by Tim Powers
“Until tonight,” Roger agreed.
His father’s smile was sickly. “Look,” the old man said, “we’ve got lots to discuss, I’ll admit – lots to, uh, beg forgiveness for, even – but can we get out of here right now? Without attracting the attention of … our hostess?”
Roger looked around. Evelyn was chatting gaily with the group on the other side of the room, and every time she glanced up the chandeliers brightened and the trays of hors d’oeuvres came into clearer focus, but the stewards were getting leaner and taller, and their features were fading like images cast by a projector with a dimming bulb, and peripherally Roger saw one of them out in the lobby leap right up to the ceiling and cling there like a big fly.
“Yeah,” said Roger, suddenly frightened and taking Cyclops’ warning seriously. He let his drink evaporate, glass and all. “If anybody asks, say we’re just going out for some fresh air – and go on about what a great time you’re having.” He took Debbie’s arm. “Come on,” he said.
“No, I’m staying. You know what they put in this drink, after I told them not to?”
“We’re only going for a stroll, just to take a look at the front of the building – but sure, stay if you want.”
“No, I’m coming.” She put her drink down, and Roger noticed that the glass broke up silently into an unfocussed blur when she let go of it.
The four of them made their way to the lobby unhindered – Evelyn even saw them go, but looked more exasperated than angry – and Roger led them around the faceless, ceiling-crouching thing and across the carpeted floor, through the front doors, and down the marble steps to the sidewalk.
“South on Main, come on,” he said, trying not to panic in spite of how synchronized the traffic signals were, “away from the circle.”
As they trudged along, Roger felt a sudden slickness against his feet, and he realized that his socks had disappeared. He didn’t have to glance to the side to know that Debbie was back in the old sack dress she’d pulled on over her head right after leaping out of bed. Behind him the ticktack of his mother’s heels and the knock of his father’s shoes became a flapping – bedroom slippers, it sounded like. Good, Roger thought – I guess we weren’t too late.
He looked up, and the whole sky was turning slowly, like a vast, glitter-strewn wheel, and he couldn’t decide whether to take that as a good sign or a bad one. Funny how the night moves, he thought nervously. I don’t think this is what Bob Seger meant.
And then his feet were comfortable again, and even though they’d been walking in a straight line he saw the traffic circle ahead, and, from around the corner to the right, the glow of the Splendide’s main entrance.
The others noticed it too, and slowed. “We were walking south on Main,” Debbie said, “… away from the traffic circle.”
“And now, without having changed course,” said Roger wearily, “we’re headed east on Bailey, toward it. We waited too long.”
Jack Singer was smiling broadly. “Screw this,” he said, and his voice was cheerful, if a bit shrill. “I’ll see you all later.” He turned and fled back the way they’d come, his newly restored suit and shoes disappearing within a few yards, leaving him an overweight man in pajamas and slippers, puffing and flapping like a clown as he ran.
Roger’s mother took a hesitant step after him, but Roger took her arm. “Don’t bother, Mom – I’m pretty sure the quickest way to catch up with him is to just keep going straight ahead.”
Debbie was patting the fabric of her sequined gown. “I hope I get to keep this,” she said.
The traffic lights were in perfect step now. Roger considered leading the two women around the circle and straight out Bailey, eastward, but he was fatalistically sure that Bailey Boulevard, as they proceeded along it, would within half a block or so become Main Street, and they’d be facing the circle again. Neither his mother nor Debbie objected when he turned right at Main, toward the Splendide.
The entrance was more brightly illuminated than ever, but it was a harsh glare like that cast by arc lights, and the cars pulling up and driving away moved in sudden hops, like spiders, or like cars in a film from which a lot of the frames have been cut. The music was a weary, prolonged moaning of brass and strings. Jack Singer, once again in his suit, slouched up from the far side of the hotel and joined them on the steps.
Roger thought of making some cutting remark – something like, “Not so easy to ditch me this time, huh, Pop?” – but both his parents looked so unhappy, and he himself was so frightened, that he didn’t have the heart for it.
“Oh, God,” wailed his mother, “will we ever get back home?”
Roger was facing the hotel, but he turned around when he heard splashing behind him. It was the fountain – the traffic circle was now right in front of the hotel, and the pavement below the steps wasn’t the Main Street sidewalk any longer, was now just a concrete walkway between the grass of the circle and the steps of the hotel.
Dark buildings, as nondescript as painted stage props, crowded up around the other sides of the circle, and Roger could see only one traffic light. It was flashing slower, and its yellow color had a faint orange tint.
“Do come in,” called Evelyn from the open lobby doors. “It’s just time to sit down for dinner.” Her face was paler, and she seemed to be trembling.
Roger glanced at his mother. “Maybe,” he said. Then he turned toward the circle and concentrated; it was harder than making a snifter of Scotch appear, but in a moment he had projected, blotting out the dim traffic circle, a downtown street he remembered seeing on the way to the Crystal Lake amusement park in New Jersey. It was one of the things Evelyn had never permitted him to dream about.
He was surprised at how clearly he was able to project it – until he saw that the sky behind the shabby New Jersey office buildings was overcast and gray instead of the brilliant blue he remembered, and he realized that someone else, perhaps unintentionally, perhaps even against their will, was helping to fill out the picture, using their own recollections of it.
Behind him Evelyn gasped – and the one visible traffic signal began to flash a little faster, and to lose some of the orange tint.
Okay, Roger thought tensely, the cord isn’t quite cut yet. What else was there? Oh yeah …
He made the New Jersey street disappear and instantly replaced it with a prairie, across which a horse and rider galloped. At first the rider was a cavalry soldier, as in the movie scene Roger remembered, but again someone else’s projection changed the scene – the rider was smaller now, and not dressed in blue … it was hard to see clearly, and again Roger got the impression that this altering of what he was projecting was unintentional … and when the rider fell off the horse it was hard to tell which foot had caught in the stirrup …
The pavement below him had widened, and now he could see another traffic light. The two were still in step, but were at least flashing in their normal pace and color.
He replaced the vision of the galloping horse and the suffering figure behind it with a rendition of the hospital room in which he’d awakened after the removal of his tonsils … and this time the picture was altered instantly and totally, though the lingering-in-the-back-of-his-throat smell of ether grew stronger. He saw a window-less room with newspapers spread neatly all over the floor, and there was a sort of table, with …
The night shuddered, and suddenly he could see down Main Street – and, way down south, he saw one yellow light blinking out of synch. “This way out,” he said, stepping to the sidewalk and walking south. “Walk through the visions – I’m building us a bridge.”
Again the downtown New Jersey street appeared, and without his volition a young couple – hardly more than teenagers – entered the picture. They both looked determined and scared as they walked along the sidewalk looking at the address numbers on the buildings.
Roger kept leading his group southward, and when the New Jersey picture faded he saw that the out-of-step signal was closer. Debbie was walking
carefully right beside him. Thank God, he thought, that she hasn’t chosen this occasion to be difficult – but where are my parents?
He couldn’t turn to look behind him, for the next projection was appearing, cleaving a path out of Evelyn’s imploding fake world. Obviously Evelyn’s aversion to these memories was strong, for her own projection simply recoiled from these the way a live oyster contracts away from lemon juice squeezed onto it.
The cowboy movie memory was now altered out of recognition, though it was the most effective yet at re-randomizing the traffic lights; now it was a girl instead of a cavalry soldier, and somehow she still had both feet in the stirrups, and though there was blood she didn’t seem to be being dragged over any prairie … in fact she was lying on a table in a windowless room with newspapers all over the floor, and the ether reek was everywhere like the smell of rotten pears, and her young boyfriend was pacing the sidewalk out in front of the shabby office and at last the overcast sky had begun dropping rain so that he needn’t struggle to hold back his tears any longer …
“Woulda been a girl, I think,” came the multiply remembered voice of a man …
Shock and sudden comprehension slowed Roger’s steps, and involuntarily he turned and looked back at Evelyn as bitterness and loss closed his throat and brought tears to his eyes. The man knew his business, he thought. “Goodbye, Evelyn,” he whispered.
Goodbye, Roger, spoke a voice – a receding voice – in his head.
The projected scene ahead was even clearer now, but beyond it lay the real pre-dawn Santa Margarita streets. “Come on,” said Roger, stepping forward again. “We’re almost out of it.”
Debbie was right beside him, but he didn’t hear his parents, so he paused and turned.
They were stopped several yards back, staring at the pavement.
“Come on,” Roger said harshly. “It’s the way out.”
“We can’t go through it,” his father said.
“Again,” added his mother faintly.
“We weren’t married yet, then, in – ‘48 …” his father began; but Roger had taken Debbie’s hand and resumed their forward progress.
They moved slowly through the windowless room, every full stride covering a few inches of newspaper-strewn floor, and then there was the fluttering thump of something landing in a paper-lined wastebasket and they were out in the streets and the air was cold and Roger didn’t have socks on and the traffic signals, ready for all the early-morning commuters, were switching through their long-green, short-yellow, long-red cycles, and the one-eyed old hobo standing in the street nodded curtly at them and then motioned them to step aside, for an ancient woman was puffing along the sidewalk behind them, pushing a shopping cart full of green scraps of cloth, and behind her trotted a lean little old fellow whom Roger remembered having seen many times walking the streets of Santa Margarita, lingering by empty lots when the workmen had gone home and the concrete outlines of long-gone houses could still be seen among the mud and litter and tractor tracks. There was no one else on the street: The sky was already pale blue, though the sun wasn’t up yet.
Debbie glanced down at herself and pursed her lips angrily to see that her fine gown had disappeared again. “Are you through with your games?” she snapped. “Can we go home now?”
“You go ahead,” Roger told her. “I want to walk some.”
“No, come back with me.”
He shook his head and walked away, slapping his pants pockets for change and trying to remember where he’d seen the all-night Mexican diner with the sign about the menudo breakfast.
“When you do come back,” Debbie called furiously, “I won’t be there! And don’t bother going to my parents’ house, ‘cause I won’t be there either!”
Good for you, he thought.
And as the first rays of the sun touched the tall palms around the traffic circle a scrap of something, unnoticed by anyone, sank to the bottom of the fountain pool, at peace at last.
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Also by Tim Powers
Last Call Series
Last Call
Expiration Date
Earthquake Weather
Other Novels
Epitaph In Rust
The Skies Discrowned
The Drawing of the Dark
The Anubis Gates
Dinner At Deviant’s Palace
On Stranger Tides*
The Stress of Her Regard*
Declare*
Three Days to Never*
Collections
Strange Itineraries
* not available as SF Gateway eBooks
Tim Powers (1952 - )
Tim Powers was born in Buffalo, New York, and educated at California State University, gaining a degree in English. It was at University that he met K.W. Jeter and James Blaylock, who became friends and occasional collaborators, and the three of them are regarded as the founding fathers of the steampunk literary movement. He was also a friend of noted SF writer Philip K. Dick. Tim Powers is the author of many highly regarded novels and among his many honours are two Philip K. Dick Awards (for the Anubis Gates and Dinner at Deviant’s Palace) and two World Fantasy Awards (for Last Call and Declare). The fourth Pirates of the Caribbean film is based on his 1988 novel On Stranger Tides. Tim Powers lives in California with his wife Serena.
Copyright
A Gollancz eBook
Copyright © Tim Powers 2004
All rights reserved.
The right of Tim Powers to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This eBook first published in Great Britain in 2011 by
Gollancz
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane
London, WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 0 575 11781 5
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
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