by Dean Koontz
When I opened the door at the head of the back service stairs, I heard heavy footfalls ascending, the snorting and grumbling of more than one freak. A trollish shadow twisted across the landing wall, a step or two ahead of the creature that cast it.
We had no time to flee the kitchen. I stepped to the walk-in pantry, pushed Timothy ahead of me, and followed him, pulling the door shut and holding fast to the knob.
An instant before we entered from the kitchen, Victoria Mors, unbound and ungagged and unhinged, entered from the chef’s office, closing that door, as surprised to see us as we were startled by her. As I raised my Beretta, she seized the boy by his sweater, drew him against her, and pressed the muzzle of her pistol to his neck.
Although my Beretta was aimed at her head from a distance of just six feet, I didn’t dare shoot because it looked as if the trigger of her weapon was halfway through its double action. In the moment of her death spasm, she might reflexively complete the pull and kill Timothy even as I killed her.
On the other hand, if I lowered my pistol, she might try to pop me, even though the shots would tell the freaks where to find us. Stalemate.
Timothy’s eyes were wide with fear, his pale lips pressed tight as though he had determined both to be brave and to survive. But I worried he might arrive at the conclusion that Victoria could do something for him that was akin to what he hoped to achieve with the chronosphere: with one shot end his unnaturally long and depressing childhood, thereby ensuring for him the death, the peace, that was his destiny in 1925.
Snorting, grumbling with suspicion, making inquisitive noises, like the fabled three bears finding their porridge bowls empty after Goldilocks raided their cottage, the freaks arrived in the kitchen. At least two. Maybe three.
In the hand with which she gripped Timothy, Victoria held a key on a stretchy pink plastic coil. “Take this,” she whispered. She was still such an elfin beauty, her pale-blue eyes sparkling as if with the reflections of fairies only she could see, that she seemed to be offering not merely an ordinary key but instead a magic talisman that could give us the power to find a hidden treasure and summon dragons. “The keyhole in the steel plate.”
She let go of the boy for just one second, to toss the key to me, and she clutched him again before he could think to escape.
To catch the key, I had to let go of the doorknob. If one of the freaks tried to inspect the pantry, I wouldn’t be able to hold the door shut for long, anyway.
“A quarter turn to the right, back to vertical, and withdraw it,” she whispered.
The pantry door had no lock. The keyhole she meant was in a small steel plate in the wall beside the door.
To do what she wanted, I would have to look away from her. I asked, “Why?”
In the kitchen, cabinet doors were wrenched open, slammed shut. Something clattered to the floor.
Victoria’s whisper grew fierce. “Damn you! Hurry, before they kill us all!”
Maybe the brutes in the kitchen would find the cheesecake, the almond croissants, a cookie jar if there was one, and be distracted. Or maybe they didn’t like sweets.
Victoria clearly wanted to spit on me again, but her fury was inspired by terror and by my hesitation. I saw no deception in her wrenched face.
I turned away from her long enough to insert the key and do as she had instructed. The moment I withdrew the key, the floor moved beneath my feet.
Startled, I swung the Beretta toward her face.
After a moment of disorientation, I realized that under the pantry must lie a shaft. The floor descended smoothly and silently within it.
After pocketing the key, I took a two-hand grip on the pistol.
As more of the walls appeared, the pantry became a higher space. The shelves laden with canned and packaged food remained above us, growing farther away by the moment.
The deeper we descended, the less well the ever more distant overhead light revealed us to one another. Irrationally but perhaps understandably, given my mood, I expected that we would drop into such depths that the lamp above would be as dim as a star and we would be nearly invisible to one another, in a deep darkness with two guns, one of us having no limits and no rules.
When we had gone down perhaps twenty feet, an opening began to appear in the wall to my right, behind Victoria and the boy. Seconds later, we came to a stop, and the opening proved to be a seven-foot-high, six-foot-wide copper-clad passageway like the one connecting the mausoleum to the house. Evenly spaced fluorescent tubes striped the tunnel with bands of shadow and light. Embedded in the walls were glass tubes through which pulsed those golden flares that seemed to be receding and approaching at the same time.
Almost thirty feet overhead, at the top of the shaft, a pantry door opened. A freak peered in, looked down. It shrieked at us but didn’t want to make the long jump.
Victoria pulled Timothy with her, into the tunnel. When I followed, the pantry floor began to rise through the shaft, lifted by what appeared to be a hydraulic ram, although without the hiss and hum common to such machinery. It ascended past the ceiling of the tunnel, moved out of sight in the shaft, and the shrieking of the freak far above was now muffled.
Forty-seven
THE FREAKS IN THE KITCHEN NOW KNEW THAT THE pantry was a kind of elevator to a subterranean realm, but they didn’t have a key to operate it. We seemed to be safe from them.
Standing in the copper-clad corridor, Victoria Mors and I were, however, not safe from each other, and Timothy wasn’t safe from her.
Pressing the muzzle of her pistol to the boy’s throat with such force that the front sight gouged his flesh, she told me how effing much she hated my effing guts, how effing much she wished I were effing dead with my effing brains blown out of my effing skull.
For a woman who had lived well over a century, she had a sadly limited vocabulary.
In potentially deadly confrontations where I see no easy exit, I tend to think less than talk. I have found that if I say whatever comes into my mind, without calculation, all filters removed, I often talk my way to a solution that I don’t see coming until it arrives. It’s not that I’m opening a spillway to some huge dam of subconscious wisdom. Believe me, no such dam exists.
Maybe it’s just that before anything came the word, and words are the roots of everything that our senses perceive. Nothing can be imagined, nothing can be visualized in our minds, until we have a word for it. Therefore, when I give myself to the free flow of any words that trip off my tongue without predetermination, I am tapping into the primal creative power at the heart of the cosmos.
Or maybe I’m just a bullshit artist.
When Victoria told me how intensely she hated me, I kept the Beretta aimed at her face, but heard myself say, “I don’t hate you. Maybe I detest you. Maybe I abhor you. Maybe I loathe you, but I don’t hate you.”
She called me an effing liar and said, “Hate makes the world go around. Envy and lust and hate.”
“I stopped hating anyone when I realized hating can’t restore to me anything that’s lost.”
“Envy and lust and hate,” she insisted. “Lust for sex, power, control, revenge.”
“Well, I’m just a simple clocker with a simple philosophy.” I suddenly remembered something she’d said in the furnace room, between the times that she spat in my face. “ ‘You bear the whips and scorns, but we don’t and never will.’ ”
“True unless you’ve ruined everything,” she said, twisting the muzzle of the pistol back and forth in the boy’s neck, so that the front sight broke the skin.
Timothy whimpered in protest, and the thinnest thread of blood unraveled along his neck.
“Shakespeare,” I said. “ ‘For who would bear the whips and scorns of time.’ Hamlet.”
“You don’t know anything. Shakespeare, my ass. Constantine. My Constantine.”
I reminded her of something else she’d said: “ ‘Your thoughts are enslaved to a fool, but ours will never be.’ I think that’s from Henry IV, Pa
rt 1. It goes … ‘But thought’s the slave of life, and life time’s fool.’ ”
She seemed to think her look of contempt would draw my blood as the front sight of the pistol had drawn the boy’s. “What are you trying to do, you little piss-ant? Play with my head? An ignorant clocker like you?”
“You told me the women he killed were just animals, ‘walking shadows, poor players. Their lives signified nothing.’ ”
“Just as yours signifies nothing. Constantine’s truth stings you, doesn’t it. Doesn’t it?”
“Macbeth,” I said. “ ‘Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more.’ ”
Constantine, the leader of her cult and the poet of her dark heart, was not a poet but instead a plagiarist, cribbing from the best. The sparkle in her pale-blue eyes became a sharper glint. If his poetry was stolen, and not just stolen but also twisted from its original meaning for a wicked purpose, then the wisdom of his philosophy, of his insane gospel of earthly immortality, might also be secondhand and false, a prospect that she dared not contemplate at this late hour in the history of Roseland. She hated me more fervently for this revelation.
I recited the rest of that quotation for her, thrust it at her: “ ‘It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.’ ”
To please my friend Ozzie Boone and to please myself, I have read Shakespeare’s plays, many more than once, and I have memorized some lines. But I’m no dedicated scholar with a photographic memory. The quotations came to me because I gave myself to the free flow of words much as a spirit medium with a pencil and paper might find herself writing voluminous messages that didn’t arise in her own mind. I was no less surprised than Victoria was to hear these things spilling from me.
“You said the foot would be on my neck within the hour,” I reminded her. “You said ‘the inaudible and noiseless foot.’ That’s from All’s Well That Ends Well. ‘The inaudible and noiseless foot of time.’ ”
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.”