by Tim Powers
The faces on the flesh-snake bulbs, and the shadow-pied faces of the intruding ghosts, and the red faces of the giant infants, and the blood-and-smoke-and-tear-streaked faces of Elizalde’s patients, all were shouting and screaming and babbling and praying and crying and laughing, while Frank Rocha blazed away like a blast furnace in the middle of the floor. By the time his unbearably bright body had shifted and rolled over and then fallen through the floor, the big windows had all popped and disintegrated into whirling crystalline jigsaw pieces and spun away into the darkness, and people had begun to climb out, hang from the sill, and drop to the flower bed below. Elizalde had dragged one unconscious woman to the window, and had then somehow hoisted the inert body over her shoulder and climbed out; the jump nearly broke her neck and her knees and her jaw, but when the fire trucks had come squealing across the parking lot Elizalde had been doing CPR on the unconscious patient.
Elizalde blinked now, and realized that she had been standing for some length of time on the curb, shivering and sweating in the cold diesel breeze.
That was all two years ago, she told herself. What are you going to do right now?
She decided to backtrack up Belmont and then walk on down to Lucas along some other street; Houdini’s thumb was still there tickling her, down behind her sweaty anklebone, but something had paid attention to her a few moments ago, and she didn’t want to blunder into some supernatural event. She turned around and walked into the mariachi-jukebox noise of the mariscos place and bought a couple of fish tacos wrapped in wax paper just so as to be able to wheedle from the counterman a plastic bag big enough to slide her ruptured grocery bag into.
The next block up was Goulet Street, gray old bungalow houses that had mostly been fenced in and converted to body shops and tire outlets after some long-ago zoning change. As she hurried along the sidewalk past the sagging fences, a young man stepped up from beside a parked car and asked her what he could get her, and half a block later another man nodded at her and made whip-snapping gestures, but she knew that they were both just crack-cocaine dealers, and she shrugged and shook her head at each of them and kept walking.
On the morning after the séance, she had been remanded from the hospital into the custody of the police, charged with manslaughter; she spent that night in jail, and on the following day, Friday, she had put up the $50,000 bail—and then had calmly driven her trusty little Honda right out across the Mojave Desert, out of California. She hadn’t had a clue as to what had happened at her therapy session—she had known only two things about it: that Frank Rocha and two of the other patients had died, and—of course—that she herself had had a psychotic episode, suffered a severe schizophrenic perceptual disorder. She had been sure that she had briefly gone crazy—and she had not doubted that diagnosis until this last Monday night.
Walking along the Goulet Street sidewalk now, she wondered if she might have been better off when she had thought she was crazy.
At Lucas she turned right, and then turned right again into a narrow street that curved past the rear doors of a liquor store and a laundry, back to Beverly. RAPHAEL’S LIQUOR was across the Beverly intersection, and she was hurrying, hoping Sullivan wasn’t parked there yet.
But the compass was still in her hand, and she glanced at it. The needle was pointing behind her, which was north.
Good old reliable north, she thought. She sighed, and felt the tension unkink from her shoulders—whatever had been going on was apparently over—but she glanced at it again to reassure herself, and saw the needle swing and then hold steady.
Grit crunched under her toes as she spun around to look back. A hunched, dwarfed figure was lurching toward her from around the corner of the liquor store.
Duende! she thought as she twisted to get her balance leaned back the other way; it’s one of those malevolent half-damned angels the women on the beach told me about last night!
Then she had crouched and made a short hop to get her footing and was striding away toward Beverly, in her retinas burning the glimpsed image of a gaunt face behind glittering sunglasses under a bobbing straw cowboy hat.
But a battered, primer-paint-red pickup track had turned up from Beverly, its engine gunning as the body rocked on bad shocks, and she knew that the half-dozen mustached men in wife-beater T-shirts crouching in the back were part of whatever was going on here.
Elizalde sprinted to the back wall of the laundry, leaning on it and hiking up her left foot to dig out the can of mace; but the men in the truck were ignoring her.
She looked back—the duende had turned and was hurrying away north, but it was limping and clutching its side, and making no speed. The truck sped past Elizalde and then past the duende, and made a sharp right, bouncing up over the curb. The men in the back vaulted out and grabbed the dwarfish figure, whose only resistance was weak blows with pale little fists.
The hat spun away as the men lifted the small person by the shoulders and ankles, and then the oversized sunglasses fell off and she realized that the men’s prey was just a little boy.
Even as she realized it, she was running back there, clutching the bag in her left arm, her right hand thumbing the cap of the mace spray around to the ready position.
“Déjalo marchar!” she was shouting. “Qué estás haciendo? Voy a llamar a policía!”
One of the men who wasn’t holding the boy spun toward her with a big brown hand raised back across his shoulder to hit her, and she aimed the little spray can at his face and pushed the button.
The burst of mist hit him in the face, and he just sat down hard on the asphalt; she turned the can toward the men holding the boy and pushed the button again, sweeping it across their faces and the backs of their heads alike, and then she stepped over the spasming, coughing bodies and shot a squirt into the open passenger-side window of the truck.
A quacking voice from the bed of the truck called, “No me chingues, Juan Dominguez!”—but she didn’t see anyone back there, only some kind of cloth bag with a black Raiders cap on it. The bag seemed to have spoken, in merry malevolence.
The boy had been dropped, and had rolled away but not stood up; Elizalde’s own eyes were stinging and her nose burned, but she bent down to spray whatever might be left in the can directly into the faces of the two men who had only fallen onto their hands and knees. They exhaled like head-shot pigs and collapsed.
Elizalde dropped the emptied can and hooked her right hand under the boy’s armpit and hoisted him up to his feet. She was still clutching her bag of supplies in the crook of her left arm.
“Gotta run, kiddo,” she said. “Fast as you can, okay? Corre conmigo, bien? Just across the street. I’ll stay with you, but you’ve got to motivate with your feet. Vayamos!”
He nodded, and she noticed for the first time the faded bruise around his left eye. Not stopping to retrieve the hat and the sunglasses, she frog-marched him back around the liquor store to the Lucas Avenue sidewalk and started down it toward the stoplight.
Across the wide, busy street she could see the dusty brown box that was Sullivan’s van.
She looked behind her—there was no sign of the pickup truck.
The boy seemed to be able to walk, and she let go of him to dig the compass out of her pocket. The needle was pointed straight east. The ghost’s still ahead of us, she thought nervously; then she held it out in front of them, and the needle swung back toward north.
She moved it around, to be sure—and it was consistently pointing at the boy who was lurching along beside her.
She knew that she would change her pace, one way or the other, when she gave that new fact a moment’s thought—so she instantly gripped the compass between her teeth and began to walk faster, dragging the boy along, lest she might otherwise stop, or ditch him and just flat-out run.
This boy is the ghost, she told herself; Sullivan said they can accumulate mass from organic litter, and eventually look like solid street people.
But Elizalde couldn’t believe it. For a moment s
he pulled her attention away from the sidewalk pedestrians they were passing, and craned her neck to look down into his pinched, pale face—and she couldn’t believe that a restless ghost could have made those clear brown eyes, now pellucidly deep with fear, out of gutter puddles and sidewalk spit and tamale husks. And his eye socket was bruised! Surely the bogus flesh of those scarecrows couldn’t incorporate working capillaries and circulating blood! He must have a ghost … on him, somehow, like an infestation of lice.
A big ghost, she reminded herself uneasily, remembering how steadily the compass needle had pointed at it from blocks away.
She still couldn’t see the red pickup truck, behind or ahead. Apparently the mace had worked.
They had nearly reached the corner. She spat the compass into her shopping bag. “What’s your name?” she asked, wondering if she would even get a response.
“The kid’s in shock,” said the boy huskily, his voice jerking with their fast steps. “Better you don’t know his name. Call me … Al.”
“I’m Angelica,” she said. Better you don’t know my last name, she thought. “A friend of mine is in that brown van across the street. See it?” She still had her hand under his arm, so she just jerked her chin in the direction of the van. “Our plan is to get out of here, back to a safe place where nobody can find us. I think you should come with us.”
“You’ve got that compass,” said the boy grimly. “I’ve been in a ‘van,’ and I can scream these lungs pretty loud.”
“We’re not going to kidnap you,” said Elizalde.
They shuffled to a rocking halt at the Lucas corner, panting and waiting for the light to turn green. Elizalde was still looking around for pursuit. “I don’t even know if my friend would want another person along,” she said. She shook her head sharply, wondering if it could even be noon yet. “But I think you should come with us. The compass—anybody in the whole city who knows about this stuff can track you.”
The boy nodded. At least he was standing beside her, and hadn’t pulled away from her hand. “Yeah,” he said. “That is true, sister. And if I put my light back under the bushel basket, if I—step out of the center-ring spotlight, here, this kid will collapse like a sack of coal. So you’ve got a place that’s safe? Even for us? How are you planning on degaussing me? This damned electric belt’s not worth one mint.”
Hebephrenic schizophrenia? wondered Elizalde; or one of the dissociative reactions of hysterical neurosis? MPD would probably be the trendy analysis these days—multiple personality disorder.
She floundered for a response. What had he said? Degaussing? Elizalde had heard that term used in connection with battleships, and she thought it had something to do with radar. “I don’t know about that. But my friend does—he’s an electrical engineer.”
This seemed to make the boy angry. “Oh, an electrical engineer! All mathematics, I daresay, equations on paper to match the paper diploma on his wall! Never any dirt under his fingernails! Maybe he thinks he’s the only one around here with a college degree!”
Elizalde blinked down at the boy in bewilderment. “I—I’m sure he doesn’t—I have a college degree, as a matter of fact—” Good Lord, she thought, why am I bragging? Because of my rumpled old clothes and dirty hair? Bragging to a traumatized street kid? “But none of that’s important here—”
“B.S.,” said the boy now, with clear and inexplicable pride. “Let’s go meet your electrical engineer.”
“Shit, yes,” said Elizalde. The light turned green, and they started walking.
CHAPTER 37
“But that’s not your fault,” the Rose added kindly. “You’re beginning to fade, you know—and then one ca’n’t help one’s petals getting a little untidy.”
Alice didn’t like this idea at all …
—Lewis Carroll,
Through the Looking-Glass
SULLIVAN HAD SEEN ELIZALDE crossing the street, and when he saw that the reason she was moving slowly was because she was helping a limping kid along, he swore and got out of the van.
He had noticed the onset of bar-time as he’d been driving, five or ten minutes ago, when he reflexively tapped the brake in the instant before the nose of a car appeared out of an alley ahead of him; he had then tested it by blindly sliding a random cassette into the tape player, cranking the volume all the way up, and then turning on the player—he had not only cringed involuntarily, but had even recognized the opening of the Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil,” just before the first percussive yell had come booming out of the speakers. He had switched the set off then, wondering anxiously what was causing the psychic focus on him, and if it was on Elizalde too.
And now here she was with some kid.
He met them by the traffic-light pole at the corner, and he took the shopping bag from her. “Say goodbye to your little friend,” he said. “We’ve gotta go now. Bar-time, you feel it?”
“Yes, I do,” she said, smiling. “Other people out here probably do too. Act natural, like you don’t feel it.”
She was right. He smiled stiffly back at her and hefted the bag. “So, did you get your shopping done? All ready to go?”
Two teenage Mexican boys swaggered up to them, one of them muttering, “Vamos a probar la mosca en leche, porqué no?” Then one of them asked her, in English, “Lady, can I have a dollar for a pack of cigarettes?”
“Porqué no?” echoed Elizalde with a mocking grin. She reached into her pocket with the hand that wasn’t supporting the sick-looking boy, and handed over a dollar.
“I need cigarettes too!” piped up the other teenager.
“You can share his,” said Elizalde, turning to Sullivan. “We’re ready to go,” she told him.
We’re not taking this sick kid along with us! he thought. “No,” he said, still holding his smile but speaking firmly. “Little Billy’s got to go home.”
“Auntie Alden won’t take him today,” she said, “and it’s getting very late.”
Sullivan blew out a breath and let his shoulders sag. He looked at the boy. “I suppose you do want to come along.”
The boy had a cocky grin on his face. “Sure, plug. On your own, you might get careless and open a switch without turning off the current first.”
Sullivan couldn’t help frowning. He had spent the morning at an old barn of a shop on Eighth Street called Garmon’s Pan-Electronics, and he wondered if this boy knew that, somehow. Was the boy’s remark the twang of a snapped trap-wire?
“I told him you’re an electrical engineer,” said Elizalde in a harried voice. “Let’s go!”
After a tense, anguished pause: “Okay!” Sullivan said, and turned and began marching his companions back across the liquor-store parking lot toward the van. “The collapsing magnetic field,” he told the boy, in answer to the boy’s disquieting remark, “will induce a huge voltage that’ll arc across the switch, right?” Why, he wondered, am I bothering to prove anything to a kid?
“Don’t say it just to please me,” the boy told him.
When they had climbed into the van and pulled the doors closed, Sullivan and Elizalde sat up front, and the boy sat in the back on the still-unmade bed.
“Why did you give that guy a buck?” asked Sullivan irritably as he started the engine and yanked the gearshift into drive.
“He might have been Elijah,” Elizalde said wearily. “Elijah wanders around the Earth in disguise, you know, asking for help, and if you don’t help him you get in trouble at the Last Judgment.”
“Yeah?” Sullivan made a fast left turn onto Lucas going south, planning to catch the Harbor Freeway from Bixel off Wilshire. “Well, the other guy was probably Elijah, the guy you didn’t give a buck to. Who’s our new friend, by the way?”
“Call me Al,” spoke up the boy from the back of the van. “No, my name’s Kootie—” The voice sounded scared now. “—where are we going? It’s all right, Kootie, you remember how I didn’t trust the Fussels? These people are square. I’m glad you’re back with us, son. I was
worried about you.”
Sullivan shot Elizalde a furious glance.
“He’s magnetic,” she said. She seemed near tears. “Compasses point to him. And I used up my mace spray on a crowd of bad guys who were trying to force him into a truck.”
“It’s okay,” Sullivan said. “That’s good, I’m glad you did. I wish I’d been there to help.” Good God, he thought. “Did you get some likely … groceries?”
“I think so.” She sighed deeply. “Did you hear what those two vatos said? They described you and me as la mosca en leche. That means fly-in-milk—like ‘salt-and-pepper,’ you know, a mixed-race couple. They thought I was a Mexican.”
Sullivan glanced at her. “You are a Mexican.”
“I know. But it’s nice that they could tell. How did you do, did you get some good electronic stuff?”
Sullivan was looking into the driver’s mirror on the outside of the door. A new Lincoln had sped up to make the light at Beverly, and it was now swerving into the right lane as if to pass him. He was glad of the distraction, for he didn’t want to talk about the ragtag equipment he’d bought.
“Not bad,” he said absently, “considering I didn’t know what I wanted.” When the Lincoln was alongside, Sullivan pressed the brake firmly, and the big car shot ahead. “They had some old carborundum-element bulbs there cheap, so I bought a few, and I got an old Ford coil for fifty bucks, and a Langmuir gauge.” He made a show of peering ahead with concern.
But the Lincoln ahead had actually slowed, and now another one just like it was speeding up from behind. “Other stuff,” he added—nearly in a whisper, for something really did seem to be going on here. His palms were suddenly damp on the wheel.
There was a cross street to the right ahead, and he waited until the last instant to touch the brake and whip the wheel around to cut directly across the right-hand lane; the tires were screeching, and a bar-time jolt of vertigo made him open the sharp turn a little wider before the van could roll over, and then he had stamped the gas pedal and they were roaring down the old residential street.