadows on the windows and knocked their limbs against the walls, I preferred not to meet them. And whatever they might want from me, I was not p
repared to give it.
The first of them turned the corner and found the north door, by which Kenny had recently fled. It beat upon the bronze, not as if knocking politely for admission but as if determining the nature of the barrier. In addition to the pounding, there were questing sounds in the area of the door handle.
Wondering for the first time how Kenny had gotten those facial scars, I hurried from the middle of the stable toward the south door.
I didn’t want to risk making my way through this goblin night to the stone tower in the eucalyptus grove. I was even less charmed, however, by the prospect of remaining here for whatever hoedown these visitors had planned.
As I approached the south door, that great bronze panel rang with the blows of something seeking entrance. Being a mere fry cook and seer of ghosts, lacking the talent to teleport, I now had no way out.
To my left, the tack room couldn’t be locked. It contained no furniture these days, and therefore the door couldn’t be barricaded.
The ten empty stalls behind me offered no hope of concealment.
Beyond a door to my right lay the feed room, which was about twelve feet on a side. Because it had no windows, it was now as black as any dungeon.
I had seen the feed room on a previous visit. I knew that along the right-hand wall were empty shelves, and opposite them stood two five-foot-long bins, each about four and a half feet deep and four feet back to front.
The bin nearest the door had three lids on top, hinged at the back, and was divided into three compartments. Unless I dismembered and distributed myself, I wouldn’t fit.
The second had two lids but was one big compartment. Strongly constructed of heavy and well-joined wood, it was lined inside with tight-fitted stainless steel. Each lid featured a drop lip that set in a groove on the bin edge, making a rubberless seal, perhaps to keep the mice out of the grain.
Given any other reasonable choice, I wouldn’t have climbed into that empty bin, which as I recalled bore an uncomfortable resemblance to a casket. But if the insistent visitors currently pounding on the doors at both ends of the stable were hostile, the alternatives to the bin were to die in the tack room or die in the aisle, or die in one of the horse stalls, and I didn’t consider any of those options to be reasonable.