Three Days to Never

by Tim Powers

  Then a new white Honda came up fast from a dark street on the right and rocked into a squealing right turn directly in front of Derek; he wrenched the wheel to the left, but suddenly the car that had been a hundred yards ahead was braking hard, and looming up fast in front of him in the left lane; and the car speeding up from behind swung wide to the left, as if to pass Derek, but instead of shooting on past in the empty oncoming lanes, its hood dipped as it abruptly slowed.

  Derek stamped on the brake and the tires screeched as he braced himself against the wheel. The old Rambler rocked to a halt, shaking on its suspension. His vodka bottle tumbled out from under the seat and rapped his left heel.

  His face was cold with sudden sweat. They’ve got me bracketed, he thought tensely—I could shift to reverse, but I know I wouldn’t get away in this old wreck. I can talk to them, I can make a deal with them—they won’t be rough, they’ve got no reason to be rough with an old man—

  The Rambler was still shaking, in fact it was shaking so rapidly that the motion was a harsh vibration now, accompanied by a loud rattling hiss like a rain of fine gravel on the roof and the hood and even in the ashtray, though the windshield showed empty black night; only because it moved so fast did he notice the needle on the temperature gauge swing to the right.

  And somehow he was getting an electric shock from the plastic steering wheel.

  Derek’s heart was racing, and he kept his foot pressed on the brake as he would cling to a tree trunk in a hurricane.

  Then the shaking and the noise and the electric current were gone, and he almost fell forward against the wheel as if they’d been a pressure he’d been leaning against.

  The Rambler was stopped, though the engine was still running. He made himself uncramp his hands from the wheel and focus his eyes out through the windshield, and he saw that his car was positioned diagonally across the center divider lines in the middle of the highway.

  No other cars were visible at all, up or down the wide light-pooled lanes; no lighted signs, just an anonymous band of blue neon far away in the dark. The night was perfectly silent except for the grumble of the Rambler’s idling engine. Shakily he reached for the key to turn it off, then noticed that the temperature-gauge needle was back down in its usual ten o’clock position.

  Did I pass out? he wondered, his forehead still chilly with sweat. And did the guys in those other cars just leave?

  Derek started the engine and cautiously lifted his foot from the brake and stepped on the gas pedal, and the car jumped forward. For a moment he thought the stress must have knocked a valve or lifter back into its proper position, and that the car was running uncharacteristically well; then he realized that it was his right leg that was performing smoothly.

  His heart was still hammering in his chest, and he tried to take deep breaths. When he had straightened the car in the left lane and got it moving steadily at thirty miles per hour, he reached down and pressed his fist against his right thigh.

  It didn’t hurt at all.

  He steered the Rambler across the right lane to the curb in front of a lightless cinder-block thrift store, clanked the shift lever into park, and cautiously climbed out of the car, leaving the engine running.

  In the chilly night air he took two steps out into the street, then two steps back. Then he stood on his right foot and hopped around in a circle.

  His teeth were cold, for his mouth was open; he realized that he was grinning like a fool.

  He did three deep-knee bends, then crouched and crossed his arms and tried to kick like a dancing Russian. He tumbled over onto his back on the cold asphalt, but he was laughing and bicycling both legs in the air.

  At last he rolled lithely to his feet and slid back into the driver’s seat.

  “I’m as giddy as a drunken man,” he panted, quoting Ebeneezer Scrooge.

  He took a deep breath and let it out, staring at the dark low buildings and roadside pepper trees that dwindled with perspective in the big volume of night air in front of him.

  But in fact he wasn’t drunk. This was sobriety—not the shaky, anxious sobriety of a few hours or days, but the easy clarity of months without the stuff.

  She must have died after all, he thought. I can go to the hospital now. And—and I no longer have any reason to hate hospitals! And there are lots and lots of things I’ve got to tell Frank Marrity—he’s going to be a very wealthy, healthy, contented man.

  North of the San Bernardino city limits, Waterman Avenue becomes Rim of the World Highway as it curls steeply up into the mountains around Lake Arrowhead. The turns are sharp and the drops below the guardrails are often precipitous; the steep mountain shoulders are furred with towering pine trees, but at 3:00 a.m. the only view was of the lights of San Bernardino, far below to the south, dimmed and reddened now by veils of smoke. Forest fires on the other side of the mountain lit the fumey sky like a Hieronymus Bosch painting of Hell. Aurora Infernalis, thought Denis Rascasse.

  The bus was pulled off the highway at Panorama Point, a wide sand-paved rest area, and Rascasse and Golze stood in the smoky darkness outside the bus, a yard back from the knee-high rail. The abyss below the stout railing was called Devil’s Canyon, East Fork.

  Golze glanced back toward the bus. “How’s our boy, Fred?” he called.

  From one of the opened windows in the dark bus came the driver’s voice: “Breathing, through his nose.”

  “No obstruction to closing the lid, if somebody pulls in here?”

  “Nothing’s in the way,” said Fred. “He’s entirely in the bin, and I can close it quietly.”

  They had picked the young man up at Foothill and Euclid an hour ago. He was a student at one of the Claremont colleges, and he had stepped up into the bus with no hesitation when Fred had asked him to point out the 210 freeway on a Thomas Brothers map-book page. Now he was bound and gagged with duct tape.

  Golze nodded and peered down at the glowing crisscrossing dotted lines that were San Bernardino’s streets. “Where’s your focus?” he asked Rascasse.

  Rascasse pointed slightly west of south, toward the largely unlighted patch that was the California State University at San Bernardino campus. “Right behind the library.”

  Half an hour ago he had carefully laid on the grass down there a square of oiled glass with his handprints and a few of his white hairs pressed onto the slick surface of it.

  Soon Rascasse would kneel down by the railing here, step out of his body, and let his astral projection partly assume the sensorium of the Rascasse focus down there behind the college library. At the same time he would still be aware of kneeling up here beside the bus—like a beam of light split by a slanted half-silvered mirror.

  Rascasse would then be occupying two finitely different time shells—the minutely slower time three thousand feet below and this infinitesimally accelerated time halfway up the mountain. He would, briefly, be disattached from the confines of the four-dimensional continuum.

  Golze would then cut the throat of the young man in the bus, and the fresh-spilled blood—the end-point of one of the lifelines on the freeway, the release of the young man’s accumulated mass energy—would in that instant have drawn the hungry attention of one of the Aeons who existed in the five-dimensional continuum; and that creature would be aware of Rascasse, who for the distance of a second or two would be protruding out of the “flat” four-dimensional fabric like a thread pinched up out of a sheet of cloth.

  And Rascasse would leap and cling to the bodiless spirit, mind to incomprehensibly alien mind, and look out at the unphysical landscape that he would then perceive surrounding him; and since space and volume didn’t exist there, it would be just as accurate to call it the landscape he would be surrounding. Lifescape, fatescape.

  He would be out of his body for no more than a second by his watch, but time didn’t pass on the freeway—an hour out of his body, a day, a year, wouldn’t give him a better comprehension of that non-space.

  For that timeless moment Rascasse’s p
erspective would be freed of things in the way—viewed from this bigger space, nothing in the normal four-dimensional continuum could be in front of anything else, or under it, or hidden inside it; and seeing a man or a car at one moment would not make it impossible for him to see them simultaneously at other moments too. Golze had said once, when he had stepped back down into sequential time, that it was nearly the perspective of God. And he had seemed both wistful and angry to have to say nearly.

  The cold wind from over the top of the mountain behind Rascasse smelled of pine sap and wood smoke, and he was shivering when the radio on his belt buzzed softly. He unsnapped it and said, “Prime here.”

  “Quarte here,” said a voice from the radio, frail and tinny under the vast night sky. “You said it might get surreal, and not to hesitate to tell you about crazy things happening. Uh, man and superman.”

  Rascasse switched the frequency-selector dial on the radio. “Right,” he said into the microphone. “So what happened?”

  “I was in the lead car,” came the voice from the radio, “and after the number three car swerved in from the south, number two came up from behind and blocked him on the north. Then in my rearview I saw the Ra—the—”

  “The subject car, the quarry, go ahead.”

  “Right. It suddenly accelerated toward me faster than…any subject car like that should be able to. And he didn’t hit me, he should have, but he didn’t, but I heard a huge bang, like an M-80. Uh, Caesar and Cleopatra.”

  Rascasse switched the frequency again, impatiently. “Go on,” he said.

  “Well, then he was gone. I mean, the car was just gone, not visible anywhere up or down the highway, and not in any of the lots to the sides. The scanner says the subject car is about three miles northeast of us right now. But the weird thing is, the guys in the number two and three cars got out, and it turns out each of them saw the, the subject car suddenly accelerate toward him! Like the subject car split into three cars, each shooting straight at one of us!”

  “Arms and the man,” said Rascasse quietly, almost absently.

  On the new frequency, Rascasse went on, “Find him again, but this time wait until he’s out of the car, and then ghosts.”

  Rascasse switched frequencies again, but after several seconds realized that the field man had not caught the cue. “Dammit,” he whispered, and switched back to the previous frequency.

  “—try that,” said the field man, and then his signal was gone.

  “Shit.” Rascasse switched the dial back to its previous setting, and the man was saying, “Are you here? Was that a cue? There’s no ghosts on the list.”

  “Never mind,” snapped Rascasse, “we’re here now. Hit him with a trank dart when he doesn’t know you’re on to him.”

  “Okay. What was it about ghosts?”

  “It’s—a Shaw play that wasn’t on your list. Never mind. Just bring him to me. That’s all.”

  ”’Kay. Later.” And the signal was gone again. Rascasse hooked the radio back onto his belt and took a deep breath of the cold, smoke-spicy air.

  “Ghosts is by Ibsen,” said Golze.

  “I know, I know. Shut up.”

  “I guess that old guy in the Rambler isn’t just some relative in town for the funeral.”

  “Shut up, I said.” Rascasse exhaled, almost whistling. “What happened there? When our fellows tried to grab him, and his car disappeared.”

  “It wasn’t bilocation,” said Golze. “Trilocation, that is—because the car went in three directions too, not just the man…assuming the man was in the car; he might have ’ported away an instant before. I would have, if I was him, if I’d had that option. But that wouldn’t explain three apparent cars.”

  “Does it sound as if he’s used the Einstein-Maric artifact?”

  “That wouldn’t explain the multiple cars either, or at least I can’t see how it would. Maybe Charlotte shouldn’t kill Marrity. He could know some things.”

  “A decision made is a debt unpaid,” said Rascasse. “And the Mossad will have briefed him, with compulsions, on what to tell other agencies. The daughter will be more valuable to us isolated. And,” he added, waving at the bus behind them, “it wants this offering from each of us—our dues—and Charlotte has been in arrears.”

  “Our souls.”

  Rascasse shrugged. “Anything that would interfere with our chosen polarity.”

  “Does it really count as binding payment if you’re drunk when you pay it?” Golze asked. “The rest of us don’t drink alcohol. Charlotte does.”

  “For some people, and Charlotte’s one of them, drink is a valuable disassembly factor. But once it’s disassembled her, she’ll have to leave it behind too.”

  “That’ll be a day. You were kind of sweet on her once, weren’t you?”

  “Irrelevantly.”

  Golze pulled a lock-back knife from his pocket and opened the blade. “She thinks she’ll be allowed to go back, remake her life.”

  “Do you care what she imagines?”

  Golze laughed fondly. “Care? No. Note.” He waved the knife toward the bus. “My dues are paid up. Fred!” he added, speaking louder.

  “Yo,” came Fred’s voice through the open bus window.

  “Ask your boy if he’s a Christian.”

  “He nods,” called Fred after a moment.

  “Aw, too bad. Tell him he’s gift-wrapped for the Devil.”

  “Cruelty is another good disassembly factor,” remarked Rascasse. “But it will eventually have to be given up too.”

  “Don’t anthropomorphize me,” said Golze with a laugh. “Have to be given up? ‘Man can’t will what he wills.’ I’m a roulette ball.”

  Rascasse shook his head. “Schopenhauer. Philosophy will be left behind too. Even rational thought, eventually.”

  “Can’t wait.”

  “You’ll go far. It’s time for you to get aboard the bus.”

  Golze laughed softly and trudged away across the packed sand and disappeared around the lightless front of the bus. A few moments later the bus shifted perceptibly as he stepped aboard on the far side.

  We need to succeed at this soon, Rascasse thought as he began taking deep breaths in anticipation of stepping outside his body. I need access to the bottom half of the chalice.

  He shuffled to the guardrail and knelt in front of it. It was a horizontal wooden pole supported at every ten feet by a steel stanchion, and he leaned his chest against it, draping his arms over the far side.

  He had been twelve, the first time he had left his body; he had simply got out of bed one morning and looked back and seen his body still lying in the bed. Terror had driven him back into it, and for the first time he had experienced reentering his body: like a tight bag being pulled over his head and sliding down his arms and legs and eventually closing over his toes. A few years later he had experienced it again, while breathing through the ether-sprinkled mask during a dental operation. And by the time he was twenty, he had been able to step out of his body at will, with only the faintest reflexive twitch of vertigo.

  He felt a flash of cold now, and then he was standing beside his kneeling body, carefully noting that it was balanced and leaning firmly against the guardrail. He flexed the fingers of his right hand, and saw the kneeling body’s fingers spread wide.

  He leaped forward into empty space, and then he could not only still feel the guardrail against his chest, but also smell the grass of the college lawn and feel oily glass under his fingers—and then he was rocked by the explosion of energy sweeping through higher dimensions as the young man on the bus gave up the ghost, and Rascasse was on the freeway.

  Here time was distance, and he was unable to move anything but his attention.

  By a perception that did not involve light he could see the bus, and Golze and Fred and the dead boy inside it—and he could see them from all sides at once. Even their organs and arteries, and the valves and crankshaft of the bus, and the secret sap and inner bark of the surrounding trees, were
as clearly visible as the mountain. And he could see all sides of the mountain, the fires on the northern slopes and the compacted gravel under the asphalt of the roads.

  He moved away from this close perspective, and saw the men now as zigzagging lines, their recent actions and their future actions laid out like rows of tipped dominoes, blurring out of focus at the far ends; the moon was a long white blade in the sky. Golze was beside Rascasse’s body, telling him “Ibsen,” and Golze was also climbing into the bus, and cutting the young man’s throat, and leaving the bus and talking to Rascasse again, and the bus itself was driving out of the Panorama Point rest area, making a loop with the trail of earlier versions of itself driving in.

  This was the perspective of the crows in the Grimm brothers’s fairy tale “Faithful John”—flying high above the surface-bound characters and able to see things previously encountered and things still to be met.

  The young man in the bus was a line of blended figures like Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, and the line ended at the point where the young man’s astral body made a turbulence that spread into the sky.

  It was a motionless shock wave, and Rascasse’s attention followed it outward, away from the precise time and place of the young man’s death.

  And Rascasse wasn’t alone. A living thing that seemed to consist of buzzing or corrugations was with him, its thoughts as evident to him as the inner workings of the bus but far more alien to him than the courses of the stars or the repetitive patterns of cracks in the stone of the mountains.

  Rascasse knew at least that it was summoned by the human sacrifice.

  The living thing occupied a region that extended far in a dozen directions from the early morning hours of August 18, 1987, and Rascasse’s disembodied self overlapped the thing’s self.

  Lines like arcing sparks or woven threads stretched across a vast vacuum, and he could discern the thread that was his own time line, with several exploded segments along its extent; he was occupying the cloud around one of the ruptured sections now, just as he was occupying the others in his previous and future excursions onto the freeway.