by Tim Powers
The hit was cold with nitrous oxide, but nausea-sweat sprang out on his forehead at the hard, static absence of the rotted thing that rode the rushing incoming stench and wedged itself hopelessly sideways in the breech of his mind. The back of Obstadt’s head hit the carpet as his chair went over backward, and then his knees banged against a bookcase and clattered sideways to the floor, and he was convulsing all alone on the carpet under the high blue sky.
CHAPTER 36
“I love my love with an H,” Alice couldn’t help beginning, “because he is Happy. I hate him with an H, because he is Hideous…”
—Lewis Carroll,
Through the Looking-Glass
AT EYE-HEIGHT ON one of the glass shelves was a white bas-relief of Jesus done in reverse, with the face indented into a plaster block, the nose the deepest part—as if, Elizalde thought, Jesus had passed out face-first into a bowl of meringue. Someone had at some time reached into the hollow of the face to paint the eyes with painstaking lack of skill, and as Elizalde shuffled across the linoleum floor the head gave the illusion of being convex rather than concave, and seemed to swivel to keep the moronic eyes fixed on her.
What household out there, she asked herself nervously, is decorated to near perfection, lacking only this fine objet d’art to make it complete?
Frank Rocha’s house had been full of things like that—prints of Our Lady of Guadalupe, tortured Jesuses painted luridly on black velvet. Elizalde nervously touched the bulge of her wallet in her back pocket.
The old woman behind the counter smiled at her and said, “Buenas días, mi hija. Cómo puedo ayudarte?”
“Quiero hacer reparaciones a un amigo muerto,” said Elizalde. How easy it was to express the idea, I want to make amends to a dead friend, in Spanish!
The woman nodded understandingly, and bent to slide open the back of a display case. Elizalde set down her grocery bag and clasped her hands together to still their trembling. Already she had stopped at a tiny corner grocery store and bought eggs and Sugar Babies and a pint of Myers rum and a cheap plastic compass with stickum on the back so that it could be glued to a windshield; and in another botánica she had bought a selection of herbs in cellophane packets, and oils in little square bottles, that she had been assured habría ojos abrir del polvo, would open eyes out of the dust—all of it had been set out on the counter in response to her request for something that would call up the dead.
Out of the display arrangement of stones and garish books and cheap metal medallions, the old woman now lifted a plastic bag that contained a sprig of dried leaves: YERBA BUENA, read the hand-lettered sticker on the bag, and Elizalde didn’t even have to sniff it, just had to look at the dusty, alligator-bumpy leaves, to be surrounded by the remembered smell of mint; and, for the first time, she realized that the Spanish name meant good herb—over the generations her family had smoothed and elided the words to something that she would have spelled yerra vuena, which she had always taken to mean something like “fortunate error,” with the noun given an unusual feminine suffix.
“Incapacita las alarmas del humo en su apartamento,” the woman told her—quietly, though they were alone in the shop. “Hace un te cargado, con muchas hojas; añade algún licor, tequila o ron, y déjalo cocinar hasta que está seco, y deja las hojas cocinar hasta que están secas, y humando y quemadas. Habla al humo.”
Elizalde nodded as she memorized the instructions—disable smoke alarms in the apartment, make a strong mint tea with booze in it, then cook it dry and let the leaves smoke, and talk to the smoke.
Jesus, she thought; and then in spite of herself she glanced at the disquieting bas-relief-in-reverse, which still seemed to be turned toward her, staring.
I still like “fortunate error,” she thought helplessly as she took the bag from the woman and handed her a couple of dollar bills. She tucked the dried mint into the bag with her other purchases, thanked the woman, and shuffled out of the store. Bells hung on the doorframe rang a minor chord out into the sunlight as she stepped down to the Beverly Boulevard sidewalk.
Two young boys whirled past her on bicycles, giggling, one of them riding with one hand on the handlebars and the other clutching the metal box of a car stereo. Looking in the direction they’d come from, she saw a blue scatter of car-window glass on the sidewalk, and a white-haired old woman wrapped in a curtain scooping up the bits of glass and eating them.
Up ahead of her on the other side of Beverly was the two-story, fifties-vintage building where she had rented her psychiatric office. She could see a vertical edge of it from here, and a corner of glowing green neon—it was still standing, apparently still occupied.
Well, she thought with a shudder of nausea, the fire trucks did get there damn quick.
Elizalde had rented a suite there for only a couple of months (before that final night, two years ago tomorrow)—a tiny reception room, her office, a bathroom, and the big conference room with windows looking out over Beverly (the glass of which had burst out in the intense heat of the flames).
At her Wednesday-night séances she would have the six or eight of her patients sit around the conference table, and after lighting a dozen or so candles on the shelves she would turn out the lights and have everyone hold hands. They took turns “sharing with the dead”—reliving old disagreements, talking with the dead sometimes, crying and praying sometimes—and Elizalde had tried to insist that if someone felt the need to say Fuck you, fuck you to the group and then storm out of the room, that it at least be done quietly.
Frank Rocha had always tried to get the seat next to Elizalde, and the palm of his hand was often damp and trembling. At the penultimate séance, a week before Halloween, he had passed her a folded note.
She had tucked it into her pocket, and only read it later, at home.
It had been painstakingly handwritten, and some misguided idea of formality had led him to draw quotation marks around nearly every noun (… my “love” for you … the lack of “understanding” from my “wife” … my concern for your “needs” and “wants” … my “efforts” to make a “life” for you and me … the “honor” of “marrying” you …), which gave the thing an unintended tone of sarcasm. Elizalde had telephoned him at his job the next day and, as gently as she had been able, had told him that what he had proposed was impossible.
But she had cried over the note, alone in her living room late that Wednesday night, and she had kept it in her wallet through all the subsequent horrors and flight and migration.
Elizalde hadn’t wanted to leave the Long Beach apartment this morning—or at worst go any farther outside than to where Sullivan had parked the van, to fetch his meager food and some instant coffee and then hurry back inside—until the dawning of Sunday morning, when Halloween would safely be passed. But when Sullivan had begun to speculate on things that they ought to go buy before sundown today, his own readiness to be talked out of leaving Solville was so palpable that she had pretended to be unaware of it, and she’d made herself agree brightly to his proposed shopping trip. New socks and underwear, she noted, would be a necessity.
The apartment’s toilet had indeed proved to be hooked up to the hot-water pipe—the bathroom window was steamy. They took turns showering and getting back into yesterday’s unfresh clothes, and by the time they had moved the plaster hands away from the door and opened it to the fresh Friday-morning breeze, Sullivan was tight-lipped and grumpy and Elizalde was brittle with imitation cheer.
Sullivan had furtively switched license plates with a pickup truck in the Solville parking lot, and then the two of them had driven off north into the skyline-spiked brown haze of Los Angeles, Sullivan to buy some “electronics” and Elizalde to cruise the botánicas and hierverias for any likely-looking séance aids.
“I think that, in addition to being wisps of stuff, ghosts are an electromagnetic phenomenon,” Sullivan had said nervously as he steered the van along the middle lane of the Harbor Freeway, “something like radio waves. When they focus somewhere, like they do wh
en something energizes them and wakes them up, gets them into their excited state, they’re located—a particle rather than a wave, for our purposes, or maybe a standing wave with perceptible nodes, sort of low-profile ball lightning—and they’re detectably magnetic. Sometimes strongly so.” Sullivan had been sweating. “I’ve seen them around the step-up transformers at power plants out in the desert, just a bunch of indistinct guys standing around blinking on the concrete, and if there’s enough of them their magnetic field can interfere with the power readouts. What I’m going to … try to do is scrounge together some gear that’ll isolate an individual ghost’s signal, step it up, and hook it to a speaker. Meanwhile, you can pick up whatever sort of voodoo stuff it is that …”
He had paused then, at least having the grace to be embarrassed … that you used when you killed your patients two years ago, she had thought, mentally finishing his sentence for him.
She had given him a hooded gaze under one raised eyebrow. “You just be sure you get some spare big-amp fuses for your electronics, gabacho,” she’d said quietly.
He had pursed his lips and nodded, clearly intimidated by her supposed connections to some vast, secret, potent brujeria folklórica.
Now, standing on the sidewalk in her stale clothes and stringy long hair, among the baby carriages and beer signs, watching the progress of all the old beat Torinos and Fairlanes with defeated suspensions and screeching power-steering belts, she wondered if she could accomplish anything at all.
Sullivan had told her about “bar-time,” and had explained that experiencing it was one of the consequences of being a spiritual antenna, with a psychic guilt-link to some dead person or persons; when hungry ghosts or ghost hunters focused their attention on her, she couldn’t help but put some of her spiritual weight on her “one foot in the grave,” so that she lived just a fraction of a second outside of time, ahead of time. He said it happened to all ghost-bound people.
And Sullivan had told her how dormant ghosts could be excited into fitful agitation by people such as themselves, and had told her how to spot the elusive creatures, once that had happened.
She had been careful not to make any of the moves that would rouse the things—she had not whistled any old Beatles tunes (Sullivan had told her that “The Long and Winding Road” was particularly evocative), nor, in this neighborhood, Santana’s “Oye Como Va”; she’d been careful not to pick up stray coins on the pavement, especially very shiny ones; and she had not stared into the eyes of the faces, faded to washes of pink and blue, in the photos taped up in the windows of the little hairstyling salons, for Sullivan had told her that frightened new ghosts would cling to those paper eyes and then wait to meet and hold on to an unguarded gaze.
She had bought the compass, though. Sullivan had told her that when a compass needle pointed in some direction besides north, it was very likely pointing at one of the awakened ghosts. She had kept it in her pocket and glanced at it frequently—and at one point during her shopping stroll she had walked wide around a dusty old Volkswagen sitting on flat tires in a parking lot, averting her eyes as she skirted it; and a few minutes later she had crossed Beverly to avoid the open front door of a corner bar; because the needle had swung away from north to point at these things.
Sullivan had told her to wait for him by the video games in the RAPHAEL’S LIQUOR store at the corner of Lucas Avenue, and now she started angling through the crowd in that direction. It would be better for her to be waiting for him inside than for him to have to idle in the parking lot in the conspicuous van. Her bag of purchases was heavy enough now, and her hip and shoulder still ached from her fall on the Amado Street sidewalk two days ago; and she was walking awkwardly, for she had tucked the thing that Sullivan swore was Houdini’s dried thumb into the high top of her left shoe, to balance the can of mace in her right one.
Un buen santo te encomiendas, she thought, quoting an old saying of her grandmother’s. A fine patron saint you’ve got.
At a red light, she leaned her elbow on the little steel cowl over the signal-change button on a curbside traffic-light pole—and then gasped with dizziness and heard the thump of the seat of her jeans and the grocery bag hitting the sidewalk in the instant before her vision jumped with the jar of the impact.
People were staring at her, and she thought she heard borracha!—drunk!—as she scrambled back up to her feet; the light box on the pole across the street had finally begun flashing WALK, and she hoisted her bag in both arms and marched between the lines of the crosswalk toward the opposite curb, sweat of embarrassment chilly on her forehead. Not until she heard a wet plop on the pavement by her foot, and looked down just in time to see an egg from her torn bag hit the asphalt, did she realize that she was on bar-time again.
She stepped up the curb so carefully that any bar-time effect was imperceptible, and then she crossed the sidewalk and leaned against the brick wall of a mariscos restaurant, panting in the steamy squid-and-salsa-scented air that was humming out of a window fan.
It could be just Sullivan nearby, she told herself nervously; he said we can have that effect when we’re together, our antenna fields overlapped and making “interference fringes”—it happened with him and his twin sister all the time, he said. Or it could be Frank Rocha, resonating in the sidewalk in forlorn response to the scuff of my sneakers (though the dried thumb in my shoe should be keeping any spiritoids from recognizing me). Maybe I just got confused, and thought I heard the egg break on the street before it really did; I haven’t had a decent night’s sleep, a decent meal, in—
But of course she was standing right across the street now from 15415 Beverly. She looked up, slowly and sullenly; the two-story building had been repainted, but she couldn’t recall now anyway whether the fire had streaked the outside walls with soot. The windows of what had been her conference room had glass in them again, and between the glass and the curtains hung a green neon sign reading PSYCHIC—PALM READER.
Good luck to you, she thought bitterly to the present tenant. You’ll never host as good a show as I did.
On that final Wednesday evening, that Halloween night, Frank Rocha had arrived very drunk. A week had passed since the night when she had read his clumsy letter, and, mostly out of guilt and uncertainty, she had let him stay at the meeting in spite of his condition. At one point early in the evening he had taken his hand out of hers, and had fumbled at something inside his leather jacket; after a muffled snap!, he had shuddered and coughed briefly, then returned his hand to hers, and the séance had proceeded. The smoke from the candles and incense had covered any smell of cordite, and Frank Rocha had continued to mumble and weep—no one present had realized that he was now dead, that he had neatly shot himself squarely through the heart with a tiny .22 revolver.
Later, in the darkness, he had again pulled his hand free, but this time it had been to squeeze her thigh under the table; not wanting to hurt his feelings, she had thought for a while before reaching down and firmly pushing his hand away. Luckily she had had her face averted from him.
With a blast of scorching air that hit her like a mailbag dropped from a train, Frank Rocha’s body had exploded into white fire. Elizalde and the person who had been sitting on the other side of him were ignited into flame themselves and tumbled away in a screaming tangle of bodies and folding chairs, and everyone was dazzled to blindness by the man-sized, magnesium-bright torch that had been Frank Rocha.
And then the séance had started to be for real.
Elizalde looked away from the white building across the street and made herself take deep, slow breaths.
Hoping to reassure herself, she dug the plastic compass out of her jeans pocket and looked at it—
But it was pointing southeast, straight ahead down Beverly toward the Civic Center.
The compass needle didn’t wobble in synch with any of the cars or pedestrians she could see. Unlike the readings she had got earlier at the abandoned Volkswagen and the barroom door, this one seemed to be some distance aw
ay.
There’s a … a ghost down that way, she thought carefully, trying to assimilate the idea. A big one.
A furniture truck made a ponderous low-gear left turn onto the boulevard from Belmont Avenue, and little Toyotas and big old La Bamba boat cars rattled along the painted asphalt, up toward Hollywood or down toward City Hall, and crows and pigeons flapped around the traffic lights or pecked at litter on the sidewalks in the chilly sunlight … but there was a big ghost awake and walking around somewhere down Beverly in the direction of the Harbor Freeway.
The ghosts had arrived at the séance sometime during the confused moments when curtains were being torn down from the windows and bundled around the people who had been set afire; Frank Rocha himself was a roaring white pyre that no one could get close to.
Half of Elizalde’s hair had been burned off, and after she’d been extinguished herself she had scorched her hands and face in a useless attempt to throw a curtain over Frank Rocha, but what she today remembered most vividly was the agony of listening to the shattering, withering screams.
The hallway doors had opened, and a lot of people had begun to come in who didn’t even seem to notice the fire; and they hadn’t walked in, but seemed to glide, or float, or flicker like bad animation. The light had been wrong on most of them—the shadows on their faces had not been aligned with the flaring corpse on the floor, and when their faces had happened to turn toward it, the incongruously steady shadows had abruptly looked like holes.
Others appeared from the ceiling—several of these were oversized infants, impossibly floating in midair, with the purple umbilical cords still swinging from their bellies, and their huge faces were red and their mouths hideously wide as they howled like tornadoes.
Bloody, mewling embryonic chicks pecked and clawed at Elizalde’s scorched scalp, and fell into her face when she tried to cuff them off.
Instead of running for the ghost-crowded doors, everyone had seemed to be scrambling to the corners, down on their hands and knees to be below the churning burnt-pork-reeking smoke. The clothing burst away from three of her patients, two women and a man, to release long fleshy snakes, which lifted like pythons as they grew, and then dented and swelled to form grimacing human faces on the bulbous ends.