Odd Apocalypse. Dean Koontz

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.

      More important, they might realize the missing copper disc was not a case of vandalism but a consequence of investigation. If they suspected that I was more than a mere guest enjoying the pleasures of Roseland, I might learn the secrets of this place suddenly and violently.

      A full nine feet above the ground, atop the wall, a missing bit of copper would not readily be noticed. When I set to work with the penknife, digging out the mortar, I soon discovered that the copper would not readily be removed, either. By the time I burrowed down an inch, when the blade of the penknife snapped, I realized that the discs were not as thin as coins but were instead the blunt ends of inch-diameter copper rods. For all I knew, they extended the entire depth of the wall and into its concrete footing.

      Copper was far too soft a metal and too expensive to serve as structural reinforcement. Steel rebar would have been used for that purpose. The copper had some other function. Considering the expense of embedding so many rods in a long work of masonry, I could only assume they must be no less essential to the true purpose of the wall than was the web of rebar that maintained the structural integrity.

      I threw the pieces of the broken knife into the tall wild grass beyond the estate and crawled forward on hands and knees until I came out from under the overhanging branches of the oaks. I got to my feet and walked the yard-wide wall, as if I were again—or still—a boy adventuring.

      The rise in the land hid the distant main house and all other structures from me—and me from them.

      Within fifty feet, I came to what appeared to be a foot-wide, shallow black bowl turned upside down in the center of the wall cap. When I knelt again, I saw that this object was supported on four-inch-long steel pins, and that it was a rain deflector set over a six-inch-square ventilation grill.

      I thrust one hand under the bowl and felt a faint, warm draft barely fluttering against my fingers. When I bent my head to the deflector, I smelled something that reminded me of new-sprouting spring grass and ripe summer grass and wild strawberries, although the fragrance was not in fact like any of those things, but unique. Abruptly the draft turned cold, and though the scent that came with the change of temperature was also unique, it reminded me of things that it smelled nothing like: dry leaves but also dead leaves wet with a not-unpleasant mold and also the so-faint but stirring scent released by cracking ice.

      Cool changed to warm and warm to cool every twenty seconds, for what reason and to what purpose I couldn’t guess. I had no idea why a wall would need to be ventilated or why the flow of air and odor would not be consistent.

      I rose and continued perhaps four hundred feet until I came to another rain deflector and vent. Here, I found the same conditions.

      Immediately ahead, another hurst of oaks spread branches over the wall, and a few hung low. I considered jumping off the rampart, but I didn’t know what ankle-fracturing hole or rock the long grass might hide, and so I slid backward off the top, hung by my hands, and dropped a little more than three feet.