Alternate Routes

by Tim Powers

  Castine had sat up. “That’s the highway,” she said, nodding in the other direction. “It doesn’t have pieces anymore.”

  Vickery looked back at the expanse of black water, and he saw that it was a river, wider than the highway had been but curving away as the highway had done. Its rippling surface was hazed with mist. “Carbonated water,” he said. “Aerated, that is. No buoyancy. A float wouldn’t boat. I mean—”

  “No use,” interrupted Castine, “no highway. Let’s go home.”

  “Yes.” Vickery was pretty sure he didn’t live in Barstow, but somehow that was the place he was thinking of.

  The ground shook then, and the river surged up its bank, engulfing Vickery’s waist and nearly pulling him back into its obsidian flow. Castine scrambled up the shallow slope and grabbed his upper right arm, and somebody else took hold of his left arm, and he dug his shoes into the rocky sand and thrust himself back, out of the current.

  When they were several yards away from the water, he looked up to see who his second helper had been, bracing himself to face the ghost of Amanda.

  But it was the little girl who called herself Mary, still in her overalls and straw hat, staring down at him with a concerned look on her narrow face.

  “This is where I live,” she said.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  He remembered who she was, and he flinched as the shock of it cleared his mind. My daughter times the square root of minus one, he thought. The daughter I might have had, should have had.

  Castine straightened up and looked warily at the girl. “We’re going back to the, the world,” Castine said to her. “You should come along.” She glanced worriedly at Vickery and said, “Ten minus three.”

  “Uh,” said Vickery, “don’t tell me. Seven.”

  Mary shook her head. “There is just here, soon.” She glanced in the direction away from the river, toward the factory and the steady tornado. “I’ll never find my secret garden.” The wind was flapping her straw hat, and she tightened a drawstring under her chin.

  A moment earlier Vickery’s one vague thought had been to use the string abacuses to get out of the Labyrinth as quickly as possible, since the highway was gone. But now—

  He made himself look at his never-born daughter, though it was hard to make his eyes focus.

  But there’s another real place there, Laquedem had said.

  The factory. If it’s possible to take something from there, and bring it back . . .

  If you close the conduit, Laquedem had said, the ones who have come across stay here, and eventually fade to nothing. Painlessly.

  It’s what’s left that I can do for her, Vickery thought. Let her fade to nothing in the real world, rather than be consumed by the thing that roars in this awful place. This so-called place.

  He squinted at Castine, who was now holding her beaded string. “I’ve got to go on to that factory,” he said carefully. “You should use your string to go back to . . . the world.”

  Beyond her he could see figures waving their arms overhead and rushing back and forth among the phantom buildings. The wind carried the sound of singing voices now, and smelled of fresh-sheared metal and curdled milk.

  It’ll be worse now, Laquedem had said; that state is getting more polarized and churned up by the hour.

  Castine shook her head. Raising her voice over the monotonous chorus, she repeated what Mary had said: “There is here soon.”

  Vickery had no answer for that.

  He got his aching legs under himself and stood up, blinking and swaying, and he pulled his string out of his jeans pocket and stared at it. There seemed to be a lot of beads on it, and for the moment he forgot about everything else.

  “Ten,” said Castine into the stinging breeze. “No more and no less.”

  He peered closely at the beads. “I think you’re right.” He slid two beads away from the rest. “Now it’s eight,” he said, fairly sure of that.

  He took a step through the resistant air toward the buildings and the shifting crowds that lay between him and the distant hill on which stood the factory.

  And he was facing the other way, toward the river.

  He turned around, and was again looking directly at the surging black water.

  “You’ll never get to the artificer’s castle,” said Mary, “by going there.” She ran toward the river, chanting words that were lost in the wind, and Vickery was startled to see her image fold away like a picture abruptly turned sideways.

  He started after her, and the landscape whirled around and he was facing the buildings and the hill, and Mary was now walking away crossways, parallel to the river that was presumably behind them now.

  Castine was beside him a moment later, gasping. “It was a number that you had,” she said, “can I have it again? It doesn’t seem to be in my phone.” He mouth was working. “I don’t feel so good.”

  “Look at your string,” he told her. “Two from ten is eight.”

  Castine held up her string, and moved two beads. “Damn, you’re right. I see.” She grimaced and spat, then peered in the direction that seemed to be ahead. “Where is she going?”

  “One plus two. I don’t know. Follow her.” He was breathing shallowly. The harsh air was already giving him a headache, and his arms and legs still ached from the exertions in the river.

  “Three.”

  Vickery took Castine’s arm and hurried after Mary, keeping his eyes on the girl rather than on the shifting landscape. Both of them were shaking in their wet clothes; Vickery sneezed—then hurriedly spat several times after seeing half a dozen tiny flies come spinning out of his mouth. The girl seemed very far away at some moments and only a yard or two in front of them at others, but eventually he and Castine were plodding beside her through the sand, and now Vickery could hear what she was chanting.

  “There was a man of double deed,” Mary recited in a sing-song tone, “Who sowed his garden full of seed; when the seed began to grow, ’twas like a garden full of snow.”

  Vickery guessed that reciting this nursery rhyme was her way of holding coherent thought and purpose in this place, and he countered with, “Two plus two plus two—”

  “Is six,” said Castine, laboring along through the cold wind beside them, “and four is ten!”

  Several of the flailing figures ahead were spinning toward them now, their mouths opening and closing rapidly.

  “My garden is full of sand,” said Mary sadly.

  Vickery braced himself for some sort of irrational confrontation, but the approaching figures fell apart into cascades of tiny dark wiggling fragments, which he saw were little lizards as the things began hopping about on the sand. The air shook like jelly with a group of voices laughing, and when the voices paused and began laughing again, the sound of it was exactly the same, as if the laughter were on a rewound tape.

  The river was no longer in sight anywhere, and the stumbling trio was moving now through a sparse cluster of low buildings. The buildings couldn’t be seen by looking directly at them, but in peripheral vision they seemed to be mostly old bungalow houses with pulsing chimneys, and as Vickery and his companions passed between them, the houses could be glimpsed spinning ponderously in place while slow carnival music clanged in counterpoint to the endlessly repeated segment of crowd laughter. Several times they were approached by groups of the phantom figures, but though the things appeared to try to speak, they soon either unfolded into broad stained sheets and flew away on the wind or fell apart in wriggling torrents of lizards, like ruptured spider egg-sacs. The carnival music had faded to a thumping dirge, and the laughter in the air was loud, and shriller, like bird cries.

  Vickery and Castine paused frequently to catch their breaths in the harsh air and hoarsely remind each other what various sums and subtractions were, sometimes desperately arguing about what the beads showed, and from time to time Mary would chant a line or two of her nursery rhyme.

  The factory and the tornado slowly circled them as they walked in an
apparently straight line.

  Vickery peered at the distant hill, which at the moment appeared to be behind them on their left. He fought down nausea and made himself take a deep breath, and said, “I don’t think we’re getting closer.”

  “You don’t get to it by getting closer to it,” said Mary.

  “Last time I was here,” said Vickery, “I saw the, what I guess was the artificer, flying. Does he come from there? If we see him, maybe we could follow.”

  “You could try,” said Mary, “if you see him. Sometimes he drops whistles with weird letters on them, but I don’t have breath to blow them.”

  Vickery hadn’t seen any sort of whistles lying around in the sand, and the winged man was not visible now.

  The rippling sky was for a few seconds darkened by a riot of low-flying crows, and the eternal imbecilic laughter rang down from them; but Vickery looked away when he noticed that their heads were those of grimacing babies.

  “I was one of those once,” said Mary. “They fight the lizards for dropped memories.”

  Vickery’s mouth opened, and he found himself saying, “Cute story.”

  Castine stared at him, wide-eyed, as she said, “Oh, I was cute once. Several times, probably. And now I do a lot worse than shoot hamsters.”

  “Several times, probably,” said Mary.

  The voices in the air were a choppy scream now, and suddenly they were eclipsed by a ground-shaking bass roar that shook the flickering houses into whirling dust and knocked Vickery to his hands and knees with an impact of compressed air. The huge inorganic bellow rocked the ground under his hands and seemed to echo from the throat of a miles-deep cavern, expressing an inorganic and incomprehensible passion, and the only thought in Vickery’s shattered mind was to hide, to shut down, to stop presuming to exist.

  The terrible roaring went on negating everything else for an unmeasured length of time, and awareness only came back to Vickery, cautiously, when he realized that the sound had at some point stopped.

  His face was in the cold sand, and when he rolled over with some effort he saw that he had burrowed into it up to his shoulders. Castine was now propping herself up on her elbows and shaking sand from her hair; her eyes were empty, and her face was white even in the brassy light of this place.

  Mary was still standing, though her eyes were shut, and over the ringing in his ears Vickery could hear what she was saying:

  “When the sky began to roar, ’twas like a lion at my door; when my door began to crack, ’twas like a stick across my back . . .”

  Vickery’s face was cold with sweat and he was gagging, and Mary looked down at him. “Don’t throw up,” she said. “You won’t like what you see.”

  He clenched his teeth and swallowed.

  The girl looked from Vickery to Castine. “If it can know stuff,” she said, “it knows you’re here, inside it.”

  The earth shook under them, and Mary swayed to keep her balance. The brown sky looked crazed with cracks now, like an impacted windshield.

  Castine tried to speak, then spat out sand and said, “I can’t take that again, that—noise.” She looked haggardly across at Vickery. “There’d be no I left. I want to go home.”

  “Four and four,” croaked Vickery, hopelessly.

  “Eight miles high.” She looked at his hand. “You were what, going to—?”

  Reminding himself that four and four were in fact eight, he looked down and saw that he had at some point during the auditory ordeal dropped his string abacus and pulled the gun from behind his belt.

  He sat up. As in the last time he was here, the gun had changed from an semi-automatic to a revolver. For at least a few moments now he could see it clearly, and when he peered at it he saw not only that it was a .357 Magnum, but that it was one that he had once owned, with black rubber Pachmayr grips that he had cut away on the left side for easier application of a speed-loader.

  But this gun shouldn’t exist. The police had returned it to him after the inquest into Amanda’s suicide five years ago, and he had beaten it to pieces with an eight-pound sledge and thrown the pieces into the ocean.

  He flipped open the cylinder. Every chamber was filled with the bright brass of a Federal round, though the primer of one showed the dimple of a spent shell. The other five shells, he knew, would be loaded with Hydra-Shok hollow-points, and he shuddered as he remembered whose hand it must have been that had pulled him out of the submerged taco truck and tucked this gun into his belt.

  Does she want me, too, to kill myself with it?—leave it on the sand here with two spent shells in the cylinder?

  But in that case why rescue me from the sinking truck?

  He stood up unsteadily and pushed the gun back behind his belt.

  “Your string,” said Castine.

  “Right.” He bent down, though it made him dizzy, and picked up the string abacus. The beads felt soft now, like miniature marshmallows.

  Mary was walking away. Exchanging a rudimentary math problem and answer as if they were a password and a countersign, Vickery and Castine did their best to trudge after her. The river was once again on their right more than anywhere else.

  Walking was exhausting work: moving through the air was like pushing between rubber curtains, and it was impossible not to stumble and sometimes fall when a level-looking patch of sand proved to be a steep upward or downward slope, and any careless off-course step would leave one of them heading directly toward the river, and the only way to get back was to deliberately try to approach the water. The air pressure changed from place to place, and several times Vickery had to yawn to make his ears pop.

  Big raindrops began cratering the sand, and a new smell, like burnt plastic, steamed up from underfoot. Vickery took a step, and found himself alone—when he blinked around, he saw that Mary and Castine were twenty yards away; Castine started to walk toward him, and disappeared. A cry from behind him drew his raddled attention, and she was now farther away in another direction, hard to make out through the thickening veils of heavy, sour-tasting rain. His eyes were stinging. He had no idea where the river or the factory might be.

  He looked down at his hand to see the string, but what he held was now a cigarette; when the rain hit it, it darkened and unfolded twig-like legs and began crawling up his wrist. He shook it off with a shudder.

  He tried to remember what the string had been for; something like calculating mileage? Maybe it had been a makeshift pedometer. Probably it had clocked a million steps.

  The sky had lowered and grown dark, and the rain was battering his bruised and aching head. He sat down cross-legged in the wet sand. When he rubbed his hand over his face it came away bloody; his nose was bleeding, apparently a lot.

  The sand was coughing—gritty popping sounds simultaneous with wet clumps flying into the air; it baffled him until a moment when suddenly all the air blew out of his lungs, spraying blood across his ankles. Spontaneous vacuum bubbles, he thought as he reared back out of the bubble and inhaled deeply and then covered his face with both bloodied hands.

  The popping was happening all around him, bursting up patches of wet sand and tossing raindrops in all directions; fearful that one of the bubbles might abruptly occur in his body, in his skull, he struggled to his feet and lurched a dozen yards and then sat down again.

  The turbulent air seemed to rattle with fragments of music and laughter and weeping and droning voices—he knew they weren’t real, just memories spilled from the leaky heads of the phantoms, quickened now by the rain—and then a clear voice intruded:

  “Do you know any poems?”

  He peered up through the stinging rain and saw Mary standing over him. Her curly hair was darkened and clinging in strands across her face and throat.

  “Recite a poem,” she said, speaking loudly over the wind, “if you know one that goes like a drum.”

  Vickery had played Prospero in a high school production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and a couple of remembered lines from it suggested themselves: �
�Our revels now are ended,” he croaked. “These our actors, as I foretold you, were all spirits and are melted into air, into thin air . . .”

  “Get up,” said Castine, who was now swaying beside Mary in the rain. “Like this insubstantial nightmare faded, leave not a rack behind.”

  That sounded to Vickery like more lines from . . . from that play, whatever it had been. He got his legs under himself and stood up.

  And he had to count his companions—there was Ingrid, yes, and there was Mary, and he had apparently forgotten the name of the third person, the one standing in the rain behind Ingrid.

  Castine twitched and shook her head, and Vickery glimpsed a tendril of mist or smoke quickly dissipate from around her shoulders. She stumbled forward, and Vickery caught her; and now he saw that the figure behind her was the ghost of Eliot.

  “You took my memory of it!” the ghost wheezed. Its arms were hanging by its sides, but they disappeared and then were visible raised over its head. “Tell me what we had!”

  Castine pulled free of Vickery and faced the thing. “Nothing beside remains,” she said harshly, evidently quoting something else now. “Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare the lone and level sands stretch far away.”

  Eliot’s ghost was suddenly farther away, and it was peering down at the sand around its feet.

  Castine reeled back against Vickery, clutching her head. “I know he was my fiancé,” she said, “but what did we have?” Blinking in the rain, she looked up at Vickery. “What did we have?”

  “I don’t know,” he said helplessly.

  Now she too was looking down at the sand, scuffing it with the toe of her shoe. She looked up at Mary. “Did I drop something?”

  The little girl shook her head. “Recite more of your poem.”

  “What was it, oh, it was ‘Ozymandias,’” said Castine, “by P-Purse-Snatcher Shelley, right? But I think that was the end of it.” She peered vaguely out across the sand, squinting through the downpour, then shook her head and stepped away from Vickery. “My abacus string turned into a Swiss Army knife,” she said. “Rhyme and meter is all we’ve got to steer by now.”