More Walls Broken

by Tim Powers

  Allegra jerked as if with an electric shock, then steadied herself and stepped in front of Blaine and pushed him back.

  “You killed him,” she whispered in the old man’s face, but a moment later she was blinking around in evident confusion.

  “Ach,” said Taysha, shoving her chair back and throwing her cigarette away across the grass. “I don’t smoke!” She seemed startled to see the rosary in front of her on the table, and picked it up.

  Blaine desperately called to the ghost over Allegra’s shoulder. “In the car? Where in the car? Under the seat, in the trunk?”

  Ainsworth had straightened up. His chin was wet and he was still wheezing, but he lurched around the table toward the ghost. His hands were clawed in front of him, apparently intending to simply tear the suffering apparition to shreds.

  “Allegra!” called Allegra. “Stop him!”

  Still gripping the rosary, Taysha leaped up from her place at the table and drove a shoulder into Ainsworth’s sopping shirt over his chest; with a squeal he went flailing backward.

  Then she spun toward where Allegra stood. “I’m—”

  “—in the—” said Allegra through clenched teeth.

  “—wrong body!” wailed Taysha, pressing her fists to her temples. “Put me back!”

  Allegra stepped up in front of Cobb, and her eyes showed white all around the irises.

  “What,” she said, her voice resolutely level, “the hell—is this?”

  Cobb looked into her eyes. The woman confronting him wore Allegra’s skirt and sweater and housecoat, but he said, with unhappy certainty, “Taysha.”

  “Yes!” She lifted a hand and dragged her palm across her face and down her throat, and her mouth worked as if she were feeling her teeth with her tongue. She looked past him, evidently meeting the eyes of her own body. “But that’s me, standing behind you.”

  Her face blank, Lucy crossed to the woman in jeans and squinted up at her face.

  “He did it!” cawed Ainsworth. He turned to the wavering ghost, rubbing his wet chest and grimacing. “Armand, do it for me now, while you can!” He thrust one bony old finger toward Cobb. “Switch me with him! I’ll give you more rum!”

  Vitrielli’s ghost was dimming again. It raised its arms, and with a final diminishing wail it imploded, leaving nothing to be seen. A puff of chilly air swept across the patio.

  The rosary dangling from Taysha’s fist vibrated into a blur beside her head.

  And a rapid clicking started up in the backyard, seeming to come from all directions at once, and the woman in jeans and a white blouse who had been standing beside the table was gone. Lucy stumbled forward a step, reaching toward nothing.

  The unsupported rosary flickered through the lamplight and rattled on the cement.

  No one moved. For a few seconds the wind in the dark trees at the back of the yard was the only sound.

  Lucy backed up till she bumped a chair, and she sat down, shaking her head rapidly. Taysha, in Allegra’s body, simply shut her eyes as if replaying the past few moments in protesting memory.

  Blaine said, bitterly, “They’ve both gone back. The interval is closed.”

  Cobb’s face was cold with a sudden dew of sweat as he quickly and uselessly looked around at the house and the patio and the yard. The right body went back to the divergent universe, he thought in horror, but with the wrong woman in it. What—

  What have I done?

  Ainsworth was panting, possibly with relief. “Get the tape, hurry!” he called to Blaine, swaying and rubbing his chest.

  Lucy’s hand remained raised, and she was still staring at the empty space where Taysha’s body had stood, but she inhaled and said, clearly, “My mom cleaned out that car. Vacuumed under the seats and spare tire and everything. There were some tapes—cassettes—they got thrown out.”

  Blaine had started toward the Buick, but slid to a halt and looked back at her. “Are you sure? All of them?”

  Lucy’s lips were pressed together and her gaze was fixed; but after a few seconds she turned to the old professor and said, “I threw ’em out. Nobody listens to cassettes anymore.”

  “That makes sense,” said Blaine eagerly, nodding. To Ainsworth he snapped, “We’ve got to get out of here, now. This whole evening has been a rout.”

  It was clear that Ainsworth would need assistance to get back to the van—he was pale, and gulping air—and Blaine glanced toward Cobb and beckoned impatiently.

  “I’m not going,” said Cobb.

  “If you want to save any portion of your career—” began Blaine.

  “I don’t. Go.”

  “You may be sure we’ll deny—”

  “I know. Go.”

  Blaine rocked his head back and inhaled. “I must demand that you give me my colleague’s slide rule. It’s university property, and I’ll see that charges are brought if you refuse.”

  Cobb just stared at him.

  After several seconds, Blaine lowered his head and frowned at Cobb from under his gray eyebrows, and then he just turned away and got his right shoulder under Ainsworth’s left arm. Ainsworth gasped in evident pain, but the two of them went shambling unsteadily away down the driveway.

  When the sound of their halting progress finally ended with the closing of two doors and the roar of the van’s engine, Lucy looked up at Cobb with narrowed eyes. “Now you make everything back the way it was, you hear?” she said fiercely.

  Cobb looked away from her, down at the pavement under his shoes. He was trembling, and his face was cold with sweat, and he couldn’t look at her or the woman standing on the other side of the table. Because of my actions, this little girl’s mother has been sent God knows where, he thought, and this woman has been pulled out of her world and put in the wrong body—and incidentally the animate revenant of a man I liked and admired has been cruelly tormented—and I can’t think of a way to make any of it…back the way it was.

  Taysha broke in on his spiraling thoughts. “What slide rule?” Already she looked ill-at-ease in Allegra’s skirt and housecoat.

  “It’s,” Cobb began; he took a deep breath and met her intent gaze. “It’s how we brought you across. I can work it again, but we had metal that you had touched, that gate—but the gate is used up, and it wouldn’t summon her, anyway.”

  “Why did she disappear?”

  “The interval was over, and she was holding that rosary—it was metal, and it was something she had handled a lot in at least one of the two worlds—aura signature—and she was touching it in this one; so it worked like a trap-door.”

  He kicked at a piece of broken glass, then made himself face Lucy. “Or a bridge, say,” he added hastily. “Did—does—your mother have anything else, metal, that she’d have had before she…got together with your father?”

  The girl bit her trembling lip, then glanced back toward the house. “Some books, maybe some clothes,” she said. “Metal? I don’t know. my father made her get rid of a lot of stuff.”

  Taysha shivered and pulled Allegra’s housecoat more closely about her. “I had a garden,” she said, “when I was a little girl—long before Gorba ever showed up—way at the back of the yard, by the fence. I stopped tending it when I was twelve or so. Do you think the old faucet is still out there? Nobody else ever went out to that end of the yard.” She snapped her fingers in front of Cobb’s face. “The faucet was metal.”

  “When you were twelve.” Cobb blinked at her. He could feel the angularity of the slide rule in his back pocket. “Your lifelines hadn’t split yet…in that place and time you were still the one girl.” He wiped his face with both hands, then dragged his fingers through his damp hair. “There are still trees at the back end of your father’s empty lot, maybe the faucet is still there too.” He tried to remember some of old Vitrielli’s speculations. “And there’s been a lot of strain on the fabric tonight—violations of the Law of Conservation of Reality—if we do it with you holding the faucet, thus aimed back to where you came from, where you b
elong, all these violations might very well cancel out, and the realities fall back to their ground states.” He gave her what must have been a wild-eyed look; when she took a step back, he hastily smoothed his disordered hair and just nodded, with more confidence than he felt.

  “Things,” he said distinctly, “would be back the way they were, in other words.”

  “You’re not just…losing your mind, right?”

  “No, no.”

  “Okay.” Taysha slapped the pockets of the housecoat. “Keys,” she said. She turned to Lucy. “Where did your mom—where does your mom keep her car keys?”

  “You can’t take her car!” said the little girl, finally beginning to cry. “You’re not even her!”

  “We’re trying to—” Taysha began, then just shook her head and sprinted to the Buick. The door was still open, and she bent to peer inside. “There’s a key in this one,” she called.

  “I’ll drive,” said Cobb, jumpy and breathless now with the prospect of something, anything, to be done. “It tends to stall when it’s cold, unless she got the EGR valve fixed.”

  Taysha nodded and slid into the passenger seat.

  Lucy ran to the kitchen door and closed it, then hurried to the car and pulled open the back passenger-side door. “I’m going,” she said as she climbed in and closed the door.

  Taysha, in the girl’s mother’s body, half turned around, her mouth open, but hesitated.

  “We can’t leave her here by herself,” said Cobb, twisting the familiar key in the ignition. The engine chugged, turned over several times reluctantly, then roared. Cobb released the parking brake and clicked the gear shift into reverse.

  “Go back up Tustin,” said Taysha as she pulled her door shut.

  “I know where it is. I spent a lot of evenings there, talking with him.” He hooked his arm over her seat and steered backward down the driveway into the dark street. “Drinking Maker’s Mark bourbon, in fact.” He shifted to drive and sped toward the intersection.

  Lucy was sniffling in the back seat. “Did my mother turn off the oven?” she asked.

  “Yes,” said Cobb, catching a green light and making a squealing left turn north on Tustin Avenue. In the rear-view mirror he saw Lucy sit back, tears still gleaming on her face, frowning and staring out the window at the passing stores and restaurants. He looked away before she might meet his eye.

  After a few moments he heard the girl say, “My mom never touched this car after she drove it home. If there was a tape in it, it’s still here.”

  Taysha laughed softly. “Clever girl!”

  “You’ll want to tell the police about it,” said Cobb; “that is, have your mother tell them.”

  “You tell her, when you get her back.”

  “Right.” He spared a glance at Taysha beside him. “Who’s president? Where you come from?”

  “Donald Trump,” she answered distractedly. Then she turned to him and asked, “How about here? Slow down, will you?”

  “The same. Trump.” The engine seemed to be running smoothly, and Cobb lifted his foot from the accelerator. “What won the Best Picture Oscar this year?”

  “I don’t know. La La Land? That was big.”

  “That was last year, and Moonlight won. Emma Stone did get Best Actress.”

  “Oh.” She shrugged. “I don’t pay a lot of attention to the Oscars.”

  Despite the weight of his guilty anxiety, Cobb was impatient to find out how her alternate reality might differ from this one. “Who won the World Series?” he asked.

  “Beats me. You’re going to turn right on Lincoln, but don’t get on the freeway.”

  “I know.”

  “So who did win the World Series?”

  “Never mind. How about—”

  From the back seat, Lucy spoke up. “She thought he didn’t love her. My grandfather.”

  “He,” said Taysha, tugging Allegra’s housecoat around herself, “did what he did, to save her. Me. Us.”

  “I never even got to meet him,” said Lucy. In the rear-view mirror, Cobb saw that she was scowling. “I’ll find that tape.”

  Cobb turned right on Lincoln and sped past the freeway connector lanes to rows of dark houses set back from the street.

  “It’ll be on your left,” said Taysha, pointing with Allegra’s hand. Lucy was now leaning forward between the seats.

  “Not anymore,” said Cobb.

  “There it,” Taysha began, then fell silent when the flat, empty lot swung into view. A nearby streetlight cast a fan of light that extended past where Cobb recalled the front porch of the house had stood.

  “An hour ago—!” breathed Taysha.

  “Did his house disappear too?” asked Lucy timidly.

  Taysha could only nod.

  Cobb steered the Buick onto the rutted patch that had been the bottom of the driveway, and soon he was driving slowly across flat dirt; and he was and thinking about the absent rooms whose spaces he was traversing. Here had stood the kitchen; here the dining room; and here the study, where on so many evenings he had sat across the broad table from Armand Vitrielli, as smoke from the old man’s pipe and his own cigarette settled in a faint layer over their heads, and lamplight gleamed on surrounding book spines and two frequently refilled glasses.

  Et tu…

  He blinked and glanced to the side at Taysha, and guessed that she too was seeing vanished rooms; and he wondered how they differed from the ones he remembered.

  After a minute he was sure he had driven past where the back porch had stood—with, in his memories at least, a threadbare old couch and a spare refrigerator and bins of old forgotten clothing—and in the headlight beams he saw the tall laurel trees still standing along the fence at the far end of the lot.

  “All the way back,” said Taysha hoarsely.

  The car had rolled past the wide area of planed-flat dirt now, and was rocking across low ridges and dips. Tall weeds rustled and bent against the bumper.

  Taysha was shaking her head. “He always ignores the letters from the county,” she said. “It’s me that chops the weeds down after every rain.”

  Tangles of old fallen branches ahead of them shone stark white in the headlight glare. The car slid to a halt, though the engine was still in gear; Cobb gunned it a couple of times, and heard a rear tire spinning in sandy dirt.

  He switched off the engine but left the headlights on. “We walk from here,” he said. “I can wedge branches under the tires afterward. Lucy, you stay in the car.”

  “I don’t think I’ll need headlights,” said Taysha.

  “I will,” he said.

  “Can’t I come with you?” pleaded Lucy. “What if his ghost comes back, and wants to sit in here?” The idea had apparently occurred to her even as she had spoken, for her voice had risen sharply by the end of the question.

  “Damn it—” Cobb opened his door, flooding the car with cold air that smelled of decaying leaves, “—stand by the car, anyway! We don’t want you falling into any…cosmic vortices.”

  Taysha climbed out, gave the girl a semblance of a reassuring smile, and began walking through the weeds toward the back fence. Cobb followed her.

  “Careful,” she said. “Drag your feet—there’s probably still old tomato cages out here.” She paused and turned her head from side to side. “I think some of these things are millionth generation onions.”

  “Find the damn faucet.”

  “Oh, it’s right here.” She tapped an upright pipe with Allegra’s shoe. “You should have seen this corner of the yard back in 2000 or so. Pumpkins, strawberries…” She looked up at him, her hair backlit by the headlights and her face lost in shadow. “What do we do?”

  Cobb sighed. “It’ll seem funny,” he said, pulling the slide rule from his pocket.

  “Funny?”

  Abruptly he had no confidence that anything at all would be accomplished here. After half an hour or so of useless stamping around under these trees, he thought, what will we do? Where do we take Lucy? A
nd what will become of Taysha, in Lucy’s mother’s body? What on earth can we possibly do?

  He forlornly wished they’d brought the bourbon along.

  “Go on,” said Taysha. “Should I be touching the faucet?”

  “Oh—yes. Yes, you might as well hold onto the faucet.”

  She turned on him, probably glaring. “You are gonna try here, right?”

  Her words shamed him. Yes, he thought, try. “It worked before. Sort of.”

  He pulled the slide rule from his pocket and held it up. He had to tilt it toward the car’s headlights to see which lenses were clear. The car, and Lucy standing beside it, looked very far away though the tiny glass disks.

  “Well go on then, grab the faucet,” he told Taysha.

  He slowly pushed the center bar and shifted his feet around until he could see faint light through all three of the cursor’s lenses; it required him to face away from the car, and he had to move his head aside to see the musical note stamped in the wood below it in the headlights’ illumination.

  D. The re in do re mi.

  Belatedly he realized that he should have told Taysha that he would be vocalizing musical notes; she jumped when he began singing the note, and he freed one hand from the device long enough to wave away any interruption.

  He was sweating again as he blinked and squinted and dragged his feet through dry leaves, stepping over fallen branches when he bumped into them, and sang a series of low notes. A specific sequence of compression frequencies projected in the air, in space and time, in certain directions, he told himself. The drawing object will resonate.

  The slide rule in his hand did seem to vibrate, as if the little lenses in it were rotating.

  He plodded on, regularly tilting the slide rule to see the indicated notes by the car’s lights. It must be nearly midnight, he thought as he sang another note. What can that little girl, Lucy, be thinking of all this?

  At one turn he was able to glance to the side, toward the car, and he saw that she was still standing beside the front bumper.

  When he had paced—counterclockwise, this time—all the way around Taysha and the faucet, there was no light at all to be seen through any of the lenses, and the tree branches overhead rustled in a sudden cold wind. He was panting, and he could see the steam of his breath.