Alternate Routes

by Tim Powers

  Santiago sat on the deck just behind Vickery and Castine, and Vickery gunned the engine experimentally, and pumped the brakes. Everything seemed to work well enough, and the dashboard metronome was motionless, so he shifted the truck into reverse and backed around in a half-circle, then shifted to low gear.

  “But,” said Castine, apparently continuing a line of thought she’d been pursuing, “not if it involves you going back into the Labyrinth!”

  “No,” agreed Vickery, with feeling. He could comfortably have carried Amanda’s ghost, silent and safe and inert in the pinecone, for the rest of his life; but in the Labyrinth—even if a second trip didn’t trap him forever in that insane hell—he might have to face her ghost again, hear what it would say to him.

  He began driving up the path to Mulholland Drive. “No,” he repeated; and just in case he might later change his mind, he reached to the side, took hold of the metronome’s upright pendulum by the bone knob on top, then nodded, snapped it off and tossed it out the window.

  Brett and Ollie, senior officers, waited in the administration office for the inspector, while in the break room Terracotta went through the motions of conducting the prescribed activities of the Operations Extension of the Transportation Utility Agency.

  The assignment packets he had passed out to the dozen uneasy staff members were, in some cases, weeks old, and he knew that they were a waste of time in any case. The NSA wanted an interview with a Chinese embassy clerk who had been killed in a wreck on the 405, TUA headquarters was asking for interviews with anyone who had died on or near the 210/605 intersection between certain hours on a date a week ago, and there was even a request from an attorney having to do with a probate case; at least those would involve summoning ghosts. But there were also requests for analyses of highway deaths of American citizens in Moscow and Riyadh and Mumbai, which would be completely pointless. Terracotta knew these little goals were all just scattered artifacts, incidental noise at the periphery of a single entirely different, and transcendent, purpose.

  Somebody had put a plate of broccoli and tofu in the microwave and then left it there after the bell pinged, and now the smell of it on the air-conditioned breeze made Terracotta wrinkle his nose. He wished the inspector would arrive and then leave, so that he could get back to the important work; before reluctantly leaving the radio in Room One to convene this sham meeting, he had briefly got Amanda Woods on the ghost frequency, and under feedback duress she had said that Woods was for some reason back on Mulholland Drive. The contact had lasted only a few seconds—Terracotta had switched on the microphone as she’d been babbling something about a pinecone, and when he switched it off, she had said, Mulholland, please, Mulholland again.

  “Uh . . . is everyone clear on his or her assignment?” Terracotta asked now, pushing his chair back from the table and standing up.

  They all gave him blank-faced nods, and he said, “Fine,” and walked out of the room into the big warehouse space just as Ollie emerged from the office two doors down, pocketing his phone. Brett was already walking out away from the office. Terracotta didn’t look toward the north end of the warehouse, where the ghosts still stood against that wall. He assumed his father’s ghost was still among them, but he couldn’t bring himself to make sure.

  “Show time, boss,” Ollie said, pointing across the broad floor. Terracotta took a deep breath and straightened his shoulders before turning to look toward the parking lot door.

  Brett had opened the door, and a lean, silver-haired man in a business suit was for a moment silhouetted by the daylight outside, and then Brett was escorting him into the building. Four younger men in suits followed him in, and then the door was closed.

  “Mr. Terracotta?” called the silver-haired stranger when he was still a dozen yards away across the blue floor.

  Terracotta stepped forward—

  But he rocked to a halt when the broad doors on the south side of the warehouse shuddered, shed clouds of rust, and, with a prolonged screech that echoed in the big warehouse space, began to move apart on their long-unused tracks. A billowing cloud of sand blew in through the widening gap, and the old truck tire that hung above it rocked and swung and then fell; the tire struck the floor and bounced high, and through the churning curtain of sand Terracotta could see that it was now hanging unsupported in mid-air. His nose stung with the smell of ozone. A roar like truck engines sounded from beyond the separating doors.

  Terracotta glanced quickly around, and it was clear that this was not some private hallucination of his own. Several of the staff had hurried out of the break room, and at least a couple of them were now running away from the opening south wall.

  “Turn off all communication devices!” shouted the inspector. The ghosts who had been standing by the north wall were now moving out across the floor, and the inspector sprinted right through several of them on his way to the office door.

  Clearly he had not seen the ghosts, but the four men with him did; they stepped wide around the wobbling figures, eyeing them in alarm, and one man called, loudly over the engine noise, “Which one is Terracotta? We have to act now.”

  Smoky silhouettes of old trucks were moving through the big opening now, images from the days when this place had been a working warehouse.

  Brett was holding a handkerchief across his nose, but he pointed toward Terracotta with his free hand. “Gray pony-tail,” he called back. “Not here! Big Bear.”

  Et tu, Brett! thought Terracotta. But they don’t dare kill me here in this current, in this tsunami. They aim to take me to where they can do it.

  Promoted sideways!

  He feinted to the right, toward the office, then dug the toes of his Birkenstock sandals into the vinyl floor and ran for the parking lot door, knowing even as he ran that they’d catch him before he could punch in the code.

  But one of the ghosts had stepped between him and the four men, and one of the men yelled in surprise and fell over backward, and when Terracotta glanced that way he saw that a hose or cable connected the ghost’s head to the fallen man; and when it retracted and struck another of them, Terracotta saw that it must be the ghost’s tongue—and the ghost was his father’s. A gunshot rang echoes around the walls, apparently hitting no one and possibly aimed at the ghost.

  Out across the floor somewhere, the inspector was shouting, “Shut it all down right now, kill the momentum!”

  Terracotta had reached the door, and his hand was tapping out the code. Looking back as he pushed the door open, he saw figures struggling in the whirling veils of sand, and Brett running out of the confusion toward him; but the tongue, if it was a tongue, sprang out of the cloud and hit Brett in the side of the head; he tumbled forward onto the floor, and Terracotta stepped outside, slammed the door behind him and hurried down the sidewalk to his own car.

  Deleted persons are not the people they derive from, he reminded himself feverishly as he got in and started the engine. It was not my father, back there, who saved me from being driven to a place far from the freeway current and killed. In any case, love—and forgiveness!—are poisonous unwelcome illusions!

  He rocked the car in reverse out of the parking space and then drove forward to the gate; for several anxious seconds he waited, wondering if Brett and the inspector could possibly have had time to delete his transponder code from the security system. But the gate rolled back at last, even as the rearview mirror showed him people staggering out of the warehouse door after him, and he sped through and turned right on Bandini to get onto the 110 north, to the Pasadena Freeway. He knew that he, or something inside him or something he was inside of, had to be at the omphalos now. There was no longer any hope of getting a TUA team together to find Woods, and it was apparently no longer necessary anyway.

  Sounds and colors had become less distinct, and he knew that his superfluous personality was, finally, close to being entirely consumed by the perpetual chaotic ground-state remembered in mythology as the Minotaur. It was confined in the Labyrinth and it w
as the Labyrinth—the terrain is the body, the map is the anatomy chart—but Terracotta, or it through him, had done enough now to bring the freeways into the identity of the Labyrinth, allowing, no, forcing, a long-delayed, long-impeded consummation. And it surely was at hand.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “It’s letting up,” said Castine.

  When they had turned south from Mulholland onto Cahuenga and driven for two tense but uneventful minutes, she turned on both of the radios. They were tuned to KOXR 910, and the mariachi music vibrating out of both sets of speakers was synchronized.

  “I should get news,” she added, reaching for the tuning knob on the dashboard radio.

  “Leave it,” Vickery told her, “you’d have to hunt and then get the same station on both of them, and things might change fast.”

  On the freeway lanes visible beyond the row of trees to their left, traffic was moving, though slowly, and in several quick glances Vickery had seen only a couple of instances of cars crumpled together, with other cars edging around the collisions in a fairly orderly way. Maybe it hasn’t been too bad yet, he told himself.

  “Oh, do let’s make this quick,” said Castine, her voice strained, “with this old crutches guy! We need to be going north, or east, soon, as fast as this damn truck will go. With luck we can be in Lancaster or Palm Springs before your horrible magic current starts up again.”

  Santiago was leaning forward between the seats. “He’s at Griffith park. The observatory.”

  Vickery glanced at Castine. “That’s not far, and no freeways.” She shook her head impatiently.

  Santiago shifted his sneakers on the vinyl kitchen deck. “This is a food truck,” he added.

  Vickery dismissed a sarcastic reply and said, “Yes, Santiago.” Then he added, “Oh! Are you hungry? Go ahead and microwave something.”

  Castine muttered under her breath, then said, “I guess I wouldn’t mind another burrito.”

  “Me either,” said Vickery. Santiago had already shuffled back into the kitchen, and Vickery called, “Make it three!”

  The freeway to their left was higher now, rising toward a bridge over an onramp, and to their right was a weedy slope and a row of seven cypress trees beyond the sidewalk—and in front of the first cypress stood a small figure with its right arm extended. Vickery was concentrating on staying in his lane and watching for deformations of the landscape, but Castine touched his arm and pointed.

  The hitchhiker was the girl in overalls and straw hat.

  After a moment’s hesitation, Vickery slowed, then swung the truck close to the curb. He passed the girl, but as soon as her face had appeared outside the passenger side window, it remained there, motionless in the window frame, as he braked to a halt.

  Castine opened the door—and Vickery gasped in surprise, for the image of the girl stayed in the window glass as the door swung away, and there was no one standing on the sidewalk. In the window glass, viewed nearly end-on, he saw the girl’s face narrowed by perspective, and then it was gone.

  Castine slowly closed the door.

  Vickery looked ahead, and in the passenger side mirror, but there was no one at all on the sidewalk.

  Several seconds later, after a couple of cars behind him honked, he lifted his foot from the brake; the idling engine rolled the truck forward slowly, and he moved his foot to the gas pedal and accelerated back up to thirty miles an hour, passing a median pedestal indicating the entrance to the Hollywood Bowl.

  “Hollywood Bowl,” Castine noted emptily. She cleared her throat and went on, “I won’t roll the window down for a while.”

  Vickery nodded. The lost little ghost girl, who liked to imagine that she was the character in that book, might reappear in the glass.

  At Franklin, Vickery turned left, and soon they were driving between old apartment buildings and cars parked fender-to-fender along the curb. He drove more slowly, careful not to clip the parked cars or drift into the next lane, and when Castine touched his arm again he didn’t spare her a glance until he had stopped at a red light.

  She nodded over her shoulder, back toward the dim kitchen, and when he turned around he saw two small silhouettes leaning over a counter. When the door of the microwave oven was briefly opened, he saw again the pale face he had seen moments earlier in the passenger side window.

  He looked at Castine. She was frowning with evident concern, and mouthed, Can they eat?

  “No,” he whispered. “It’s for us.”

  The light turned green and he drove forward, and a minute later he heard the microwave oven ping behind him. Vickery risked a quick look back toward the kitchen, and Santiago was now the only one back there.

  The boy sidled up between the seats and handed him and Castine each a hot burrito wrapped in paper towels. Vickery reached forward and set his on the dashboard to cool off. Santiago was already eating one.

  “You had . . . help, back there?” Vickery said.

  “Yeah,” said the boy around a mouthful. He swallowed, then added, “I didn’t know how to work a microwave.”

  “I guess she picked that up sometime,” said Castine softly.

  “She looked at the food,” Santiago went on, “like she would have liked some, but she didn’t touch it.”

  Maybe she liked Mexican food when she was alive, Vickery thought.

  At Western he turned north, and soon the avenue became Los Feliz Drive, with a tight turn northeastward, and now it was palatial houses above ascending green lawns on either side.

  Castine had resignedly taken a bite of her own burrito. “I’d get tired of a steady diet of these,” she remarked, “but right now they’re damn good.” She looked at Vickery. “Who was Hipple?”

  Vickery dismissed the little girl from his thoughts. “Oh,” he said, “small-time blackmailer, forger, ghostmonger. And painter—I always knew he did those pet portraits, by mail, with ads in the Pennysaver and all, but yesterday I found out he did portraits of ghosts, too, which were supposed to keep them anchored on this side, in exchange for . . . I don’t know, useful information, blackmail stuff, I imagine. And for a while he was claiming he could get the ghosts of writers like Auden and Yeats to sign books posthumously—which some collectors value way more than books the poets signed when they were alive—but it turned out he was faking the signatures.”

  He steered the truck left on Vermont and followed the curving road up the hill between old trees and close-set houses.

  “I knew about him from my days as a cop,” Vickery went on, “and when I recovered from being shot by your TUA comrades four years ago, I went to him for help getting a fake identity, this Sebastian Vickery identity. I figured we had enough on each other to keep us mutually quiet, but after a while he wanted to make it blackmail, hinting that he might accidentally tell certain people about Herbert Woods if I didn’t give him access to valuable ghosts that I came across in my work for Galvan.” He smiled mirthlessly. “And then he did try to sell me out to the TUA, but our little Mary warned me away from him, and Galvan stepped in with a more reliable plan to get me, and at that point the TUA clearly had no more use for the . . . inconveniently informed Hipple.”

  “And Mary warned you off then too,” said Castine.

  Vickery nodded and quickly looked back again, but the little girl had not reappeared. “That’s right. Anyway, that’s how Hipple was—somebody was bound to kill him sooner or later.”

  “He always wanted to buy my wrist-bands,” said Santiago from behind the seats. The boy held out one arm between Vickery and Castine, and the leather band swung loosely on his wrist as the truck rocked along. “My parents are in them,” Santiago went on. “He said he just wants to give them a safe home, up on the shelf with his pipes and old teeth, but I know he would say he would burn them, if I didn’t do stuff for him.”

  “I’m glad he’s dead,” said Castine with a shiver.

  “I imagine a lot of people will be,” said Vickery.

  Castine shifted in her seat. “You know what
he had in his bedroom? I looked in there, searching for my gun. Hung on the walls are about a dozen self-portraits.”

  Vickery thought of the pinecone in his pocket. “He decided to just hide out, instead. Insensibly, forever.”

  The curling road had narrowed to two lanes and climbed up into the hills, out of the clusters of houses, and now the truck was passing only occasional weather-twisted trees, with an ascending slope to the left and a precipice to the right.

  “Not far,” said Castine.

  “We’re almost there,” Vickery said, and he ignored a skeptical look from Santiago.

  “You met this Laquedem guy yesterday,” Castine said to Vickery. “Is he another . . . ghostmonger, like Hipple?”

  “No,” said Santiago sharply. “Whatever that means. He’s nothing like Hipple.”

  “Sorry,” said Castine. “Okay.” She turned in her seat to face the boy. “Do you know what plan he might have, for closing off the—” She nodded back down the hill, “—the Labyrinth?”

  “If I did, I would still let him tell you. Your people opened it up.”

  “Not my people anymore. You were there when I lost my job two days ago . . . and picked yourself up a gun.”

  Remembering that Santiago had extorted three hundred dollars from Castine for the return of her own gun, now lost, Vickery thought it was time to change the subject—but something twitched in his shirt pocket, and he jumped and slapped at it before remembering that he had put the Hipple pinecone there.

  “What?” asked Castine in alarm. Santiago was staring at him.

  “It’s just the pinecone —” he began, but the battery-powered radio abruptly stopped playing music, and a man’s hoarse voice came scratching out of its speakers.

  “Hello-o—hello-o,” it rasped. “Is this the Gulf of Mexico?” Then it began making a choppy sound that might have been an attempt at laughter, and it didn’t stop. The radio mounted in the dashboard kept on playing mariachi music.