Odd Apocalypse

“The project that blew up in space.”

“Why would that matter if it was in space?”

“Because it was big.”

“How big could it have been?”

“Really big.”

After we walked a minute in silence, Kenny said, “You feel better knowing all that?”

“No,” I admitted.

When he looked smug, one snaggle tooth overhung his lower lip. “So now it’s in your head, what’re you going to do?”

“Drink myself brainless.”

“It’s the best thing,” Kenny said.

We arrived at the mini truck with the depleted battery. In the vale below, maybe twenty carrion crows gathered on the dead porker.

As I took the pillowcase sack out of the vehicle, I said, “What do you do in your Roseland?”

“I work security for this honcho, he’s one lunatic sonofabitch.”

“Lunatic how?”

“He thinks in Roseland he’ll live forever.”

After a hesitation, I said, “Is his name Noah Wolflaw?”

“Wolflaw? No. Calls himself Constantine Cloyce.”

Kenny’s green eyes sparkled with sunlight, but there didn’t seem to be any deception in his direct gaze.

Suddenly he said, “Yellow sky.”

I glanced up, but the heavens were blue.

When I looked back to Kenny, he was gone, and in the place where he had been, the air shimmered for a moment.

Thirty-five

So as I stood by the defunct mini truck, swapping the Beretta’s half-depleted magazine for the fully loaded spare, as then I plucked seven bullets from the extra ammunition that I carried in a sports-coat pocket and replenished the first magazine, I brooded about the discovery that the secret of Roseland had something to do with time. If some kind of localized disorder in time was a side effect of what was going on here, my sense that I was running out of time might be true in ways I couldn’t yet comprehend.

Before encountering the porkers, I’d been on my way to the guesthouse to make sure Annamaria remained safe. Now I recalled a thing that happened in Magic Beach a few days earlier, when we encountered a pack of coyotes that boldly stalked us and seemed about to attack. Annamaria had spoken to them as if they understood her — and with only words she got them to retreat. Whatever the nature of the gift that she possessed, she had nothing to fear from animals, probably not even from the porkers; if she was killed, her murderer would be a man driven not by an animal nature but by the worst of his very human impulses. With Roseland counting down to some kind of detonation, I had to trust in Annamaria to take care of herself for now.

Carrying the pillowcase sack in one hand and the pistol in the other, taking my bearings from hilltop after hilltop, alert for more of the bacon brigade, I made my way to the statue of Enceladus, the Titan. From there I ventured into the oak grove that surrounded that lawn. As before, not a single fallen leaf littered the earth under the trees.

I put down the pillowcase and, from one of the low branches, I selected a twig with three leaves. I snapped it off and threw it on the ground.

As if I were watching a time-lapse film of a few weeks’ growth, the tree sprouted a new twig at the break point, leafed out exactly as it had been, and fully restored itself in less than a minute.

When I thought to look on the ground where I’d thrown the broken twig, it wasn’t there.

Finally, almost twenty-two, I got my haunted house, for which I was singularly well prepared, and it was a country house, as was the one in The Turn of the Screw, and it had a history of perversity, like the place in Hell House, and in it might be people who should be dead but were not, as in The Fall of the House of Usher, and there was an imprisoned child in jeopardy, as in Poltergeist. The only ghost in Roseland, however, was the rider of the spirit stallion, and she was neither menacing nor truly at the center of the problem that I, as an unofficial exorcist, needed to resolve.

Instead of flailing poltergeists and phantoms from the grave, with which I might have easily contended, I faced a threat consisting of swine things, cosmic clockworks, a thoroughly insane movie mogul, and the conspirators that he had drawn around him with the power that he wielded, power given to him, perhaps unwittingly, by the late great Nikola Tesla, who, although long dead and although not a ghost, nevertheless ricocheted like an immaterial pinball in and out of the scene, who said that he had seen me where I’d not yet been, and who encouraged me to throw the master switch, wherever that might be.

Some days I just want to go back to bed and pull the covers over my head.

Instead, from the tree, I broke off the same twig that I’d broken before and held it in the open palm of my left hand. Within a minute, the tree repaired itself, and the twig vanished even though, at the last moment, I closed my fist around it.

Roseland didn’t need a platoon of gardeners. In the landscaped portion of the grounds — as opposed to the wild fields — the trees and the shrubs and the flowers and the grass were in a kind of stasis, neither growing nor dying, somehow maintained in exactly the same condition in which they had been since … Perhaps since one day in the early 1920s.

The residents of Roseland were not outside of time. Clocks still ticked and hours passed. Sunrises and sunsets came and went. Weather changed, as did the seasons. Time did not stand still within these estate walls.

Evidently, by the transmission of a current of some exotic energy through root and trunk and limb and leaf, through every blade of grass and every flower petal, all remained as it had been. Wind might strip some leaves from the trees, but new growth appeared even as the torn leaves fell and, upon the ground, ceased to exist. Or perhaps the new leaves were in fact the old ones, and perhaps each damaged tree or plant — but nothing adjacent to it — slipped back in time to a moment just before the leaves had been plucked from it, and then rejoined the present.

If I dug down into the earth, I would most likely find some kind of metal mesh or those copper rods embedded in the foundations of the buildings. Suddenly I knew what the elongated 8 represented when you read it horizontally rather than vertically: It was the symbol for infinity.

I felt dizzy. I wished I were as good at not thinking as Kenny claimed to be.

I returned to that peninsula of flawless lawn in which Enceladus raised a fist to challenge the gods, and I followed it to the acres of grass surrounding the main residence. From a distance, I could see that the windows and doors of the house were still covered with steel panels.

Around one corner of the mansion came a ragtag mob of freaks in a violent frenzy because they had not been invited inside for lunch. They were overturning patio furniture and pounding on the shutters.

I retreated into the Enceladus lawn, screened from the house by the time-frozen oaks. I stood by the Titan, trying to get my mind around the ramifications of the theory that Roseland was not a time machine — no, nothing that simple — but a machine that could manage time, reverse or retard its effects, and ensure against the otherwise inevitable decline of all things, which is the way of Nature.

In the main house, as in the guest tower, everything appeared to be immaculate, pristine, as if nothing ever wore out or broke down or produced dust. Wooden floors and steps were as tight and squeak-free as the day that they were installed. No cracks in the marble or limestone.

The kitchen appliances were new; but most likely they had been replaced not because those of the 1920s didn’t still work but because newer ovens and refrigerators offered features and conveniences that the older models did not.