Three Days to Never: A Novel

by Tim Powers

  Entering the house was stepping out of shadow into sunlight, for the entire west side of the house was windows facing the Beachwood canyon. Frank Marrity and Daphne followed Bennett and Moira inside, blinking around at the blank white walls of the spacious interior; they had entered at street level, but stairs led down to a lower floor with a balcony outside the glass. The afternoon sunlight gleamed on polished wood floors, and Marrity noticed that the faces of his companions were underlit, as if by reflecting water. He put down his briefcase and the shoe box by the door.

  “Lock it, Dad,” said Daphne.

  “Right,” said Marrity, twisting the door’s dead-bolt knob.

  “This would have been perfect for filming,” muttered Bennett. “Camera on the balcony and on the street out front, lots of room inside for everybody’s gear.”

  The kitchen was on the upper, entry level, and Marrity noticed a telephone on the wall by the counter.

  “The phone work?” he asked, starting toward it. His footsteps echoed in the empty house.

  “It’s supposed to,” said Bennett, following him as Moira and Daphne moved to the rail to look down into the broad lower level. “I think Subaru is paying the bill. Let me see your man’s card.”

  Marrity was already tugging his wallet from his hip pocket, and when he pulled the card out he handed it to Bennett.

  Bennett looked at the phone number, which was all that was printed on one side of the card, and then at the other side, which was blank.

  “Who says this guy is with the NSA?” he asked. “Besides him?” He clunked his bagged bottle down on the counter. “I should have bought plastic cups,” he said, his voice lower. “We’ll have to drink from the bottle.”

  “I don’t really care if he’s NSA or not,” said Marrity, taking the card back. He was speaking more quietly too—the echoes seemed to amplify volume. “He’s against the crowd who keeps trying to shoot us, which makes him somebody I approve of.”

  Daphne had joined her father by the counter. “Eugene Jackson was a nice man,” she said.

  Moira turned around and leaned back against the rail, so that she was just a silhouette against the brightness behind her. “Why not just call the police, Frank?”

  Marrity remembered the cartoon thing that had spoken to Daphne from the turned-off television at the hospital, late last night. The Jackson person had appeared to know how to handle it—and Marrity was certain the police would not.

  And he remembered Bennett’s fifty thousand dollars. Was Bennett anxious to talk to the police?

  “We’ll probably call the police,” he told her. “But I want to call this NSA guy first, and then you need to hear the full story. Then, if you like, we can call the police.”

  “Can I call my office?” Moira went on. “Tell them I’ll be late coming back?”

  “You should have done it from a pay phone down the hill,” said Bennett. “You haven’t seen these guys, Moira, they’re scary.”

  Moira laughed incredulously and stepped away from the railing, into the kitchen area. “You think they’ve tapped the phone at the dentist’s office?”

  “Let’s see what our NSA man says about you calling your office,” said Marrity. He laid the card down on the tile counter with a faint slap, and then took a deep breath and flexed his fingers.

  They all stared at him.

  “Who,” Bennett asked, squinting, “was the Greek philosopher who practiced rhetoric by putting pebbles in his mouth?”

  “Demosthenes, I think,” said Marrity.

  “They probably didn’t have scotch, in those days.” Bennett pulled the bottle of Ballantine’s out of the paper bag. “You want a mouthful before you call?”

  Moira muttered, “Oh for God’s sake,” but Daphne nodded at her father as solemnly as if she were advising sunscreen or seat belts.

  “Good idea,” Marrity said. Bennett twisted off the cap and took a generous sip of the liquor before passing the bottle to Marrity.

  Marrity took several scorching swallows, then handed it back.

  Bennett nodded. “Damn good idea,” he said breathlessly.

  “We didn’t get any Cokes,” said Daphne.

  “Sorry, Daph,” Marrity said, exhaling, “we’ll get some later. But you can’t have warm scotch right out of a bottle.”

  “Nor even in a glass with ice and soda, I hope!” said Moira.

  “No, no,” agreed Marrity, who in fact had been thinking that if they’d had glasses he could have given Daphne a very watered-down drink. “Here goes,” he said, picking up the telephone receiver and dialing the number.

  The phone at the other end rang only once, and then a man’s voice said, “Yes.”

  “This is—”

  “I know who it is,” interrupted the voice.

  “Okay. I think we need rescue.”

  “Yes you do. I gather you and your daughter weren’t injured this morning? Let’s not use names.”

  “Okay. No, that’s right, neither of us was injured. But two hours ago that crowd tried to kidnap us in front of my grandmother’s house. It’s the woman with the sunglasses and her friends, I mentioned her to you last night.”

  “Yes, we’re aware of them. Where’s the last place your grandmother was standing, on Sunday, in Pasadena? As far as you know? I don’t think she went to Newport Beach, do you?”

  “No, she didn’t go to Newport Beach. Who said she did? She went to the airport. We have information you need, and if you don’t rescue us this crowd will find us again.”

  “And kill us,” added Daphne. Marrity frowned and touched his forefinger to his lips.

  “We’ll pick you up immediately,” said the man on the phone, “and you’ll be safe. Did you use a radio, or the telephone, at your grandmother’s house, Sunday or today?”

  “No.” Marrity frowned impatiently. “Yes, on Sunday, I called my sister from there. Why, was it tapped?”

  “How was the connection?”

  “It was a bad connection, it kept fading out, with static. We can tell you all this—”

  “But where’s the last place your grandmother was standing in Pasadena? To the best of your knowledge?”

  Marrity reminded himself that this man was their only hope. “At the curb, waiting for the cab. Or on the porch.”

  “No, I mean while she was still in the house.”

  “How could I possibly—in her kitchen, I imagine, or in the shower, or in her shed. How should I know? Listen, my father is with these people, the people who tried to kidnap—”

  “Voluntarily?”

  “My father? Yes, he could have driven away with us, but he decided to stay with them. He says he’s met them before, when he was thirty-five, though most of this crowd is too young for him to have met them then.”

  “I daresay. Why her shed? What’s in the shed?”

  “Uh—lawn mowers.”

  “Plural?”

  Marrity was sweating. Actually there wasn’t even one lawn mower in Grammar’s shed; it had just seemed like a plausible answer.

  The man went on: “Is there any unusual machinery in her shed? Is this the decrepit old shed in her backyard?”

  “Yes, that shed.” Marrity saw Moira raise her eyebrows. “Well, she’s got a VCR out there.”

  “A VCR. Is there a gold-wire swastika on the floor? Maybe under the floor?”

  Marrity opened his mouth, but couldn’t think of an answer to give the man.

  “I’ll take your silence as a yes,” said the man’s voice. “And I bet she was barefoot.”

  Marrity remembered the tire-soled sandals he and Daphne had seen on the brick floor of the Kaleidoscope Shed. “Uh…” he began.

  “Stay right where you are, I’ll send somebody to pick you up. For right now just tell me your nearest big cross streets—call this number again in half an hour to give me your exact location.”

  “Nearest…?” said Marrity, trying to remember. “Uh, Franklin and Beachwood, I guess. We’re up in the hills.” He glanced at Moi
ra. “Can we call the—what do you think of the idea of us calling the police? Or my sister’s employer?”

  “Don’t call anyone else. Repeat, do not. Just sit still and call me again in half an hour.”

  Daphne was tugging at Marrity’s sleeve. “Something you’ve got to tell him!” she whispered.

  “One second,” said Marrity into the phone; then he covered the mouthpiece and said, “What, Daph?”

  “They’ve got to feed the cats!”

  Marrity nodded and took his hand off the phone. “You still there?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “We have one condition, for our cooperation. A…gesture of good faith, on your part.”

  “What is it?”

  “You people need to put a twenty-pound bag of Purina Cat Chow in my kitchen. Lay it down flat, like a pillow, and then cut the whole top surface off. It’s stiff paper, there’re knives in the drawer to the right of the sink. They’ll be all right for water, they all drink out of the toilets.”

  “Your house is certainly under hostile surveillance.”

  “That’s why I’m asking a pro to do it, not one of the neighbors.”

  The voice laughed. “Fair enough. We’ll do it. Talk to you in thirty minutes.”

  Nineteen

  Lepidopt switched off his portable telephone and tucked the bulky thing into its carrying case. He shifted in the passenger seat to look around; they were on Fairfax, not far south of Hollywood Boulevard.

  “Ernie,” he said to Bozzaris, “get to Lieserl’s house right now—204 Batsford Street, in Pasadena—take the 101 south to the northbound Pasadena freeway, it ends very close to her place.”

  Bozzaris visibly decided on the quickest way to the 101, then made a fast right turn onto Santa Monica Boulevard.

  “And when we get there,” Lepidopt went on, “you go into the shed in the backyard and find the gold swastika on the floor. It might be under whatever the floor is, which I hope isn’t concrete. Photograph the swastika, trace any wiring or machinery and photograph that, and then take it all out; we’ll want to reassemble it at the Wigwam Motel. That other crowd has got the old twenty-first-century Frank Marrity. He’s with them voluntarily—he’ll probably want to delay telling them about the machine in the old lady’s shed until he’s made some deal, got some assurances, but they might abbreviate that. So be quick.”

  “The old guy knows this stuff about the shed?”

  “It’s got to be how he came back here, from the future.”

  “Ah. You’ll want me to drop you off somewhere.”

  “No, I’ll wait in the car, outside her house. None of that crowd has seen me before. If they arrive in the middle of your work, I think we’ll kill them.”

  The portable phone buzzed again, and Lepidopt thought Marrity must have thought of some other task like feeding the cats; but it was an old man’s voice on the line.

  “What?” said the reedy old voice.

  Lepidopt’s chest was suddenly cold, for he thought he recognized the voice. Easy enough, he thought, to make the phone ring again. Just push some electrons around, reactivate the circuitry that was activated a moment ago.

  “Uh,” said Lepidopt hoarsely, “Sam?”

  Peripherally he could see Bozzaris glance sharply at him.

  “I don’t know what it is,” said Sam Glatzer’s voice. “But it’s in a cement tepee. And it’s also in a truck. This thing.”

  “What is, Sam?” A moment later Lepidopt bared his teeth, belatedly remembering that it’s no use asking ghosts questions before they’ve given the answers.

  He was sweating. He had talked to a ghost only once before, and that had been during his training in Tel Aviv in 1968, in the trailer, with an instructor and other students—and the ghost hadn’t been anyone he had known.

  Another ghost voice intruded on the phone line now—a younger man, possibly drunk: “Two days I sat beside my body, staring at the holes in my chest.” Looking out the car window, Lepidopt noted that they were driving past the gray stone walls of the Hollywood Cemetery.

  “Not that,” said Sam, “but a place that looks like that.”

  “Okay,” said Lepidopt helplessly.

  “I went to my grandfather,” said the other man’s voice; a moment later the voice added, “to find out who I am, where I came from.”

  Lepidopt gritted his teeth. The intruding voice was certainly a ghost too, so there was no point in telling him to be quiet.

  “And it’s in the Swiss Family Robinson tree house at Disneyland,” said Glatzer’s voice, “in a manner of speaking.”

  “Right,” Lepidopt said. What is, Sam? he thought. He tried to remember everything Sam had said so far.

  “At the Chinese Theater,” Glatzer went on. “It’s in a lot of places.”

  “But I have no mother, really,” interjected the other voice, “Only children.”

  “You know what a capacitor is, right?” said Glatzer. “Put the hand in when the cement was wet. It’s more like a capacitor.”

  “My mother will hide them,” said the other ghost voice, “or try to. Everyone who dwells here is safe.”

  “The thing I thought was a gravestone,” said Glatzer.

  Lepidopt sighed and wiped his forehead.

  “Tell me about it, Sam,” he said, to pave the way for the things the old man’s ghost had already said; for he had it now.

  “They’ll try to find my children,” said the other voice unhappily.

  “Oren,” said Glatzer, “listen…”

  Oren Lepidopt held the phone to his ear, but neither of the ghosts said anything more.

  Lepidopt supposed that was the last thing he would ever hear Sam Glatzer say: Listen…

  Lepidopt switched off the phone. “That was Sam Glatzer,” he told Bozzaris. “His ghost. He says we’ve got to get the Charlie Chaplin footprint slab too. It’s apparently part of the machine, and it’s apparently in the shed too. It’s a capacitor, he said.” He began punching numbers into the phone. “I’d better get some sayanim with a truck.”

  Bozzaris’s eyebrows were up, and he was nodding as he watched the glittering lanes ahead of him. “How did Sam sound?”

  Lepidopt laughed harshly. “Good. Rested.”

  Denis Rascasse’s body was stretched across one of the bunks at the back of the parked bus. He was breathing through his open mouth, in ragged snores. The gash in his scalp had been rubbed with Neosporin and bandaged, but he was still unconscious and there were no plans to take him to a hospital. Young Hinch sat up front in the driver’s seat, twisting a Rubik’s Cube on each square of which he had painted a Hebrew letter.

  Rascasse’s attention was several miles away, at Echo Park. He had long since lost the body habit of seeing from two close-set points as if he were using organic eyes, and his perspective was broad—sunlight was gleaming off the lake in a million directions like a fire, and at the same time the lake was a placid jade green with no reflections at all; he could see all sides of every one of the trees around the lake and the undersides of the lotus lillies on the western shore. Nothing was “in front of” anything else.

  But he couldn’t focus on one of the rental boats on the lake.

  He knew why. Golze and the elderly Frank Marrity were in that boat, and Golze must have removed the Chaplin’s-hat ribbon from the Baphomet head and buttoned it around his own neck—almost certainly with a twist to make a Moebius strip of it.

  Chaplin had made a lot of movies at Echo Park for Keystone Studios, back in the nineteen-teens. Chaplin had been a magician who took extensive masking precautions, and his lifeline was a tangle here; every time a director had said, “Cut!” there was a jig in his line, and in 1914 Chaplin had even made a movie in which he had completely submerged in the lake, as if in a baptism. Lots of kinks and false stops.

  And Golze had now lit up that old spiderweb camouflage pattern by wearing Chaplin’s hat ribbon. Whenever Rascasse tried to focus on the boat, he found that he was instead looking away from the b
oat, in all directions at once. Even for a person as experienced in out-of-body perspectives as Rascasse, it was jarring and disorienting.

  The elderly Frank Marrity squinted around in the sunlight at the palm and yellow-flowered acacia trees that ringed the little lake. From the boat on the water, he could see here and there a homeless person sleeping in the shade beside a shopping cart, and children and ducks on the asphalt walk that ringed the lake.

  “Last time we talked,” he said, “it was on a bus. Do you still have that bus?” He leaned forward as he spoke, to be heard over the clanging and squeaking of the mechanical toy animals Golze had set into motion on the curved boards below their feet.

  “Yes.” Golze rested on the oars, having propelled the orange-painted rowboat a good ten yards out from the shade of the roofed rental dock. He had loosened his tie and laid his tweed jacket across the blue vinyl cushion on the thwart between them, but his white shirt was already dark with sweat. For some reason the fat man was wearing a black ribbon choker, barely visible below his beard.

  “When was this?” Golze asked.

  A tin ape with a pair of cymbals had run down, and Golze picked it up and wound the key in its back. Luckily most of the toys were battery operated.

  The old Frank Marrity shrugged as Golze set the rackety toy back down among its fellows. “It might have been right now, this date and this hour,” Marrity said. “I don’t recall, exactly. For me, subjectively, it was quite a while ago—I was thirty-five years old.” He took a sip from his can of 7-Up, to which he had added enough vodka to dispel its coldness, and shuddered. The lake smelled like moss and algae and the breeze smelled like roof tar.

  “I see,” said Golze. “Things, events have deviated, from the way they originally happened? You can help keep these toys wound up.”

  “Of course they’ve deviated.” Marrity carefully set his 7-Up on the thwart and then bent to pick up a dog with brown-and-white nylon fur and begin twisting its key. He wished he’d brought a hat; the sun overhead was hot on his scalp through his thinning gray hair. “For one thing, in my original experience of August 1987 my elderly father didn’t visit me. That’s who I’ve told my younger self that I am. My father. Our father. He believes it—I’m close enough to the right age, and of course I look like him, and I know the family history.”