by Dean Koontz
“Odd Thomas,” he said. “You remember me?”
“Kenneth Randolph Fitzgerald Mountbatten.”
He beamed, delighted that I remembered his name, as if he were so plain that people usually forgot him the moment he was out of sight.
Overhead, having wandered farther than usual from the ocean, a lone gull soared high and swooped down, making symphonic gestures as if conducting music only it could hear. Having so recently faced pig death, I felt some of the bird’s joy in being alive.
“Thank you for saving my life.”
Kenny shrugged and looked embarrassed. “I didn’t really.”
“No, sir, you really did.”
Slinging the strap of the assault rifle over his shoulder and surveying the surrounding hills, Kenny said, “Well, I have a way with guns and fighting, that’s all. Kill or be killed—there’s only one option there, far as I’m concerned. Each of us has some gift. What’s your gift, Odd Thomas?”
Holstering my pistol to prove that I wanted to believe in the idea of the concept of the possibility of the hope that we might be lasting friends, I said, “Fry cookery. I’m a wizard at the griddle.”
His neck was nearly as thick as his head. Even his ears looked muscular, as if he did one-lobe push-ups every morning.
“Fry cook. That’s a good gift,” he said. “People need food more than anything.”
“Well, maybe almost as much as anything but not more.”
The air smelled fresh, with a trace of ozone that repeatedly almost faded away but always returned, though it was never strong enough to be unpleasant.
Kenny sounded apologetic when he said, “I checked the guesthouse tower. No one’s been staying there.”
“Am I already back to being a candy-ass punk boy who shouldn’t have been let through the gates?”
He rolled his eyes and shook his head. “I didn’t mean anything by that. It’s just my way. It’s kind of how I say hello.”
“I usually say, ‘Pleased to meet you.’ ”
“Anyway,” he said, “I figured it out. You’re an invited guest here, not there, which is none of my business, being as how my job is there, not here, and being as how I’m hardly ever here and don’t know why I am even when I am.”
I said, “I guess all of you must have gone to the same school.”
“What school?”
“To learn how to talk that way.”
“What way?”
“The way of confusion.”
Kenny shrugged. “I was just saying.”
“Sir, I need to find the mini truck.”
“The electric sonofabitch you were driving around in, looking for trouble?”
“That’s the one.”
“I saw you and said, ‘That crazy little sonofabitch is going to run into a bunch of sonofabitch porkers,’ and you sure enough did.”
“I thought they were called freaks.”
“Maybe here they’re freaks, but there we call ’em porkers, though I call ’em porkers here, there, it doesn’t matter to me.”
“Consistency is a good quality in a man.”
“I don’t know about that,” Kenny said. “But I found the truck just as those three sonsofbitches were running after you over the hill. I can show you where it is.”
“That would be great, sir. The battery’s dead, but there’s something on the front seat that I really need.”
“Then I will,” he said, and strode south along the crest of the hill.
I needed to take three steps for every two of his. Hurrying along, I felt like a Hobbit playing sidekick to the Terminator.
With warm sun on my face, listening to the songs of cicadas in the tall grass, I was profoundly grateful not to have been bubbling in the stomach acid of four porker freaks.
I said, “So my Roseland is here and yours is there.”
“Seems that way.”
“Here is here,” I said. “But where is there?”
“Thinking about it makes my head hurt, so I don’t.”
“How can you not think about it?”
“I’m real good at not thinking.”
“Well, I’m bad at it,” I said.
“Anyway, being here doesn’t happen to me every year and it never lasts long. None of it matters, because I always end up back there.”
“Back there—where?”
“Back there in my Roseland.”
“Which is where?”
“You need to loosen up, Odd.”
“I’m as loose as I need to be.”
Kenny favored me with a smile as yellow as a yield sign. “Now and then you need to take a night just to drink yourself brainless. Helps you cope.”
“Where’s your Roseland?” I persisted as we climbed out of a glen toward another hilltop.
He sighed. “Okay, now I have a big sonofabitch headache.”
“So you might as well think.”
“I saved you from the porkers. Isn’t that enough?”
“Well, I told you what to do about your cold sore.”
“It hasn’t worked yet.”
“It will if you keep your tongue away from the damn thing and don’t keep licking off the ointment.”
“You’re kind of like a cold sore yourself,” Kenny said.
“So tell me where your Roseland is, and I’ll stop annoying you.”
“Okay, okay, okay. All right. This woman I was with for a while, she never stopped nagging, just like you. I finally figured out how to put an end to that.”
Dreading his answer, I said, “How did you put an end to it?”
“By just doing what the crazy bitch wanted. It was the only way to shut her up.”
“So where is your Roseland?”
“Maybe it’s way in the future from here.”
“Maybe?”
“It’s like a theory.”
“So you have been thinking about it.”
“But I don’t care.”
“Well, I care.”
“What is is. It doesn’t matter why.”
“You’re not only a thinker, you’re a philosopher.”
He growled with disgust. “I wish some sonofabitch porkers would show up so I could shoot ’em.”
“Way in the future, huh? Sir, do you mean you have a time machine?”
He told me that he didn’t need any fornicating time machine, except that he didn’t use the term fornicating. Then he said, “It just happens. But only in Roseland. Never anywhere else. Sometimes I look up, sky’s blue for a minute, other times for a few hours, and the world’s not all crap like it has been most of my life. I’m here where the world’s not crap yet, instead of there.”
“Just look up and it happens?”
“Or turn around. Next thing, the blue goes away, the sky’s as yellow as a cat’s diarrhea, and everything’s screwed up again. It’s like something pulls me here, but then it pushes me back where I came from. It probably does the same with the porkers—pulls ’em here but then pushes ’em away.”
“That can’t be what Tesla built the machine to do.”
“What machine?”
“The pulling and pushing must be a side effect. The porkers in your time—are they just in your Roseland?”
“Hell, no. They keep popping up everywhere. They’re worse than cockroaches.”
“Why is your sky yellow?” I asked.
“Why is yours blue?”
I said, “It’s supposed to be blue.”
“Not where I come from.”
As we walked, he took the slung rifle off his shoulder and carried it at the ready.
Drawing my pistol, I said, “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing yet. Relax.”
After a while, I said, “If the sky’s yellow and your future is crawling with porker freaks, it must be a pretty hostile place.”
“You think?”
“Something must have happened between now and then.”
“What happens happens.”
“But what is the what tha
t did?”
“Who knows? Maybe the war.”
“Nuclear war?”
“A few of ’em were nukes.”
“A few nuclear wars?”
“They were little ones.”
“How can a nuclear war be little?”
“And bio. Maybe that was worse.”
“Biological warfare?”
“And what they called the nano swarms.”
“What are nano swarms?”
“I didn’t go to any sonofabitch college, you know. And I don’t hang out with a bunch of candy-ass techno geeks. Whatever the nano swarms were, the sonsofbitches ate themselves in the end.”
“Ate themselves?”
“Well, after they ate a lot of other stuff.”
I mulled that over.
He said, “And those professors.”
“What professors?”
“The sonsofbitches doing experiments.”
“What kind of experiments?”
“With pigs.”
“Nukes, viruses, nano swarms, pigs,” I said.
“Vampire bats. Nobody knows where they came from. Some say the Chinese made ’em as a weapon. Or maybe it was that weirdo billionaire in Nebraska. Then there was the big government solar-energy thing.”
“What government solar-energy thing?”
“The project that blew up in space.”
“Why would that matter if it was in space?”
“Because it was big.”
“How big could it have been?”
“Really big.”
After we walked a minute in silence, Kenny said, “You feel better knowing all that?”
“No,” I admitted.
When he looked smug, one snaggle tooth overhung his lower lip. “So now it’s in your head, what’re you going to do?”
“Drink myself brainless.”
“It’s the best thing,” Kenny said.
We arrived at the mini truck with the depleted battery. In the vale below, maybe twenty carrion crows gathered on the dead porker.
As I took the pillowcase sack out of the vehicle, I said, “What do you do in your Roseland?”
“I work security for this honcho, he’s one lunatic sonofabitch.”
“Lunatic how?”
“He thinks in Roseland he’ll live forever.”
After a hesitation, I said, “Is his name Noah Wolflaw?”
“Wolflaw? No. Calls himself Constantine Cloyce.”
Kenny’s green eyes sparkled with sunlight, but there didn’t seem to be any deception in his direct gaze.
Suddenly he said, “Yellow sky.”
I glanced up, but the heavens were blue.
When I looked back to Kenny, he was gone, and in the place where he had been, the air shimmered for a moment.
Thirty-five
SO AS I STOOD BY THE DEFUNCT MINI TRUCK, SWAPPING the Beretta’s half-depleted magazine for the fully loaded spare, as then I plucked seven bullets from the extra ammunition that I carried in a sports-coat pocket and replenished the first magazine, I brooded about the discovery that the secret of Roseland had something to do with time. If some kind of localized disorder in time was a side effect of what was going on here, my sense that I was running out of time might be true in ways I couldn’t yet comprehend.
Before encountering the porkers, I’d been on my way to the guesthouse to make sure Annamaria remained safe. Now I recalled a thing that happened in Magic Beach a few days earlier, when we encountered a pack of coyotes that boldly stalked us and seemed about to attack. Annamaria had spoken to them as if they understood her—and with only words she got them to retreat. Whatever the nature of the gift that she possessed, she had nothing to fear from animals, probably not even from the porkers; if she was killed, her murderer would be a man driven not by an animal nature but by the worst of his very human impulses. With Roseland counting down to some kind of detonation, I had to trust in Annamaria to take care of herself for now.
Carrying the pillowcase sack in one hand and the pistol in the other, taking my bearings from hilltop after hilltop, alert for more of the bacon brigade, I made my way to the statue of Enceladus, the Titan. From there I ventured into the oak grove that surrounded that lawn. As before, not a single fallen leaf littered the earth under the trees.
I put down the pillowcase and, from one of the low branches, I selected a twig with three leaves. I snapped it off and threw it on the ground.
As if I were watching a time-lapse film of a few weeks’ growth, the tree sprouted a new twig at the break point, leafed out exactly as it had been, and fully restored itself in less than a minute.
When I thought to look on the ground where I’d thrown the broken twig, it wasn’t there.
Finally, almost twenty-two, I got my haunted house, for which I was singularly well prepared, and it was a country house, as was the one in The Turn of the Screw, and it had a history of perversity, like the place in Hell House, and in it might be people who should be dead but were not, as in The Fall of the House of Usher, and there was an imprisoned child in jeopardy, as in Poltergeist. The only ghost in Roseland, however, was the rider of the spirit stallion, and she was neither menacing nor truly at the center of the problem that I, as an unofficial exorcist, needed to resolve.
Instead of flailing poltergeists and phantoms from the grave, with which I might have easily contended, I faced a threat consisting of swine things, cosmic clockworks, a thoroughly insane movie mogul, and the conspirators that he had drawn around him with the power that he wielded, power given to him, perhaps unwittingly, by the late great Nikola Tesla, who, although long dead and although not a ghost, nevertheless ricocheted like an immaterial pinball in and out of the scene, who said that he had seen me where I’d not yet been, and who encouraged me to throw the master switch, wherever that might be.
Some days I just want to go back to bed and pull the covers over my head.
Instead, from the tree, I broke off the same twig that I’d broken before and held it in the open palm of my left hand. Within a minute, the tree repaired itself, and the twig vanished even though, at the last moment, I closed my fist around it.
Roseland didn’t need a platoon of gardeners. In the landscaped portion of the grounds—as opposed to the wild fields—the trees and the shrubs and the flowers and the grass were in a kind of stasis, neither growing nor dying, somehow maintained in exactly the same condition in which they had been since … Perhaps since one day in the early 1920s.
The residents of Roseland were not outside of time. Clocks still ticked and hours passed. Sunrises and sunsets came and went. Weather changed, as did the seasons. Time did not stand still within these estate walls.
Evidently, by the transmission of a current of some exotic energy through root and trunk and limb and leaf, through every blade of grass and every flower petal, all remained as it had been. Wind might strip some leaves from the trees, but new growth appeared even as the torn leaves fell and, upon the ground, ceased to exist. Or perhaps the new leaves were in fact the old ones, and perhaps each damaged tree or plant—but nothing adjacent to it—slipped back in time to a moment just before the leaves had been plucked from it, and then rejoined the present.
If I dug down into the earth, I would most likely find some kind of metal mesh or those copper rods embedded in the foundations of the buildings. Suddenly I knew what the elongated 8 represented when you read it horizontally rather than vertically: It was the symbol for infinity.
I felt dizzy. I wished I were as good at not thinking as Kenny claimed to be.
I returned to that peninsula of flawless lawn in which Enceladus raised a fist to challenge the gods, and I followed it to the acres of grass surrounding the main residence. From a distance, I could see that the windows and doors of the house were still covered with steel panels.
Around one corner of the mansion came a ragtag mob of freaks in a violent frenzy because they had not been invited inside for lunch. They were overturning patio furniture and pounding on
the shutters.
I retreated into the Enceladus lawn, screened from the house by the time-frozen oaks. I stood by the Titan, trying to get my mind around the ramifications of the theory that Roseland was not a time machine—no, nothing that simple—but a machine that could manage time, reverse or retard its effects, and ensure against the otherwise inevitable decline of all things, which is the way of Nature.
In the main house, as in the guest tower, everything appeared to be immaculate, pristine, as if nothing ever wore out or broke down or produced dust. Wooden floors and steps were as tight and squeak-free as the day that they were installed. No cracks in the marble or limestone.
The kitchen appliances were new; but most likely they had been replaced not because those of the 1920s didn’t still work but because newer ovens and refrigerators offered features and conveniences that the older models did not.
Out of nowhere, as if conjured, a hundred or more bats with seven-foot wingspans appeared at the tree-encircled end of the long lawn. They flew toward me, in such tight formation that they appeared to be a solid mass, a tidal flow two feet above the grass, abroad in daylight as bats should never be.
The urge to flee was countered by the recognition that I could move at only a fraction of their speed. Perhaps they didn’t see well in daylight. Like most predators, they must track their prey by scent. But maybe their natural guidance system, echolocation, also played a role in identifying food, in which case absolute stillness might be wiser than movement. The enormous lead statue, in the shadow of which I stood, might mask me from detection.
Perhaps, maybe, might be, might: With such qualifications did I stand paralyzed in hope that I would not be devoured alive.
Their wings beat in unison so many times per second that the thrum of them became almost a buzz, and their orchestral timing was no less impressive than it was fearsome. Heads as big as grapefruits, they approached with chins dropped, mouths open, curved incisors bared, flat noses sifting from the air the scents of blood, sweat, minute particles of dander shed by skin or fur or feathers, and the pheromones of fear.
I could not breathe as they rushed past so low that I looked down on the soft brown fur that covered their bodies and on their membranous wings. In the passing, they vanished through a sudden shimmering in the air, as if through a curtain between my time and theirs.
