by Tim Powers
“Running away from the Merignac monastery, up in the hills.” Thomas answered. “I was an orphan, you see, so the monastery kindly indentured me to work for them until I turned twenty-five—which is four years from now—in exchange for room and board and education.”
“And you’re making a … premature exit.”
Thomas nodded.
“And you grabbed the collection basket one morning, and jumped over the wall, and then discovered there was only eleven solis in it.”
Thomas laughed ruefully. “That’s almost right,” he admitted. “I made a kite and a fishing pole, and last night I went sky fishing.” (“Jesus,” Spencer muttered.) “Those bird-men make their nests up at the high end of the valley, you know, and the monastery lies right in their flight-path. I’ve heard they grab bright, glittery objects like coins and jewelry, and carry ‘em home in their pouches to decorate their nests; so I figured if I caught about ten of them, over a period of a month, say, I’d have enough money to fund my escape.”
“Did you know … do you know what they do to sky-fishers?”
“Yeah. They cut their hands off. Seems a little extreme to me.”
“Well, sure. All the penalties are extreme. But the government claims those bird-men are tax collectors, see. They’ve got big nets set up by the Hollywood Bowl, and they catch them, empty their pouches, give ‘em a little food and then send them on their way. It’s a government monopoly. Anytime you catch one yourself, it’s the same as holding up a tax collector at gunpoint.”
“Oh.” Thomas thought about it. “Then I really was robbing from the collection basket.”
Spencer snapped his fingers, sending his cigarette flying at a rat who had poked his nose timidly from behind a collapsed and abandoned couch; he missed, but the shower of sparks sent the rat ducking back into the shadows. “And all you got out of it was eleven solis.”
“That’s right,” Thomas said. “I was caught by the abbot the first time I did it. Did you know those bird-men can talk? And yell? So I had to punch the abbot and take off immediately.”
Spencer shook his head wonderingly. “You’re lucky to have got this far. Sky-fishing, punching old priests—and how did you get so bloody?”
“I was shot—relax, I don’t think it’s serious; just plowed up the skin—by a madman. And I’ve been having adventures all day. I was chased by gangs, some guy gave me wrong directions for San Pedro, so I was walking north on Vermont for an hour, and—”
“I get the picture,” Spencer said. “Well, the Bellamy Theatre is just around this corner. We can get you some hot soup, a clean bed and a solid roof to sleep under.” He clapped Thomas on the shoulder. “Relax, brother,” he said. “Your troubles are over.”
They picked their way for a few yards down a cobbled alley that reeked of Chinese food (“Restaurant next door,” Spencer explained) and then climbed a swaying wooden stairway that brought them to a narrow balcony overlooking the alley. Two ruptured, rain-faded easy chairs and a mummified plant in a pot gave evidence of some long-ago attempt to make the balcony habitable, but the only occupants at present were two surly cats.
“This way,” said Spencer, leading Thomas around the chairs to a plywood door set in the brick wall. He knocked on it in a three-two sequence.
“Who is it, for Christ’s sake?” came an annoyed female voice. “The door ain’t locked.”
Spencer pulled the door open. “It’s supposed to be locked,” he complained. “Gladhand said you’re only supposed to open it when somebody gives the secret knock.”
Thomas followed Spencer inside and found himself in a red-carpeted, lamp-lit hallway, looking at a short, dark-haired girl wearing a brown tunic and leotard.
She stared at Spencer for a moment and then, with exaggerated caution, leaned out the door, peered up and down the length of the balcony, pulled the door closed and bolted it securely. “Don’t we have a dresser or something we could lean against it?” she asked innocently.
“Save your cuteness for somebody else, will you, Alice?” said Spencer. “Now sober up, I want you to meet somebody. Thomas, this tawdry baggage is Alice Faber. Alice, this is Thomas, a friend of mine. He needs a place to sleep tonight.”
“My God,” Alice exclaimed, looking at Thomas for the first time. “He’s all bloody! You’re all bloody! Did somebody knife you?”
“No,” said Thomas, embarrassed. “I … uh, was shot at. There was this old guy with an armload of books, and—”
“We’ll have to get you cleaned up,” she interrupted, taking him by the arm. “I won’t do it, but Jean will. I get sick if I see blood. Really. Jean!”
“I’ll see you later,” Spencer said. “When the girls get through with you, there’s somebody you’ve got to talk to.”
“Okay,” Thomas said, and allowed Alice to lead him down a tightly curving stairway to another, wider hallway.
“She’s probably in the green room,” Alice said “Hey, Jean!”
“Yeah?” came a lazy call.
“Come out here and clean up this young man who’s been shot! He’ll bleed to death right here if you don’t move fast.”
“I’m not bleeding,” protested Thomas.
A tall, thin girl leaned out of a doorway. Her tired, sarcastic expression turned to alertness when she saw Thomas swaying in the hall, leaning on Alice’s arm and looking pale and exhausted in his ragged, blood-streaked robe.
“It’s not as bad as it looks,” Thomas said. “The bullet just creased me,
really …”
The sudden shift to the warmth in the building from the chilly air outside had made him dizzy, and he wasn’t sure what he was saying. Jean was standing in front of him now, he noticed, and had apparently asked him a question. Probably asked me my name, he thought; he was still trying to pronounce “Thomas” when her face slid away below him and the back of his head struck the floor.
CHAPTER 3
The Misunderstanding in Pershing Square
“Well now, Spencer. What’s this I hear about you taking in a stray monk? What if—” The voice became softer. “Oh, is that him?”
“Yes, sir,” came a whisper. “I figured he might be your Touchstone.”
“Well, let’s not jump the gun here. Let’s see … he looks okay, I guess. Is he smart?”
“He’s read Shakespeare. And he’s adrift completely—has some crazy idea of going to San Pedro and becoming a sailor.”
“Hmm!” An odd, slow bumping-and-sliding sound was repeated several times. “Hand me my cigars, would you Spencer? Thanks.” There was the scratch and hiss of a match being struck.
It was the sharp smell of tobacco fumes that finally pulled Thomas up into complete wakefulness. He opened his eyes, and found himself staring at a great stone head that rested on a shelf only a foot away from him. It was bigger than life-size, and although the forehead and part of the thick, wavy hair were chipped, and the nose was broken off entirely, Thomas could see that it was a fine piece of craftsmanship. The shelves above and below the head were cluttered with bundles of colored paper, a stack of cardboard swords with tinfoil-wrapped blades, a number of grotesque wooden masks, and piles and piles of crumpled, glittery cloth.
“Oh hell. I admit I’d have done just what you did, Spencer. Of course with our luck we’ll no sooner get St. Francis here really good in the role than Klein will reappear.”
“Don’t be pessimistic.”
“I have to be, I’m the manager.” Thomas heard the ponderous bump-and-slide again. “Has he eaten anything within the last couple of days? He looks like one of the old Nevada atrocity posters.”
Thomas sat up slowly, scratching his head. “You did say something about soup,” he reminded Spencer.
Standing next to Spencer he saw a burly, bearded, bald-headed man with a thick cigar clamped in his teeth. The man was propped up awkwardly on a pair of crutches, and Thomas knew then what the bump-and-slide sound had been.
“Spencer told me your name,” the man said, “b
ut I’ve forgotten it. Francis? Rufus?”
“Thomas,” supplied both young men at once.
“Oh, that’s right.” He poled his bulk laboriously across the room and thrust his hand toward Thomas. “I’m Nathan Gladhand.”
Thomas shook the muscular paw, and Gladhand lowered himself into a wicker chair. “Jean said you’d be unconscious until morning,” he said, laying the crutches on the floor beside him.
“It was the mention of food that snapped me out of it,” Thomas said, hoping that wasn’t too broad a hint.
“Get him some soup, will you, Spencer? And bring a bottle of cognac and three glasses.” Spencer darted out of the room.
“Where are we?” asked Thomas, peering around at the high-ceilinged chamber. A flickering lantern nearby illuminated endless piles of poles, plywood and boxes.
“In the theatre basement,” Gladhand said. “You can sleep here. Listen,” he added, fixing Thomas with a direct stare, “I don’t mind helping a distressed traveler—I’ve been one myself, often enough—but I won’t keep freeloaders.” He held up his hand to silence Thomas’ protests. “What I’m trying to say is—you’re welcome to stay as long as you like.”
“That’s what you were trying to say?”
“Let me finish, will you? What I mean is, you can work here.”
“Oh. Doing-what?”
“That depends. Spencer says you’ve read Shakespeare. Who else have you read?”
“Oh … Byron, Kipling, Baudelaire, Ashbless …”
“You go for poetry, eh?”
“Yes, sir. I, uh … hope to publish some poems of my own, sometime.”
“Of course you do.” A tarnished brass woman stood with upraised arms beside Gladhand’s chair, and he tapped his cigar-ash onto her head. “Spencer may have mentioned that I’m putting on As You Like It here. We’re supposed to open two weeks from now, on the twenty-second, and the guy that was playing Touchstone left the day before yesterday. Just walked out.”
“You want me to play Touchstone,” Thomas said.
“Right. Not that I’d even consider you, of course, if experienced actors were available.” He blew smoke toward the ceiling. “Which they aren’t.
You’ll get no salary, but you get room and board, which is not something to snap your fingers at, these days.”
Thomas shrugged, and noticed for the first time that he was wearing a long woolen bathrobe. “I’ll do it,” he said. “Where are my clothes, by the way?”
“Your robe we burned. The sandals we gave to an old Olive Street beggar named Ben Corwin. We’ll give you new clothes, don’t worry about it.”
Spencer angled his way into the room, a steaming bowl and a bottle clutched in one hand, three glasses in the other, and a folding table wedged under his arm.
“Jacques,” Gladhand pronounced it jay-queez, “meet the new Touchstone.”
Spencer set up the table and put the soup, bottle and glasses on it. “By God,” he said, handing Thomas a spoon he’d carried in his pocket, “it’s good to have you aboard.”
“Thank you,” smiled Thomas, taking the spoon with as formal a bow as he could manage.
Gladhand leaned forward and poured an inch of the brandy into each glass. “Any business at all today, Spencer?”
“No. The welfare board was locked and guarded, the permit bureau never opened their gates, the employment office was the same way, and even the breadlines were gone.” He sat down on a box and sipped the cognac. “I’ll try it tomorrow, early. It can’t stay this way for long.”
“What do you do, Spencer?” Thomas asked, stirring his hot chicken broth to cool it off.
“I hold places in lines.” Seeing Thomas’ puzzled look, he went on. “Hand-outs, jobs, housing, medicine … you have to wait in long lines for those things nowadays. I have a friend who does clerical work for the police—she’s human, let me add, not an android—and she tells me in advance what’s being given out, and where. I get there early, let the line get to be about three blocks long, and then sell my place to the highest bidder. The people in the tail end of the line know whatever it is will be gone before they get to it, see, so they walk up and down the column, offering to buy places.”
“Don’t the people around you undersell you sometimes?”
“Not often. They’re in line because they need whatever’s being given away, see? They can’t afford to lose their places.” He grinned at Thomas over the rim of his glass. “You want to come with me tomorrow? The prices should be goddamn high by then, and if we have two places to sell, we could make enough to buy a fancy dinner somewhere. I’ll even dig up a couple of girls to impress. How’s that sound?”
Thomas, to his horror, felt his face get hot and realized he was blushing. He covered it by lowering his head and busying himself with his soup. “Sounds good to me,” he muttered. “Fine soup, this.” Until today the only female humans he’d seen had been a handful of haggard old nuns who did the laundry at the monastery, and the prospect of impressing a couple of girls filled him with a kind of excited terror.
“Good!” Spencer hopped up and Gladhand winced to see the young man toss off his brandy in one gulp. “I’ll amble over to Evelyn’s place, then, and get the scoop on where the lines will be. See you tomorrow, early.”
Thomas nodded and Spencer was gone.
Gladhand sat back in his chair with a long sigh. “Stick by Spencer,” he said after a thoughtful pause. “He acts crazy sometimes, but he won’t ditch you and he knows this city better than … he knows it very well.” He carefully pinched out his cigar with two fingers and put it in his shirt pocket. “Don’t go outside by yourself, at least for a while. The police would probably take interest in someone with a gun-shot wound, and there’s plenty worse than the police out there. Wait’ll you know your way around a bit more.” Thomas nodded. “Finish your brandy, now, I haven’t got all night to spend down here.”
Thomas drained the last trickle of it. “That’s nice,” he breathed when he’d swallowed it.
“You like that, do you?”
“Yes sir. Hennessey, isn’t it?”
Gladhand stared at him. “Yes,” he said. “And how is it that you’ve acquired a taste for Hennessey?”
“The Merignac monastery had a very well-stocked cellar,” Thomas explained.
“I see.” Gladhand reached down and picked up his crutches. “Just shove your table over there when you finish,” he said. “That couch you’re sitting on will, I’ve been assured, turn into a bed if you pull this out. Whether it does or not, there are blankets and a pillow here. Try to remember to put the lantern out before you turn in.”
Aye aye.
“See you tomorrow.” Gladhand levered his body erect, picked up the bottle and clumped out of the room. Thomas listened until he could no longer hear the theatre manager’s progress, and then set to work on the soup.
The bird-creature kept pulling itself clear, leaving Thomas with the weary, finger-cramping job of reeling it in still another time. He couldn’t remember why he had to catch it, but he knew it was desperately important that he do so, and becoming more urgent with every passing second. He suspected that the creatures face was changing, but he couldn’t be certain since by the time he pulled the thing near enough to look at, he had invariably forgotten what it had looked like the time before. It was coming closer again, now, unwillingly, tugging harder than ever. Its face was obscured by the thrashing wings, but after a moment they became transparent and blurred away, and Thomas was able to see clearly.
It was a girl. Her face was white as Jack cheese, and huge, wide as a sail and rippling as if it were under running water. The eyes were empty black holes, and the mouth, which was slowly spreading open, was an infinitely wide window upon a cold universe of vacuum.
Thomas withdrew convulsively, opened his eyes by sheer rejection of sleep. He was trembling and afraid to move, but aware that he was lying on a couch, and that he’d been dreaming. After a while he remembered where he was, and the m
usty stale smells, the odor of old dust, ceased to bother him.
When Spencer shook him awake, the first gray light of dawn was slanting in through ventilation grates set high in the walls.
“Here’s some clothes,” Spencer said quietly. “Everybody else is still asleep, so don’t knock anything over.”
Thomas nodded and began groggily struggling into the jeans, flannel shirt and rope-soled shoes. “I smell coffee,” he whispered.
“Yeah, here.” Spencer handed him a steaming cup and he sipped at it until he could think clearly. “Not bad,” he said.
“I put a little rum in it. Now come on, the police are going to dispense ration numbers today from Pershing Square. Sequentially, so the early birds get the low numbers.”
Thomas stood up and finished the warm coffee in one long gulp. “What’s so great about low numbers?”
“Well, the city has only got so much credit, see.” Spencer fitted a cigarette into the corner of his mouth. “The low numbers are sure to be covered, but a shopkeeper would be real doubtful about accepting a ration ticket if the number was more than, say, five hundred.” He snapped a match alight with his thumbnail, grinned proudly, and waved the flame under the cigarette. “Lets go,” he said. “The LA. Greeter comes out in twenty minutes, and this ration number business is going to be on the front page. In half an hour Pershing Square will look like Hell’s courtyard on the Day of Judgment.”
The stately old Biltmore Hotel stood aloof over the milling herds of people that choked Pershing Square. The midmorning sun had begun to dry the grass, and a lot of people were sitting down, some under little tents made of the blankets they’d been wrapped in when they had arrived, early in the chilly morning.
The people in the first two hundred feet of the line, on the east side of the square, weren’t sitting, though; they were on their feet and tense, ready to repel the frequent attacks of desperate late-comers. There had, hours earlier, been a few old and crippled people in the front section of the line, but they had long since been forcibly weeded out.
“I don’t like this,” Spencer muttered to Thomas. “I’m afraid we might just have to duck out of here and go home.”
