More Walls Broken

by Tim Powers

  “I’m leaving,” said Taysha, “and I can outrun any of you.” She turned toward the door, then froze, staring at a bookshelf above the TV set.

  “That’s my book,” she said, and, watching the others warily, crossed to the cabinet and pulled a volume free. Cobb leaned forward to peer at the ragged dust-jacket—the book was Further Adventures of Lad, by Albert Payson Terhune.

  Taysha blew dust off the top page edges and tossed it toward Allegra, who winced and caught it carefully with both hands.

  Taysha said, “If there’s a pencil drawing of a collie dog on the back flyleaf of that, signed Taysha, then I’m not going crazy.”

  “There is,” said Allegra faintly, without opening the book. “I drew it when I was about seven.”

  “So did I.”

  Taysha leaned back against the cabinet and ran the fingers of both hands through her hair. “And I once shoplifted Justin Timberlake’s album, FutureSex. I never told anybody.”

  “Oh my God,” whispered Allegra.

  “Hah!” Taysha was panting, as if she’d been holding her breath. “You’re the liar,” she said to Blaine, “not what’s-his-name here, Clive.” She paced from the kitchen entry to the door and back again. “When I woke up in your van, we were coming west down the hill on Chapman; Holy Sepulchre Cemetery’s up there. The university is north, up the freeway. Why are you—”

  “A shortcut—” began Ainsworth.

  The curtains over the front window brightened, and Cobb heard a car engine close outside.

  “My daughter’s home!” said Allegra, standing up. “Everybody, please—act normal!” She gave Taysha a wide-eyed look, and added, “I’ll send her to her room—you hide in my room!” She pointed down a hall to the right of the kitchen.

  Taysha was clearly in agreement that she should not meet Allegra’s daughter, and hurried away down the hall. The sound of the car engine changed and then receded away.

  Blaine struggled to his feet as footsteps tapped up the driveway and onto the porch, and a girl of about ten pushed open the door and hurried into the living room, then abruptly stopped when she saw the visitors.

  She was thin and dark-haired, wearing jeans and a white T-shirt, and Cobb thought she looked very like a young Taysha—or Allegra.

  Allegra managed a smile. “These are professors from your grandfather’s college, Lucy. Say hello and then leave us to talk grownup business.”

  “You knew him?” the girl asked, looking from Cobb to the two professors. Ainsworth had not got up.

  “Oh, yes,” said Blaine.

  “I never got to.” She half-turned toward her mother, then faced Cobb. “Was he a nice man?”

  Cobb cleared his throat. “Yes. I liked him.”

  She held his gaze for a moment, then said, “Hello,” to the room at large. She turned away and disappeared down a hall to the left, and a few seconds later they all heard a door close.

  “He is a nice man,” said Taysha quietly, stepping into the living room from the other side of the kitchen. “I’m glad he’s still alive…in my world.” She was holding the crucifix of a dangling silver-beaded rosary. “This is mine too.”

  “I’ve had it forever,” said Allegra, too softly for Cobb to guess whether it was agreement or protest.

  “In my world,” Taysha went on, “the Virgin Mary doesn’t have one hand broken off.”

  “Lucy knocked it off the bedside table one time,” said Allegra. “I’ve meant to glue the hand back on.” She gazed down the left-side hall and said vacantly, as if from long habit, “Kids!”

  “Kids,” echoed Taysha in a hollow voice, also looking down the hall. She gathered the rosary into her palm. “You went ahead and married Lou Gorba?” Without waiting for an answer, she turned to Cobb. “So how do I get back there? Home?”

  His face was suddenly cold. “Oh,” he said. “I’m—not sure. The chain-link gate got used up, according to how your father said these things work…maybe if I flipped it over, and tried to do the ritual in reverse?” Somehow, he thought. “The security guard might let us back into the cemetery, where the gate is, to try.” He was ruefully aware that he sounded hopeless.

  “Not in the university van!” objected Blaine. “We can’t participate in these hurtful fantasies.”

  Allegra cast an anxious glance down the hall toward her daughter’s room, and said, “Can’t you all just leave?”

  “Do you think we can?” asked Taysha.

  Allegra met her duplicate’s gaze, then sighed. “Let’s take this out back. Bring your drinks and the bottle.”

  Blaine helped Ainsworth up off the couch, and Allegra led the way through the kitchen and pushed open a back door.

  Outside, lit by a couple of lamps under the eaves, half-a-dozen plastic-webbing chairs were arranged around a wrought-iron table on a narrow patio, and to the left the old gray Buick that Cobb had worked on so often was parked at the top end of the driveway. Cobb set the bottle and his glass on the table and slumped into one of the chairs.

  Out in front of the house, the driver’s side door of the van slowly swung open, and the interior light came on, and then after a few seconds the door closed and the light went out again.

  Taysha pointed at the Buick as she stepped down from the kitchen doorway. She was still holding the rosary.

  “That’s Dad’s car. You’ve been driving it?”

  “Just one time, from the university. It smells like his old pipes.”

  Blaine and Ainsworth tottered outside right behind her, carrying glasses, and Blaine crossed to the table, picked up the bottle and poured a generous slosh of bourbon into his. Ainsworth fidgeted impatiently beside him.

  Taysha sat down in the chair next to Cobb, and the rosary rattled as she laid it on the table. “You’ve got cigarettes,” she said to him. “Bum one?”

  Cobb pulled the pack of Camels from his shirt pocket and dug in his jeans for the lighter. She pulled a cigarette from the pack and took the lighter from him, and a moment later she was leaning back in her chair, exhaling a plume of smoke.

  She glanced back toward the kitchen. “Is he going to show up?” she asked Allegra. “Lou,” she added, when Allegra gave her an alarmed look.

  “Oh, him,” said Allegra. She had shuffled a few steps out across the patio, but kept glancing back at the house as if she might run back inside. “We’re divorced. Three years now. He’s in Oregon.”

  “I can’t believe you married him! I told him to get lost after he had that big fight with Dad.”

  “Oh, I nearly did, too,” sighed Allegra, “but Dad started it—he provoked him, picking on him about his biker tattoos, remember?”

  Cobb was surprised to see that Allegra was apparently accepting his theory, and he wondered how much she had had to drink before they arrived.

  Taysha nodded. “He wanted me to get one, too, and Dad wouldn’t stand for that.” She tapped ash from her cigarette and gave Allegra an inquiring look.

  Cobb saw Allegra’s face redden. “I have Lucy,” she said, quietly but defiantly.

  Taysha opened her mouth, then closed it. After a moment she went on, “But you left Dad alone in that house? Did you think he could manage by himself?”

  “I have my own life!” protested Allegra. “We had a big fight about Lou. Dad said he was a bum, and I called Dad a has-been loser who couldn’t keep his wife. But it was true! And he drank!”

  Taysha angrily pointed her cigarette at the drink in Allegra’s hand and was clearly about to make an obvious rejoinder, but the creak of a car door opening stopped her.

  And then a windy whisper from the left said, “I did.”

  Every head whipped around toward the Buick, and Taysha’s cigarette went flying; the passenger door was open now, and a filmy silhouette inside was visible only because it was moving. A glassy distortion at the bottom edge of the door frame implied a lowered leg, and then part of the roof seemed to ripple as the silhouette straightened up.

  Allegra sat right down on the cement, he
r eyes wide and her hands over her mouth; Cobb would have stood up, but Taysha had clamped a hand on his upper arm and was breathing harshly in his ear. He was staring toward the indistinct thing that now stood beside the car; for a moment in his peripheral vision he could see Blaine and Ainsworth, motionless, and then they had retreated out of his sight.

  “Hath no man’s bottle here a drink for me?” came the ghost’s whisper again.

  Cobb heard scuffling behind him, and managed to look away from the wavering distortion in the air. Blaine was now trying to open his briefcase, impeded by Ainsworth, who seemed to be trying to help.

  At last Blaine fumbled the steel thermos bottle out of his briefcase and was unscrewing the cap. “Here!” he said, “rum and chocolate!”

  Ainsworth tried to say something, presumably to coax the ghost, but produced only a spitty wheezing.

  Cobb shook his head sharply to clear it. They still want to capture Vitrielli’s ghost, he thought, so that they can question it later, learn what Vitrielli chose to die rather than reveal to them. In Ainsworth’s words, How am I ever to get a renewing transfer?

  Taysha let go of Cobb’s arm and for a moment closed her eyes; then she opened them and said, fairly steadily, “I’m sure he’d rather have bourbon than whatever that is.” She reached for the Maker’s Mark bottle.

  But the upright patch of distortion had shifted forward, past her, and an expanding spray from its upper limbs might have been ghost fingers extending toward Blaine.

  “Sweeter,” breathed the ghost.

  “See,” said Blaine, “he wants this stuff!” He waved the thermos with one shaking hand, holding the cap above it with the other.

  He’s ready to catch Vitrielli like a moth in a bottle, thought Cobb; and he got up and stepped around the side of the table away from the ghost, waving Blaine back, and all he could think of to say was, “You don’t serve him in a glass?”

  Allegra had got unsteadily to her feet, and she and Taysha both nodded. “He’s,” quavered Allegra, “a guest.”

  “There’s no extra glass,” snapped Blaine, staring over Cobb’s shoulder at the apparition and still waving the steel cylinder. “Armand!” he called.

  “He can have mine,” said Taysha, whose glass was still empty. “I’m not thirsty.”

  Blaine rocked back and forth, breathing hard and squinting belligerently at Cobb; then his shoulders sagged and he muttered, “Of course, of course—where are my manners.”

  He shuffled to the table and reluctantly leaned over it to pour some of the brown liquid into Tasha’s glass; but he hovered nearby, and Cobb thought he was positioning himself to slap his hand over the top of the glass.

  Taysha may have thought the same, for she lifted the glass and held it away. She looked up at the blur hovering over her and in a husky voice said, “Here you go, Dad.”

  “Mirrors on the grass, alas,” whispered the ghost.

  It seemed to shrink, and Cobb realized that it must have been bending over the glass that Taysha was holding out. And the brown liquid in the glass jiggled, and its level might have gone down a fraction of an inch.

  And the ghost’s form curdled into visibility—Cobb found himself staring at a figure that seemed to be made of white smoke. There were suggestions of a turned-up collar and coat-tails, and its long hair, and fringes on the vague clothing, waved outward as if the figure were under agitated water. Taysha clanked the glass back down onto the table.

  “Not mirrors,” the ghost said, and its voice, stronger now, was a groan. “Two Tayshas.” The oval of the head became a profile, facing one way and then the other. “Blaine and the monkey,” the ghost went on. Its form was pulsing, as if it were laboring for breath. “The tape—in the car. Let me go. It hurts.”

  Ainsworth shook Blaine’s arm and gestured toward the ghost, clearly demanding that the other man somehow catch the unnatural thing in the thermos. Certainly more loudly than he meant to, he whispered, “Hurry, it’s speaking!”

  The thing bent and uttered a hoarse cry. Everybody except Taysha flinched, though her eyes glittered with tears.

  “What did you kill yourself for?” Her voice was harsh. “Why didn’t you come to me?” She touched her chest and then gestured toward Allegra.

  The ghost was beginning to fade—Cobb could see the outlines of moonlit trees through its substance. “Enquire of the jokers yonder,” it said, more faintly. “Et tu, Clive?”

  Cobb flinched. “I’m sorry!” He jerked his head toward Blaine and Ainsworth. “They want to catch you when you’re drinking the rum and chocolate. Get you into that thermos bottle. Force you to tell them…what you didn’t want to tell them before.”

  “Ah?” said the ghost, retreating from the glass with the brown mix in it. “Still? And which of these Tayshas…” Its voice was hard to hear now.

  Taysha quickly grabbed Cobb’s glass, and held it up. “Maker’s Mark, Dad!”

  “My old pal,” said the ghost, to the woman or the liquor, and its fading form bent over the raised glass. Cobb couldn’t tell whether the liquid in the glass was stirred by the ghost’s action or by Taysha’s raised and trembling hand, but in seconds Vitrielli’s ghost was again an opaque, smoky white silhouette. The glass fell from Taysha’s limp fingers and broke on the cement. Cold bourbon splashed on Cobb’s ankle.

  The ghost’s profile was still tilted down toward her, and its rippling hand touched her shoulder, and even managed to twitch back the collar of her blouse. Her eyes were clenched shut, and Cobb saw her knuckles whiten as she gripped the edge of the table.

  “No Ride to Live, Live to Ride?” croaked the ghost, straightening up. “No panhead rampant?” Cobb recalled that a panhead was an antique Harley Davidson motorcycle.

  “I’m,” Taysha said through clenched teeth, “the one who didn’t marry Lou Gorba.”

  The ghost moved back from her, and she opened her eyes and hugged herself, gripping her elbows.

  “Blaine,” said the ghost’s voice; and it went on slowly, as if trying to remember names: “Ainsworth…Cobb. More walls than you knew, broken, eh? To force me here.”

  Cobb’s heart was pounding in his chest, and he was fervently wishing that Vitrielli’s reproachful ghost—this wrongly half-awakened thing, this animate evidence of their…betrayal, sacrilege—would just finally disappear. His lips pulled back from his teeth as he recalled conversations he’d had with the man whose ghost this was.

  Et tu, Clive?

  But a smoky white arm extended toward Allegra. “That one,” it said, and Cobb imagined he could see a pained grimace on the featureless oval of its head, “of this house. You would kill her.”

  “No!” whispered Blaine, and Ainsworth flapped his hands. “No, no, my friend,” Blaine went on, more strongly, “we wouldn’t have done it—it was just a, a bluff, to get you to work with us! We need—you need!—youth, health—”

  “He killed himself,” said Cobb harshly, “to evade your ultimatum. Your blackmail.”

  Allegra’s chin was pulled back, making folds in her neck. “You did it,” she whispered to the ghost, “to save me? Me?”

  Blaine’s mouth hung open, and he was still absently waving the thermos. “We never,” he was muttering, “never would—”

  “I heard a glass break,” said a young girl’s voice from the kitchen doorway.

  Cobb looked up—Allegra’s daughter Lucy was stepping down to the patio.

  “Sweetie, get back in the house!” cried Allegra, spreading her arms as she hurried toward the girl—but Lucy was staring past her, and her eyes were wide.

  “That’s a ghost,” she said distinctly.

  “No,” babbled Allegra, “it’s a, at the college, a hologram, like at Disneyland—”

  Cobb saw with relief that the Vitrielli apparition was fading again. When it spoke, its voice was hitching, as if it were in pain:

  “What I am,” it said, “should not be here.”

  Go, thought Cobb. Just go, poor restless dead, before they do catch
you.

  Lucy had been staring at the ghost, but now glanced at Taysha, then looked at her more closely; and she turned to her mother. “Are you twins?” she asked quietly; but her mother seemed not to have heard.

  Allegra must have noticed the ghost’s dimming, for she hurried around the table and held up her glass. “Bourbon,” she whispered; “drink, Dad, please! Don’t leave me—us!”

  The oval of its head, nearly transparent now, hesitated, then quickly dipped toward the liquor. Its silhouette filled out over the course of several seconds, like ice crystals growing in a chilled container of water, but the resulting figure was a foot or so shorter than it had been, and faintly marbled with gray streaks. Cobb thought he heard it groaning faintly.

  “I don’t belong here either,” Taysha said. “In my world I stayed with Dad.” But she was looking at Lucy as she spoke, and her voice wavered.

  Allegra lowered the glass with which she had renewed the ghost. “I did what I had to do,” she said, blinking against tears. “I can’t go back.”

  “I can,” said Taysha, with an intense stare at Cobb. “Right?” She picked up his pack of cigarettes and lit another one.

  Lucy was simply staring, wide-eyed, at everyone.

  “The tape,” came the ghost’s voice then, tight with evident effort, “for you to find.”

  “What tape?” Cobb burst out.

  “The monkey called, said tell him how, or—” The thing seemed to cough, and what had been gray streaks were now gaps in its substance; it partially collapsed, and was now only about three feet tall. Cobb heard Taysha groan softly in sympathy, and realized that he had done the same.

  Blaine turned to Ainsworth. “You did it over the phone? So he could record it?”

  Ainsworth backed away from him and bumped the table. “I was circumspect!” he said shrilly, and he snatched up a glass and took a gulp; but it was Taysha’s glass, and he choked and spat rum and chocolate down his shirt. “Circumspect!” he whispered, and bent over, gagging.

  Blaine quickly shuffled forward and reached out to scoop the suffering, truncated ghost into the thermos bottle, and both women called, simultaneously, “Look out, Dad!”