Odd Apocalypse

The lingering dead don’t always provide helpful information, and even those who want to assist me are hampered by their psychology in death as in life. In fact, because they are lost between this world and the next, their reason is often bent by fear, by confusion, and perhaps by other emotions too complex for me to imagine. As a result, they’re likely at times to behave irrationally, hindering me when they mean only to help, turning away from me when they should turn toward.

Eager to get as much from Wolflaw’s murdered wife as I could before she might become less cooperative, I said, “There’s a boy in the house. Just as you suggested.”

She nodded vigorously. Her eyes welled with tears, because even spirits can weep, although their tears do not water anything in this world.

Because the boy had said that he’d been taken from someplace and that he wanted to be taken back, I had assumed he was no relation to Noah Wolflaw and didn’t belong in Roseland. But the woman’s tears forced me to reconsider my assumption.

“Your son.”

Yes.

“Is Noah Wolflaw his father?”

After another hesitation and a look of frustration, she replied in the affirmative. Yes.

“I assume you don’t know much more about me, just that I can see you and others who haven’t crossed over. But I want you to know that I’ve been drawn here because of your son. I’m meant to help him, and I will try my best.”

She appeared hopeful but also uncertain. Her maternal anxiety, carried with her even into death, made her a pitiable figure.

“He says he wants to be taken back, but I don’t know where he was brought from. Was he living somewhere else for a while, maybe with his grandparents?”

No.

“With an aunt or uncle?”

No.

“I promise you, I’ll take him back.”

To my surprise, she reacted with alarm, adamantly shaking her head. No, no, no.

“But he wants to go back, he wants it more than anything, and he’ll have to go somewhere when this is over.”

Obviously distressed, the late Mrs. Wolflaw pressed her hands to her head as though she was mentally tortured by the thought of her boy being taken anywhere.

“Serial killing isn’t the entire story of Roseland. Something damn strange is going on here, and it won’t end well. There’s not going to be a Roseland anymore, or if there is, then it’ll surely be notorious, a magnet for the morally confused, the mentally unhinged, cultists, freaks of all kinds. The boy will have to go back wherever it is that he wants to go.”

Fear twisted her lovely face, but anger caused her to swing a fist at me.

The lingering dead can touch me — and be felt — when the intention is benign. But when they mean to harm, their blows pass through me with no effect, confirming their immaterial nature.

Why this should be, I don’t have a clue. I didn’t make the rules, and if I were allowed to rewrite them, I would impose a number of changes.

I don’t even know why I should be, just that I am.

Again Mrs. Wolflaw swung at me, and a third time. Her failure to connect dismayed her so that desperation wrenched her face, and she let out a plaintive howl to which I was deaf and the world unheeding.

She was frightened and frustrated more than angry. I didn’t think that she could work up the white-hot fury that alone can transform a harmless ghost into a dangerous, furniture-slinging poltergeist.

She proved me right by turning away from me, rushing past the dead women, and vanishing as she reached her own bullet-riddled body.

Sometimes it seems that I am dreaming when I am in fact awake, my reality as unreal as the lands I walk in sleep.

Alone except for the convocation of the dead, I looked up at the six arrays of golden gears. Shining teeth meshed, bit without rending, chewed without consuming, revolved without a sound, moving across the room from wall to wall, as if they were the clockworks in Hell by which the devil measured progress toward eternity.

Twenty-six

In the clockwork crypt, the timeless dead gave silent testimony to the human potential for evil. To meet their sightless eyes would be to weep. This was no more a time for weeping than it was a time for laughter, and I moved back toward the spiral stairs, rich in wrath but without anger.

Ozzie Boone, the best-selling mystery writer who lives in Pico Mundo, is my four-hundred-pound mentor, friend, and surrogate father. He has appeared in some volumes of these memoirs, and his advice on writing shapes them all.

He told me that I must keep the tone light because the material is often so dark. Without the leavening of humor, Ozzie says, I will be writing for a small audience of bitter nihilists and dedicated depressives, and I will fail to reach those readers who might be lifted by the hope that lies at the heart of my story.

My writing can’t be published while I’m alive, if only because I would be besieged by people who would mistakenly conclude that I can control my sixth sense. They would expect me to serve as a medium between them and their loved ones on the Other Side. Others would even more completely misunderstand my gift and come to me to be healed of everything from cancer to bunions.

And here, beyond the limits of Pico Mundo, I must consider the police and the courts, where I would not likely find a sympathetic ear for my story of another world within the world they know, of a more complex reality within the reality of all things material. I would be called guilty, and the guilty on whom I turned my wrath in defense of the innocent would be declared innocent victims. My best hope would be prison, my likely destination a madhouse, and during the years that I waited for that decision, I would not be able to use my gift to help anyone because I would be woven immobile in a web of lawyers.

At the stairs, I registered something that I had seen before but not considered: a door in the farther wall. From here the stairs went up to rooms I’d already visited, but the door led to something new.

New isn’t always better. iPhones are better than rotary-dial models, but not so many years ago, some maniacs had a big new idea that they should announce their grievances by flying airliners into skyscrapers.

Nevertheless, carrying the pillowcase containing the hacksaw, I crossed to the door, hesitated, and opened it. Beyond lay a down-sloping tunnel approximately six feet wide and seven high.

As I was at the north side of the mausoleum and as the main house stood north of this building, I assumed the tunnel led under the stepped cascades, under the lawn, under the terrace, terminating in the basement of the residence.

My ultimate intention since leaving the guest tower was to sneak into the house unnoticed and then do what must be done to unravel the mysteries of Roseland and free the boy. The tunnel offered a sneakier route than I could have hoped to find — as long as I didn’t encounter Wolflaw or Sempiterno, or a swine presuming to walk like a man.

This was more than a passageway. It apparently served some other purpose, as part of the baroque mechanism that I’d discovered in the cellar and subcellar of the mausoleum.

The floor, walls, and ceiling were sheathed in copper plates, and overhead rectangular lamps striped the length of the tunnel with shadow and light. Inlaid in each wall was a single clear-glass tube through which pulsed slow-moving golden flares reminiscent of the raindrop-like luminous bursts thrown off by the flywheels.

One moment the pulses seemed to be moving toward the house, the next moment away from it. Staring