Three Days to Never: A Novel

by Tim Powers

  Then her father had kissed that woman Charlotte. Charlotte had told these people that they should not try to kill her father, and that they should “negate” her instead of Daphne.

  Daphne hoped the woman wouldn’t be killed, if negated meant killed. Sometimes at night, even these two years later, Daphne would be awakened by intrusive images of her mother, and a droning undercurrent of bewildered loss.

  I’m not enough, loving him by myself, she thought. I need help.

  She opened the door before the Fred man might start knocking on it. Fluorescent lights now glowed whitely below the ceiling in the big room.

  The box with the portable phone in it began ringing, and old Canino picked it up from the floor and carried it to Golze. “Here you go, chief,” he said, unsnapping the case and lifting the phone out.

  Daphne jumped then, and even felt a twitch too in Fred’s restraining hand on her upper arm, for a cluster of ancient whisks on the wall over the stove had begun buzzing and vibrating, throwing off a cloud of dust. Old Marrity’s bad leg drummed on the floor planks as he made an abortive scramble toward the front door.

  A voice came shaking out of the ringing whisks, with a baritone quality provided by the resonance of the wooden wall. “It’s Charlotte. Go along with what she says.”

  Golze nodded irritably and switched the phone on. “Charlotte!” he said. “What’s the good word?”

  Charlotte’s voice was scratchy under crackling static. “Oblivion, Paul,” she said. “You know you want it too. Meet me at dawn somewhere and we’ll do the switch. Daphne walks out first from your side, then I walk out from mine and you take me in exchange for her.”

  “Okay, that works for us,” said Golze. “El Mirador Medical Plaza, at Tacheva Drive and Indian Canyon Drive. That’s, uh, in Palm Springs.”

  “Duh. I’ll be armed, and if anything goes funny, I promise you I’ll be able to kill both myself and Daphne, as well as anybody else who might be standing nearby, and you’ll be left with nothing. Right?”

  “Well, not with nothing,” said Golze. “We’ve got the directions on how to use the time machine. We’ve debriefed old Marrity thoroughly, and we’ll kill him at the first sign of any trouble from your side. So don’t let your new pals imagine they can just wipe us all out like the pope did at Carcassonne. You know they have no interest in this exchange.”

  “I’ve got no pals. ‘But I will go where they are hid who never were begot.’ And I don’t care about the time machine. You can all fight about that in a world that never included any Charlotte Sinclair.”

  “I hope they don’t negate you!” piped up Daphne.

  “You be me, kiddo,” came Charlotte’s faint voice. “Go easy on the sauce.” There was an enormous click, and the line was dead.

  Golze turned the phone off, then said to the ceiling, “She’s sincere. If the Mossad is running her to get to us, she doesn’t know it. Fred, cuff the girl to the pipe.”

  “She’s with them,” said the Rascasse voice, sounding to Daphne like a bowling ball rolling over broken glass, “or I’d see her, and I don’t. They’ve given her a masking amulet.”

  “Speaking of which sort of thing,” said Golze, “get the girl’s prints.”

  Canino nodded and touched his forehead, then crossed to the stoves and lifted a foot-square pane of glass from a white enameled pan. Clear oil ran off the corner of the glass in a long, glittering string, and he wiped the front and back surfaces with an ancient towel and then turned to Daphne, holding the square of glass out toward her.

  “If you would press your hands on that, sweetie.”

  Daphne did, and then accepted the towel from him and managed to wipe most of the oil off her hands on its stiff fabric.

  “And,” Canino said, “I’ll take just the tiniest bit of your hair.” He clicked open a switchblade knife and cut off a pinch of her brown hair. “Thankee.”

  Then Fred took her back to the vertical pipe and ratcheted the handcuff onto her wrist again.

  “I think we can assume Charlotte’s with them,” said Canino, pressing the hairs onto the oily glass and then wiping his hands too and tossing the towel into a corner, “and that they’ll come with her, acting like backup but ready to push her aside and take you.” He pointed at Golze. “Or Denis. Is he still alive?”

  “Fred,” said Golze, waving toward the gurney in the corner, “if you would…”

  Fred walked to the gurney in the corner and flipped back the blanket.

  “Shit!” he exclaimed. “This is a woman!”

  Canino burst out with a surprised laugh. “Now where did you clowns leave poor old Denis?”

  “That’s me, you fools,” said Rascasse, managing to make the whisks and the wall almost roar, “I was a woman once.” After a pause the voice went on, more quietly, “I see I’ve now reverted back to that.”

  “I’m not sure this can be said to be…going well,” said Golze thoughtfully.

  Daphne was horrified to realize that she was about to start giggling, though not in merriment. She clamped her teeth together hard and didn’t look toward Canino.

  “Some magical procedures,” rang Rascasse’s voice from over the stoves, “can’t be done by women. I found certain alchemists who reconfigured all my elements, and fixed me in the masculine estate.”

  Canino shook his head, frowning sympathetically. “Looks like you’ve come unfixed, old buddy.”

  Daphne snorted, and then she was laughing hysterically, trying to stifle it by biting her handcuffed fist.

  Fred turned to her and, still with no expression, slapped her cheek stingingly hard.

  Rascasse’s voice went on, “I’m losing my attachment to this place and time. I never quite came back to here, I think, from last night’s freeway trip. But I can last until we close this time line out. Paul, radio for reinforcements now. Three cars—we’ll want the helicopter too.”

  Daphne had noticed that he was speaking like someone in Shakespeare, the same cadence. Rubbing her cheek, and with a cautious glance at Fred, she asked, “Why are you speaking in iambic pentameter?”

  “I need to keep my thoughts straight, little girl,” rattled the whisks, “and meter is an aqueduct for them.” After a pause, they went on, “I was a little girl myself, you know.”

  Daphne just nodded, wide-eyed.

  “I sure signed on with the winning team,” said Marrity. “Where’s that bottle?”

  “I’ll dig one out for you,” said Canino, looking at a watch on his tanned wrist, “as soon as I get back from taking my favorite girl for a little walk.”

  He signaled Fred to unlock the cuffs, and then Canino unbolted the door and waved Daphne ahead of him, outside. To Fred he said, “Watch us.”

  As she tapped down the two steps to the dirt, she listened to Canino’s steps behind her over the alien buzz of cicadas, and she considered running. The sky was dark blue already, with a few shreds of clouds showing pink over the mountain’s shoulder, but the breeze was still warm. Could she outrun Canino and Fred and hide, somewhere among all those rocks up there?

  A puff of dust sprang up from the ground a dozen feet ahead of her, simultaneous with a breathy snap from behind her. She spun around.

  “I wasted a dart,” said Canino, grinning as he lowered a pistol, “but you see it works. Tranquilizer darts, Fred has one too. You’d fall down—bloody nose, torn clothes—we don’t want that, do we?”

  “No,” said Daphne. Mentally she reached out for the gun, but she knew she couldn’t get away before Fred could shoot her with a dart. The cicadas sounded like a hundred dentists’ drills.

  She sighed, and followed Canino around the corner of the cabin to the flatbed truck that had a tent set up on its bed. The tent was hardly bigger than a ticket kiosk at a carnival.

  “Now this tent!” said Canino, putting a hand on the edge of the truck bed and lithely vaulting up onto it, his boots knocking on the wood, “is where you’re going to be spending the next couple of hours. Girl needs her privacy.
Gimme your hand.” He leaned over the edge and took hold of Daphne’s hand and then lifted her up onto the boards. Up close, Daphne could see that the tent was made of some thick black cloth.

  Looking back, she saw that Fred was leaning against the corner of the cabin. She looked the other way and almost gasped—far below the edge of the little plateau, the lights of what must have been Palm Springs lay in lines and squares against the darkness of the desert-valley floor.

  Canino pulled the tent flap aside and reached into the darkness; a moment later she heard a click over the rattle of the cabin’s air-conditioning unit, and an electric bulb was glowing on the end of a wire swinging from the tent’s peak. Below it in the narrow space, a kitchen chair was bolted to the truck-bed boards, and a silvery roll of duct tape lay next to one of the legs. In front of the chair, a section of white plastic pipe was mounted like a telescope on an aluminum pole, and the far end of the pipe stuck outside the tent through a close-fitting hole in the fabric. Behind the chair were stacked a lot of metal boxes with cables connecting them, and at the top were what seemed to be two car headlights.

  “This here’s sort of a deprivation chamber, though not sensory,” said Canino with a squinting smile. “I’ve got to tape you in, but you’ll have fresh air”—he clicked a switch with the toe of his boot, and a motor hummed and air was being blown into the tent—“and music.” He touched a dial, and faintly she could hear recorded strings and woodwinds now—vaguely classical in a comfortless “easy-listening” way.

  “Deprivation of what?” she asked hoarsely, and in spite of the hot, acid-smelling air her jaw was tingling as if her teeth might start to chatter.

  “Trouble,” said Canino kindly. “Sit down.”

  Daphne took what felt like her last look at the world—the rock-crusted mountains against the darkening sky—and then sat down in the chair.

  Canino picked up the roll of tape and began pulling off strips, cutting them free with his teeth.

  “You ever hear the old rule, ‘Love thy neighbor,’ Daphne?”

  “Sure.”

  Her right ankle was farthest from him, and he reached in under the chair to loop tape around the cuff of her jeans and the chair leg.

  “How are you supposed to do that, really?” He pressed the edge of the tape down firmly. “Lots of neighbors aren’t very nice.”

  “Well, you can love them without liking them, my dad says.”

  With a ripping sound, he unrolled another length of tape, and she heard his teeth click as he bit it off. He taped her left ankle to the chair leg.

  “Your daddy’s right. Did you ever have a cat or dog die, that you loved? Well, your mom died, didn’t she?”

  “Yes.” Daphne took a deep breath and let it out.

  “But God loves us, right? That’s what everybody says.” He pulled her right wrist down until it was against a slat of the chair’s back, and grunted as he worked a piece of tape between the slats.

  “Right,” said Daphne. “God loves us.”

  “But He kills our cats and our dogs and our mothers. Pretty cruelly too, sometimes! Why is He always doing shit like that? I’ll tell you a secret.”

  “I don’t want to hear any secrets.” Daphne was keeping her voice steady only with an effort.

  Now Canino was holding her left wrist against the outside chair-back slat, and he was able to tape it down more quickly.

  “It’s like neighbors. God loves us, but He doesn’t like us. He doesn’t like us at all.”

  Suddenly Daphne was aware of her father’s love and urgent concern, and she knew he had been radiating these for at least the last several seconds.

  I’m okay, Dad, she thought, hoping he could catch the thought. She told herself not to be afraid, since her father could sense her fear. God might not like her, as Canino had said, but her father did.

  Canino straightened up. “I’m going to have to turn off the light,” he said, “but you can look through that length of pipe at Palm Springs. See?” He switched off the overhead lightbulb and stepped back, out of the tent.

  Daphne peered into the plastic tube, and there were the distant lights of the city, far, far below.

  “I’ll come out and see how you’re doing in a while,” Canino said. He let the tent flap fall closed, and then she heard his boots scuff on the truck-bed boards, crunch into the dirt, and recede away.

  Daphne stared longingly at the remote lights of restaurants and theaters and homes, and clung to her father’s mind.

  Fred was leaning against the cabin wall in the gathering darkness. Canino stopped beside him and pulled a pack of Camels from his shirt pocket.

  “What with that music and the synchronized lights and all,” Canino said, “she’ll be pretty dissociated, come dawn. Have a couple of the guys get that piece of oiled glass down the hill. You stay here.” He stretched. “I’m gonna get a beer, you want a beer?”

  “I don’t drink. The plan is to proceed with negating her?” Fred waved toward the truck and the tent.

  “Oh shit yes. We can’t negate Charlotte—she’s been involved too long, we’d lose years. She’s stupid, or she thinks we are. Hell, she’s the one who fucked over that old guy in New Jersey, to get us the Einstein papers from Princeton! Remember, the old guy killed himself in jail afterward? Would we have got those papers anyway, without Charlotte? Maybe, maybe not. And negating Charlotte wouldn’t stop this kid from having burned up the Chaplin movie. Nah, it’s gotta be the girl.”

  “Kill her father?”

  “Sure, why not? There’s no way he won’t be coming along with Charlotte tomorrow morning, so that should be easy. But,” he added, laughing softly, “by tomorrow noon he’ll be alive again, in a brand-new world. He just won’t ever have had a daughter.”

  Twenty-four

  The twelve-sided motel room was crowded. Frank Marrity and Charlotte sat on the double bed with an ashtray on the bedspread between them, Lepidopt and Malk sat on the carpeted floor, and old Mishal was rubbing his eyes at the lamplit desk by the bathroom door. On the far side of the bed, blocking one of the knee-level windows, stood the concrete block Marrity had last seen in his grandmother’s shed. Somebody had apparently been shooting at it since then—it was pocked and cracked in the right handprint and in the imprint of the cane, and the S in Sid had almost entirely been chipped off. Alongside the block were stacked four cardboard moving boxes with old cloth-insulated wires trailing out of the tops. The light in the narrow ceiling threw an antiquating sepia radiance over everything.

  Marrity’s Einstein letters lay on the table in front of Mishal, each page now in a clear plastic sleeve.

  “I’ve read the letters,” Mishal said, leaning back from the desktop lamp that had made his face look like a skull. “They’re supplemental. Valuable, but Einstein assumed his reader already knew a lot of things we don’t know.”

  “I notice he gives page numbers for something called Grumberg’s Fairy Tales,” said Lepidopt. “I could look that up.”

  “His handwriting was no good,” said Mishal. “That’s ‘Grimm bros,’ and I know what story he’s referring to. It’s ‘Faithful John,’ in which crows are represented as being able to see the past and future. Sequential events are on the ground, along roads the characters have to travel, but the crows live in a higher dimension, and can see what’s in the future and past of the characters. He’s explaining higher-dimensional perspective to his daughter.” He stretched. “Bert, did I see you making coffee?”

  Malk leaned forward to look into the bathroom. “It’ll be ready any minute.”

  “We won’t be having any for a while yet. And,” Mishal went on, “Einstein mentions having told Roosevelt—Einstein calls him the king of Naples in the letters, it’s all in terms of characters out of The Tempest—having told him about the atomic bomb, but he says he didn’t tell Roosevelt about this other thing he’s discovered, which is the time machine. Or maybe it’s the singularity you told us about,” he said, nodding to Charlotte. “Most likely th
ey’re both parts of the same thing. Right before his death in 1955 he writes that he’s talked to ‘NB,’ who visited in October, and he says NB fortunately has no clue about the time-machine possibility inherent in the math. Niels Bohr visited Einstein in October of ’54.” He squinted at Marrity. “Basically all he does in the letters is tell your grandmother why she should destroy the machine in her shed.”

  “She tried to,” said Marrity, “at the end.”

  “And he mentions ‘the Caliban who is your chaste incubus,’” Mishal said. “That’s the thing that showed up on your daughter’s hospital-room TV set?”

  “Maybe,” said Marrity. “It quoted one of Caliban’s lines from The Tempest. You heard it,” Marrity said to Lepidopt.

  Lepidopt nodded. “And it was trying to get your daughter to let it into her mind. It said, ‘the mountains are burning,’ and ‘when the fires are out it will be too late.’ It’s what your grandmother died to get rid of—she jumped sideways, as it were, across space instead of time, and she scraped the Caliban thing off, like a psychic barnacle.” He remembered that poor Bozzaris had been amused by the phrase, when they had talked in Newport Beach—only about twelve hours ago! “And the so to speak friction of it started all these fires in the mountains.”

  “Caliban,” said Marrity. “What is it?”

  “It’s pretty clearly a dybbuk,” said Mishal wearily. “More correctly dybbuk me-ru’ah ra’ah, the cleaving of an evil spirit. More correctly still, it’s an ibbur, the spirit of a man who has no proper place in the world, and has to find a host to cling to, to live in.” He looked at Lepidopt. “Are the fires still burning in the mountains?”

  “They were today.”

  “Then the dybbuk is still stalking your daughter,” Mishal said to Marrity. “But she’s in no danger unless she invites him in; he can’t penetrate her mind forcibly.”

  Marrity probed for Daphne’s mind, but sensed only her ongoing attention to him, and uneasy boredom. Faintly he thought he could hear Muzak. He tried to project a smile and a clasping hand.