Dead Lines

by Greg Bear

  The girls’ bedroom door was still nearly closed.

  Peter opened it and walked in.

  “Honey? Sweetie?”

  Both beds, revealed by the spill of light from the hallway, were prim and neatly made. The matching Harry Potter coverlets and neatly folded counterpanes had not been disturbed. They were just as Helen had left them two years ago, with a few wrinkles made by Peter’s dusting every now and then.

  His hand let the rebar drop. It landed on end, then toppled onto the patchwork rug between the beds with a heavy, ringing thump. He took a shuddering breath and squatted. “I’m here,” he told the room. “Please, Daniella, give me another chance.”

  Of course, there was no answer.

  The world had become real again.

  CHAPTER 25

  SOMETIMES, THE ONLY thing that saves us is a fantasy, a memory, something stolen from the library of the past and long past its due date, but we keep it anyway, grateful and not in the least guilty.

  Peter took a morning shower and dressed and thought, when he thought much at all, I’m okay. I’m all right.

  What could have, should have shattered him did nothing of the kind. He was not seeing things and he was not crazy. He would not give himself that kind of artistic credit; for a fact, in all the months he had wished he could once again clearly visualize Daniella in his memory, or in his dreams—see her without looking at her pictures—he had failed.

  It was not imagination that had brought his daughter back to him. Daniella was in the house. She was in some sort of trouble and she had come to him. With him around, she would be all right; he provided protection. It was all vague—vague, nebulous, and unconvincing—but it was enough to keep Peter moving through the morning. He called the tow company and then his favorite Porsche garage. He would walk down to the car during the daylight; nothing would go wrong during the daytime. Perhaps day here was night on that other side of the world and everything there slept or hid out. It was beginning to make sense. Perhaps Phil’s death, or Lydia’s phone call, had started it all, pushed him over the line.

  As a teenager, he had loved The Twilight Zone, reveled in the thrill of half believing there was something more than this ordinary life. Well, now here it was. He had proof to tip his own balance scales. Skeptical Peter Russell had swung back to credulity, but this time he had real, if entirely subjective, evidence; he was no longer desperately reaching for straws but forced to acknowledge the tree trunks floating by.

  Peter went about his necessary business in a thick daze, waiting for evening and another chance to spend a few moments with Daniella. To protect her as he had not protected her before.

  He walked down the hill and saw the Porsche, undisturbed where he had parked it—a small miracle in itself—and noted the striped police tape and crayoned impound date and number on the back window.

  In the late-morning sun, he leaned against the roof of the Porsche, waiting for the tow truck. Today was very like the day he had received Lydia’s call, waking him to a larger reality. He visualized sunshine pouring through the house, even into the hall corners, keeping the scavengers at bay.

  Keeping his daughter safely hidden.

  The tow truck arrived on time, and Peter spent a few minutes thumbing through the battered, greasy 356C manual to remember how and where to arrange the hooks.

  CHAPTER 26

  AFTER AN EARLY supper, Peter took one of the smaller rattan chairs from the backyard and placed it at the end of the hall. He sat there with his length of rebar, waiting.

  He had left the door to the twins’ bedroom cracked open, but not too far. Perhaps those on the other side were as skittish as deer, like fawns afraid to break cover. He would trust their instincts. He would trust his daughter to know what was best.

  “Whenever you’re ready, sweetheart,” he murmured. “I’m here for you.”

  Around ten o’clock, he fell asleep in the chair. He awoke at dawn, stiff but refreshed. He was not alarmed or unhappy; had anything happened, he knew he would have awakened, would have jerked to complete alertness had anyone—or anything—arrived.

  The house had been quiet.

  He could not expect miracles every night.

  Peter stretched and showered, then descended into the basement and began sketching, automatically it seemed. Floodgates opened. The ideas looked pretty good to him.

  At eleven he took the phone call from the repair shop. Tried to wrap himself around a two-thousand, four-hundred dollar estimate and a long list of parts and necessary services.

  Peter could not abandon anything in distress, not now. He had to preserve his past, any part of it. Peter told the mechanic to go ahead, get her fixed, he had money coming in and would pay them next week. He had used the same shop for twenty years, they had done his last engine rebuild, they knew him well. He had never welshed on a bill. One good relationship left in his life, thank God.

  By four o’clock, he had thirty sheets of breakdown paper and twenty pages of script. Just like old times. Preserving the past had reawakened another, younger Peter Russell, more flexible and confident. With satisfaction, he stacked and tamped the sheets and slipped them into a black folio binder. Really, was being haunted any different from dropping into another world while he was writing? Briefly living in another space or time? Perhaps art and writing were like seeing another kind of reality.

  “Sure,” he said with a chuckle. “Canine Planet. Dogs driving motorbikes and hunting women in fur bikinis.”

  There, see, he told himself. You have perspective. You can tell silly ideas from those that make sense.

  My daughter coming back makes sense.

  My dead daughter.

  He worked through most of the night, slept briefly, and resumed on Sunday morning, producing dozens of drawings, sheets of script, scribbled scenarios. A flood of ideas.

  Only for a moment did he feel lost and desperately fragile.

  This is too good. It can’t go on.

  CHAPTER 27

  AT FIVE-THIRTY ON Sunday evening, as he had predicted, the strange, private sanctuary of Peter Russell came crashing down.

  He had been here before, full of desperate hope that the past could be reclaimed, or at least a shred of it. One night eighteen months ago he had drunk himself into a near-stupor and persuaded Phil to drive him into Sherman Oaks to visit a psychic. The evening had cost him five hundred dollars and had ended up a complete disaster.

  Phil had brought him back to this house, a basket case, weeping uncontrollably. He had brewed Peter coffee and sat up with him all night and into the morning.

  Peter could not let that happen again.

  As the sky darkened and the phones and Trans did not ring, as Sunday passed with no call from Helen, Peter sat in the backyard slouched in the solitary rattan chair—the other was still in the hall—with his hands folded on his stomach. The sky declined from robin’s-egg blue through a series of dusty shades to brown-tinted darkness.

  Wind chimes tinkled behind the house, not ten feet away.

  All the rationales had worn thin. “What did you see?” he asked himself in leaden tones. “Maybe you didn’t see her. You made up what you wanted to see.”

  But he had mistaken her for Lindsey. Lindsey was a close approximation, but not exact. Lindsey and Daniella had not been identical twins. After their births—within three minutes of each other—the doctors had told him, and later, Helen, coming out of her general for the Caesarean, about a third type of twin, neither fraternal nor identical; the upshot was that both he and Helen (and Phil and a lot of their friends) had always been able to tell Lindsey from Daniella, even as babies, even when they had been dressed alike.

  Wasn’t it possible, then, that a wraith of Lindsey had appeared—a leftover image of Lindsey’s emotions from years past, from just after the funeral?

  Peter nodded at the grim logic of that. Even if he was sane, he had yet to see a full-fledged ghost, a haunt, someone dead. But what about the sandblasted old man and the children n
ear Point Reyes?

  Yet in Peter’s memory, the dim face he saw so clearly above the shadowed counterpane in the girls’ bedroom was indisputably Daniella. His expectations of Lindsey had colored what he had seen.

  Even a wraith of Lindsey would never have slept in Daniella’s bed.

  His misery and confusion deepened.

  AT SEVEN O’CLOCK, he climbed the short flight of steps to the porch and walked through the rear door into the kitchen. He listened for a moment to the pops and cracks of settling timbers, all soft. No starting pistols announcing a leave-taking of his senses or the world changing into something new.

  He was not hungry, so he walked to his bedroom and searched the shelves for The Doors of Perception. He found Huxley’s book, a slender volume, blue board covers and black cloth spine, minus its dust wrapper. The pages were well thumbed—he had bought it from an alternative bookstore in Laguna Beach back in 1969 and had read it once, but the previous owner had read it almost to tatters. He sat on the corner of the bed and leafed through the pages until he found the reference to philosopher Henri Bergson’s valve that kept the brain from being flooded by the minutiae of the real. The valve that kept us free of metaphysical persiflage, kept us sane and focused on what was really important in life. Focused on what could actually kill you, not just distract you.

  Huxley had died on the same day as JFK’s assassination, November 22, 1963, leaving behind a slip of paper on which he had scrawled just three letters: LSD. Perhaps Huxley had taken LSD just to keep exploring. To jam that old Bergson valve wide open even after death.

  That theory didn’t feel right, however. What was happening to Peter was less like the opening of a valve and more like a loose seal on a spigot: the drip, drip, drip of bad mental chemistry, mundane and sad. His uncle on his mother’s side had suffered from schizophrenia. Peter had never had any symptoms . . . until now. But he had gone off the deep end before. Trying to find out. Trying to learn how to bring something back.

  He lowered the book and stared at the wall, at the eight-by-ten pictures of the girls hanging there in simple brass frames. Daniella, in the last year of her life, flashing him a cheesy smile with her index finger screwing a little dimple into her plump cheek. Lindsey, on the same day, more serious, with wide blue eyes and lips drawn into a firmly noncommittal line.

  Peter told himself, “No, you are not crazy, and you are not making up excuses. You’re a bereaved daddy, and that’s hard to live with, but you’re seeing real things. You’re trying to figure out what they are and what makes the most sense.”

  He then asked with a wry grimace, “So why is it just you seeing things, me bucko?”

  Huxley’s book lay open on the bed, not very helpful after all.

  The house phone rang in the kitchen. He walked across the hall and picked up the receiver from the cradle, tugging its long winding cord to hold it to his ear. “Russell here.”

  “Mr. Russell, this is Detective Scragg. Robbery Homicide. I called earlier. We haven’t talked for quite a while. I hope this is a good time, or at least not a bad time.”

  Peter turned. The kitchen was dark; the only light came from the porch through the window over the sink. A wood-slatted Venetian blind over the window cast bars of shadow on the cabinets and counter.

  The voice on the other end continued. “I just wanted to set up an appointment to meet with you again. Discuss some things, if you don’t mind.”

  “It’s Sunday evening,” Peter said.

  “Yeah, well, weekends don’t really exist for me. I’m going over open cases, cold cases. I do that. Someday I’ll learn, but not yet. Mrs. Russell won’t take my calls.”

  “Right.” Peter didn’t feel like telling Scragg about the divorce.

  “I don’t blame her, but there’s some things I need to go over with you, not new stuff, just to refresh my memory. Wind up the case ticker again.”

  Peter did not know what a case ticker was. “What can I do?”

  “You know, this is the second anniversary.”

  Peter looked at the calendar on the wall. His fingers tightened on the phone.

  “I just wanted to go back and ask some of the questions I might have asked before, and I might not have. New perspective. Cops change and grow. Maybe I’ll see something differently this time.”

  Two years since her death. Suddenly, Peter could visualize his daughter so clearly, walking across the porch, laughing with Helen as they folded laundry, sulking after a fight with Lindsey. Trying to make her real again in his head. That was it, right? Make her so real, as if she had never gone away. He hurt with the effort.

  “Nothing new?” Peter asked.

  “No, sir. Nothing new,” Scragg said. “Nothing concrete, anyway.”

  Peter turned slowly in the dark kitchen, winding the cord around his arm. “If I can help . . .”

  “I’m sure you can, Mr. Russell. Sorry if I’m imposing. What I wanted to ask about was, did we miss interviewing anyone, talking to people, anybody, even those we couldn’t possibly suspect—anyone interested in masks . . . I’m reaching here.”

  Peter closed his eyes. The killer had painted a raccoonlike mask around Daniella’s eyes and nose, using mixed dust and blood. He felt his own blood slow throughout his body, turning into cool, sluggish rivers everywhere but behind his eyes.

  His eyes.

  “We’ve searched high and low for something similar, and we’ve found nothing, Mr. Russell. But we’re sure this person has killed before. Can you think of a hobbyist, a collector maybe, some sort of artist, someone who knows you, who might have singled you out for special attention . . . I mean, who has killed before, but hidden his crimes. He would need a safe place to store bodies, perhaps lots of bodies—”

  Peter kept trying to see his daughter as she had been when alive, defense against the images so horribly replayed for him. He stopped listening to Scragg’s voice. He could not focus on that particular fountain of unbearable truths.

  He opened his eyes and reversed his turning, unwinding the phone cord.

  The twilit shadow of a ten-year-old girl stood in the doorway that led from the kitchen back to the hall. It was Daniella, not Lindsey, with longer hair, smaller and slighter, younger—of that he was certain. Her outline was distinct, her form fully dimensional. A spot of pale yellow light seemed to rest on her midsection. She watched him, basking in his attention.

  Scragg continued to talk, a distant murmur of sympathetic but cruel reality.

  Daniella raised one hand as if to point. Peter stared, the heat behind his eyes like a blast of tropical air. His seeing made her more real.

  Scragg’s voice perversely grabbed his attention again.

  “—someone she knew, someone she recognized,” Scragg said. “Can you think of anybody we did not interview?”

  “I’ll ask her,” Peter said.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “She’s here, she’s back,” Peter murmured in awe.

  It was not just the reappearance of his daughter, it was what she had become—translucent, gossamer, as beautiful as a piece of crystal. Peter could not combine what he was hearing with what he was seeing. The detective spoke of death, of suspects and murder, but Daniella was here, demanding his attention.

  She smiled.

  He frowned and shook his head, resolved to focus. If he did not, he might lose the one impossibility that was far more important to him. “I can’t talk now.”

  “Mr. Russell—”

  Peter hung up.

  This image was not just Daniella seen from the outside, not just a ghost of the exterior; as the seconds passed, he could see deeper, through the wisps of what might have been an afterthought of clothing; deeper still, below the skin, into lightly sketched outlines of bones and organs, kept in place by some slavery to mortal form, but no longer functional, certainly. No longer necessary. As with the outside, so the inside. She looked like a medical school model made of glass—or more correctly, like a human diatom, translucent and n
acreous.

  “Ghosts have bones,” Peter murmured.

  She looked to her left, mildly concerned about something waiting down the hallway, and then returned her gaze to Peter.

  “Hello, Daniella,” he said. “Is it still there?” he asked gently, as if discussing a spider or some other small vermin that had distressed her. Wait a minute. I’ll get a jar and put it outside.

  She agreed with a girlish nod, it was still there, whatever it might be. Peter wondered if she could disagree with anything he said. Maybe ghosts were like puppets, forced to do or believe what you suggested.

  In his mind, he tried various statements, I love you. Where are you, sweetie? What happened to you? and wondered if she could pick up what he was thinking. He had been talking to Daniella in his head for years, saying all the things there had not been time enough to say while she was alive.

  He finally settled on, “Tell me if you’re real.”

  She rewarded him with a step forward. Apparently, whatever was in the hall did not worry her too much—if she could be worried. Past all mortal cares, right? But on to other cares, postmortal?

  What in hell could that mean?

  Peter felt as if he had just drunk six cups of strong coffee. His pulse raced. He was not sweating, however; he was not in distress, just excited almost beyond words, excited out of his wits. Overjoyed.

  “I love you so much,” he said. “Thank you for giving me another chance. Thank you.”

  Little motes of light floated up from the floor and found their place in her. The closer she came, the more solid she seemed. He could almost reach out and touch her, embrace her.

  No.

  “You’re real,” Daniella said. Her voice was a reed instrument through yards of thick gauze, a bad connection from across impossible seas. She raised her hand and spread her fingers as if to lay them flat on his chest. Once more Peter noticed the glow, like light falling on her midriff, as if she contained a small luminous cloud, a sunset within a ghost.