"Why would Constantine bring you and that ... that woman here?"

I shared with him one of my main theories: "Subconsciously he may be weary of all this and want someone to bring it to an end."

"Don't Freud me, fry cook. Freud is a load of horseshit."

"Well, there's also the fact Annamaria is uncannily persuasive."

"I don't find the bitch in the least persuasive."

"With all due respect, sir, you've not spoken to her. Give her a chance, and you'll see."

"Put down the pistol nice and easy."

Now that he recognized the gun as his, he didn't want me just to drop it. Apparently, even extremely wealthy immortals have a strong attachment to their stuff.

"Well," I said.

Timothy said, "Chiang, just let us go to the chronosphere. Let me go back where I belong."

I thought "let us go to the chronosphere" sounded like it should have been an old David Bowie song. Even in moments of peril, my mind takes curious detours.

The gardener had dropped his benign Zen persona along with his pretense of being a gardener. Hatred pulled his round face long, and in his eyes reflections of the overhead lights seemed to flicker like serpent tongues.

"If I had my way, boy, I'd slit you open and let you die trying to stuff your intestines back in yourself. And then I'd bring you back from ten minutes ago and do it all over again."

"Well," I said, because this didn't seem to be one of those disagreeable conversations that was likely to take a positive turn.

Perhaps realizing that the years of his imprisonment might be only the prelude to the horrors that an inventive man like this could visit upon him, Timothy sidled closer to me.

"One last chance to put the gun down, fry cook. Otherwise I blow you away and maybe bring both of you back for more."

"Killing me once will be enough, sir. I don't want to put you to any trouble."

Because I couldn't think of anything else to do, I bent my knees slightly and began to lower the adored Beretta to the floor, doing it slow and easy, as he had suggested, in fact so slow and so easy that I might live to see another birthday before I finally released the weapon.

I was hoping that some brilliant maneuver would occur to me and that I would astonish him as Jackie Chan astonished his foes in those martial-arts movies. But I'm no Jackie Chan, and as it turned out, the porkers pulled my bacon from the fire.

Twenty feet behind Jam Diu, the wine-cellar door flew open, and one of the freaks raged into the corridor. It wasn't a hunchback with a misshapen head and too-long arms, but was instead one of those that might be called a normal specimen of their kind. In the hoggish head: a leering mouth of rending teeth, the fleshy nostrils in the dripping snout, the yellow eyes like the fevered glare of something crawling through the moss-hung darkness of a swamp dream.

The beast had evidently discovered the guardian-angel door in the mausoleum wall, which I had been unable to close. It had found its way through cellar, subcellar, and tunnel to this moment of reckoning.

Jam Diu swung toward the door when it crashed open, but the swine thing was quicker than it appeared to be. It seized his right arm and snapped it like a dry stick. As Jam Diu, prince of time and a god among mere men, screamed, the buckshot tore harmlessly into the ceiling.

While this was happening, I shouted to Timothy to run, but he was already on the move. I chased after him, thankful that I hadn't put down the Beretta, although in these close quarters and against these beasts, a 9-mm pistol promised to be about as effective as fighting a T. rex with a set of lawn darts.

Two-thirds of the way to the west service stairs, down which we had come in more halcyon times, three minutes earlier, I glanced back and saw Jam Diu coming apart in ways I refuse to remember. Behind the first freak, a second entered the corridor, and behind the second came a third.

Forty-three.

AFTER RACING UP TWO FLIGHTS OF THE FRONT SERVICE stairs, Timothy apparently thought, as I did, that going to the second floor would be a mistake. He flung open the stairwell door and hurried into the foyer, in the center of which he halted, looking around, unsure what to do next.

With three freaks in the house plus five heavily armed members of the self-improvement club called the Outsiders, all of them on the hunt, we were not likely to find a quiet corner where we could have tea and discuss literature undisturbed. And the sooner we went to the top floor, the sooner we would have nowhere left to go.

The freaks weren't brainiacs, weren't likely to spend a lot of time in a huddle strategizing their next move. They weren't stupid, either, and weren't entirely impulsive, but I didn't think they would linger in the basement when so much more meat could be found upstairs.

Although I didn't hear grunting and snorting and three-hundred-pound footfalls on the front service stairs, I figured they were coming. I pulled Timothy out of the foyer and into the main drawing room.

The giant goatish Pan still stood on the plinth under the central chandelier, and I knew whose side he'd be on in any battle between me and a wild boar with pretensions. We stayed to the shadowy perimeter of the room and stopped at the sofa behind which earlier I had hidden. Alert. Listening. We would probably smell them coming before we heard them.

After searching the basement, Cloyce and his crew had stationed Jam Diu there in case I got around behind them. But I doubted the freaks were well enough disciplined for one of them to be willing to remain below while the others were upstairs having all the fun. If we could stay alive for a few minutes, and if all of the freaks came upstairs, we could slip down again and leave as we originally intended, although I wasn't keen on having to plod through the remains of Mr. Diu.

I suddenly realized that we had been fearfully close to the invading freaks in the basement corridor but hadn't smelled them.

"They didn't stink," I whispered. "You always know they're nearby because of their stink."

"It's only the deformed ones that stink," Timothy said.

That was unfair. If they didn't stink, maybe they could be quiet, too, when they wanted to be. I wasn't prepared for odorless, stealthy freaks that might abruptly loom out of nowhere.

In some distant part of the house, a shotgun discharged. The first cry was as much a bellow of rage as it was a squeal of pain, unquestionably issuing from a swine's throat.

But the second cry, fast on the heels of the first, was the most wretched human scream imaginable, the like of which I hoped never to hear again. It went on for half a minute or longer, an excruciating expression of terror and agony, so chilling that it brought to mind that horrific painting by Goya titled Saturn Devouring His Children, which is even more bloodcurdling than its title suggests.

Although none of the residents of Roseland was Timothy's friend, not even his father, the tormented screaming affected him so deeply that he began to shudder and to sob quietly.

Because a scream shares the character of the person's usual voice, I was certain that we had just heard the end of Chef Shilshom.

The limits imposed by reality on all of us were now apparent even to those here who believed that they lived with no limits, no rules, no fear.

I could not pity them, because true pity is joined with a desire to help. I had no intention of putting myself and Timothy at risk for any of them.

But I was unexpectedly moved by the despairing recognition of the inescapable void, which was a note that twisted through the long, tortured death cry. The worst and best of humanity stand in the same cold shadow, and even a deserved death can send a shiver of sympathy through me from skin to marrow.

In the wake of the scream, the silence in the house pooled deep.

If we were contending only with the Outsiders, we might try to hide somewhere exceedingly clever for a few minutes, until it seemed that all the freaks must have ascended in the house, and then return to the basement. But the swine things would probably smell us out everywhere except in the airtight walk-in refrigerator off the kitchen.

Besides the possibility of being trapped inside the walk-in, I didn't want to hide in a refrigerator for the same reason I wouldn't have hidden in the communal cookpot in a village of cannibals.

To Timothy, I whispered, "Freaks inside the house, there's no longer any reason not to go outside, more places to run. Where are the controls for the security shutters?"

"I d-don't know."

"Any guess at all?"

"No," he said. "N-n-none."

He reached for me. I took his hand. It was small and cold and damp with sweat.

In the ninety-five years of his singular existence, he had read thousands of books, which together comprised most of his experience. Thousands of lives in thousands of books, lived vicariously, plus so many years of grim familiarity with the many horrors of Roseland, yet he not only kept his sanity but also, in some part of his mind and heart, he remained a little boy, having held tightly to a kernel of innocence. Under the most oppressive and depressing circumstances, he had preserved at least a measure of the purity with which he was born.

I could not have done as much in his position, and I dreaded failing him, which I had been certain I would since that trusting smile he had given me on the service stairs.

The continuing silence seemed both to invite us to get moving and to warn us against rash action.

Diagonally across the vast room, near the southeast corner, the hidden service door in the paneling opened, and Mrs. Tameed entered like an experienced cop clearing a threshold: staying low, pistol in a two-hand grip, sweeping the muzzle left to right.

Although we were at the farther end of the room and in shadow, she saw us, and I could almost feel her fury before she spoke.

"You scum-sucking sonofabitch," she hissed, perhaps so chastened by the current peril that she felt obliged to clean up her language at least to some extent. "You let them into the house."

As I'd done with Timothy in the basement, I held a finger to my lips to convey my belief in the desirability of silence, because no matter how much we might despise each other, trading insults right now might bring upon us the fate of Jam Diu and Shilshom.

She took a shot at me.

Forty-four.

JUST BECAUSE MRS. TAMEED WAS TO WICKEDNESS WHAT Albert Einstein was to modern physics, just because she had never met a vice that she didn't embrace, just because she wallowed in depravity, just because she was insane, didn't mean that she shouldn't have the common sense to recognize what behavior was called for in the current situation. Ranting at me and shooting at me would draw the freaks to us.

Most insane people with a taste for homicide are cunning if not wise. They are as concerned with their survival as they are with finding a virgin to decapitate or a child to strangle. Mrs. Tameed's noisy antics were foolish. I was of a mind to tell her as much.

She shot at Timothy and me again. At a distance of sixty feet, especially in a cluttered and shadowy environment, you have to be a good marksman to plug your target. She missed.

I couldn't hit her from sixty feet, especially because guns are always a last resort with me, even if I am often given no choice but to use them.

Her third shot buzzed wasplike past my right ear, an inch from a bad sting.

Turning my back on the Amazon, expecting her to put a lucky shot through my spine, I pulled Timothy with me toward the second service door that was nearly hidden in the paneling, which I had used before when I'd gone to the library. As we approached it, the door started to open, and I drew the boy at once toward the hinge side, so that we were concealed behind it as it swung wide.

Although I couldn't immediately see who had entered, a low growl identified the newcomer as one of the yellow-eyed pack. When it took two steps into the room, its immense muscular back was toward us.

The door began ever so slowly to ease shut, further exposing the boy and me. Because it was a door intended not to disrupt the lines of the paneling, it had no knob or lever that I could easily grasp to prevent it from arcing away from us. When you wanted to open it, you pushed on it to disengage a touch latch, and you pulled it open with a finger groove concealed under a strip of molding.

The freak stopped where it was and stared across the drawing room at Mrs. Tameed, whom I could still see in the shadowy distance. Muttering to itself, the beast brandished its hatchet at her.

Mrs. Tameed fired two more rounds. She seemed to be aiming at me rather than at the brute that should have been of more concern to her.

The slugs cracked into the wood paneling. I supposed that no sooner had the wounds in the wall opened than the Methuselah current began rewinding the damage.

The freak issued a noisy challenge, half bleat and half roar.

Mrs. Tameed began shouting at it, calling it a stupid pig, though she tossed the F word in both before and after stupid. She shouted at it to look behind itself and encouraged it to "Get the bastard, get him, gut him."

I never imagined that the freaks could understand English, and I guess they couldn't, because this one just shrieked at her again and raised its hatchet high.

The wide-set eyes on its long skull provided it with excellent peripheral vision. If Timothy or I made the slightest move, the creature might become aware of us.

In that case, I would need a lot of luck to take it down before it could fully turn and swing the hatchet at me. Its arms were long enough to reach me if it lunged just one step.

Slowly, so the movement might not draw its attention, hoping to shoot it before it sensed us, I raised the Beretta.

The service door that had been drifting shut was suddenly thrust open. A second freak entered behind the first. This one didn't entirely clear the door, which rested against its flank.

The new arrival was so close that I could have touched it without completely extending my arm. I had no hope of killing both of them before one of them could kill us.

If the excitement of the recent slaughter hadn't caused the creatures to mutter continuously and to growl low in their throats, they would have heard me trying-and failing-not to breathe.

Mrs. Tameed fired another round, perhaps this time at one of the freaks.

The brute in the lead threw his hatchet at her with such force and accuracy that it spun across the drawing room and embedded its blade in her chest.

Mrs. Tameed's claim to immortality and the absolute license of a god had been declared invalid. Her death came so suddenly that she didn't have a chance to cry out in protest.

As the woman dropped, the hatchet-throwing freak loped toward her, shrieking in triumph as it crossed the drawing room. There was something apelike about it, too, perhaps because it moved rather like a man but was not a man, though also because its emotions were always at the surface and instantly expressed in action, as were those of the lower primates. And it had an apelike capacity for violence so extreme that each of its killings was also an atrocity that made Constantine Cloyce's murders seem like the work of a prim and proper villain in an Agatha Christie mystery.

Watching the thing caper toward the body of Mrs. Tameed, I was reminded of that unspeakably awful news story a few years back, the one about the innocent woman who was attacked by her friend's large and enraged pet chimpanzee. It bit off her fingers, plucked out her eyes, and tore off her face all in a frenzied half minute.

The second freak remained within arm's reach of us, the door against it and half concealing it. Although shadows swaddled the boy and me, light from the service hallway behind the beast revealed the side of its head, a hideous profile. This was the face of something designed to strike fear in the hearts of all who saw it, designed to terrorize and kill. By the mutilation and desecration of its victims, it left survivors with the demoralizing thought that human beings were nothing but meat, just another animal in a world where there was no natural law, where the only virtues were strength, power, cruelty, and ferocity.

Pressed against me, Timothy shuddered uncontrollably. I held fast to him with one hand, worried that the proximity of the freak would at some point make him reckless with fear, and that he would bolt.

Maybe he really did want to be taken back into the past and no longer be a perpetual boy, to have his life ended on the night that his father shot him. But no matter the depth of his despondency, he couldn't want to fall into the hands of one of the freaks, look into those yellow eyes as the talons tore him open and the teeth bit into his face.

To die that way would be perhaps to die twice, the first death being that of the soul, of the sense that there was anything unique and sacred about humanity, the second death being merely physical.

The creature at the door hissed and gnashed its teeth as it watched its companion make its way through the groups of furniture, knocking a lamp off a table, overturning a chair.

At the farther end of the drawing room, the triumphant beast set upon the body of Mrs. Tameed. Shrieking in glee, it rended her as a furious child might rend a doll. The killing itself was not satisfying enough and must be followed by one outrage after another.

We were in Poe territory again, this time "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," where the ape in the night, straight razor in hand, does not find murder alone sufficiently rewarding and must visit some indignity on the bodies of its victims.

The brutal sounds of dismemberment caused Timothy to shake more violently than ever. If he began to sob again, as he had done when listening to Shilshom's protracted death scream, he would reveal our presence and assure that we would go the way of Mrs. Tameed.