by Tim Powers
“I’ve decided,” Vickery said. “I’m going to do it.”
“Sebastian,” she said, pushing aside her coffee and standing up, “Herbert, no, come with us, please! Don’t go and die—or worse, be lost forever—uselessly!—in that—” She stopped talking and just bit her lip; then she held up two cards that looked like airline boarding passes. “I bought you a bus ticket, too.”
Vickery remembered giving her three hundred dollars, two days ago. He pulled the battered envelope of twenty dollar bills from his pocket and held it out to her. “Try to get your money back on my ticket,” he said. “Even with this, your getaway fund is damn slim.”
Castine didn’t look at the envelope. “I don’t want,” she began, then shook her head. “Half an hour ago you said you’d give me half the money—now you want to give it all to me? You don’t expect to come back, do you?”
“I don’t think there’s a lot of time left,” said Laquedem, gently.
“Stay with me!” said Castine suddenly, drawing startled glances from other people in the cafeteria. She snatched off her new sunglasses and stared at him, then looked away, visibly angry and embarrassed. “I—I can’t lose you too, damn you.”
Vickery reached out with his free hand and gripped her shoulder. “Ingrid. I have to. Think about it. It’s all that’s left that I can do. You’ll be okay.” He gave her a crooked smile. “Put the sunglasses back on, they’ve certainly got security cameras in here.”
She nodded absently and fitted the sunglasses back onto her face.
A dark-haired man in a business suit had been blinking around at the brightly-lit menus on the wall behind the cashier, and he was now looking toward Vickery and his companions.
“There you are!” he said.
Castine turned toward the man; and Vickery caught her arm, for her face had gone suddenly pale.
“Eliot!” she said. “Oh God.”
“Why would I give a stranger a hundred dollars?” said the figure facing her. “For all I knew, she was just g-going to go buy drugs with it. Did you see her eyes?”
Santiago had reached into his back pocket; Laquedem was watching the ghost warily. Vickery shifted his feet to be able to pull Castine away. “Six and six?” he whispered.
Castine shook her head, without looking away from the ghost. “The girl from the florist?” she asked the thing.
“Ring a ring of roses,” the ghost chanted, “pocket full of posies, ashes, ashes—I can’t think!—so I called your office to verify it, and agents with proper identification told me . . . audits! Income and taxes, all the way back, and fines and disbarment! So of course, meet me on Toluca Street at ten, like they said. You can see that.”
Vickery was pretty sure Toluca Street was the cul-de-sac below Emerald Street, where the TUA agent had nearly shot Castine yesterday.
“I—thought they tortured you,” said Castine, “to get you to tell me that; to send me into that trap.”
“Traps, torture, pish!” The thing seemed to snap its fingers, though there was no sound of it. “I forgive you, my dear. I’m glad you at least had the sense to get us tickets on a bus—this place where they’ve got me waiting is awful—just a desert, and a bunch of retarded people, and my phone doesn’t work—” The thing had been glancing around the cafeteria anxiously, and now it looked back at Castine, and licked its lips. “Let’s you and me switch places, just to be on the safe side.”
The ghost yawned, widely, and Vickery grabbed Castine and spun around as Laquedem boomed out, “Six and six is twelve, squared is a hundred-and-forty-four, squared is twenty-thousand-seven-hundred-and-thirty-six!” and Santiago had whipped a spirit-level star from behind his back and yelled, “Why are you tilting?”
Vickery was holding Castine against the counter he had been leaning against, facing away from the ghost, with his back toward the thing. Staring at the floor, Castine said, clearly, “I loved you, Eliot—but one from one is nothing. Don’t take my word for it, do the math. Nothing.”
Vickery heard a hard whump from behind him, and then the rattle of a plastic cup hitting the linoleum floor; coffee spattered around his shoes and his dropped envelope.
He looked over his shoulder, and the ghost was gone, though people at other tables were again staring toward his party.
“I don’t think that’s right, Eliot,” called an old man standing over a half-eaten cheeseburger a few yards further down the counter.
Vickery let go of Castine, who stepped around him and slumped back onto her stool.
Looking toward the man who had spoken, Vickery cleared his throat and said, unsteadily, “What?”
“Not what she told you, of course,” the man went on, “one from one—I mean your friend’s guess about the square of one-forty-four. I’m pretty sure that wasn’t right.”
Vickery realized that none of these onlookers had seen the Eliot ghost—evidently none of them had been intimate with a person who had died in a freeway current!—and that they must have supposed Castine had been talking to Vickery.
“I was,” said Laquedem, rubbing his face with one hand, “using imaginary numbers.”
The old man down the counter frowned, then shook his head and went back to eating his cheeseburger.
Vickery leaned back against the counter. Beside him, Santiago tucked the spirit-level star back into his pocket. Laquedem was frowning at Castine, who had lowered her head into her hands.
For a long moment none of them spoke. Around them, trays clattered and the other people had resumed their conversations. Then Castine raised her head and looked at the tickets she was still holding, and handed both of them to Santiago. “Here,” she said, “get a refund on them if you can, and if I ever see you again you owe me seventy-one bucks.”
“Okay, lady.” The boy gave her a rueful smile. “Vaya con Dios.”
Vickery understood what she intended, and he bent and picked up the envelope he had dropped. He brushed spattered coffee off of it and pressed it into her hand, closing her fingers over it.
“Ingrid,” he said. “no, you can’t come along. This isn’t—”
Above the dark lenses her brows creased. “I said you couldn’t get out of there by yourself. You know it’s true. You’ll need somebody to keep calling your attention to the math—and so will I.”
“Castine,” Vickery insisted. “No. He’ll be there.”
“You saw him, you heard him.” Her mouth was bitter. “He’s nothing.”
Laquedem cleared his throat and began, “I don’t think there’s—”
Castine interrupted him.“I’ll steal a car,” she said to Vickery, “and follow you, if I have to. I think you know I will. I’m an adult—I can choose to do this. Allies. Friends.”
Vickery stared at her. Then he turned to Laquedem and said, “Tell her she’s crazy.”
“She’s right,” said the old man, “you’ll need help. Respect her choice.”
Respect her choice. It was a big thought.
“O-kay,” Vickery said finally. He tucked the wet envelope back in his jacket pocket and let his hands drop to his sides. “Ingrid. Thank you. And he’s right, there isn’t a lot of time.” He turned to Laquedem and Santiago. “And thanks for all your help, I think. Give our regards to the world.”
“Yes, yes, and the world thanks you,” said Laquedem, “now git, will you?”
Vickery nodded, and he and Castine hurried toward the 7th Street doors and the parking lot beyond.
Vickery had to grind the starter for a full thirty seconds before the taco truck’s engine stuttered to life, and as he drove north he tried to catch green traffic signals so he wouldn’t have to stop.
When he was driving west on Fifth Street with the low red sun in his eyes, the music from the radios fell into discordant noise; and after a minute of that, as they were driving past the wide lawn of Pershing Square, the music became clear again.
“Just an aftershock,” ventured Castine. Her hands were clenched in her lap.
But Vickery
could feel the pinecone thumping and twisting in his pocket. “I don’t think so,” he said in a tight voice. “Give it a minute.” He had noticed that the ten-story purple bell tower in Pershing Square was wider than he remembered, and seemed to have more openings along its height, and the bushy heads of several palm trees hung in the sky with no trunks below them. And he could hear vacuum bubbles softly popping back in the kitchen.
The music blurred into cacophony.
“The waves are so out of synch,” Vickery hazarded, “that they move over a whole cycle and synchronize there.”
“Oh,” said Castine. “I was hoping that it might all somehow be over.”
Vickery had been breathing shallowly, and he had to take a deep breath to answer. “I think it soon will be, one way or another.”
“How many blocks now, till we get on the freeway?”
“Just two.”
She sighed and looked out her window at a fleeting parking lot. “Better than one. I hope they’re long blocks.”
Vickery wished they were.
“Eliot,” she said slowly, “was just a venal fool, wasn’t he? After all?”
Vickery shrugged. “Hard to argue.”
“I’d like to be holding your hand,” she said, almost in a whisper, “but you’ve got to drive.”
He freed his right hand and for two seconds gripped her left, then returned his hand to the wheel. The freeway was coming up, and he would want to be over in the right lane.
“I don’t think you’re a klutz McMuffin,” she said.
“Klutz mit aoygn,” he corrected.
“Whatever.” She shifted restlessly in her seat. “Three days ago I had a job and a fiancé. I discover I’m better off without either one. This has been a long day’s journey into . . . what?” she said.
He didn’t answer. All too soon he was driving the truck through the Figueroa intersection, and then the green freeway signs loomed overhead. His shirt clung to him and his hands were damp on the steering wheel as he stepped on the gas pedal and steered into the lane that would merge with the northbound 110.
The lane swept onto the freeway. The engine was stuttering, and cars behind him honked as he merged hastily into the right lane. Vacuum bubbles were popping in front of his face now, and he held his breath and narrowed his eyes. But there was no sandstorm yet.
He swerved to the right, slamming the side of the truck against the retaining wall, then swung the truck back into the lane.
“It’s not working,” he gasped.
Desperately he spun the wheel to the left, and tires screeched as he crossed the lane-divider bumps, and he heard a crash behind him.
He shrilly whispered, “Sorry, sorry!” and then saw piercing blue-and-red lights erupt in his side mirror, and heard a one-second whoop of siren.
A loud bang that he thought was a gunshot proved to be a tire blowing out when the right front end of the truck dipped and the vehicle slewed back into the right lane; over the racket from the radio he could hear the flapping flat tire and the wheel’s steel rim abrading pavement.
He opened his mouth to say that they had failed, but before he could speak Castine grabbed the back of his head and slammed his forehead hard into the steering wheel. He rebounded back against the seat—a metallic taste filled his head, and his eyes were watering.
He was dizzily aware that she had taken hold of the steering wheel and that her foot was now pressed down on top of his own foot on the gas pedal, and that the pinecone was jumping and twisting furiously in his shirt pocket. Blood was rolling down his nose and cheek, and when he tried to focus his eyes, it took him a second to realize that the tan blur in his vision was outside the windshield.
The whipping clouds of sand cleared for a moment, and he glimpsed at last the straight offramp that should not have been there. Vickery blinked at the side mirror, but could see no red-and-blue lights now.
And then they were weightless—and a moment later he was thrown forward across the dashboard as the front of the truck crashed into deep water and the truck rolled all the way over. Vickery and Castine were upside-down in sudden darkness, hanging by their seatbelts. Icy water was spraying in at Vickery’s left.
At the Rowley Training Center in Michigan he had many times practiced escaping from an inverted and submerged helicopter, and now he automatically braced one forearm against the headliner and unsnapped his seatbelt; he slid heavily onto the truck’s ceiling, his shoulders taking his weight and his legs still braced against the dashboard above him, and a moment later he felt Castine splash down beside him.
“Open the window,” he shouted, and he heard her gasp, “Right.”
He had to reach up to grope for the window crank in the darkness, and when his fingers finally closed on it he couldn’t get leverage to turn it. Cold water was heavily gushing in now from his right, indicating that Castine was having more luck with the window on her side. The cold was a physical shock, and he barely managed to take a breath before the churning water covered his head. Something pushed hard against his right shoulder and then quickly retracted, and he guessed that it had been the sole of one of her shoes. Perhaps she had got her window open and had thrust her way out.
It was too late to try to find an air pocket and renew his held breath. He pulled himself through the water to his right across the inverted seat backs, and he didn’t collide with Castine—and as he groped for her door, a hand gripped his and tugged him forward; his legs slid free of the dashboard and his free hand found and gripped the edge of the doorframe, and then his knees bumped across the roof edge and he was out.
The black water surged as the truck sank away, and the water was too dark for him to see anything, so he had no idea which direction was up. But her hand still held his, and after a few seconds she tugged him firmly toward the side. He began trying to kick himself through the water in that direction.
But he could feel that the water was full of bubbles, and all his efforts didn’t seem to move him at all. Her hand tugged harder, though, so he kept flailing his legs and his free hand in the oddly unresistant water. The bitter, penetrating cold leached strength from him, and his lungs were heaving against his resolutely closed throat.
When he was sure he must surrender and let his spasming lungs fatally exhale and then inhale water, his face broke the surface and he blew out the stale air and inhaled deeply—and it was the remembered astringent air of the Labyrinth. She let go of his hand and tucked something hard and angular in the back of his belt, and then she was gone.
He slid his hand into his left jacket pocket and pulled out the beaded strings and gripped them with his teeth, then quickly shrugged out of the leather jacket, but even after he had cast it away he could hardly stay afloat—he couldn’t tread water normally, but had to thrash continuously with his arms and legs just to keep his head above water. The fizzing water still looked black, and the low sky was the color of scorched parchment.
“Sebastian!” came a call from his right, and when he managed a glance in that direction he saw Castine’s head ten yards away across the agitated surface of the water. “This way—to shore!” she shouted.
He couldn’t spare the effort to nod, but began to fight his way toward her, having to swim as if at racing speed to make any perceptible progress. The breath whistled through the strings between his clenched teeth. To the extent that he was able to think at all, he was bleakly sure he would lose consciousness from sheer exhaustion before he could get to any shore.
But after some interval of furious exertion, his hand brushed a slope of gritty stones, and he was able to crawl forward on his hands and knees, and he collapsed on rock-strewn wet sand and spat out the beaded strings. He rolled over onto his back, shivering and panting in the noxious air, while the water swirled around his waist and tugged at his legs.
Castine was already ashore, and crawled over to him. She picked up one of the strings and shoved the other into his pants pocket.
“I went back,” she gasped, “but I could
n’t—find you.” She collapsed prone beside him, her face near his. The bandage over her right ear was gone.
“You didn’t,” he managed, “pull me out.” He rolled over and gagged out some of the sulfur-tasting water that clogged his throat and nose. “By the hand.” The darker clouds in the brown sky formed concentric arcs overhead, moving inward as if toward some center.
“No.” She shivered in her wet clothes. “Did somebody?”
He sat up, shaking—with the cold, and with the thought of the hand that had grasped his, down in the black water. “Depends—” he paused to cough and spit—“on what you mean by—somebody.”
He was certain it had been Amanda.
“You kept your,” she began; she was clearly trying to remember a word, and finally just waved at his back.
He reached around, and his numb fingers brushed the grip of a handgun. He remembered Amanda’s rescuing hand tucking it there when he’d been struggling in the water.
He drew up his knees and tried to rest his head on his crossed forearms, but the bruise on his forehead made him lift it again. “I wasn’t drunk,” he said, “or concussed—so you—shot me in the head?”
“That was me,” she said, “who got shot in the head, remember? I shoved your face into the Ferris wheel . . . no, the, you know, the—damn it!” She took a deep breath, wincing, and then said carefully, “The steering wheel of your taco truck.”
“That’s right.” He rubbed his face, trying to remember something very important. “The highway,” he said finally, “we’re supposed to break off a piece of pavement, and take it back to . . . out of this place.” He squinted over his shoulder; there were a lot of low buildings standing at varying distances across the desert now, though when he focused his eyes on any one of them it disappeared. Farther away he could see the factory steady on its hill; and the tornado he had seen on his previous visit now stood sky-tall beside it, slowly flexing. The curved cloud-bands seemed to be converging there. “Quick,” he added.
