by Tim Powers
Artificial Christmas trees and plastic flowers lined the banks of the trench he had ridden the motorcycle over two days ago, but there was no water in the damp cement channel now. A few yards further down the slope, they came across the other channel, in which water had flowed in the direction opposite to the first one; it too carried no water. The arms of the green metal statue just beyond it were still outstretched, though its arms ended at the wrists, its pinwheel hands gone.
Vickery pulled the .45 from his pocket and signaled to Castine to stop.
He lifted his head and opened his mouth, straining to hear anything above bird calls and the wind in the branches, but there was no other sound.
At last he whispered, “Somebody’s dismantled his ghost distracters. Probably yesterday,” he added, seeing Castine’s alarmed look.
She spread her hands. “Let’s just go,” she whispered back.
Vickery considered that. Hike back up to the truck, find a cutout or fire road on Mulholland where they could just wait out this spectral earthquake, this supernatural hurricane; or maybe take Mulholland all the way west to the 405 Freeway—it was always clogged with slow traffic, so maybe it wouldn’t be generating as intense a current as the 101 was doing at the moment. North on it to the San Fernando Valley . . . and Kagel Mountain, from the peak of which he and Amanda had so many times launched their hang-gliders . . .
You took my wing . . .
I need to lay her to final rest before we go, he thought. Try to, at least.
“You can wait in the truck.”
She shook her head. “I wish I still had my gun, though,” she whispered.
Vickery stepped over the second trench, careful not to place his foot on dry leaves or twigs, and Castine followed him silently as he led the way down the wooded slope toward Hipple’s house.
When he could see the one-story clapboard house through the trees, he paused and waved Castine to a halt. The place looked exactly as it had two days ago—the dozens of tiny windows below the widely overhanging roof, the TV antennas with their dolls and false teeth dangling on strings—and the screen door was open, and Vickery saw Jack Hipple step out of the house and sit down on the front steps. The man didn’t seem to be hurt.
Vickery was about to move out from behind the trees into the clearing when he heard thrashing in the underbrush among the trees behind him, up the hill. Castine didn’t have to be told to step out of sight behind the trunk of an oak.
The noise halted, though Vickery could now faintly hear grindings of shoes on damp soil above him; it sounded like just one pair of shoes. Someone was descending the slope, trying not to be heard doing it. Perhaps the person had belatedly noted the empty channels and the handless statue, and likewise concluded that a silent approach was called for.
The sounds became fainter, and Vickery couldn’t tell how far away among the trees the person might be; and then a voice spoke softly from only a few yards away:
“Don’t shoot, Señor Vickery.”
Vickery turned his head, and wasn’t altogether surprised to see the boy Santiago peering at him from behind a carob trunk. The boy was holding a semi-automatic pistol that looked extra big in his small brown hand, but it was pointed at the ground and his finger was outside the trigger guard. Vickery saw that it was a SIG-Sauer P229, and he guessed that it was the gun he and Castine had left behind on that service road two days ago.
Santiago nodded to Castine, then asked Vickery, “You come to kill Hipple?”
“No. To collect on a debt.”
“I believe I recognize that gun,” said Castine sternly.
“Sure, lady.”
Santiago pushed the gun into the waist of his jeans and pulled his shirt out over it. To Vickery he said, “I went looking for you at the Galvan kitchen this morning. Laquedem wants to see you.”
Vickery shifted uncomfortably. It’s important, the old man had told him. Bring it back with you, and bury that piece in the dirt at the omphalos. Well, Vickery thought now, the piece of asphalt melted. Nothing I could do about it.
“I talked to him yesterday,” he said gruffly.
“Something else. Important.”
Important. That word again. Vickery sighed and squinted at him. “Do you know what it is?”
“I don’t ask him his business.”
Vickery hesitated, then shook his head dismissively. “We talked enough already.”
The boy gave him a quizzical look, then stepped past him into the clearing. Vickery and Castine followed him, looking warily around at the gaps between the trees. There didn’t seem to be anyone else in the vicinity.
Hipple looked up as the three of them approached him. The sun was on his pale face, and his dark moustache and horn-rimmed glasses looked especially dark.
“Three blind mice,” he said. “What purpose brings you all here?”
“I’m here because I believe you owe me a big favor,” said Vickery. “Do I need to say why?”
“I don’t know. And you, my dear? What did you do to your head?”
“I’m just along with him,” said Castine. “I, uh, had a misadventure with a hair-dryer.”
“And the Mexican boy,” said Hipple. “You want more ghost repellers?”
“Maybe,” said Santiago. “Credit for future stuff, anyway. For it, I trade you this: a ghost told me that the TUA people aim to lean on you.”
“No doubt,” said Hipple. “I tell you what, I’m not feeling well today, so why don’t you all—”
“Let’s talk in the house,” said Vickery.
“Oh, very well.” Hipple got to his feet and shuffled back into the dimness, and his three visitors followed. The tarry smell of latakia tobacco was strong on the stale air.
“I want you to summon a ghost,” said Vickery, fishing the little pinecone out of his pocket, “and subsume her into this. If you do that, I’ll write off your betrayal.”
“Hmm, hmm, subsuming ghosts, are we?” said Hipple. “A good day for it.” Castine had taken a step toward the door over the abyss, and he snapped, “Stay here by the table!”
Castine halted, then went back to stand beside Vickery.
Hipple peered at him through the manifying lenses of his glasses. “You were on the highway?”
Vickery nodded. “In one of the taco trucks. For a few miles.”
“Overcooked?”
“Hm? Over everythinged, you might say.”
Vickery peered past the couch, wondering what Hipple had not wanted Castine to see, and his eyes had adjusted to the dimness enough for him to make out a pair of men’s shoes lying toes-up on the carpet between the back of the couch and the far door.
A suspicion dawned on him, and he sang, softly, “Three blind mice, three blind mice . . .”
Hipple began jiggling violently on the couch, and then his tongue shot out six feet toward Vickery; but Vickery had half-expected it, and sprang to the side so that the wiggling tendril fell on the carpet and was quickly retracted.
“Flee now the gun!” sang Hipple, “dum dum de dum! They epitaph the embalmer’s life—”
“Two and two is—” began Castine quickly.
“No!” Vickery shouted at her, “he can still do it!” To what he now understood was Hipple’s ghost, he said, “Stay where you are,” and then he strode past the couch and pulled open the door over the cliff. Cool fresh air blew into the room, chilling the sudden sweat on his forehead, and in the wash of daylight Vickery saw Hipple’s body lying face-up on the floor behind the couch. The eyes were open but not gleaming, and the shirt was blotted brown with dried blood. Vickery glanced behind him—Hipple’s ghost was still on the couch, its head bobbing to the song it was now humming.
Vickery stepped back and switched on the old television set, then turned to face the sky beyond the open door.
He could hear Hipple’s ghost still humming. Through the doorway the distant rooftops of Beverly Hills were confetti around the line of Sunset Boulevard. His heart was thudding in his chest.
&
nbsp; The orange wing and the red-striped white one, he thought. We’ll meet at the landing zone. He took a deep breath.
“Amanda!” he called out into the air. He dug a hand into a pocket of his jeans and pulled out his wedding ring and slipped it onto his finger. “Amanda!” he called again, holding his left hand up against the daylight.
He heard Castine gasp behind him, and when he turned he saw that she was staring at the television set. He followed her gaze and saw that a face had appeared in black and white on the screen.
This time it was recognizably Amanda’s face. The mouth moved, and from the open doorway her voice shivered the air.
“Herbert.”
A quick glance showed him that the doorway was still empty, and he looked back at the screen.
“Herbert,” came her voice from the side again, “run, jump, quick get here where they can’t find you, help me hide from them. Where are the children? I looked out in the yard, but it’s just a big hole now. Were you going to put in a swimming pool? It’s way too deep, I think it goes to China.”
He held out the little pinecone in a trembling palm. “Amanda,” he said unsteadily, “I want you to relax into this. The . . . person on the couch can tell you how. You’ve been too long out beside that desert highway—”
Castine emitted a squeak in the same moment that the light from the opened doorway dimmed slightly, and when Vickery looked up he saw a translucent silhouette framed there.
“I will not!” said Amanda’s ghost. “You relax into it, if you want somebody to be a pinecone forever!” Her glassy arms rose, slow and disjointed, like kelp fronds in a slow tide. “I keep on looking for our children, when the bad man isn’t asking me questions . . . but I keep coming back to the same place . . . the factory moves . . .”
“Jack,” called Vickery desperately, “how do we do this?” He waved the pinecone toward the couch. “Like with your pipes, your Castellos.”
“Dearly departed,” said Hipple’s ghost in an affected high, nasal tone, “we are gathered here to join this woman and this pinecone in holy oblivion—”
Castine and Santiago, wide-eyed, stepped back as Hipple’s ghost rippled and blurred and then was visible standing up. It now appeared to be wearing pajamas.
“Amanda!” said Vickery. “Cooperate here, please!”
“But,” said Hipple’s ghost, “speak now and forever hold my peace.” It faced Vickery, and again the tongue leaped out of its face, this time striking Vickery’s outstretched hand.
Razory cold lanced through Vickery’s hand, and the pinecone fell to the floor, jerkily, for the ghost’s tongue was now attached to it—and the body of Hipple’s ghost was shrinking, disappearing. Within moments the tongue was all that was left, and then it disappeared into the pinecone.
“No, damn it,” gasped Vickery, “not you—”
His empty hand was numb and throbbing. He spun back to Amanda’s ghost—and it was vibrating now, and when he glanced at the television screen he saw that her mouth was wide and her eyes had disappeared.
“I seen this,” said Santiago softly. “They’re shocking her.”
“Feedback,” said Castine. “I—”
“Amanda!” called Vickery, his voice cracking. “Stay here—damn it—”
The television screen showed only bristling gray now, but her voice came faintly from the clear doorway, “Mulholland, please, Mulholland again . . .”
The door over the cliff slammed shut with an impact that shook the whole house. The television screen went dark.
Vickery and Castine and Santiago looked at one another breathlessly for several seconds, and then Santiago walked around the couch and looked down at Hipple’s corpse.
Castine exhaled as if she’d been holding her breath. “Is that his body back there?”
“What?” snapped Vickery, wincing as he massaged his hand. “Oh—yes, damn him. Looks like he’s been shot, at least several hours ago.” He looked at Santiago. “They already leaned on him.”
“We’ve got to get out of here,” said Castine. “She just told them where we are. And,” she added, waving toward the body behind the couch, “they were here a while ago, they know where this place is. Where would he have put my gun, my registered SIG?”
“I don’t know,” said Vickery. “Look around.”
She swept a quick glance over the shelves, then hurried past the television, down a hall.
Santiago had turned away and picked up the pinecone. He held it out toward Vickery. “You want it? Hipple’s in it.”
“I’d like to burn it,” said Vickery. “But I suppose we can always use another inhabited piece of junk.” He took it with his left hand and put it in his shirt pocket. This was a failure, he thought. Worse than a waste of time.
Santiago walked past him, toward the shelves. The boy dragged an ottoman over and stood on it, and pulled down the box that Vickery recalled held the spirit-level stars and fixed compasses. Santiago hopped down and opened the box.
“He still owes me,” he said, taking several of the spirit-level stars.
“Fine, fine.” Vickery looked around the dim room, but didn’t see anything that seemed to him worth taking.
Castine reappeared from the hallway, panting. “I didn’t see it. And we’ve got to get away from this, now!”
Santiago didn’t look at her, and spoke to Vickery. “Laquedem needs to talk to you.” Vickery started to tell the boy to forget it, but Santiago went on, “I think a lot of people are dying. Cars are crashing out there, a lot of ’em. This is your city.” The boy tucked the spirit-level stars into the back pocket of his jeans.
Castine stamped her foot and waved toward the front door.
Vickery nodded to Castine, and told Santiago, “If he knows a way to fix it, let him do it.”
The boy gave him an unfriendly look. “You maybe noticed he’s old, and sick.”
Vickery bared his teeth impatiently. Would it all have stopped, he wondered, if I had buried a piece of something real—hyper-real—at the omphalos? Might that have closed the omphalos, the conduit between the two worlds?
Cars are crashing out there.
Is there—by any chance—something I can still do?
This is your city.
“We can call him from Nevada or somewhere,” said Castine, stepping to the door. “Sebastian! Will you come on?”
Vickery followed Castine. “The guy’s just down by Pico,” he said to her. “It’s a quick drive.”
“Not now,” said Santiago, tossing the box onto the couch. “He’s someplace else, not at Rambam now. I can take you to him, quick, in your truck. He’s got tickets for me and him to take a bus to Barstow tonight. If the city can’t be fixed, he wants to be away from freeways and north of the San Gabriel Mountains.”
“We should go see him before we leave California,” Vickery told Castine as they stepped down onto the astroturf in front of Hipple’s house. The pine-scented breeze was chilly.
“This is the guy on crutches?” Castine asked angrily. “Who I saw at Holy Sacrament yesterday? If he’s so smart, why don’t we do what he’s doing? Away from the freeways, north of the mountains!”
Vickery started across the clearing toward the trees, squinting in the sunlight after the dimness inside Hipple’s house. “Is he close by?” he asked Santiago. When the boy nodded, Vickery turned to Castine. “I should talk to him. I owe him—he told me how to rescue you, in return for me doing something for him, and I didn’t manage to do it.” He held up a hand to stop her further objections. “And if he knows a way”—another way, he thought—“to close the gate between the, the Labyrinth and this world . . .” He took a step up the slope. “People were certainly getting killed today on the crazy freeways. Still are, probably. Maybe we could help stop it, somehow.”
“Would you still care about all that,” said Castine, starting up the slope herself, “if your Amanda had climbed safely into the pinecone?”
Vickery opened his mouth to snap an angry reply, wh
en it occurred to him that in fact he probably would be willing to leave everybody on the freeways to their perils, if Amanda had consented to take eternal refuge in the pinecone. Slowly he pulled the wedding ring off of his finger and pushed it back down into the pocket of his jeans.
“Maybe not,” he conceded. “But if this guy Laquedem thinks he knows a way to save people from getting killed on these cranked-up freeways, don’t you think we should delay our exit long enough to at least hear what he has to say?”
She was silent as the three of them clambered up the hillside, stumbling over roots and rocks. Vickery’s right hand was recovering enough feeling and muscle control for him to use it to brace himself on tree trunks from time to time. When they reached the green metal figure, Santiago stepped aside and began tugging his bicycle out from behind a pyracantha bush, and Castine gave Vickery a doubtful frown and nodded toward the boy.
Clearly she meant, Do you trust him?
“I think he’s honest, most of the time,” said Vickery quietly. “Freelance, not loyal, but honest, to an extent.”
“Huh. Like us all these days.”
Santiago had freed the bicycle, and the three of them resumed climbing the slope, Santiago leaning on his bicycle to keep his balance, and Castine and Vickery sometimes proceeding awkwardly on all fours.
At the crest of the slope at last, Vickery walked a few steps across the clearing and sat down by the mailbox post to catch his breath. “We can put your bike,” he said to Santiago after a few moments, “in the truck.”
Castine flicked her fingers upward. “You can rest while you’re driving.”
“Ri-ight,” said Vickery, getting to his feet. He trudged to the taco truck and opened the back doors. Santiago wheeled his bicycle over, and easily lifted it in and leaned it against the refrigerator.
“If everybody’s tricky,” the boy said, squinting up at Vickery, “you can’t be loyal to more than one of them.”
You can try, thought Vickery. He closed the doors and they walked to the front of the truck.
