by Tim Powers
Caroleen got a quick impression of a dim living room with clear plastic covers over the furniture, and a bright kitchen with copper pans hung everywhere, and then Amber’s mother had knocked on a bedroom door and said, “Amber honey? You’ve got a visitor,” and pushed the door open.
“I’ll let you two talk,” the woman said, and stepped away toward the living room.
Caroleen stepped into the room. Amber was sitting cross-legged on the pink bedspread, looking up from a cardboard sheet with a rock and a pencil and BeeVee’s hairbrush on it. Lacy curtains glowed in the street-side window, and a stack of what appeared to be textbooks stood on an otherwise bare white desk in the opposite corner. The couple of pictures on the walls were pastel blobs. The room smelled like cake.
Caroleen considered what to say. “Can I help?” she asked finally.
Amber, who had been looking wary, brightened and sat up straight. “Shut the door.”
When Caroleen had shut it, Amber went on, “You know she’s coming back?” She waved at the cardboard in front of her. “She’s been talking to me all day.”
“I know, child.”
Caroleen stepped forward and leaned down to peer at it, and saw that the girl had written the letters of the alphabet in an arc across the cardboard.
“It’s one of those things people use to talk to ghosts,” Amber explained with evident pride. “I’m using the crystal to point to the letters. Some people are scared of these things, but that’s one of the good kind of crystals.”
“A Ouija board.”
“That’s it! She made me dream of one over and over again just before the sun came up, because this is her birthday. Well, yours too I guess. At first I thought it was a hopscotch pattern, but she made me look closer till I got it.” She pursed her lips. “I wrote it by reciting the rhyme, and I accidentally did H and I twice, and left out J and K.” She pulled a sheet of lined paper out from under the board. “But it was only a problem once, I think.” “Can I see? I, uh, want this to work out.”
“Yeah, she won’t be gone. She’ll be in me, did she tell you?” She held out the paper. “I drew in lines to break the words up.”
“Yes. She told me.” Caroleen slowly reached out to take the paper from her, and then held it up close enough to read the pencilled lines:
I/NEED/YOUR/HELP/PLEASE
Who R U?
I/AM/BEEVEE
How can I help U?
I/NEED/TO/USE/YOUR//BODY/INVITE/ME/IN/TO/YOUR/
BODY IM/SORRY/FOR/EVERY/THING/PLEASE
R U an angel now? Can U grant wishes?
YES
Can U make me beautiful?
YES/FOR/EVER OK. What do I do?
EXHAUSTED/MORE/LATER
BV? It’s after lunch. Are U rested up yet?
YES
Make me beautiful.
GET/MY/HAIRBRUSH/FROM/MY/SISTER
Is that word “hairbrush?”
YES/THEN/YOU/CAN/INVITE/ME/IN/TO/YOU
How will that do it?
WE/WILL/BE/YOU/TOGETHER
+ what will we do?
GET/SLIM/TRAVEL/THE/WORLD
Will we be rich?
YES/I/HAVE/BANC/ACCOUNTS GET/MY/HAIRBRUSH/FROM/HER/NOW
I got it.
NIGHT/TIME/STAND/OVER/GRAVE/BRUSH/YR/HAIR/INVITE/ME/IN
“That should be B-A-N-K, in that one line,” explained Amber helpfully.
“And I’ll want to borrow your car tonight.”
Not trusting herself to speak, Caroleen nodded and handed the paper back to her, wondering if her own face was red or pale. She felt invisible and repudiated. BeeVee could have approached her own twin for this, but her twin was too old; and if she did manage to occupy the body of this girl – a more intimate sort of twinhood! – she would certainly not go on living with Caroleen. And she had eaten all the Vicodins and Darvocets.
Caroleen picked up the rock. It was some sort of quartz crystal.
“When,” she began in a croak; she cleared her throat and went on more steadily, “when did you get that second-to-last message? About the bank accounts and the hairbrush?” “That one? Uh, just a minute before I knocked on your door.”
Caroleen nodded, wondering bleakly if BeeVee had even known that she was leaving her with carbon copies – multiple, echoing carbon copies – of the messages.
She put the rock back down on the cardboard and picked up the hairbrush. Amber opened her mouth as if to object, then subsided.
There were indeed a number of white hairs tangled in the bristles.
Caroleen tucked the brush into her purse.
“I need that,” said Amber quickly, leaning forward across the board. “She says I need it.”
“Oh of course, I’m sorry.” Caroleen forced what must have been a ghastly smile, and then pulled her own hairbrush instead out of the purse and handed it to the girl. It was identical to BeeVee’s, right down to the white hairs.
Amber took it and glanced at it and then laid it on the pillow, out of Caroleen’s reach.
“I don’t want,” said Caroleen, “to interrupt … you two.” She sighed, emptying her lungs, and dug the car keys out of her purse. “Here,” she said, tossing them onto the bed. “I’ll be next door if you … need any help.”
“Fine, okay.” Amber seemed relieved at the prospect of her leaving.
Caroleen was awakened next morning by the pain of her sore right hand flexing, but she rolled over and slept for ten more minutes before the telephone by her head conclusively jarred her out of the monotonous dream that had occupied the last hour or so.
She sat up, wrinkling her nose at the scorched smell from the fireplace and wishing she had a cup of coffee, and still half-seeing the Ouija board she’d been dreaming about.
She picked up the phone, wincing. “Hello?”
“Caroleen,” said Amber’s voice, “nothing happened at the cemetery last night, and BeeVee isn’t answering my questions. She spelled stuff out, but it’s not for what I’m writing to her. All she’s written so far this morning is – just a sec – she wrote, uh, ‘You win – you’ll do – We’ve always been a team, right –’ Is she talking to you?”
Caroleen glanced toward the fireplace, where last night she had burned – or charred, at least – BeeVee’s toothbrush, razor, dentures, curlers, and several other things, including the hairbrush. And today she would call the headstone company and cancel the order. BeeVee ought not to have an easily locatable grave.
“Me?” Caroleen made a painful fist of her right hand. “Why would she talk to me?”
“You’re her twin sister, she might be –”
“BeeVee is dead, Amber, she died nine weeks ago.”
“But she’s coming back, she’s going to make me beautiful! She said –”
“She can’t do anything, child. We’re better off without her.”
Amber was talking then, protesting, but Caroleen’s thoughts were of the brothers she couldn’t even picture anymore, the nieces she’d never met and who probably had children of their own somewhere, and her mother who was almost certainly dead by now. And there was everybody else, too, and not a lot of time.
Caroleen was resolved to learn to write with her left hand, and, even though it would hurt, she hoped her right hand would go on and on writing uselessly in air.
At last she stood up, still holding the phone, and she interrupted Amber: “Could you bring back my car keys? I’ve got some errands.”
Like a lot of people of my generation, my wife and I spent a year — 2007, in our case — visiting elderly parents in “assisted living homes,” the kind of places where the dining room has tables but no chairs because all the diners will arrive in wheelchairs, and there are banners advancing sentiments like, “Sunsets are as beautiful as sunrises,” which can come to seem bitterly ironic.
In one of these places I was standing against the wall of a corridor so that two extremely elderly ladies could be wheeled past one another – and as they crossed, one of them croaked at the o
ther, “Bitch!”
It occurred to me that a story about conflicts between two very old people would be fun – and of course I had to put a ghost in it.
And I teach one class a week at the Orange County High School of the Arts – the other end of the age spectrum! – and the school building used to be a nineteenth-century church. My classroom is the basement catacombs, and one afternoon when I had given the students an assignment and they had all dispersed throughout the church to write, I found two of the girls huddled over a box that they had converted into a makeshift Ouija board, using a crystal for a planchette. When I said, “What the hell!” one of them quickly explained, “It’s okay, Mr. Powers, it’s one of the good kind of crystals!”
Oh. Well then.
So I had to give Amber their Ouija board.
–T. P.
A JOURNEY OF ONLY TWOPACES
She had ordered steak tartare and Hennessy XO brandy, which would, he reflected, look extravagant when he submitted his expenses to the court. And God knew what parking would cost here.
He took another frugal sip of his beer and said, trying not to sound sour, “I could have mailed you a check.”
They were at one of the glass-topped tables on the outdoor veranda at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, just a couple of feet above the sidewalk beyond the railing, looking out from under the table’s umbrella down the sunlit lanes of Rodeo Drive. The diesel-scented air was hot even in the shade.
“But you were his old friend,” she said. “He always told me that you’re entertaining.” She smiled at him expectantly.
She had been a widow for about ten years, Kohler recalled – and she must have married young. In her sunglasses and broad Panama hat she only seemed to be about twenty now.
Kohler, though, felt far older than his thirty-five years.
“He was easily entertained, Mrs. Halloway,” he said slowly. “I’m pretty … lackluster, really.” A young man on the other side of the railing overheard him and glanced his way in amusement as he strode past on the sidewalk.
“Call me Campion. But a dealer in rare books must have some fascinating stories.”
Her full name was Elizabeth St. Campion Halloway. She signed her paintings “Campion.” Kohler had looked her up online before driving out here to deliver the thousand dollars, and had decided that all her artwork was morbid and clumsy.
“He found you attractive,” she went on, tapping the ash off her cigarette into the scraped remains of her steak tartare. He noticed that the filter was smeared with her red lipstick. “Did he ever tell you?”
“Really. No.” For all Kohler knew, Jack Ranald might have been gay. The two of them had only got together about once a year since college, and then only when Kohler had already begged off on two or three email invitations. Kohler’s wife had always thought Jack was inwardly mocking her – He forgets me when he’s not looking right at me, she’d said – and she wouldn’t have been pleased with these involvements in the dead man’s estate.
Kohler’s wife had looked nothing like Campion.
Campion was staring at him now over the coal of her cigarette – he couldn’t see her eyes behind the dark lenses, but her pale, narrow face swung carefully down and left and right. “I can already see him in you. You have the Letters Testamentary?”
“Uh.” The shift in conversational gear left him momentarily blank. “Oh, yes – would you like to see them? and I’ll want a receipt –”
“Not the one from the court clerk. The one Jack arranged.”
Kohler bent down to get his black vinyl briefcase, and he pushed his chair back from the table to unzip it on his lap. Inside were all the records of terminating the water and electric utilities at the house Jack had owned in Echo Park and paying off Jack’s credit cards, and, in a manila envelope along with the death certificate – which discreetly didn’t mention suicide – the letters he had been given by the probate court.
One of them was the apparently standard sort, signed by the clerk and the deputy clerk, but the other had been prepared by Jack himself.
Kohler tugged that one out and leaned forward to hand it across the table to Campion, and while she bent her head over it he mentally recalled its phrases: … having been appointed and qualified as enactor of the will of John Carpenter Ranald, departed, who expired on or about 28 February 2009, Arthur Lewis Kohler is hereby authorized to function as enactor and to consummate possession … In effect it was a suicide note. It had been signed in advance by Jack, and Kohler had recently been required to sign it too.
“Kabbalah,” she said, without looking up, and for a moment Kohler thought he had somehow put one of his own business invoices into the briefcase by mistake and handed it to her. She looked up and smiled at him. “Are you afraid to get drunk with me? I’m sure one beer won’t release any pent-up emotions, you can safely finish it. What is the most valuable book you have in stock?”
Kohler was frowning, but he went along with her change of subject. Jack must have told her what sort of books he specialized in.
“I guess that would be a manuscript codex of a thing called the Gallei Razayya, written in about 1550. It, uh, differs from the copy at Oxford.” He shrugged. “I’ve got it priced high – it’ll probably just go to my,” he hesitated, then sighed and completed the habitual sentence, “my heirs.”
“Rhymes with prayers, and you don’t have any, do you? Heirs? Anymore? I was so sorry to hear about that.”
Kohler stared at her, wondering if he wanted to make the effort of taking offense at her flippancy.
“No,” he said instead, carefully.
“But it’s about transmigration of souls, isn’t it? Your codex book? Maybe you could … bequeath it to yourself.”
She pushed her own chair back and stood up, brushing out her white linen skirt. “Have you tried to find the apartment building he owned in Silver Lake?”
Kohler began hastily to zip up his briefcase, and he was about to ask her how she knew about the manuscript when he remembered that she was still holding the peculiar Letter Testamentary. “Uh.?” he said, reaching for it.
“I’ll keep it for a while,” she said gaily, tucking it into her purse. “I bet you couldn’t find the place.”
“That’s true.” He lowered his hand and finished zipping the case; the letter signed by the clerks was the legally important one. “I need to get the building assessed for the inventory of the estate. The address on the tax records seems to be wrong.” Finally he asked, “You … know a lot about Kabbalah?”
“I can take you there. The address is wrong, as you say. Do you like cats? Jack told me about your book, your codex.”
Kohler got to his feet and drank off half of the remaining beer in his glass. It wasn’t very cold by this time. Jack had always wanted to hear about Kohler’s business – Kohler must have acquired the manuscript shortly before they had last met for dinner, and told Jack about it.
“Sure,” he said distractedly. She raised one penciled eyebrow, and he added, “I like cats fine.”
“I’ll drive,” she said. “I have no head for directions, I couldn’t guide you.” She started toward the steps down to the Wilshire Boulevard sidewalk, then turned back and frowned at his briefcase. “You’ve followed all the directions he left in his will?”
Kohler guessed what she was thinking of. “The urn is in the trunk of my car,” he said. “You can drive. Your car is smaller, better for the tight turns.”
Kohler followed her down out of the hotel’s shadow onto the glaring Wilshire sidewalk, wondering how she knew what sort of car he drove, and when he had agreed to go right now to look at the apartment building.
She directed him east to the Hollywood freeway and then up into the hills above the Silver Lake Reservoir. The roads were narrow and twisting and overhung with carob and jacaranda trees.
Eventually, after Kohler had lost all sense of direction, Campion said, “Turn left at that street there.”
“That? That’s a driveway,” Kohler ob
jected, braking to a halt.
“It’s the street,” she said. “Well, lane. Alley. Anyway, it’s where the apartment building is. Where are you living these days?”
In an apartment building, Kohler thought, probably not as nice as the one we’re trying to find here. The old house was just too unbearably familiar. “Culver City.”
“Did you like him? Jack?”
Kohler turned the wheel sharply and then steered by inches up onto the narrow strip of pavement, which curled away out of sight to the right behind a hedge of white-blooming oleander only a few yards ahead. Dry palm-fronds scattered across the cracked asphalt crunched under the tires. The needle of the temperature gauge was still comfortably on the left side of the dial, but he kept an eye on it.
“I liked him well enough,” he said, squinting through the alternating sun-glare and palm-trunk shadows on the windshield. He exhaled.
“Actually I didn’t, no. I liked him in college, but after his father died, he – he just wasn’t the same guy anymore.”
“It was a shock,” she said, nodding. “A trauma. He had heartworms.”
Kohler just shook his head. “And Jack was sick, he said. What was wrong with him?”
She shrugged. “What does it matter? Something he didn’t want to wait for. But –” And then she sang, “We’re young and healthy, so let’s be bold.” She giggled. “Do you remember that song?”
“No.”
“No, it would have been before your time.”
The steep little road did seem to be something more than a driveway – Kohler kept the Saturn to about five miles an hour, and they slowly rumbled past several old Spanish-style houses with white stucco walls and red roof-tiles and tiny garages with green-painted doors, the whole landscape as apparently empty of people as a street in a de Chirico painting. Campion had lit another cigarette, and Kohler cranked down the driver’s-side window, and even though it was hot he was grateful for the sage and honeysuckle breeze.
“It’s on the right,” she said, tapping the windshield with a fingernail. “The arch there leads into the parking court.”