Odd Apocalypse. Dean Koontz

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       Ten

      ACCOMPANIED BY THE BUZZ OF BUMBLEBEES, BY DARTING wrens that sang complex songs in high tinkling trills, by bright butterflies that seemed out of season, and for a while by a pair of scampering squirrels, I felt like a character in a Disney movie, and I half expected the squirrels to start talking as I followed the property line south from the gatehouse.

      That gave me no comfort. Bad things happen to good animals in some Walt Disney movies. Think of Bambi’s mother and Old Yeller, the former shot down in front of her child, the latter foaming at the mouth with rabies and killed by the boy who loved him. People don’t always fare better. Even the sweetest of princesses get poisoned by witches. There was a touch of Quentin Tarantino in Uncle Walt.

      Henry Lolam had said that he hated Roseland but nonetheless returned to it because, with its encircling masonry, “the center might still hold.” I knew what the poet, Yeats, had intended by his lines, but I didn’t know what the security guard meant.

      The high, wide structure was reminiscent of a fortification, but it wasn’t, after all, the Great Wall of China. It wouldn’t hold back the Mongol hordes or their equivalent. A determined man could easily climb over it, either to enter or to leave.

      Even in the early 1920s, such a massive construction project would have been costly. The income tax had been new and low in those days, and Constantine Cloyce had been an incredibly wealthy man. But if his purpose was to define his fifty-two acres, building the wall two-thirds this height and half this width would have done the job as well at a fraction of the cost.

      Until now, I hadn’t given any thought to this rampart. But the conversation with Henry pricked my curiosity.

      Although I followed the property line, I gave no indication that the wall intrigued me. Always at Roseland, I felt watched, but now more than usual. Certainly, Henry must be keeping an eye on me from the gatehouse. He had seemed to wish me well; perhaps he still did. But his attitude changed when I mentioned the giant with the scars.

      After a hundred yards, the manicured lawn and flower gardens gave way to wild grass, and two hundred yards after that, I ascended a gentle slope and passed through a stand of California live oaks ranging in size from sixty to ninety feet in height. The wildlife had abandoned me except for nuthatches whistling in the majestic branches of the black-trunked trees.

      Screened from the gatehouse and the main house, I went to the wall. The stones provided toeholds, handholds, and I scaled those nine feet with alacrity.

      Atop the palisade, on hands and knees, I discovered what I might have unconsciously expected. Set in the grout lines among the dark stones were serpentine patterns of the bright copper coins on each of which was engraved the slightly elongated figure eight that I had seen elsewhere.

      Dappled with sunshine and oak-branch shadows, the cap was of the same material as the wall, sawn into flags and set in an irregular but fitted pattern. With my palms flat on the cool stone, I could feel the faintest vibrations, as though buried within this massive rampart must be machinery of some kind.

      Leaning forward, I put my left ear to the stone, but I could hear no noise arising from inside the wall.

      If those rapid, small-arc oscillations produced a sound, it would not be a heavy throb or thrum, but instead a high-pitched hum or even a whine.

      The longer I considered those vibrations, the less they seemed to be the product of laboring machinery and the more the source struck me as electronic.

      I got to my knees, fished in a pocket of my jeans, and extracted a penknife that I had purchased when I’d gone into town to buy some clothes. I had gotten the small knife specifically to pry one of the copper discs from its mortar bed, though I hadn’t taken one from the stable or from the mausoleum—where they also decorated the floor—because I assumed that if the vandalism was noticed, I would be the first suspect to whom they turned.