Odd Apocalypse

Conversation was better than blasting at each other. You never know when even a most disagreeable conversation might take a positive turn.

“Yes, sir. Yes, it is. It’s your Beretta.”

“You stole my Beretta.”

“No, sir. I’m no thief. I borrowed it.”

With rough affection, he said, “That is a wonderful pistol. I adore that pistol.”

“Well, to be honest, I don’t even like guns. But the way things have been going, I thought I might need one sooner than later. Like now.”

“You broke into my rooms,” he said, clearly offended that I had so little respect for his privacy.

“No, sir. I used a key.”

“Constantine is a flaming idiot.”

“That was Mr. Sempiterno’s opinion earlier today.”

“Why would Constantine bring you and that … that woman here?”

I shared with him one of my main theories: “Subconsciously he may be weary of all this and want someone to bring it to an end.”

“Don’t Freud me, fry cook. Freud is a load of horseshit.”

“Well, there’s also the fact Annamaria is uncannily persuasive.”

“I don’t find the bitch in the least persuasive.”

“With all due respect, sir, you’ve not spoken to her. Give her a chance, and you’ll see.”

“Put down the pistol nice and easy.”

Now that he recognized the gun as his, he didn’t want me just to drop it. Apparently, even extremely wealthy immortals have a strong attachment to their stuff.

“Well,” I said.

Timothy said, “Chiang, just let us go to the chronosphere. Let me go back where I belong.”

I thought “let us go to the chronosphere” sounded like it should have been an old David Bowie song. Even in moments of peril, my mind takes curious detours.

The gardener had dropped his benign Zen persona along with his pretense of being a gardener. Hatred pulled his round face long, and in his eyes reflections of the overhead lights seemed to flicker like serpent tongues.

“If I had my way, boy, I’d slit you open and let you die trying to stuff your intestines back in yourself. And then I’d bring you back from ten minutes ago and do it all over again.”

“Well,” I said, because this didn’t seem to be one of those disagreeable conversations that was likely to take a positive turn.

Perhaps realizing that the years of his imprisonment might be only the prelude to the horrors that an inventive man like this could visit upon him, Timothy sidled closer to me.

“One last chance to put the gun down, fry cook. Otherwise I blow you away and maybe bring both of you back for more.”

“Killing me once will be enough, sir. I don’t want to put you to any trouble.”

Because I couldn’t think of anything else to do, I bent my knees slightly and began to lower the adored Beretta to the floor, doing it slow and easy, as he had suggested, in fact so slow and so easy that I might live to see another birthday before I finally released the weapon.

I was hoping that some brilliant maneuver would occur to me and that I would astonish him as Jackie Chan astonished his foes in those martial-arts movies. But I’m no Jackie Chan, and as it turned out, the porkers pulled my bacon from the fire.

Twenty feet behind Jam Diu, the wine-cellar door flew open, and one of the freaks raged into the corridor. It wasn’t a hunchback with a misshapen head and too-long arms, but was instead one of those that might be called a normal specimen of their kind. In the hoggish head: a leering mouth of rending teeth, the fleshy nostrils in the dripping snout, the yellow eyes like the fevered glare of something crawling through the moss-hung darkness of a swamp dream.

The beast had evidently discovered the guardian-angel door in the mausoleum wall, which I had been unable to close. It had found its way through cellar, subcellar, and tunnel to this moment of reckoning.

Jam Diu swung toward the door when it crashed open, but the swine thing was quicker than it appeared to be. It seized his right arm and snapped it like a dry stick. As Jam Diu, prince of time and a god among mere men, screamed, the buckshot tore harmlessly into the ceiling.

While this was happening, I shouted to Timothy to run, but he was already on the move. I chased after him, thankful that I hadn’t put down the Beretta, although in these close quarters and against these beasts, a 9-mm pistol promised to be about as effective as fighting a T. rex with a set of lawn darts.

Two-thirds of the way to the west service stairs, down which we had come in more halcyon times, three minutes earlier, I glanced back and saw Jam Diu coming apart in ways I refuse to remember. Behind the first freak, a second entered the corridor, and behind the second came a third.

Forty-three

After racing up two flights of the front service stairs, Timothy apparently thought, as I did, that going to the second floor would be a mistake. He flung open the stairwell door and hurried into the foyer, in the center of which he halted, looking around, unsure what to do next.

With three freaks in the house plus five heavily armed members of the self-improvement club called the Outsiders, all of them on the hunt, we were not likely to find a quiet corner where we could have tea and discuss literature undisturbed. And the sooner we went to the top floor, the sooner we would have nowhere left to go.

The freaks weren’t brainiacs, weren’t likely to spend a lot of time in a huddle strategizing their next move. They weren’t stupid, either, and weren’t entirely impulsive, but I didn’t think they would linger in the basement when so much more meat could be found upstairs.

Although I didn’t hear grunting and snorting and three-hundred-pound footfalls on the front service stairs, I figured they were coming. I pulled Timothy out of the foyer and into the main drawing room.

The giant goatish Pan still stood on the plinth under the central chandelier, and I knew whose side he’d be on in any battle between me and a wild boar with pretensions. We stayed to the shadowy perimeter of the room and stopped at the sofa behind which earlier I had hidden. Alert. Listening. We would probably smell them coming before we heard them.

After searching the basement, Cloyce and his crew had stationed Jam Diu there in case I got around behind them. But I doubted the freaks were well enough disciplined for one of them to be willing to remain below while the others were upstairs having all the fun. If we could stay alive for a few minutes, and if all of the freaks came upstairs, we could slip down again and leave as we originally intended, although I wasn’t keen on having to plod through the remains of Mr. Diu.

I suddenly realized that we had been fearfully close to the invading freaks in the basement corridor but hadn’t smelled them.

“They didn’t stink,” I whispered. “You always know they’re nearby because of their stink.”

“It’s only the deformed ones that stink,” Timothy said.

That was unfair. If they didn’t stink, maybe they could be quiet, too, when they wanted to be. I wasn’t prepared for odorless, stealthy freaks that might abruptly loom out of nowhere.

In some distant part of the house, a shotgun discharged. The first cry was as much a bellow of rage as it was a squeal of pain, unquestionably issuing from a swine’s throat.

But the second cry, fast on the heels of the first, was the most wretched human scream imaginable, the like of which I hoped never to hear again. It went on for half a minute or longer, an excruciating expression of terror and agony, so chilling that it brought to mind that horrific painting by Goya titled Saturn Devouring His Children, which is even more bloodcurdling than its title suggests.

Although none of the residents of Roseland was Timothy’s friend, not even his father, the tormented screaming affected him so deeply that he began to shudder and to sob quietly.

Because a scream shares the character of the person’s usual voice, I was certain that we had just heard the