Three Days to Never: A Novel

by Tim Powers

  The house lurched violently back to level solidity again, though the curtains in the front window didn’t even sway; and black smoke was jetting out of the vent slots in the VCR.

  Daphne was sobbing, and her ears were ringing, but she could hear her father in the hall shout, “Daph, the fire extinguisher, quick!”

  She got dizzily to her feet and blundered to the kitchen, and she muscled the heavy red cylinder up from beside the tool chest. Then her father was there, yanking it from her arms with a brief “Thanks!” and turning away—but instead of going straight across into the living room, he ran left, up the hall.

  Daphne peered around the corner after him, and saw smoke billowing out across the hall ceiling from the far-right-hand doorway—her bedroom.

  Her father could handle that. Daphne hurried back into the living room, coughing and blinking in the fumes of burning plastic, and she tugged the VCR’s cord from the wall and then yanked the still smoking thing down off the TV set; she gave it a few more jerks, and when it lay smoking on the rug, free of all connecting cables, she dragged it through the kitchen and out the door, onto the grass. She took a couple of deep breaths of the fresh air before hurrying back inside.

  She ran back through the kitchen and up the hall, and she stepped wide around the doorway to her room in case her father might come out fast; smoke made a hazy layer under the hall ceiling and the air smelled of burning cloth.

  Her father was shooting her blackened bed with quick bursts of white fog from the extinguisher, but the fire seemed to be out. Her pillow was charred, and the blue wall behind the bed was streaked with soot.

  She was wringing her hands. “What burned?”

  “Rumbold,” her father panted. Rumbold was a teddy bear Daphne’s mother had given her years and years ago. “Was there somebody in the house, at the door?”

  “Oh, I didn’t mean to burn Rumbold! No, that was in Grammar’s movie. It wasn’t Pee-wee, it was a scary movie. I’m sorry, Daddy!”

  “Your mattress might be okay. But we’d better drag your sheets and blankets and pillow outside. And Rumbold, what’s left of him.”

  The teddy bear had melted as much as burned, and Daphne carried him outside on a cushion because he was still very hot.

  “The VCR too?” her father asked in the fresh air as he stepped over the charred machine on his way to the trash cans.

  Trotting along after him, Daphne called, “Yes, it too. Dad, it was a really scary movie!” Tears blurred her vision—she was crying as much about Rumbold as about all the rest of it. The late afternoon breeze was chilly in her sweaty hair.

  Stepping around the truck, her father dumped the still smoking bedding into one of the cans.

  “I want to bury Rumbold,” Daphne said.

  Her father crouched beside her, wiping his hands on his shirt. “Okay. What happened?”

  “It was the movie—it wasn’t Pee-wee except for the first couple of minutes, then it was a black and white, a silent. And I felt myself falling—the whole house felt like it was falling!—and I grabbed on—I guess I grabbed the VCR and Rumbold, both.” She blinked at him through her tears. “I’ve never been that scared before. But how could I set stuff on fire?”

  He put his arms around her. “Maybe you didn’t. Anyway, the movie’s gone now.”

  His kindness, when she had expected to be yelled at, set her sobbing again. “She was a witch!” she choked.

  “She’s dead and gone. Don’t—”

  She felt her father shiver through his shirt, and when she looked up she saw that he was looking past her, down the driveway.

  Daphne turned around and saw Grammar’s old green Rambler station wagon rocking to a halt on the dirt driveway, thirty feet away, under the overhanging boughs of the Paraiso tree.

  Daphne had begun moaning and thrashing in her father’s arms before she heard him saying, “It’s not her! Daph! It’s some old guy, it’s not her! She’s dead and gone and her movie’s burned up! Look, it’s just some guy!”

  Daphne clutched her father’s shoulders and blinked fearfully at the car.

  There was only one person visible in it, a gray-haired man with a pouchy, frowning face; perhaps he had only now noticed the child and the crouching man beside the Ford truck. As she watched, the car quickly reversed out of the driveway back into the street, and then sped away east. She lost sight of it behind the fence and the trunks of the neighbor’s eucalyptus trees.

  “That was Grammar’s car!” Daphne wailed.

  “Yes it was,” her father said grimly, straightening up. “Probably that guy was the burglar who broke into Grammar’s house. Casing our place now, I bet.”

  “Her keys were gone,” said Daphne, shivering and sniffling now. “He must have waited till we were all gone, then took her car.” And followed us, she thought.

  “I’ll call the police. We’re dealing with thieves here, Daph, not witches.”

  And a girl who can set things on fire in rooms she’s not even in, Daphne thought unhappily. Even things she doesn’t want to burn up. What if I have nightmares about that movie? Could I set fires in my sleep?

  A shrill screeching from behind her made her jump and grab her father’s leg.

  He ruffled her hair. “It’s the smoke alarm, goof. It just now noticed that there was a fire.”

  Four blocks away, the green Rambler had pulled over to the dirt shoulder of Highland Avenue, and a couple of children on bicycles laughed to see the gray-haired old driver open the door and lean out to vomit on the pavement.

  Four

  When Lepidopt unbolted the door and pulled it open, Malk was startled by how exhausted the man looked—Malk knew Lepidopt was forty, but at this moment, with the lines in his hollow cheeks and the wrinkles around his eyes, and with the stray curls of his prayer-toupee stuck to his forehead, he looked twenty years older. In his hand was a piece of white paper that he had clearly written out as a report, in the strict Mossad format with the addressee and subject line underlined.

  Malk knew there was no superior officer for Lepidopt to give it to—it could only be a copy-to-file letter; a bit of kastach, covering one’s ass.

  “What did I miss?” Malk asked cautiously after he had stepped inside and Lepidopt had closed and rebolted the door. The curtains were drawn, and a lamp by the window had been switched on. “There was no particular man and girl at the Chinese Theater.”

  Young Bozzaris was standing in the kitchen doorway by the bowl of macaroni this time, silhouetted by the fluorescent ceiling light, and Sam Glatzer was sitting on the couch, asleep. The room smelled of salsa and corn tortillas.

  Lepidopt nodded. “No, they went straight home. Glatzer received another transmission.”

  Malk noticed the tape recorder on the coffee table, among a litter of greasy waxed paper and cardboard cups; apparently the transmission had arrived so suddenly that it had been easier to bring the recorder to Glatzer than to bring Glatzer to the recorder.

  “Any locators this time?”

  Lepidopt leaned his back against the curtained window and rubbed his eyes. “No, still no locators.” He lowered his hands. “Glatzer’s gamúr.”

  Malk looked again at the old man on the couch. Glatzer’s chin was on his chest, and he wasn’t moving at all. The holograph talisman lay on his belt buckle, its cord curled slackly across his shirt.

  “Oh weh,” Malk said softly. “Was it…stressful?”

  “I’ll play it back for you. After dark we can drive him to Pershing Square, sit him at one of those chess tables, and then call the police to report a body there. Perishing Square. Poor Sam. Sit down.”

  Malk sat down in the chair next to the door, across from the couch.

  Lepidopt had apparently rewound the tape to the right place, for when he pushed the play button there was only a moment of silence and then the abrupt beginning of a recording.

  Lepidopt’s voice began it, a few syllables ending with “—go!” Then Malk heard Glatzer’s frail voice: “The girl, in a
house, with cats. Now the Eiffel Tower—no, it’s just a picture of it—a bicycle race, in France—some crazy giggling guy in a gray suit is riding in it, passing everybody—he’s riding a red bicycle, not any kind of racing bike—he won, he broke the tape—”

  Bozzaris’s recorded voice interjected, “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure is what that is.”

  “—crowd is carrying him to a lawn—”

  “What?” said Lepidopt’s voice.

  “It’s a movie,” Bozzaris had explained then, “somebody’s watching it.”

  “It’s a movie, on a TV set,” said Glatzer’s voice. “Now it’s a different movie, one woman playing two roles—no no, two women playing one role—” For several seconds the old man was as silent on the tape as he was now on the couch. Malk wished he’d asked for a cigarette before the tape started; he couldn’t shake the thought that the tape voice was Glatzer talking live from wherever dead people go.

  A hoarse cry shook out of the machine, and then Glatzer’s voice went on breathlessly, “I can’t follow her, she’s falling out of here and now. I almost fell out with her—Wait, she’s back—everything’s on fire, up the hall and the TV set—running through smoke—I’m fine, let me get this!—a man’s voice says, ‘Was there somebody in the house, at the door?’”

  Malk kept looking at Glatzer’s dead body in its shirt and tie, half expecting gestures to accompany these terse, fragmentary impressions.

  From the recorder Glatzer’s voice said, “‘I didn’t mean to burn Rumbold,’ says the little girl.”

  The tape recorder was quiet again for a while, though Malk could hear recorded panting. He made himself look away from the body.

  Glatzer’s voice went on finally, “‘I want to bury Rumbold,’ says the girl. ‘It was the movie—it wasn’t Pee-wee except for the first couple of minutes, then it was a black and white, a silent’—uh—‘She was a witch!’ Now—now a car is pulling into the driveway, an old guy in it, in a, a green station wagon—he’s—the girl is holding on to her father—I can see the old guy, he’s—”

  Then there was the sound of a sharply indrawn breath, and blurred exclamations from Lepidopt and Bozzaris.

  Lepidopt now reached down and switched off the recorder. “And then he died.”

  And we lost our remote viewer, Lepidopt thought. Our psychic eyes are gone. We killed this old man—and what did we get for it? Not even any locators.

  Through the curtain he could hear the faint music from the speaker taped to the living room window: Madonna’s “Who’s That Girl?”

  Lepidopt didn’t think he had ever been this tired. Malk and Bozzaris had better not need help walking the dead body from the car to one of those cement tables in Pershing Square with a chessboard on it in mosaic tile. They’d have to remember to take the talisman off the body.

  He thought of the old man sitting there abandoned in the night, with no player on the other side of the table; and he almost asked, Who played Rooster Cogburn in True Grit?

  Instead he pushed away from the window and said to Bozzaris, “What have we got right now?”

  “From the noon tape,” said Malk, “we’ve got an old woman who died on Mount Shasta, and she was probably the Marity woman: Sam said she just appeared there, and of course Sam saw her via the holograph talisman, which would indicate her. What was it she said, just before she died?”

  “It sounded like ‘voyo, voyo,’” said Bozzaris. “Voyou is French for hoodlum, if that’s worth anything. And then an hour and a half later,” he went on, sitting down in his white plastic chair by the computer, “we have a man and a little girl who quote Shakespeare. And they apparently know the Marity woman fairly well—he said she doesn’t drink, or own a gun.”

  “And the guy knew her age, within two years,” put in Malk. “And he says she went to Switzerland after Chaplin died in ’77, and she’s got the Chaplin footprints from the Chinese Theater in this shed.”

  Lepidopt was pleased that they were thinking, and let them go on with it.

  “I still think they’re locals, the man and the girl,” Malk went on. “This seems like L.A. to me.”

  “But the old woman got mail as Lisa Marity,” Bozzaris reminded him, “and we’ve checked L.A., past and present, for any Marity.”

  Malk nodded. “And there’s no indication that this man and girl know anything,” he said. “They were surprised by the Chinese Theater slab, and the guy said ‘a bunch of old letters’ with no evident informed guessing, and they assumed it was a plain thief who broke into the house, not a reconnaissance team. Obviously they don’t—”

  “Hah!” interrupted Bozzaris, springing lithely from his chair. He grabbed a hefty telephone book from the kitchen shelf and began flipping through it.

  “What?” asked Lepidopt.

  “The little girl said, ‘Divil a man can say a word agin them,’” Bozzaris said excitedly, “it’s a Cohan song. It’s Harrigan in the song, but with Marity it’d be ‘M-A-double R-I,’ see? We’ve been”—he was tossing his way through the white pages—“looking for either the Serbian Maric or the Hungarianized Marity, with one r, but what if the old lady added an extra r to make it look Irish? Nothing in L.A.—Bert, give me Long Beach, and you get busy on Pomona or something.”

  Lepidopt shambled past Malk and Bozzaris into the stuffy kitchen and took a telephone book from the shelf. He thumbed through the pages to the Marriage–Martinez page, and squinted down the columns.

  “Here’s a Marrity, L,” he said, “with two rs.” He flipped to the cover. “Pasadena.”

  There proved to be no more Marritys at all in the Los Angeles area.

  “I bet that’s her,” Malk said. “I knew this was local.”

  Lepidopt stared at the telephone book in his hands. “We should have found this…years ago,” he said sadly.

  “Natural oversight, though,” said Bozzaris with a shrug. “If you were looking for M-A-R-I, you’d never see that solitary Marrity way over there. There’s a whole nation of Marquezes in between—and Marriots. And you wouldn’t expect to find her listed anyway.”

  “Still,” said Lepidopt, “there it was, all this time.”

  “Hey,” Bozzaris said, “nobody’s human.” It was an old Mossad line, a mixture of “nobody’s perfect” and “I’m only human.”

  Lepidopt nodded tiredly. “Get on the phone,” he told Bozzaris, “and tell your sayan to look up Lisa Marrity with two rs. Your San Diego detective. Have him check L.A. and Shasta.”

  He sat down on the couch facing Sam, and when Malk stepped toward him, he waved him off.

  When he had returned to Tel Aviv in mid-June of 1967, unable to work because his hand was still bandaged, he had brooded, and checked out various books on Hebrew mysticism from the library, and finally he had visited a friend who was an amateur photographer.

  Lepidopt had wondered if it had been the Shekinah, the presence of God, that had given him the prediction that he would never again touch the Western Wall—the prediction that he had foolishly tested, at the cost of his finger and a good bit of his hand—and he remembered how the Lord had warned Moses to keep everyone back from Mount Sinai, in the book of Exodus: “You shall set bounds for the people round about, saying, ‘Beware of going up the mountain or touching the border of it. Whosoever touches the mountain shall be put to death: no hand shall touch him, but he shall be either stoned or shot; beast or man, he shall not live.’”

  To Lepidopt this had sounded like precautions, in terms a primitive people could follow, against exposure to radiation; especially the order that anyone who got too close to the mountain should be killed from a distance. So he gave his photographer friend the film badge he had been issued when the Fourth Battalion’s mission had been to find the Rephidim stone in the southern wastes of the Sinai desert. Lepidopt wanted to know if the film showed that he had been exposed to divine radiation.

  The photographer broke open the film badge in his darkroom and developed the patch of film it contained, but while it wasn’
t transparent and unexposed, neither did it show the graduated fogged bands of radiation exposure—instead the negative showed, in white lines against a black background, a Star of David inside two concentric rings, with a lot of Hebrew words in all the spaces and four Hebrew words evenly spaced around the outer circle. The words in the corners proved to be the names of the four rivers of Paradise—Pishon, Gihon, Prath, and Hiddekel—and the script inside the star read, “Your life story be sacrosanct, and all who are in your train.” Between the rings had been various names such as Adam and Eve and Lilith, and word fragments in all the diamond-shaped spaces had been rearrangements of the letters of the Hebrew word for “unchanged” or “unedited.”

  To his own surprise, Lepidopt had not taken this as evidence of divine intervention; his belief, he discovered, was that the diagram had been exposed onto the film and inserted into the ORNL badge before it was issued to him.

  Perhaps the photographer had mentioned the odd “photograph” to friends; or perhaps all the men who had so briefly been assigned to the Fourth Battalion were monitored; in any case, Lepidopt received postwar orders to report to the army base in Shalishut, outside Tel Aviv. There, in a garage that was empty except for himself and half a dozen white-coated technicians, he was given a series of peculiar tests—he was asked to describe photographs in sealed cardboard envelopes, to identify playing cards just by looking at the backs of them, and to heat up coffee in a cup inside a glass box. To this day he had no idea if his guesses about the photos and the cards had been accurate, or if the coffee had heated up at all.

  For the next several months he was called back for more tests, but these were more mundane—he was given a number of thorough physical examinations, and his reflexes were tested; the medical staff gave him strict dietary instructions, steering him away from preservatives, hard liquor, and most meats.

  After three months the program had become more instruction than testing. If he hadn’t been amply paid for the time all this took, he might have refused to go on, even though he understood this was part of his army reserve service. Certainly it was pazam in both senses of the word: service time, and a long time too. Luckily he had still been single in those days.