More Walls Broken

by Tim Powers

  “Ah!” exclaimed Taysha sharply; she started to fall, and reached out and grabbed Cobb’s hand to keep her balance. The slide rule tumbled out of his hand.

  But the blackness in the lenses had filled his vision, and engulfed him. His instant of panic gave way to unconsciousness.

  He became aware that he was lying face-down on twigs and dirt in darkness, and a chilly wind was twitching at his damp hair.

  He heard leaves crackle very nearby, and heavy breathing; he rolled to the side in alarm, and by dim moonlight filtering through branches overhead he was able to see that a woman was sprawled in the dirt a yard or so away from him.

  Then his memories began falling back into place, like scattered pages restored to order.

  “Taysha?” he said hoarsely.

  “Yes,” she answered, sitting up. “What happened? Did we switch back, is this your, your ground state?”

  Cobb blinked around at the wide yard, and he could see no one at all—just a patchy lawn and trees and the yellow-lit windows of the house a hundred feet away.

  “I don’t think—” he began, but Taysha interrupted him.

  “There’s my house! And the car is gone!”

  “Oh,” he said. A shrill keening seemed to have started up in his head, and he had to remind himself to breathe. “Yeah.”

  She exhaled in a long, low whistle. “I’m back, thank God! Look, no weeds! I cut ’em back with a weed-whacker just a week ago, here! Here!” She started to get up, then froze, staring at one bare knee; and she clutched at the hem of the plaid skirt she was wearing. “Ach, but I’m still in her body! She went back, in mine! O God God God.” For several seconds she just crouched, blinking at her knee; then her wide eyes reflected points of amber from the distant windows as she turned to Cobb. “And what are you doing here?”

  “I guess I,” he paused to take a deep breath, “fell through the reality hole with you.”

  “Terrific.”

  “Before we—” he began, but Taysha had already stood up and was striding toward the house.

  “I’m gonna talk to my dad,” she called back.

  “Wait, dammit,” he said, struggling to his feet, “keep your voice down, we should make sure—”

  He hurried after her; and when they had covered half the distance to the house, a figure detached itself from the shadows below the eaves and stepped forward into the oblique light from the windows, waving at them.

  Taysha paused, and Cobb caught up with her, panting.

  “It’s me,” she whispered to him. “My body, I mean. She didn’t go back after all.”

  The woman ahead of them, who was indeed wearing Taysha’s rightful jeans and white blouse, pointed toward the west corner of the house, and Taysha and Cobb hurried forward and joined her in the shadows there by the driveway. The dusty black Buick Regal that Cobb had worked on so often in the other world stood in front of them; at Cobb’s elbow was an open window, and the kitchen within was dark. Faintly, somewhere in the house, he could hear violin music.

  “Where is Lucy?” asked Allegra in a tense whisper. She was bracing herself with one hand against the wall, and Cobb saw that she was somehow holding the rosary again.

  “She’s waiting for us by the car,” said Taysha, “Dad’s Buick, back in the other…world. Is Dad in the house? Why are you hiding out here?”

  “Don’t talk so loud!” said Allegra, “Yes, he’s in there, alive, in his study. I woke up on our bed, in our room! The same old bed! I could hear him, whistling along to Tchaikovsky, the way he always did, and I tip-toed out through the kitchen.”

  “Where did you get the rosary?” asked Cobb.

  Allegra blinked at the silver beads on the string loop. “It was under the pillow.”

  Taysha nodded impatiently. “That’s where I keep it, that’s why she wound up in my room, right? Come on, we’re going in to talk to him.”

  “No!” said Allegra, in a whisper that managed to be shrill. “I can’t face him! I called him a, a has-been loser who couldn’t keep his wife. How can I—”

  “That wasn’t him,” said Taysha. “Not this him.”

  “But it did hurt him. It hurt me.” She stared imploringly at the other two. “I’m afraid to! I went to his funeral! I saw his horrible old ghost! Can’t you see? He’s—”

  And then both women protested, simultaneously, “He’s my dad!”

  Allegra’s fist clenched spasmodically on the rosary; Taysha jerked and then swayed against Cobb, who braced an arm around her shoulders to steady her.

  The hand holding the rosary opened. “How—”

  “—did you get hold of—” gasped the other woman.

  “—this?”

  The woman in the housecoat stepped hastily away from Cobb, blinking at him with evident mistrust.

  And the woman in jeans and a white blouse straightened away from the wall and slapped at her ribs and thighs. She had dropped the rosary. “I’m in—” she began.

  “—my own body—” exclaimed Allegra, stepping backward and tugging for reassurance at the lapels of the housecoat.

  “—again!” said Taysha, walking hesitantly out across the driveway.

  Through the open kitchen window came the sound of a door closing somewhere in the house, and the scuff of footsteps on a hardwood floor.

  Cobb waved urgently at the two women, and no one spoke until they heard another door close.

  “Don’t say anything,” he whispered. He had just remembered these two women speaking heatedly in unison once before, back on that patio—Look out, Dad!—when Blaine had tried to scoop their father’s ghost into his thermos bottle. “Your father is where the two of you overlap—emotionally, psychically. When you both said Dad at once, you spilled across, into each other. Both times. We’re in an unstable trap-door interval right now—don’t say it again.”

  And that first interval ended, he thought, shortly after they had done it on the patio. Allegra, in Taysha’s body, had been holding the rosary then—and when the interval ended, she had been transported here, to Taysha’s room, where the rosary’s duplicate was.

  How long did that interval last?

  And Taysha, in Allegra’s body, had been touching that faucet, and she was gripping my hand when this transition happened—so I was dragged here along with her. How long will this interval last? I don’t have the slide rule anymore, I can’t open another trap-door.

  With an faint click, the light in the kitchen came on, throwing a fan of illumination out across the car and the driveway. Cobb and Allegra crouched against the wall below the window, but Taysha stepped out and leaned against the car, facing the window.

  Then she was partially in shadow, and Armand Vitrielli’s well-remembered voice spoke from in the kitchen.

  “Taysh!” he said. “Where the hell have you been? Was there any mail?”

  Pressed against the cold stucco wall, Cobb could feel Allegra’s shoulders silently shaking; and he was remembering all the other times he’d heard Vitrielli’s voice, laughing delightedly at some joke or pun or clever point of logic, and remembering too the agonized, attenuated voice of the ghost he had uprooted from its rightful rest. He and Allegra both huddled lower.

  “Sorry, Dad,” said Taysha. “Those dogs from over on Porter were in the yard again, and I was chasing them and then trying to find how they got in.” She shrugged. “And no mail.”

  “Well, come back inside,” said Vitrielli. “It’s cold out there.”

  “In a minute, there’s just one more section of fence I want to check for holes.”

  Cobb heard the old man sigh and say, “Well be quick, honey.”

  Then Cobb felt Allegra tense beside him. She opened her mouth, and before Cobb could stop her she called, “I’m sorry, Dad!”

  Taysha gave her double a startled look, and Cobb just closed his eyes.

  But Vitrielli’s receding voice only said, “S’okay, just don’t dawdle.” The kitchen light went out, and the sound of his footsteps diminished away down
the hall.

  Cobb exhaled and tried to relax his tensed muscles.

  “Allegra,” he said. She pushed him away, sobbing audibly now, and he shook her shoulder. “Listen to me,” he hissed, “this unstable interval is about to end, and you need to be holding something metal that you’ve handled in both worlds! And I need to be touching you when it happens. Think—what is there like that?” She just buried her face in her hands, and he went on harshly, “You want to get back to Lucy, right?”

  He stood up and reached a hand down to her.

  She waved it away, and then slowly got to her feet. “Hearing his voice again,” she whispered. “He said That’s okay, didn’t he? At least.” Then she shook her head and blinked at Cobb. “What? Metal? The rosary—”

  “It’s used up,” he said impatiently, “and so’s the faucet out back that drew Taysha and I here, they’re spent capacitors.” He was agonizingly aware of seconds passing, and he resisted the impulse to shake her. “Something else.”

  “Think about this,” Taysha said to her; “not,” she added with a nod toward the house, “him.”

  Allegra had stepped out past the front bumper of the car, peering around the yard anxiously. “But there’s nothing here that I have there…our wagon’s long gone, and the swingset…” She turned to Taysha. “Wait, do you still have our woven leather belt? It has a metal buckle—”

  A gust of cold air swept up the driveway, and Cobb jumped, for the old Buick’s engine seemed to have started; a moment later he realized that the sound was much quieter than the engine—the car was simply vibrating all over.

  Even as a rapid clicking started up in the air, he thought: This car is a link between both worlds, and I must have touched just about every corner of it, in the other world. Lots of my aura signature in it. If I put my hand on it now, it would take me back there. But I should be touching Allegra—

  Allegra was standing six feet away, still looking questioningly at Taysha.

  How long had Armand Vitrielli had the car? Cobb hesitated only an agonized fraction of a second.

  He lunged forward, caught Allegra around the waist and then spun, flinging her at the front end of the old Buick. An apology was already rising in his throat.

  She thumped against the hood and rebounded—into nowhere in this world. A brief whirlwind spun where she had been standing, and then he and Taysha were alone with the car in the dark driveway.

  Cobb’s heart was thudding in his chest, and he made his way unsteadily back to the wall by the kitchen window and leaned against it, closing his eyes.

  He opened them again when he felt Taysha’s hand on his shoulder.

  “Do you still have your slide rule thing?” she asked.

  “No. I dropped it when you grabbed my hand, back by the faucet. Just as we jumped.”

  “Oh. Sorry.”

  He shook his head. The breeze had died, and his damp face just felt hot.

  “You could have gone,” said Taysha, “instead of her. Right?”

  “Yes.” He sighed deeply. “I could have gone back with her,” he said, “if she’d been standing closer to the car. In that moment.” He paused, afraid his voice would catch if he said anything more. He took another deep breath and let it out, and said, carefully, “I guessed your father owned the car before you met this Gorba—so she’d probably have had a lot of physical contact with it back then, imprinted a lot of aura signature: opening the doors, the trunk, maybe driving it. It’d link her to the car here and there. But I couldn’t be sure.”

  She squeezed his shoulder and then dropped her hand. “But you took the chance, to send her home. Yes, I’ve been driving that car since I was sixteen.”

  “Good. I guess.”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t think of the car. We were thinking of smaller stuff—rosaries, faucets, belts.”

  He could only wave dismissively.

  She shifted on her feet, glancing at the Buick and away. “So Allegra—the other me—is back by the car now, in that empty lot?”

  “Somewhere near it. Probably sitting down. I threw her against the hood pretty hard.”

  “She’s back with Lucy, in her own world. Is it—you know—all over now?”

  “Without the slide rule, yes, I’m afraid it is. And I’m here.”

  Taysha stretched, then shivered and crossed her arms. “You marooned yourself here, so that the other me could be back with her daughter, in her life. Her daughter—” She smiled crookedly, “I want to say our daughter—isn’t deprived of her mother.”

  “I thought I had to. The whole thing was my fault. Blaine and Ainsworth wouldn’t have been able to do it on their own.” He yawned so widely that a couple of tears spilled down his cheeks. “I hope she knows how to wedge branches under the tires, so she can back out of that lot. I left the key in the ignition.”

  “I think it was their fault—Blaine and Ainsworth. I’ll tell my dad about them.”

  Cobb let himself slide down the wall until he was sitting on the cement. “Good idea. But I helped, crucially. I even knew it was wrong.”

  She sat down near him, and for several seconds neither of them spoke.

  “You’ve got cigarettes,” she said finally. “Bum one?”

  Cobb touched his shirt pocket, and was remotely surprised to find that his pack of Camels was still there. “Sure.”

  He straightened one leg to get his lighter out; his hands were shaking, and she took it from him and lit a cigarette for him and one for herself.

  Taysha handed the lighter back. “That Lucy kid seemed nice.”

  “Did she? I guess.” He took a deep drag on his cigarette. “There’s probably a me, somewhere, in this world. Not working for your dad at Cal State, I gather.” He exhaled and shook his head. “Doing something worthwhile, do you suppose?”

  She nodded thoughtfully. “Well, I’m naturally partial.”

  “Oh?”

  She grinned. “To Lucy, I mean. No, if you worked there I’d have met you. I…well, I wouldn’t have such a terrible opinion of Dad’s colleagues.”

  He pushed aside thoughts of Googling “Clive Cobb”—and of his Visa card being no good here, and his apartment doubtless being occupied by someone else—and he patted her hand.

  “Thanks,” he said, then awkwardly moved his hand away. He cleared his throat. “I wonder what other thing I might have done, here, in these—twelve, is it?—years. What I always wanted to do was write kids’ books, young adult stuff.”

  “Maybe he has, this different you. Maybe they’re big movies now, like The Hunger Games.”

  “What,” he said, “that Kafka story?”

  “No, Suzanne Collins. The Hunger Games? Three or four movies? You know, with Jennifer Lawrence?”

  He shrugged. “Rings no bells.”

  She cocked her head. “You do watch movies?”

  “Sure, I just don’t recall those. Jennifer somebody? I suppose his fingerprints would be the same as mine. If I kill myself, he’ll be surprised to hear that his dead body’s been found somewhere.”

  She took a last drag on her cigarette and flicked it away. “You’re not going to kill yourself, Clive. Come on, get up. We should go talk to my dad.”

  She got to her feet and extended her hand down to him. He tossed his own cigarette and took her hand as he stood up.

  “We can go in through the kitchen,” Taysha said. “His study is down the hall.”

  He was about to say that he knew the way, but she was still holding his hand, leading him as she pulled open the kitchen door and stepped inside. Together they walked past a newer refrigerator than the one he remembered, and down a hall that didn’t have boxes of books shoved up against the walls on both sides. The air was fresher than it had been when he had visited this house in his own world, though he still caught the rich smell of Latakia tobacco.

  The door to the study was closed, and the strains of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto cut off when Taysha let go of Cobb’s hand and knocked. A moment later she pushed the
door open.

  “Look what I found, Dad,” she said, waving Cobb in. “Can I keep him?”

  Vitrielli’s study appeared to be the same as it was in Cobb’s memory—Doré and Piranesi prints above a worn couch, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on two walls, and a cabinet below a window that he knew was dark even in daytime because of a curtain of lantana branches growing outside. On an old carpet in the center of the room stood a wide, ornate old mahogany table, flanked by two leather armchairs. Tan-shaded lamps stood in two corners, but the face of the old man seated at the desk was lit by a computer monitor.

  Now it was Cobb’s experiences in the last couple of months that seemed to have happened in a world where he didn’t belong. Here was his friend again, and in this moment the remembered funeral had no more relevance than a fleeting dream. The very familiarity of the room was reassuring, and Cobb felt the muscles of his shoulders begin to relax.

  Armand Vitrielli took a pipe from his mouth and laid in carefully in a brass ashtray. “Where,” he asked, “did you find him?”

  “You’ll be interested,” said Taysha, settling herself on the couch. She looked up at Cobb and patted the cushion beside her.

  “I don’t mean to impose,” said Cobb as he slowly sat down, “but I believe you keep glasses and a bottle of bourbon in the cabinet behind you. Could you spare an inch or two for a trans-reality vagrant?”

  Vitrielli’s white eyebrows were raised, but after a moment he turned to the cabinet and said, “Tell me about this, Taysha.”

  What with increasingly intent questions from the old man, and Taysha and Cobb interrupting each other as they took turns telling the story, an hour had passed by the time Vitrielli sat back and picked up his pipe again.

  He pushed a pipe cleaner through it, pulled it out and dropped it into a wastepaper basket, then thoughtfully struck a wooden match and re-lit the pipe. As smoke curled toward the ceiling, he squinted at Taysha.