Forced Perspectives

by Tim Powers

  Ba could provide that. Wystan had needed to recover the buried hieroglyph sigil, and he needed at least a few credulous minds to combine with his, once he had found it—and so he had joined Mrs. Haas’ coven and, by default, had become its High Priest.

  And now he had finally recovered the Ba hieroglyph, the sigil. The Nu hieroglyph that had called it out of the sand would be inert, now that the extension of the Baba Gurgur fire in the lantern was extinguished, but even so, he didn’t want to let the two sigils get within several yards of each other.

  “Pull that smaller board out of the sand,” he called to the witch who was standing over the dark lantern, “and put it back in the portfolio—that cardboard folder!—and close it and tie the ribbon. Now we all walk back to Mrs. Haas’ auto, and you stay out in front with it, away from me.”

  He got to his feet, shivering, and clasped the recovered Ba hieroglyph board firmly under his arm. With luck, he thought, by midnight we’ll be back at Mrs. Haas’ house on Paseo del Mar in the Point Fermin area of San Pedro. And we can finally blow out the sacrilegiously employed Paschal candle and make some coffee and then sit down around the kitchen table and all have a look at Ba. The minds of these few women and himself would not be enough to engender the sort of autonomous, transcendent entity in which he yearned to lose himself, but they were a start.

  CHAPTER ONE:

  Some Kind of Hobo

  The enigmatic ad in the Los Angeles Times classified section had read, in its entirety, “Skeet thrower for sale, October 29, 2018, 2 PM,” and at 1:30 PM Sebastian Vickery was sitting on a bus bench across the street from Canter’s Delicatessen.

  There was a plexiglass roof on struts over the metal-screen bench, and he had taken off his faded tan bush hat and set it beside him. His hair and graying beard were clipped short these days, and aviator sunglasses hid his eyes. The breeze down Fairfax Avenue was cool on his damp forehead.

  He had spent the previous fifteen minutes in the Council Thrift Store across Oakwood Avenue, to all appearances giving close scrutiny to a dining table and a china hutch and several chairs, all of which stood by the window that gave a good view of the parking lot and entrance of Canter’s. In another ten minutes he planned to cross Fairfax and take a while sorting through the various sizes of shipping cartons at the FedEx Print and Ship outlet, from the window of which he would be able to watch the Canter’s parking lot and sidewalk and the rooftops of the nearby buildings. At 1:50, if he still saw no signs of surveillance, he would go into Canter’s and take a seat at the far end of the counter, by the back wall.

  Apart from a couple of brief, furtive visits to certain clearings beside the 710 and 405 freeways, Sebastian Vickery hadn’t been to Los Angeles in eight months, and he was glad that Canter’s, at least, was still in business. The FedEx outlet was new, replacing a bar, as he recalled, and the thrift store had been called Out of the Closet when he had last been down here.

  His car, an oddly angular bright blue sedan, was parked across the street, only a dozen yards from the Canter’s front door. While waiting for a curbside spot to open up, he had driven around several blocks, noting alleys and unevident parking lots.

  No one was likely to bump into him on this bus bench in the next few minutes, so he decided to risk a look back in what he thought of as echo time.

  Most of his echo time intervals were brief, and he could afford to lose nearly half an hour here in apparent catatonic oblivion. He would at least feel it if any Good Samaritan were to touch or shake him, and though he wouldn’t be able to see what was going on, he’d be able to say reassuring things to dissuade any unwanted help.

  His attention, though, would be elsewhere. Elsewhen.

  Last year he and a woman named Ingrid Castine had been driven to cross over, alive, from ordinary reality into a nightmarish afterlife, known as the Labyrinth, populated by deceased or never-born spirits. The two of them had managed to return, still alive, and close the leaky conduit between the two worlds—but, among other things, they had learned that the moment of “now” is not a discrete instant, as irreducible as a point on a line in geometry.

  What normal people perceive as the instant of “now” is in fact just the blanket average of an infinity of time-spikes that spring up and disappear at the interface between the fluid future and the crystallized past. The spikes are quantum extensions of the past into the future, but they’re far too brief to have any effect on the world’s smooth continuity.

  But those traumatic experiences of last year had left him able to drop himself—his perceptions, at least—into whatever flickering time-spike he might at some moment be in contact with; and time tends to be especially spiky in populated areas, so in a crowded city like Los Angeles it was unlikely that any spot would be absolutely chronologically flat.

  Leaning back on the bus bench, he looked at his watch: 1:35. He memorized the cars at the curbs and in the deli parking lot, then took off his sunglasses and sat back and let his eyes unfocus; and when the street and buildings in front of him seemed to be no more than a flat collage of shifting random colors, he made himself look past it, as if trying to see the image hidden in the confetti dots of a stereogram print.

  Lately the echo view had been alarmingly unreliable, but today it worked as expected, and abruptly he was seeing parked and moving cars and pedestrians in three dimensions again, but in a sepia twilight; the faces and swinging hands of the human figures glowed with a color he never saw in real time, a sort of silvery bronze. The grumble of traffic was muted, almost inaudible.

  What he was seeing now, dimly, was the recent local past.

  He looked carefully at the cars parked along the street and in the lot. Colors were virtually indistinguishable in this echo view, but he noted that a pale Honda Accord was parked over there in front of Canter’s; a moment ago, in real time, he had seen an apparently identical white Honda on this side of the street, to his right.

  All at once the buildings and cars and people sprang into color again, and the rattling tremolo of car engines resumed. His eyesight was back in alignment with real common time, and the cars and pedestrians he saw now were actually present.

  He put on his sunglasses and looked to his right, at the white Honda parked three spaces up the street. Sun-glare on the windshield made it impossible to see any occupant or occupants, but by echo vision Vickery had seen that it, or a car very like it, had been parked on the other side of the street not long before. The extents of his echo visions were variable, but he had never been able to see his surroundings as they had been more than a couple of hours earlier.

  The Honda might belong to somebody who had moved it to avoid a parking ticket; Vickery was asking for a ticket himself, leaving his car parked where it was. Or there might simply have been two light-colored Hondas parked on Fairfax Avenue this afternoon.

  Or it might be that Ingrid Castine had been careless, and unwittingly led them to this meeting, and to himself.

  Whoever them was, exactly. At least this wasn’t the Ford van he had seen parked in front of his apartment on a cold February morning eight months ago, triggering his flight from the city and the adoption of this new identity.

  He had spent these eight months of exile covertly trying to find a way to retrieve a uniquely precious book that had been stolen from him on that morning—a worn paperback copy of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden that contained, fossilized in its unliving but organic pages, the spirit of a little girl. He and Castine had encountered her in the Labyrinth afterworld—ghosts’ memories often fell out of their insubstantial heads and were scavenged by other spirits, and this wraith had picked up a memory of the Burnett novel; and, lacking a name of her own, had taken to herself the name of the book’s heroine, Mary Lennox. The small spirit had told him at one point that a robin had shown Mary Lennox where to find the key to a secret walled garden, and it had seemed that the spirit, too, was hoping to find a key to some enduring refuge.

  The girl-spirit had followed Vickery ba
ck from the turbulent afterworld last year, and even before being subsumed into that copy of the book, the spirit had been especially frail and evanescent—for it was not even the ghost of a deceased person, but just the unfulfilled likelihood of a little girl who had never actually been conceived, whose chance of existence had gone by, unrealized.

  It was, in fact, the shade of a girl Vickery would have fathered, if he had not, long before, taken steps to ensure that he would never have children—it was, or was to have been, his daughter, whom circumstances had cheated of life.

  She was inert in the pages, but, driven by guilt and a love whose object had tragically never existed, he had daily read aloud sections of the book, and imagined that his unconceived daughter might somehow be aware of his voice, her almost-father’s presence.

  These days his main concern was trying to find a clue to where the book was now, and his researches didn’t depend on his location—but he had felt bound to come back to Los Angeles today.

  Before parting last year, he and Castine had agreed that if she put an ad having to do with skeet shooting in the Times classifieds, the two of them would meet at Canter’s at the date and time specified in the ad. October 29, 2018, 2 PM. Now, in retrospect, the scheme seemed foolhardy, and he was tempted to get into his car and drive back north to his trailer in Barstow.

  The driver’s-side door of the Honda opened—and it was Castine herself stepping out. She closed the door and began walking this way, toward the corner and the crosswalk. Vickery put his hat back on and faced straight ahead, watching her peripherally.

  Her auburn hair was longer now, bouncing around her shoulders as she walked, and she was wearing tan slacks and a matching jacket and white sneakers. She didn’t have a purse, and her jacket seemed too short and close-fitting for her to be wearing a holster.

  Vickery himself had a Glock 43 behind his belt buckle, under his untucked shirt. The gun was six inches long from backstrap to muzzle and only an inch wide, but it held seven 9-millimeter rounds.

  He let Castine walk past the bus bench and stop at the corner, waiting for the green walk signal. He wasn’t surprised that she hadn’t recognized him. His dark hair had been longer last year, and he had been more or less clean-shaven; and spending a lot of time outdoors lately had given him a deep tan.

  She’s thirty-one now, he thought. Standing straight, shoulders back, slim and graceful—she seems to have brushed her hair over the gunshot scar above her right ear, or maybe she had got hair implants.

  Vickery recalled that she had been engaged last year, and that her fiancé had been murdered. The last time Vickery had seen her, last August, she had said she was on paid leave from the Transportation Utility Agency . . . which had pretty clearly been responsible for the fiancé’s death. He wondered, not for the first time, how she had reconciled herself to going on taking the agency’s paychecks, and what her situation was these days.

  He had first met her five years ago, when he had been a Secret Service field agent and onetime Los Angeles Police officer, and she had been an active agent of the TUA. He had broken protocol during a Presidential motorcade on Wilshire Boulevard, and stumbled onto the TUA’s top-secret clandestine use of ghosts as a security measure, and she had arrested him and turned him over to a couple of higher-ranking TUA agents. They had taken him away in handcuffs, intending to summarily execute him in the desert out by Palmdale, but he had managed to escape by killing both of them . . . and for the next five years he had led a furtive, covert life as the fictitious Sebastian Vickery.

  And then last year he and Castine had been thrown together again in fleeing the lethal attentions of a rogue regional TUA director . . . and they had wound up fleeing together right out of the normal world into the Labyrinth afterworld, and back.

  Vickery and Castine had become allies, during it all—friends, even.

  The rogue director had decisively disappeared, the TUA had undergone a drastic reorganization, and Castine had stayed on the TUA payroll.

  When the walk signal came on, he waited until she was halfway across the street before he stood up from the bench and followed her. Glancing from side to side behind the lenses of his sunglasses, he didn’t see any car doors opening or anyone who seemed to be watching her.

  On the west side of the street, he paused as if to look at the display in a mattress store window while Castine walked on and pulled open the steel-framed glass door of Canter’s. When she had gone in, he followed and caught the door before it had quite closed.

  The air inside was cool and smelled of corned beef and pickles. Castine was already past the cashier and being shown to the left, where Vickery remembered a row of orange vinyl booths by the stairs that led up to the restrooms. He paused as if to look at a display of eclairs and brownies on the street side of the cash register; before joining her, he wanted to see who else might follow her in.

  Canter’s is a busy restaurant, even after the lunch rush. A couple in their twenties, wearing shorts and probably tourists, pulled open the door and crossed to the cashier’s desk to ask if they could get their parking slip validated; a middle-aged red-haired man in a black turtleneck sweater and red cowboy boots came in after them and stepped directly to the “Please Wait To Be Seated” sign, and a waiter escorted him straight ahead, toward the back of the restaurant; he was followed a few moments later by a goateed teenager in a black Bob Marley T-shirt, who waved familiarly at the clerk behind the bakery case before making a beeline to the right, toward the lunch counter. None of them glanced to the left, toward where Castine was presumably sitting.

  Vickery had just turned to step past the cash register into the dining room when the front door was pulled open again, and a young man in round black-frame glasses and a white shirt with red suspenders stepped quickly in from the street. His hair was now long and styled on top and shaved close over the ears—but Vickery recognized him.

  Vickery’s chest was suddenly cold and his pulse was pounding in his ears, though his expression didn’t change as he let his gaze shift unhurriedly to the tables in the dining room—and the man hurried past him with no sign of recognition.

  Did my beard and sunglasses fool him? Vickery wondered. He knew me eight months ago, when he and his accomplices stole The Secret Garden and nearly grabbed me too. And now he’s after Castine? What the hell’s going on?

  The man paused to glance around at all the tables and the counter along the right-side wall; when he looked to the left he seemed to stiffen, and then started in that direction.

  Vickery followed him, closely, and saw Castine sitting alone in a booth ten feet ahead.

  The young man lifted a dish from a table he passed, and he tossed it past Castine’s booth; and when the thing shattered loudly on the linoleum floor, and Castine had turned a startled glance in that direction, the man crowded close to her table—and Vickery saw him surreptitiously shake the contents of a tiny envelope into her water glass and then without a pause move on toward the restroom stairs.

  Vickery quickly stepped forward, but was shouldered aside by the red-haired man in the black turtleneck, who reached across him and slapped Castine’s water glass right off the table onto the seat across from her.

  “Stop Elisha, damn it,” the man snapped at someone behind Vickery. “We’ve got this.”

  For just an instant Vickery looked anxiously after the man disappearing up the restroom stairs; then he leaned in and grabbed Castine’s shoulder. “Up,” he said, “we’re out of here.”

  She tried to throw herself back in the booth, but Vickery’s grip was unyielding. “Get away from me,” she said, as hands from behind clamped on Vickery’s left arm and the back of his neck.

  “It’s him!” said one of the people holding him. “We’ve got both of them!”

  “Stun-gun if you have to,” rasped another, “just get ’em both into the car, quick.”

  Vickery felt a blunt object bump across his back—evidently a stun-gun, and he knew that in a moment he might be knocked down by m
illions of volts of electricity.

  Instantly, old training took over. He sprang back away from Castine and spun to his right, sweeping his arm around to knock the hand away from his neck—it belonged to the man in the turtleneck, his white teeth now bared with effort—and in the same motion pistoned the heel of his left hand very hard into the goateed chin of the teenager who was holding his left arm with one hand and gripping a black plastic stun-gun in the other. The incongruous pair tumbled backward onto the table behind them, overturning dishes and glasses. People at other tables were getting to their feet.

  Turning back to Castine’s booth, Vickery leaned in and grabbed her by both shoulders. “It’s me, Vickery!” he hissed at her. “Come on!”

  Castine stared into his face for a moment, then nodded and slid out of the booth, and together they ran to the entryway and past the cash register. Several people hurriedly stepped out of their way, and Vickery noticed a moustached man in a tan-and-orange plaid sportcoat, whose brown eyes seemed to widen in surprised recognition at the sight of them—and then they were out the door and on the sidewalk. Vickery pulled Castine to the left, toward his blue sedan.

  “I’ve got a car across the street,” she said breathlessly, but a moment later he had pulled open the passenger-side door of his car and shoved her in.

  As he got in on the driver’s side and started the engine, the man in the black turtleneck and red boots came slamming out of Canter’s, shouting into a cell phone; and a couple of men were now shoving past the pedestrians on the sidewalk to the north. Glancing that way, Vickery caught only a quick impression of gray hair and a dark windbreaker.

  Castine had locked her door just as one of them grabbed the outside handle, and Vickery clicked the gear shift into reverse, backed into the car behind them with a jangling crash, and then shifted to drive and swerved out into traffic. From the corner of his eye he saw the young man in red suspenders burst out of the restaurant and stare after them for a moment before dodging his way across the street.