She told me to shut my effing mouth.
Instead, from me poured another Shakespearean reference to time that she had not quoted to me in the furnace room: “ ‘And so, from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe, and then, from hour to hour, we rot and rot.’ ”
Judging by her stricken look, I could see that something rather like those lines had been presented to her by Constantine Cloyce as his own creation, a poetic doctrine of his cult.
She said, “No. That’s not it at all. Not at all. It goes … ‘And so, from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe, and then, from hour to hour, they rot and rot.’ They rot, you rot, you ignorant clockers rot and rot, not us.”
Unshed tears stood in her eyes, although they didn’t move me. I thought those salty waters must be as poisonous as a viper’s venom.
“You vicious little shit. You’ve ruined everything,” she said with such bitterness that I knew she meant I’d ruined more than their depraved life at Roseland, that I had as well sowed at least a seed of doubt about whatever philosophy and mythos Constantine Cloyce had conjured up to justify their life of no limits, no rules, no fear. And I’d sawn a thin score line in the cord of “eternal love” that she had claimed bonded her to the master of Roseland.
She looked as if she might take her chances, kill the boy and then hope to shoot me before I shot her, just for the thrill of spite.
By doing so, she would be acting on her dearest principles. Envy and lust and hate. Sex, power, control, revenge.
I heard myself declare, “I haven’t ruined everything. Not yet. We can still put everything right, if you’re willing.”
Although I wasn’t sure where I meant those words to take me, I knew I didn’t dare glance at Timothy again. Victoria would interpret any look that passed from me to him as an assurance that I was still his protector and her enemy.
“Nothing can be put right,” she said. “They’re dead. You let the freaks into the house, and they killed everyone.”
“I didn’t let them in,” I said, which wasn’t exactly a lie. I certainly hadn’t intended to let them inside. “Anyway, not everyone is dead. You’re still alive. Henry Lolam in the gatehouse. And Constantine, for all I know. You and Roseland can go on … if I get what I want.”
“Let me tell you what I want.” She said she wanted to see me effing dead, effing beheaded, my effing reproductive organs cut off and stuffed in my effing mouth.
Although I wasn’t looking directly at the glass tubes in which flares of light seemed to travel in opposite directions at the same time, the display behind the woman was playing more games with my head than I was playing with hers. I felt as if the tunnel might be in fact a long boxcar, racing underground, rocking back and forth ever so slightly, as a train tends to do. She was more familiar with this effect and probably unaffected by it. I grew increasingly queasy. If queasiness developed into full-blown nausea, the stalemate might end the instant she saw that I was disoriented.
Suddenly, in response to her F-word storm, I found myself playing a bad boy, pretending that my previous persona had been as phony as the name Victoria Mors. “You’re a hot-looking piece, but you’re a stupid bitch. Of course we want the same thing. Everybody wants the same thing. You said it yourself.”
“Don’t screw with me.”
“Someday you’ll beg me to screw with you,” Bad Odd said. “Next time I tie you up, bitch, it’ll be on a bed. Now shake the stupid out of that pretty head and let me shove some smart in your empty skull. If we don’t work together, none of us is going to survive.”
She was suspicious, but I could see that Bad Odd made more sense to her than the Odd she had known until this moment.
I said, “I need to know some stuff, Vicky. How long will this full tide last, before we’re rid of the freaks?”
She glared at me for a moment, but then said, “As little as another hour, at most two or three.”
“How often do the full tides come?”
“We never know. A year, three years, five. It starts with eddies in the night a couple of days before. The ozone. That cry.”
“The loon,” I said.
She shuddered. “It’s no loon.”
“The freaks, the porkers—they’ve never gotten into the house before?”
“No. They’ve never carried axes and hatchets before, either. Just clubs. They’re getting smarter.”
The lights raced to and fro in the tubes, and a sourness rose in the back of my throat.
I swallowed hard, hoping she didn’t notice, and said, “Where does this tunnel go?”
Reverting to type, she told me that she wasn’t my effing tour guide. She moved her left arm up to encircle Timothy’s neck, and she shifted the muzzle of the pistol to his right temple.
Bad Odd didn’t respond well to backtalk. I took a step toward her, so that the muzzle of the Beretta was about two feet from her face. “Listen, you stupid slut, I’d just as soon blow your brains out. If you think I care about the boy, you don’t understand the situation. The only person I care about is me. If I’m the only one who walks out of here, I’m happy with that. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Where does this tunnel go?”
She studied me for a moment, and then relented. “It runs east for a ways, then branches northeast and south.”
“Northeast to what?”
“The machine rooms under the stables.”
“And south?”
“To the guest tower.”
“That’s what I wanted to hear. So the two other security guards you said were on vacation. They don’t exist, do they?”
“Maybe they do.”
“Yeah, and maybe Santa Claus does, too. So here’s the way it’s got to be, Vicky. Annamaria and I are staying in Roseland. I like the lifestyle. I can get used to being rich. And the idea of being young forever. I killed Sempiterno. I’ll take his place. We’ll beef up the defenses here. We’ll be ready for the freaks, whether it’s a year from now or ten years.”
“This isn’t going to happen,” she said.
“Like hell it isn’t. If there’s only three of you now, you’ll need backup on the next full tide.”
My stomach seemed to turn like an eel twining lazily about itself, and I concentrated intently on Victoria’s face.
She said, “Constantine won’t let you stay.”
“You forget that Constantine invited us. Besides, we have a gift for him that he really wants.”
“What gift?”
“Annamaria’s baby.”
The horrific implications of my statement didn’t faze her. Her eyes looked as without depth as those of a doll, one of those dolls that, in movies, comes alive and reveals a keen interest in cutlery. “That’s not Constantine. That’s more Paulie’s kind of thing.”
My dark mood darkened as I wondered what, other than machinery, might wait to be discovered in the machine rooms under the stables. I did not intend to find out.
I said, “Remember, Paulie’s dead. As for Constantine … tastes change, become more sophisticated. If that’s not your thing, you and I can invent some new game. You look like you’d be a lot of fun when you let your hair down.”
“You said you detested, abhorred, and loathed me.”
“No. I said maybe I did. But don’t you see? Don’t you agree that the greatest thrill of all might be giving yourself to what you detest, abhor, and loathe? The freedom of not caring.”
Bad Odd was beginning to scare me.
Victoria’s tongue tasted her lips. “Living here, being freed from time’s oppression does something to you.”
“What something?”
“It’s like a fever in the blood, not an illness, an exhilarating liberation. We call it dispossession fever.”
“Dispossession of what?”
“We are dispossessed of all impossibilities, of everything that seemed once beyond doing. Every desire can be fulfilled as easily as it was conceived. And every desire eventually gives way to one more deliciously outrageous. The possibilities before us are infinite.”
Together we had found our way to that crossroads of self-love and self-loathing that is the modern madness most in vogue. She assumed that the very fact I recognized this place in the mind and heart must mean that I was as enthralled by it as she was, that I was ready to live a life that would be a deathwork.
Sometimes not to take a risk is to embrace failure. I took the risk of holstering my Beretta.
She held Timothy against her, arm around his neck, muzzle of the gun against his temple.
In his eyes, I thought I saw both fear and relief, and the latter saddened me.
Victoria released him. She lowered her weapon, muzzle toward the floor.
“When I spat on your mouth,” she said, favoring me with that elfin smile, “you must have liked the taste of it.”
I drew my pistol and shot her point-blank twice in the chest before she could raise her gun arm.
Forty-eight
EXCEPT FOR THE WOUNDS, THE BLOOD, VICTORIA ON the passageway floor was an elfin loveliness, shorn now of the spirit that didn’t measure up to the beauty of her material form.
I said to the boy, “Don’t look at her.”
“I’ve seen worse.”
“Just the same,” I said, “don’t look. Go on up the tunnel a little ways. I’ll join you in a minute.”
He did as I asked.
My nausea had abated. The cause of it hadn’t been the pulsing lights in the walls. The cause had been the recognition of what I would do to her if, by deception, I could win her trust.
I owed this woman nothing other than what I’d given her, and in spite of how young she appeared to be, her death was not untimely. Yet death is always first and foremost death even when it might also be something else, like justice.
In spite of what she was and what she had done, once very long ago she’d been someone else who had not yet cast aside all innocence. In respect of the better girl who had once been, I wished that I had a blanket to drape over her rather than leave her exposed in the indignity of death.
My sports coat would cover only her head and torso, which would somehow seem a mockery.
Her 9-mm pistol lay on the floor. Because I was so rapidly going through my supply of ammunition, I picked up the weapon. I ejected the magazine—and discovered it was empty. The chamber didn’t contain a round, either.
Having exhausted her ammunition before we even encountered each other, she’d not been an immediate threat either to me or to Timothy.
I snapped the magazine back into her pistol and put the gun on the floor beside her.
Nothing could have been different. What happened was the only thing that could have happened. Nevertheless, that moment was far from a high point in my life.
I turned my back to her and replenished the ammunition in the magazine of my Beretta.
When I joined Timothy farther along the passageway, I said, “Are you all right?”
“No. Last time I was all right, my mother was still alive.”
I put a hand on his shoulder. “You said no one can go from the present to the past and have any effect on what happened to make the present what it is.”
“They tell me that Tesla said so, and it turns out to be true.”
“Your father brought you back from 1925, from minutes before he accidentally shot you, but your dead body was still on the lawn with your mother’s and the horse.”
“Yeah. My life ended when he shot me.”
“But here you are, a paradox. Alive … though never changing.”
“Because I have no life—no destiny—to grow into.”
I settled on one knee, to be at his height. “If we brought your mother back from before he shot her, she would be like you.”
“Like me. Never changing physically. Haunted by the future. Never able to leave Roseland.” He glanced toward Victoria’s body. “Except by being killed again.”
This was news to me. “You can’t leave Roseland?”
“They say … they think I’d cease to exist if I did. I’m out of time, out of my time, here in a century where I don’t belong. Maybe I’m sustained only by the energy field, Tesla’s field, that encircles Roseland.”
If that turned out to be true, I had saved him only to sentence him to death, one way or another.
The freaks had taken out Jam Diu and Mrs. Tameed and perhaps even Constantine Cloyce, sparing me from dispatching as many people as I had thought I would be called upon to kill, perhaps even sparing me from being the scourge that I dreaded being. And if I shut down the estate and put an end to the last of the Outsiders, which might be Henry Lolam, I had perhaps saved the lives of all the women and children upon whom this demented cult would have preyed in the decades to come. That was a good day’s work, especially for a fry cook who was out of a job.
But this perpetual child, grown wise from books and seasoned by his suffering, was such a survivor that I was distressed by the thought that I could help him only by putting an end to him. After all that he had endured here, after the terrible things he had seen and heard, he still held fast to his innocence, at least in the sense that he was blameless, guileless, harmless, uncorrupted. He deserved better than a second death.
If his fate had been mine to craft, I would have given him life, hope, and happiness. I am, however, without such godlike power. I am only an itinerant janitor these days, going where I have to go, cleaning up one kind of mess or another, and then moving on to the next toxic spill.
When he revealed that he would cease to exist as soon as he walked outside the gates of the estate, I didn’t know what to say to him. I could only put my arms around him, hug him, hold him tight. I guess that must have been the right thing to do, because he hugged me, too, and for a moment we took strength from each other, deep in Roseland’s maze, while freaks stalked through other passageways and also through the sunlit world above, feeding on human flesh with the enthusiasm of the Minotaur prowling the labyrinth under ancient Crete.
As we set out to find the branching tunnels of which Victoria Mors had spoken, I said, “There’s someone I want you to meet.”
He shook his head. “I just want to be sent back. To be one Timothy again, not two, just one and finished in 1925, like I was meant to be.”
“Maybe that’s best,” I admitted. “But often what we want isn’t what’s best. There’s this friend of mine in the guest tower. She’s a nice lady. I want to see what she thinks before we decide what to do.”