Alternate Routes

by Tim Powers

  “Three-hundred and forty-three,” repeated Castine, more strongly.

  “No,” came a deep rumble. “I can take you.” The figure seemed to swell, or move closer. For a moment its face was Castine’s, then Vickery’s own, and then the mouth opened impossibly wide, splitting the face back to the ears—and its long tongue sprang out and struck Vickery in the face.

  It was icy cold, and it clung; Vickery gripped the squirming cylinder, and his hands froze onto it. His panicky breath was whistling rapidly in and out through his teeth.

  “And minus itself,” yelled, Castine, “it’s nothing! Don’t take my word for it—think, do the math yourself. Nothing.”

  They were out in the open, but the word Nothing seemed to call up a ringing echo from the landscape.

  The ghost wailed and then imploded with a jarring whump, and Vickery fell forward onto his hands and knees on the grass.

  His left eye was watering above his stinging cheek, but he blinked around anxiously; the ghost was nowhere to be seen now.

  Castine was crouching beside him. “Let’s get out of here!”

  It was easier not to stand up, so Vickery crawled to the steps of the tomb and groped with numb hands in the grass beside the bottom step.

  “No,” he said breathlessly, then paused to spit; “no good. There’s more like him—outside, and I think we’re—conspicuous—you, anyway. These,” he added, waving around at the headstones still dimly visible in the middle distance, “are here because they—just want to sit on their graves.” He sat back and shook his head. “There’s a key here,” he said, “wired to a rock. Find it, I—can’t feel anything.”

  “Where am I?” whispered Castine, but she reached past him and patted the grass. “Here’s wire—yes, I’ve got it.”

  Vickery waved over his head at the tomb’s two brass doors. “So unlock it.”

  She stood up and fitted the key into the lock. Vickery heard the bolt snap back, and then Castine had tugged the left-side door open on silent hinges. A puff of Pine Sol-scented air dispersed on the breeze.

  Vickery crawled up the steps and into the marble-floored darkness. “Come in,” he said over his shoulder, “and shut the door, all that racket might have alerted security.” He looked back and saw Castine hesitating. “The door opens from the inside,” he assured her.

  She hurried in and closed the door, and the lock clicked. The darkness was absolute. Vickery had sat up against a vertical marble surface, and he was flexing his hands. Enough feeling had returned to them that he was able to reach into his jacket pocket and fumble out a Bic lighter.

  “I’ve got a lighter,” he said quietly; “give me your hand and I’ll pass it to you.”

  Her hand bumped his tingling cheek and then found his hand, and a moment later he heard the thwip of the flint-wheel, and by the bright brushstroke of flame he could see her sitting a yard away on a patterned marble floor. He was leaning on one of two four-foot tall marble blocks, evidently biers awaiting caskets. High up in the far wall was a window crisscrossed with raised lines, but the picture in the stained glass was indecipherable.

  “I never believed they could be—physical,” said Vickery with a residual shiver. “I knew you could see them sometimes, but I thought it was like holograms.”

  Castine let the flame go out. “You’re not supposed to talk to them in complete sentences,” she said in the total darkness. In a lower voice she went on, “That thing might have taken you if I hadn’t split its attention—did you see how its face was mine for a second, then yours? At the TUA, even just with radio speakers, we break our sentences up and have three guys take turns to say each word separately, in sequence.”

  Vickery nodded, though of course she couldn’t see it. “There’s sleeping bags behind your bier,” he said, “unless the last fugitive to use this place swiped them.”

  He heard her scuffle on the floor, and then she said, “Yes—yes, two sleeping bags. When do we get new clothes? And I’d pay a hundred dollars to be able to take a shower.” Her words had been punctuated by the hitching sound of the zipper on her old leather jacket yielding to tugging.

  Vickery wished he’d brought one of the half-pints of Jack Daniel’s from his storage unit. He stretched his fingers and then closed his hands in fists; feeling was coming back, and he rubbed his cheek where the ghost’s ectoplasmic tongue had struck him.

  He managed to unlace his shoes and take them off, and he set them carefully at the end of the pedestal; and he got out of his own leather jacket with little difficulty. “We can hit a thrift store for clothes tomorrow morning, and there’s rest-rooms at the car lot.”

  He hiked himself into the sleeping bag and heard Castine doing the same, and he balled up his jacket for a pillow. For a while neither of them spoke, and the only sounds were slowing breath and shiftings to more relaxed positions.

  “I guess we’ll be getting up early,” came her quiet voice from the darkness. “It’s hardly five hours since I . . . took Mike Abbott’s life . . . and wrecked my own.”

  “I do know exactly how that is,” said Vickery, not without sympathy.

  For several seconds neither of them spoke.

  Then he heard paper rustling. “We’ve got what feels like some bags of peanuts, and four probable Hershey bars,” she said, “and little boxes that smell like raisins. You want some?”

  “A bag of peanuts, please,” he said. He stretched out his hand and moved it around until it bumped Castine’s; she rolled her hand over and spread her fingers, pressing a cellophane packet into his palm.

  He tore it open with his teeth and picked one object out and popped it into his mouth. “Roasted peanuts,” he confirmed, chewing as he shook some more out into his hand. “Thanks.”

  “De nada.” Now he smelled raisins, and guessed that she was eating those.

  Again there were several seconds of silence. “There,” she said finally, “I’ve taken off my engagement ring. Do I dare leave it here?”

  “I imagine it’s hidden enough in your pocket.” He touched his wedding ring. You want to change the aspects of yourselves that ghosts can recognize, so get rid of your rings, Hipple had said. Will I still dream of Amanda, Vickery thought, if her ghost can’t find me?

  Not sure if he was saddened or guiltily relieved at the idea, he slowly twisted it off of his finger and tucked it into his pants pocket. It was the first time he’d had the ring off in eleven years.

  “I keep wondering how on earth I ended up here,” said Castine. “I double-majored in college, criminal law and physics, and the TUA recruited me even before I graduated. Terracotta in person! I was hoping it would be something like forensics, lab work—I’ve always hated guns.”

  Vickery contented himself with just saying, “Oh?”

  “Yes, ever since I was a little girl. They . . . horrify me. One time my mom told me that my dad was off with his shotgun to shoot skeet, and I started crying because I thought skeets were some little animal, like maybe hamsters. My mom thought I was worried that my dad might get hurt, so she reassured me about how safe it was—she explained that he was on a boat, and there was a catapult that flung the skeets out over the water, so my dad could blast them in mid-air.” She laughed softly. “That didn’t help.”

  Vickery smiled in the darkness. “Cute story.”

  “Oh, I was cute once.” After a moment she added, “Several times, probably.” He heard her yawn. “And now I do a lot worse than shoot hamsters.”

  “You saved my life. And Santiago’s.”

  She was quiet for so long then that he thought she’d fallen asleep; but eventually she said, “When we talked on the sidewalk, four years ago on Wilshire Boulevard, after the motorcade stopped to let Obama get his chicken and waffles . . . before the bad stuff happened . . . you told me about going to Latin Mass. Do you go to Confession too?”

  Vickery sighed silently. “Sometimes. And you said you’d been raised Catholic.”

  “I’m impressed you remember. Right now I feel a
s if I should be saying my prayers, sleeping in a tomb after all this.” He heard the fabric of her sleeping bag slide on the marble; perhaps she was braced up on one elbow. “Did you and your wife have any kids?”

  “No,” he said, a bit hoarsely. And it was my fault, he thought, and she killed herself. “No.”

  “Oh.” He heard her shift again, and he guessed that she was thinking about his wife’s suicide. It sounded as if she were speaking toward the ceiling when she went on, “Terracotta says people can’t help what they do, any more than a rock rolling down a hill can. The rock might think it has a choice about rolling left or right, just like people think they choose what they do, but really it’s all just physics.”

  “I guess he can’t help but say that.”

  She laughed again, quietly. “Right, no choice. In one of his books he wrote, free will is a fiction, and he liked it when a misprint made it, free will is affectation. He says consciousness is pointless—what’s the use of a you, when all you can do is watch what your body does and says? Sometimes he seems surprised by what he does—though he’d say surprise is useless too.”

  “He sounds useless.”

  “I wish. Sometimes I think somebody or something finds him very useful.” She yawned audibly. “Good night.”

  “Good night.”

  Vickery closed his eyes. The numbness in his hands had worn off, but now his right palm flexed with the remembered texture and weight of the gun he had picked up from the alley pavement immediately after Castine shot the Mike Abbott fellow. Jack Hipple had that gun now, but it had been a .40 caliber SIG-Sauer P229, and at the Secret Service training course in Laurel, Maryland, Vickery had shot thousands of rounds through pistols just like it.

  And he recalled the recoil of firing the fallen TUA agent’s gun in the arroyo four years ago, with his wrists in handcuffs and his left arm twisted across his back—and the hammer-blow impacts of the other agent’s bullets hitting him in the thigh and ribs. He remembered that the impacts had been disorienting and strength-sapping, but they hadn’t actually hurt as much as the wax-filled plastic “Simunition” bullets used in the Secret Service training courses.

  At last he fell asleep.

  He didn’t dream of Amanda; instead he dreamed that he was at a crowded table in a bar, and for a long time he couldn’t make out the faces of the others at the table, nor remember where this place was. The conversation was lively and loud, and the words his companions spoke were in English, but Vickery wasn’t able to fit them together into comprehensible sentences. Eventually he heard explosions and gunfire from the street outside—but none of his companions paused in their conversation, and he realized at last that this was the King Tiki Bar, one of the fake buildings in Hogan’s Alley at the Rowley Training Center in Michigan. Hogan’s Alley was a specially constructed tactical village, like a Hollywood set, in which Secret Service agents were confronted with various simulated attacks and trained in how to react; so of course the gun-battle outside was not real. But even though his tablemates went on talking as energetically as ever, Vickery now saw that their shirts and blouses were blotted with blood, and when one of the men turned to face him, the previously averted half of his face was just a gory crater. Vickery touched his own face just as the other man did the same, and he knew that he was looking into a mirror on the wall.

  In the moments before he forced himself to open his eyes to the darkness of the tomb, all the people at the table fell silent, and then began to sing, very softly, an old song that he knew—and as he rolled over in his sleeping bag on the marble floor, he remembered what it was: “Where Have All The Flowers Gone?”

  And though he was now awake, he was still hearing it.

  The tomb was not completely dark; a faint glow of ambient city light made a narrow upright rectangle of the door, interrupted by the standing silhouette of Castine.

  He saw her head turn in profile. “You’re awake?” she whispered. “Check this out.”

  Vickery crawled out of the sleeping bag and stood up, and the floor was cold through his socks as he crossed to stand beside her.

  The singing was more audible from the doorway, though still very faint. Vickery rubbed his eyes and peered out across the cemetery, and each of the tombstone-perching ghosts that he could make out was swaying gently, and the spots that were their mouths were wide; it was the ghosts that were singing. He thought some of the frail voices seemed to be those of children.

  Standing in the doorway of a tomb under the infinite night sky, Vickery shivered as he listened to this secret chorus of the dead in the middle of the sleeping city, and he was glad that Castine was beside him.

  She took his arm, as if for support. “The poor things,” she whispered.

  The two of them stood there, breathing quietly in the night air, and the voices faded and returned and faded again like the scent of jasmine on the breeze. The lyrics of the song made it natural for the last stanza to lead to the first again, and the slow, melancholy song seemed likely to continue until dawn.

  Finally Castine stepped back and looked at Vickery. He nodded, and she closed the door.

  Back in his sleeping bag he went to sleep quickly, and was aware of nothing until he was awakened by someone shaking his shoulder.

  After the events and memories and dreams of the day before, he awoke—as he had awakened a hundred times in his years as a Secret Service agent—anxiously wondering what country he was in and when he was expected to report for duty.

  “Sebastian,” came Castine’s whisper, and that brought him back to his current situation. “It’s dawn through the keyhole.”

  “Right.” He sat up and ran his fingers through his disordered hair. “Right. Let’s stash the sleeping bags and get back to the bike. How does breakfast at the For Lease place sound?”

  He heard her shuffling around. “What do they serve for breakfast?”

  “Same as last night, I imagine. They never really close.”

  “I’ll skip the carrots this time.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Galvan lot just off Normandie at Eighth Street was a half-acre of asphalt bounded on three sides by a wide car-repair bay and two low office buildings with windows painted over white, and on the street side by a chain link fence masked with green netting. At 7 AM the gate was already rolled back, and Vickery rode his motorcycle up the driveway and between two rows of cars and stopped it in front of an old silver Airstream trailer. Castine swung a leg over the seat and stepped away from the bike, and Vickery switched off the engine. The chilly morning breeze smelled of coffee and gasoline.

  He gave Castine his phone—“You’ll need it to activate yours,” he told her—and directed her toward the restroom in the nearest building, then stepped up into the trailer.

  Shelves crowded with file boxes, a glowing electric heater, and clocks set to various times surrounded a metal desk in front of him; on the desk were a computer monitor and keyboard and several motionless metronomes, and behind it sat a bald man in a sweatshirt.

  The man looked up, then put on a pair of reading glasses and peered at the monitor. “Vickery,” he said, “looking even crappier than usual, car five. You’ve got Bradley Arnold, pickup at 8:30. You’ve had him before.”

  “Sure, the guy who’s afraid ghosts will read his mind. Pick him up at his house in Encino, take him to LAX, right? Delta departure terminal.”

  “Right. See if you can’t shave first.”

  Vickery nodded. “Oh, and Tom, I want to take a copilot along—a trainee, if she works out.”

  “A . . . copilot.”

  “Right.”

  “Trainee.” Tom said it as if he might have to look the word up in a dictionary.“Has Galvan interviewed her?”

  “Not yet. This girl wants to see what the work’s like before she applies.”

  “Huh. Girlfriend?”

  “Well, yeah,” said Vickery, since it implied that he was fairly well acquainted with her. “Galvan does hire people sometimes,” he added mildly.


  “I’ve seen it happen.” Tom scratched his scalp and then nodded toward the metronomes. “I gather she can see. You vouch for her?”

  “Yes. And she can see stuff as well as I can.”

  Tom shrugged. “Well, Arnold is a routine job. Be sure she knows not to talk during the ride.” He pulled a slip of paper out of a drawer and scribbled on it. “Have her fill the rest of it out,” he said, handing it across the desk, “and get it back to me when you return the car.”

  “Right.” Vickery hopped down from the trailer and nodded to another driver who was just stepping in. The top floors of the building on the west side shone with slanting sunlight against a blue sky, but he could see the steam of his breath, and he walked across the yard to the open-fronted repair bay where several urns of coffee stood on a wheeled cart.

  He was finishing his third cup when Castine walked up beside him and handed him back his phone.

  He concluded from her expression that she’d seen better restrooms. “At least there’s an electric outlet,” she said. “I got my phone activated, and it’s charging.”

  “I told the yard manager that you’re a trainee. Oh, and I said you’re my girlfriend.”

  She looked annoyed. “I suppose you had to.”

  “It means I know you well enough to vouch for you.” He rocked his head thoughtfully. “And we did spend the night together.”

  “In a goddamn tomb.” She sighed and zipped up her jacket, with some difficulty. “And there was that dinner, and that breakfast. You sure lay on the style for a girl.”

  He smiled wryly. “Under other circumstances I could probably do better.”

  “Actually,” she said, then hesitated and touched his arm; “actually you did very well. I—I’m grateful.”

  “Actually,” he said, bemused to realize that it was true, “I am too, in a way.”

  She gave him a surprised look. “Grateful that I messed up your life here?”

  “That you . . . shook up my life here. It was getting a bit stagnant.”