Odd Apocalypse (9 page)

I began to gag, and their stink was so intense that I could also
taste
it. If I started to retch, I might be convulsed with nausea and wouldn’t be able to pull hard enough on the lids to keep the beasts out. The very thought of retching caused me to retch. A bitter mass rose in my throat, I choked it down, but I knew that I wouldn’t be able to swallow it again.

Suddenly the pack in the feed room fell silent and halted their assault. Their smell swiftly ebbed, receded entirely, as did the tang of ozone.

Beyond the torn screens in the ventilation holes, the light of the stable sconces—if not also daylight—seemed to plume into the dark room through the open doorway, as if it were not real light at all but instead a phosphorescent exhalation of cold breath, which then lay as a pale and uneven gray condensation on the rough board walls.

I was accustomed to being the target of violence. But I wasn’t familiar with bad guys who, at the height of their assault and having victory within their grasp, abruptly turned peaceable and went away to meditate.

Whatever they were, the motivation for their retreat was not likely to be an attack of conscience and a tender desire to dispense a little mercy.

Some people misunderstand evil and believe it will relent, and because their misplaced hope inspires dark hearts to dream darker dreams, they are the fathers and mothers of all wars. Evil does not relent; it must be defeated. And even when defeated, uprooted, and purified by fire, evil leaves behind a seed that will one day germinate and, in blooming, again be misunderstood.

I had defeated nothing. I knew better than to believe that my mysterious attackers would not return. The question was—
when
?

Holding fast to the pulls on the underside of the feed-bin lids, I
listened but heard nothing except my less frantic breathing and an occasional twang as my weight shifting ever so slightly upon the stainless-steel liner caused it to flex.

After a minute or so, the pale light, the absence of ozone, and the silence drew me to the conclusion that the grunting pack had not left of their own will but had been somehow swept away when the too-early nightfall was magically undone and the day restored to morning.

I didn’t know how night could have come so quickly after dawn or how it could have been rolled back, as if time were not a river with a fixed course but instead a changeable wind gusting now toward but now away.

My curious life has been filled with supernatural events, but never before one like this.

An argument could be made that the many strange things I see and experience are in fact as natural as the sun and moon, and that the five senses of other human beings have not yet adapted to the full reality of the world.

That theory would seem to suggest that I am special, better than others, but I know that isn’t true. In spite of my talent, I am not any better than any other soul seeking redemption, no more than a good musician is a better person than those with no musical talent, and I am worse than some.

Willing to entertain the possibility that I would not be torn asunder and eaten if I ventured forth, I let go of one of the lids, pushed up the other, and clambered out of the feed bin.

I believed that I now knew what a lobster felt as it languished in a tank beside the maître d’ station in a restaurant, while hungry patrons, waiting to be seated, tapped the glass and remarked upon its size and succulence.

Stepping out of the feed room, I saw that the south door was
closed and the north one stood open precisely as far as it had when I first entered the stable. The sconces, which had failed earlier, now glowed. At the windows, the day was as it should be: plenty of light, brighter to the east than to the west.

Warily, I proceeded through the stable to the open door, but no threat manifested.

When I switched off the lights and stepped outside, the morning was fair and mild and right. The bright brush of a single sun painted the trees and grass and sloping land, leaving the distant ocean still half dark like gray slate through which were smeared some of the softer colors of the clay from which it had been formed. The stable cast a single black shadow, to the west, as did I. The rock and the crumpled Coke can had reappeared; they, like all things around me, spilled their silhouettes only westward in ordinary daylight.

For a moment some power had imposed chaos on the day, followed by this reprieve. This is the world of men and women in their flesh, and more often than not they rebel against order, preferring the perceived freedom of a measured chaos. But chaos half-loosed cannot be long controlled; it is all or nothing. This reprieve would be brief.

Whatever might be happening at Roseland, it was misconceived by men in the quest for power, because it was a lust for power of one kind or another that quivered at the root of every base human desire. I sensed that not only the land sloped from east to west; within the grounds of this walled estate, reality also was tilted from the norm and was being steadily levered to an ever more severe angle, until Roseland would abruptly slide to ruin, reason would slither down to madness, and everyone here would cascade into death.

The sun was hardly risen, but already time was running out.

IF THE ONSET OF NIGHT SO SOON AFTER DAWN AND then its equally astonishing repeal had been observed by others in Roseland, they were remarkably unmoved by it. As I crossed the estate, I expected to see at least a couple of people on terraces or lawns, regarding the sky with wonder if not terror, but no one was out and about. Although I couldn’t understand how such a stunning cosmological event could be confined to the stable, apparently only I had experienced it.

I see the lingering dead, but I don’t have hallucinations. And I didn’t believe that Chef Shilshom spiked my almond croissant with peyote. If the guard at the front gate, where I was headed, did not remark on an eclipse of the sun, then the change from day to night, to day again, had been weirdly localized.

Nine feet high and three thick, the wall surrounding Roseland’s fifty-two acres had been built of concrete faced with stones gathered from the property. In the only gap, the impressive gates at the driveway entrance were not formed from pickets and rails through which the curious might peer, but were solid panels of bronze decorated with copper discs like those in the floor of the stable.

The gatehouse was of the same stone. Like the guesthouse tower in the eucalyptus grove, its windows were narrow and barred, and its ironbound-oak door stood like a challenge to barbarians.

About fourteen feet on a side, the building was large for its purpose, containing an office, a kitchenette, and a bathroom. I’d had only a glimpse inside, through the open door, on our second day here. But I could not have failed to notice the gun rack on the farther wall: two shotguns—one with a pistol grip—and two assault rifles.

Apparently, they intended to leave no doubt in the minds of door-to-door salesmen that when they said no, they were serious.

On the north side of the structure, adjacent to the driveway, an extension of the sloped roof, supported by four posts, provided a six-foot-deep shelter where a guard might stand in bad weather to speak with arriving guests. In that shade, to the right of the door, Henry Lolam sat in a captain’s chair with a padded seat.

He was perhaps thirty, and handsome in such a boyish way that on first encounter he seemed callow. Unlined face, mouth as innocent as that of a child who had not yet spoken one curse, cheeks the pink that sometimes blushes peach skins, he looked as if nothing hard in the world had touched him, as if he’d drifted through it like dandelion fluff on the softest warmest breeze that ever blew.

His green eyes were alien in that boyish face, full of loss and anguish and, at times, bewilderment.

As on the two other occasions when I had sought him out, Henry was reading a book of poetry. On a small table beside his chair were other haphazardly stacked volumes by such poets as Emerson, Whitman, and Wallace Stevens, a dangerous crew to let into your head.

Some will be skeptical of the contention that a security guard—a “rent-a-cop,” in the mocking Hollywood argot of our times—might be immersed in poetry. The uniqueness of every soul is not a theme that our current culture, obsessed with group identities, cares to
assert. But Henry was himself and no one else, and judging by the intensity with which he focused on those verses, he sought from them something profound.

While he lingered over the last stanza of a poem, I leaned against a porch post and waited. He was not rude, merely preoccupied.

I had come here to ask him about Kenny Randolph Fitzgerald Mountbatten, who claimed to be a Roseland security guard even though he hadn’t worn the uniform—gray slacks, white shirt, blue blazer—that the other guards wore and though he was in so many ways more flamboyant than Henry and his colleagues.

Waiting, I watched what appeared to be a peregrine, judging by its immense wingspan and the universal pattern of its underwings. These falcons generally hunted smaller birds, rather than rodents, making spectacular swoops and seizing their prey in midair.

When Henry closed the book and looked up, a lost expression marked his eyes, as if he knew neither me nor where he was.

I said, “I’m sorry to interrupt, sir.”

His confusion, or whatever it might be, ebbed, and in ebbing washed a smile onto his beach-smooth face. He appeared as boyish as any preadolescent in a Norman Rockwell painting—as long as you did not care to see more in his eyes than the green of them.

“No, no,” Henry said. “I enjoy our chats. Sit down, sit down.”

To the left of the door, he had earlier put out a second chair, apparently in anticipation of my visit. I settled in it, deciding there was no point in asking about an eclipse.

“I’ve been brushing up on my UFO history,” Henry said.

He was intrigued by reports of abductions by extraterrestrials and alien bases on the far side of the moon. Although I could not say why I felt so, I suspected that he sought the same thing in UFO lore that he pursued in poetry.

Aware of the irony of a spirit-seer debunking the possibility of
visitors from outer space, I nevertheless said, “I’m sorry, sir, but I just can’t buy into flying saucers and all that.”

“Several of those who’ve been abducted have passed lie-detector tests. There’s a lot of documentation.”

“See, it doesn’t make sense to me that a superintelligent race would come all the way across the galaxy just to abduct people and put probes up their rectums.”

“Well, that’s not the
only
thing they do in their examinations.”

“But it always seems to be the first and most important thing.”

“Don’t you think a colonoscopy is advisable now and then?”

“I can get one from a doctor.”

“Not as thorough as the one the aliens give you.”

“But, sir, why would aliens be interested in whether I have colon cancer?”

“Maybe because they
care
,” Henry said.

I had learned that to get to a subject that I wished to discuss, I had to indulge Henry’s bizarre fascination with proctologists from other worlds. Indulging him, however, didn’t mean taking a craziness pill and tripping with him, and I remained a skeptic.

“I suspect they’re just very caring,” Henry persisted.

“Coming fifty light-years to give me a colonoscopy is so caring it’s downright creepy.”

“No, Odd, you see, fifty light-years to them might be like fifty miles to us.”

“Coming even fifty miles to force a probe up my butt without my permission is a pretty good definition of a pervert.”

Henry’s face was alight with wonder at the idea of aliens, and dimpled with the amusement that any mischievous boy feels when he gets a seemingly legitimate chance to talk about butts and such.

“They’re probably taking DNA samples, too.”

I shrugged. “So I’ll give them a lock of my hair.”

Smiling dreamily, but turning the book of poetry over and over in his hands as if agitated, he said, “Some UFO experts think the aliens have conquered death and just want to give us immortality.”

“Give it to everyone?”

“They’re so compassionate.”

“Lady Gaga’s cool,” I said. “But a thousand years from now, I don’t want to have to listen to Lady Gaga’s seven hundredth album.”

“It wouldn’t be boring like that. Immortal, you could change careers again and again. Be a singer like Lady Gaga, and she can be a fry cook.”

I grimaced. “I can’t sing, and I have a hunch she can’t cook.”

He thumbed repeatedly, insistently through the pages of the book without looking at it, making a sound like shuffled cards. “Enhanced by alien technology, we’ll all be able to do
everything
perfectly.”

“Then why do anything at all?”

“What do you mean?”

“If there’s nothing to learn because we know it all, what’s the challenge, why would the effort matter, what would be the point?”

For a moment he continued riffling the pages of poetry, but then his hands grew still and the smile flatlined.

I waited for his reply, but he didn’t make one. After a while, he said, “I’m supposed to be on vacation. Eight weeks in Hawaii.”