Earlier she had told me that she never did anything dangerous, not even anything as relatively unchallenging as climbing an oak tree. As her fundamental aversion to risk returned, she closed her eyes and shuddered.

Deciding to appeal to whatever shred of decency might still hang tattered in her heart, I took the gun away from her face, and in a tone of voice marked both by distaste and by a sympathetic desire to understand, I said, “Is this some kind of cult, you’ve been caught up in it and you can’t see a way out? Is Noah Wolflaw your Jim Jones or something?”

“Cultists are deranged,” she said. “Ignorant and deranged. Cultists? No. We’re the sanest people who ever lived.”

“Ever, huh?”

“You and your kind are the deranged ones, and you don’t even know it.”

“Enlighten me.”

Every feature of her face contorted to form a sneer of maximum power and hauteur. “You bear the whips and scorns, but we don’t and never will. You bear them, and they drive you mad.”

“Well, that clears up everything,” I said, and wondered if some voodoo priest I didn’t remember meeting had placed a curse upon me that would condemn me to a life of association with people who spoke always in riddles.

Her face grew red and dark with hatred, and the contempt in her voice was so thick that her words seemed in danger of clotting on her tongue unspoken. “Your thoughts are enslaved to a fool, but ours will never be.”

In spite of her denial, this seemed like cult talk, words passed down from the supreme leader and repeated by followers who only half understood them but resorted to them as mantras, whether they were appropriate to the moment or not.

Now that she was talking, I tried to bring her back to the issue of the dead women in the mausoleum. “You called Wolflaw one of the greatest men who ever lived. How can you follow him so submissively when he’s treated those women like dolls to be played with, broken, and discarded?”

Shared gender with the victims was not enough to squeeze a drop of pity from Victoria Mors. “They’re not women like me. They weren’t like us. They were like you. Animals, not gods. Walking shadows, poor players. Their lives signified nothing.”

The more she said, the madder she seemed, the pretense of sanity now too far behind her to be retrieved.

Yet something in her words seemed familiar to me, as if in some other place and time I had heard certain of these phrases used in a rational context, for a nobler purpose.

I felt contaminated by this Victoria, who seemed like the evil twin of the laundress, but I pressed her further. “Where did those women come from? How did Wolflaw persuade them to let him bring them here?”

She smirked like a child with a dirty secret that she relished revealing. “Noah never leaves Roseland to go farther than to town. Paulie cruises far and wide for them. Henry goes fishing, too, all over the state and into Nevada, elsewhere.”

“They … participate with Noah?”

She shook her head. “No. They don’t care what he does, though they have no taste for it themselves. But you interrupted me before I could tell you the best part.”

“So tell me.”

“I’m better than all of them, better than Paulie or Henry, at setting the hook and reeling in the pretties. Once I’ve identified one who has the look Noah wants, I scheme to meet her. I chat her up. They always like me. We delight in each other’s company. I’m so good at making them like and trust me. I’m petite, almost a waif. I’ve got this pixie face. Who can distrust a pixie?”

“Like an elf, I thought, a pretty elf.”

Victoria fired up a warm and saucy smile and winked at me. For a moment, the mask of pixie innocence and charm was so well crafted that I could see nothing of the demon behind the elfin beauty even though I knew it festered there.

“Sooner than later,” she continued, “we meet for lunch. I pick her up where she works or at her home. We never reach the restaurant. I’ve got a little hypodermic gun. Tranquilizer puts her out almost instantly. When she wakes, sometimes hours later, sometimes days, depending on how far we have to drive, she’s tethered to a post of Noah’s bed, and she learns what she is and what we are.”

Pixie or elf, the sight of her sickened me. “And what are you?”

“Outsiders,” she said, and I thought she capitalized the word. “We’re Outsiders, with no limits, no rules, no fears.”

If what they had was not a cult by name, it was a cult in every way that mattered.

“He’s not your Jim Jones,” I said. “He’s your Charles Manson, Ted Bundy with apostles.”

“Sometimes he lets me watch.” She saw that she revolted me, and she grinned wickedly. “Poor boy, you can never understand. You’re a walking shadow, a poor player. You don’t signify.”

Those words, which she had spoken before, again rang familiar to me.

A part of me still wanted to understand, to find a reason why she had no choice but to submit to Wolflaw. “He must have some hold on you.”

“Love,” she said. “Love for eternity.”

Apparently love of their kind meant never having to say you’re sorry about anything.

As though talking about watching Wolflaw with the women made Victoria’s mouth water, she spat an unusual volume with special force in my face. “The foot will be on your neck within the hour.”

Cleaning off with the now-damp piece of T-shirt, I said, “What foot would that be?”

“The inaudible and noiseless foot.”

“Oh, right, that one.” I wasn’t going to get anything more useful out of her. I balled up the cloth and said, “Be a good girl. Open wide.”

She pressed her lips together. I pinched her pert nose, and she held her breath until she had to gasp for it, and I shoved the wad of cloth in her mouth.

Although her words weren’t clear, I thought she called me a stupid cocker, although I wasn’t sure why being compared to that lovely breed of spaniel should be considered an insult.

She tried to tongue the cloth back at me, but I held her mouth shut. With some pleasure.

I snatched up the last length of cloth and tied it around the lower part of her face as she tried and failed to bite me, knotting it at the back of her head, to prevent her from expelling the wad in her mouth.

Holstering the pistol, I was relieved I hadn’t needed to shoot her. Shooting one woman, even a murderous one, had been traumatic enough to last me a lifetime.

Once, in a burned-out Indian casino, I had watched a 150-pound mountain lion creep up behind a woman who worked really, really hard at being bad; she had been holding me at gunpoint, and rather than take a bullet in the gut and another one in the head, I hadn’t warned her and had allowed the big cat to go at her like a famished pothead chowing down on a triple-patty cheeseburger. I didn’t like myself much—in fact not at all—for doing that, but somehow it was easier to live with than pulling a trigger.

Bound foot and hand, hobbled, gagged, tightly leashed to a water pipe, Victoria Mors glared poisoned darts at me from her belladonna eyes.

I crossed the room, switched off the lights, cracked open the door, saw that the way was clear, and stepped into the basement hall.

I wished that I were Harry Potter with his invisibility cloak and all the other fabulous gear that a young wizard carried with him. But I had a 9-mm pistol, plenty of spare ammunition, and a high-quality hacksaw, which was more armament than I’d possessed on other perilous occasions. Besides, if all you had to do was throw on such a cloak, there would be little fun sneaking into the dragon’s lair, either for you or the dragon.

For a moment, I stood at the closed door to the furnace room, listening. I had no doubt that Victoria was shrieking behind the stifling gag. Even at risk of strangulation, she would be trying to rattle the water pipe. But I could hear nothing.

In the laundry room one last time, I went to the sink and washed my face with liquid soap and hot water.

The really bad woman whom I allowed to be killed by a mountain lion once spat a mouthful of red wine in my face.

Women don’t find me as appealing as they do, say, that singer Justin Bieber. But I take comfort from the fact that Justin Bieber wouldn’t know how to escape from a walk-in freezer after being chained there by a couple of huge guys in porkpie hats. He couldn’t sing his way out of a spot like that; inevitably, he would be a Biebersicle.

Hoping that the tall gaunt man would appear again to explain who he was and what master switch he wanted me to throw, I continued along the hallway, checking rooms. I didn’t find anything interesting until the door at the end.

Twenty-nine

STEPPING THROUGH THAT END DOOR, I SEEMED TO BE in a different building from Noah Wolflaw’s elegant mansion. The large rectangular room had a plasterboard ceiling and beadboard walls, all painted white. Set in two pairs in the farther wall, the four windows were covered by oilcloth shades hung on old-fashioned roller bars.

In one corner stood a wooden cabinet with a metal sink on top. On one side of the sink was a lever-action, cast-iron hand pump to draw water from a well.

A large oak desk backed up to each set of the windows, and on each desk was a work lamp with a green-glass shade. The office chairs were entirely of oak, with hard-rubber wheels on steel-shank castors. They were in fine condition but looked a hundred years old.

On each desk stood also a candlestick phone of brass painted matte black, with the mouthpiece at the top, the earpiece on a cord and hanging from a cradle, and an early rotary dial on the base.

Along the shorter walls were oak filing cabinets and what seemed to be a map chest with wide, shallow drawers. In the open part of the room, two draftsman tables stood back-to-back, with oak stools, and to the right of them was a large oak table high enough that you would have to stand at it to work.

On the tall table lay a four-inch-thick set of blueprints bound on the left. The cover page presented a pen-and-ink rendering of the main house as it would appear when viewed from the west. Under that superb drawing, the name ROSELAND was handsomely hand-lettered. And in the title block at the bottom, to the left, were the words CONSTANTINE CLOYCE RESIDENCE.

This appeared to be the room in which the original contractor and perhaps an on-site architect worked back in the day when Roseland was being built. It must have been the first thing constructed, and the meticulous preservation of the space suggested that Constantine Cloyce, the press baron and silent-movie mogul, intended to create an estate that would have the historic importance of someplace like the Hearst Castle.

The only things this space had in common with the rest of the house were the concrete floor, in which were embedded copper circles etched with elongated eights, and the dustless, ageless quality of a hermetically sealed exhibit in a museum.

As I toured the room, I was suddenly drawn to reconsider the oilcloth-covered windows because I realized there should be none in a basement room. Putting down the pillowcase containing the hacksaw, leaning across one of the desks, I pinched the ring pull and put up the shade.

The view beyond the window stunned me, and I stood paralyzed by disbelief. When I could think to move, I went to the other desk, reached across it, and put up the shade at the second window, as if I hoped to find a different scene or the blank basement wall that should have been there. The same vista greeted me.

In addition to the door by which I’d entered, another waited in what would be the west wall, flanked by the desks. I went to it, hesitated, opened it, and stepped outside.

The long driveway that sloped down from the main house to the county road was gravel instead of cobblestones as it had been before. At the farther end of that long lane, neither a gatehouse nor gates existed to guard admittance to Roseland.

No stone wall encircled the huge property. The land, which had not yet been excavated and shaped to the needs of the construction team, rolled away to neighboring parcels with nothing between but property-line-marker stakes painted white.

The parklike landscaping did not exist. Instead, fields with waist-high grass and weeds were shaded by many fewer oak trees than those that I had walked among in the past few days.

Distracted by this impossible vista, I walked perhaps thirty feet along the graveled drive before I quite realized that I had moved away from the door.

Turning, I looked back and saw that no palatial residence rose behind me, as if Wolflaw’s great house had vaporized.

Two structures were there instead, the first being a clapboard building with a tar-paper roof and four front windows flanking an open door. This must be the construction shack from which I had stepped a moment earlier.

The second, perhaps a hundred feet to the left of the larger building, was obviously an outhouse.

For most people, reality is as simple as a painting, hanging before them in their frame of reference, understood and unquestioned. I live with the awareness that under the apparent painting are countless layers, previous scenes that have been painted over. Any physicist well-schooled in quantum mechanics or chaos theory knows that reality is a beast of mysterious dimensions and potentials and that the more we learn, the more we realize how much we don’t know.

Because that understanding of reality has shaped my life, I am seldom knocked flat by astonishment. In the absence of Roseland, I was still on my feet, but I felt like Wile E. Coyote after he’d been run down by a bulldozer.

The sense that the architect had structured this place by the application of a new geometry with a mysterious dimension, which I mentioned before, was nothing compared to the shock of this latest discovery. Finding rooms connected in ways I didn’t remember, the feeling that there was always more to any room or passage than the eye could see now seemed prescient.

Distant engine noise drew my attention to the west once more. On the paved but primitive two-lane county road, one coming from the south and one from the north, were what appeared to be two Ford Model T’s, black with open passenger compartments.

As they passed each other about where the gates to Roseland would one day be, other traffic appeared in the north. Laden with bales of hay, a horse-drawn wagon clopped and rattled along.

I stood trembling, not in fear as much as in mystification. My heart knocked out hoofbeats, too, but they were faster than those of the draft horse.

Rowing lazily through rising thermals, three ducks sailed low across the land, as silent as the flywheels and rotating spheres under the mausoleum that did not yet exist here.

If man-made aircraft plied these skies, they would be biplanes, not airliners. Here, no ocean had ever been flown across; and no boot prints marked the soil of the moon.

A breeze whispered in from the north. With it came a fear that if the construction-shack door blew shut, some connection would be broken and I would not be able to open it and return to Roseland in its twenty-first-century grandeur.