Free Odd Apocalypse by Dean Koontz Page A

that quivered at the root of every base human desire. I sensed that not only the land sloped from east to west; within the grounds of this walled estate, reality also was tilted from the norm and was being steadily levered to an ever more severe angle, until Roseland would abruptly slide to ruin, reason would slither down to madness, and everyone here would cascade into death.
    The sun was hardly risen, but already time was running out.

Nine

    If the onset of night so soon after dawn and then its equally astonishing repeal had been observed by others in Roseland, they were remarkably unmoved by it. As I crossed the estate, I expected to see at least a couple of people on terraces or lawns, regarding the sky with wonder if not terror, but no one was out and about. Although I couldn’t understand how such a stunning cosmological event could be confined to the stable, apparently only I had experienced it.
    I see the lingering dead, but I don’t have hallucinations. And I didn’t believe that Chef Shilshom spiked my almond croissant with peyote. If the guard at the front gate, where I was headed, did not remark on an eclipse of the sun, then the change from day to night, to day again, had been weirdly localized.
    Nine feet high and three thick, the wall surrounding Roseland’s fifty-two acres had been built of concrete faced with stones gathered from the property. In the only gap, the impressive gates at the driveway entrance were not formed from pickets and rails through which the curious might peer, but were solid panels of bronze decorated with copper discs like those in the floor of the stable.
    The gatehouse was of the same stone. Like the guesthouse tower in the eucalyptus grove, its windows were narrow and barred, and its ironbound-oak door stood like a challenge to barbarians.
    About fourteen feet on a side, the building was large for its purpose, containing an office, a kitchenette, and a bathroom. I’d had only a glimpse inside, through the open door, on our second day here. But I could not have failed to notice the gun rack on the farther wall: two shotguns—one with a pistol grip—and two assault rifles.
    Apparently, they intended to leave no doubt in the minds of door-to-door salesmen that when they said no, they were serious.
    On the north side of the structure, adjacent to the driveway, an extension of the sloped roof, supported by four posts, provided a six-foot-deep shelter where a guard might stand in bad weather to speak with arriving guests. In that shade, to the right of the door, Henry Lolam sat in a captain’s chair with a padded seat.
    He was perhaps thirty, and handsome in such a boyish way that on first encounter he seemed callow. Unlined face, mouth as innocent as that of a child who had not yet spoken one curse, cheeks the pink that sometimes blushes peach skins, he looked as if nothing hard in the world had touched him, as if he’d drifted through it like dandelion fluff on the softest warmest breeze that ever blew.
    His green eyes were alien in that boyish face, full of loss and anguish and, at times, bewilderment.
    As on the two other occasions when I had sought him out, Henry was reading a book of poetry. On a small table beside his chair were other haphazardly stacked volumes by such poets as Emerson, Whitman, and Wallace Stevens, a dangerous crew to let into your head.
    Some will be skeptical of the contention that a security guard—a “rent-a-cop,” in the mocking Hollywood argot of our times—might be immersed in poetry. The uniqueness of every soul is not a theme that our current culture, obsessed with group identities, cares toassert. But Henry was himself and no one else, and judging by the intensity with which he focused on those verses, he sought from them something profound.
    While he lingered over the last stanza of a poem, I leaned against a porch post and waited. He was not rude, merely preoccupied.
    I had come here to ask him about Kenny Randolph Fitzgerald Mountbatten,