Expiration Date

by Tim Powers

  The stairs were broad between the low corniced walls, but were thickly littered with bricks and chunks of masonry and the brown palm fronds that had been falling untended for five decades; and sycamore branches hung so low in places that he practically had to crawl from step to step. When he had scrambled up to the second landing he paused to catch his breath. The air was still and silent and fragrant with eucalyptus, as if Laurel Canyon Boulevard and all of Hollywood were very far away. He couldn’t even hear any birds or insects.

  A row of once-white marble pillars supporting nothing anymore ran along the top of a wall across the stairs from him, and below the wall a dead stone fountain poked up from a bank of dried leaves; the ruined architecture all looked Greek, or at least Mediterranean, and it occurred to him that time didn’t seem to pass here—or, rather, seemed already to have passed and left this place behind. Probably that’s why they don’t tear it all down, he thought. It’s too late.

  He was now three-quarters of the way up the dusty, overgrown slope. To his right was a little stone bridge over a dry streambed, and though both of the wide cement railings still arched over the gully, the middle six feet of the bridge’s floor had long ago fallen away. A weathered two-by-six beam spanned the gap, and he remembered that in 1986, at least, the beam had been sturdy enough to bear his weight.

  He discovered that it still was, though it was springy and he had to stretch his arms out to the sides to keep his balance. On the far side he paused to wipe the dusty sweat off his face; he thought about lighting a cigarette, but looked around at all the dry brush and glumly decided he’d better not.

  Then he froze—someone was moving around below him, clumsily, through the litter on one of the clogged side terraces. Sullivan couldn’t hope to see the person through the shaggy greenery below, but in the weighty silence he could hear someone mumbling and scuffling around.

  One of the bums that live here, he thought. It doesn’t sound like a cop or a caretaker; still, the bum might draw the attention of such people, and I don’t want to get kicked out of here myself before I retrieve the mask. They might fix the fence, or even post guards, before I could get back. This place is a historical landmark, after all, though nobody seems to pay any attention to it.

  He tiptoed through the fieldstone arch ahead of him and picked his way up a side stairway, which, being narrower, was relatively clear of debris. His fast breathing sounded loud in the still air.

  There was another arch at the top, and he paused under it, for he was at the broad main terrace of the hill now, and he’d be visible crossing the cement pavement that stretched between the jungle below and the odd house in front of him.

  The pavement was clear up here, and he let himself light a cigarette. Sukie, he recalled, had brought a flask, on that … March? … day in ’86. That’s right, March—it had been Good Friday afternoon, which had seemed like a good day for burials.

  At first the two of them had thought that this house—this narrow two-story building, brick below and stuccoed above, with castle-like crenellations along the roof as if the owner were ready to hire archers to repel attack from below—must be Houdini’s mansion, and they’d been surprised that the famed magician would live in such a little place. Later they’d learned that this was just the servants’ quarters. Houdini’s mansion had stood a hundred yards off to the south, and had burned down in the thirties. But this was nevertheless a part of the old Houdini estate. It would do fine as a place to hide the mask. “Hide a thumb in a place where there’s already a lot of its thumbprints,” Sukie had said.

  Sullivan now stared uneasily at the house. The doors and windows were all covered with weathered sheets of plywood, but on the tiny upstairs balcony sat a flowerpot with a green plant growing in it. Had there been rain in L.A. recently? The palm fronds he’d climbed over below had been dry as mummies. Was some homeless person living in this place?

  He decided to hide here for a little while and see if the noises on the slope had been heard and might draw someone out onto the balcony.

  Sullivan recalled that he and Sukie had nearly killed themselves struggling up the slope six years ago, for they’d been “on bar-time big time,” as Sukie had said—they’d been feeling the roughness of a step underfoot before the shoe actually touched it, and the bark of a tree limb a second before the hand grasped it. But Sukie had been full of hectic cheer, chatting graciously with imaginary guests and singing misunderstood snatches from Handel’s Messiah. Sullivan had been constantly whispering at her to shut up.

  No one seemed to be home in the little castle. Sullivan relaxed and sucked on his cigarette, and he looked up at the brushy slope beyond the house. The upper slope had advanced visibly since his previous visit—broken dirt was piled up right to the stones of the arch at the south end of the house now, and a section of ornate marble railing stuck up crookedly above and behind the arch like a bleached rib cage exposed by a cemetery landslide.

  He jumped suddenly, and as his cigarette hit the pavement he heard a voice from the stairway he’d just climbed: “By the hair of my chinny-chin-chin—”

  Sullivan crouched behind the house side of the arch as the voice went on, “I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll eat you, billy-goat-gruff.”

  It’s that bum, he thought nervously. He’s following me, and of course my gun is locked up back in the van.

  Then he grinned at his momentary panic. Just a bum, he told himself. Forget him and go get the mask from the garage, which luckily is still standing. Sullivan stretched out his leg and stepped on the smoldering cigarette, but he was trembling, for the billy-goat-gruff remark had reminded him of the troll that had lived under a bridge in that old children’s story. Maybe, he thought as he made himself maintain his grin, I shouldn’t have walked across that board over the broken bridge back there.

  He straightened up and stepped out into the sunlight and began walking across the old cement, careful not to kick any stray rocks.

  The open-arched garage was a strange structure too, entirely fronted with tiny inset stones and with two broad castle-like merlons on the roof; the inside walls were all stonework as well, and the back wall was concave, as though to provide good acoustics.

  After only a few steps he whipped his head back around to the left and saw a skinny old woman come shuffling around the corner of the house. Her white dress looked as if it had been elegant before someone had spent years sleeping, and apparently doing engine work, in it, but all she was wearing on her stained feet was a broken pair of plastic zoris. The soles flapped on the cement as she hunched toward him!

  “I suppose you don’t want to lose your name?” she was calling anxiously.

  Then Sullivan heard the bum scuffling quickly to the top of the stairs behind him. “Blow your house down!” he was cawing.

  Sullivan broke into a run for the garage; he stomped and skidded inside and in an instant was crouched in the shadows against the back wall, digging in the loose dry dirt with his hands. It seemed to him that the dirt was colder than it had any right to be.

  “Where the fuck,” he was keening to himself, just as he felt the plywood board he and Sukie had laid over Houdini’s mask. He paused, even though he could hear the bum wheezing his way across the driveway toward the garage. It’s not Houdini buried here, Sullivan reminded himself, it’s not even his ghost. He took a deep breath and lifted the board away in a shower of powdery dirt.

  And he saw that the life-size plaster hands and the little cloth Bull Durham sack were still in the hole. If the bum was just a bum, Sullivan could probably chase him away by waving the plaster hands like clubs.

  Even in his panic he grimaced with distaste as he tucked the sack into his shirt pocket, and then he made himself snatch up the plaster hands, and he turned toward the light of the entrance.

  The bum from the hill slope was standing there, visible at last, and Sullivan saw that he did have hair on his chin; lots of it, white and matted. The man had his hands in the pockets of an enormous ragged over
coat, and he was rocking his head and peering in Sullivan’s direction.

  Sullivan’s heart was pounding, for the man was clearly puzzled to see him. “What do you want?” Sullivan ventured. “How did you get in here?”

  “I saw a guy—come in here,” mumbled the old man, “couldn’a had a hall pass, aren’t they—I forget. Where’d he go, anyway? I think he’s the guy that stole my … my Buick.” He was scuffling backward in confusion now. “I’m still pissed about that Buick.”

  “He came in here,” said Sullivan, trying to keep the shakiness out of his voice. “I ate him. And I’m still hungry.” He could smell the old man now, the well-remembered tang of raw cheap wine oozing out through dead pores.

  “Jesus God!” the old man exclaimed shrilly, his brown-mottled eyes wide. “Ate—him! I help out around here, ask anybody, I fold the newspapers—” He was flapping his shaky hands. “—rearrange the rocks and—branches, you know? Make it all neater.” He bared teeth that seemed to be made of the same bad stuff as his eyes. “You can’t eat me, not right on top of him.”

  Sullivan jerked his head toward the slope and the ruined stairs. “Go, then.”

  Nodding as rapidly as a pair of wind-up chattering teeth, the old man turned and began limping rapidly back toward the stairs.

  Sullivan stepped out into the light, his heart pounding against the little bag in his pocket. The old woman had stopped a few yards away and was gaping at him uncertainly.

  “I … was keeping your plant watered,” she said. “In most gardens they make the beds too soft—so that the flowers are always asleep.”

  Sullivan recognized the line as something from the Alice in Wonderland books. He had read so many of them and somehow remembered them. Sukie had always said that the Alice books were the Old and New Testaments for ghosts—which Pete had never understood; after all, Lewis Carroll hadn’t been dead yet when he’d written them.

  “Fine,” Sullivan told the old woman, making a vaguely papal gesture with one of the hands. “Carry on.”

  The old man had by now scrambled some distance down the side stairway, and in a birdy old voice was calling, “I got away-ay! I got away-ay!” in the nyah nyah nyah-nyah-nah! cadence of spiteful children.

  Sullivan glanced back in distaste, then turned and looked past the old woman at the driveway that curled away down the hill to Laurel Canyon Boulevard. Best to leave that way, he thought. I haven’t heard any sirens, and it’s less important, now, that I not be seen. At least now I’ve got the goddamn things.

  “Excuse me,” he said, and stepped around the woman.

  After a few moments, as he was trudging down the driveway, she called after him, “Are you animal, vegetable, or mineral?”

  That was what the Lion had asked Alice, in Through the Looking-Glass. “It’s a fabulous monster!” he called back, quoting what the Unicorn had answered about Alice.

  Don’t I wish, he thought.

  CHAPTER 7

  “I can’t help it,” said Alice very meekly: “I’m growing.”

  “You’ve no right to grow here,” said the Doormouse.

  —Lewis Carroll,

  Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

  THE VAN SHOOK EVERY time a car drove past it, but after carefully laying the plaster hands and the little bag with the dried thumb in it on the front seat, Sullivan climbed in the back and tossed the sheets and blanket and cushions off the unmade bed. The bed could be disassembled and partially telescoped to become a U-shaped booth with a little table in the middle, but when it was extended out like this, the boards under the booth-seat cushions could be lifted off, exposing a few cubic feet of unevident space. He hooked his finger through the hole in the forward board and levered it up out of its frame.

  Inside the booth-seat box lay a couple of square, limp-plastic rectangles connected by two foot-and-a-half-long ribbons, and a gray canvas fanny-pack containing his .45 semi-automatic Colt and a couple of spare magazines.

  He lifted out the fanny pack and hefted it. He hadn’t shot the .45 since an afternoon of target practice in the desert outside Tucson with some of the other tramp electricians a couple of years ago, but he did remember cleaning it afterward, and buying a fresh box of hardball rounds and reloading all three magazines.

  The strung-together plastic rectangles were meant to be worn around the neck while traveling, with one rectangle lying on the chest and the other back between the shoulder blades—right now he had about six and a half thousand dollars in hundreds in the one, and his union papers in the other. Sullivan always thought of the pair as his “scapular,” because the linked flat wallets looked like one of those front-and-back medallions Catholics wear to keep from going to hell. He was always vaguely embarrassed to wear it.

  He glanced toward the front of the van, where the three pieces of Houdini’s “mask” lay on the passenger seat.

  What would he put away in the seat box, and what would he keep out?

  If he was going to drive straight back to Arizona and try to save his job at the Roosevelt Nuclear Generating Station, he would peel off a couple of hundred dollars to comfortably cover gas and food, and leave the rest of the cash hidden in the seat box here, along with the loaded gun, which was a felony to take across state borders; and the mask would be most effective where it was, out in the open. But if he was going to stay in Los Angeles for a while he’d have to allow for the possibility of being separated from, or even abandoning, the van—he’d want to have the cash and the gun on him, and the mask would have to be hidden from the sort of people who might get into the van and ransack it.

  Another car drove past on Laurel Canyon Boulevard, and the van rocked on its shocks.

  Stay in Los Angeles? he asked himself, startled even to have had the thought. Why would I do that? She works here, Loretta deLarava, and she probably still lives aboard the Queen Mary in Long Beach and commutes right up through the middle of the whole city every day.

  I’d be crazy to do anything but leave the mask on the front seat and drive … anywhere. If I’m screwed with the Edison network I can still get electrician work, in Santa Fe or Kansas City or Memphis or any damn place. I could be a plain old handyman in any city in the whole country, doing low-profile electric, as well as cement work and drywall and carpentry and plumbing. An independent small-time contractor, getting paid under the table most of the time and fabricating expenses to show to the IRS on the jobs where I’d have to accept checks.

  And if I scoot out of here right now, I might not even be screwed with Edison.

  Sukie’s nonsense Christmas carols were still droning in the back of his head, and he found himself thinking about the last time he’d seen her, at the shoot at Venice Beach on Christmas Eve in ’86. He had somehow not ever been to Venice before—he was certain—and of course he had not been there since.

  But on that overcast winter morning he had recognized the place. Driving around in one of deLarava’s vans, he had several times found himself knowing what he would see when he rounded the next corner: a gray old clapboard house with flowers growing in a window box, the traffic circle, the row of chipped Corinthian pillars lining Windward Avenue.

  On this Christmas Eve of ’86, big red plastic lanterns and garlands of fake pine boughs had been strung around the tops of the pillars and along the traffic-signal cables overhead, and the sidewalks had been crowded with last-minute Christmas shoppers and children, and dogs on leashes, and there had seemed to be a car in every curbside parking slot—but the pavements in his flickering memory had been empty and stark white under a harsh summer sun, and in his memory the shadows in the gaping windows and behind the bone-white colonnades were impenetrably black, all as silent and still as a streetscape in some particularly ominous De Chirico painting.

  Under an overcast sky the real, winter ocean had been gray, with streaks of foam on the faces of the waves, but luckily deLarava had not wanted to actually go out onto the sand. Sukie was already drunk and wearing sunglasses, and Pete had been shaking as
he set up the lights along the sidewalk.

  They’d been supposed to be doing a short subject on the bodybuilders who apparently spent all their days lifting weights in the little fenced-in yard by the pavilion at the bottom of Windward Avenue, but deLarava’s props had been old—a rented 1957 Buick, a Gigi movie poster to hang in a shop window—and she had had something else, too, that she’d carried in a shoebox.

  (Sullivan was shaking now, holding the scapular and the gun.

  (Idaho, he thought desperately, up in the Pelouse area where they grow lentils instead of potatoes. It’ll be snowing soon now, and people always need electrical work done when it gets real cold. Or, what the hell, all the way out to the East Coast, way out to Sag Harbor at the far end of Long Island—there was a lot of repair work of all sorts to be done during the off season, and you could hardly get farther away from Los Angeles.)

  But helplessly he found himself remembering the moment on that chilly morning when deLarava had put down the shoebox on a truck fender, and Sukie had found an opportunity to peek inside it—and then had screamed and flung it away from her onto the sidewalk.

  Pete had already spun around in sudden fright, and he’d expected to see something like a dead rat, or even a mummified baby, roll out of the box; but what had come spilling out of the box, tumbling across the looping electrical cables on the beachfront sidewalk, had been a well-remembered brown leather wallet and ring of keys and, somehow worst of all, three cans of Hires Root Beer. One of the cans rolled up against Pete’s shoes, spraying a tiny jet of brown foam.

  He and Sukie had simply fled then, mindlessly, running away up Windward Avenue. He had eventually stopped, winded, at a gas station somewhere up on Washington Boulevard, and had taken a cab to their apartment, and then driven his car to his bank, where he had cashed out his savings account. To this day he didn’t know or care where Sukie had run to. Pete had been in Oregon by the next afternoon. Sukie had eventually tracked him down through union records, and they had talked on the phone a few times, but they’d never knowingly been in the same state at the same time again.