by Tim Powers
“Okay,” Vickery clicked the engine into gear and steered the Nissan across both lanes, and started up the rutted bumpy path. “I bet nobody’s been up here for years.”
“May as well keep going. You can’t turn around.”
The track climbed sharply, and Vickery shifted to low gear; and after a dozen yards of slow, swaying progress the trail leveled out, and on a narrow, uneven plateau, walled on three sides by rugged slopes, he saw a structure like an abandoned barn. A big wood-frame door at the front of it was slid halfway open and looked as if it hadn’t been moved from that position in decades.
But a shiny black panhead Harley Davidson motorcycle leaned on its kickstand a few yards in front of the barn.
“Good lord,” whispered Castine.
Vickery braked to a halt.
“Have your gun handy,” he told Castine as he opened his door. The smell of motor oil tainted the juniper and tree bark scent on the cold breeze.
Castine got out, and she and Vickery walked cautiously toward the incongruous barn. Vickery noticed that the motorcycle had no clutch or front-brake levers, nor rear-wheel shock absorbers. A real old-school hardtail chopper, he thought.
They halted when a bald old man in boots and jeans and a ragged, once-white T-shirt stepped out of the building into the sunlight. His face and arms were tanned almost purple, and his left hand was behind his back.
“I bet you thought this was the Café Mimosa,” he said, in a high, nasal voice like a nailed-shut box being pried open. “That’s another mile up the road.”
Vickery cleared his throat and said, “We were told a man named Sandstrom used to hang out here.” His hands were in his jacket pockets.
“He’s dead,” said the old man. “I’m watching his place till he gets back.”
Vickery nodded uncertainly, wondering if they were dealing with a lunatic—but the well-maintained antique motorcycle was evidence that the man might actually know something about the old days of Sandstrom and the Gadarene Legion.
“It has to do with some things that happened in 1968,” Vickery said.
“A lot of things happed in the canyon in ’68,” said the old man. “If this old bike could talk, it could tell you some strange stories.”
“Somebody’s trying to restart Chronic’s egregore!” Castine burst out; she paused, then nodded. “With the coloring books and all.”
For several seconds none of them spoke, and the wind in the hillside trees was the only sound.
The old man spat. “Sure. It’s been hanging fire for a long time. You think the ghosts don’t know about it? Shit.”
It occurred to Vickery that this figure might itself be a ghost—and he and Castine had spoken to it in complete sentences!—but the sun had risen above the hills surrounding this notch, and the old man was casting a clearly delineated shadow on the leaf-strewn dirt.
Struck with a sudden conviction, Vickery said, “Mr. Sandstrom, can you tell us what made it fail, in ’68?”
The old man’s jaw worked as if he were chewing something, and finally he shrugged and nodded. “Cops wouldn’t know or care about that stuff. Yeah, I’m him. What do you want?”
“We want to know how to stop it again,” said Vickery.
“All you gotta do is kill somebody.”
To Vickery’s surprise, Castine said, “We’ve both done that.”
“Have you now! Sweet little chick like you. Well, old ones don’t count. Who did you kill?”
She stared straight at the old man. “A federal agent. Last year.”
Sandstrom turned his reptilian gaze on Vickery, who rolled his eyes, hesitated, and then said, “Another federal agent. Likewise last year.”
“You two desperadoes. Why don’t you be good little outlaws and just—” He paused, and peered narrow-eyed at Vickery and Castine. “Hah!” The old man rocked on his heels and grinned, exposing several teeth. “If you’re the pair I think you just might be, tell me what you brought back.”
Vickery waved his free hand. “Brought back where?” he asked. “From where?”
But Castine had caught her breath and then shakily exhaled. “He means from the afterworld,” she said to Vickery, “the Labyrinth.” Facing the bald old man, she said, “A hang-glider. It wound up blocking a hole in a clearing off the Pasadena Freeway.”
Sandstrom’s eyebrows were halfway up his wrinkled forehead, and he had stopped chewing. “A hole to Hell, they say. Though sometimes the story is you had a hot-air balloon. After that, do you . . . live in now, all the time?”
Vickery pursed his lips. “Not all the time,” he allowed.
“I should have guessed you two would be likely to show up this week.” Sandstrom stared at them for a few heartbeats, then swung his left arm from behind his back and dropped the revolver he’d been holding hidden, and he nodded toward the open door of the barn. “Come inside,you can carry my gun. I’m sure the brothers will want to see you.”
Vickery and Castine exchanged a wary glance, then Vickery crouched to pick up Sandstrom’s revolver and they followed the old man across the uneven dirt to the half-open door of the barn.
The interior was lit by a couple of dusty skylights in the high roof, but after a moment Vickery’s eyes had adjusted enough to see three flames in glass chimneys on a shelf at the far end of the big chamber; and then, in the shadows to his left, he noticed a cobwebbed tangle of haphazardly stacked old motorcycles. Wind whistled through gaps between the boards of the walls.
Sandstrom led the way across the rippled floor of square paving blocks to the shelf where the three flames stood upright above corroded gas jets, protected from the draft by the glass chimneys. Vickery noticed a fourth chimney at the end of the row, its gas jet unlit.
Irrationally, Vickery felt exposed in front of the flames, as if they were three malevolently senile old men staring at him. The flames weren’t terribly bright, but when he looked away, their arrangement lingered in his vision for several seconds.
“I let ’em out for a while, most days,” said Sandstrom, “to sit on the propane. The rest of the time they’re in a lantern I got from old Booty, after it was all over. Lamp oil’s my biggest expense these days.” He waved at the unlit gas jet. “The dark one at the end is waiting for Coastal Eddie—he got shot off the porch that night, and just plain disappeared. But I’m holding his place for him.” In a louder voice, he said, “Brothers, here’s two more who don’t live in this bullshit future!”
Vickery guessed that Sandstrom was addressing the flames; and when they all wavered at the same moment, it seemed that they were responding—acknowledging. A couple flared briefly, seeming to score Vickery’s retinas, and he suppressed a shudder.
“They want to know did you die,” said Sandstrom. “You can talk plain, they don’t stir from the flames.”
From their combustion wheelchairs, Vickery thought.
“Uh, no,” said Castine nervously. “We went across in our bodies, and came back, still alive.”
All the flames bobbed, and Sandstrom grinned. “They’re not dead either, see, just in this fake 2018. It’s still ’68 in the way station down there at the bottom of the canyon, and they mean to go back.” He looked up at an empty section of the wall. “And I’ll get the rest of the old Legion here again, in their home place—they’re in the sigil Chronic stole from us.”
“The Egyptian hieroglyph,” said Castine.
“Its name is Ba,” said Sandstrom. His lean, deeply grooved face seemed best suited to express rage or ironic humor, but now he sounded almost reverent. “We found it back in ’65, where it once tried to jump into the sea and took a big old part of San Pedro with it. That’s how the club got its name, jumping off a cliff, dig?”
Castine nodded. “It makes sense. The Gadarene Legion.”
“Sure. And we’ll have our sigil again.”
“In this bullshit future,” ventured Vickery.
Sandstrom waved his left arm toward the three flames. “It’s bullshit to them. Gas is stil
l thirty-four cents a gallon where they are, two bucks gets you a six-pack of Bud and change, and Buck Owens is on the radio.” He sighed. “I wish I could go back myself. Can I have my gun?”
“Oh, sure.” Vickery handed it to him. “So what made Chronic’s egregore fail?”
“I told you. People got killed there, when he was launching his invitation across the nation, at that crazy old house.” Sandstrom looked from Vickery to Castine and added, speaking clearly, “Ghosts got in the mix. Ghosts are spaces shaped like somebody, but the somebody isn’t there, they’re like bubbles in a fuel line—the engine stalls.”
“We heard he shot you,” said Castine. “In the arm.”
After a pause, Sandstrom nodded. He touched his right arm and stiffly flexed the fingers of that hand. “He was a punk. I went there that day to try to negotiate the return of our property, which the fucker stole. There was a movie actress there too, with some legal hassle for him, and he shot her. And then yeah, he shot me that night, when four of us rode back down there to just take the sigil back, right as I walked in the door.”
With a sudden chill, Vickery realized that he and Castine had experienced that, three hours ago. It’s this Sandstrom person, he thought, who must be the source of our visions!
Castine’s mouth had dropped open, and she exclaimed, “He was on the stairway, right?—with Gale Reed, when he shot you.”
In the ensuing silence the three flames were motionless.
Sandstrom cocked his head and squinted at her. “If you say so, doll.”
“And that was your sigil, wasn’t it,” asked Vickery, “hanging on the wall over the couch?”
The flames jiggled furiously in their glass cylinders, and Sandstrom folded his arms with his gun hand out, the barrel pointed at the high ceiling planks; he smiled and said, “You tell me, Lazarus.”
Vickery had the impression that in the last few seconds he and Castine had stepped wrong, forfeited whatever degree of openness Sandstrom and his flaming companions had extended to them.
Perhaps sensing the same thing, Castine looked back toward the open doorway. “I think we’ve learned what we wanted to know. If you—all—will excuse us—” Then she looked back at Sandstrom. “Where was that wrecked house full of sand, the place where it all happened?”
Sandstrom let his arms fall to his sides. The gun was pointed at the floor now. “I told you. That’s the way station. It’s down at the bottom of the canyon. If you drove up from PCH, you went right by it.”
“But it was torn down, right?” said Castine. “After the flood in ’69?”
“In some times. Not in all.”
Vickery asked, “Where exactly is . . . its place?”
“You don’t need to be there.”
“We’d like to watch.”
“Come back here one day and I’ll tell you about it.”
“Right.” The discussion was clearly ended. “Be seeing you.” Vickery nodded toward the flames, from which the only response was flaring and sputtering, and took Castine’s suede-sleeved elbow and led her back across the floor and out onto the sunlit dirt. Sandstrom followed, and watched from the doorway as they got in the car and Vickery started it up.
Vickery managed, on the narrow and tilted space in front of the barn, to twist the steering wheel and switch from drive to reverse enough times to get the car pointed back the way they’d come, and after inching his way down the bumpy track for several minutes he reached the two lanes of Topanga Canyon Boulevard.
He signaled for a right turn, and when no car was visible to the left, he swung into the lane and accelerated, heading back south.
Castine fastened her seatbelt and whistled a descending note. “I did not like the way those flames looked at me!” she said.
“Nasty old men,” Vickery agreed. “I didn’t like the way they looked at me, either.”
The car’s heater was still on, but Castine shivered and pulled her coat more tightly around herself. “You remember last night, when Fakhouri said the candles at Hipple’s house just had normal flames? I think we just saw abnormal flames.” She turned in her seat to face him. “So!—damn it!—why should we have been experiencing his memory of that terrible day?”
Vickery shook his head, not taking his eyes from the curving road. “I don’t think that weird purple tan on him is from the sun.”
Castine raised one hand, palm up and fingers beckoning in a go on gesture.
“Those flames,” Vickery said, “are out of synch with recommended retail time, just like we are—as Sandstrom said, it’s still 1968 for them. So they’re FM transmitters, in this world of AM. And Sandstrom’s been standing in front of them for—what do you think, a million hours?”
“Say an hour a day, for fifty years. Call it eighteen thousand.”
“Okay. I think they’ve lit him up, like an electric current through hydrogen gas. The hydrogen doesn’t shine with the full spectrum, just a few frequency bands, and I think Sandstrom just shines—on what you might call their carrier wave—with his memories of that day fifty years ago. Laquedem probably saw the old house visions too, since he’d been to the Labyrinth afterworld, and got chronologically fractured same as us. He’d have been an FM receiver too.”
“Sure, that old gag,” said Castine, knotting her fingers together in her lap. “I don’t want to see it—I don’t want to be there!—when Gale Reed’s bedlam starts up.”
“It looks like that’s the next installment,” Vickery said, “since the gunshot didn’t kill him.”
“We need to check out the way station while the sun’s still up,” said Castine. When Vickery looked away from the road to give her a questioning look, she added, “It’s got to be the X on that map in Ragotskie’s papers.”
Half an hour ago the iPad had lost the signal from Beatrice Kittredge’s phone. The green dot had been moving west past Will Rogers State Beach when it disappeared, and Loria, free to talk in a normal voice, had said Vickery and Castine had probably driven up into Topanga Canyon, which famously had bad phone reception. Harlowe had insisted that GPS locating could still function, and Loria had explained that one needed a particular app for that, which Kittredge apparently didn’t have.
Tony and Biloxi had just been turning onto PCH. Harlowe told them to get to Topanga Canyon Boulevard and head north. The signal had to reassert itself when Vickery and Castine got out of the canyon.
“And we’ve got to get out there,” Harlowe told Loria. “Bring my phone and the iPad.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN:
The Inverted Broken Ankh
The ragged old man stood at the top of the hill above PCH, his white beard blowing around his tanned face. Behind him was the Pacific Ocean, and below him to his right the colorful array of Oasis Imports outdoor furniture stretched up the road to the rambling red-and-white building that was the Malibu Feed Bin; but he was looking down the inland slope, past the terraced hill paths to the curving line of trees that marked the course of Topanga Creek.
Two people, a man and a woman, had parked a white car on the highway and gone walking up the path to the creek; and a few minutes later he had seen them again, through a gap in the trees, following the creek’s westward curve. After several more minutes they had not reappeared in a clear area to the left. They had stopped, somewhere down there among the trees.
Very near whatever foundations of the house might be left.
Half a century ago the house’s roof would have been visible from up here, the two gable windows on the rear side . . . and Cayenne would still have been alive. She had been twenty years old to his twenty-eight, generally in a feathered hat and wool shawl and big rainbow sunglasses, with a shy smile and a frank resolve to rid herself of a life she had never wanted. He had loved her, and had been a proxy for the egregore in wooing her toward a bigger, selfless existence—but in the end she had had to settle for her old goal of plain death, when a load of buckshot from a Gadarene Legion shotgun had caught her squarely in the chest, on that disastrous final n
ight.
He shook off the memory of crouching over her broken body amid the melee, seeing the shock fade to infinite absence in her blue eyes.
The egregore had not manifested itself on that night, and none of the eager communicants had achieved the bigger, selfless existence.
He had been long gone by the time the 1969 flood knocked the place over and it was finally cleared away, decades after it had stopped measuring up to any municipal building code; but in the ’60s, people hadn’t cared about such things. He had met, and recruited, many prominent people in that crazy old place, with its non-vertical walls and ground floor drifted with sand—movie directors and stars, writers, politicians; Dot Palmer hadn’t by any means been the most notable.
And treacherous Dot Palmer had threatened, on the very day of the intended consummation, to go to the police about a couple of underage runaway girls who were staying at the house.
He had not been able to afford any such delay.
And Palmer’s ghost, only hours old by that time, had probably done its part in wrecking the egregore, though several more ghosts—including, intolerably, Cayenne’s—had been created to join Palmer’s before that night was out. Sandstorm had led a real scorched-earth assault, perversely unable to comprehend the benefits the sigil could offer to everybody, not just his gang of hoodlum bikers.
Conrad Chronic watched the trees along the creek banks, but nobody had appeared. He believed he had recognized the inquisitive couple, even seeing them at this distance of several hundred feet. They were the pair he had met yesterday afternoon, at Simon Harlowe’s vacated ChakraSys office on Sepulveda. Chronic had driven his old VW van there to try to stop Harlowe, even kill him if necessary, but Harlowe and the whole ChakraSys crowd had abandoned the place, and he had been trying to find some clue to their new location when this pair had wandered up.
He had supposed then that they were just a couple of losers pursuing some dipshit spirituality . . . but here they were, at the site of the focus house itself.
The old man bent down and lifted the yard-long pine board with the carved wooden figure of a man-headed hawk glued onto it. Over the decades he had several times had to re-gue the figure, but exposure to weather and ground water—and marijuana smoke, when it had hung on the wall of the filthy Gadarene Legion clubhouse—had long since silhouetted the place where Claude Wystan had originally glued it.