Seize the Night (30 page)

I could have used my flashlight, but I might have drawn unwanted attention. Under the circumstances, any attention would be unwanted. Besides, the name of the medication wasn’t important.

Sasha led us into the large living room, where the illumination came from a television screen nested in an ornate French cabinet with japanned panels. Even in the poor light, I could see that the chamber was as crowded as an automobile salvage yard, not with junked cars but with Victorian excess: deeply carved and intricately painted neo-rococo furniture; richly patterned brocade upholstery; wallpaper with Gothic-style tracery; heavy velvet drapes with cascades of braided fringe, capped with solid pelmets cut in elaborate Gothic forms; an Egyptian settee with beaded-wood spindles and damask seat cushions; Moorish lamps featuring black cherubs in gilded turbans supporting beaded shades; bibelots densely arranged on every shelf and table.

Amidst the layers on layers of decor, the cadavers almost seemed like additional decorative items.

Even in the flickery light of the television, we could see a man stretched out on the Egyptian settee. He was dressed in dark slacks and a white shirt. Before lying down, he’d taken off his shoes and placed them on the floor with the laces neatly tucked in, as though concerned about soiling the upholstery on the seat cushions. Beside the shoes stood a drinking glass identical to those in the dining room—Waterford crystal, judging by appearance—in which remained an inch of fruit juice. His left arm trailed off the settee, the back of the hand against the Persian carpet, palm turned up. His other arm lay across his chest. His head was propped on two small brocade pillows, and his face was concealed beneath a square of black silk.

Sasha was covering the room behind us, less interested in the corpse than in guarding against a surprise assault.

The black veil over the face did not bellow or even flutter. The man under it was not breathing.

I knew that he was dead, knew what killed him—not a contagious disease, but a phenobarbital fizz or its lethal equivalent—yet I was reluctant to remove the silk mask for the same reason that any child, having pondered the possibility of a boogeyman, is hesitant to push back the sheets, rise up on his mattress, lean out, and peek under the bed.

Hesitantly, I pinched a corner of the silk square between thumb and forefinger, and pulled it off the man’s face.

He was alive. That was my first impression. His eyes were open, and I thought I saw life in them.

After a breathless moment, I realized that his stare was fixed. His eyes appeared to be moving only because reflections of images on the TV screen were twitching in them.

The light was just bright enough to allow me to identify the deceased. His name was Tom Sparkman. He was an associate of Roger Stanwyk’s, a professor at Ashdon, also a biochemist, and no doubt deeply involved in Wyvern business.

The body showed no signs of corruption. It couldn’t have been here a long time.

Reluctantly, I touched the back of my left hand to Sparkman’s brow. “Still warm,” I whispered.

We followed Roosevelt to a button-tufted sofa with carved-wood rails at seat and crest, on which a second man lay, with hands folded across his abdomen. This one was wearing his shoes, and his drained glass lay on its side on the carpet, where he’d dropped it.

Roosevelt peeled back the square of black silk that concealed the man’s face. The light was not as good here, the corpse not as close to the television as Sparkman, and I wasn’t able to identify the body.

Two seconds after switching on my flashlight, I clicked it off. Cadaver number two was Lennart Toregard, a Swedish mathematician on a four-year contract to teach one class a semester at Ashdon, which was surely a front for his real work, at Wyvern. Toregard’s eyes were closed. His face was relaxed. A faint smile suggested he was having a pleasant dream—or was in the middle of one when death claimed him.

Bobby slipped two fingers under Toregard’s wrist, feeling for a pulse. He shook his head: nothing.

Batwing shadows swooped along one wall, across the ceiling.

Sasha spun toward the movement.

I reached under my jacket, but there was no shoulder holster, no gun.

The shadows were only shadows, sent flying through the room by a sudden flurry of action on the television screen.

The third corpse was slumped in a huge armchair, legs propped on a matching footstool, arms on the chair arms. Bobby stripped away the silk hood, I flashed the light on and off, and Roosevelt whispered, “Colonel Ellway.”

Colonel Eaton Ellway had been second in command of Fort Wyvern and had retired to Moonlight Bay after the base was closed. Retired. Or engaged in a clandestine assignment in civilian clothes.

With no additional dead men to investigate, I finally registered what was on the television. It was tuned to a cable channel that was running an animated feature film, Disney’s
The Lion King.

We stood for a moment, listening to the house.

Other music and other voices came from other rooms.

Neither the music nor the voices were made by the living.

Death lives here.

From the living room—a chamber grossly misnamed—we cautiously crossed the front hall to the study. Sasha and Roosevelt halted at the doorway.

A tambour door was open on an entertainment center incorporated into a wall of bookshelves, and
The Lion King
was on the television, with the volume low. Nathan Lane and company were singing “Hakuna Matata.”

Inside, Bobby and I found two more members of this suicide club with squares of black silk over their heads. A man sat at the desk, and a woman was slumped in a Morris chair, empty drinking glasses near each of them.

I no longer had the heart to strip away their veils. The black silk might have been cult paraphernalia with a symbolic meaning that was comprehensible only to those who had come together in this ritual of self-destruction. I thought, however, that at least in part, it might be meant to express their guilt at being involved in work that had brought humanity to these straits. If they felt remorse, then their deaths had a degree of dignity, and disturbing them seemed disrespectful.

Before we had left the living room, I had once more covered the faces of Sparkman, Toregard, and Ellway.

Bobby seemed to understand the reason for my hesitancy, and he lifted the veil on the man at the desk, while I used the flashlight with the hope of making an identification. This was no one that either of us knew, a handsome man with a small, well-trimmed gray mustache. Bobby replaced the silk.

The woman reclining in the Morris chair was also a stranger, but when I directed the light at her face, I didn’t immediately switch it off.

With a soft whistle, Bobby sucked air between his teeth, and I muttered, “God.”

I had to struggle to keep my hand from shaking, to keep the light steady.

Sensing bad news, Sasha and Roosevelt came in from the hall, and though neither of them spoke a word, their faces revealed all that needed to be said about their shock and revulsion.

The dead woman’s eyes were open. The left was a normal brown eye. The right was green, and not remotely normal. There was almost no white in it. The iris was huge and golden, the lens a gold-green. The black pupil was not round but elliptical—like the pupil in the eye of a snake.

The socket encircling that terrifying eye was badly misshapen. Indeed, there were subtle but fearsome deformities in the entire bone structure along the right side of her once lovely face: brow, temple, cheek, jaw.

Her mouth hung open in a silent cry. Her lips were peeled back in a rictus, revealing her teeth, which for the most part appeared normal. A few on the right side, however, were sharply pointed, and one eyetooth seemed to have been in the process of reshaping itself into a fang.

I moved the beam of the flashlight down her body, to her hands, which were in her lap. I expected to see more mutation, but both her hands were normal. They were folded tightly together, and clasped in them was a rosary: black beads, silver chain, an exquisite little silver crucifix.

Such desperation was apparent in the posture of her pale hands, such pathos, that I switched off the light, overcome by pity. To stare at this grim evidence of her final distress seemed invasive, indecent.

Upon finding the first body in the living room, in spite of the black silk veils, I’d known that these people had not committed suicide solely out of guilt over their involvement in the research at Wyvern. Perhaps some felt guilty, perhaps all of them did, but they participated in this chemical hara-kiri primarily because they were becoming and because they were deeply fearful of
what
they were becoming.

To date, as the rogue retrovirus has transferred other species’ DNA into human cells, the effects have been limited. They manifest, if at all, only psychologically, except for telltale animal eyeshine in the most seriously afflicted.

Some of the big brains have been confident that physical change is impossible. They believe that as the cells of the body wear out and are routinely replaced, new cells will not contain the sequences of animal DNA that contaminated the previous generation—not even if stem cells, which control growth throughout the human body, are infected.

This disfigured woman in the Morris chair proved that they were woefully wrong. Hideous physical change clearly can accompany mental deterioration.

Each infected individual receives a load of alien DNA different from the one that anybody else receives, which means that the effect is singular in every case. Some of the infected may not undergo any perceptible change, mentally or physically, because they receive DNA fragments from so many sources that there is no focused cumulative effect other than a general destabilization of the system, resulting in rapidly metastasizing cancers and deadly autoimmune disorders. Others may go mad, psychologically devolve into a subhuman condition, driven by murderous rages, unspeakable needs. Those who, in addition, suffer physical metamorphosis will be radically different from one another: a nightmare zoo.

My mouth seemed to be choked with dust. My throat felt tight and parched. Even my cardiac muscle seemed to have withered, for in my own ears, my heartbeat was juiceless, dry, and strange.

The singing and comic antics of the characters in
The Lion King
failed to fill me with magic-kingdom joy.

I hoped Manuel knew what he was talking about when he predicted the imminent availability of a vaccine, a cure.

Bobby gently draped the square of silk over the woman’s face, concealing her tortured features.

As Bobby’s hands came close to her, I tensed and found myself repositioning my grip on the extinguished flashlight, as if
I
might use it as a weapon. I half expected to see the woman’s eyes shift, to hear her snarl, to see those pointed teeth flash and blood spurt, even as she looped the rosary around his neck and pulled him down into a deadly embrace.

I am not the only one with a hyperactive imagination. I saw a wariness in Bobby’s face. His hands twitched nervously as he replaced the silk.

And after we left the study, Sasha hesitated and then returned to the open door to check the room once more. She no longer gripped the .38 in both hands but nonetheless held it at the ready, as though she wouldn’t have been surprised to discover that even a glassful of the Jonestown punch, their version of a Heaven’s Gate cocktail, was not poisonous enough to put down the creature in the Morris chair.

Also on the ground floor were a sewing room and a laundry room, but both were deserted.

In the hallway, Roosevelt whispered Mungojerrie’s name, because we had yet to see the cat since we’d entered the house.

A soft answering
meow
followed by two more, audible above the competing sound tracks of the Disney movie, drew us forward along the hall.

Mungojerrie was sitting on the newel post at the bottom of the stairs. In the gloom, his radiant green eyes fixed on Roosevelt, then shifted to Sasha when she quietly but urgently suggested that we get the hell out of here.

Without the cat, we had little chance of conducting a successful search of Wyvern. We were hostage to his curiosity—or to whatever it was that motivated him to turn his back to us on the newel post, sprint agilely up the handrail, spring to the stairs, and disappear into the darkness of the upper floor.

“What’s he doing?” I asked Roosevelt.

“Wish I knew. It takes two to communicate,” he murmured.

22

As before, Sasha took the point position as we ascended the stairs. I brought up the rear. The carpeted treads creaked a little underfoot, more than a little under Roosevelt’s feet, but the movie sound track drifting up from the living room and study—and similar sounds coming from upstairs—effectively masked the noises we made.

At the top of the stairs, I turned and looked down. There weren’t any dead people standing in the foyer, with their heads concealed under black silk. Not even one. I had expected five.

Six doors led off the upstairs hall. Five were open, and pulsing light came from three rooms. Competing sound tracks indicated that
The Lion King
was not the universal choice of entertainment for these condemned.

Unwilling to pass an unexplored room and possibly leave an assailant behind us, Sasha went to the first door, which was closed. I stood with my back to the wall at the hinged edge of the door, and she put her back to the wall on the other side. I reached across, gripped the knob, and turned it. When I pushed the door open, Sasha went through fast and low, the gun in her right hand, feeling for the light switch with her left.

A bathroom. Nobody there.

She backed into the hall, switching off the light but leaving the door open.

Beside the bathroom was a linen closet.

Four rooms remained. Doors open. Light and voices and music coming from three of them.

I emphatically am
not
a gun lover, having fired one for the first time only a month previously. I still worry about shooting myself in the foot, and would
rather
shoot myself in the foot than be forced ever again to kill another human being. But now I was seized by a desire for a gun that was probably only slightly down the scale of desperation from the urgency with which a half-starved man craves food, because I couldn’t bear to see Sasha taking all the risks.

At the next room, she cleared the doorway quickly. When there was not an immediate outburst of gunfire, Bobby and I followed her inside, while Roosevelt watched the hall from the threshold.

A bedside lamp glowed softly. On the television was a Nature Channel documentary that might have been soothing, even elegiac, when it had been turned on to provide a distraction for the doomed as they drank their spiked fruit punch; but at the moment a fox was chewing the guts out of a quail.

This was the master bedroom, with an attached bath, and though it was a large chamber, with brighter colors than those downstairs, I felt suffocated by the determined, slathered-on, high-Victorian cheerfulness. The walls, the drapes, the spread, and the canopy on the four-poster bed were all of the same fabric: a cream background heavily patterned with roses and ribbons, explosions of pink, green, and yellow. The carpet featured yellow chrysanthemums, pink roses, and blue ribbons, lots of blue ribbons, so many blue ribbons that I couldn’t help but think of veins and unraveling intestines. The painted and parcel-gilt furniture was no less oppressive than the darker pieces downstairs, and the room contained so many crystal paperweights, porcelains, small bronzes, silver-framed photographs, and other bibelots that, if considered ammunition, they could have been used to stone to death an entire mob of malcontents.

On the bed, atop the gay spread and fully dressed, lay a man and a woman with the de rigueur black silk face coverings, which now began to seem neither cultish nor symbolic but quite Victorian and proper, draped across the awful faces of the dead to spare the sensitivities of those who might discover them. I was sure that these two—on their backs, side by side, holding hands—were Roger and Marie Stanwyk, and when Bobby and Sasha pulled aside the veils, I was proved correct.

For some reason, I surveyed the ceiling, half expecting to see five-inch-long, fat cocoons spun in the corners. None hung over us, of course. I was getting my waking nightmares confused.

Struggling to resist a potentially crippling claustrophobia, I left the room ahead of Bobby and Sasha, joining Roosevelt in the hallway, where I was pleased—though surprised—to find there were
still
no walking dead people with black silk hoods covering their cold white faces.

The next bedroom was no less gonzo Victorian than the rest of the house, but the two bodies—in the carved mahogany half-tester bed with white muslin and lace hangings—were in a more modern pose than Roger and Marie, lying on their sides, face-to-face, embracing during their last moments on this earth. We studied their alabaster profiles, but none of us recognized them, and Bobby and I replaced the silks.

There was a television set in this room, too. The Stanwyks, for all their love of distant and more genteel times, were typical TV-crazed Americans, for which they were certainly dumber than they otherwise would have been, as it is well known and probably proven that for every television set in a house, each member of the family suffers a loss of five IQ points. The embracing couple on the bed had chosen to expire to a thousandth rerun of an ancient
Star Trek
episode. At the moment, Captain Kirk was solemnly expounding upon his belief that compassion and tolerance were as important to the evolution and survival of an intelligent species as were eyesight and opposable thumbs, so I had to resist the urge to switch the damn TV to the Nature Channel, where the fox was eating the guts of a quail.

I didn’t want to judge these poor people, because I couldn’t know the angst and physical suffering that had brought them to this end point; but if I were becoming and so distraught as to believe that suicide was the only answer, I would want to expire not while watching the products of Empire Disney, not to an earnest documentary about the beauty of nature’s bloodlust, not to the adventures of the starship
Enterprise,
but to the eternal music of Beethoven, Johann Sebastian Bach, perhaps Brahms, Mozart; or the rock of Chris Isaak would do, and do handsomely.

As you may perceive from my baroque ranting, by the time I returned to the upstairs hall, with the body count currently at nine, my claustrophobia was getting rapidly worse, my imagination was in full-on hyperdrive, my longing for a handgun had intensified until it was almost a sexual need, and my testicles had retracted into my groin.

I knew that we weren’t all going to get out of this house alive.

Christopher Snow knows things.

I knew.

I
knew
.

The next room was dark, and a quick check revealed that it was used to store excess Victorian furniture and art objects. In two or three seconds of light, I saw paintings, chairs and more chairs, a column-front cellarette, terra-cotta figures, urns, a Chippendale-style satinwood desk, a breakfront—as if the Stanwyks’ ultimate intention had been to wedge every room of the house so full that no human being could fit inside, until the density and weight of the furnishings distorted the very fabric of space-time, causing the house to implode out of our century and into the more comforting age of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Lord Chesterfield.

Mungojerrie, to all appearances unaffected by this surfeit of death and decor, was standing in the hallway, in the inconstant light that pulsed through the open door of the final room, peering intently past that last threshold. Then suddenly he became way
too
intent: His back was arched and his hackles were raised, as if he were a witch’s familiar that had just seen the devil himself rising from a bubbling cauldron.

Though gunless, I was not going to let Sasha go through another doorway first, because I believed that whoever entered this next room in the point position would be blown away or chopped like a celery stalk in a Cuisinart. Unless the last four bodies had been mutated in ways concealed by clothing, we had not encountered another refugee from
The Island of Dr. Moreau
since the woman slumped in the Morris chair downstairs, and we seemed overdue for another close encounter of the bowel-loosening kind. I was tempted to pick up Mungojerrie and pitch him into the room ahead of me, to draw fire, but I reminded myself that if any of us survived, we would need the mouser to lead us through Wyvern, and even if he landed on his feet unscathed, in the great tradition of felines since time immemorial, he was likely thereafter to be uncooperative.

I moved past the cat and crossed the threshold with absolutely no cunning, ad-libbing and adrenaline-driven, hurtling headlong into a deluge of Victoriana. Sasha was close behind me, whispering my name with severe disapproval, as though it really ticked her off to lose her last best opportunity to be killed in this sentimental wonderland of filigree and potpourri.

Amidst a visual cacophony of chintz, in a blizzard of bric-a-brac, a television screen presented the cuddly cartoon creatures of the veld capering through
The Lion King.
The marketing mavens at Disney ought to turn this into a bonanza, produce a special edition of the film for the terminally distraught, for rejected lovers and moody teenagers, for stockbrokers to keep on the shelf against the advent of another Black Monday, package the videotape or DVD with a square of black silk, a pad and pencil for the suicide note, and a lyrics sheet to allow the self-condemned to sing along with the major musical numbers until the toxins kick in.

Two bodies, numbers ten and lucky eleven, lay on the quilted chintz spread, but they were less interesting than the robed figure of Death, who stood beside the bed. The Reaper, traveling without his customary scythe, was bending over the deceased, carefully arranging squares of black silk to conceal their faces, plucking at specks of lint, smoothing wrinkles in the fabric, surprisingly fussy for Hell’s grim tyrant, as Alexander Pope had called him, although those who rise to the top of their professions know that attention to detail is essential.

He was also shorter than I had imagined Death would be, about five feet eight. He was remarkably heavier than his popular image, too, although his apparent weight problem might be illusory, the fault of the second-rate haberdasher who had put him in a loosely fitted robe that did nothing to flatter his figure.

When he realized that there were intruders behind him, he slowly turned to confront us, and he proved not to be Death, the lord of all worms, after all. He was merely Father Tom Eliot, the rector of St. Bernadette’s Catholic Church, which explained why he wasn’t wearing a hood; the robe was actually a cassock.

Since my brain is pickled in poetry, I thought of how Robert Browning had described Death—“the pale priest of the mute people”—which seemed to fit this lowercase reaper. Even here in the animated African light, Father Tom’s face appeared to be as pale and round as the Eucharistic wafer placed upon the tongue during communion.

“I couldn’t convince them to leave their mortal fate in God’s hands,” Father Tom said, his voice quavering, his eyes brimming with tears. He didn’t bother to remark upon our sudden appearance, as if he had known that
someone
would catch him at this forbidden work. “It’s a terrible sin, an affront to God, this turning away from life. Rather than suffer in this world any longer, they’ve chosen damnation, yes, I’m afraid that’s what they’ve done, and all I could do was comfort them. My counsel was rejected, though I tried. I tried. Comfort. That was all I could give. Comfort. Do you understand?”

“Yes, we do, we understand,” Sasha said with both compassion and wariness.

In ordinary times, before we had entered The End of Days, Father Tom had been an ebullient guy, devout without being stuffy, sincere about his concern for others. With his expressive and rubbery face, with his merry eyes and quick smile, he was a natural comedian, yet in times of tragedy he served as a reliable source of strength for others. I wasn’t a member of his church, but I knew his parishioners had long adored him.

Lately, things hadn’t gone well for Father Tom, and he himself hadn’t been well. His sister, Laura, had been my mother’s colleague and friend. Tom is devoted to her—and has not seen her for more than a year. There is reason to believe that Laura is far along in her becoming, profoundly changed, and is being held in The Hole, at Wyvern, where she is an object of intense study.

“Four of those here are Catholic,” he said. “Members of my flock. Their souls were in my hands. My hands. The others are Lutheran, Methodist. One is Jewish. Two were atheists until…recently. All their souls mine to save. Mine to lose.” He was talking rapidly, nervously, as if he were aware of a bomb clock relentlessly ticking toward detonation, eager to confess before being obliterated. “Two of them, a misguided young couple, had absorbed incoherent fragments of the spiritual beliefs of half a dozen American Indian tribes, twisting everything in ways the Indians would never have understood. These two, they believed in such a mess of things, such a jumble, they worshipped the buffalo, river spirits, earth spirits, the corn plant. Do I belong in an age where people worship buffalo and corn? I’m lost here. Do you understand? Do you?”

“Yes,” Bobby said, having followed us into the room. “Don’t worry, Father Eliot, we understand.”

The priest was wearing a loose cloth gardening glove on his left hand. As he continued to speak, he worried ceaselessly at the glove with his right hand, plucking at the cuff, tugging at the fingers, as if the fit was not comfortable. “I didn’t give them extreme unction, last rites, didn’t give them the last rites,” he said, voice rising toward a hysterical pitch and pace, “because they were
suicides,
but maybe I should have given unction, maybe I should have, compassion over doctrine, because all I did for them…the only thing I did for these poor tortured people was give comfort, the comfort of words, nothing but empty words, so I don’t know whether their souls were lost because of me or in spite of me.”

A month ago, the night my father died, I experienced a strange and unsettling encounter with Father Tom Eliot, of which I’ve written in a previous volume of this journal. He’d been even less in control of his emotions on that cruel night than he was here in the Stanwyk mausoleum, and I had suspected he was becoming, though by the end of our encounter, he had seemed to be racked not by anything uncanny but rather by a heart-crushing anguish for his missing sister and by his own spiritual despair.