Odd Apocalypse (13 page)

As the odor of the creature grew stronger, I began to feel like Jean Valjean in
Les Misérables
, except that instead of the implacable Inspector Javert, my pursuer was a red-eyed demonic mutant something.

The absolute darkness was now relieved by what appeared to be the light of a rising yellowish moon. The oak around me reappeared, though like a less than fully imagined tree in a dream. I remained unable to see the climber below.

I could no longer afford to wait for this unscheduled night to recede and to take the mysterious creatures with it, as happened in the stable. This event had already lasted longer than the first, and I had no reason to expect that in another minute I would find myself freed from the current weirdness and returned to the daylight of that kinder, gentler Roseland.

As the stench grew, I rose gingerly, pressing my back to the trunk, and gripped a branch above me, first with one hand, then with both. I turned on the limb to peer down into the quadrant of the great oak through which the thing was making its way.

The action I intended might result in losing my footing, losing my overhead grip, and plunging through battering, skewering phalanxes of limbs and branches with a cry far less triumphant than the cry with which Tarzan conquered jungles. But I could see nothing
else to do but wait for the beast to appear below me and, as it attempted to clamber up to my level, kick it repeatedly in the face until it lost its grip—or bit off my foot.

Sometimes I wish I liked guns.

I’ve had to resort to them at times, but always with reluctance. The terrifying games that my disturbed mother played with a pistol when I was a boy have left me with an abiding aversion to firearms and a preference for simpler weapons—in this case as simple as my foot—that might sooner or later get me killed.

The singular stink had become nearly thick enough to make my eyes water, but the climber had not yet appeared, although the noise of its ascent was greater and closer.

Only when something swung around from the farther side of the oak onto my limb, behind me and slightly to my left, did I realize there had been at least one other climber in addition to the freak that I’d been tracking. It seized my right shoulder in one brutish hand, and I knew next would come a bite, a slash.

Before claws or teeth could draw blood, I thrust backward with my entire body. My feet slipped off the curve of bark—and treaded empty air. I was hanging only from the limb above my head, but with that sudden move I also knocked my attacker off the tree. Clutching fast to my shoulder was its only hope, but its terrible weight was such that I felt as if, in its grasp, my muscle might be separating from the shoulder bone. Pain shot up my arm and into my right hand, which slipped off the branch.

I hung now only by my left hand, but the abrupt change in my position jolted the creature clinging to me, and its hand—which felt poorly articulated, of limited dexterity—slipped off my shoulder. With a howl, the thing fell away and quickly had the howl knocked out of it as it slammed through the unforgiving architecture of the oak. The beast, of which I hadn’t a single glimpse, must have crashed
into the mob at the base of the tree, because shrieks of pain and outrage rose from below.

As those cries began to subside, the crepitation of a thousand long, leathery wings reverberated through the blind-dark woods. The swarm, most likely the same that I had seen descending out of the northwest the previous evening, seethed among the oaks, attacking the beasts below, who squealed in terror.

As I restored my two-hand grip on the overhead limb and began to swing gently back and forth in the hope of regaining my footing, I steeled myself against the likelihood that one of the immense bats—if that’s what they were—would soar up through the branches below me and tear off a piece of my face. At the taste of me, it would call up others of its kind, and an Odd feast would begin.

I regained my footing, not expecting to keep it long. But as I shivered, listening to the tumult and the screaming below, I dared to hope that the prey at ground level might be so plentiful that the flock, the colony, whatever it should be called, would be satiated by what it killed on the woodland floor.

From a TV documentary, I remembered a variety of bat that had curved incisors as sharp as razors and another variety that possessed claws so sharp and so precisely hooked that it could rip fish out of the water and fly away with them. Nature films can inspire as many nightmares as any blood-soaked monster movie ever made.

Abruptly the darkness ebbed as morning light once more flowed down over me and through the branches to the floor of the woods. The tide of sunshine washed away the creatures that the unnatural night had brought with it, as if they had never existed. As far as I could see, nothing dead or alive waited on the carpet of leaves below.

All in white and immense, like an array of taut mainsails and topsails and staysails, Chef Shilshom seemed about to glide away wherever the wind might carry him. But the kitchen, of course, was windless, and the chef was intent upon adding to a pile of eyes on the cutting board beside the sink, where he was blinding several pounds of potatoes before peeling them.

My morning had been exhausting, especially as I’d eaten nothing but an almond croissant, and I needed to fill my fuel tank. “Sir, I don’t want to bother you, but Roseland is taking a lot out of me today. I could use some protein.”

“Mmmmm,” he said, and pointed to a warm quiche on a cooling rack and to a fresh cheesecake to which the lemon glaze had recently been applied.

As a guest granted kitchen privileges, I could have made a ham sandwich or searched out a leftover chicken breast. Instead I cut and plated a wedge of the quiche
and
a slice of the cheesecake, and poured a glass of milk.

I don’t worry about cholesterol. Considering my gift and the limited
life expectancy it almost certainly ensures, my arteries will be as squeaky-clean as those of a newborn when I die, even if I eat nothing but ice cream at every meal.

Sitting on a stool at the island nearest to the chef, I watched him carve the faults out of the potatoes with an intensity that was a little disturbing. Tip of the tongue pinched between his teeth, plump cheeks rosier than usual, eyes slitted as if with contempt, and a fine dew of perspiration on his forehead all seemed to indicate that in his imagination he was cutting the eyes from something potentially more responsive than potatoes.

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.