Alternate Routes

by Tim Powers

  Vickery recoiled out of the vision, but the monster’s pointing arm moved, and he fell into another.

  A car with decals of faces all over it slammed into the side of a bus, then righted itself and sped away down a sunlit avenue that Vickery recognized as Second Street in Los Angeles. Two gray Chevrolets rounded a corner and raced after what Vickery now knew was Galvan’s Ford Taurus. Three gunshots could be heard over the roaring engines, and the Taurus swerved sharply, jumped a curb and tore through a chain-link fence and came to rest upside-down, tangled in the chain-link.

  Vickery was forcibly pulled out of the vision, and he was standing beside Castine in the archway. Her jaw was clenched with effort and her face was pale.

  “We,” she said, “did—not—die.”

  “See,” said the Minotaur, extending its arm again.

  The desert highway vision exploded into Vickery’s view again, and this time it was narrowed—he saw only the two men marching the third man down the slope; Vickery was able to recognize his own profile above the shoulders pulled back by the handcuffs.

  Exerting all his will power, he pulled the view back, so that he heard the single gunshot but didn’t see the result. The vision faded as the two men with guns were striding back up out of the gulley.

  There was no pause between the visions now.

  Again the sunlit expanse of Second Street filled his vision, and the inverted Taurus was closer, the wheels still spinning; the windshield was an opaque web, spotted with red—

  And the imposed daylight dimmed and was just the radiance thrown by the flapping glowing things in the big chamber, and Castine was panting beside him.

  “We did not die,” whispered Castine, swaying with the effort of pulling out of the vision.

  “See,” repeated the Minotaur—

  —And this time Vickery was looking straight down into the arroyo. The handcuffed man who was himself had been tripped and thrown to the ground, and the two armed men stepped back, one of them raising a gun—

  But the scene warped, and seemed to bubble away like a stuck movie frame melting in the heat of the projection bulb. In its place was a view of a slim teenaged girl sitting in a recessed window, reading a book by lamplight. Vickery was able to see the title of the book—it was The Secret Garden.

  The vision blinked away.

  Emilio Terracotta’s enormous head rocked back and its mouth opened, and the remembered inorganic bellow shook Vickery’s consciousness to fleeing fragments. The intolerable sound pulverized the sequence of time; while it continued, it was eternal.

  When at last it had stopped, and he had begun breathing again, and his senses had trickled back into the mental crater that had been his attention, Vickery was staring uncomprehendingly at a gaudy car sitting upside-down in a mess of chain-link fencing. But before he could muster anything like curiosity, distorting bubbles broke up the imposed vision, and when they cleared he was seeing a dark-haired young woman laying a baby in a crib in a room with Winnie-the-Pooh wallpaper.

  That vision too faded, and he found that he was sprawled on the cement floor of the archway. He rolled over, and felt the angular lump of the gun at the back of his belt; he reached around and tugged it out, and the feel of the grip in his hand roused a reflexive sense of urgency. A moment later he was up in a crouch, blinking around.

  Castine was on her hands and knees a yard away, gasping, her eyes squeezed shut. Vickery raised the gun and looked toward the Minotaur, but someone was standing now a few yards in front of him, facing it.

  He recognized the straw hat and the overalls.

  Beyond the diminutive figure of Mary, the towering half-man half-bull creature extended an arm and pointed again at the honeycomb cells on the wall, and Vickery glimpsed the pickup truck passing the parked car on the desert highway—but almost at once it was eclipsed by a fleeting vision of a middle-aged woman in a greenhouse, holding a pair of clippers and leaning over a rose bush.

  The visions, offensive and defensive, stopped altogether. The Minotaur’s massive arm dropped to its side. Vickery realized that Mary had disrupted the Minotaur’s lethal projections by interposing images of her own.

  The little girl looked over her shoulder at Vickery. “It can’t find a death for me,” she called. “I never lived.”

  Keeping a wary eye on the monster beyond her, Vickery said, “Those were scenes from a life . . . yours?”

  “Memories I picked up before the lizards could eat them. None of them—”

  The Minotaur lowered Terracotta’s huge horned head and shook the floor as it pawed up chunks of asphalt with its rear hooves. It lifted its massive front legs and brought them down hard as it began to lumber forward.

  Vickery raised the .45. Mary didn’t move, but he had long ago been trained to shoot precisely enough to miss close bystanders, and he fired twice past her, into the thing’s outsize human chest. The hard pops of the gunshots battered his ears.

  But the hollow-point 230-grain bullets had no effect, and Vickery spun with the recoil and threw his left arm around Castine, and both of them dove to the side, rolling out across the cracked asphalt floor.

  Vickery looked up in time to see Mary, who had apparently spun away out of the Minotaur’s path, lightly flick its tail.

  And the giant beast faltered at the negligible touch, then spun around, its hooves ripping up arcs in the asphalt—but Mary had skipped back. She had her straw hat in her hand now, and she waved it.

  “The other gun,” she called.

  Vickery opened his mouth to ask what she meant, when a bony white hand and forearm darted into his peripheral vision from behind him; the long fingers touched his wrist, cold as metal, and then the arm whipped back out of sight.

  The gun he was holding was now the .357 revolver with the cut-away Pachmayr grip: the gun that should no longer exist, the gun with which his wife had killed herself.

  And in the moment when the pale hand had been visible, he had seen the mate to his wedding ring on one thin finger.

  The Minotaur had swung Terracotta’s head back toward Vickery and Castine. Even as Mary darted in and touched the creature on the flank, Vickery raised the revolver and fired at the yard-tall face under the horns. The boom of the shot was louder than the previous two had been, and the glowing winged things scattered toward the walls.

  A black dot had appeared beside the nose and rocked the big head back, and the leg Mary had touched folded, causing the beast to sit down heavily. Vickery fired twice more, another shot into the big face and one into the broad human chest.

  The creature opened its mouth again, but it produced only the resonant note Vickery and Castine had first heard—and then the human parts of it, the face and arms and torso, gorily split and tore to pieces, leaving just the figure of a huge, raggedly beheaded bull.

  The glows of the flying things abruptly dimmed out, and the chamber was in darkness.

  “It can’t die,” came Mary’s voice, “but a never-born touching it, and bullets from a gun a human erased herself with, take away everything but its own self.” More loudly Mary said, “You’re on your paper airplane! Open your eyes!”

  Vickery closed his eyes in the darkness and then, with some unexpected effort, opened them again—and immediately had to squint against a battering headwind. His right hand was clutching the diagonal bar of the hang-glider wing instead of the gun, and his left arm was around Castine’s waist and his feet were firmly set on the horizontal control bar over the whirling abyss. Overhead, beyond the point where the leading edge bars were wired to the keel, was the round patch of night sky, with a faint scattering of real stars visible in it. Translucent human forms were reeling bonelessly into sight at the edges of the earthly sky and tumbling away down the core of the funnel, even as ghosts spiraling upward were bursting away into the night up there.

  Directly ahead of them, Mary gave one last wave for course-correction, and then disappeared over the top of the wing.

  The wing’s nose tilted up, threateni
ng a stall, and Vickery flung his weight forward, pulling Castine with him—and the wing jolted to an abrupt stop as it snagged against something, and the two of them were flung forward, airborne for a moment, and they slammed to solid ground and rolled across shadowed dirt tufted with patchy grass.

  Vickery came to rest lying on his side, gasping, and it was all he could do to lift his head. Nearby streetlights cast a fitful white glow, and with no surprise, but with profound relief, he recognized the trees and the freeway exit lane to his left; he and Castine were again in the triangular island beside the Pasadena Freeway at Avenue 34. The omphalos. Castine was lying one her back a yard away, and though her eyes were closed she was visibly breathing.

  He looked back. From wingtip to wingtip the hang glider was jammed across a luminous hole in the clearing, ballooning up and dimly lit at its edges by the amber glow that radiated up from beneath it; the black and blue lines on the vellum weren’t visible on the top side—the map was facing the other way, back down into the Labyrinth.

  The Labyrinth is facing itself, he thought.

  Castine had rolled over and hunched across the dirt to sit beside him, and now she too was staring toward the billowing underlit sheet of vellum. Their clothes were still damp, and she shivered in the breeze.

  “We did bring something real, hyper-real, back with us,” she said.

  Vickery nodded. “The wing. The map.”

  Ghosts like big gelatinous moths were faintly visible circling the glowing hole now, but they were dispersing, losing even their provisional diaphanous shapes as one by one they retreated away to the highest branches and the night sky beyond.

  The hyper-real wing, Vickery thought, is repelling them; just as the ghosts mounting the tornado from below are doubtless being repelled back downward. No more exchange of force-carrying particles.

  “Were we in time, do you think?” asked Castine, exhaustion giving her voice a tone of indifference.

  Vickery had sat up, but was postponing the effort of getting to his feet. He shrugged, feeling tension in his shoulders. “If we find ourselves suddenly in the Labyrinth—begging for cigarettes—we’ll know we weren’t.”

  Castine giggled for a moment, then choked it off. “Back in the Labyrinth, along with everybody who’s within a couple of miles of us right now, probably.”

  The light below the wing was dimming rapidly, and by the white streetlight radiance Vickery saw the expanse of vellum settling and collapsing.

  “I think we were in time,” said Castine.

  Vickery suppressed a groan as he got to his feet, and he limped across the clearing and paused a few feet away from what he could see of the vellum sheet. The glow beneath it had faded away completely. The ground appeared to be solid, and most of the structure of the wing was buried now. He stamped on the dirt, and it didn’t yield at all, so he edged forward carefully and put the weight of one foot on the half-buried vellum; and it rested on firm ground.

  He sighed deeply and felt the tense muscles in his shoulders begin to relax.

  He walked back to Castine and sat down beside her. “We were in time.”

  She was leaning back, staring into the sky between the treetops. “I don’t even see . . . that constellation now.”

  Vickery chuckled weakly. “Maybe we deleted it. Astronomers will remark.”

  For several minutes neither of them spoke. Then Castine said, “I need a bath, and decent clothes, like few people have ever need them before. Do you still have any money?”

  Vickery thought of his envelope full of twenty dollar bills, sunk with his leather jacket in the bubbling river in the Labyrinth.

  “A few twenties in my pocket, unless they’ve turned to mush.”

  “They probably have.” Castine yawned. “Maybe a homeless shelter. We’re homeless, aren’t we?”

  “I—”

  “Vickery,” came a voice from behind them, “and Betty Boop.”

  Vickery’s gun was gone, and neither he nor Castine was in any shape to try to run, or fight.

  He sighed and looked over his shoulder. A few yards away, the blocky figure of Lady Galvan stood with three taller silhouettes.

  “Where’s my taco truck?” she asked.

  “Oh,” said Vickery, “guess.” He shifted around to face her.

  She laughed merrily. “This here?” she said, slapping the shoulder of one of the men beside her. “This is one of my nephews, Carlos. I think you saved his life just now!”

  Vickery licked his lips, then managed to raise his eyebrows politely. “Oh?”

  “Sure. Your kite,” she said, nodding toward the flap of limp, half-buried vellum barely visible in the shadows cast by the trees, “smothered the fuse, didn’t it? Hah! The gypsies all said a big ghost bomb was gonna blow up LA if that hole didn’t get closed, and Carlos volunteered to jump into it, and do his best to shut the whole thing down. He’s got metronomes, holy water grenades, mirrors, a gun with silver bullets . . . but then you two came popping out, and the hole healed up.” She turned said and said, “Carlos, say thank you to the people who saved you from jumping in there.”

  One of the men beside Galvan shuffled forward across the dirt. He had on a bulky jacket and cargo pants, and at first Vickery thought he was wearing a backpack; then he noticed that there were straps across the man’s chest and between his legs. He was wearing a parachute.

  Carlos extended his right hand to Castine and said, “Thank you . . . very much.”

  “You’re welcome,” she said bewilderedly as she shook his hand. “You were going to—parachute down the hole?”

  Carlos didn’t answer, but moved to where Vickery sat and held out his hand again. “Thank you . . . very much.”

  “No hay de que,” replied Vickery, shaking the man’s hand. Carlos stepped back and, after glancing anxiously at Galvan and getting a nod, began pulling the parachute straps off.

  To Castine, Galvan said, “I promised to pay his debts and see that his wife and niños would be well taken care of, if he didn’t come back.” She shrugged. “Now it looks like they’re all on their own again.”

  Vickery took a deep breath and stood up, and he thought of Laquedem and Santiago. “You didn’t consider just . . . fleeing LA?”

  “I’ve got family from Venice to Whittier,” Galvan said. “I’d never have got them all out.”

  A movement on a tree branch behind Galvan caught Vickery’s eye. He looked more closely, and shivered, then said to Galvan, “I don’t think Carlos would have succeeded.”

  “Probably not,” she admitted.

  Vickery went on, rapidly, “We saved your family then. And you. That’s worth a lot more than your Taurus and your taco truck, right? So you have to do us a favor, right away.”

  Galvan rocked back and peered at him. “You did what you say. What do you want?”

  “What do we want?” echoed Castine as she too got to her feet.

  “There’s a Barnes and Noble on Colorado, five miles from here,” Vickery said, “just east off the 710, on the left, on the north side. Do you have somebody you can call who’s near there?”

  “I got family everywhere,” Galvan told him. She was smiling in puzzlement. “What, you want a book?”

  “Yes—and can you get somebody here, quick, who knows how to subsume ghosts into—you know, organic objects?”

  Galvan turned to another of the men behind her and spoke rapidly in Spanish. Turning back to Vickery, she said, “Yes, only ten minutes away. She charges fifty dollars.”

  “The favor includes you paying her,” he said. “Get her here, and get somebody to go to that Barnes and Noble and get a copy of—”

  Castine had noticed the motion on the tree branch too, and spoke in unison with Vickery when he said, “The Secret Garden”—and she added, “by Frances Hodgson Burnett.”

  Galvan apparently sensed Vickery’s urgency. She had a cell phone in her hand and was tapping in a number. She gave somebody directions to get to the bookstore, then put the phone back in he
r pocket. “She’ll call when she’s there, and you can tell her the name of the book.” One of the men behind her was talking on a cell phone now, and Galvan said, “He’s getting the woman who can put a ghost in a thing.” She shook her head and punched Vickery in the shoulder. “And I’ll pay the fifty bucks.”

  “Thank you. Now—wait here, would you?” He hesitated, then said, “Ingrid, you come along.”

  Together he and Castine limped across the grass and dirt to the tree by the exit lane. Sitting on a branch just above Vickery’s head, in the streetlight-shadows of the leaves, was the little girl, Mary, in her overalls and straw hat.

  “I’m—so sorry—” Vickery began, but Mary interrupted him.

  “I heard,” she said. “Will you read the book sometimes?”

  Vickery knew that it would always be an aching reproach to read the book that contained her, this imaginary girl, the daughter he should have had—but he nodded. “Every day.”

  “Thank you,” said Castine, “for guiding us, back there.”

  “No hay de que,” said Mary. “Don’t talk now—I need to hold myself till they get here.”

  Vickery sat down in the dirt, blinking back tears as he stared up into the little girl’s eyes, willing her not to disappear. After a while he heard Castine talking to someone, and then a car engine stopped on 43rd Street. A few minutes later he heard another car pull up, and then footsteps hurrying across the dirt.

  “The robin, with the key,” said Mary.

  EPILOGUE

  Westbound traffic on Old Man 10 was brisk on this late August morning, and chrome flashed under the cloudless blue sky as cars emerged from the shadows under the Crenshaw Boulevard overpass. The westbound onramp slanted down from Crenshaw to join the freeway, defining a wedge that widened as it extended back toward the overpass bridge.

  The slope directly under the bridge was cleared dirt, all too visible to passing cars, but the broad eastern end of the wedge, right up against the bridge abutment, was thick with olive and pepper trees, and Sebastian Vickery sat in the dappled shade, screened by green branches from the view of motorists rushing past below. Beside him was a jar half-full of water with a popsicle stick laid across the top, and a string tied to the popsicle stick hung down almost to the water. The string was dry.