“Could I be?”
“That would be nice,” he said, for the first time sounding more like a child than like an old man in a child’s body.
With one hand, she gently smoothed the hair back from his brow and pressed her palm to his forehead as if to determine if he might have a fever.
Something important was happening here, but I didn’t have a clue what it might be.
The third oil lamp, the clear-glass one, stood on the counter in the kitchenette. Impurities in the wick caused the flame to flutter and to elongate until it slithered for a moment into the long, narrow neck of the vessel before raveling back to the pool of oil on which it fed.
Taking Timothy’s hand in both of hers once more, Annamaria said, “How have you kept yourself as yourself all these years?”
“Books,” the boy said. “Thousands of books.”
“They must have been the right books.”
“Some were, some weren’t. You figure out which are which.”
“How do you figure it out?”
“At first by how you feel.”
“And later?”
“By reading what’s there on the page and also what’s not.”
“Between the lines,” she said.
“Under the lines,” he said.
I had so little purpose in this encounter that I felt not like a fifth wheel on a cart but rather like a fifth wheel on a tricycle.
I was suddenly distracted from their conversation by a ruckus outside, a clang and clatter that drew me to one of the windows. I pulled aside the drapery and pressed my forehead to the glass, the better to see down.
One story below, agitated freaks swarmed around the base of the guest tower, both the hideous kind and the more hideous. I heard them grunting and snorting, and then came the loud clang again as one of them swung an axe hard against the iron bars that protected a ground-floor window directly below the one at which I stood.
Even if they were to chop away at the masonry in which the iron was anchored and were to pry loose those bars, the windows were too small for them to squeeze through. These beasts were primitive, emotionally volatile, mentally unstable, one deep-fried pork rind short of a full bag, but they were not so stupid or so rabidly mad that they would continue futilely attacking the windows when the front door awaited them.
That door was ironbound, not entirely ironclad. Edged with iron, banded with iron, it nevertheless offered swaths of oak at which to chop. And though it was exceedingly thick and though the hardware was forged to withstand a siege by dumb brutes that, at best, might try battering it down, it hadn’t been installed to withstand an assault by freaks armed with axes and hammers.
Victoria Mors had said the freaks were never armed like this before, that they had carried nothing but simple clubs until this full tide. She’d said they were getting smarter.
One of them saw me at the second-floor window and began to shriek at me and shake one fisted hand. His rage infected the others, and they all faced me, howling for blood and brandishing both fists and weapons.
I thought of Enceladus and the Titans, crushed under the stones that they had piled high in order to reach the heavens and make war with the gods. But I was not one of the gods, and the second floor of the tower wasn’t as far away as the heavens.
Turning from the window, I interrupted Annamaria and Timothy in their half-scrutable conversation. “The freaks are here. As soon as they decide to come at the door, we’ll have ten minutes at most.”
“Then we’ll worry about it eight minutes after that,” Annamaria said, as if the mob outside was nothing more than an Avon lady eager to show us a new line of personal-care products.
“No, no, no. You don’t know what the freaks are,” I told her. “We haven’t had time to talk about them.”
“And we don’t have time now,” she said. “What I have to discuss with Tim takes precedence.”
The boy and the dogs seemed to agree with her. They all smiled at me, amused by my nervous excitement about the arrival of a few overwrought pigs with a reverse luau on their minds.
“We have to go up to the third floor,” I said. “The only way out of here is the way Tim and I came in.”
“You go ahead now, young man. We’ll follow just as soon as we’re done here.”
I knew better than to press her further on the issue. She would respond to each of my urgent arguments either with a few words of quiet reassurance or with an enigmatic line I would not understand for maybe three years, if ever.
“Okay,” I said, “all right, fine, okay, I’ll go up to the third floor and just wait for you, for the freaks, for a ghost horse, for a marching band, whoever wants to come, anyone, everyone, I’ll just go wait.”
“Good,” Annamaria said, and returned to her conversation with Timothy.
I left her suite, closing the door behind me, and I ran down the stairs rather than up. In the vestibule between the outer door and the door to my suite, I could hear the freaks milling around out there, making a variety of piggish noises and some that were human enough to give me the creeps big-time. They seemed to be pumping up one another, like members of a team psyching themselves for the next big play.
In my suite, from the highest shelf in the bedroom closet, I retrieved the plastic-wrapped brick of money that had been given to me by the elderly actor Hutch Hutchison before I’d left Magic Beach just a few days earlier. If I shut down Roseland forever and fled, Annamaria and I would need this bankroll.
During my weeks in Magic Beach, I had worked for Mr. Hutchison, and we had become friends. I didn’t want his money, but he insisted with such grace and kindness that refusing it one more time would have been the basest kind of insult.
When Mr. Hutchison had been nine years old, a lot of banks had failed in the Great Depression. Consequently, he didn’t entirely trust such institutions. He concealed bricks of cash in his freezer, wrapped tightly in pieces of white-plastic trash bags and sealed with plumbing tape.
Each package was labeled with code words. If the label read BEEF TONGUE, the brick contained twenty- dollar bills. SWEETBREADS identified a fifty-fifty split between twenties and hundreds. When Hutch gave me one such package in a pink hostess-gift bag with little yellow birds flying all over it, he wouldn’t tell me how much money it contained, and thus far I hadn’t looked.
I’d forgotten the code word on the label of this brick. When I retrieved it from the closet, I saw that it said PORK RIND. At the center of the universe is someone who has a sense of humor.
Clutching Mr. Hutchison’s gift, I left my suite and locked the door behind me.
The freaks had not yet begun to chop at the front door.
I hurried up the winding stairs, past Annamaria’s suite, to the third-floor door, where I’d stuffed two dollars in the receiving hole for the latch bolt.
When I entered the high chamber, Constantine Cloyce stepped out from behind the door and slammed the butt of his pistol-grip shotgun in my face.
Fifty
I was in Auschwitz again, terrified of dying twice. I was not digging fast enough to please the guard. He kicked me once, twice, a third time. The steel toe of his boot ripped my left cheek. Out of me poured not blood but instead powdery gray ashes, and as the ashes flowed, I felt my face beginning to collapse inward, as if I were not a real man but merely the inflatable figure of a man, a hollow man stuffed with straw that had turned to ash and soot without my being aware. And in the ground where I was digging with inadequate speed there appeared a chair on which sat T. S. Eliot, the poet, who read to me two lines from a book of his verse: “This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper.”
I woke on the copper floor of the high room, for a moment not sure how I had gotten there. But then I remembered Wolflaw.… No, Cloyce. Constantine Cloyce. His eyes the gray of brushed steel, his matinee-idol chin thrust forward, his jaws clenched, his small, full-lipped mouth twisted in a sneer of contempt as he drove the butt of the shotgun into me.
