me in its singular fashion about how best to pursue and trap and kill its quarry, the likelihood of escaping them in any extended chase would be hardly greater than the likelihood of foiling black-robed Death himself when he knocked on your door with his harvesting scythe in one bony hand and a termination notice in his other.
Sunshine winked off the blades of the axes and laid a sheen on the skull-crushing hammer heads.
The freaks turned their attention from me and the corpse to one another. Their wide jackal mouths cracked open, but if they made any sounds, I could not hear them.
Each snaky, hairless, white tail, with a tuft of gray at the tip, raised straight up—one, two, three.
Their pointed ears twitched. Pricked forward. And then flattened back along their skulls.
They spread out at the foot of the slope, putting more space between one another.
Again, they swung their axes forward, back, forward, back, and around in a complete circle. As if the blades were stropped sharper against the whetting air, flares of sun flew from the weapons.
I had needed seven rounds to bring down the first freak. At that rate, I’d need twenty-one shots to kill the remaining three.
Ten rounds remained in the Beretta’s magazine. The spare in my holster contained another seventeen, but I doubted that I would have the time to swap it for the empty one as they stormed toward me.
Shakespeare has Falstaff say that discretion is the better part of valor, and on that slope I opted for discretion. I ran to the crown of the hill and down the other side.
I am aware that Falstaff was a fighter but also a coward, a thief but also a charmer. He serves as a role model only for those who believe that self-esteem is the highest of all values. The playwright meant for him to be a comic figure but not an admirable one, for he knew that when such men lose their capacity to amuse, they are dangerous in the extreme. They are the Charles Mansons and the Pol Pots of our time, no crime too terrible to dissuade them from committing it.
All of us are cowards at some time in our lives, but I took comfort in the fact that when I fled that hillside, I left no allies behind. With only my own butt at risk, I could justifiably claim that my action was caution rather than cowardice. Or so I told myself as I fled pell-mell into the glen where I had earlier parked for a moment in the mini truck, making thin quaverous sounds of childlike terror, repressing the urge to wet my pants, and turned north in the hope of making it on foot to the guest tower. By such self-deceptions do we survive—and also begin to put the most essential part of ourselves at risk.
Thirty-three
THE TOPOLOGY OF THAT PART OF ROSELAND WAS COMPLICATED, the hills and vales turning into one another in such a way that I was reminded of the folds and fissures on the surface of the brain. I was like a thought slipping through the fissures, and the thought was: Move, move, live, live!
I stayed entirely in the lower places, some of which were shaded by looming hillsides, others by banyan trees that grew on slopes and by California laurels that rooted in swales between the hills, where the soil was always a little moist. Weaving quickly between trees, ducking under low branches, racing across open areas, I relied on intuition to decide which way to go each time the rumpled land folded upon itself in such a way that the path branched.
Focused on moving fast and faster, I dared not look back and risk faltering. Besides, if the freaks were gaining on me, I would rather not know until one of those taloned hands snared my sports jacket and wrenched me off my feet or until an axe cleaved my skull and killed me in the instant, sparing me what horrors I might have to endure if I were taken alive.
Only a couple of hours earlier, I had been cozy in the main-house kitchen, eating quiche and cheesecake. My biggest problems had been how to penetrate the armored mysteries of Roseland and how to make sense of what people here told me when they pulled a cloak of inscrutability over themselves before every conversation.
At least the swine things weren’t inscrutable. They didn’t play word games with me or pretend to be distracted, or in any other way deceive. The freaks made their intentions clear: They wanted to club me, chop me, eat me, and sit around later reminiscing about the taste of me. They were as open about their intentions as were IRS agents.
I followed so many branching paths that I was not sure anymore whether I was moving toward or away from the guest tower. And I would not have been surprised to see on a hillside the abandoned vehicle with balloon tires and the three freaks playing cards while they waited for me to run in a circle and back into their arms.
A couple of times, the cool air shimmered with what seemed to be currents of rising heat, and I saw things in my peripheral vision that weren’t there when I turned my head for a closer look. Some of them might have been nothing but shadows that appeared solid and menacing only from the corner of the eye. But others were far more specific: an impression of a great pile of human skulls, of coyotes feeding on several dead freaks, of a naked woman chained to a post as cowled figures touched torches to the kindling at her feet.…
One vision did not vanish when I looked directly at it. I came out of a grove of laurels, and twenty feet ahead, the path divided around a promontory of land. Marking the crossroads was a leafless black-limbed tree that someone had used as the framework for a mobile of sun-bleached bones. Hanging from the branches were the delicate skeletons of children, some of whom had been perhaps as young as three, none older than ten, when they were murdered and stripped of their clothing and arranged just so in this insane celebration of cruelty.
The sight was like a road sign announcing that ahead lay a town in the thrall of savage violence that knew no limits.
For the first time in my headlong flight, I faltered when the apparition didn’t dissolve before me. But I regained my footing and hurried on, taking the path to the right.
I could imagine only that somehow I was running in two Roselands at once: the estate to which I’d come with Annamaria a couple of days before, and another that existed in some alternate reality parallel to ours.
The fork I’d taken at the black tree festooned with white bones proved to be a short path. The hills crowded close, closer, and grew steeper as the way narrowed. I soon came to a dead end at a junction of three formidable slopes, weeds and thorny brambles to the left and right, a slide of raw earth and jumbled rocks ahead.
The brambles would snare and perhaps eventually tangle me to a halt. I clambered up the rocks, some of which shifted underfoot, and soon I was forced to holster my pistol and proceed at a sort of inclined crawl, desperately grabbing for handholds to prevent myself from crashing backward when stone that seemed firm abruptly proved treacherous and tumbled out from under my feet.
Gasping for breath, heart thundering, I could hear the freaks behind me—but I couldn’t smell them. Although they sounded close, a fluke of landscape must have made their voices seem nearer than they really were, because their foul stench should have announced them as they bore down on me.
Halfway up the slope, they caught me. One of them snared the left leg of my jeans. Holding to my perch with my hands, I kicked frantically, connecting with something, maybe its head. But it would not let go, and in fact the beast pulled hard to dislodge me.
A rock came loose from the slide debris in which it was seated, slipped out from under my right hand, and rattled down the hillside. Still clinging to the slope with my left hand, I twisted onto my side and reached cross-body with my right hand to snatch the Beretta from my holster.
A freak loomed over me, and a second freak to my left, and a third to my right, all of them about to fall atop me. The whites of their eyes were pinked with blood, their irises as yellow as the strange sky that I had glimpsed earlier.
Their slash mouths, their bristling teeth, their long pink tongues spotted with black were not made for words of mercy but for the vicious rending and efficient consumption of prey that, as it fed them, might be still alive and screaming.
Three axes were raised, two with blades toward me,
one with the hammer brandished. As I drew my pistol, I knew that I could at most kill one before the other two cracked my head and pried it open like a clamshell. I was ready for death if only because nothing on the Other Side could possibly smell as bad as these swine things did.
Before I could bring the Beretta to bear, the creature over me bore down with its disgusting body, pale skin slick and stubbled with irregular patches of prickly hair—but then reared away from me just as a hole appeared between its eyes. The back of its skull exploded. It fell out of sight, disappearing as suddenly as if a trapdoor had opened under it.
Although I didn’t hear the initial shot, the second and third were loud and clear and close. The remaining pair of freaks appeared to fling themselves away from me. One axe clattered to the rocks beside my head and the other twirled out of sight, like a baton thrown too enthusiastically by the ugliest drum majorette in the history of parades.
The rock slide wanted to shift under me. I was determined not to ride a cascade of earth and stone onto the bodies of the freaks, which sprawled on the floor of the dead-end passage below.
Gasping, spitting because I had the notion that a drop of the freak’s sweat had fallen into my open mouth, I turned onto my stomach again and sought firm purchase.
A pair of red-and-black, carved-leather cowboy boots appeared beside me. Beyond the big hand that reached down to assist me was a massive forearm and Herculean biceps crawling with screaming hyenas.
Thirty-four
I TOOK HOLD OF HIS HAND, WHICH SEEMED TWICE THE size of mine, and the tattooed giant helped me to my feet. We staggered to the summit of the eroded slope.
In the west, the sun-dappled sea glittered like a pirate’s chest of jewels. My last sight on Earth had almost been the teeth of the monstrous swine as they spread wide to bite.
My rescuer’s facial scars were as livid as before, his teeth no less crooked and yellow, but now the cold sore on his upper lip glistened with protective ointment.