by Tim Powers
He exhaled, and nodded. “It’s possible, yes.”
“I think I owe it to you. Some Pat Moore does. We left you alone.”
“It was my fault.” In a rush he added, “I was even glad you didn’t leave a note.” It’s true, he thought. I was grateful.
“I’m glad she didn’t leave a note,” this Pat Moore said.
He needed to change the subject. “You’re a ghost,” he said. “Can’t you make her never have existed?”
“No. I can’t get far from real places or I’d blur away, out of focus, but she can go way up high, where you can look down on the whole carpet, and – twist out strands of it; bend somebody at right angles to everything, which means you’re gone without a trace. And anyway, she and her students are all blocked against that kind of attack, they’ve got ConfigSafe.”
He laughed at the analogy. “You know about computers?”
“No,” she said emptily. “Did I?”
He sighed. “No, not a lot.” He thought of the revolver in the seat, and then thought of something better. “You mentioned a park. You used to like Buena Vista Park. Let’s stop there on the way.”
Moore drove clockwise around the tall, darkly wooded hill that was the park, while the peaked roofs and cylindrical towers of the old Victorian houses were teeth on a saw passing across the gray sky on his left. He found a parking space on the eastern curve of Buena Vista Avenue, and he got out of the car quickly to keep the Pat Moore ghost from having to open the door on her side; he remembered what she had done to the bowl of popcorn.
But she was already standing on the splashing pavement in the rain, without having opened the door. In the ashy daylight her purple dress seemed to have lost all its color, and her face was indistinct and pale; he peered at her, and he was sure the heavy raindrops were falling right through her.
He could imagine her simply dissolving on the hike up to the meadow. “Would you rather wait in the car?” he said. “I won’t be long.”
“Do you have a pair of binoculars?” she asked. Her voice too was frail out here in the cold.
“Yes, in the glove compartment.” Cold rain was soaking his hair and leaking down inside his jacket collar, and he wanted to get moving. “Can you … hold them?”
“I can’t hold anything. But if you take out the lens in the middle you can catch me in it, and carry me.”
He stepped past her to open the passenger-side door, and bent over to pop open the glove compartment, and then he knelt on the seat and dragged out his old leather-sleeved binoculars and turned them this way and that in the wobbly gray light that filtered through the windshield.
“How do I get the lens out?” he called over his shoulder.
“A screwdriver, I guess,” came her voice, barely audible above the thrashing of the rain. “See the tiny screw by the eyepiece?”
“Oh. Right.” He used the small blade from his pocketknife on the screw in the back of the left barrel, and then had to do the same with a similar screw on the forward end of it. The eyepiece stayed where it was, but the big forward lens fell out, exposing a metal cross on the inside; it was held down with a screw that he managed to rotate with the blade-tip – and then a triangular block of polished glass fell out into his palm.
“That’s it, that’s the lens,” she called from outside the car.
Moore’s cell phone buzzed as he was stepping backward to the pavement, and he fumbled it out of his jacket pocket and flipped it open. “Moore here,” he said. He pushed the car door closed and leaned over the phone to keep the rain off it.
“Hey Pat,” came Rick’s voice, “I’m sitting here in your Garden City club in San Jose, and I could be at the Bay. Where are you, man?”
The Pat Moore ghost was moving her head, and Moore looked up at her. With evident effort she was making her head swivel back and forth in a clear no gesture.
The warning chilled Moore. Into the phone he said, “I’m – not far, I’m at a bar off the 85. Place called the Pirate’s Cove.”
“Well, don’t chug your beer on my account. But come over here when you can.”
“You bet. I’ll be out of here in five minutes.” He closed the phone and dropped it back into his pocket.
“They made him call again,” said the ghost. “They lost track of your car after I killed the guy with the shotgun.” She smiled, and her teeth seemed to be gone. “That was good, saying you were at that bar. They can tell truth from lies, and that’s only twenty minutes from being true.”
Guardian angel, he thought. “You killed him?”
“I think so.” Her image faded, then solidified again. “Yes.”
“Ah. Well – good.” With his free hand he pushed the wet hair back from his forehead. “So what do I do with this?” he asked, holding up the lens.
“Hold it by the frosted sides, with the long edge of the triangle pointed at me; then look at me through the two other edges.”
The glass thing was a blocky right-triangle, frosted on the sides but polished smooth and clear on the thick edges; obediently he held it up to his eye and peered through the two slanted faces of clear glass.
He could see her clearly through the lens – possibly more clearly than when he looked at her directly – but this was a mirror image: the dark slope of the park appeared to be to the left of her.
“Now roll it over a quarter turn, like from noon to three,” she said.
He rotated the lens ninety degrees – but her image in it rotated a full 180 degrees, so that instead of seeing her horizontal he saw her upside down.
He jumped then, for her voice was right in his ear. “Close your eyes and put the lens in your pocket.”
He did as she said, and when he opened his eyes again she was gone – the wet pavement stretched empty to the curbstones and green lawns of the old houses.
“You’ve got me in your pocket,” her voice said in his ear. “When you want me, look through the lens again and turn it back the other way.”
It occurred to him that he believed her. “Okay,” he said, and sprinted across the street to the narrow stone stairs that led up into the park.
His leather shoes tapped the ascending steps, and then splashed in the mud as he took the uphill path to the left. The city was gone now, hidden behind the dense overhanging boughs of pine and eucalyptus, and the rain echoed under the canopy of green leaves. The cold air was musky with the smells of mulch and pine and wet loam.
Up at the level playground lawn the swingsets were of course empty, and in fact he seemed to be the only living soul in the park today. Through gaps between the trees he could see San Francisco spread out below him on all sides, as still as a photograph under the heavy clouds.
He splashed through the gutters that were made of fragments of old marble headstones – keeping his head down, he glimpsed an incised cross filled with mud in the face of one stone, and the lone phrase “in loving memory” on another – and then he had come to the meadow with the big old oak trees he remembered.
He looked around, but there was still nobody to be seen in the cathedral space, and he hurried to the side and crouched to step in under the shaggy foliage and catch his breath.
“It’s beautiful,” said the voice in his ear.
“Yes,” he said, and he took the lens out of his pocket. He held it up and squinted through the right-angle panels, and there was the image of her, upside down. He rotated it counterclockwise ninety degrees and the image was upright, and when he moved the lens away from his eye she was standing out in the clearing.
“Look at the city some more,” she said, and her voice now seemed to come from several yards away. “So I can see it again.”
One last time, he thought. Maybe for both of us; it’s nice that we can do it together.
“Sure.” He stepped out from under the oak tree and walked back out into the rain to the middle of the clearing and looked around.
A line of trees to the north was the panhandle of Golden Gate Park, and past that he could see the s
tepped levels of Alta Vista Park; more distantly to the left he could just make out the green band that was the hills of the Presidio, though the two big piers of the Golden Gate Bridge were lost behind miles of rain; he turned to look southwest, where the Twin Peaks and the TV tower on Mount Sutro were vivid above the misty streets; and then far away to the east the white spike of the Transamerica Pyramid stood up from the skyline at the very edge of visibility.
“It’s beautiful,” she said again. “Did you come here to look at it?”
“No,” he said, and he lowered his gaze to the dark mulch under the trees. Cypress, eucalyptus, pine, oak – even from out here he could see that mushrooms were clustered in patches and rings on the carpet of wet black leaves, and he walked back to the trees and then shuffled in a crouch into the aromatic dimness under the boughs.
After a couple of minutes, “Here’s one,” he said, stooping to pick a mushroom. Its tan cap was about two inches across, covered with a patch of white veil. He unsnapped his denim jacket and tucked the mushroom carefully into his shirt pocket.
“What is it?” asked Pat Moore.
“I don’t know,” he said. “My wife was never able to tell, so she never picked it. It’s either Amanita lanei, which is edible, or it’s Amanita phalloides, which is fatally poisonous. You’d need a real expert to know which this is.”
“What are you going to do with it?”
“I think I’m going to sandbag her. You want to hop back into the lens for the hike down the hill?”
He had parked the old Dodge at an alarming slant on Jones Street on the south slope of Russian Hill, and then the two of them had walked steeply uphill past close-set gates and balconies under tall sidewalk trees that grew straight up from the slanted pavements. Headlights of cars descending Jones Street reflected in white glitter on the wet trunks and curbstones, and in the wakes of the cars the tire tracks blurred away slowly in the continuing rain.
“How are we going to get into her house?” he asked quietly.
“It’ll be unlocked,” said the ghost. “She’s expecting you now.”
He shivered. “Is she. Well I hope I’m playing a better hand than she guesses.”
“Down here,” said Pat, pointing at a brick-paved alley that led away to the right between the Victorian-gingerbread porches of two narrow houses.
They were in a little alley now, overhung with rosebushes and rosemary, with white-painted fences on either side. Columns of fog billowed in the breeze, and then he noticed that they were human forms – female torsos twisting transparently in the air, blank-faced children running in slow motion, hunched figures swaying heads that changed shape like water balloons.
“The outfielders,” said the Pat Moore ghost.
Now Moore could hear their voices: Goddamn car – I got yer unconditional right here – excuse me, you got a problem? – He was never there for me – So told him, you want it you come over here and take it – Bless me Father, I have died –
The acid smell of wet stone was lost in the scents of tobacco and jasmine perfume and liquor and old, old sweat.
Moore bit his lip and tried to focus on the solid pavement and the fences. “Where the hell’s her place?” he asked tightly.
“This gate,” she said. “Maybe you’d better – ”
He nodded and stepped past her; the gate latch had no padlock, and he flipped up the catch. The hinges squeaked as he swung the gate inward over flagstones and low-cut grass.
He looked up at the house the path led to. It was a one-story 1920s bungalow, painted white or gray, with green wicker chairs on the narrow porch. Lights were on behind stained-glass panels in the two windows and the porch door.
“It’s unlocked,” said the ghost.
He turned back toward her. “Stand over by the roses there,” he told her, “away from the … the outfielders. I want to take you in in my pocket, okay?”
“Okay.”
She drifted to the roses, and he fished the lens out of his pocket and found her image through the right-angle faces, then twisted the lens and put it back into his pocket.
He walked slowly up the path, treading on the grass rather than on the flagstones, and stepped up to the porch.
“It’s not locked, Patrick,” came a woman’s loud voice from inside.
He turned the glass knob and walked several paces into a high-ceilinged kitchen with a black-and-white-tiled floor; a blonde woman in jeans and a sweatshirt sat at a formica table by the big old refrigerator. From the next room, beyond an arch in the white-painted plaster, a steady whistling hiss provided an irritating background noise, as if a teakettle were boiling.
The woman at the table was much more clearly visible than his guardian angel had been, almost aggressively three-dimensional – her breasts under the sweatshirt were prominent and pointed, her nose and chin stood out perceptibly too far from her high cheekbones, and her lips were so full that they looked distinctly swollen.
A bottle of Wild Turkey bourbon stood beside three Flintstones glasses on the table, and she took it in one hand and twisted out the cork with the other. “Have a drink,” she said, speaking loudly, perhaps in order to be heard over the hiss in the next room.
“I don’t think I will, thanks,” he said. “You’re good with your hands.” His jacket was dripping rainwater on the tiles, but he didn’t take it off.
“I’m the solidest ghost you’ll ever see.”
Abruptly she stood up, knocking her chair against the refrigerator, and then she rushed past him, her Reeboks beating on the floor; and her body seemed to rotate as she went by him, as if she were swerving away from him; though her course to the door was straight. She reached out one lumpy hand and slammed the door.
She faced him again and held out her right hand. “I’m Pat Moore,” she said, “and I want help.”
He flexed his fingers, then cautiously held out his own hand. “I’m Pat Moore too,” he said.
Her palm touched his, and though it was moving very slowly his own hand was slapped away when they touched.
“I want us to become partners,” she said. Her thick lips moved in ostentatious synchronization with her words.
“Okay,” he said.
Her outlines blurred for just an instant; then she said, in the same booming tone, “I want us to become one person. You’ll be immortal, and – ”
“Let’s do it,” he said.
She blinked her black eyes. “You’re – agreeing to it,” she said. “You’re accepting it, now?”
“Yes.” He cleared his throat. “That’s correct.”
He looked away from her and noticed a figure sitting at the table – a transparent old man in an overcoat, hardly more visible than a puff of smoke.
“Is he Maxwell’s Demon?” Moore asked.
The woman smiled, baring huge teeth. “No, that’s … a soliton. A poor little soliton who’s lost its way. I’ll show you Maxwell’s Demon.”
She lunged and clattered into the next room, and Moore followed her, trying simultaneously not to slip on the floor and to keep an eye on her and on the misty old man.
Moore stepped into a parlor, and the hissing noise was louder in here. Carved dark wood tables and chairs and a modern exercise bicycle had been pushed against a curtained bay window in the far wall, and a vast carpet had been rolled back from the dusty hardwood floor and humped against the chair legs. In the high corners of the room and along the fluted top of the window frame, things like translucent cheerleaders’ pompoms grimaced and waved tentacles or locks of hair in the agitated air. Moore warily took a step away from them.
“Look over here,” said the alarming woman.
In the near wall an air-conditioning panel had been taken apart, and a red rubber hose hung from its machinery and was connected into the side of a length of steel pipe that lay on a TV table. Nozzles on either end of the pipe were making the loud whistling sound.
Moore looked more closely at it. It was apparently two sections of pipe, one about eight inch
es long and the other about four, connected together by a blocky fitting where the hose was attached, and a stove stopcock stood half-open near the end of the longer pipe.
“Feel the air,” the woman said.
Moore cupped a hand near the end of the longer pipe, and then yanked it back – the air blasting out of it felt hot enough to light a cigar. More cautiously he waved his fingers over the nozzle at the end of the short pipe; and then he rolled his hand in the air-jet, for it was icy cold.
“It’s not supernatural,” she boomed, “even though the air conditioner’s pumping room-temperature air. A spiral washer in the connector housing sends air spinning up the long pipe; the hot molecules spin out to the sides of the little whirlwind in there, and it’s them that the stopcock lets out. The cold molecules fall into a smaller whirlwind inside the big one, and they move the opposite way and come out at the end of the short pipe. Room-temperature air is a mix of hot and cold molecules, and this device separates them out.”
“Okay,” said Moore. He spoke levelly, but he was wishing he had brought his gun along from the car. It occurred to him that it was a rifled pipe that things usually come spinning out of, but which he had been ready to dive into. He wondered if the gills under the cap of the mushroom in his pocket were curved in a spiral.
“But this is counter-entropy,” she said, smiling again. “A Scottish physicist named Maxwell p-postulay-postul – guessed that a Demon would be needed to sort the hot molecules from the cold ones. If the Demon is present, the effect occurs, and vice versa – if you can make the effect occur you’ve summoned the Demon. Get the effect, and the cause has no choice but to be present.” She thumped her chest, though her peculiar breasts didn’t move at all. “And once the Demon is present, he – he – ”
She paused, so Moore said, “Maintains distinctions that wouldn’t ordinarily stay distinct.” His heart was pounding, but he was pleased with how steady his voice was.
Something like an invisible hand struck him solidly in the chest, and he stepped back.
“You don’t touch it,” she said. Again there was an invisible thump against his chest. “Back to the kitchen.”