Alternate Routes

by Tim Powers

  Vickery explained to Castine, “You people are evidently causing weird freeway conditions lately by calling up so many ghosts out of the current.”

  “Well why didn’t he say that?”

  “Miss Castine,” said Hipple, “did you see a man and woman climbing the hill, as you came down? The man probably still had a beard.”

  She blinked at him. “Yes.”

  “You need my help, not a pet portrait.” He shook his head sternly, as if she had come to him asking for one. “Only someone compromised by a ghost could have seen those two.”

  Castine bust out, “Oh, give me a break! What, they were some of your ghosts? Easy to say, now that they’re gone.” She turned to Vickery. “I’ve got to get a phone. This man’s a charlatan. Deleted persons have no visible substance. We researched that.”

  “He’s a lot of things,” said Vickery, “and probably a charlatan too, a lot of the time. But ghosts are visible to some people. And vice versa.”

  “And you’re one of those people,” said Hipple, apparently unoffended. “You are indeed trackable by them. Obviously you have been intimate with someone who died within the freeway current.”

  Vickery looked at Castine. “You were less than a hundred yards away from the freeway. These days that’s in the current.”

  “I was never intimate with him!” she protested. “This is ridiculous.”

  “Did you kill him?” asked Hipple.

  “What? What’s that got to do with—”

  “Answer him,” said Vickery. “Or I will.”

  Castine bit her lip. “Yes. I—I killed him.”

  Hipple nodded. “Ending someone’s earthly life from him is about as intimate as you can get. Was this recent?”

  “An hour or so ago,” said Vickery.

  Hipple stood up and crossed to a television set beside the computer, and twisted a knob; the screen stayed dark. Then he stepped to a door in the south wall and pulled it open. Sudden bright daylight showed drifts of dust on the pattern of the rug underfoot, and a breeze tossed Castine’s short hair and fluttered papers on the table. Fresh air blew away the tobacco and onion smells.

  Vickery and Castine followed him and looked out over a view of descending green canyons to the distant spires along Sunset Boulevard. Vickery looked straight down, then took a step back; the house sat flush on the edge of a sheer cliff, and he estimated the drop beyond the threshold to be a hundred feet.

  “That’s a door you don’t have to lock,” said Castine, stepping back herself.

  “On the contrary,” said Hipple, moving back to the television, “I get more visitors by way of that door than the one you came in through. The couple you saw climbing away up the hill, for example.” The television screen now glowed gray. “Let’s see how close your astral companions are. Stand closer to the door so everybody can see you.”

  “I don’t want to be seen!” said Castine.

  “I don’t think I do either,” said Vickery. “Just tell us how to hide ourselves from them!”

  “I need to know how heavy a dose to prescribe.” Hipple crouched beside the television, peering at the screen. “Analog TV broadcasts stopped eight years ago, so there’s bandwidth free for a more fleeting sort of signal on this old set.” He sat back on his heels. “Ah, Sebastian, do you recognize this face?”

  Vickery peered warily at the screen, and saw a brighter oval against the gray, with dark spots that might have represented eyes and a mouth. The mouth spot was changing shape, as if the face were trying to speak.

  It might have been an image of Amanda. “Switch it off, damn it!” Vickery said hoarsely.

  Hipple shrugged and clicked the channel selector knob a few notches.

  After a few seconds he said, “Miss Castine, does this seem to be your intimate friend?”

  Castine glanced at the screen, where another pale oval was collecting.

  “No,” she snapped; then added, “Turn it off.”

  Hipple chuckled indulgently and clicked the set off. “The surprising thing, really, is not that their unwitting self-portraits on the cathode ray tube are good, but that ghosts can produce them at all. And your two admirers are in fact very local and wide awake.”

  Vickery glanced at the open doorway, and saw two vertical areas where the sky appeared to be rippling, as if seen through agitated water. He stepped forward and closed the door firmly.

  “Oh,” said Hipple, straightening up, “yes. You don’t want them coming through here and scampering away up the hill as well.”

  Vickery suppressed a shiver, and Castine muttered under her breath.

  “So how do we evade them?” Vickery asked, trying not to imagine his wife’s ghost hovering insubstantially in mid-air outside the closed door.

  “I charge fees for consultation, Sebastian.”

  “Sorry, what? Oh—I have money.”

  “I’m sure you do, and I’ll be happy to take some of it for incidental extras, but for my expert consultation . . .” He squinted from one of his guests to the other. “You’re both carrying guns. Miss Castine, is yours the one you killed—” he nodded toward the dark television, “—with?”

  “Well . . . yes.”

  “I’ll take that for your payment. A weapon that’s participated in killing a person never loses a valuable connection with that event. Sebastian, how about yours? Was it ever used to kill a person?”

  Vickery looked at Castine, and after a moment she nodded. “Terry shot one of your crazy freeway gypsies last year.” She faced Hipple. “I’m not giving you my gun. It’s registered in my name, I could get in big trouble. And until I can get in touch with a certain person, I think I need to have a gun.”

  “I’ll provide you with replacements in exchange,” Hipple assured her. “I’ve got a couple of unassociated .45 autos, 1911 model.”

  Castine shook her head. “How do we know they’re not stolen? And in California you can’t legally just—”

  “For God’s sake, Ingrid,” interrupted Vickery, “you’ve got bigger problems.”

  Her face lost all expression, and Vickery wondered if she was about to cry.

  She closed her eyes for a moment. At last, “I’ve always obeyed the law,” she said quietly. “Even with Abbott, it was a justifiable shooting.”

  Vickery thought of reminding her that she had almost certainly broken the law by warning him of the imminent arrest this morning; but, remembering that again, he just said gruffly, “He can have the gun I picked up this morning, and you can keep yours.”

  “Miss Castine’s has the greater value,” interjected Hipple, “having done its spiritual work this very day. I want both.”

  For several seconds no one spoke.

  “Very well,” said Castine finally, “yes, I’ll do it.” She smiled at Vickery for the first time, though it was an uncertain smile, accompanied by a worried frown. “We’ve fallen outside the law, haven’t we? Even,” she added, waving toward the southern door, “outside natural law. I don’t know what I’m doing out here.” She coughed out two syllables of a laugh. “I watch myself walk and talk, but I don’t know what I’m doing!”

  Hipple folded himself back into his chair and tapped the table. “Bring out your dead.”

  Vickery pulled the gun from his belt and laid it on the table. Castine made an aimless gesture, then quickly reached around behind her back, drew her gun, and clunked it down beside the other. The two stainless steel semi-automatics gleamed in the light from the western windows.

  “Okay,” said Hipple. “There are several things you should do and not do. Time spent in the ghost currents is said to keep a person young, but of course you must try to stay out of them. Ghosts are—”

  A gust of wind shook the abyss door, and Vickery thought it went on rattling for a moment or two after the gust had abated.

  “Ghosts,” Hipple went on more loudly, “are compatible with alkaline bloodstreams, so you should be acidic—drink lots of Cokes and coffee, eat roasted nuts, blueberries, prunes. Pickle
s, chocolate. Right? You probably don’t want to go into stores with security cameras, but I have packets of these things that I can sell you for plain cash. But avoid hard liquor—a lot of ghosts miss it, and they’re drawn to the smell. And you want to change the aspects of yourselves that ghosts can recognize, so get rid of your rings, get uncharacteristic used clothes and wear them inside out or backward, replace your shoes with used ones as often as you can, part your hair on the other side if not shave it all off, wear your watches on the other wrist and set to the wrong time. You’re pretty untrackable while you’re on that velocipede you rode here, but of course stay off freeways if you can; and if you’re in a car, be ready with a portable radio to check your immediate surroundings. Hop on one foot as much as is convenient. I have pogo sticks for sale with durable pads made of human hair, and these have proven effective. When using a rest-room—”

  “Spare me,” interrupted Castine. She glared at Vickery. “For this lot of nonsense I’m giving up my SIG?—and getting a .45 with a seven-round magazine? Pickles? Pogo sticks? What kind of—”

  “This is good, as far as it goes,” interrupted Vickery, “some of it, anyway, but—”

  “And I can provide ten-round magazines for the .45s,” said Hipple. “With one in the pipe, you’ve got eleven shots.”

  “But,” Vickery went on, turning to Hipple, “aren’t there ways to repel ghosts?—besides just eating a lot of chocolate? I mean, this is all good-sounding advice for avoiding their notice, but if one catches us with our shoes off or no part in our hair at all—how can we drive it off?” He made himself not look at the closed southern door.

  Hipple rocked his head judiciously. “I won’t lie to you, there’s nothing foolproof. I can sell you a couple of spirit-level stars and fixed compasses, those can disorient ghosts . . . and it might help to recite the multiplication tables in a loud voice; math is deterministic, and ghosts are an effect of possibility extended beyond reason. It might repel them—they wouldn’t like ‘to know that two and two are four, and neither five nor three,’ as A.E. Housman wrote.” He leaned back and shook his head. “Get used shoes and don’t take them off.”

  Castine was rubbing her temples as if she had a headache. “What,” she asked with labored patience, “are spirit stars and fixed compasses?”

  Hipple got up and crossed to a bookcase, and when he returned to his chair he was carrying a wooden cigar box. He pulled out of it a pocket compass and held it out on his palm.

  “The needle points north, you see; but—” He flipped it over to show a knurled knob on the underside. To Vickery the thing now looked like a speed-loader for a revolver. “By twisting this knob,” Hipple went on, “you can fix the needle in one position. Swing the compass around in a circle then, and the apparent shifting of north might induce a terminal y-axis spin in a ghost.”

  “Unless he won’t look at it,” said Vickery.

  “True,” admitted Hipple. He now lifted from the box a plastic disk on which eight little glass tubes were glued like spokes on a wheel. Each tube was partially filled with clear lucite, with a motionless bubble in the center of it.

  “They’re levels, you see. But each one in the ring is defining a different line as level. Looking at this might induce a negating z-axis spin in an attentive ghost.”

  An attentive ghost, thought Vickery. I don’t think they’re ever very attentive.

  Hipple produced another of each device and slid all four across the table. “You owe me eighty bucks. And you’ll probably want some packets of dried prunes and blueberries, and some Hershey bars, and maybe a couple of—”

  “No pogo sticks today,” rasped Castine.

  Vickery was squinting skeptically at the objects on the table. “The old gypsies talk about some brass thing that repelled ghosts like WD-40 repels water.”

  Hipple smiled. “Yes, it’s supposed to have been a brass capital letter L, as big as a chair. Some fellow brought it through the omphalos, the story goes, in 1960, from the other side, from the desert-highway afterlife. They say it was a supremely effective ghost repeller, but people got cancer if they owned it for very long, and it disappeared about thirty years ago. The word is that the Vatican bought it, and keeps it in a lead box.”

  “Is this the same guy,” asked Vickery, “who supposedly did some kind of phase-change on the freeway around then, and just disappeared, car and all?”

  Hipple shrugged. “Could be. If it ever happened at all. Stick to the multiplication table.”

  “This is the second time,” said Castine, “that you’ve mentioned this omphalos. It sounds like something a proctologist would look for.”

  “It’s an exit on the Pasadena Freeway,” said Vickery, “where the freeway current was first used to open a conduit to the, uh, other side. That was in the ’40s, I think. It’s the center, the main . . . ghost drain, or ghost fountain.”

  “The Pasadena was the first freeway,” remarked Hipple, closing the cigar box, “and they didn’t know how to build them yet. The exits are too tightly curled for freeway velocities.” He stood up and stepped to the bookcase to put the cigar box back. “Of course,” he remarked over his shoulder, “sometimes a ghost can be induced to subsume itself forever in some organic physical object.” A pipe rack with a dozen pipes in it stood on a higher shelf, and he touched two briars and a corncob, as if picking out notes on a xylophone.

  Vickery nodded and said to Castine, “The wooden or bone knobs on the metronomes, for instance. The ghosts in those are in there for good.”

  “But that’s generally ghosts who are fairly exhausted,” said Hipple, turning back to the room, “or who were never born.”

  “They died,” said Castine, “but they were never born?”

  Vickery too was looking questioningly at Hipple.

  “They never lived or died,” said Hipple. “Expanded possibilities. In the desert-highway afterlife, personalities can exist whose potential for birth, for life, never quite got realized, for one reason or another. Children Romeo and Juliet would have had, as it were.”

  The dim room had come to seem narrow and oppressive, and Vickery reached into his pocket for the loose twenty dollar bills.

  “Fetch out those two .45s,” he said, “and we’ll take the compasses and the spirit-level rings. And a few packets of raisins or whatever. We’ve got to get moving.”

  Hipple sighed. “Very well . . . Herbert.”

  “It’s been fun,” Castine told him. “Sort of.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The glow through the skylights indicated that it was not much later than midafternoon, but Emilio Terracotta felt as if he had been running from room to room nonstop for days. He had sent an agent out for kale salad and tofu-and-avocado wraps more than once, and somebody had brought in bottles of Chardonnay, but all three auxiliary rooms were in tense use, and he had spent all his time crouched over one radio speaker or another, trying to derive sense from the frail voices vibrating out of them.

  The three men around each of the radios had asked their relay-worded questions endlessly, and several times they had got Amanda Woods, once for as long as twenty seconds; one of the agents in contact with her had stared at Google Earth on a laptop monitor and moved the view according to her breathless directions; and before the contact was lost, she had seemed to be indicating that Herbert Woods was somewhere along Mulholland Drive.

  But the ether was even more crowded with vociferous deleted persons today than usual, and Terracotta was sick of their whining demands for beer and tow trucks and baptism.

  He had stepped out of the third radio room, which had been the personnel break room until a few hours ago, and he blinked around in the wide, high-ceilinged warehouse space. To his tired eyes the blue-and-white checkerboard pattern on the walls seemed arranged to provoke some optical illusion, and he looked away from it and trudged down the row of doors to the administration office.

  The door was open, and he walked in and pulled it closed behind him. Ollie was talking on his ce
ll phone again, and Terracotta stepped around behind the desk and sat down in the padded office chair. Against the far wall was a big whiteboard with a grid of vertical and horizontal lines drawn in purple felt pen; the columns were labeled time, identity, questions asked, and questions ans’d, and most of the squares in the grid were blank.

  Ollie tapped his phone and put it away. “Westwood got some information about Herbert Woods’ marriage. He married Amanda Cantrell in ’06, she was twenty-three, he was twenty-five and he had been an LA cop for a year and a half at the time. They had cats, three of them over the six years of their marriage: Toby, Cosmo, and Myshkin. No kids, though. They both liked hang-gliding—they belonged to the Sylmar Hang Gliding Association, and Woods liked to build his own gliders. They visited San Francisco several times, and often ate at Alioto’s on Fisherman’s Wharf. Amanda’s mother’s name was Ruth, and she died when Amanda was twelve.”

  Terracotta nodded. “That’s good stuff, prime the radio boys with it. Mentioning the cats, for instance, might establish trust, keep her talking. And tell Westwood to try to find out what they ordered, at that restaurant. It wouldn’t hurt to mention foods she particularly likes.” He stood up and yawned. “I’m going to be outside.”

  Ollie nodded, and Terracotta walked out from behind the desk and left the office.

  As he walked across the wide blue floor, Terracotta was mildly surprised to see that there was a pack of Camel cigarettes in his right hand. He must have picked it up from a table in one of the radio rooms. It shouldn’t have been there, smoking was forbidden in the building . . . but a moment later he realized that he had a tactile memory of his hand pulling the pack out of his pants pocket.

  I must have bought it myself, he thought. Perhaps I’ve started smoking again. He touched the pocket and felt the once-familiar shape of a Bic lighter.

  Interesting, he thought.

  He tapped his code into a panel on the wall and pushed open the west door and stepped out, blinking in the sunlight, onto the breezy sidewalk that fronted the parking lot. He had called in personnel from the Victorville and Oceanside field offices, and gray Chevrolet sedans filled all eight parking spaces now, even with Abbott’s and Castine’s cars missing, and others were parked outside the fence along Bandini Boulevard, which was technically a violation of protocol.