by Tim Powers
“Right, it’s got a spiral staircase—”
“Spiral is right-twist rifling,” said the ghost, speaking more rapidly now. “They fired that once, you know, and they’re gonna fire it again. Shut up about it.”
“Do you know where it is—”
The scratchy ghost voice interrupted: “I said shut up! If you want to be dead, you better get busy quick.”
Again the frame creaked. Move on, Vickery thought.
“Okay,” he said as the breeze under the bridge chilled the sweat on his face, “listen, there’s a fossil spirit, in a book, The Secret Garden, somewhere in the L.A. area. Can you catch any sort of . . . vibration from it?”
“I always see the fossil spirits,” said the ghost, “dancing on the roof yonder. They only know one dance.”
The bottom of the frame slid forward an inch in the dirt, and Vickery braced his foot against it.
“Past them,” he said desperately, “by the sea. Can you make out where it is?”
For several second there was silence, except for the windy rush of a car, and a few moments later another, speeding past under the bridge.
Then, “The whole world is lit up,” said the ghost with something like a gasp, though the night beyond the bridge was as dark as ever. Then a man’s harsh voice, somehow familiar to Vickery, said, “It’s on a boat, among a lot of boats, and . . . a crowd of people falling into the black hole, a shape with a hawk body and the head of a man, a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun . . . ”
Castine leaned forward and gripped Vickery’s shoulder. “Some people in Los Angeles,” she said quickly, “have an Egyptian artifact—”
A scream like a circular saw biting into sheet steel sent Vickery lurching back against Castine. The scream broke up into shrill, imbecilic laughter that echoed back from the close cement surfaces, and now there seemed to be a number of figures on the far side of the chicken-wire, all thrashing and grunting. The wooden frame fell right over onto Vickery, and he tried to shove it back in place as irregular impacts from the other side pushed it toward him.
“Math,” said Castine in the darkness; then in a louder voice, “Two and two is four!”
“Four subtracted from four,” shouted Vickery, “is nothing! Check it out!”
But the ghosts clearly weren’t listening.
“Ba, Ba!” another voice was yelling, and a woman’s voice, not the one that had been speaking a few moments ago, wailed, “Quoth the raven!” followed by a mumbled word that Vickery thought might have ben Nevermore, and then wailed “Its hour come round again!”
Again the frame creaked.
Over the increasing tumult Vickery could hear wet things slapping against the chicken wire, and he knew it was the elongated, ice-cold ectoplasmic tongues of the maddened ghosts. He was still holding the chicken-wire barrier in place, and before he could pull his fingers free, one of the tongues touched the knuckles of his right hand; his hand was suddenly numbed and aching, and he lost his balance.
He thrashed convulsively, brushing long, tangled hair away from his somehow sunken face, and his right foot slipped off the ledge and bent like putty on the dirt slope—and the realization crashed in on him that he was now on the other side of the barrier, while his body was still over there beside Castine. Soft, grunting shapes crowded against his back and shoulders.
His breath was now rasping in an insubstantial throat that was not his own, but he managed to choke out the syllables, “Skeet shooting, help!”
Over the bestial cries of the ghosts around him, he heard Castine gasp. Then the lighter flame flared up, and he saw that she was holding up her free hand with two fingers extended.
Vickery quailed to see his own body over there with her on the other side of the chicken-wire; it was crawling clumsily past Castine, away from the light.
She didn’t glance at it. “Two,” she said loudly, then raised her other two fingers in the light, “plus two, is four, and nothing else! See?”
The flame wavered as her hand shook, but she closed her free hand in a fist and said, “Minus four—is nothing! Look! Nothing!”
And then, with a mental and physical jolt, Vickery was on his hands and knees behind her. He looked over his shoulder and saw Castine’s crouching silhouette against the glow of the lighter.
“I’m here,” he gasped, “it’s me, Vickery. Down the slope, back to the car. Fast.”
“Thank God.” The light went out, and when, above the groaning and weeping of the turbulent ghosts, he heard her sliding away below, he dove down after her as things snatched ineffectively at his heels.
As he slid head-first down the dirt incline, the wall and the underside of the bridge were suddenly lit with a yellow glow, and he guessed that at least one of the ghosts up on the ledge had burst into flame.
He hit the base of the wall with his outstretched hands and let his flexing elbows absorb the impact, and then he had rolled over and got his legs under himself and was running out from under the bridge, following Castine, who was sprinting away across the open dirt a few yards ahead of him. He was panting, and the cold air stung his throat.
When he caught up with her he grabbed her hand to lead her toward the car—
And all at once the world was bathed in coppery light, and Castine squeezed his hand tightly as they both slid to a halt.
The freeway bridge was no longer visible to Vickery’s left; and he could feel Castine’s hand, but he appeared to be standing by himself in a narrow valley, once again facing the crooked old two-story house. Its porch steps were only a few yards away.
The motorcycle was now parked off to the left, and the shadow of it was longer. Three people were standing on the wide porch this time, and Vickery’s field of vision swiveled involuntarily from side to side to see each of them: at the left end stood a woman in a long robe, and at the other, two men. One of the men leaned against the slanted railing, his face hidden in the shadow of a cowboy hat, and the other, in the familiar Nehru jacket, was the man Vickery had seen here before. That man’s right arm was extended toward the woman, and he was holding a revolver.
Vickery yelled and started forward, dragging the invisible Castine by the hand, but the house didn’t draw closer, and of course none of the figures on the porch could hear or see him.
CHAPTER FIVE:
Regressively Indiv
By feel, for he had no visible body in this hallucination, Vickery pulled the .45 out from behind his belt with his left hand and flicked down the tight safety lever. He couldn’t see his arm or the gun, but the textured grip felt solid as he extended his invisible hand in the direction of the porch, between the woman and the two men, and the ridged trigger was pressed firmly against his finger as he squeezed it.
The grip punched back into his palm in recoil, but there was no sound, and the three people didn’t react.
The arm of the man with the revolver jerked upward, and Vickery did hear that shot—as a stuttering rumble—and the woman at the other end of the porch rocked her head back and then collapsed.
Castine’s hand twisted free of his own. He turned his head, but the scene didn’t shift from in front of his eyes—he was still helplessly staring at the house; peripheral vision showed him nothing but trees and the close hills in the sepia light.
The man in the leather jacket had lowered the gun, and now said something. The words were muffled—something like haddock tucker lud bishop—but in this dim interlude the gunshot had been no louder. The man laughed, which sounded like someone trying to start a car with a nearly dead battery, and turned away, toward the front door of the house.
And then the world went dark, with a flickering glare off to Vickery’s left. He swung his head that way, and now his view matched the way he was facing; he saw the freeway overpass, with a few flames still visible at the top of the slope underneath it. He looked in the other direction, out across the dark desert, and hoarsely called, “Castine!”
“Here,” came her voice from ahead of him. His night vis
ion was not impaired by the just-closed hallucination, and he saw her silhouette standing among the weeds a dozen yards off. She added, “Are you okay?”
Vickery took a deep breath and let it out, and spat to get rid of the imagined taste of ghost saliva. Two and two is four, he thought. “I guess so.”
“Where the hell’s your car?”
He gingerly tucked his hot gun back into his belt and trudged up to her and extended his hand.
She shied back and glanced toward the weakly underlit bridge. “I don’t think you should touch me skin-to-skin. Look what just happened.”
Vickery closed his hand. “You may be right.” He yawned widely enough to creak his jaw. “The car. Right, the car’s over here.”
He led the way across the weeds to his old white Saturn; the flames under the bridge had subsided, and the car was now the most visible thing in the nighted landscape. Castine hurried around to the passenger side, but stopped abruptly and drew her revolver, ducking below the rear fender.
Vickery had seen her and heard her cock the gun, and he drew his own gun again and crouched, looking around and groping in his pocket with his free hand for the flashlight. He was breathing deeply, forcing alertness.
He heard Castine’s harsh whisper: “Somebody’s shot out your rear side window!” After a moment she added, “Both of them, left and right!”
Vickery had got his flashlight out when he paused, and then relaxed.
“It’s okay,” he said, straightening up, “I think I did it myself.”
“No, they weren’t broken when we drove out here! Stay down!”
“Were you—in that vision, just now? The old house, the people on the porch?”
“Yes! That man shot that woman! Will you get down?”
“I pulled my gun and shot at the house door—as best I could—to get his attention—make him drop the revolver. But of course it had no effect there.”
“Oh!” She stood up from behind the car, lowering the gun. “I didn’t hear your shot . . . no, of course not. I did hear his.” She was facing him over the car’s roof. “Are you sure you’re okay? Some ghost switched places with you, for God’s sake!”
“Yes, I’m fine, or okay, at least. Thank you for the . . . visibly empirical math.”
“You’re welcome.” She opened the passenger side door, glancing back at the rear side window. “In one and out the other. Lucky you didn’t hit the gas tank.” She slid onto the seat and pulled the door closed. Vickery heard a rattle of glass falling out of the rear windows.
“Too bad I wasn’t able to save that woman,” he said as he climbed in on his side and started the engine.
“I think it was a long time ago,” Castine said as Vickery carefully backed the car around and then drove forward along the dirt track. “And the visions aren’t time travel, just—like you said, echoes.” She dropped the revolver onto the floor and wiped her hands on her new blouse. “I hate ghosts!”
Vickery’s hands were sweating too, and he knew they’d be trembling if they weren’t clamped on the steering wheel.
Castine was peering ahead. “Still no headlights?”
“Especially now, if somebody reports a fire under the bridge. I think at least one of the ghosts got excited to the point of ignition.”
Castine’s breathing gradually slowed. Finally she burst out, “Not substantial!”
“They weren’t like this before, not anything like this.” He gulped against a surge of nausea. “It’s as if they’ve found a fresh 120-volt socket to plug into.”
“Or a black hole. Did you hear what the leather jacket guy said, after he shot that woman?”
“I couldn’t make it out.”
“He said, ‘Had to take her blood pressure.’”
Vickery was concentrating entirely on seeing the faint path. “Let’s talk when we’re back in the trailer.”
She nodded, staring ahead. “Where the fossil spirits dance on the roof. I want to go home.”
The trailer still smelled of fried bacon and onions, and Vickery decided the pan and the dishes could wait till morning. He saw Castine sniffing as she stepped into the living room and sat down on the couch, and he hoped she found the familiar domestic smells as reassuring as he did.
He dropped ice cubes into two fresh glasses and carried them and the bottle into the living room and set it all down on the coffee table. “Help yourself,” he said as he lowered himself stiffly into an easy chair.
Castine was frowning at him. “I don’t think you should go to your damn freeway nest anymore.”
“Two minds with but a single thought,” he said, leaning forward to pour bourbon into one of the glasses. “All we learned about the echo-vision house—”
“If we learned anything.”
Vickery bobbed his head in acknowledgment. “If anything,” he went on, “is that it was ‘fired’ once, whatever that might mean, and will be again. Right-twist rifling refers to the grooves—”
“In a gun barrel, I know.”
“Okay.” Vickery leaned back. “That was Yeats, sort of, what that first ghost was quoting.” He handed her the bottle.
She went on frowning at him for a moment, then relaxed. “I know that too. ‘Somewhere in sands of the desert’—but it’s supposed to be ‘a shape with a lion body and the head of a man,’ not a hawk body—‘is moving its slow thighs, while all about it reel the indignant shadows of the desert birds.’ And it’s supposed to be, ‘What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward Bethlehem to be born.’” She had poured a good two inches into her own glass, and drank a third of it in one swallow. “Whew! And—something about a crowd of people falling into a black hole.”
“It was a man’s voice, that said that.” Vickery lifted his glass and swallowed a mouthful of the bourbon, and sighed as he felt it begin to relax him. “Did you recognize it? I think I did.”
After a pause, she said, “That old guy, Laquedem.” She sat back and stared at the stained ceiling. “So he obviously died, sometime in this last year. Well—God rest his soul.”
“Wherever it is,” agreed Vickery.
“So,” Castine went on, “you’ve found him in Barstow after all. Your think he knew he was talking to us?”
Vickery shrugged, remembering the gruff old man they’d met last year. “Poor old Laquedem. Setting fires under a freeway bridge in the desert now.”
“His ghost isn’t him.”
“I know, it’s just a thing that thinks it’s him.” Vickery looked around at his modest living room and wondered if some freeway gypsy might one day summon his ghost—a half-wit revenant believing it was still Sebastian Vickery, trying in its imbecilic way to meet uncomprehended goals, straining uselessly to convey broken thoughts to actual, living people.
Castine might have been thinking along the same lines. “It’s a bad deal, for sure,” she said; and when Vickery raised his eyebrows, she added, “Death.”
In a fruity, affected voice, he said, “Death is a natural part of life.”
“It’s not, though,” she said. “According to Genesis, we weren’t originally meant to experience it . . . that sundering, cleaving . . . soul and body torn apart . . . ghost fragments spinning away from the wreckage. If Adam and Eve hadn’t screwed up, it wouldn’t happen to us.”
“At least we get to exist,” said Vickery, thinking of his never-conceived daughter.
Castine took a breath, then just let in out in a sigh.
For half a minute neither of them spoke, and the hum of the air conditioner was the only sound.
Vickery stirred and said, “My daughter is on a boat. Among a lot of other boats. That sounds like a marina.”
“Your nonexistent daughter. Fossilized now in a paperback book. Yes.” Castine set down her glass and looked around the room. “Do you even have a TV?”
“In the bedroom. No cable, though, I just watch DVDs.” He stretched, and said, “Your friend with the red suspenders was outside my apartment when that copy of The Secret
Garden was taken. Why would they take that?”
She spread the fingers of one hand. “Ransom, I imagine—coercion—to get you to do something you wouldn’t want to do. But you evaded them and then disappeared, so they weren’t able to tell you their terms. And so you didn’t have to do something you didn’t want to do.”
Vickery nodded and took a deeper gulp of his drink. “I do wonder, though, if they wanted it for its own sake, somehow. I told you I made another stop before I left L.A. eight months ago and became Bill Ardmore.”
Castine set down her glass and laid back on the couch. “You went to see your old boss, Galvan.”
“Right. I was still occasionally driving for her then, taking such supernatural-evasion fares as still came along . . . and doing occasional retro-surveillance jobs . . . even working in her fleet of taco trucks, sometimes. Anyway, I asked her if she knew anything about my book being stolen, and she got all huffy and said she didn’t know my Secret Garden was any more a secret than it was a garden. And she told me—”
“Some guy who collected fossilized spirits asked if she knew of any for sale. And she told him about your book. I remember.”
Vickery idly moved his glass in a circle on the table. “And Galvan was the only one, besides you and me, who even knew about the book.”
“Along with some of her family, you recall.”
“Well, yeah . . . and Galvan was known to have dealings in supernatural stuff, so I guess it makes sense that a collector of such things would approach her. But the guy was clearly, or probably, with this group that was after us today. Galvan pointed them to my book.”
“Innocently—”
Castine had started to say the word as a statement, but the last syllable went up in pitch, making it a question.
“She kind of blew it off,” said Vickery, “when I asked her about it, like I’d lost a souvenir pen or something. I assumed she was embarrassed at having told a thief where to find it.” He laughed briefly. “Especially without her getting a cut.”
“Unless, I suppose, she did get a cut.”
Vickery drained his glass, and it clanked when he set it down on the table. “She gave me a description of this alleged collector. Now I think she was just describing Harry Dean Stanton. She was a big fan of Repo Man.”