Expiration Date

by Tim Powers

  “Well, they were crazy too. The old man, named Jiddu K. Parganas, was born in 1929. His parents announced that he was the jagadguru, which is apparently like a messiah, okay? The World Teacher. Theosophical stuff. There was a guy he was named for, named Jiddu Krishnamurti, who was supposed to be it, but he shined the job on in ’28. He got tired of the spirit world, he said, seeing ghosts crowding up the beaches all the time. Great stuff, hm? But our Jiddu, the one born a year later, didn’t work out too well. When he was twenty he got arrested for having burglarized the old house of Henry Ford, who had died two years earlier. The Ford executors hushed it up, but apparently Jiddu got away with a glass test tube. The Ford people hooked up another one to replace it, and nowadays the fake is on display in the Ford Museum in Greenfield Village in Michigan.”

  deLarava’s heart was pounding, and tears were again leaking out of her eyes. “Fake of … what?”

  “It’s supposed to contain Edison’s last breath.”

  “Edison?” My God, deLarava thought, no wonder the psychic gain is cranked up so high around here since Monday! No wonder Apie is coming out of the sea, and every ghost in town needs only a sneeze to set it frolicking. I guessed that the Monday-night torture-murder wasn’t a coincidence, and that the kid had run away with someone heavy—but Edison!

  “Yeah,” said Ayres blandly, “the guy that invented the lightbulb. Anyway, Jiddu married a rich Indian woman who was also into this spiritual stuff, and they seem to have formed a sort of splinter cult of their own, just the two of them. They bought the house in Beverly Hills, where they were killed Monday night. The police are aware of the place—they’ve had to answer a lot of complaints from the Parganases and their neighbors. A lot of drunks and bums used to come around demanding to talk to somebody named Dante or Don Tay.”

  “That would have been the mask,” said deLarava softly. “They kept it in a hollowed-out copy of The Divine Comedy or something.” She waved at Ayres. “Never mind. Go on.”

  “Some comedy. Their kid, this Koot Hoomie that you’re looking for, was born in ’81. His teachers say that he was okay, considering that his parents were trying to raise him to be some kind of Hindoo holy man. Have you got any calls?”

  “Hundreds,” she said. “People have grabbed every stray kid in L.A. except Koot Hoomie Parganas.” She thought of the boy out there in the alleys and parking lots somewhere, eating out of Dumpsters and sleeping all alone under hedges … and last night’s dream came back to her, forcefully.

  She was crying again. “I’ve got to get some air,” she said, blundering up out of her chair. “Tell Joey Webb to keep looking—and tell him to keep an eye on the canals.’ ”

  The sea was too full of imagined ghosts, waked up and opposing her, and the carpeted corridors and long splendid galleries’ seemed suddenly bristly with hostile ectoplasm accumulated like nicotine stains over the decades, so she fled to the Windsor Salon on R Deck.

  She liked the Windsor Salon because it had hanging chandeliers, not the lights-on-columns that stood everywhere else in the ship, big Art Deco mushrooms with glowing mica-shade caps. The Windsor Salon had been built after the Queen Mary had been permanently moored in Long Beach, had in fact been built in the space of one of the now-useless funnels, and so it could afford the luxury of ceiling lights that would have swung and broken if the ship had been out at sea.

  No parties of tourists were being shown through the room at the moment, so she collapsed into one of the convention-hotel chairs and buried her face in her hands.

  She had dreamed of a group of little girls who were camping out on a dark plain. At first they had played games around the small fire they had kindled up—a make-believe tea party, charades, hopscotch on lines toed across the gray dust—but then the noises from the darkness beyond the ring of firelight had made them huddle together. Roars and shouts of subhuman fury had echoed from unseen hills, and the drumbeat of racing hooves and the hard flutter of flags had shaken in the cold wind.

  Perhaps the girls had gathered together in this always-dark wasteland because they all had the same name—Kelley. They had formed a ring now, holding hands to contain their campfire and chattering with tearful, nervous, false cheer, until one of the girls noticed that her companions weren’t real—they were all just mirrors set up closely together in the dirt, reflecting back to her own pale, dirt-smeared face.

  And her sudden terror made the face change—the nose was turned up, and became fleshier, the skin around the eyes became pouched and coarse, and the chin receded away, leaving the mouth a long, grinning slit. Kelley had known what this was. She was turning into a pig.

  Loretta had driven herself up out of the well of sleep then, and discovered that she was kneeling on the tile floor of the little bathroom, crouching over the toilet and calling down, down, down into the dark so that Kelley might find her way back up out of the deep hole she’d fallen into.

  There were no parking lines painted on the weathered checkerboard of cracked concrete and asphalt behind the apartment building, so Sullivan just parked the van in the shade of a big shaggy old carob tree. He dug around among the faded papers on the dashboard until he found Houdini’s thumb, unpleasantly spitty and dusty now, and then he groped below the passenger seat and retrieved the Bull Durham sack and pushed the thumb back into it.

  With the sack in his shirt pocket and his gun snugged in under his belt, he pushed open the door and stepped down onto the broken pavement. Green carob pods were scattered under the overhanging tree branches, and he could see the little V-shaped cuts in the pods where early-morning wild parrots had bitten out the seeds.

  This would be the fourth apartment building he checked out. When he had come down off the freeway at Seventh Street in Long Beach, he had quickly confirmed his suspicion that motels never had garages, and then he’d driven around randomly through the run-down residential streets west of Pacific and south of Fourth, looking for rental signs.

  He had stopped and looked at five places already, and, no doubt because of his stated preference for paying in cash, only a couple of the landlords had seemed concerned about his murky, out-of-state, unverifiable references. He thought he would probably take the last one he had looked at, a $700-a-month studio apartment in a shabby complex on Cerritos Avenue, but he had decided to look at a few more before laying out his money.

  He was down on Twenty-first Place now, right next to Bluff Park and only half a block from the harbor shore, and he had just decided that any of these beachfront rentals would be too expensive, when he had driven past this rambling old officelike structure. He wouldn’t even have thought it was an apartment building if it hadn’t had an APT FOR RENT sign propped above the row of black metal mailboxes. It looked promisingly low-rent.

  Sullivan walked across the pavement now toward the back side of the building, and soon he was scuffing on plain packed dirt. Along the building’s back wall, between two windowless doors, someone had set up a row of bookshelves, on which sat dozens of mismatched pots with dry plants curling out of them, and off to his left plastic chairs sat around a claw-footed iron bathtub that had been made into a table by having a piece of plywood laid over it. He stared at the doors and wondered if he should just knock at one of them.

  He jumped; and then, “Who parked all cattywampus?” came a hoarse call from behind him.

  Sullivan turned around and saw a fat, bald-headed old man in plastic sandals limping across the asphalt from around the street-side corner of the building. The man wore no shirt at all, and his suntanned belly overhung the wide-legged shorts that flapped around his skinny legs.

  “Are you talking about my van?” asked Sullivan.

  “Well, if that’s your van,” the old man said weakly; he inhaled and then went on, “then I guess I’m talking about it.” Again he rasped air into his lungs. “Ya damn bird-brain.”

  “I’m here to speak to the manager of these apartments,” Sullivan said stiffly.

  “I’m the manager. My name’s Mr. Shadroe
.”

  Sullivan stared at him. “You are?” He was afraid this might be just some bum making fun of him. “Well, I want to rent an apartment.”

  “I don’t need to … rent an apartment.” Shadroe waved at the van. “If that leaks oil, you’ll have to … park it on the street.” The old man’s face was shiny with sweat, but somehow he smelled spicy, like cinnamon.

  “It doesn’t leak oil,” Sullivan said. “I’m looking for an apartment in this area; how much is the one you’ve got?”

  “You on SDI or some—kinda methadone treatment? I won’t take you if you are, and I—don’t care if it’s legal for me to say so. And I won’t have children here.”

  “None of those things,” Sullivan assured him. “And if I decide I want the place I can pay you right now, first and last month’s rent, in cash.”

  “That’s illegal, too. The first and last. Gotta call the last month’s rent a deposit nowadays. But I’ll take it. Six hundred a month, utilities are included … ’cause the whole building’s on one bill. That’s twelve hundred, plus a real deposit of… three hundred dollars. Fifteen. Hundred, altogether. Let’s go into my office and I can … give you a receipt and the key.” Talking seemed to be an effort for the man, and Sullivan wondered if he was asthmatic or had emphysema.

  Shadroe had already turned away toward one of the two doors, and Sullivan stepped after him. “I’d,” he said laughing in spite of himself, “I’d like to see the place first.”

  Shadroe had fished a huge, bristling key chain from his shorts pocket and was unlocking the door. “It’s got a new refrigerator—in it, I hooked it up myself yesterday. I do all my—own electrical and plumbing. What do you do?”

  “Do? Oh, I’m a bartender.” Sullivan had heard that bartenders tended to be reliable tenants.

  Shadroe had pushed the door open, and now waved Sullivan toward the dark interior. “That’s honest work, boy,” he said. “You don’t need to be ashamed.”

  “Thanks.”

  Sullivan followed him into a long, narrow room dimly lit by foliage-blocked windows. A battered couch sat against one of the long walls and a desk stood across from it under the windows; over the couch were rows of bookshelves like the ones outside, empty except for stacks of old People magazines and, on the top shelf, three water-stained pink stuffed toys. A television set was humming faintly on a table, though its screen was black.

  Shadroe pulled out the desk chair and sat down heavily. “Here’s a rental agreement,” he said, tugging a sheet of paper out of a stack. “No pets either. What are those shoes? Army-man shoes?”

  Sullivan was wearing the standard shoes worn by tramp electricians, black leather with steel-reinforced toes. “Just work shoes,” he said, puzzled. “Good for standing in,” he added, feeling like an idiot.

  “They gotta go. I got wood floors, and you’ll be boomin’ around all night—nobody get any sleep—I get complaints about it. Get yourself some Wallabees,” he said with a look of pained earnestness. “The soles are foam rubber.”

  The rental agreement was a Xerox copy, and the bottom half of it hadn’t printed clearly. Shadroe began laboriously filling in the missing paragraphs in ink. Sullivan just sat helplessly and watched the old man squint and frown as his spotty brown hand worked the pen heavily across the paper.

  The old man’s cinnamon smell was stronger in here, and staler. The room was silent except for the scratching of the pen and the faint hum of the television set, and Sullivan’s hairline was suddenly damp with sweat.

  He found himself thinking of the containment areas of nuclear generating plants, where the pressure was kept slightly below normal to keep radioactive dust from escaping; and of computer labs kept under higher-than-normal pressure to keep ordinary dust out. Some pressure was wrong in this dingy office.

  I don’t want to stay here, he thought. I’m not going to stay here.

  “While you’re doing that,” he said unsteadily, “I might go outside and look around at the place.”

  “I’ll be done here. In a second.”

  “No, really, I’ll be right outside.”

  Sullivan walked carefully to the door and stepped out into the sunlight, and then he hurried across the patchwork pavement to his van, taking deep breaths of the clean sea air.

  That apartment back up on Cerritos looks good, he told himself. (This place is only half a block from the beach, and I could probably see the Queen Mary across the water from the cul-de-sac right beyond the driveway, but) I certainly couldn’t count on getting anything done here, not with this terrible Shadroe guy blundering around.

  He unlocked the van door, carefully so as not to touch the drying egg-smear, and climbed in. Mr. Shadroe was probably still sitting back there in the office, carefully writing out the missing paragraphs of the rental agreement; not even breathing as his clumsy fingers worked the pen.

  Sullivan pulled the door closed, but paused with the key halfway extended toward the ignition. The man hadn’t been breathing.

  Shadroe had inhaled a number of times, in order to talk, but he had not been breathing. Sullivan was suddenly, viscerally sure that that’s what had so upset him in there—he had been standing next to a walking vapor lock, the pressure of a living soul in the vacuum of a dead body.

  What are you telling me? he asked himself; that Mr. Shadroe is a dead guy? If so, I should definitely get out of here, fast, before some shock causes him to throw stress-shells, and his overdrawn lifeline collapses and he goes off like a goddamn firebomb, like the patient at Elizalde’s Día del Muerte séance.

  Still uncomfortable with the idea, he put the key into the ignition.

  Shadroe could be alive, he thought—he could just have been breathing very low, very quietly. Oh yeah? he answered himself immediately. When he inhaled in order to speak, it sounded like somebody dragging a tree branch through a mail slot.

  Maybe he’s just one of the old solidified ghosts, a man-shaped pile of animated litter, who drifted down here to be near the ocean, as Elizalde in her interview, unaware of how literally she was speaking, noted that the poor old creatures like to do. (“Tide pools seem to be the best, actually, in eliciting the meditation that brings the old spirits to the surface …”) But Shadroe didn’t quite talk crazily enough, and a ghost wouldn’t be able to deal with the paperwork of running an apartment building; collecting rents, paying taxes and license and utility bills.

  Okay, so what if he is one of the rare people who can continue to occupy and operate their bodies after they’ve died? What’s it to me?

  Sullivan twisted the key, and the engine started right up, without even a touch of his foot on the gas pedal.

  I wonder how long he’s been dead, he thought. If his death was recent, like during the last day or so, he probably hasn’t even noticed it himself yet; but if he’s been hanging on for a while, he must have figured out measures to avoid the collapse: he must not ever sleep, for example, and I’ll bet he spends a lot of time out on the ocean.

  (“… patients seem to find their ghosts more accessible in the shallow depths of actual ocean water. It’s been worth field trips.”)

  He didn’t want to think, right now, about what Elizalde had said in the interview.

  What would that blind witch on the Honda see, he wondered instead, if she were to come around here? With a dead guy up and walking around all over this building and grounds, insulting people’s vehicles and shoes, this whole place must look like a patch of dry rot, psychically.

  This place would be good cover.

  And the location is perfect for me. And six hundred a month, with utilities included—and a new refrigerator!—is pretty good.

  Sullivan sighed, and switched off the engine and got out of the van. When he had walked back across the yard and stepped into the office, Shadroe was still at work on the rental agreement. Sullivan sat down on the couch to wait, stoically enduring the psychically stressed atmosphere.

  (“Eventually I’d like to move my clinic to some location
on the beach—not to where there’s surf, you see, but pools of ordered, quieted seawater.”)

  “If you’ll take cash right now,” he said unsteadily, “I’d like to start moving my stuff in this afternoon.”

  “If you right now got the time,” said Shadroe, without looking up. “I right now got the key.”

  Sullivan had the time. He was suddenly in no hurry to go find Angelica Anthem Elizalde, for he was pretty sure that he knew where she would be.

  At the canals at Venice Beach.

  CHAPTER 28

  “I can’t go no lower,” said the Hatter: “I’m on the floor, as it is.”

  —Lewis Carroll,

  Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

  SITTING IN A BUS seat by a sunny window, warmed by the noon glare through the glass and by the oversized fleece-lined denim jacket he had bought at a thrift store on Slauson, Kootie was too sleepy and comfortable to worry. He was sure that the last two days and three nights had aged his face way beyond that picture on the billboards, and, especially with the sunglasses, he was sure he must look like a teenager. The denim jacket even smelled like stale beer.

  Keeping his face maturely expressionless, he cocked an eyebrow out the window at the pollo stands and the 1950s-futuristic car washes along Crenshaw Boulevard. He would be transferring at Manchester to catch another RTD bus to the Dockweiler State Beach at Playa del Rey.

  The boy had awakened at dawn, his eyes already open and stinging in the ancient paint fumes in the abandoned car, and he had recognized the stiff drop cloth under his chin, and the split and faded dashboard in front of him; he had clearly remembered breaking the wind-wing window the night before, and opening the door and climbing in.

  But he hadn’t recognized the city dimly visible beyond the dusty windshield this morning.

  Cables and wires were strung so densely against the sky overhead that for one sleepy moment he had thought he was under some kind of war-surplus submarine-catching net; then he had seen that the wires were higher than he had thought, and separate, strung haphazardly from telegraph poles and bulky insulators on the high roofs of all the old buildings. And even through the grime on the glass he could see that they were old buildings—imposing brick structures with arched windows at the top and jutting cornices.