by Tim Powers
He levered open the car door and crawled out on his hands and knees down onto the cold sand, wrinkling his nose at the sharp ozone smell on the gusty breeze, and his foot hooked the Marlboro carton out onto the sand after him.
When he got to his feet there were half a dozen indistinct people swaying and nodding on the sand only a few yards away.
Vickery found it difficult to see them clearly, but when he concentrated on one of them at a time he was able to see a young woman in a bathrobe with dark hair flying in all directions, an elderly man in a tuxedo . . . he met the gaze of a man standing further back—
—and in an instant, like a burst radio transmission, a compressed memory appeared in Vickery’s mind; before it faded, he mentally touched it at several points, and sensed singing and orchestral music. It was some opera he didn’t recognize, and a moment later it was gone.
The man clutched his head, and in an instant he was standing several yards further back. “What fell out?” he wailed, blinking down at the sand, where tiny lizards appeared and disappeared around his feet like fleas. Then he simply vanished, and Vickery thought a new and similar figure appeared in the shifting crowd out there.
Now he heard music on the wind, faint but possibly the same opera. Vickery was breathing shallowly in the stinging air, and aware of his rapid heartbeat, and he leaned back against his vehicle; but he felt an unfamiliar roughness at his back, and when he turned around clumsily he saw that his car had been replaced by a derelict wooden shack. White paint had peeled in strips and patches off the planks, making it almost impossible to read hot dogs 25¢ in blue lettering over an open counter.
He took a quick step back, but the world moved back faster and his nose bumped against the planks. More carefully, thinking about it, he extended his right foot behind him, then followed it with his left, and straightened up—and he was relieved to see the shack recede. He turned to face the people who had appeared in front of him moments ago, but they were gone. Then he saw a group that might have been them, fifty yards away beside a white SUV, and he recognized it as his own car. On the far side of it the empty highway curved away into the distance. The nearly inaudible music had subsided to a faint, wavering bass tone.
Walking toward the vehicle was like driving a car in reverse—any errors in navigation led to wide swerves. When he had managed to plod up to the Blazer, the half-dozen ghosts were all on their knees—they had managed to open the carton of cigarettes and were scrabbling ineffectually at the spilled red-and-white packs.
The resonant air seemed to be fizzing like champagne. Bitter champagne.
“You got a light?” squeaked one of the ghosts. The others began chirping too: “These are mine!—high lead content is why they’re so heavy—what else you got, you bring any Dunhills?—”
Vickery managed to step forward, and he crouched and stuffed the scattered packs back into the torn carton and stood up.
“Who wants one?” he asked. The astringent breeze hurt his teeth.
They all clamored for cigarettes, their arms momentarily appearing at several angles simultaneously as they waved and flailed.
Vickery stood up straight and looked at the figures close around him. “A woman came through here a few hours ago,” he said, “and—and she doesn’t like pickled carrots, you understand?” It seemed important that they understand this, if they were all to go to the For Lease place for dinner tonight. He lost his train of thought—what had he been saying, anyway? Not what he had meant to say—and he looked bewilderedly at the torn cigarette carton in his hands. His wedding ring was on his finger—hadn’t he taken it off? Yes, he knew he had. Was this before he had taken it off?
One of the ghosts, a man in a threadbare suit and raddled tie, stepped forward and stuck his tongue out at Vickery. He retracted it and piped, “You’re the guy! Up the hill, by the motorcycle!” His tongue emerged again, longer, but as it stretched it looked as insubstantial as smoke, and Vickery was forcibly reminded of the ghost he and Castine had encountered by the tomb at the Hollywood Forever cemetery—and he guessed that this ghost didn’t have enough ectoplasmic substance here to hurt him. Still, he stepped back and fanned the tendril away.
What had it said? Up the hill, by the motorcycle—Vickery belatedly realized that this must be the ghost of the man he had shot in the head this morning.
“Take it back,” said the ghost, and its wavering tongue flicked across Vickery’s shoulder—
—And for a moment Vickery found himself standing beside a car on a curved street with old houses to his right, looking up a green slope to his left at a man sitting on a motorcycle. And then a stunning, mercilessly hard blow to the skull knocked him back and down, and in the moments before the vision blinked away he was on his knees on asphalt, peering blurrily and without comprehension at the bloody mess that had spilled out of himself onto the street, and trying to figure out what catastrophic thing had just happened to him.
Vickery reeled back, dropping the cigarette carton and bracing himself with one hand against the cold hood of the Blazer, and even though his own identity was rocking on its foundations he was able to once again recall Hipple’s words: Ending someone’s earthly life from him is about as intimate as you can get.
“I’m—sorry!” he gasped.
“Take it back!” the ghost repeated, more faintly.
It wavered and split into several figures, at least three, one of which was a young boy, and then they all vanished; Vickery didn’t look out at the crazily running figures in the distance to see if their number appeared to be increased.
But you killed yourself, Vickery thought, as I recall—one of us killed somebody, anyway; possibly we killed each other. The thought fluttered away.
He straightened up and took a halting breath and looked at the remaining ghosts crouched and standing on the sand, and he struggled to remember what he had been saying. “A woman came through here in a car with faces all over it,” he said, carefully considering each word before speaking it. He waved the Marlboro carton. “Who knows where she—”
He was interrupted by a deafening bellow that seemed to shiver the ground and the sky, a prolonged inorganic sound that expressed no comprehensible emotion but nevertheless drove Vickery to his knees in unreasoning panic. He turned to crawl under the Blazer, but it was now a rust-frailed shell sitting flat on the sand with no wheels. The terrible sound went on shaking the world, and the ghosts had all disappeared.
After some duration in which thought was impossible, the groaning bellow finally faded and rolled away past the distant mountains, and eventually a cramp in Vickery’s right hand made him look down. Blinking tears or sweat out of his eyes, he saw that he had instinctively pulled the gun out of his jacket pocket—but it was a revolver now, and he couldn’t focus his watering eyes well enough to tell what caliber it might be, just that it was something bigger than a .32.
He had apparently reached into his left pocket too, for his left hand was clutching the beaded strings he had made while sitting in the underground Bank of America parking lot.
He sat up and tried to take a deep breath.
A clear thought surfaced in his mind: I can get back to the real world. He opened his mouth and said, hoarsely, “Two and two are . . .”Well, an even number, anyway, he reasoned, since it’ll be divisible or indivisible with liberty and justice for all, and—
That was no good.
He tucked the revolver back in his pocket and laid one of the strings across his left palm; and he carefully slid two beads to the knot at one end of the string, then pushed two more up to join them.
“Two and two are four,” he said, seeing the fact. He raised his hand. “Don’t take my word for it, look!”
And in the wake of that comprehension, he was able to think fairly clearly, at least for the moment. He got to his feet and looked over the lowered roof of his collapsed car, away from the highway. Hills mounted to another range of low, repetitive mountains, but on one of the nearer hills he now saw a struc
ture—a high brick building with a row of smokestacks along the top. It appeared to be a factory. And he became aware that a nearly subsonic pulsing sound that he’d been feeling in his bones came from that direction.
The ghosts had fluttered back to him now that the worldwide bellowing sound had dissipated, and they were clucking about the cigarettes.
“That woman drove in here,” piped one, “gimme a smoke I’ll show you where.”
Vickery shoved the beaded strings back into his pocket, then crouched and fetched up one of the spilled packs. He tore it open and pulled a cigarette free and held it out. The ghost’s hands were only able to wobble it, though, so Vickery tucked the filter end into the ghost’s insubstantial mouth, and it stayed there. When he dug a lighter out of his pocket and flicked the flint-wheel, the flame was a blue sphere rather than a vertical yellow feather, and it burned his hand, but in the moment before he dropped it the cigarette had caught fire and the ghost managed to draw several puffs of smoke out of it before the cigarette fell flaming to the ground.
The ghost was more opaque now, and its silhouette was that of a woman in baggy clothing. It raised an arm and pointed back, past where the hot dog stand had briefly stood. Looking in that direction, Vickery could now see the black hulk of a car with a figure sitting in the sand beside it.
“The faces all caught fire,” said the ghost. “Stay away from her, Herbert, she’s bad luck.”
She’s certainly that, Vickery thought. But I’ve got to get to her before this corrosive air kills us and we’re here for good. For good. For better or worse, she’s a friend, he had told that old man in the backward clothes. For bitter or verse, he thought now, and was my homework to memorize that poem? How the hell did it go? Sister Clementissima will give me an F if I can’t remember it . . . I think that I shall never see, O cruel Minos, thy dominion be, poems are made by fools like me, we’ll go by air, for sure the air is free . . .
The ghost in the baggy clothing stretched a hand toward him—
—and suddenly Vickery was in bright daylight, precariously upright as he ran fast down a steep grassy slope, gripping the slanted down-tubes of the triangular control bar and dragging the wide glider through the air over his head. He was running downhill too fast for his legs to keep up with his body, beginning to fall forward but resolutely not looking down at his feet, and then his feet were just scuffing the receding grass as the harness straps gently, and then firmly, lifted him into the air.
The summit slope of Kagel Mountain dropped away below him as he shifted his hands to the horizontal base tube of the control bar triangle just inboard of the wheels, and he folded one leg at a time and tucked them up into the cocoon harness. He swung his body to the right on the hang-strap and the glider banked to the west, away from the lee side of Trash Mountain, where rotor downdrafts could pull a flier down fast. He found an updraft over the reservoir lake at the bottom of Pacoima Canyon and pulled himself forward on the bar to get more speed as he soared over the suburbs of San Fernando.
But when he looked up, he saw that his glider wing was orange fabric; and off to his right and below him sailed a white wing with red stripes.
But that’s my glider, he thought—the orange wing is—
Before he could complete the thought, the memory fell out of his mind.
He was looking up into the turbulent burnt-ochre sky of the Labyrinth, and he realized that he was somehow lying on his back in the cold sand. Had the ghost with the cigarette hit him? On one side of the sky, toward the hills, a small angular black object was moving against the shifting brown—he focused his eyes on it and saw that it was a man high up in the air, a man with wings, gliding, spiraling. The sight reminded him of something, but a gust had blown the memory away.
The ghost of the woman was gone. He rolled over, coughing in the bitter air, and for a moment lizards no bigger than matchsticks appeared and disappeared on his hands. He jerked his hands up and shook them, and the little creatures did not reappear.
Vickery struggled to his feet, squinting at the other vehicle, the blackened Taurus in the changing distance. He knew it was important that he make his way to it, and his left hand pulled one of the beaded strings out of his pocket and he began trying to walk in that direction. The air seemed both thick and effervescent—it took some work to drag his legs and torso through it, and he could feel it dragging through his damp hair like cold fingers.
Staring into the palm of his hand, he moved the beads and described the results aloud: “Two and two is four, look; plus two more is . . . six! Anybody can see that . . .”
He had worked all the way up to dividing the ten beads by five, sweating even in the chilly breeze but peering triumphantly at the palpable enactment of five pairs of beads, when he heard a voice call, “My God, Sebastian?”
He looked up, and saw that he was only a couple of yards from the charred-looking Ford Taurus, and Ingrid Castine was getting awkwardly to her feet beside it.
“Sebastian!” she said. Her face was streaked with dried blood and the front of her blouse was still wet and red. He stepped to one side to squint anxiously at her head; he saw a two-inch raw gash above her right ear, but it didn’t seem to be deep, or still bleeding.
“What time is it?” she asked. “Are we still in the tomb?”
“In another one,” he said, “but I know the way out. Here.” He handed her one of the strings. “Look at it! At the string I just gave you! How many beads are on it?”
“A lot. My mom was just here, maybe she could—”
“Count them! You know, one, two, three . . .”
“Oh, four, five, six—ten. What’s burning? It’s something toxic, our lungs—”
“Now subtract two. Move two away from the others. What’s left?”
“Why? There’s so many!—uh, eight.”
“Good. Look, I’ve got a string of my own, let’s do it together as we walk. Can you walk?”
“Yes,” she said, blinking around now at the desolate landscape. “Is that some kind of factory over there?”
“Who cares? Walk along the highway shoulder here with me. Let’s push all the beads together and then slide three away. What have we got left?”
“Seven. I can do this!” She looked at him with what might have been a tentative smile behind all the crisscrossed lines of dried blood. “Now take two from that.”
“Five,” he said.
“I know what twenty times five is,” she said in a confiding tone.
“Never mind that, just do ones we can physically perform here. Take one away and what’s left?”
“Four.” Staring at the string in her hand, she stumbled and nearly fell. “Can we rest? It’s hard to walk through this air.”
“No. Keep moving.”
A regularly interrupted chiming sound started up somewhere nearby, and Vickery knew it was a familiar sound that was incongruous here; and he identified it as a telephone ringing in the same instant that he noticed a candlestick telephone standing upright on the sand a few yards away. He took a step toward it.
“No,” gasped Castine, “don’t answer it. It’s got to be Terracotta’s people.”
Vickery reluctantly pushed his way through the air past the gleaming black thing, though he was irked that she wouldn’t let him answer it. It might have been anyone.
The wind was at their backs for a while, then blowing in their faces, and the factory on the hill was sometimes ahead of them, sometimes off to their left, and sometimes nowhere to be seen. Vickery found that he could follow the highway if he kept it in his peripheral vision to the right, but didn’t look directly at it.
At one point they passed a square hole in the sand, and as Vickery stepped around it he felt a metal surface dent and spring back under the sand, and guessed that the hole was the side window of a buried car.
He paused. I remember that my car fell over sideways, he thought; is this mine? Did I leave the keys in it? Why don’t we clear away this sand and just drive everybody to the For L
ease place?
He crouched and began sweeping the sand away. It was a relief to stop trying to walk.
Castine had plodded a few yards further, then halted and made her way back. “What,” she panted, “are you doing?”
“My car,” said Vickery. “Those kids took it, and now look.”
“Sebastian,” she said, “pick up that string. We have to keep moving, remember?”
“Galvan keeps an iPhone under the seat. It’s not ringing, so we’re okay. We can call Triple A.”
She leaned down and slapped his face hard. “You must take the string and stand up.” When he had grumblingly complied, she told him, “Push the beads on it together. Now move one away.” She took a deep, wincing breath. “What’s left?”
“Oh,” said Vickery, “nine, if you must know.”
“Get up. Walk.”
“Right. Yes, I remember.” Vickery picked up the string and got wearily to his feet, and they resumed their effortful trek along the highway border.
The highway pavement was asphalt, split and crumbling at the edges. It reminded him of something, but Castine interrupted the thought by asking what six from nine was.
“Sixty—wait, let me do it on the string—three,” he said.
“Right. Keep walking.”
After a while the air seemed a bit less oppressive, and Vickery no longer had the sensation of pushing himself through it.
Castine sniffed the breeze cautiously. “Do you suppose,” she asked, “that we may be getting somewhere?”
“I think we are. Slide ’em all together again and tell me what you’ve got.”
“Ten, boss.”
Vickery kept his concentration on the simple math they were performing, while peripherally keeping the crumbled edge of the highway in sight a few yards to his right. And after a dozen more steps through the ever less-resisting air, he heard a new sound on the breeze—the rapid swish-swish of rushing cars—and for a moment he thought he caught a whiff of engine exhaust.
