by Tim Powers
And he remembered what the highway had reminded him of. “I need to get a piece of the pavement,” he said.
“No,” said Castine, “two plus two.”
“Four, I’m thinking clearly! I promised to bring a piece of it back to the omphalos. It’s . . . important. Give me a second.”
He looked toward the broad expanse of black pavement, but as soon as he did, the landscape rotated and the highway swung out of sight behind him.
He slowly turned his head, squinting, until he saw Castine a couple of yards away. “I’m going to shut my eyes,” he told her, “and move toward the highway. Don’t look right at me!—but tell me when I’m beside it.”
“Please come along—!”
“Damn it, pi is 3.14159 et cetera, okay? I really do need to bring a piece of the pavement back to LA! My eyes are closed, talk.”
He heard her anxious and impatient sigh, and then she said, “Oh—shuffle to your right. Now back up and turn around.” With his eyes closed, Vickery followed her directions. “Crouch and reach out straight ahead of you,” she added.
Vickery got down on one knee and stretched out his left hand—and felt flat, hard roughness. He trailed his fingers across it toward himself, and at the edge of the surface he felt loose pieces. He closed his fist around a baseball-sized chunk and stood up.
“That’s got it,” he said, opening his eyes, “now let’s—”
He stopped talking, for the piece of asphalt had abruptly become a handful of cold black water.
“For God’s sake,” said Castine.
But now another voice, from ahead, said, “Herbert.”
He looked up. One of the insubstantial figures blocked their way. Squinting at it, he saw that it was the woman in baggy clothes who had briefly puffed on a cigarette.
He peered at her shadowy, half-transparent face, but it wasn’t until the wedding ring twisted suddenly on his wet left ring finger and the ghost said, “You took my wing,” that he recognized her, and flinched back.
He wondered what she meant. Her wing? In the old days when they’d gone hang-gliding? Her wing was orange, he thought, and mine was a red-striped white one. I never used hers.
“You took my memory of it,” Amanda’s ghost went on, “it’s gone, now the little lizards have it. And you took more, held back more. Stay. Give it now.” Her ghost frowned and its eyes closed or disappeared. “We can,” it said, apparently with some effort of unfamiliar concentration, “have our children. Here. Anything is—p-possible, here.”
Castine stepped to the side and stood up straight. “Three and three is six,” she said, “and nothing else.”
The ghost of Vickery’s wife flickered, and he said, quickly, “Wait a minute, it’s my wife. I think I should—”
“It’s not her,” said Castine, “We can’t stop. Your wife is in Heaven or Hell—this is a, an animate cast-off shell. Five and five is ten, ten, ten.”
“Stop it!” cried Vickery, for his wife’s ghost was now just a two-dimensional sheet flapping in the breeze. “It thinks it’s her, I can’t just—”
“Castine!” came a yell from some sort of distance.
Vickery looked behind, and saw a figure running this way across the sand; it was a man, and he seemed to be wearing a white robe that tautened with every upward jerk of his knees and flailed behind him like a cloak. As his head rose and fell with the effort, his neck visibly gleamed bright red. He appeared to be running very fast, though it was difficult to tell if he was getting closer, or even from exactly which direction he was coming. He seemed to be very tall.
“It’s Abbott,” gasped Castine, and then she was hurrying away down the highway shoulder.
Amanda’s ghost had vanished, and Vickery cast one last glance at the approaching figure and then took off running as best he could after Castine. “One plus six!” he yelled.
He heard her hoarse “Seven!” and then—
A tuft of weeds tripped him and he sprawled onto patchy green grass at the foot of a tall, leafy eucalyptus tree, panting in air that seemed supremely fresh despite reeking of engine exhaust. He rolled over and squinted against a bright sun in a cloudless blue sky.
I’m in somebody’s memory vision again, he though in alarm—where are Castine and Abbott while I’m hallucinating?
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Men’s voices were exclaiming nearby, and he sat up. A tent made by draping a blue tarpaulin over several six-foot wooden stepladders stood between two more eucalyptus trees, and several men in jeans and ragged coats were huddled around a body in a leather jacket and gray trousers lying beside the tent. Three ball-topped metronomes were shaking furiously back and forth a few yards away, and the treetops shook in a whirlwind.
Vickery’s heart thudded with sudden hope.
He got to his feet and hurried to the group. The body, as he had guessed, was Castine, and she was on her hands and knees now, bracing one hand against a tree trunk as she dragged one leg under her and, in stages, stood up.
Vickery exhaled, only then aware that he had been holding his breath. We’re back, he told himself. We both actually got out. The breeze cooled the sweat on his face.
The freeway gypsies who hadn’t got a clear look at her yet flinched at the sight of her bloody face and blouse. She waved off hands trying to steady her, and blinked around until she saw Vickery.
“Sebastian!” she said. She paused to cough, then said hoarsely, “You—went in and got me out!” She stumbled across the clearing to hug him tightly. “God bless you.”
One of the metronomes threw its pendulum away into the trees. The others kept rattling back and forth.
“You’re the one,” quavered a gray-haired gypsy, staring at Castine, “who drove off into the desert world from the 110 this morning! We heard about it.”
The others all took a step back in evident awe, and Castine moved away from Vickery and sat down in the grass. “I think we can rest now,” she said, and lowered her face into her hands. “I won’t cry. That would be . . . unprofessional.”
Vickery’s legs were aching from the effort of walking in the afterworld, and he was glad to sit down beside her. “Yes,” he said. “How do you feel? It looks like a bullet just scraped your scalp. It’s stopped bleeding.”
She raised her head, touching her cheek now. “My face is all stiff. Blood?” When he nodded, she said, “I can’t go anywhere like this.”
“Did you bring anything back?” called another of the freeway gypsies.
Vickery grimaced, remembering the piece of asphalt that had turned to water in his hand. “No,” he told them. “Just ourselves.”
“They say you gave them cigarettes,” the man went on. “That was a kindness.”
Vickery nodded and turned back to Castine. “Let me look at your pupils.”
She pushed back her sweaty hair and stared at him.
Her pupils were the same size. “Who’s the President now?” he asked.
“Donald J. Trump.”
“And the date?”
“Monday, uh, May eighth. 2017.”
He nodded. “Okay, I guess. But I’ll keep checking you. If your condition starts to deteriorate at all, I’ll get you to a hospital, quick. But right now I don’t think you’re dying.”
Castine flexed her fingers. “I feel . . . very alive, actually,” she said, “by recent comparison.” She gave him a haunted look. “But when I do die, I’ll by God make sure it’s very far away from any freeway.”
“Don’t want to be back there, ever,” he agreed with a shiver.
We can have our children here, Amanda’s ghost had said. Anything is possible here. He looked at his left hand and saw that his wedding ring was no longer on his finger. No, Amanda, he thought—I closed that door; on them and, as it turned out, on you.
Castine evidently saw the direction of his glance. “It wasn’t her,” she said quietly.
Vickery shook his head and lowered his hand. Remembering something, he patted his right jacket pocket, and h
e could feel the flat shape of the .45 semi-automatic, not the bulky cylinder of the revolver he’d had in the afterworld.
“I’ve still got my gun,” he told her quietly.
“Mine’s still at your car lot, I hope.”
“We should get moving, if you feel up to walking.”
“Sure.”
Castine sighed and got to her feet. She turned to the men in front of the tent and gestured toward her face. “Do any of you have some water I could use?”
Vickery stood up himself, suppressing a wince.
“I do!” called one, shrugging out of a knapsack and digging in it. “Our lady of the freeways!” he said as he handed her a tall plastic Arrowhead water bottle. He dug further and came up with a white athletic sock and held it out to her.
Vickery admired her for not hesitating to accept the dubious offering, and when she had unscrewed the top of the water bottle she splashed some liberally onto the sock and then rubbed it over her face.
“Here,” Vickery said, “let me help.”
He took the sock from her and poured more water on it, and gently wiped dried blood from her forehead, nose, cheeks and chin, then turned the sock around and scrubbed at a few clinging spots.
He handed it back to her and said, “Once more over all and you’ll be presentable. More nearly presentable, anyway.”
She poured half of the remaining water onto the sock and mopped her face thoroughly, then shook her head and blinked at the man who had handed it to her. “Can I pay you for the water?” she asked.
“Just let me have the sock,” he said, and when she gave it back to him he folded it carefully, even reverently, before sliding it back into the knapsack.
Castine and Vickery exchanged a brief, ironic glance, and he knew they were both thinking, Like Saint Veronica’s veil.
“You need that wound cleaned up and bandaged,” Vickery said. “I think we go back to the Galvan commissary.”
Castine nodded, then said, “Oh!” and looked at him uncertainly. “You can still, uh, go back there?”
“Yes. I threatened to shoot myself, and she let me keep my job.” He smiled, for the first time in many hours. “I’ll tell you about it.”
She glanced around, tugging up the zipper of her jacket. “Do you know where we are?”
“Sure,” he said, taking her elbow and starting toward the surface street away from the freeway, “by the Avenue 43 exit from the Pasadena Freeway. The omphalos, the conduit between the worlds, where else?”
“Let’s get away from it. Quickly.”
“Good idea. Can you walk half a mile? There’s a Metro station on Pasadena Avenue.”
“Of course!” She took a deep breath and let it out in a cough. “That is—with a rest stop or two, maybe.”
They walked carefully across the grassy freeway island and stepped onto the sidewalk.
“We’ve got to cross this bridge over the freeway,” said Vickery. “I don’t know how we’ll interact with the current. Just walk as fast as you can and don’t look at anything till we’re well past it on the other side.”
She nodded, tight-lipped. “At least you can breathe this air, and it lets you pass through it.”
Vickery kept his eyes on his shoes as he took her hand and trotted along the bridge sidewalk, not looking over the low wall at the freeway lanes below, and though at several points there seemed to be many other people on the bridge, he and Castine got to the far side without interference.
“The bridges of Madness County,” panted Castine when they slowed to a walk. She spread her hands and glanced down at herself and then at Vickery. “Good lord, look at us.”
She had zipped her battered leather jacket all the way up to her neck to hide her bloodstained blouse, but her gray trousers were sooty and wrinkled and spotted with blood, and one cuff was torn nearly off, and her hair was darkly matted on one side. Vickery’s jeans and leather jacket were dusty and scuffed, and when he touched his face he could feel whiskers. If we were indoors, he thought, I don’t imagine we’d smell very good. His comb was still in his back pocket, and he dragged it cursorily through his tangled hair.
As if reading his thought, she said, “I require a shower and some clothes.”
“And some food.” She nodded, and he went on, “We can hit a thrift store again for clothes, and there’s a shower at the commissary. And food, obviously.”
For several minutes they trudged in silence past craftsman bungalows and fenced-in yards, and then they turned south at the wider lanes of Figueroa. Vickery’s watch had stopped, but the distinct shadows of telephone poles on the sidewalk indicated that it was about four o’clock.
“Those beads,” Castine said at last, “on the strings—we’d still be there, if you hadn’t had those.”
“Thank Ariadne,” he said.
“Ah! Don’t tell me. Let me think about that.”
At the Heritage Square Metro station platform he bought two five-dollar TAP cards, and when a few minutes later a train came sweeping around a curve, its two headlights flashing alternately and then shining steadily as it slowed to a stop, Vickery led Castine across the brick pavement to the emptiest-looking car. He was reassured to see that the seats were upholstered in tough dark-blue fabric; he and Castine probably wouldn’t leave any visible grime.
“We’ll transfer to the Purple Line at Union Station,” he said as the train surged forward, “and get off at the Wilshire/Western stop. From there it’s only a half hour walk to my storage place. We can pick up the bike and ride from there.”
“Your Chevy Blazer . . .?”
“Is in the same place as Galvan’s Taurus.”
“Oh. Sorry.” She touched his hand. “I owe you. Again.”
“We both owe everybody.”
Looking out the window at empty lots and the back sides of factories sweeping past, she said, “Speaking of Taurus—did you hear—in that place—”
“It was like a bull, bellowing,” agreed Vickery with a reminiscent shiver, “if God were a bull.”
“You said Ariadne,” she began, then jumped and unzipped her jacket to reach inside; when she pulled her hand out she was holding her phone.
“Your phone still works?” said Vickery. “My watch—”
She waved him to silence and flipped it open. After a moment she exclaimed, “Eliot? What the hell happened? Of course it’s me! Yes, it’s Ingrid, are you okay? Where are you? What happened?”
“They can triangulate this,” whispered Vickery, wearily trying to remember what the next stop on this line was.
“Eliot, what?” She frowned for a few moments, then said softly, “Oh my God. Eliot, I’m so sorry.” And she closed the phone.
“What?” asked Vickery.
Castine just waved at him and then bit her knuckle, blinking rapidly.
“He’s dead,” she said finally. “I got him killed, getting him involved.”
“What, he was killed just now, while you were—?”
“No, I don’t know when he died. He started reciting fucking ring a ring of roses, all fall down, and—and giggling—” There were tears in her eyes when she looked at Vickery. “They must have kidnapped him, tortured him!—to make him send me into a trap today.”
Vickery could only nod in helpless sympathy.
For several seconds neither of them spoke, as trees and telephone poles rushed past outside the windows.
“Eliot’s dead,” she said then—quietly, as if trying to encompass the thought. “I don’t even know where his body is.” She sniffed, and took a deep breath and let it out.
The faint traces of blood still on her face were now transected by the tracks of tears, but the look she gave Vickery was resolutely calm. “He talked to me through a phone. And I spoke to him in complete sentences! But when we talked to—” she waved vaguely, “—it was always through special radios.”
Vickery sighed. “The current is much more powerful now. Tomorrow you could probably talk to . . . uh, a departed person, with two
Dixie cups on a string.”
She was rocking back and forth on her seat, her arms crossed, gripping her elbows. “Do you still have your phone?”
“No, and I’m not going to go look for it. I left it with three ejected .45 shell casings on a bicycle path, above that street where you nearly got killed this morning. The police are likely to find it.” He pursed his lips. “With luck it didn’t have any distinct fingerprints on it.”
“I’m sorry. I knew it must somehow have been you who shot that guy, on that street. I’m sorry I put you in that position. That’s what I do, to the men in my life, wreck their lives—or end them.” She leaned her head back and stared at the ceiling. “Don’t worry about your prints—the TUA will have taken preemptive jurisdiction of the event, and they already mean to kill you and delete all records of it.”
“Good news.”
Beside him, Castine shivered. “Let’s get on your motorcycle and just ride east till either your money runs out or the motorcycle breaks down or we hit the Atlantic Ocean.”
“Not on that bike,” said Vickery absently, “especially with a passenger.” He shifted in his seat to look directly at Castine. “Is the TUA likely to interrogate my wife again? She got pretty distinct, there.” God help me, he thought. “Probably more accessible.”
“What? Your wife? Oh, sorry, right. I don’t know, maybe. Yes, probably. But it’s not her.”
“It’s part of her, or was part of her. And it thinks it’s her.”
“So?” She spread her still-bloodstained hands. “Eliot’s g-ghost thinks it’s still Eliot! And lots of crazy people think they’re Jesus or somebody.”
There’s a real grievance, though, thought Vickery, whoever has the right to hold it. “Well, we need a proper vehicle, if we’re going to . . . flee. In the meantime—”
“If your motorcycle won’t do, you must know how to hot-wire a car! Fill the tank and drive east!”
“And get located by our ghosts before we even get past San Bernardino. We’ve got to get a durable vehicle, and fix it up to avoid their attention, and calculate the safest route—lots of considerations. In the meantime, we can wear ghost-camouflage clothes and eat peanuts and chocolate. I think we could sleep tonight in one of the taco trucks—they’re shielded almost as well as Galvan’s cars.”
