Odd Apocalypse (30 page)

If such rats resided behind the wainscoting, there would be no reason to expect them to be sages. Even a lot of human beings grow no wiser past a certain age—or ever.

Constantine Cloyce—now Noah Wolflaw—had been seventy when he apparently faked his death in 1948. Now at the age of 134, he seemed to have learned neither humility nor the wisdom of moral living. And repeatedly telling me to shut up was hardly the sophisticated and amusing banter you expected from a man of his age and experience.

I crossed the subcellar to the door beyond which lay the copper-sheathed passageway that led underground to the main house. Through the glass tubes embedded in the walls, flares of golden light seemed to be moving simultaneously toward and away from the main residence, and I avoided looking at them to spare myself the queasiness and the confusion that I’d felt the first time I had been here.

In the wine cellar under the house, I didn’t proceed into the basement corridor as before. Instead, I took the narrow service stairs up to the ground floor.

I entered the kitchen with caution, in case Chef Shilshom might be preparing a banquet for a celebration worthy of Edgar Allan Poe’s Prince Prospero. In an apocalyptic time threatened by a plague called the Red Death, the prince threw a great party to deny his mortal nature. That hadn’t turned out well. I suspected that the several residents of Roseland would not fare any better than Prospero.

The only illumination came from two lights above the sinks. The windows were covered by steel shutters.

At the moment, no freaks hammered at those defenses, and the house was hushed. Maybe the pull and push of Tesla’s machine had shoved them back to their time, but I doubted it. Something about the silence struck me as ominous.

Off the kitchen lay a room that served as the chef’s office. I stepped inside and quietly closed the door.

Here Chef Shilshom planned menus, prepared shopping lists, and no doubt puzzled over the proper thing to serve the master of the house when next a young woman, resembling the late Mrs. Cloyce, was brought to Roseland to be tortured and murdered. Meals for special occasions are always tricky to plan.

Constantine Cloyce might be the only one whose sense of superiority, arising from his potential immortality, inspired him to murder mere mortal people as sport, but the others in this place were just as insane. Their madness was evidenced by the fact that they assisted him, either to continue to be allowed to live forever or because they saw no crime in killing mortals who would sooner or later die anyway.

None of them had lived so long that longevity itself could have driven them insane. I could imagine that, after a few hundred years, the repetitive character of human experience might lead to a tedium that would leave them chronically depressed or so desperate for new and more extreme sensations that torture and murder became a kind of Valium that relieved anxiety. But Cloyce was only 134, the others most likely younger. Something other than longevity accounted for their descent into one form of madness or another.

In Chef Shilshom’s office, a massive chair had been custom built to accommodate his bulk, its seat as wide as two of me, its castors as big as baseballs. When I sat in it, I felt like Jack in the castle at the top of the beanstalk.

The computer on this desk was the only one I’d seen on the main floor, though there were probably others in the wing that contained the servants’ suites. I switched it on, accessed the Internet, and went looking for Nikola Tesla.

Apparently Serbian, he was born on July 10, 1856, in Smiljan,
which seemed to be either in Croatia or in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, or in a place called Lika, or in all three. It sounded sort of off-planet to me, but the problem was most likely just the semicoherence common to biography sites on the Web.

He died on January 7, 1943, in a two-room suite in the New Yorker Hotel, which was in New York and nowhere else. Two thousand people attended his funeral at St. John the Divine cathedral. Tesla was cremated, and his ashes were thereafter kept in a golden sphere at the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade.

More than one online source informed me that a golden sphere was Tesla’s favorite shape.

Hmmmm. Interesting.

In 1882, Tesla solved the problem of the rotating magnetic field and built the first induction motor. Not that I have the slightest idea what that means. But the induction motor powered the industrial revolution at the turn of the century; it has been used both in heavy industry and for simple household appliances ever since.

Behind me, something outside scratched on the steel shutter that covered the window. Scratched, tapped, and scratched again.

The sounds were subdued, compared to the racket previously made by the pack of freaks, but I was pretty sure the creature inquiring at the window was not just a curious raccoon.

The freak was just trying to determine in what ground-floor rooms its lunch might be waiting. I focused on the computer again.

After coming to America, Tesla worked with Thomas Edison, but they fell out because Tesla believed that Edison’s direct-current electricity transmission was inefficient. He said all energies were cyclic and that generators could be built to transmit electricity first in one direction and then in the other, in multiple waves according to the polyphase principle.

Given that primate swine were stalking Roseland and a murderous
sociopath was in charge of the place, I decided that I didn’t have time to look up and understand “polyphase principle.”

Anyway, Tesla went into business with George Westinghouse. Alternating current, which changes direction about sixty times per second and allows long-distance transmission with a minimum of energy loss, soon became the world standard.

In 1895, at Niagara Falls, Nikola Tesla designed the world’s first hydroelectric power plant.

Marconi is still cited as the inventor of radio, but Tesla patented the basic system of radio in 1900, years before Marconi. Marconi’s patent was eventually declared invalid.

Again at the steel shutter behind me:
Tap, tap, tap … tap, tap, tap … tap, tap, tap
.

The tapping was eerily discreet. As if some secret lover had come to keep a previously arranged assignation.

I didn’t answer with a tapping of my own, because I could too easily imagine a lady freak who wanted to be Juliet to my Romeo.

Reading further, I discovered that among Tesla’s discoveries were fluorescent bulbs and laser beams. Wireless communications. Wireless transmission of electricity. Remote controls. He took the first X rays of human bodies, ahead of Roentgen.

This was a superbrainy guy.

In Colorado, in 1899, applying something that he referred to as “terrestrial stationary waves,” he lighted two hundred lamps at a distance of twenty-five miles, without wires, by transmitting electricity through the air.

Here’s a cool one that’s related. He built a transmitting tower on Long Island, between 1901 and 1905, which rose almost to 190 feet, with a copper dome 68 feet in diameter, standing on hundred-foot-deep foundations. It was meant to turn Earth itself into a massive
dynamo and, through a magnifying transmitter, send unlimited amounts of electricity anywhere in the world.

When J. P. Morgan, who was financing the project, realized there was no way to charge anyone for the electricity because there would be no way to know who was tapping the flow, he pulled all funding.

Albert Einstein was an admirer of Nikola Tesla. Einstein’s theory of relativity holds, among other things, that space and time are not absolute concepts, but relative.

Hmmmm.

Tesla was so brilliant that he could solve mathematical problems of the highest complexity entirely in his head, without resort to paper and pencil.

More astonishingly, he could visualize complex inventions like the induction motor in every detail and then diagram them as quickly as he could draw.

Scratching. Tapping.

“We don’t need any magazine subscriptions,” I muttered.

Reading on, I discovered that Tesla was a good friend of Mark Twain. In addition to
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
, Twain wrote
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
, which is cast as a dream arising from a blow to the head but is for all intents and purposes a
time-travel
story.

Hmmmm.

In 1997,
Life
magazine placed Nikola Tesla among the one hundred most famous and world-changing people of the past thousand years.

Of course that was before reality TV, Twitter, Twaddle, and the like managed to reduce the average attention span of most of the world’s population to two minutes, wither our long-term memory to fourteen months, and convince us that the most admirable of all individuals
are not the likes of George Washington, Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Jonas Salk, Mother Teresa, and Nikola Tesla, but instead whatever celebrity just won
Dancing with the Stars
and whatever dancing cat just drew ten million hits for its YouTube video.

Tapping. Scratching. Knock-knock.

“Who’s there?” I asked softly. “Juno,” I replied in a quiet but authentic piggy voice. “Juno who?” I asked with sincere puzzlement. And I answered: “Juno how much I’d like to get in there and ham it up with you?”

I learned also that Tesla had his peculiar side. Sometime between 1899 and 1900, in his laboratory in Colorado Springs, he believed that he had received signals from another planet. Serious people examined his evidence and agreed. He once said that with the right application of an electric current, he could easily split the Earth in two. Fortunately, Tesla didn’t leave notes as to how this might be done, for otherwise those guys in the
Jackass
movies would already have done it.

In short, he not only could think outside the box, but he could think outside the bigger box in which the first box had come. Such a man might be able to meet the challenge of harnessing time and using it as he wished.

Before I was tempted to surf over to YouTube to look at that dancing cat, I backed out of the Internet and shut down the computer.

As the tapping and scratching came again at the shutter, I heard Chef Shilshom in the kitchen, cursing profusely, as though he thought he might be Victoria Mors. He seemed to be coming this way.

I sprang off the Jabba the Hutt office chair, snatched up the pillowcase sack, and darted through the door between the chef’s office and the walk-in pantry, which also had an entrance from the kitchen.

In the pantry, I left the door to the office a half-inch ajar and waited to see if the quiche king would appear.

The chef breached the room in great white billows, more than agitated but less than panicked, as though he had just seen Captain Ahab stumping toward him on one good leg and one of polished whalebone. He didn’t appear to be in a mood either to bake or to broil.

From a cabinet that might have contained a trove of exotic spices or his personal collection of antique egg cups, he took what appeared to be a 12-gauge semiauto combat shotgun.

A FRIGHTENED, ANGRY, FOUR-HUNDRED-POUND, ANTISOCIAL chef with a combat shotgun never leads to anything good.

I slipped away from the door between Chef Rambo’s office and the pantry. Eased through the dark. Found the other door by the thin line of light that glowed at the bottom of it. Entered the kitchen. Left the kitchen. I crept along a hallway where one door or another might suddenly be flung open by a Roselander, whereupon I’d be discovered and sternly reprimanded for not remaining behind locked doors in the guest tower—or shot.

When I reached a side hall and then a discreet service door to the main drawing room, I ducked into that vast space, which felt like a stately common room on some exceedingly formal luxury liner from a distant era, which in the movies are peopled by beautiful women in glamorous gowns and men in tuxedos and platoons of waiters in white jackets serving drinks on silver trays. Islands of Persian carpets offered several arrangements of furniture, armchairs and side chairs and sofas and chaises enough to seat a quarter of high society’s top four hundred.

The windows were shuttered. None of the Tiffany lamps glowed.
Of the five chandeliers, only the one in the center of the room provided light.

Directly under that glitteration of candle-shaped lamp bulbs and pendant crystals stood a circular banquette that surrounded a twice-life-size statue of the Greek god Pan. Pan had the head and chest and arms of a man, the ears and horns and legs of a goat, and he was badly in need of a fig leaf.

The periphery of the room was curtained with shadow. The corners folded away in the dark.

My intention was to slip around the darker part of the chamber, staying well away from horny Pan, until I came to another service door, hidden in the wall paneling, catercorner from the one through which I had entered. That would take me to a short hallway that also served the library, where I hoped to climb the circular bronze stairs to the second floor.

I was still about six acres away from my destination when I heard hurried footsteps on marble. Through the deep, columned archway that separated the drawing room from the better-lighted foyer, I saw Noah Wolflaw—alias Cloyce—and Paulie Sempiterno, both with shotguns, coming this way.