Odd Apocalypse Read online

  Occasionally, the deceased attempt to communicate not merely by nodding and gestures but through the art of mime, which can be frustrating. Like any mentally healthy citizen, I am overcome by the urge to strangle a mime when I happen upon one in full performance, but a mime who’s already dead is unmoved by that threat.

  Turning in a full circle, in seeming solitude, I nevertheless said, “Hello?”

  The lone voice that answered was a cricket that had escaped the predatory frogs.

  Three

  THE KITCHEN IN THE MAIN HOUSE WAS NOT SO ENORMOUS that you could play tennis there, but either of the two center islands was large enough for a game of Ping-Pong.

  Some countertops were black granite, others stainless steel. Mahogany cabinets. White tile floor.

  Not a single corner was brightened by teddy-bear cookie jars or ceramic fruit, or colorful tea towels.

  The warm air was redolent of breakfast croissants and our daily bread, while the face and form of Chef Shilshom suggested that all of his trespasses involved food. In clean white sneakers, his small feet were those of a ballerina grafted onto the massive legs of a sumo wrestler. From the monumental foundation of his torso, a flight of double chins led up to a merry face with a mouth like a bow, a nose like a bell, and eyes as blue as Santa’s.

  As I sat on a stool at one of the islands, the chef double dead-bolted the door by which he had admitted me. During the day, doors were unlocked, but from dusk until dawn, Wolflaw and his staff lived behind locks, as he had insisted Annamaria and I should.

  With evident pride, Chef Shilshom put before me a small plate holding the first plump croissant out of the oven. The aromas of buttery pastry and warm marzipan rose like an offering to the god of culinary excess.

  Savoring the smell, indulging in a bit of delayed gratification, I said, “I’m just a grill-and-griddle jockey. I’m in awe of this.”

  “I’ve tasted your pancakes, your hash browns. You could bake as well as you fry.”

  “Not me, sir. If a spatula isn’t essential to the task, then it’s not a dish within the range of my talent.”

  In spite of his size, Chef Shilshom moved with the grace of a dancer, his hands as nimble as those of a surgeon. In that regard, he reminded me of my four-hundred-pound friend and mentor, the mystery writer Ozzie Boone, who lived a few hundred miles from this place, in my hometown, Pico Mundo.

  Otherwise, the rotund chef had little in common with Ozzie. The singular Mr. Boone was loquacious, informed on most subjects, and interested in everything. To writing fiction, to eating, and to every conversation, Ozzie brought as much energy as David Beckham brought to soccer, although he didn’t sweat as much as Beckham.

  Chef Shilshom, on the other hand, seemed to have a passion only for baking and cooking. When at work, he maintained his side of our dialogue in a state of such distraction—real or feigned—that often his replies didn’t seem related to my comments and questions.

  I came to the kitchen with the hope that he would spit out a pearl of information, a valuable clue to the truth of Roseland, without even realizing that I had pried open his shell.

  First, I ate half of the delicious croissant, but only half. By this restraint, I proved to myself that in spite of the pressures and the turmoils to which I am uniquely subjected, I remain reliably disciplined. Then I ate the other half.

  With an uncommonly sharp knife, the chef was chopping dried apricots into morsels when at last I finished licking my lips and said, “The windows here aren’t barred like they are at the guest tower.”

  “The main house has been remodeled.”

  “So there once were bars here, too?”

  “Maybe. Before my time.”

  “When was the house remodeled?”

  “Back when.”

  “When back when?”

  “Mmmmm.”

  “How long have you worked here?”

  “Oh, ages.”

  “You have quite a memory.”

  “Mmmmm.”

  That was as much as I was going to learn about the history of barred windows at Roseland. The chef concentrated on chopping the apricots as if he were disarming a bomb.

  I said, “Mr. Wolflaw doesn’t keep horses, does he?”

  Apricot obsessed, the chef said, “No horses.”

  “The riding ring and the exercise yard are full of weeds.”

  “Weeds,” the chef agreed.

  “But, sir, the stables are immaculate.”

  “Immaculate.”

  “They’re almost as clean as a surgery.”

  “Clean, very clean.”

  “Yes, but who cleans the stables?”

  “Someone.”

  “Everything seems freshly painted and polished.”

  “Polished.”

  “But why—if there are no horses?”

  “Why indeed?” the chef said.

  “Maybe he intends to get some horses.”

  “There you go.”

  “Does he intend to get some horses?”

  “Mmmmm.”

  He scooped up the chopped apricots, put them in a mixing bowl.

  From a bag, he poured pecan halves onto the cutting board.

  I asked, “How long since there were last horses at Roseland?”

  “Long, very long.”

  “I guess perhaps the horse I sometimes see roaming the grounds must belong to a neighbor.”

  “Perhaps,” he said as he began to halve the pecan halves.

  I asked, “Sir, have you seen the horse?”

  “Long, very long.”

  “It’s a great black stallion over sixteen hands high.”

  “Mmmmm.”

  “There are a lot of books about horses in the library here.”

  “Yes, the library.”

  “I looked up this horse. I think it’s a Friesian.”

  “There you go.”

  His knife was so sharp that the pecan halves didn’t crumble at all when he split them.

  I said, “Sir, did you notice a strange light outside a short while ago?”

  “Notice?”

  “Up at the mausoleum.”

  “Mmmmm.”

  “A golden light.”

  “Mmmmm.”

  I said, “Mmmmm?”

  He said, “Mmmmm.”

  To be fair, the light that I had seen might be visible only to someone with my sixth sense. My suspicion, however, was that Chef Shilshom was a lying pile of suet.

  The chef hunched over the cutting board, peering so intently and closely at the pecans that he might have been Mr. Magoo trying to read the fine print on a pill bottle.

  To test him, I said, “Is that a mouse by the refrigerator?”

  “There you go.”

  “No. Sorry. It’s a big old rat.”

  “Mmmmm.”

  If he wasn’t totally immersed in his work, he was a good actor.

  Getting off the stool, I said, “Well, I don’t know why, but I think I’ll go set my hair on fire.”

  “Why indeed?”

  With my back to the chef, moving toward the door to the terrace, I said, “Maybe it grows back thicker if you burn it off once in a while.”

  “Mmmmm.”

  The crisp sound of the knife splitting pecans had fallen silent.

  In one of the four glass panes in the upper half of the kitchen door, I could see Chef Shilshom’s reflection. He was watching me, his moon face as pale as his white uniform.

  Opening the door, I said, “Not dawn yet. Might still be some mountain lion out there, trying doors.”

  “Mmmmm,” the chef said, pretending to be so distracted by his work that he was paying little attention to me.

  I stepped outside, pulled the door shut behind me, and crossed the terrace to the foot of the first arc of stairs. I stood there, gazing up at the mausoleum, until I heard the chef engage both of the deadbolts.

  With dawn only minutes below the mountains to the east, the not-loon cried out again, one last time, fro
m a far corner of the sprawling estate.

  The mournful sound brought back to me an image that had been part of the dream of Auschwitz, from which the first cry of the night had earlier awakened me: I am starving, frail, performing forced labor with a shovel, terrified of dying twice, whatever that means. I am not digging fast enough to please the guard, who kicks the shovel out of my grip. The steel toe of his boot cuts my right hand, from which flows not blood but, to my terror, powdery gray ashes, not one ember, only cold gray ashes pouring out of me, out and out.…

  As I walked back to the eucalyptus grove, the stars grew dim in the east, and the sky blushed with the first faint light of morning.

  Annamaria, the Lady of the Bell, and I had been guests of Roseland for three nights and two days, and I suspected that our time here was soon drawing to a close, that our third day would end in violence.

  Four

  BETWEEN BIRTH AND BURIAL, WE FIND OURSELVES IN A comedy of mysteries.

  If you don’t think life is mysterious, if you believe you have it all mapped out, you aren’t paying attention or you’ve anesthetized yourself with booze or drugs, or with a comforting ideology.

  And if you don’t think life’s a comedy—well, friend, you might as well hurry along to that burial. The rest of us need people with whom we can laugh.

  In the guest tower once more, as dawn bloomed, I climbed the circular stone stairs to the second floor, where Annamaria waited.

  The Lady of the Bell has a dry wit, but she’s more mystery than comedy.

  At her suite, when I knocked on the door, it swung open as though the light rap of knuckles on wood was sufficient to disengage the latch and set the hinges in motion.

  The two narrow, deeply set windows were as medieval as that through which Rapunzel might have let down her long hair, and they admitted little of the early-morning sun.

  With her delicate hands clasped around a mug, Annamaria was sitting at a small dining table, in the light of a bronze floor lamp that had a stained-glass shade in an intricate yellow-rose motif.

  Indicating a second mug from which steam curled, she said, “I poured some tea for you, Oddie,” as though she had known precisely when I would arrive, although I had come on a whim.

  Noah Wolflaw claimed not to have slept in nine years, which was most likely a fabrication. In the four days that I’d known Annamaria, however, she was always awake when I needed to talk with her.

  On the sofa were two dogs, including a golden retriever, whom I had named Raphael. He was a good boy who attached himself to me in Magic Beach.

  The white German-shepherd mix, Boo, was a ghost dog, the only lingering canine spirit that I had ever seen. He had been with me since my time at St. Bartholomew’s Abbey, where I had for a while stayed as a guest before moving on to Magic Beach.

  For a boy who loved his hometown as much as I loved Pico Mundo, who valued simplicity and stability and tradition, who treasured the friends with whom he’d grown up there, I had become too much a gypsy.

  The choice wasn’t mine. Events made the choice for me.

  I am learning my way toward something that will make sense of my life, and I learn by going where I have to go, with whatever companions I am graced.

  At least that is what I tell myself. I’m reasonably sure that it’s not just an excuse to avoid college.

  I am not certain of much in this uncertain world, but I know that Boo remains here not because he fears what comes after this life—as some human spirits do—but because, at a critical point in my journey, I will need him. I won’t go so far as to say that he is my guardian, angelic or otherwise, but I’m comforted by his presence.

  Both dogs wagged their tails at the sight of me. Only Raphael’s thumped audibly against the sofa.

  In the past, Boo often accompanied me. But at Roseland, both dogs stayed close to this woman, as if they worried for her safety.

  Raphael was aware of Boo, and Boo sometimes saw things that I did not, which suggested that dogs, because of their innocence, see the full reality of existence to which we have blinded ourselves.

  I sat across the table from Annamaria and tasted the tea, which was sweetened with peach nectar. “Chef Shilshom is a sham.”

  “He’s a fine chef,” she said.

  “He’s a great chef, but he’s not as innocent as he pretends.”

  “No one is,” she said, her smile so subtle and nuanced that Mona Lisa, by comparison, would appear to be guffawing.

  From the moment I encountered Annamaria on a pier in Magic Beach, I had known that she needed a friend and that she was somehow different from other people, not as I am different with my prophetic dreams and spirit-seeing, but different in her own way.

  I knew little about this woman. When I had asked where she was from, she had answered “Far away.” Her tone and her sweetly amused expression suggested that those two words were an understatement.

  On the other hand, she knew a great deal about me. She had known my name before I told it to her. She knew that I see the spirits of the lingering dead, though I have revealed that talent only to a few of my closest friends.

  By now I understood that she was more than merely different. She was an enigma so complex that I would never know her secrets unless she chose to give me the key with which to unlock the truth of her.

  She was eighteen and appeared to be seven months pregnant. Until we joined forces, she had been for a while alone in the world, but she had none of the doubts or worries of other girls in her position.

  Although she had no possessions, she was never in need. She said that people gave her what she required—money, a place to live—though she never asked for anything. I had been witness to the truth of this claim.

  We had come from Magic Beach in a Mercedes on loan from Lawrence Hutchison, who had been a famous film actor fifty years earlier, and who was now a children’s book author at the age of eighty-eight. For a while, I worked for Hutch as cook and companion, before things in Magic Beach got too hot. I had arranged with Hutch to leave the car with his great-nephew, Grover, who was an attorney in Santa Barbara.

  At Grover’s office, in the reception lounge, we encountered Noah Wolflaw, a client of the attorney, as he was departing. Wolflaw was at once drawn to Annamaria, and after a brief chat as perplexing as conversations with her often were, he invited us to Roseland.

  Her powerful appeal was not sexual. She was neither beautiful nor ugly, but neither was she merely plain. Petite but not fragile, with a perfect but pale complexion, she was a compelling presence for reasons that I had been struggling to understand but that continued to elude me.

  Whatever there might be between us, romance was not part of it. The effect she had upon me—and upon others—was more profound than desire, and curiously humbling.

  A century earlier, the word charismatic might have applied to her. But in an age when shallow movie stars and the latest crop of reality-TV specimens were said to have charisma, the word meant nothing anymore.

  Anyway, Annamaria did not ask anyone to follow her as might some cult leader. Instead she inspired in people a desire to protect her.

  She said that she had no last name, and although I didn’t know how she could escape having one, I did not doubt her. She was often inscrutable; however, as one believes in anything that requires hard faith rather than easy proof, I believed that Annamaria never lied.

  “I think we should leave Roseland at once,” I declared.

  “May I not even finish my tea? Must I spring up this instant and race to the front gate?”

  “I’m serious. There’s something very wrong here.”

  “There will be something very wrong with any place we go.”

  “But not as wrong as this.”

  “And where would we go?” she asked.

  “Anywhere.”

  Her gentle voice never acquired a pedantic tone, although I felt that I was usually on the receiving end of Annamaria’s patient and affectionate instruction. “Anywhere includes everyw
here. If it does not matter where we go, then surely there can be no point in going.”

  Her eyes were so dark that I could see no difference between the irises and the pupils.

  She said, “You can only be in one place at a time, odd one. So it’s imperative that you be in the right place for the right reason.”

  Only Stormy Llewellyn had called me “odd one,” until Annamaria.

  “Most of the time,” I said, “it seems you’re speaking to me in riddles.”

  Her gaze was as steady as her eyes were dark. “My mission and your sixth sense brought us here. Roseland was a magnet to us. We could have gone nowhere else.”

  “Your mission. What is your mission?”

  “In time you will know.”

  “In a day? A week? Twenty years?”

  “As it will be.”

  I inhaled the peachy fragrance of the tea, exhaled with a sigh, and said, “The day we met in Magic Beach, you said countless people want to kill you.”

  “They have been counted, but they are so many that you don’t need to know the figure any more than you need to know the number of hairs on your head in order to comb them.”

  She wore sneakers, khaki pants, and a baggy beige sweater with sleeves too long for her. The bulk of the sweater’s rolled cuffs emphasized the delicacy of her slender wrists.

  Having left Magic Beach with nothing but the clothes she wore, Annamaria was at Roseland just one day when the head housekeeper, Mrs. Tameed, purchased a suitcase, filled it with a few changes of clothes, and left it in the guesthouse, though she had not been asked to provide a wardrobe.

  I, too, had come with no clothes other than those I was wearing. No one bought me as much as a pair of socks. I’d had to leave the estate for a couple of hours, go into town, and purchase jeans, sweaters, underwear.

  I said, “Four days ago, you asked me if I would keep you alive. You’re making the job harder for me than it has to be.”

  “No one at Roseland wants to murder me.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “They don’t realize what I am. If I am killed, my murderers will be those who know what I am.”