Odd Apocalypse

“It’s not a riddle. It’s a metaphor. I speak truth to you by indirection, because to speak it directly would pierce you as the brightness of the sun can burn the retina.”

I pushed my chair back from the table. “I sure hope you don’t turn out to be some New Age bubblehead.”

She laughed softly, as musical a sound as I had ever heard.

Because the beauty of her laughter made my comment seem rude by comparison, I said, “No offense intended.”

“None taken. You always speak from your heart, and there’s nothing wrong with that.”

As I rose from my chair, the dogs began to thump their tails again, but neither moved to accompany me.

Annamaria said, “And by the way, there is no need for you to be afraid of dying twice.”

If she wasn’t referring to my nightmare of being in Auschwitz, the coincidence of her statement was uncanny.

I said, “How can you know my dreams?”

“Is dying twice a fear that haunts your dreams?” she asked, managing once more to avoid a direct answer. “If so, it shouldn’t.”

“What does it even mean — dying twice?”

“You’ll understand in time. But of all the people in Roseland, in this city, in this state and nation, you are perhaps the last who needs to be concerned about dying twice. You will die once and only once, and it will be the death that doesn’t matter.”

“All death matters.”

“Only to the living.”

You see why I strive to keep my life simple? If I were, say, an accountant, my mind full of the details of my clients’ finances, and if I saw the spirits of the lingering dead, and had to try to make sense of Annamaria’s conversation, my head would probably explode.

The pattern of the yellow-rose lamp petaled her face.

“Only to the living,” she repeated.

Sometimes, when I met her eyes, something made me look away, my heart quickening with fear. Not fear of her. Fear of … something that I couldn’t name. I felt a helpless sinking of the heart.

My gaze shifted now from Annamaria to the dogs lounging on the sofa.

“I’m safe for now,” she said, “but you are not. If you should doubt the justice of your actions, you could die in Roseland, die your one and only death.”

Unconsciously, I had raised my right hand to my chest to feel the shape of the pendant bell beneath my sweater.

When I had first met her on the pier in Magic Beach, Annamaria had worn an exquisitely crafted silver bell, the size of a thimble, on a silver chain around her neck. It had been the only bright thing in a sunless gray day.

In a moment stranger than any other with this woman, four days before we came to Roseland, she had taken the bell from around her neck, had held it out to me, and had asked, “Will you die for me?”

Stranger still, though I hardly knew her, I had said yes and had accepted the pendant.

More than eighteen months before, in Pico Mundo, I would have given my life to save my girl, Stormy Llewellyn. Without hesitation I would have taken the bullets that she took, but Fate didn’t grant me the chance to make that sacrifice.

Since then, I have often wished that I had died with her.

I love life, love the beauty of the world, but without Stormy to share it, the world in all its wonder will for me be always incomplete.

I will never commit suicide, however, or wittingly put myself in a position to be killed, because self- destruction would be the ultimate rejection of the gift of life, an unforgivable ingratitude.

Because of the years that Stormy and I so enjoyed together, I cherish life. And it is my abiding hope that if I lead the rest of my days in such a way as to honor her, we eventually will be together again.

Perhaps that is why I so readily agreed to protect Annamaria from enemies still unknown to me. With each life I save, I might be sparing a person who is, to someone else, as precious as Stormy was to me.

The dogs rolled their eyes at each other and then looked at me as if embarrassed that I was unable to withstand Annamaria’s stare.

I found the nerve to meet her eyes again as she said, “The hours ahead may test your will and break your heart.”

Although this woman inspired in me — and others — the desire to protect her, I sometimes thought that she might be the one offering protection. Petite and waiflike in spite of her third-trimester tummy, perhaps she had crafted an image of vulnerability to evoke sympathy and to bring me to her that she might keep me safely under her wing.

She said, “Do you feel it rushing toward you, young man, an apocalypse, the apocalypse of Roseland?”

Pressing the bell hard against my chest, I said, “Yes.”

Five

If someone in Roseland was in great danger and desperately needed me, as Annamaria had said, perhaps it might be the son of the long-dead woman on the horse, though surely he could not be as young as the spirit imagined that he still was. But if it wasn’t her child, I nevertheless suspected that the endangered person must be somehow related to her. Intuition told me that her murder was the mystery that, if solved, would be the slip string with which I could loosen the knots of all the mysteries in Roseland. If her murderer still lived all these years later, the person who needed me might be his next intended victim.

The two stables were not as vast or as ornate as the stables at the palace at Versailles, not so fabulously ostentatious as to inspire revolutionary multitudes to cease watching reruns of Dancing with the Stars and enthusiastically dismember all the occupants of Roseland, but they weren’t typical board- and-shingle structures, either. The two buff-brick buildings with dark slate roofs featured leaded-glass windows with carved-limestone surrounds, implying that only a better class of horse had been wanted here.

No stalls opened directly to the outside. At each end of each building was a large bronze door that rolled on recessed tracks into a pocket in the wall. The doors must have weighed two tons each, but they were so expertly balanced, their wheels so well lubricated, that little effort was required to open or to close them.

Embossed on each door, three stylized Art Deco horses sprinted left to right. Under the horses was the word ROSELAND.

The waist-high weeds grew shorter as I drew closer to the first stable. They withered away altogether ten feet from the building.

I might not have perceived the wrongness in the scene if I’d been among the weeds instead of on bare earth. But something seemed incongruous, and I halted six feet short of the bronze door.

Before the call of the not-loon had pierced my first night on this estate, before I’d seen the ghost horse and his comely rider, long before I’d seen the creatures of the yellow sky, Roseland struck me as a place that was and was not what it seemed to be. Grand, yes, but not noble. Luxurious but not comfortable. Elegant but, in its excess, not chaste.

Every beautiful facade seemed to conceal rot and ruin that I could almost see. The estate and its people asserted the normality of Roseland, but in every corner and every encounter, I sensed deception, deformity, and deep strangeness waiting to be revealed.

On that patch of bare earth before the stable door, additional evidence of Roseland’s profoundly unnatural character abruptly appeared before me. The sun was but half an hour into the eastern sky to my left, and therefore my morning shadow was a long lean silhouette to my right, reaching westward. But the stable cast