Dean Koontz - Odd Apocalypse

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, from 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.

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.