Odd Apocalypse (18 page)

After Johnny and his bride-to-be left in a snit, we asked Gypsy Mummy the question that the other couple had posed. Into the brass tray slid a card that read
YOU ARE DESTINED TO BE TOGETHER FOREVER
.

Stormy framed it behind glass and hung it above her bed, where it remained for a few years. Now it was in a smaller frame on the nightstand in my guest-tower bedroom.

When I lost Stormy, I never considered destroying the card in anger. I have no anger. I have never raged at man or God about what happened. Sorrow is my legacy from that terrible day, and as well a humbling awareness of my inadequacies, which are beyond counting.

To keep the sorrow from overwhelming me, I remain focused on the beauty of this world, which is everywhere to be seen in rich variety, from the smallest wildflowers and the iridescent hummingbird that feeds on them to the night sky diamonded with fiery stars.

And because I am able to see the lingering dead, I know that something lies outside of time, a place to which they belong and to which one day I will go. The prediction of Gypsy Mummy, therefore, has not proved finally wrong; it may yet be fulfilled, and I keep sorrow in check by anticipating the fulfillment of that much-desired destiny.

Since leaving Pico Mundo, I had taken the fortune-teller’s card with me when I traveled where my intuition propelled me. But for fear of losing it in some moment of desperate action, I didn’t carry it on my person all day, every day.

Recent events had led me to believe that the evil in Roseland was of an unprecedented nature. Annamaria was a help to me but not a
shield, and my chances of surviving until morning didn’t seem to be good. I had no silly notion that as long as Gypsy Mummy’s seven words were in my possession, I would be invulnerable. But I felt, perhaps foolishly, that were I to die and step out of time, the powers that be on the Other Side would feel more obliged to lead me directly to Stormy if I carried with me evidence of the promised destiny.

I don’t mind being considered foolish. I’m as much a fool as anyone, more so than some, and keeping that truth always in mind prevents me from becoming cocky. Cockiness gets you killed.

I pried up the fasteners on the back of the frame, removed the rectangle of chipboard, and retrieved the card. I put it in one of the plastic windows in my wallet.

Otherwise, those windows were empty. I carried no photo of Stormy because I had no need of it. Her face, her smile, her form, the beauty of her graceful hands, her voice were all vivid in my mind, indelible. In memory, she lived and moved and laughed, but all that a photograph could offer was one frozen moment of a life.

Over my sweater, I put on a sports jacket that I had bought during my shopping trip to town. I wasn’t trying to spiff up my image. A sports jacket provided pockets and concealment.

As Noah Wolflaw had instructed, I locked the narrow, barred windows and drew shut the draperies. I turned on all the lamps so that much later, when nightfall came, the light leaking around the draperies would suggest that I was in residence.

After locking my suite of rooms, I climbed the winding stone stairs from the vestibule to the second floor. The knuckles of my right hand chased the door as it swung open before they could quite rap the wood.

Raphael, the golden retriever we’d rescued in Magic Beach, was lying on the floor, holding a Nylabone in his forepaws, gnawing it
with gusto. He thumped his tail in greeting, but the Nylabone was at the moment of greater interest to him than any chest scratch or tummy rub he might get from me.

Boo was either elsewhere in the suite or had gone out to explore Roseland. As a spirit dog, he could walk through walls if he wished and do any of the usual ghosty things. But I had previously observed that, like any living dog, he had considerable curiosity and enjoyed exploring new places.

As before, the draperies were closed, and the only light came from two stained-glass lamps. Annamaria sat at the same small dining table. No mugs of tea stood steaming for either her or me.

Instead, on the table rested a shallow blue bowl eighteen inches in diameter, filled with water, in which floated three enormous white flowers. They were somewhat like magnolia blooms but larger, as big as cantaloupes, lusher, the petals so thick they seemed artificial, as if made of wax.

I had seen these flowers before, on an immense tree that grew outside the place where she had lived for a while in Magic Beach. We had eaten a meal together at a table where three blooms floated in a large shallow bowl like this one.

Knowing the names of things is a way of paying respect to the beauty of the world that sustains me and keeps my sorrow in check. I know the names of many trees, but not the name of the one from which these flowers came.

Approaching the table, I said, “Where did you get these?”

The lamp glow fell upon the flowers, the waxy petals bounced it softly to Annamaria, and this indirection played a trick on the eye, so that it seemed the light on her face shone from within her.

She smiled and said, “I took them from the tree.”

“The tree is back in Magic Beach.”

“The tree is here, Oddie.”

I had only ever seen one tree with these blooms, the nameless one in Magic Beach, with its great spreading black branches and its eight-lobed leaves.

“Here in Roseland? I’ve been all over the estate. I haven’t seen anything with these flowers.”

“Well, it’s here as surely as you are.”

Less than a week earlier, she had performed a trick with one of these white flowers. A friend of mine, a woman named Blossom, her only audience, had been wonderstruck by it. Now it seemed that she likewise impressed Noah Wolflaw, although the illusion apparently disturbed him in a way it didn’t disturb Blossom.

“In Magic Beach, you promised to show me something with a flower like this.”

“And indeed I will. Something that you will remember always.”

I pulled out the chair in which I had been sitting earlier.

Before I could settle, she raised a hand to stop me. “Not now.”

“When?”

“All things in their time, odd one.”

“That’s what you said before.”

“And it’s what I say again. You have a pressing matter to attend to, I believe.”

“Yeah. I found the one who needs me. A boy who won’t tell me his name. I think he really might be her son … if that makes any sense.”

Reflections of the blooms in the bowl flowered in her big dark eyes. “You have no time for an explanation, and I don’t need one. Do what you must.”

Something nuzzled my hand, and I looked down to see that Boo had materialized. He felt as solid to me as any real dog, as all spirits felt to me. His tongue was warm as he licked my fingers, but my hand did not become wet.

Annamaria said, “And remember what I told you earlier. If you should doubt the justice of your actions, you could die in Roseland. Do not doubt the beauty of your heart.”

I understood why she counseled me with those words. Mere days earlier, in Magic Beach, I had been caught up in a series of events that required me to kill five people involved in a terrorist plot, one of them a lovely young woman with large pellucid blue eyes. They would have murdered hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, if I had not killed them, and they would have murdered me. But the killing, especially of the woman, even though in self-defense, had left me dark inside and sick of myself.

That is why I told you at the start that I had recently been in a
mood
, not as buoyant and quick to find the humor in any moment as I have usually been. That was surely why I dreamed of Auschwitz, too, and worried about dying twice.

“The boy needs you,” she said.

After looking one last time at the flowers in the bowl, I went to the door.

“Young man.” When I glanced at her, she said, “Trust the justice of your actions and come back to me. You are my one protector.”

The retriever and the white shepherd were staring at me. Neither wagged his tail. Henry Ward Beecher once said, “The dog was created especially for children. He is the god of frolic.” I agree with that sentiment. But dogs can sometimes give you the most solemn look you will ever see on a human or an animal face, as if occasionally they are able to foretell, as if they see something in your future that they dread on your behalf.

I stepped out of Annamaria’s suite, pulled the door shut, fished the key from my pocket, and locked her safely inside.

LEAVING THE GUEST TOWER, I REALIZED THAT AMONG the eucalyptuses, as in the oak grove around the Enceladus lawn, no leaves lay on the ground either where the earth was bare or where a sparse grass grew, or on the flagstone path.

Brooding on that and a great deal more, I made my way to the groundskeeper’s building by a roundabout route that prevented me from being seen by anyone who might be at a window in the main house. By lawns, by wild fields, by the cover of trees, I circled to the north end of the huge estate, always watchful for the mysterious pigs, if pigs they were, as well as for the stallion and his rider.

The swine scared me, but at least the only horse in Roseland was a spirit. I find horses beautiful and noble and all that, but … One night years earlier, three women on horseback hunted me through the desert around Pico Mundo. They wanted to carve open my skull and take my brain. And their steeds were no less scary than the women.

I had chanced upon them in the middle of a ceremony that no man was ever meant to see. I thought they were Wiccans, but they despised Wiccans almost as much as they despised reason. According to those three, mere witches were wimps.

Their ceremony was for the most part so dull that it wasn’t worth a ticket at any price, especially not at the cost of my life. The event was rather like a university women’s society meeting, with a reading of the minutes and a report from the treasurer, except that these three met in the nude, brewed magic-mushroom tea, and structured their get-together around the sacrifice of three plump doves. The poor birds never did anything to anyone but had the misfortune to be symbols of peace, and nothing infuriated those particular women more than the concept of peace.

They were a nasty trio. And their horses seemed to track me by scent, as if they were half Appaloosa, half bloodhound. The flaring nostrils, the black lips skinned back from big square teeth, the flashing eyes … Consequently, I find movies like
Seabiscuit
and even
Black Beauty
to be as disturbing as
The Silence of the Lambs
.

The groundskeeper’s building was a sizable two-story stone structure in a shallow, picturesque glen that was sunny in the center and ringed by lacy California pepper trees. The small leaves of the peppers shimmered in a soft breeze of hardly greater force than an infant’s breathing.

The ground-floor windows were larger than those at the guest tower, but they were barred. The man-size door was locked. Behind three garage doors were evidently vehicles used by the landscapers, wherever they might be. From Henry Lolam during one of my visits to the gatehouse, I had ascertained that Jam Diu occupied an apartment on the second floor, and that there were also rooms on that level for other live-in members of the landscaping staff, though Henry had never quite confirmed that said staff existed.

Although it might be dangerous to assume that Jam Diu would still be pottering around up near the house, searching for that one hateful dandelion that could destroy the perfection of Roseland, I made the assumption anyway. I boldly tried the front door, but it
was locked. The garage bays had power roll-ups and offered no exterior handles for manual operation.

At the back of the building, I found two doors and a series of barred windows. Kicking in a door might be difficult if a deadbolt was engaged.

Besides, I was wearing rubber-soled Rockports. If you’re going to go around kicking down doors, you need to wear jackboots or the equivalent, so you don’t wind up lying on the ground with a fracture of the heel bone, sobbing like a baby.

Matt Damon and Tom Cruise and Liam Neeson and Bruce Willis and other men of their stature have kicked down numerous doors without sustaining the slightest injury to the calcaneus, which is the heel bone. Sometimes they have even done it barefoot. But I do not claim to be as tough as those gentlemen are, nor do I have access to the superlative health-care plan of the Screen Actors Guild.

On my way across the estate, I had thought hard about Wolflaw’s bewilderment as to why he had asked Annamaria to be his guest—and remembered Henry Lolam and Paulie Sempiterno being equally mystified. If these people harbored secrets that might destroy them, inviting strangers to stay in Roseland was self-destructive.

Annamaria might have charisma, in the truest sense of the word, and she might inspire in people a desire to assist her, but she was not a voodoo priestess casting spells that could bring her into any inner sanctum where she wished to go. She had told Wolflaw that he had a purpose in bringing her and me to Roseland, and she seemed to have at least some general idea of what that purpose might be, even if it was her curious nature not to share her insight, to be as enigmatic with me as with everyone else.