Odd Apocalypse

When I returned to Victoria Mors, she was moaning but not yet conscious. I sat her up with her back against the wall, positioning her approximately as the thirty-four women were arranged in the mausoleum subcellar, though of course she was still clothed, hadn’t been tortured, was alive, and remained an admirer of Noah Wolflaw.

Using a yellow sash from a pair of cotton slacks in the laundry, I tied a noose around her neck. I secured the free end of the sash to an inch-diameter water line that came out of the wall and ran to the boiler. The pipe was securely anchored, and jerking on it with all my strength caused little noise; no one in the hallway could have heard it. Now she wouldn’t be able to scootch along the floor and reach the door after I left.

As I knelt beside her, Victoria’s eyelids fluttered. She opened her eyes and for a moment did not seem to know me. Then she must have recognized me, because she spit in my face.

“Nice,” I said, and wiped off the spittle with a piece of a T-shirt that I had earlier scissored apart.

The act of spitting evidently caused some discomfort, because she winced and worked her jaws to assess the damage from the punch.

I said, “I’m sorry I had to hit you, ma’am.”

In spite of the pain, she spit in my face again.

After wiping off the spittle, I said, “Do you know about the dead women in the mausoleum?”

She advised me to have an erotic experience with myself.

“Obviously you do know about the dead women.”

She suggested that I had fornicated with a close relative.

In this light, her faded-denim eyes appeared to be the pale blue-purple of highly poisonous belladonna flowers. They were still large and limpid, but there was no mistaking them any longer for the eyes of a shy and winsome girl.

“What is this place, what is the purpose of all the strange machinery?”

Now in a mood to dispense culinary advice, she recommended that I make a dinner of the end product of her digestive tract.

Drawing the pistol from my belt holster and pointing it at her face, I said, “Who was the man who came into the laundry room?”

Refusing to be intimidated, she continued to favor me with her belladonna stare and told me in no uncertain terms to shove the pistol up a part of my anatomy that wasn’t designed to serve as a holster.

“Don’t underestimate me,” I warned. “I’m more dangerous than I look.”

After informing me that I had a face reminiscent of a monkey’s posterior, she said, “You’ll never get out of Roseland alive.”

“Maybe none of us will.” I pressed the muzzle of the Beretta against her forehead. “I’ve killed a number of people, ma’am, and I expect I’ll have to kill some here.”

“I’m not afraid of you.”

“Maybe not,” I said, “but I’m afraid of me.”

That was too true. With the excuse that I am a defender of the innocent, I have done things that curl in my memory like worms in an infected apple. When I sleep, they squirm and wriggle forth to crawl the dreams from which I wake in a sweat.

Earlier she had told me that she never did anything dangerous, not even anything as relatively unchallenging as climbing an oak tree. As her fundamental aversion to risk returned, she closed her eyes and shuddered.

Deciding to appeal to whatever shred of decency might still hang tattered in her heart, I took the gun away from her face, and in a tone of voice marked both by distaste and by a sympathetic desire to understand, I said, “Is this some kind of cult, you’ve been caught up in it and you can’t see a way out? Is Noah Wolflaw your Jim Jones or something?”

“Cultists are deranged,” she said. “Ignorant and deranged. Cultists? No. We’re the sanest people who ever lived.”

“Ever, huh?”

“You and your kind are the deranged ones, and you don’t even know it.”

“Enlighten me.”

Every feature of her face contorted to form a sneer of maximum power and hauteur. “You bear the whips and scorns, but we don’t and never will. You bear them, and they drive you mad.”

“Well, that clears up everything,” I said, and wondered if some voodoo priest I didn’t remember meeting had placed a curse upon me that would condemn me to a life of association with people who spoke always in riddles.

Her face grew red and dark with hatred, and the contempt in her voice was so thick that her words seemed in danger of clotting on her tongue unspoken. “Your thoughts are enslaved to a fool, but ours will never be.”

In spite of her denial, this seemed like cult talk, words passed down from the supreme leader and repeated by followers who only half understood them but resorted to them as mantras, whether they were appropriate to the moment or not.

Now that she was talking, I tried to bring her back to the issue of the dead women in the mausoleum. “You called Wolflaw one of the greatest men who ever lived. How can you follow him so submissively when he’s treated those women like dolls to be played with, broken, and discarded?”

Shared gender with the victims was not enough to squeeze a drop of pity from Victoria Mors. “They’re not women like me. They weren’t like us. They were like you. Animals, not gods. Walking shadows, poor players. Their lives signified nothing.”

The more she said, the madder she seemed, the pretense of sanity now too far behind her to be retrieved.

Yet something in her words seemed familiar to me, as if in some other place and time I had heard certain of these phrases used in a rational context, for a nobler purpose.

I felt contaminated by this Victoria, who seemed like the evil twin of the laundress, but I pressed her further. “Where did those women come from? How did Wolflaw persuade them to let him bring them here?”

She smirked like a child with a dirty secret that she relished revealing. “Noah never leaves Roseland to go farther than to town. Paulie cruises far and wide for them. Henry goes fishing, too, all over the state and into Nevada, elsewhere.”

“They … participate with Noah?”

She shook her head. “No. They don’t care what he does, though they have no taste for it themselves. But you interrupted me before I could tell you the best part.”

“So tell me.”

“I’m better than all of them, better than Paulie or Henry, at setting the hook and reeling in the pretties. Once I’ve identified one who has the look Noah wants, I scheme to meet her. I chat her up. They always like me. We delight in each other’s company. I’m so good at making them like and trust me. I’m petite, almost a waif. I’ve got this pixie face. Who can distrust a pixie?”

“Like an elf, I thought, a pretty elf.”

Victoria fired up a warm and saucy smile and winked at me. For a moment, the mask of pixie innocence and charm was so well crafted that I could see nothing of the demon behind the elfin beauty even though I knew it festered there.

“Sooner than later,” she continued, “we meet for lunch. I pick her up where she works or at her home. We never reach the restaurant. I’ve got a little hypodermic gun. Tranquilizer puts her out almost instantly. When she wakes, sometimes hours later, sometimes days, depending on how far we have to drive, she’s tethered to a post of Noah’s bed, and she learns what she is and what we are.”

Pixie or elf, the sight of her sickened me. “And what are you?”

“Outsiders,” she said, and I thought she capitalized the word. “We’re Outsiders, with no limits, no rules, no fears.”

If what they had was not a cult by name, it was a cult in every way that mattered.

“He’s not your Jim Jones,” I said. “He’s your Charles Manson, Ted Bundy with apostles.”

“Sometimes he lets me watch.” She saw that she revolted me, and she grinned wickedly. “Poor boy, you can never understand. You’re a walking shadow, a poor player. You don’t signify.”

Those words, which she had spoken before, again rang familiar to me.