Expiration Date

by Tim Powers

  “Begin life anew,” advised the drunk bearded man, who had followed her back inside.

  Life a-old, she thought. This was an accumulation of the crumbled shells of lives, collapsed when the owners had become absent, piled here now like broken cast-off snakeskins, some pieces still big enough to show outlines of departed personalities.

  Well, Elizalde thought, I’m kind of a broken personality myself. I should hide in here for a while, at least long enough to see if cop sirens go past on the street outside, or angry Rochas or Gonzalvezes come bursting in. If they do, I’ll just drape myself over one of these fine tables and be as inconspicuous as a skeleton hiding in a scrimshaw shop.

  But nobody did come in at all, and the traffic outside was uneventful. The sunny October Los Angeles day had apparently swallowed up the gunshots without a ripple and was rolling on. Elizalde bought a Rastafari knitted tarn—red, gold, black, and green—big enough to tuck her long black hair up into, and a tan size-fourteen Harve Benard jumpsuit that had no doubt had an interesting history. Three dollars paid for the whole bundle at the counter by the street door, and the bearded man didn’t even remark on it when Elizalde swept the hat forward over her head and then pulled the jumpsuit on” right over her jeans and sweatshirt.

  After she had pushed open the door and walked a block back south toward Sixth Street, she realized that she had taken on the humbled, slope-shouldered gait she remembered in many of her patients; and she was pleased at the instinctive mimicry, during the few moments it took her to realize that it was not mimicry at all, but natural.

  CHAPTER 20

  “Don’t keep him waiting, child! Why, his time is worth a thousand pounds a minute!”

  —Lewis Carroll,

  Through the Looking-Glass

  HUNCHING AND HOPPING ALONG the walkway that flanked the Ahmanson Theater, moving in and out of the fleeting shade of the strips of decorative roof so narrow and so far overhead that they could serve as shelter only against a preternaturally straight-falling rain, Sherman Oaks followed his missing, pointing arm. The nonexistent arm was so hot that the rest of him felt chilly, as if he were reaching out the door of an air-conditioned bar in Death Valley, out into the harsh sunlight. And he was sniffing vigorously, for the boy Koot Hoomie Parganas had moved through this place not long ago, and he could strongly smell the big ghost that the boy carried.

  Run, he read in the impressions still shaking in the air, a long run, fleeing under a masked sun on the front of a train, running … on all fours? With long nails clicking on pavement! What the hell?

  His missing arm practically dragged him around the moat that encircled the giant wedding cake of the Mark Taper Forum, and then the stair railing across the pavement ahead of him seemed to be the only focused thing in the landscape; everything else, even the incongruous ragged pile of raw meat by the Taper’s entry doors, was a blur. He was close!

  At the top of the stairs he came to a full stop, and then cautiously peered down—and his heart began pounding still harder, for a dead old man was sprawled down there on the blood-smeared concrete stairs.

  I should get right out of here, he thought—hop over this deceased old party and continue on the kid’s trail.

  But as he shuffled down the steps he realized that the thing on the stairs was not actually a man; it was a limply collapsed dummy, stitched into a coarse black coat of badly woven fur. But the imbecilically distorted face, and the white hands, seemed to be made of flesh—and the spattered and smeared blood looked real. It smelled real.

  Oaks paused to crouch over the crumpled shell. He emptied his lungs through his open mouth, hearing the faint outraged stadium roar of all the ghosts he had inhaled over the years; and then he inhaled deeply, flaring his nostrils and tilting his head back and swelling his chest.

  He caught the flat muskiness of ectoplasm, the protean junk that squirted out of mediums to lend substance to ghosts … but he smelled real flesh, too, and real blood.

  Dog flesh, he realized as he sucked up more of the charged air. Dog blood.

  No wonder he had caught an impression moments ago of running on all fours! Someone had vaporized a dog to get substance for filling out a figure too big and solid for ectoplasm alone. And a prepubescent kid wouldn’t be able to provide much ectoplasm anyway.

  The big ghost had done this, had made this thing. Why? The ghost must have perceived itself to be in some emergency, for this would have been a very stressful move.

  Oaks stared down at the flat head of the thing. This would have to be a portrait of the big ghost that the kid was carrying: white hair, a pouchy and wrinkled face …

  Who the hell was it? Probably someone famous, certainly someone powerful, to judge by the huge psychic field that his ghost projected. The face, broad and big-chinned and dominant even deflated on the steps here, looked vaguely familiar to Oaks … but from a long time ago. Briefly and uneasily, Oaks wondered how old he himself might be, really; but he pushed the question away and thought about the ghost who had left this thing here.

  Whoever it was, he had died at the Parganas house on Loma Vista two nights ago—or at least that’s where and when his spanking-new ghost had appeared, blazing in the psychic sky like a nova—and the Parganas couple had chosen to die horribly rather than tell Oaks anything at all.

  Oaks stared at the blood on the steps here, and he remembered following the powerful new ghost’s beacon all the way across town to that house in Beverly Hills on Monday night. By the time Oaks had got there the ghost was gone, headed south, but Oaks had stayed to find out who it had been, and who had taken it away, in the hope of avoiding this weary labor of following every step of the thing’s trail. He remembered his useless torturing of the middleaged man and woman in that garden-type patio off the living room. As soon as he had taped the two of them into the chairs and started questioning them, they had gone into some kind of defensive trance; and Oaks, fearful of being caught there, had got angry and had cut them more and more savagely, and after he had finally cut out their very eyes he had realized that they had died at some point.

  After that, still angry, he had set about searching the house. And then the kid had come home—very late, not far short of dawn—and when Oaks had gone into the living room the dead couple’s ghosts had been standing in there! Blinking around stupidly, but as solid as you could ask for, and them only an hour dead at the most!

  He should have known right then that the big ghost had come back, and that it was the big ghost’s promiscuous field that had lit up the two silly new ghosts in their wedding clothes. But the trail had been looped right back onto itself at that point, and too grossly powerful for Oaks to comprehend that it had doubled when the kid entered the scene. And anyway, the kid had taken off like an arrow out of a bow; and the boy had run out of the house through that garden patio, which could only have speeded him up still more.

  Oaks hopped over the bloody mess on the stairs and stepped down to the cement-floored landing—apparently this was a parking level—but after a couple of steps he froze.

  His phantom left arm wasn’t pointing anymore; it had flopped nervelessly, and he couldn’t feel anything at all in it. He tried to work the hand—usually when the arm was down by his side he could rasp the fingers against the hairy skin of his thigh, whether or not he happened to be wearing long pants—but the nonexistent fingers sensed nothing now but, perhaps, a faint cool breeze sluicing between them. The trail was gone.

  Had the ghost freed itself from the kid and evaporated? That would be bad—Oaks was getting thin, and for the last thirty or forty hours he had been passing up the chance to eat smaller ghosts, in his anxiety not to miss this big feast. Or had the kid somehow all at once attained puberty this morning, enabling him to eat and digest the ghost himself?

  Oaks’s face was chilly with alarm—but after a moment he relaxed a little. Whatever had happened here, whatever it was that had provoked the ghost into whipping up this ectoplasmic mannikin … the whole event must have been a ter
rible shock to the kid, too. In his terror the boy might very well have just clathrated the ghost, convulsively enclosed it within his own psyche but not assimilated it—encysted the thing, shoved it down, walled it up tightly inside himself.

  That could happen, Oaks knew; and if it had, the locked-in ghost wouldn’t be detectable from the outside.

  Like that one time when Houdini …

  The fleeting thought was gone, leaving only an association: Jonah and the whale. Sherman Oaks hurried back up the stairs, stepping carelessly right on the limp face this time, and when he was back up on the pavement he hopped over a retaining wall by the valet-parking driveway and strode away south on the Hope Street sidewalk.

  Houdini? Jonah and the whale? God knew what memory had started to surface there—something from the time before he had come into this present continuity-of-consciousness three years ago, in the district of Sherman Oaks, from which he had whimsically taken this present name. Again he wondered, briefly and uneasily, how old he might really be, and when and how he might have lost his left arm.

  To his right, across the street, the elevated pools around the Metropolitan Water District building reflected the watery blue sky. Oaks calculated that the time could hardly be even an hour past noon, but the pale sun had already begun to recede, having come as far up above the southern horizon as it cared to in this season. North was behind him, and the thought prompted him to sneak a glance down at the pommel of the survival knife he wore inside his pants.

  When he had stolen the knife, its hollow hilt had been full of things like fishhooks and matches. He had replaced that stuff with reliable compact ghost lures—a nickel with a nail welded to the back so that it could be hammered into a wooden floor, where it would confound the patient efforts of ghosts to pick it up, and some pennies stamped with the Lincoln profile smoking a pipe, another surefire ghost-attention holder—but he had valued the screw-on pommel, which had a powerful magnetic compass bobbing around in its glass dome.

  But right now the compass was pointing firmly, uselessly, north. And his gone left arm was still sensing nothing at all. The ghost was effectively hidden inside the boy’s mind now—Oaks was sure that that was what had happened—and, at least for as long as the ghost remained concealed, Oaks would have to track Koot Hoomie Parganas without any psychic beacons or Hansel-and-Gretel trails at all. And now, when he found the boy, he would probably have to kill him to get the big ghost out and eat it—and of course eat the boy’s ghost too, as a garnish. A parsley child.

  It occurred to Sherman Oaks that he might be smart to get to a telephone—and damn quick.

  He walked faster, and then began jogging, hoping that in spite of his stained windbreaker and camouflage pants he looked like someone getting exercise and not like somebody in murderous pursuit.

  Clouds as solid and white as sculptured marble were shifting across the blue vault of the sky, south from the San Fernando Valley and down the track of the Hollywood Freeway, graying the woods and lawns of Griffith Park and tarnishing the flat water of the Silverlake Reservoir. Chilly shade swept over the freeway lanes and across the area of wide dirt lots and isolated old Victorian houses west of the Pasadena Freeway, and the squat wild palms shook their shaggy heads in the wind. Pedestrians around Third and Sixth Streets began to move more quickly … though one toiling small figure on the Witmer Street sidewalk didn’t increase its pace.

  Kootie was limping worse than ever, but he made himself keep moving. Raffle had been meticulous about divvying up their panhandling income, and Kootie had a pocketful of change as well as forty-six dollars in bills—eventually he would get on a bus, and then get on another, and eventually, ideally, sleep on one, and then tomorrow think of some durable sanctuary (—church, stow away on a ship, hide somewhere on a “big rig eighteen-wheeler,” go to the police, hide in a—). But right now he needed the sensation of motion—of ground being covered—that only working his legs and abrading the soles of his shoes could give him.

  Kootie had stopped being angry at Raffle, and was instead panicked and dismayed at having lost the only person in Los Angeles, in the world, who’d cared to help him. Kootie was certain that if he hadn’t been such a stupid kid, he could somehow have talked Raffle out of turning him in, and they could right now have been driving to get Raffle’s dope somewhere, happy in the car, with Fred licking their faces. Kootie winced as he stepped down off a high curb, and he wondered what Fred was doing now; probably right this minute Fred was sharing Kootie’s own personal heated-up tamale with Raffle in some safe parking lot.

  Kootie’s pelvis and right hip ached, as if he’d recently tried doing one of those Russian crouch-and-kick dances and then finished with a full butt-to-the-floor split—but he was trying not to think about it, for the mysterious muscle strain was a result of whatever had gone on during the time he had been blacked out at the Music Center, when the ghost of the old man had been in control of his body.

  God only knew what the old man had done. Fallen awkwardly? Karate-kicked somebody? Kootie would have expected more dignity from Thomas Alva Edison.

  There it was, he had thought about it. The ghost had been Edison—as in the SCE logo, painted on the doors of the Halloween-colored black-and-orange trucks, Southern California Edison—the guy that invented the lightbulb. Kootie’s parents had always told him not to play with lightbulbs, that there was a poisonous “noble gas” in them; in school he had found out that they’d been thinking of neon lights, and that neon wasn’t poisonous anyway. But there had been a poison in the glass brick hidden in the Dante statue, for sure.

  Noble gas my ass, he thought defiantly as he blinked away tears. You old … shithead! What were you doing in that test tube inside the glass brick anyway?

  Duh, he thought, replying for the absent Edison, I dunno.

  You got my mom and dad killed! And now everybody wants to kill me too.

  Duh. Sorry.

  Moron.

  Kootie remembered the face on the top of the bloody framework he had pulled off of himself, but a shudder torqued through him, almost making him miss his footing on the cracked sidewalk. It was apparently far too soon to think about that episode, and he found that he had focused his eyes on the stucco walls, bright orange even in the shadow of the clouds, of a ninety-nine cent store on the corner ahead of him. Two pay telephones were perched under metal hoods on a post by the parking-lot curb.

  Al, he thought nervously, quoting the old woman who had moaned to him out of the pay-phone receiver on Fairfax this morning, where am I gonna meet you tonight?

  Al. Alva. Thomas Alva Edison. And in the hallucination he’d had—

  Again he shied away from the memory of being dislocated out of his own body—but he was sure that it had been the Edison ghost that the old woman had been trying to talk to. She had known the name—the nickname!—of the ghost Kootie had been carrying around. To the people who live in the magical alleys of the world, Kootie thought, that ghost must have been sticking out like a sore thumb.

  But the ghost was gone now! Kootie had left it torn and deflated on the steps at the—

  Involuntarily he exhaled, hard enough to have blown out a whole birthday-cake-full of candles, if one had been here. (Raffle had told him that in these neighborhoods they generally hung paper-skinned figures from trees on kids’ birthdays, and then beat the things with sticks until they split apart, at which point the kids would scramble for the little cellophane-wrapped hard candies that spilled onto the dirt from the broken paper abdomens.)

  The ghost was gone now, that was the important thing. Maybe telephones would work, for Kootie, now.

  He flexed the fingers of his right hand and slowly reached down and dug in his jeans pocket for a quarter. Who would he call?

  The police, for sure.

  Kootie’s teeth were cold, and he realized that he was smiling. He would call the police, and the one-armed bum wouldn’t follow him anymore, not after the bum stumbled across the—

  After the bum came to
the end of the ghost’s trail.

  And then Kootie would be put in … some kind of home, finally, with showers and bathrooms and beds and food. Eventually he’d be adopted, by some family. He’d be able to see any movies he wanted to see …

  His teeth were still cold, but he was sobbing now, to his own horror and astonishment. I want my own family, he thought, I want my own house and my own mom and dad. Maybe they aren’t dead—(in those bloody chairs)—of course they aren’t dead, they were standing in the living room in formal clothes (ignoring me in such a scary way) and probably they’re the ones that hired the billboards and posted the reward!

  He needed to know, he needed to throw himself somewhere now, and he ran to the telephones even though the pain of running wrung whimpers through his clenched teeth.

  When he had rolled the quarter into the slot, he punched in 911.

  After two rings, a woman’s voice said, calmly, “Nine-one-one operator, is this an emergency?”

  “I’m Koot Hoomie Parganas,” said Kootie quickly. “My parents were—were robbed and beaten up, real bad, night before last, and there’s billboards with my picture on ’em, and a reward—” Kootie was suddenly dizzy, and he actually had to clutch the receiver tightly to keep from falling. He swung around on the pivot of his good heel until his shoulder hit the phone’s aluminum cowl. When he had straightened up he had a quick impression that someone was behind him, wanting to use the phone, but he looked around and saw no one near him. “—A reward,” he went on, “that’s being offered for me. My mom and dad live on Loma Vista Street in Beverly Hills and there was—”

  A man’s voice interrupted him. “Parganas?” the man said alertly.

  “Yes.”