Thirty-six
In the mausoleum, the mosaic of the Franchi painting remained recessed from the rest of the north wall, exposing the two sets of stairs that led down to the first cellar.
I had assumed that after a delay, the entrance to the secret world below would close automatically behind me. Now, standing to one side, I put a finger to the tile in the angel’s shield that I had pressed to unlock the door, but it remained countersunk, and the slab of stone did not move forward to plug the hole where it belonged.
After searching the wall at the head of one set of stairs and then at the head of the other, I found no switch. Intuition told me that I should waste no more time here. Events in Roseland were rapidly coming to a tipping point.
I went down into the first cellar where, along the center of the chamber, the seven golden spheres were spinning silently on the seven poles. The many flywheels flew without a sound, and from their outer rims, radiant drops of golden light glided to the tapestry of copper wires on the ceiling, where they were absorbed and transmitted along the elaborate patterns until they dimmed and vanished.
With my recent discovery of the primary purpose of the machinery — the management of time — I hoped to understand, if only dimly, how these various devices conspired to perform such an astonishing feat. But I was as mystified as ever.
Neither a gift for frying nor one of a psychic nature requires also that the recipient be a blazing genius. I knew other fry cooks, none of whom was likely to win a Nobel Prize in science. And when you can see the lingering dead and have occasional prophetic dreams, you tend to be too distracted either to become an international chess champion or to create the next Apple Inc.
At the spiral stairs in the corner, I went down again into the subcellar. In that lower space, six arrays of golden gears churned silently and ceaselessly in their silver tracks overhead, and the collection of dead women waited, their pinned-open eyes watchful unto eternity.
Perhaps here in the immediate presence of the machine — or a key part of the machine — the generated stasis was stronger even than it was elsewhere. Seated on the floor, leaning against the walls, the grisly trophies were as freshly dead as when the master of Roseland murdered them.
Corpses in stasis are still just corpses. But I wondered if in the quiet of the night their killer ever fell into a fever of guilt or a morbid despond, and if he then imagined that he might encounter these women on the move, their bloody wounds as compelling as stigmata, their accusing voices rough and half trapped in their necktie- throttled throats.
Anything I might do to him was so much less than he deserved.
Perhaps because the timeless cadavers were not bothered by creatures drawn to carrion, I realized that the house must have been free of insects and rodents when Tesla’s machine was first switched on. I’d seen no immortal spiders weaving infinite webs, no houseflies with an antique look, no rats grown wise from living fifty ratty lifetimes.
If such rats resided behind the wainscoting, there would be no reason to expect them to be sages. Even a lot of human beings grow no wiser past a certain age — or ever.
Constantine Cloyce — now Noah Wolflaw — had been seventy when he apparently faked his death in 1948. Now at the age of 134, he seemed to have learned neither humility nor the wisdom of moral living. And repeatedly telling me to shut up was hardly the sophisticated and amusing banter you expected from a man of his age and experience.
I crossed the subcellar to the door beyond which lay the copper-sheathed passageway that led underground to the main house. Through the glass tubes embedded in the walls, flares of golden light seemed to be moving simultaneously toward and away from the main residence, and I avoided looking at them to spare myself the queasiness and the confusion that I’d felt the first time I had been here.
In the wine cellar under the house, I didn’t proceed into the basement corridor as before. Instead, I took the narrow service stairs up to the ground floor.
I entered the kitchen with caution, in case Chef Shilshom might be preparing a banquet for a celebration worthy of Edgar Allan Poe’s Prince Prospero. In an apocalyptic time threatened by a plague called the Red Death, the prince threw a great party to deny his mortal nature. That hadn’t turned out well. I suspected that the several residents of Roseland would not fare any better than Prospero.
The only illumination came from two lights above the sinks. The windows were covered by steel shutters.
At the moment, no freaks hammered at those defenses, and the house was hushed. Maybe the pull and push of Tesla’s machine had shoved them back to their time, but I doubted it. Something about the silence struck me as ominous.
Off the kitchen lay a room that served as the chef’s office. I stepped inside and quietly closed the door.
Here Chef Shilshom planned menus, prepared shopping lists, and no doubt puzzled over the proper thing to serve the master of the house when next a young woman, resembling the late Mrs. Cloyce, was brought to Roseland to be tortured and murdered. Meals for special occasions are always tricky to plan.
Constantine Cloyce might be the only one whose sense of superiority, arising from his potential immortality, inspired him to murder mere mortal people as sport, but the others in this place were just as insane. Their madness was evidenced by the fact that they assisted him, either to continue to be allowed to live forever or because they saw no crime in killing mortals who would sooner or later die anyway.
None of them had lived so long that longevity itself could have driven them insane. I could imagine that, after a few hundred years, the repetitive character of human experience might lead to a tedium that would leave them chronically depressed or so desperate for new and more extreme sensations that torture and murder became a kind of Valium that relieved anxiety. But Cloyce was only 134, the others most likely younger. Something other than longevity accounted for their descent into one form of madness or another.
In Chef Shilshom’s office, a massive chair had been custom built to accommodate his bulk, its seat as wide as two of me, its castors as big as baseballs. When I sat in it, I felt like Jack in the castle at the top of the beanstalk.
The computer on this desk was the only one I’d seen on the main floor, though there were probably others in the wing that contained the servants’ suites. I switched it on, accessed the Internet, and went looking for Nikola Tesla.
Apparently Serbian, he was born on July 10, 1856, in Smiljan, which seemed to be either in Croatia or in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, or in a place called Lika, or in all three. It sounded sort of off-planet to me, but the problem was most likely just the semicoherence common to biography sites on the Web.
He died on January 7, 1943, in a two-room suite in the New Yorker Hotel, which was in New York and nowhere else. Two thousand people attended his funeral at St. John the Divine cathedral. Tesla was cremated, and his ashes were thereafter kept in a golden sphere at the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade.
More than one online source informed me that a golden sphere was Tesla’s favorite shape.
Hmmmm. Interesting.
In 1882, Tesla solved the problem of the rotating magnetic field and built the first induction motor. Not that I have the slightest idea what that means. But the induction motor powered the industrial revolution at the turn of the century; it has been used both in heavy industry and for simple household appliances ever since.
Behind me, something outside scratched on the steel shutter that covered the window. Scratched, tapped, and scratched again.
The sounds were subdued, compared to the racket previously made by the pack of freaks, but I was pretty sure the creature inquiring at the window was not just a curious raccoon.
The freak was just trying to determine in what ground-floor rooms its lunch might be waiting. I focused on the computer again.
After coming to America, Tesla worked with Thomas Edison, but they fell out because Tesla believed that Edison’s direct-current electricity transmission was inefficient. He said all energies were cyclic and that generators could be built to transmit electricity first in one direction and then in the other, in multiple waves according to the polyphase principle.
Given that primate swine were stalking Roseland and a murderous sociopath was in charge of the place, I
