by Tim Powers
More Walls Broken Copyright © 2019
by Tim Powers. All rights reserved.
Dust jacket and interior illustrations (Limited Edition only) Copyright © 2019 by Jon Foster. All rights reserved.
Print version interior design Copyright © 2019
by Desert Isle Design, LLC. All rights reserved.
Electronic Edition
ISBN
978-1-59606-887-2
Subterranean Press
PO Box 190106
Burton, MI 48519
subterraneanpress.com
Manufactured in the United States of America
For Bill and Peggy Wu
and Ken Estes
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
More Walls Broken
Newsletter
When the night security guard had closed the gates, the white Ford van moved slowly up the driveway, past the dark windows of the Spanish-style information center on the left, and halted a few yards short of the open-sided electric cart. The cart’s headlights shone toward the gates and Newport Boulevard beyond, while the van’s were pointed the other way, but it was the diffuse white radiance of the full moon that lit the wall and the asphalt lane and the trees over on the eastern edge of the cemetery.
Having re-locked the gate, the guard walked up to the driver’s side window of the van, first noting the California State University logo painted on the side.
The window was down. “About an hour,” said the guard, “according to the permit. Right?”
The elderly driver cleared his throat. “That should be ample,” he agreed. A man seated beside him leaned across and said, “Just taking core soil samples from six locations. Well away from any graves!”
The guard squinted into the van’s dim interior. “It said ground water contamination.”
“The possibility thereof,” said the man in the passenger seat. “Breakdown of coffin-making materials—metal, varnish, sealers. We’ll be testing specifically for evidence of ammonium copper quaternary or copper boron azole. There, uh, may be some pathogenic fumes.”
“Huh. Better you than me. My job to keep azoles out.” The security guard was chuckling to himself as he got into the electric cart and steered it out of the way.
A cold breeze smelling of clay swept across the moonlit lawns, and the van’s driver pressed the armrest button to raise the window as he drove forward. “You cover…copper boron azoles in Advanced Anomalies?”
The man in the passenger seat sighed. “I had the foresight to read up on our ostensible purpose.”
From behind them a third man spoke up. “That was good, Dr. Blaine, what he said. Copper quaternary! Boron!”
Blaine kept his eyes on the lane and didn’t reply, and the man sitting in the back leaned against the van wall and pressed his lips together. He was an assistant professor, two years along on the tenure track, and if his publication portfolio and student evaluations and “service to the university” met with the approval of the Provost three years from now, he would have tenure; if not, he would have a year to find another position somewhere. This undertaking tonight should, he hoped, count as “service to the university”—to Blaine’s Consciousness Research Department, in any case—though he wished his Sociology degree had proven acceptable to a more orthodox department at the university, and he had little confidence that the three of them would actually accomplish anything here tonight. He queasily hoped not, in fact. Still, he was demonstrating cooperation and team spirit, and meant to give it his best.
Blaine glanced at the white-haired man beside him. “Where is it, Peter?”
“That lane coming up on your left. I bestirred myself to come out here this afternoon and stick a flag on his grave.” Peter Ainsworth shifted around in his seat and peered into the back of the van. “Cobb,” he said, “you’ve got what, his gate, is it?”
“Yes,” Cobb said, “It had to be something metal, with loosely held valence electrons, and when I went to his—”
“It’s a section of chain-link fence about ten feet long,” Blaine interrupted. The little flag on the grass was visible in the headlights, and he drove a few yards past it, then braked to a halt and turned off the lights and the engine. “You should have seen us loading it in,” he added as he levered his door open and stepped down to the asphalt. “My back is still killing me.” He carefully lifted a briefcase from the van floor and held it in both hands.
A cold breeze broke up the warm air inside the van. Cobb didn’t want to climb over the gate that lay behind him, so as Ainsworth got out of the van on the right side, he crawled forward between the front seats; by the time he had got his legs under himself and climbed out of the van, the other two men had shuffled around and opened the back. Cobb followed, wishing he’d worn a sweater.
Ainsworth was impatient, and had already taken hold of one of the gate’s four-foot aluminum end-poles, and even as Cobb started forward to help, the old man rocked back, tugging at it.
The chain-link gate slid halfway out of the van and then stopped, and Ainsworth let go of it and hopped awkwardly away across the moonlit asphalt.
“Christ!” he whispered, rubbing his shoulder. Cobb recalled that his health was reputedly not good. The old man glared at Cobb. “You were just supposed to get something from his house, remember? I wanted something like a doorknob.”
Now that Armand Vitrielli was dead, Peter Ainsworth was Cobb’s immediate supervisor in the Consciousness Research Department, and he was staring at Cobb now as if the younger man must be making fun of the evening’s activity. Blaine simply stood silent on the grass a couple of yards away, clutching his briefcase.
“I was too late for anything like that,” said Cobb hastily, “the house has been torn down, and the ground even looks scraped. But the chain-link fence that used to be around the property was all piled up next to some Dumpsters by the driveway, and I got this.” He shook his head. “It wasn’t easy.”
“I can well imagine.” Ainsworth pulled a handkerchief from the pocket of his sport coat and wiped his hands, then coughed and gingerly dabbed at his lips. He blinked at Cobb through bifocals. “You figure he spent a lot of time rubbing his fence?”
“Well,” said Cobb defensively, keeping his voice down in the silent cemetery, “this was clearly the gate—there’s two pairs of wheels bolted to one side—and obviously it wasn’t motorized, so he’d have had to grip it and push it back and forth across the driveway to get his car in or out. I could still see the rutted patch where this must have been. So…yes, I figure he rubbed it a couple of times every day. And he lived there for thirty-some years! There ought to be plenty of accumulated aura signature on it.”
“Couldn’t you,” said Ainsworth, tucking his handkerchief away, “have just sawed off the upright pole that he’d have taken hold of? Did you have to bring the whole damned gate?”
“How do we know whether he pulled it from one side, or pushed it from the other?” Cobb protested, waving toward the ungainly thing. “How do we know he grabbed one of the poles rather than hooking his fingers through the chain-link? I didn’t want to take the chance of bringing a piece of it that he never actually handled.”
Ainsworth pursed his lips and turned away, which Cobb took as grudging concession, and Blaine waved toward the postcard-sized white flag fluttering on the grass slope a few yards behind him.
“Can you carry it over to his grave?” Blaine asked. “By yourself?”
“Certainly!”
Cobb took hold of the horizontal pole and pulled; but the aluminum frame had snagged on something in the van, and it didn’t move. He got a fresh grip and pulled harder, and with a metallic screech the thing slid most of the way out,
leaving Cobb sitting on the pavement with the pole at his end of the gate across his lap. The far end of the thing was now wedged up against the van’s ceiling.
“Quietly!” said Blaine, looking back. “You’ll have the security guard over here!”
“Right,” gritted Cobb, lifting the pole and hitching himself backward until he could fold his legs. He stood up and dragged the gate the rest of the way out of the van, and when the far end of it came free, the whole thing struck the pavement with a jingling rattle.
“Damn it!” whispered Ainsworth.
How has it come about, Cobb wondered miserably as he yanked the thing upright on its wheels and began rolling it like a battering ram toward the grass, that my academic career is predicated on this idiotic midnight physical exercise? Transmigration of souls indeed! These two old fools will almost certainly not succeed in raising and capturing the ghost of Armand Vitrielli…and they’ll probably blame the failure on me.
Clive Cobb had moved to California when he had got the job at Cal State, leaving behind in Lafayette only an older brother who was a probably-corrupt city councilman, and a one-time fiancée who had reconsidered. He thought of himself as no longer a citizen of Louisiana and not yet fully a Californian, and this park-like cemetery, with trees but no visible monuments, was disorienting.
On the grass the gate was harder to push, and he was impressed that Dr. Vitrielli had managed to wrestle the thing across his driveway every day. The old man had lived alone, though he sometimes spoke of an estranged daughter in Orange. But he had seemed healthy, unlike these two colleagues of his, and absorbed in, almost obsessed with, his work; and Cobb wondered, not for the first time, what could have driven him to shoot himself two months ago.
Vitrielli had been as gruff and abrupt as Ainsworth during the first few months that Cobb had worked for him, but a shared interest in cooking and old movies had warmed him up, and Cobb had been invited to dinner at the old man’s place a number of times, and had generally stayed late in long, amiable, drink-fueled discussions. On some Saturdays Cobb had even done repair work on Vitrielli’s otherwise neglected twenty-year-old Buick.
In the last year, Vitrielli had given Cobb several research projects, and since the old man’s suicide Cobb was the person most familiar with Vitrielli’s theories…and the only one who knew how the device the old man had referred to as his slide rule was supposed to work.
“Here’s his grave,” said Ainsworth, tapping his wingtip shoe on a rectangular brass plate imbedded in the grass. “I suppose you may as well lay your, your gate next to it. May it prove,” he added in a whisper, “to be indeed a gate!”
Cobb pushed the gate up beside where Ainsworth stood, and carefully laid it over sideways on the grass beside the grave marker. A ceramic disk with a photograph of Vitrielli’s face printed on it was inset on the brass plate, and by moonlight Cobb could read the raised letters beside it:
ARMAND ANTONIO VITRIELLI, 1942-2018
NATURAL PHILOSOPHER
REST IN PEACE
Blaine had apparently read it too. “No rest, I’m afraid,” he said. He spoke quietly, but the wind had shivered to a halt moments earlier, and his words were clear in the new silence.
Cobb looked down at the grave of his friend. He had a pack of Camels in his shirt pocket, but, though Vitrielli had smoked pipes and had had no objection to Cobb smoking cigarettes during his visits to the house, he was sure that these two older men would begin coughing theatrically if he were to take a rest and light one.
Blaine unzipped his briefcase and fumbled around inside it, finally pulling out a flat wooden box that Cobb had seen before. “Well,” he said, handing the box to Cobb, “go ahead. Call him up.”
Cobb opened the box—freeing a fleeting, nostalgic whiff of Dunhill London Mixture pipe tobacco—and lifted the eight-inch length of polished black wood out of the velvet-lined interior, and gave the box back to Blaine.
The object consisted of three flat lengths of wood closely fitted together; the top and bottom ones were secured with narrow copper bands screwed to the ends, while the middle length could be slid back and forth between them. Tiny lenses had been inset into a row of holes in each piece, and a square flat cursor, inset with three lenses in line with the rows, was fitted across the three lengths and was likewise laterally moveable.
“You say he told you how to work it,” said Ainsworth, waving toward the grave. “So work it.” His bony old hands were shaking, and he pressed them together as if in prayer.
Cobb held the thing up and peered at it, tilting it one way and another. “I don’t know if I can read the musical notes in this light.”
“Musical notes?” hissed Blaine. “What the hell?”
“Cobb,” said Ainsworth in a querulous tone, “if this is all just some crazy—”
“Complain to him, damn it, not me!” Cobb, said, more loudly than he had meant to. He waved at the grave as he recklessly pulled out the pack of cigarettes and dug a lighter from his pants pocket, nearly dropping Vitrielli’s device. “He said—” and he paused to shake a cigarette free and light it, “—that the words of the old occult chants were just mnemonics, and that the real…cleaving power of the rituals was the notes the words were recited in.”
He took a deep drag on the cigarette, and the coal glowed.
“You know,” he went on, every syllable a puff of smoke, “like in Gregorian Chant—dah dah dah dah dah, dah duh dah duh dah. It’s math, really—a specific sequence of compression frequencies projected in the air, in space and time, in certain directions.” He shook his head, remembering Vitrielli explaining it to him over drinks in the old man’s study. “In the Middle Ages the notes were written in what they called neumes, little square marks on a four-line scale, but he converted them to modern musical symbols and stamped them below the little lenses on this thing.” He waved the unorthodox slide rule.
“Are you supposed to sing?” asked Blaine. He started to reach toward the device, then hesitated and dropped his hand. “And what are the lenses for?”
“There are only four notes, so it’ll be kind of monotonous. But yes, sing, vocalize. And there are two polarized lenses in each aperture, and they can rotate independently.” Cobb eyed the incongruous old chain-link gate on the grass, but didn’t step toward it. “Dr. Vitrielli said the drawing object will resonate like a tuning fork, and cause the individual lenses to rotate.”
Ainsworth shook his head, but didn’t speak.
“And then,” Cobb went on, “you slide the middle bar until all three of the cursor lenses are clear, and you step forward, singing the note to the right of the cursor on the bottom row. After seven steps you move the cursor, and, depending on which lenses are clear then and which are opaque, you know which way to turn, at which of three angles, and what new note is indicated.” He grinned mirthlessly at the two older men. “When I’ve walked in a closed loop, the lenses are supposed to all go dark, and it’s over. After that, the drawing object is used up, a spent capacitor, inert. It either worked, or it didn’t.”
“Do it right the first time, then,” advised Ainsworth.
Blaine coughed, but didn’t complain about the cigarette. “‘Cleaving power,’ you said. What does that mean?”
“I don’t know. Vitrielli got all mystical when he’d talk about it. Cleaving reality, I suppose, to let an entity from one side move to the other side.”
“Does it summon the entity?” asked Blaine.
“It—” Cobb groped for a way to summarize the many ways Vitrielli had described the thing’s intended function; “—it more opens a specific trap-door,” he said finally, “as it were, for the entity to fall through.”
Blaine seemed uneasy, and Cobb wondered if the old professor was only now—standing here over Armand Vitrielli’s grave in this chilly moonlit cemetery—beginning to imagine that they might actually summon Vitrielli’s ghost…and perhaps capture it.
Cobb shivered in the wind, and he found that his own doubts about the efficacy
of the procedure no longer seemed so convincing. The old man had become a good friend, and it belatedly occurred to Cobb that a ghost might not be happy to be roused from what should have been the final rest. This stunt probably won’t work, he thought, but—we shouldn’t be doing this.
“How,” Blaine began, then coughed again. “How,” he said hoarsely, “will he appear? What will we see?”
Cobb shrugged, nervous himself now about what might happen. “I gather it could be a distortion in the air, like heat ripples, or even a faint translucent image of the way he looked, like the missing limbs that show up in Kirlian photography. He said there might be thumping sounds, adjustment between the regions. The air is likely to get cold as ambient energy is consumed, and the grass might appear to be burnt, though that’d be hard to see in this light.”
“Will he be in compost mentis?” asked Ainsworth. Cobb choked back an involuntary laugh, and Ainsworth frowned and went on, “I mean in compos mentis. When we get him back to the lab, we need him to answer a lot of fairly complex questions.”
Lab, thought Cobb. The empty office next to yours, where you’ve set up your special project—a makeshift Faraday cage, a bottle of rum, a bag of Hershey Kisses and a car battery.
“It wouldn’t be him,” said Cobb, “it’d be his ghost. It wouldn’t be likely to have much of a mind, but it ought to have most of his memory.”
Ainsworth nodded. “His memory is what we want. What he took away with him.” He looked around nervously at the lawn and the dark trees. “Before we catch him he’ll be loose—he won’t transmigrate into one of our bodies, will he?”
He didn’t want any body, at the end, thought Cobb. And if he were to take one of us now—a trick he carelessly told you he knew how to do!—it would hardly be yours.
“It won’t be him,” Cobb said again. “I don’t see how it could…have agency, be purposeful.”
