the ideologies of violence distilled and given material form, animalistic but not merely animals, for they had an implacable aggressive intent that seemed disturbingly human.
The air between me and them, in fact all around me, writhed as if tortured with heat, and I thought the pack might shimmer away like a mirage. But the thermals — or whatever they were — raveled back into the earth, the air stabilized, and the freaks were so close that I could smell them.
I sprang into the mini truck, popped the brake, and fled.
Thirty-one
The electric motor accelerated a bit quicker than an arthritic grandfather getting up from his favorite armchair. I turned left between the gatehouse and the gate. Racing south across a wide lawn in the mini truck, I glanced back after fifty yards. They were still coming, but they weren’t gaining ground. Fifty yards farther, when I looked, they were falling behind.
The flawless lawn gave way to Nature’s plan. I trucked on, ascending a gentle slope for about two hundred yards, while various insects leaped and flew out of the tall grass in front of me, like terrified pedestrians throwing themselves out of the path of a drunk driver.
At the top, as I turned east to drive around rather than through a grove of oaks, I looked back and saw that the freaks had not chased after me into the meadow. They were heading toward the main house.
I didn’t stop to leap out of the truck and do a victory lap around it, but instead angled east-southeast. I intended to circle the developed part of the estate and return to the guest tower, to see if Annamaria might be under siege.
On that rolling land, the big tires and apparently customized suspension provided a ride that was less like bounding over rough territory than like being on a boat as it slid up the face of a wave, down the back, and wallowed through a trough toward the next wall of water.
I weltered along a glen, searching for an easy way up the next slope, which was thick with brush in some places and rocky in others. Abruptly the landscape all around me rippled vertically, as if snakes of heat were rising from it again, though the air remained cool.
Paulie Sempiterno and Mrs. Tameed had spoken of eddies and a full tide. They hadn’t been talking about the sea, but about this phenomenon.
As I squinted at the way ahead, resisting a greasy nausea, the quality of the light changed, although not as dramatically as when morning had turned to night in a minute. The pale grass became a darker gold, the silver weeds tarnished. Racing shadows swelled and withered and swelled and slithered across the land.
I slowed, braked to a halt, and reluctantly looked up.
For a moment, I saw again the yellow sky that frightened me more than did the primate swine. These were not merely Earth’s heavens in the throes of Armageddon. An apocalypse is a revelation, and this was an
The quivering thermals that had brought the fearsome skyscape now shimmered it away. The heavens became mostly blue again, with an armada of ordinary storm clouds still threatening in the north, where they had been all morning, as if riding at anchor.
I hadn’t imagined those hostile yellow heavens any more than I had dreamed that I’d stepped through a doorway into a time prior to Roseland’s existence. Both moments had been as real as the warm saliva that Ms. Victoria Mors had spat in my face.
I sat in the landscaper’s truck, in the glen between two hills, letting my heart quiet itself. Usually I can knit clues into a theory while on my feet and dodging anything thrown at me, but in this case I needed a moment of stillness to make sure that I didn’t drop a stitch.
The massive wall around Roseland, perhaps housing fantastical machinery like that I had seen in the cellars of the mausoleum, not only physically isolated the estate but also set it apart in other ways. These acres were an island of the irrational in the sea of everyday reality.
Whatever the intention had been behind Roseland’s creation, the dire events of the moment were side effects that no one had expected. After the fact, they had taken steps to defend against those side effects: the bars on windows, the steel shutters, all the guns and stores of ammunition.
The freaks might be only an infrequent threat. Nevertheless, to live in this bedlam, the people here must have believed that whatever benefit they received from the system they created was worth the cost of nightly wariness and occasional full assaults by creatures that seemed to belong here less than to some other time or place.
I thought that I knew what the benefit might be, why they didn’t simply pull the master switch and eliminate the mortal threat of the freaks.
And I suspected that the benefit was simultaneously a curse. It led to their conviction that they were far superior to anyone not of Roseland. Not merely superior. They saw themselves as gods and the rest of us as animals.
Men and women who seek to become gods must first lose their humanity.
Noah Wolflaw’s homicides and the complicity of the others in his crimes seemed neither insane nor criminal to them, any more than I would consider myself mad or criminal for hooking a fish, gutting it, and cooking it for dinner. I satisfied a hunger. Wolflaw would say that he merely satisfied a more exotic appetite. To him, my fish was as far below me on the ladder of species as the women he killed were below him.
Wolflaw had not merely lost his humanity. He had thrown it away with all the force that he could muster.
My next step, after checking on Annamaria, would be to find out who the people of Roseland really were. They were either not who they claimed to be or not
I am one
The time-out had served me well. I drove farther along the glen, looking for a place where the hillside was navigable.
Suddenly he was standing forty feet in front of me. I could have driven straight through him, but I braked to a halt.
There in the wild grass, he wore a three-piece suit and a necktie. From five feet in front of the trucklet, he regarded me with that deadpan look that had once been famous.
He was portly, with a round face and full cheeks and two chins, but not immense like Chef Shilshom. Unlike the chef, he had come by his physique not by indulgence but because of genetics, having been stout as a small child. His lower lip protruded far past the upper, as if he were pondering how best to deal with a problematic person whom he wished to be rid of but did not wish to insult.
“This is not a good time,” I told him. “My plate is full. My cup runneth over. I’m sorry. I don’t usually speak in cliches. And those weren’t references to your weight. I’m just frazzled. I’m not able to deal with one more complication.”
Among some of the lingering dead who have come to me for help, a couple have been famous performers in their lifetimes. In spite of what you might think if you closely follow the entertainment-news programs on TV and the Internet, celebrities do have souls.
In the first three of my memoirs, I have written about my rather long relationship with Mr. Elvis Presley’s spirit. He appeared to me when I was in high school, and we hung around together for quite a few years. For reasons he was slow to make clear to me, the King of Rock ’n’ Roll was reluctant to move on to the Other Side, though he wanted to be there. The problem was not anything as simple as that he was worried there would be no deep-fried peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches in the next life. Eventually I helped him cross over.
Then came Mr. Frank Sinatra. His spirit was my companion only for a few weeks. They were memorable days. As a poltergeist, as in life, Mr. Sinatra could throw a heck of a hard punch when you needed backup.
I don’t know why I assumed that if the spirit of another famous person were to come to me, seeking assistance in moving on from this world, he or she would have been a renowned singer.
The gentleman in the suit walked around to the passenger side of the mini truck. He had an unusual aura of authority because it was in no way stern or superior and because it was twined with an air of congeniality.
