by Tim Powers
Chronic had reproduced the image in the Groan coloring book in ’66, and had distributed copies as widely as he could—at the UCLA and USC campuses, at one of the “acid tests” hosted by Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters in the Cinema Theater on Western, and even, briefly, at Disneyland—and the egregore, he believed, had very nearly come to life.
Tonight at midnight this Harlowe guy meant to awaken and hijack it. But I’ll take it back, thought Chronic, and in that fragmented hour I’ll find Cayenne, young and alive, and this time we’ll all leave behind the old gray shore, climb to the sky.
I suppose Harlowe knows that he needs a couple of switchboard operators. I had Stanley and Gale, my telepathic twin brother and sister pair, who had fled their home state, changed their names, and got married because it was only with each other that they could really communicate—all of it a closely held secret.
A faint reminiscent smile deepened the wrinkles in Conrad Chronic’s cheeks.
But Chronic had been the guru of the idealistic egregore group, their Messiah, in fact, ready to lead them all to transcendent immortality . . . and so it had been natural, one stoned night, for Gale to confide in him her deep but illegal relationship with Stanley. And private knowledge had always been a useful lever in getting people to do what he told them.
Stanley had rebelled, come up with some crazy historically-based reasons why the egregore would fail. And it did fail, but almost certainly because of the inclusion of fresh ghosts, not Stanley’s predicted psychological perils. And after that disastrous night, Stanley had simply disappeared.
Chronic clasped the weathered board to his chest. He still couldn’t see the man and woman down there by the creek. Why had they come sniffing around Harlowe’s vacated place on Sepulveda yesterday? And what had brought them here, on this day of all days?
Down on Topanga Canyon Boulevard, a green Camaro convertible had pulled up behind the white car the couple had arrived in; and now two men got out of it and started up the dirt path, moving purposefully. Chronic gripped the board under his arm and began walking along the zig-zag path that led down the hill to the creekside trees.
He glanced at the clear blue sky. O moon, grow bright, he thought. Cayenne, only a few hours more until we’re together forever.
Vickery had parked on the Topanga Boulevard shoulder well short of PCH, and taken Fakhouri’s shopping bag out of the trunk and carried it along as Castine led the way around a chained road-blocking gate and up a dirt path toward a hill that stood between this four-acre field and the coast highway. They were in a little wilderness of trees and weeds and curling paths, but Castine had dug around in the shopping bag and pulled the map from among the papers Ragotskie had given them, and insisted that the paths and a nearby creek corresponded to lines on it.
After a few minutes of walking, and pausing to peer at the map and squint around at their surroundings, she came to a halt. She looked south between two luxuriant willows at the hill, and breathed, “My God, look at that slope! Don’t you recognize it?”
Vickery did. It was the slope he had seen many times behind the house, in the visions that were Sandstrom’s memories. “These bricks must be where it was,” he said, pointing to a low wall mostly hidden by white calla lilies that bobbed in the breeze. “It looks like they once tried to shore it up a bit.” He realized, with a wave of vertigo that he knew Castine must share, that they were standing where Sandstrom had stood when Chronic had shot Dot Palmer, fifty years ago. We’re here in person at last, he thought.
Castine pointed a trembling finger at a rosemarybush above the low wall. “That would be where the porch was, where Dot Palmer was killed.” She raised her hand and moved it to the right. “And that’s where the staircase was. This morning we saw Gale Reed walk down those stairs when she was—uh, born in ’33—she’d have been thirty-five. And an hour later we talked to her when she was eighty-five.”
Vickery stepped back, his hands in his pockets. “She deteriorated a lot in that hour.”
“She was still hanging wreaths at the La Brea Tar Pits as recently as four years ago,” Castine pointed out; then her face went blank. “Egyptian mummies were preserved in bitumen,” she said quietly, perhaps to herself.
Vickery glanced at her in alarm, wondering if this was another of the Alice in Wonderland quotes projected from Lexi and Amber, like the “pours the waters of the Nile” line; but Castine waved impatiently. “Gale Reed told us that her husband Stanley hid from the spirits like a Pharaoh, remember? He didn’t want to become a ghost.”
“Bitumen is asphalt,” said Vickery slowly, “tar. And—”
“And she hangs a wreath annually at the La Brea Tar Pits! It’s not in honor of the mastodons and giant sloths that died there a million years ago.”
Vickery whistled softly. “You hop over the fence after the place is closed, put rocks in your pockets and wade out. And then you’re down there in the tar, with the saber-tooth tigers and all.” He nodded judiciously. “It probably is a good way to keep from becoming a vagrant ghost.”
“I bet it’s his birthday,” said Castine, “or their anniversary, when she hangs the wreaths.”
She and Vickery both jumped when grating voice intruded from the slope above them: “Oh, Br’er Fox, whatever you do, don’t throw me in de tar pits! Hah! So now he is the tar baby!”
Vickery heard a slithering rattle of leaves and gravel higher up the slope, and he and Castine quickly stepped away from each other; Vickery’s hand was on his gun in his pocket, and Castine’s was in the pocket of her jacket.
And they recognized the white-bearded old man who now limped out from behind an oak trunk and sat down on the knee-high wall. He was holding a weathered board carefully in both hands—like, it occurred to Vickery, Moses carrying the Ten Commandments down from Mount Sinai.
“As if anybody’d want his crappy incestuous old ghost anyway,” the old man said, hiking himself forward and standing up.
“You were in that Dumpster behind the ChakraSys place yesterday,” said Vickery.
“Incestuous?” said Castine.
“They were brother and sister,” the old man said, “him and Gale. Part of what made ’em a likely switchboard. Blood under the bridge, a dead guy under the tar. I know, I know, you got guns. Big deal.” He squinted from Vickery to Castine over the top of his board. “You saw Gale Reed come down those stairs this morning? What, an old home movie I didn’t know about?”
“That’s right,” said Castine quickly.
“Huh. And here you are, since this place is listed in all the tour books, right? Maybe somebody filmed it. Or maybe you two saw her, saw this place. You got a date, tonight? With that Harlowe guy’s crowd? You tell him, you hear? Tell him he’s reaping what another man sowed.”
“You’re talking about Chronic,” said Vickery; then he remembered the lean face of the man on the porch in the visions, and compared it to the face of the old man in front of them; the cheekbones and forehead were similar, but it was the eyes that he recognized.
In a hesitant, wondering voice, Vickery said, “You are Chronic.”
“Chronic as a virus,” the old man said, grinning, “in remission for fifty years but back again. And Chronic for Chronos, master of time, and the titan Cronus, who incorporated his children.”
“Cronus ate his children,” said Castine. “And we’re not with Harlowe.”
Chronic cocked his head, and locks of white hair trailed across his face. “Does he specially want you to be with him? Are you two—you see events from the past!—can you two be his desired switchboard?”
“You could say so,” said Vickery. “But don’t worry, we’re not going to—”
Chronic opened his mouth and bellowed, “Over here!”
Vickery looked back toward the boulevard and saw two men walking on the path he and Castine had followed. At Chronic’s shout, the men raised their heads and began sprinting this way.
“What do we do?” asked Castine quietly.
“Not
a gunfight. Assume others. Run.”
And then he and Castine were dodging tree trunks as they ran through patches of shade and sunlight, away from the old man and the two men on the path. The loops of the wildly swinging shopping bag jerked at Vickery’s left hand, and when they passed a shoulder-high bank of bull-thistles he noted the location and pitched the bag onto the far side of the clustered green leaves, where it wouldn’t be seen.
The creek curved to the left ahead of them, disappearing in the shadows among an impenetrable-looking stand of trees, but a makeshift wooden bridge spanned the water to their right, and they thumped across it to the open area on the other side. Now they were on a south-slanting footpath that widened out in a proper dirt road. A row of white cabins stood on a rise to their right beyond a couple of picnic tables, and Vickery was fairly confident that he and Castine, who was panting along right beside him, would reach Pacific Coast Highway before their pursuers could catch up.
When they rounded a corner and he saw a yellow road-blocking gate a couple of hundred feet ahead, he knew that they were at the other end of the unpaved lane that transected this untended area; and even as he and Castine exerted themselves in an extra burst of speed, a familiar gray SUV turned in from the highway and came to an abrupt stop on the other side of the gate.
The doors opened, and out stepped Simon Harlowe and the woman whose car Vickery had sideswiped on Crenshaw last night. Harlowe was raising a rifle to his shoulder.
Vickery and Castine dove to opposite sides of the dirt road, but Vickery heard a hard snap, and Castine yelped. He rolled to his feet and looked across the road—Castine was up and running toward a thicket by a big mesquite tree, but she stumbled and fell to her hands and knees in a drift of dry leaves. Vickery saw a dot of bright green on the shoulder of her coat even as he heard another snap and felt a hard punch to his thigh. He looked down.
A plastic cylinder with an identically green cap stood up from his leg, and through the clear barrel of it he could see that the syringe’s plunger was right down by the needle housing.
He quickly yanked out the dart and drew his Glock, but the two figures by the gate had ducked out of sight around the front of a highway-facing shed, and Vickery was already dizzy with whatever the injection had been.
He lowered the gun and fired four rapid shots into the dirt, hoping that the loud bangs would draw strangers’ attention; it occurred to him that he could have taken off his belt and tried to nake a tourniquet above the puncture, as for a snake-bite, but his fingers were already too numb even to hold onto the gun, and a remote pain in his knees let him know that he had fallen forward. His last thought was to wonder if the dart had contained a lethal or only a tranquilizing agent.
Tony and Biloxi came puffing along the path as Harlowe was tossing the Cap-Shure rifle into the SUV and glancing around nervously. Loria couldn’t help thinking that his red boots and the burgundy-colored hair fluttering around his ears made him look like a clown.
“Biloxi,” Harlowe called shrilly, “you and Agnes get Castine—Tony and I’ll take Vickery.”
Loria hurried to where the Castine woman lay face down in the dead leaves.
Biloxi scurried up and knelt beside Castine’s body. He was skinny and bearded, wearing a black hoodie and gray yoga pants, and Loria hoped he’d be able to do his part in lifting Castine.
“Harlowe shot her?” he asked in a hoarse whisper. “Is she dead?”
“It was Vickery shooting,” Loria told him. “She’s just tranked. Roll her over, then you get her under the arms. And I’ll tell Harlowe if I see you copping a feel.”
Biloxi reared back now at the suggestion. “I’d never,” he sputtered, “I respect—”
“Shut up. After tonight it won’t matter who you were.”
Together they rolled Castine over onto her back. Biloxi gripped her under the arms, and he lifted her limp body to a near-sitting position. Her head rolled loosely. He straightened up with a shrill grunt of effort, and Loria got between Castine’s legs and lifted her knees; they shuffled around a side-post of the gate to the SUV and pushed her in onto the carpeted floor, then stepped aside so that Harlowe and Tony could step up. Tony had to climb in, avoiding stepping on Castine, and pull Vickery’s limp body over the back seat arm-rest and lay him on the seat. Harlowe tossed Vickery’s gun after the rifle.
“Was somebody shooting?” came a shout from behind the SUV.
Loria stepped back and saw two young men in colorful shorts and T-shirts shading their eyes and peering into the shadows of the dirt lane.
She glanced at the SUV and saw that Tony was even now swinging the door shut. “Backfire,” she said. “Nitrous oxide additive in the fuel. You know.”
“Oh,” said one of the young men, nodding uncertainly. “Like in the Fast and Furious movies?”
“That’s it,” she said. She stepped to the back of the SUV and began unbuttoning her blouse, to their intense and focused interest; then she pulled it off and turned to tuck it around the rear license plate.
Above her jeans she was now wearing only her bra. She smiled and hurried around to get into the vehicle on the passenger side. Harlowe was already in the driver’s seat and had started the engine.
He glanced at her and then stared. “Wha-what do you mean by—” he began.
“Go, will you?” As he spasmodically yanked the gear shift into reverse, she crawled between the seats and squatted by Castine. She leaned forward and patted the extent of Castine’s slack body, and quickly found the revolver in her coat pocket. She handed it to Tony, then tilted Castine’s head back. “Tony, the Narcan. You do Vickery.”
Tony’s eyes were wide, but he passed her a couple of little white plastic objects that looked to her like toy rocket launchers, and she quickly stuck the nozzle of one of them into Castine’s left nostril and pressed the plunger; she tossed the emptied thing away and stuck the nozzle of the other one into Castine’s right nostril and squirted its contents too into Castine’s nose.
The vehicle accelerated forward now, throwing Loria against Vickery’s yielding shoulder. Tony had just pulled the second narcan nozzle out of Vickery’s nose.
“You’re, uh, supposed to use two on each of them?” asked Tony, looking away from her bra.
“Are they all right?” yelled Harlowe from the front seat.
“Probably!” Loria called back.
Biloxi had climbed into the back, and he was simply staring over the back of the seat at her breasts.
“One’s what they advise,” Loria told Tony, “but what the hell.” To Biloxi, she said, “Give me your hoodie.” When he opened his mouth to protest or ask a question, she added, “Now, dipshit.”
Biloxi’s hurt expression disappeared under the black cotton fabric as he pulled it off over his head, exposing a red and black Che Guevara T-shirt. “What about my Camaro?” he asked.
“You’re up on Topanga?” Loria said. “With luck you'll never see it again.” She quickly put on the hoodie and leaned down to shake Castine’s shoulder. “Hey, Ingrid? Speak to me, Ingrid.”
Tony was crouched on the floor by Castine’s feet; he stood up as best he could in the bobbing vehicle and slapped Vickery on the chest. “Hey, man, wake up.”
“Are they all right?” demanded Harlowe again.
“Probably!” repeated Loria. “Biloxi,” she said, “fetch me that roll of duct tape from the back.” When the sulking young man had tossed it to her, she pulled the end of the tape free, then quickly bound Castine’s wrists together, pulling the roll of tape around the joined wrists four times before tearing it off.
She gave the roll to Tony, who pulled Vickery’s wrists together and bound them the same way.
He had barely torn it off and pressed the edge down when Vickery exhaled sharply and tried to sit up. On the floor, Castine was rolling her head back and forth and mumbling.
“Vickery!” said Loria.
“What,” said Vickery hoarsely. He raised his hands as if to rub his eyes, then pa
used, squinting at his wrists. “Get this off.”
“Soon.” Loria looked down. “Ingrid, how’re you doing?”
Castine sneezed, then said, “Lea’ me alone.” She was shivering.
“They’re all right!” called Loria to Harlowe. Vickery’s pupils were tiny and his face was slack and pale, and Loria knew he was only half awake at best. “Where were you for the last hour and a half?” she asked him. “We lost your signal in the hills. You started up the canyon, but then you came back down. Why?”
Vickery closed his eyes tight. “Tension apprehension and dissension have begun,” he said distinctly. He was shivering.
“What do you mean?”
He only repeated the phrase.
Loria leaned back, between the front seats, and tilted her head toward Harlowe’s intent profile. Quietly she asked him, “Has this guy been in the military or something? I’d almost think he’s been trained in resisting interrogation.”
Harlowe glanced down at her, and seemed reassured to see that she was wearing Biloxi’s hoodie. “Nobody’s following us,” he said, returning his attention to the traffic ahead, “and we’ve got our IMPs! Who cares if he was in the military?”
“I’d like to know where they were, up the canyon.”
“It doesn’t matter now. Do you have enough Narcan to give them another nose-squirt, if it wears off before the morphine does?”
“We got a bunch of it at Walgreens.” She leaned forward over Castine’s still-limp body and took hold of Vickery’s chin. Turning his face toward her, she asked quietly, “What did Gale Reed tell you?”
“Tension apprehension and—” He blinked several times, then squinted directly at her. “I know you, don’t I?” he said. “You—stopped a baby carriage in front of my car—in—February. And—you were in a car on Crenshaw—was it last night—?” His mouth worked. “Did you squirt something up my nose? It tastes like a stale menthol cigarette.”