by Tim Powers
“They hate it,” said Vickery, now trying to puzzle out the oddly blurred letters on a green freeway sign over the lanes ahead. “It’s . . . stressful. Traumatic.”
Castine sighed deeply. “Yes.”
“This is legal? The TUA is a government agency!”
“Ghosts have no civil rights! Sebastian, will you ever understand that it’s not her? It’s like—it’s the equivalent of an old VHS tape of her. The image moves and talks, but—”
“And this Terracotta wants very badly to find you and me. Amanda can’t track me while I’m in this truck, but Terracotta won’t know that. He’ll use feedback on her, won’t he?”
Castine had leaned back and closed her eyes, and she nodded. “Yes.” For several seconds neither of them spoke. “Yes,” she said again, “okay, let’s go to Hipple’s place. I want to get my old SIG-Sauer back anyway.”
But a familiar popping sound had started up in the kitchen behind them, and when Vickery was able to read the lettering on the freeway sign, his ribs went cold and a full two seconds later the backs of his hands tingled.
“That sign,” he said unsteadily, “says 401 Beverly Hills Freeway west, in half a mile.”
“Is that the one you want?”
“No. No, it’s not. There is no 401 Freeway, no Beverly Hills Freeway.”
The air around them had begun popping now, flipping cigarette butts out of the ashtray and fluffing Castine’s hair.
Her hands were over her face. “Don’t take that freeway,” she advised in a muffled voice.
Vickery just held his breath and squinted against the distortions as the air warped and popped in front of him. He forced himself not to speed up out of this intense pocket, for the truck was now passing the spot where he and Castine had taken the phantom offramp yesterday, and any deviation from the surrounding traffic pattern might spill them into the Labyrinth again. In his peripheral vision the cars to his left seemed to swell and shrink in size, but he kept his eyes resolutely on the lane markers ahead of him.
The shadows of the car in front of him and the ones beside him were rotating, as if the sun were moving around in the sky, and then his view was entirely cut off by surging clouds of brown sand that swept in from the east. Sweating, Vickery kept his speed exactly at the previous sixty miles an hour, hoping the invisible other drivers would do the same—he didn’t dare brake, in case a car behind him did not, and he hoped that the unseen car ahead of him would not. He couldn’t see the lane markers, but the thump of his tires on the lane divider bumps let him know when he had strayed and needed to correct. He knew that the freeway curved to the left ahead, or had yesterday, anyway, and he prayed that the dust storm would abate before the lanes curled away from under all the blind cars.
But the sandstorm broke up into individual whirling dust-devils, and when he was able to see lane dividers and other cars again, Vickery swung the truck into the lane that would lead them to the 101 north, toward Hollywood and Mulholland Drive.
Castine’s seat creaked as she slowly relaxed.
“Are we,” she began hoarsely; then cleared her throat and started again, “Are we likely to run into more of that sort of thing?”
Vickery flexed his hands on the steering wheel and shrugged. “It’s a long ten miles to Hipple’s place, even as the pigeon flies.”
Castine shook her head, and Vickery knew she wished they could just drive straight east, right out of LA.
Terracotta’s thumb was swollen and had turned black, and he had pulled a glove over it to stop people advising him to go to a hospital. Now it was throbbing in time with the booming that shook out of the radio speaker in Room Two. When the sound had started up, one of the radio men had hastily tried to switch off the radio, but Terracotta had batted his hand away, and the three men had just hurried out of the room and closed the door.
It’s no harm if I hear the malmeme, he thought, straining to catch Amanda Woods’ voice over the background pounding—I already know what it is. It’s all about me, if you subtract Emilio Terracotta from me.
Now that he was alone in the room, he had no choice but to speak to the ghost in complete sentences. “Amanda,” he said, speaking loudly over the thumping noise in the background, “you told me your husband was there, where you are. And then he came back across the gap.” The rapidly narrowing gap, he thought. “How did he do that?”
“None of your beeswax,” came the frail voice from the radios speaker.
“He’s got Toby and Cosmo and Myshkin,” said Terracotta, remembering the names of the cats she and Woods had once had, “and we can bring them to you if we can find him. How did he get back across the gap?”
“Liar,” came Amanda’s voice. “They died, and I buried each of them with flowers. I keep looking for their graves here.” The drumming from the speaker was louder. Her voice went on, “The clouds contort above, and if I speak, a dreadful deluge o’er our heads may break!”
Terracotta muttered, “To hell with this,” and switched on the microphone, and even just the background drumming from the radio was enough to wring a jarring whistle of feedback out of the extra speaker. It wasn’t a distortion of her voice, but it was a clear threat. He switched the microphone off.
“I can do that again,” he said. “How did he get back across?”
“They had strings,” wailed the ghost voice, “and that woman told me three and three is six and nothing else, five and five is ten, ten, ten miles as the pigeon flies.”
Terracotta’s heart seemed to stop—and then his individual mind fell away into a limitless void where things comparable to vast old memories moved and collided and receded: imprisonment in one’s own impossibly folded-back self, and another man who had had a string in his hand, and a duel of logic against chaos—Theseus—
He was writhing on cold sand under a churning brown sky as a bone-jarring bellow shook the air and went on shaking it, intolerably not ceasing—any thought at all was impossible—
But the awful roaring did eventually recede, and someone was calling a vaguely familiar word—Terracotta—and faces hovered over him in warm air. He was lying on the vinyl warehouse floor, and the big turbulence, or alien entity, had withdrawn, leaving the Terracotta identity to gather the fragments of itself together.
“He chased us out,” said a strained voice. “He stayed in there and listened to it by himself.”
“It was that drumming sound he keeps warning us about,” said another voice. “The big malmeme. And he stayed there with it.”
Terracotta rolled over and slowly got to his feet. The five or six people around him stepped back warily, and he could see a dozen or so others standing further away, against the warehouse wall.
He patted his hair and cleared his throat. “Brett? Ah, there you are. I want to talk to you in the—the office. No, I don’t need help, I can walk!”
In the administration office, Terracotta paused for Brett to catch up, then closed the door and sat down in the chair by the desk. A few personnel out on the warehouse floor hung back and peered toward the office window.
Brett spoke first. “I think you were Amanda Woods, there, for a few seconds,” he said angrily. “You came bursting out of Room Two yelling.”
Terracotta squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, then opened them wide. “Yelling what?”
“Nothing to reassure everybody who’s been wondering about your sanity, that’s for sure. At first you were shouting, ‘Where is my husband? and then you said, ‘Theseus, aided by the virgin’s art, had traced the guiding thread through every part.’”
Again Terracotta’s identity was shaken, but he lowered his head and breathed deeply for a few seconds, and he remained himself. She switched places with me, he thought; she took me. That’s what I get for talking to her in complete sentences! She was in my place and I was in hers . . . and then it was the big other, eclipsing us both and breaking her hold.
Brett went on, “I assume that’s part of your fucking malmeme, since it rhymes. Everybody h
ere heard it, and I don’t think it’s feasible for you to kill everybody.” Brett was scowling and shaking his head. “And the inspector from the D.C. office is due to come here at three.”
“Inspector, here? Since when?”
“Westwood called a few minutes ago, while you were off in Dante’s Inferno.”
Ovid’s inferno, thought Terracotta. He took a deep breath and let it out. “Okay.” He stood up, bracing one hand on the desk. “The inspector. Okay, give everybody a half-hour break, then put three guys on the Room One radio, fishing for . . . oh, Mike Abbott. That’s a legitimate tasking, since he’s an agent of ours that got killed. I’ll keep working, and at two-thirty I’ll meet everybody else in the break room, and when the inspector arrives I’ll be handing out some of those assignments Westwood sends over.”
Brett had picked up the eraser from the tray below the whiteboard, and was quickly swiping it across the whole grid, notations and all. “You’ll keep working till two-thirty. Working on what?”
“Amanda Woods.”
She had said, That woman told me three and three is six and nothing else. The woman must be Castine, thought Terracotta. Has she come back across too? Yesterday I would have thought it was impossible for anybody to do that.
But Amanda Woods had said, They had strings.
I can’t let Woods and Castine get in the way of the consummation.
Theseus, aided by the virgin’s art, had traced the guiding thread through every part.
“Amanda Woods,” he repeated. “We’ve got to find her husband, and Castine. And I don’t trust that Galvan woman—she told me she had them, an hour ago, but they got away. I think it was one of her cars that Castine drove into nowhere.”
Brett nodded impatiently. The license plate of the car in which Castine had fled the countermeasures team yesterday morning had turned out to be registered to a limited liability company in New Mexico; but the secretary of state office in New Mexico claimed it was not a New Mexico company. The TUA office in Washington D.C. was trying to track it further.
“And before the inspector gets here,” Brett went on, “you’ll begin doing the work the agency expects you to be doing?”
“I said so, didn’t I?”
Brett pressed on, “You’re sure you can do that? Act . . . normal? If you go poking paperclips into yourself and babbling about Theseus and lustful bulls, you’re going to discredit me too, by regrettable association.”
“The Terracotta Army will be in perfect order, no fear.” He cocked an eyebrow at Brett. “Incidentally, you’re angling for a bad performance evaluation.”
“Which they won’t even look at, man, if you don’t pull yourself together before the inspector gets here.” Brett crossed to the office door and opened it. “And we’re not the damn Terracotta Army, for God’s sake. Talk sense, please!” He stepped out and slammed the door behind him.
You are, though, thought Terracotta—just not in the sense you think I meant. If in fact there is a you, if there is an I.
He wished he had not thought of the Terracotta Army; the thought, so soon after seeing his father’s ghost on Sunday, had roused unwelcome memories of his own.
He looked out of the office window at the far side of the warehouse. The ghosts who used to stand outside the fence were now in the building, clustered against the wall, swaying as if in an ethereal breeze. And, sure enough, the figure of Terracotta’s father was again among them, smiling and waving.
Terracotta looked away, down at the floor. His heart was pounding.
Why would his father’s idiot ghost be smiling at him?
Terracotta had been seventeen years old in 1974, and his name had still been Emilio Benedetti, when his father had found the video cameras and 8-track stereo players the boy had stolen from neighboring houses; and his father had declared that he was going to call the police, and had gone so far as to pick up the telephone.
Young Emilio had snatched up a little statue from a nearby shelf—a foot-tall image of a woman, made of terracotta, unglazed fired clay—and swung it with all his strength at his father’s head . . .
The statue had not taken fingerprints, and Emilio had claimed to have found his father’s body, and in the end no charges had been filed.
But Emilio had loved his father, and had been left with no definition of himself that he could live with. He mentally repeated, and tried to believe, a reassuring mantra: The statue killed him, not me. But the phrase had soon shifted its emphasis to a plaintively insistent The statue killed him, not me.
And then one day he had read about the discovery, in the buried tomb of some Chinese emperor, of some 8,000 lifesize terracotta statues of warriors; and National Geographic magazine referred to them as the Terracotta Army. Each statue was a distinct individual—some with various sorts of beards, some clean-shaven, some heavy-set and some lean, and all with different facial expressions—and at first he had been struck by how much they were like living people. Later he had been struck by how much living people seemed to be no more than mobile members of the Terracotta Army.
Emilio had finally found peace in the conclusion that the statue had effectually killed both his father and himself; and, later, that he and his father had never been actual selves at all—nobody was—and whatever else the statue might had done, it had dispelled a particularly persistent illusion. Emilio had learned, with relief, that all motion or stasis, regardless of any deceptive appearances of willful purpose, was just physics.
Everybody was a member of the extended Terracotta Army.
He opened the door and walked down the row of doors to Room Two, ignoring the staff members who eyed him cautiously, and stepped in. The three chairs around the radio were empty, and he sat down in one. The radio was still on.
“Amanda,” he said.
From the radio speaker came a querulous voice: “I ain’t speaking to you.”
He touched the microphone. “I think you will. I think you’ll want to.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
It wasn’t until they had followed Mulholland Drive’s twists and curves through the hills for several miles that they passed under a scattering of wheeling pigeons, and the distortions and alterations abated. The sun was at last steady in a blue sky, and shadows held still.
For the last hectic ten minutes, Vickery had steered the taco truck past exits to several other posted but nonexistent freeways, sped through clouds of fig beetles and monarch butterflies that exploded in puffs of white dust when they struck the windshield, and downshifted when his lane ascended or descended steep inclines that he knew weren’t normally there. He had several times had to shift to neutral and gun the stuttering engine to keep it from stalling, and slowing down had often involved downshifting and pumping the brakes and engaging the emergency brake. The air vents had variously bathed the truck cab in scents of burning tobacco, broken stone, perfume, and decay. And through it all, he had had to struggle to keep his mind focused on driving, and not pursuing weird random trains of association.
When Mulholland subsided at last into the mundane road they had traversed on Vickery’s motorcycle two days ago, Castine hummed for a moment as if to test her voice, then spoke, for the first time in ten minutes.
“Is it over? Finally?”
Vickery stretched and flexed his shoulders, and he noticed that his shirt was damp and clinging to the seat. “Till we get back on a freeway. Or near one.”
“Get your kicks on Route 666,” she said shakily. “This is what you do for a living?”
He nodded. “I’ve never seen it near this bad, though. This stuff is going to get noticed, get in the news. There were cars wrecked, maybe people killed—God knows what the papers will say it is. Earthquakes? Hurricanes? And if it keeps getting worse—”
“Much worse than this would be the Labyrinth itself,” she said. Vickery started to say something, but she held up her hand. “Are the freeways becoming the Labyrinth?” She hiccupped. “I hope you’ve still got those strings with beads on them.�
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“String abacuses. Abaci. Yes, they’re still in my jacket pocket.”
“Good. We may need them again just to get out of LA.” She peered at him narrowly. “Which I assume we’re going to be doing pretty shortly here.”
“With any luck. The truck took a beating in all that.”
“You’ve got your gun. We can always hijack another lunch wagon.”
“Oh, sure. LA’s full of ’em. Start thinking about what sort of food you like.”
He saw ahead the dirt track that led away from the road on the south side, and steered the truck onto it.
The boxy vehicle rocked down the sloping path to the clearing with the mailbox on the south side, and Vickery was glad the brakes still worked as he eased the vehicle to a halt. The engine was still running raggedly, and when he switched it off it clattered on for several seconds before subsiding. The ensuing silence, broken only by bird calls and the whisper of cars passing on Mulholland up the slope, was a relief.
Vickery got out of the truck and walked to the edge of the slope that stretched away for several miles down wooded canyons to Sunset Boulevard, though he couldn’t see that far through the closer trees. The breeze from below smelled of pine, and he crouched and freed a golf-ball-sized pinecone from the dirt and put it in his shirt pocket.
He squinted at Castine and waved toward the bandage on her head. “You okay for a hike?”
She touched the bandage. “It’s not bleeding. And no concussion.”
“As good as it gets,” he said, and stepped down onto the slope.
They picked their way down the hillside, kicking through drifts of leaves and occasionally slapping tree trunks to keep their balance. They passed the black robe that dangled on a coat hanger from a tree branch; the mirror which was its face was a web of cracks now. Vickery nodded when Castine pointed at it and raised her eyebrows.
