by Dean Koontz
Since coming to Roseland, my attempts to get information out of Chef Shilshom had been relatively subtle, my approach for the most part oblique. That strategy hadn’t gotten me anywhere. Earlier, over the croissant, I had been a bit bolder, and although I hadn’t pushed him so hard as to make him spill a single secret, I had rattled him enough to expose his concealed hostility when his reflection in the window revealed him glaring at me behind my back.
Halfway through my wedge of quiche, I said, “Sir, do you recall earlier when I asked you about the horse I sometimes see?”
“Mmmmm.”
“A black stallion, a Friesian.”
“If you say so.”
“Since Mr. Wolflaw keeps no horses, I thought it might belong to a neighbor, and you said perhaps it did.”
“There you go.”
“But I wonder, sir, how did the horse get through the front gate, with a guard there and everything?”
“How indeed?”
“Perhaps it climbed over the estate wall.”
The chef could not easily pretend distraction when taunted with such absurdity. He glanced at me but then preferred to talk to the current potato that he was mutilating. “There haven’t been horses here in many years.”
“Then what did I see?”
“I wonder.”
I finished the rest of my quiche and said, “Sir, did you notice an eclipse of the sun a short while ago?”
Now peeling the potatoes, he said, “Eclipse?”
“Day turning to night. Like a few thousand years ago people thought God was turning off the sun as punishment, so they went mad with fear and tore their hair out and sacrificed babies and lashed themselves with brambles and promised never to fornicate again, because they were ignorant, though that wasn’t really their fault, considering that there wasn’t either the History Channel or NatGeo back then, and maybe some of them tried to Google ‘sun goes out’ to learn what was happening, but they were way too far ahead of their time.”
Peeling determinedly, Chef Shilshom said, “I don’t understand you, Mr. Thomas.”
“You aren’t the first,” I assured him.
I tried the cheesecake. It was delicious.
“Sir,” I continued, “putting the mystery horse aside for a moment, do you know of an animal in these parts that is at least the size of a man, perhaps larger, with crimson eyes that glow in the dark and a really horrendous odor?”
The chef had been taking the skin off a potato in a single long ribbon, as if he collected spud peels the same way that some people collected string in giant balls that grew as big as automobiles. But partway through my question, his hand faltered, and a prematurely severed peel unraveled into the sink.
I doubt that Sherlock Holmes was my great-grandfather, but I deduced that the incident of the severed peel indicated Chef Shilshom knew the stinky animals to which I referred. He appeared alarmed by what I’d said, and intent on concealing his concern.
He at once continued peeling, but he took so long to decide on his response that his anxiety became more apparent. Finally he said, “Horrendous odor?”
“Very stinky, sir.”
“As large as a man?”
“Yes, sir. Maybe larger.”
“What did they look like?”
“I only ran into them in the dark.”
“But still you must have seen something of them.”
“No, sir. It was very dark.”
He relaxed a little. “We have no animals that big in these parts.”
“What about bears?”
“Well.”
“California black bears?”
He said, “Mmmmm.”
“Maybe the bears climbed the estate wall to kill and eat all the mountain lions.”
The slippery potato popped out of his hand and thumped around the stainless-steel sink.
“Could it be bears?” I pressed, though I knew it hadn’t been anything as cuddly as the killing machine that is a bear.
Having retrieved the potato, the chef began to peel again, but he lacked the composure with which he’d begun the chore. He hacked clumsily at that example of Idaho’s finest, and I felt embarrassed for him.
“Maybe you should stay in at night, Mr. Thomas.”
After skinning the rest of the potato in a most unfortunate manner, the chef dropped it in a large pot half filled with water.
I said, “The first time I ran into them was in the stable, this morning, about half an hour after dawn.”
He picked up another spud and went at it as though he despised everything Idahoan and was particularly infuriated by potatoes.
“The second time,” I said, “was just twenty minutes ago, in a grove of oak trees, where it got so dark I thought there must be an eclipse.”
“That doesn’t make sense, Mr. Thomas.”
“It didn’t make sense to me, either.”
“There was no eclipse.”
“No, sir, I guess not. But there was something.”
Watching him, I finished the slice of cheesecake.
Dropping the second potato in the pot, putting down the peeler, Chef Shilshom said, “My medication.”
“Sir?”
“I forgot to take it,” he said, and he left the kitchen by the hallway door.
At the back sink, I rinsed my plate, fork, and glass. I put them in the dishwasher.
The food lay heavy in my stomach, and I felt as if I had eaten my last meal.
… there’s someone here who’s in great danger and desperately needs you.…
Mentally reciting Annamaria’s words, hoping to engage my psychic magnetism as I had tried to do before I’d been warned into the tree by the mute rider on the spirit horse, I wandered across the kitchen and left it by one of the two swinging doors that served the butler’s pantry.
I passed through the formal dining room, the cozy informal drawing room that was a fraction the size of the main drawing room, and along a paneled hallway, past closed doors that I had no impulse to open.
More than once in the past couple of days, the layout of the great house had confused me, not merely because of its size but also because its architect seemed to have invented a new geometry with a previously unknown dimension that frustrated my memory. Rooms proved to be connected in ways that repeatedly surprised me.
By the time I arrived at the library, by a route that I would not have thought could bring me there, two things puzzled me: the depth of the silence in the great house, and the absence of staff. No vacuum cleaner in a distant room. No voices. No one mopping limestone floors or polishing mahogany floors, or dusting furniture.
The previous day, I had for the first time availed myself of the invitation to treat the ground level of the house as my own home, and had spent some time in both the card room and the fully equipped gym. I had encountered only the head housekeeper, Mrs. Tameed, and a maid named Victoria Mors.
Now, as I stood on the threshold of the library, wondering at the stillness in the house, I realized that neither the housekeeper nor the maid had been engaged in any obvious labor when I had come upon them. They had been standing in the card room, in the middle of an intense conversation. Although I apologized for interrupting them in their work and intended to leave, they assured me that they had finished the task at hand and had chores elsewhere. They had left at once, but I hadn’t considered, until this moment, that neither had with her any cleaning supplies or even as much as a dust rag.
A house as large as this one—with its ornate moldings, carved-marble fireplaces, richness of architectural details, and room after room of antique furnishings—should keep Mrs. Tameed and half a dozen maids bustling from morning till night. Yet although the house was immaculate, I had encountered only the two of them, and I had yet to see either woman working.
Crossing the threshold, I found the library deserted. The large, rectangular room was wrapped by laden bookshelves except for a few windows covered with heavy brocade draperies. I didn’t pause to read the titles o
n any of the thousands of spines, didn’t settle in an armchair. Guided by psychic magnetism, I went directly to the open staircase in the middle of the room.
Twenty feet overhead, the mahogany ceiling was deeply coffered. A five-foot-wide mezzanine encircled the room twelve feet above the floor.
The bronze spiral staircase featured a railing in which the balusters were wound through by beautifully wrought vines with gilded leaves. Perhaps it was meant to represent the tree of knowledge.
At the top of the stairs, a bridge connected the two longest sides of the mezzanine. Without hesitation, I went to the left. Upon reaching the end of the bridge, I turned right.
In the southwest corner of the mezzanine, set at an angle between the bookshelves, a heavy wooden door stood under a pediment surmounted by a bronze torch with a gilded flame. I passed through the door into a junction of second-floor hallways.
The invitation to enjoy the public rooms of the main house did not include the second floor. I was abusing the privilege granted to me. I didn’t hesitate to do so. I don’t think I’m really bad, but I’ll admit to being naughty.
Considering that the head of security, Paulie Sempiterno, had so recently expressed the sincere desire to put a bullet in my face, my violation of Mr. Wolflaw’s privacy might result in something worse than a stern lecture about good manners. Caution seemed essential.
As if the very thought of Sempiterno conjured him, his rough voice rose from behind one of the closed doors along the west wing, to my right.
Another voice, more worried and less angry than the security chief’s, was unquestionably that of Chef Shilshom. He evidently had not gone to fetch a forgotten medication in his little apartment in the servants’ wing on the ground floor.
A third voice, quieter than the other two, might have been that of Noah Wolflaw. His bedroom suite lay in the west wing.
I was able to hear only the louder words, but the tenor of the conversation was clearly argumentative. I imagined that Sempiterno wanted to grind me up in a wood-chipper, Shilshom wanted to roast me with onions and carrots before serving me as a peace offering to whatever red-eyed animals prowled Roseland, and Wolflaw couldn’t bring himself to assent to my being either chipped or cooked because he was still enchanted by Annamaria for reasons that even he could not explain.
Although I was tempted to listen at the door, prudence and psychic magnetism turned me away from the voices. I proceeded along the south hallway, in the first half of which all the doors were on the right. Staying on the carpet runner, treading quietly, I was grateful that whatever power guided my feet had never required me to break into a lively dance.
Just before the south wing met the south end of the east wing, I was compelled to a door on the right. I hesitated with my hand on the knob, listening, but I heard no slightest sound beyond.
Entering, I discovered a parlor that was part of a bedroom suite. In a wingback chair sat a boy with wide, staring, all-white eyes that seemed blinded by thick cataracts.
Fifteen
WHEN THE CHILD DID NOT REACT TO ME IN ANY WAY, I quietly closed the door to the hall and stepped farther into the room.
His hands lay in his lap, palms upturned. His lips were slightly parted. Motionless, silent, he might have been dead or comatose.
The parlor and the connecting bedroom that I glimpsed through an open door were not furnished or decorated to the taste of a young boy of eight or nine. A white ceiling of ornate plaster medallions depicting clusters of bristling arrows, walls hung with tapestries featuring complexly patterned borders around scenes of stag hunts, English furniture of a period I couldn’t identify, numerous bronzes of hunting dogs on tables and consoles, and a Persian rug in rich shades of gold and red and brown were decidedly masculine but better suited to a man with decades of sporting pursuits behind him than to a boy of tender years.
The draperies were closed over the windows, and the light came from a table lamp by the sofa and a floor lamp beside the armchair, both with pleated silk shades. Shadows gathered in the corners, but I was confident that the child was alone.
I approached him without eliciting a response and stood staring down at him, wondering about his condition.
The terrible blank eyes were so white that the cataracts allowed no slightest suggestion of the irises and pupils beneath. He appeared to be totally blind.
Although I couldn’t hear him inhale or exhale, his chest rose and fell slightly. His breathing was slow and shallow.
Except for those eerie eyes, he was a good-looking boy with clear pale skin, refined features that suggested he would grow quite handsome in time, and thick dark hair. He might have been a bit small for his age; the armchair dwarfed him, and his feet didn’t reach the floor.
I thought I saw in his features a suggestion of the horse-riding woman, but I could not be certain.
… there’s someone here who’s in great danger and desperately needs you.…
I believed that I had found the person of whom Annamaria had spoken—and the son of the ghost rider. I didn’t know the nature of the danger, however, or what I could do for the boy.
His upturned left hand twitched and the heel of his left shoe bumped twice against the front of the armchair as if a doctor had rapped his kneecap to test his reflexes.
I said, “Can you hear me?”
When he did not reply, I sat on the ottoman in front of his chair. After watching him for a while, I reached out and took hold of his right wrist to time his pulse.
Although he was at rest and breathing slowly, his heart raced: 110 beats per minute. But there was nothing irregular in the rhythm, and he seemed in no serious distress.
His skin was so cold that I pressed his right hand between both of mine to warm it.
He did not at first react, but suddenly his fingers clutched me and squeezed tight. A small gasp escaped him, and he shuddered.
Cataracts were not his problem, after all. His eyes had been rolled farther back in his head than I would have thought possible. The irises descended. They were ginger-brown and clear.
Initially he seemed to stare through me, at something far beyond this room. Gradually his focus changed, and he looked at me, though not with surprise, as though we knew each other or as if nothing could amaze or perplex him in spite of his youth and inexperience.
His fingers relaxed their grip on me, and he withdrew his hand from mine. His frost-pale skin gradually began to color as though with reflected flames, although the nearby fireplace was dark and cold.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
He blinked a few times and surveyed the room, as if reminding himself where he was.
“My name’s Odd Thomas. I’m staying in the guesthouse.”
His attention returned to me. His stare was unnervingly direct, especially for a child. “I know.”
“What’s your name?”
Instead of answering, he said, “They told me I’ve got to keep to my rooms as long as you’re here.”
“Who told you?”
“All of them.”
“Why?”
He got up from the chair, and I rose from the ottoman. He went to the fireplace and stood there, staring through the fire screen at the logs stacked on the brass andirons.
After deciding that he might not say any more without being pressed, I asked again, “What’s your name?”
“Their faces melt off their skulls. And their skulls turn black when the air touches them, and all their bones black. And then the black blows away like soot, there isn’t anything left of them.”
The pitch of his voice was that of a boy, but seldom if ever had I heard a child speak so solemnly. And more than solemnity, there was a quality to his speech that chilled me, a sadness that might be despondency, the incapacity for the present exercise of hope, perhaps not yet despair but just one stop up the line from that worse condition.
“Maybe twenty girls in uniforms and kneesocks,” he continued, “walking to school. One second to the next, their clo
thes are on fire, and their hair, and when they try to scream, flames fly out of their mouths.”
I moved to him and put one hand on his slender shoulder. “A nightmare, huh?”
Gazing into the cold firebox, as if seeing burning schoolgirls instead of logs or andirons, he shook his head. “No.”
“A movie, a book,” I said, trying to understand him.
He looked up at me. His eyes were lustrous and dark—and no less haunted by something than Roseland was haunted by the spirit rider and her horse.
“You better hide,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s almost nine o’clock. That’s when she comes back.”
“Who?”
“Mrs. Tameed. She comes back at nine o’clock to get my breakfast tray.”
Glancing toward the door, I heard a noise in the hallway.
“You better hide,” the boy repeated. “If they know you’ve seen me, they’ll kill you.”
Sixteen
PAULIE SEMPITERNO HAD SAID HE WANTED TO PUT A bullet in my face because he didn’t like it. Having looked in a mirror often enough, I could understand that motive. But I could not imagine why I should have earned a death sentence merely because I’d seen the boy on the second floor. Although the child was strange, I at once believed his dire warning.
When I fled the parlor through the connecting door to the next room, I saw that the bed was made, which meant Mrs. Tameed might not need to go farther than the front room. But then I spotted the boy’s breakfast tray on a small table, on which also was a stack of books.
Through another doorway, I glimpsed a bathroom. Windows in bathrooms were usually too small to serve as escape routes, which left the tub drain.
As I peered into a walk-in closet, I realized it was no safer than the bathroom. I heard Mrs. Tameed, in the other room, ask the boy if he had finished breakfast, and I stepped into this last possible refuge, leaving the door ajar an inch.