Besides, even if his destiny had been to die at nine, back in 1925, and even if the prospect of living as a perpetual child was intolerable to him, I was disturbed about helping him to commit, via the chronosphere, what might be at best a passive suicide. I wanted hope for him, and hope lay in freedom, not in surrender.
Thinking on my feet as we descended the front service stairs, I decided that before we went to the third floor of the guest tower, we would go to the second. Annamaria might be as enigmatic as any character Alice met on the other side of the looking glass, but I knew she would be wiser about Timothy than I would be, considering the pathetic Odd Thomas Standard of Wisdom that she had to exceed.
When we reached the ground floor without being shot or spat upon, I chose to continue down to the basement, though the search team might still be on that level. The point of reconnoitering is to discover what lies ahead, and the danger of reconnoitering is being discovered by what lies ahead before you discover it.
Going down, I glanced back a couple of times, to be sure the boy was staying close, which he was. The second time, he smiled at me to acknowledge my concern, the first smile of his I’d seen. He might be ninety-five and counting, but he was boy enough and vulnerable enough to break your heart with that smile.
Right then, I knew that I would fail him.
His trusting smile was significant in the way that, during some buddy-cop movies, it is reliably significant when in Act 2 the lesser star tells the bigger star that he is going to ask the lesser female lead to marry him. No more than three scenes later, he will be as dead as dead gets, and the bigger star will have the motivation he needs to walk safely through a hailstorm of bullets, slaughter twenty gangsters, and become teary-eyed without anyone thinking that he’s a sissy.
The vast majority of movies aren’t concerned about imitating life, because life avoids the clichés that make for big box office. But sometimes life imitates movies, usually to devastating effect and without the compensation of popcorn.
At the bottom of the stairwell, the door stood wide open to the basement corridor. I hesitated on the last step, listening.
Nobody here but us chickens. I never have fully understood that saying. Chickens can’t talk, and even if they could talk, to whom would they say such a thing?
The air contained a faint ozone scent, as it had for the past few hours. I could smell nothing else—and could hear nothing at all.
I motioned for Timothy to stay where he was while I eased through the open door.
On the farther side of the hallway, doors stood wide or half open, as if the searchers had been in too much of a hurry to bother closing up behind themselves.
To the right, the length of the corridor was deserted all the way to the wine cellar.
Immediately to my left, the door to the construction shack that linked the house of the present to the undeveloped land of 1921 stood mostly open, and I could see the draftsman tables, the desks, the old wooden filing cabinets.
If the searchers were still working the basement, they would have been making noise. The deep silence suggested they had found Victoria, freed her, and returned upstairs to hunt down and smack down one ignorant clocker who didn’t know his place in the scheme of things.
I glanced back at Timothy, still in the stairwell, and motioned for him to join me. I wanted him at my side, so that I could grab him and move him with me quickly if suddenly we needed to get out of sight in a room either to the left or right.
Long corridors are dangerous places. If well-armed people are looking for you, you’re exposed to gunfire from one end to the other, in a space that, for the shooter, has all the benefits of an indoor target range.
The best thing you can do is to cover the territory in a timely manner, though it’s not easy to move fast and be silent. The tendency is to adopt the Sylvester-the-Cat-stalking-Tweety-Bird exaggerated, high-speed tiptoe, which makes you look ridiculous and, anyway, never works that well for Sylvester.
I instructed Timothy to strive for quiet by cleverly raising one finger to my lips, and then side by side we walked quickly from the west end of the hallway toward the wine cellar at the farther end. The laundry was the next-to-last room on the right, and as we passed it, I saw that the door was open, though I had left it closed, which meant the searchers had been here and gone.
The door to the furnace room stood open as well, but before we quite got to it, Jam Diu stepped out of there, in front of us, his shotgun leveled at me.
My pistol was aimed at the concrete floor, so that my best hope of wounding him was with a calculated ricochet that not even Annie Oakley would have expected to pull off.
“Drop it,” Jam Diu demanded as we came to a halt.
There was no doubt that he could squeeze the trigger of the 12-gauge and chop us with buckshot before I could bring up the Beretta and fire. But if I dropped the weapon, we were finished anyway. They would return Timothy to his prison, and the nicest thing Constantine Cloyce would do to me was carve me up like he did those women and put my body in the subcellar of the mausoleum, even though I wasn’t his preferred gender.
“I said drop it,” Jam Diu reminded me, as though he thought I had the shortest attention span in the world.
“Well,” I said.
Frowning, he said, “Is that my Beretta?”
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 end of Chef Shilshom.
The limits imposed by reality on all of us were now apparent even to those here who believed that they lived with no limits, no rules, no fear.
I could not pity them, because true pity is joined with a desire to help. I had no intention of putting myself and Timothy at risk for any of them.
But I was unexpectedly moved by the despairing recognition of the inescapable void, which was a note that twisted through the long, tortured death cry. The worst and best of humanity stand in the same cold shadow, and even a deserved death can send a shiver of sympathy through me from skin to marrow.
In the wake of the scream, the silence in the house pooled deep.
If we were contending only with the Outsiders, we might try to hide somewhere exceedingly clever for a few minutes, until it seemed that all the freaks must have ascended in the house, and then return to the basement. But the swine things would probably smell us out everywhere except in the airtight walk-in refrigerator off the kitchen.
Besides the possibility of being trapped inside the walk-in, I didn’t want to hide in a refrigerator for the same reason I wouldn’t have hidden in the communal cookpot in a village of cannibals.
To Timothy, I whispered, “Freaks inside the house, there’s no longer any reason not to go outside, more places to run. Where are the controls for the security shutters?”
“I d-don’t know.”
“Any guess at all?”
“No,” he said. “N-n-none.”
He reached for me. I took his hand. It was small and cold and damp with sweat.