Expiration Date

by Tim Powers

  These were not Kootie’s thoughts, and they didn’t feel like Edison’s either. “Ionaco,” Kootie said out loud.

  And suddenly the gleam of moonlight shining on the fender of a parked car ahead of them was not just a reflection, but an angular white shape, a thing; and Kootie’s perception of scale was gone—the white shape seemed to be much farther away than the car.

  The shape was rotating, growing against the suddenly flat backdrop of the city night, and it was … an open Greek E, a white spider lying sideways, a white hand with fragmenting fingers …

  It was moving upward and growing larger, or closer.

  It was a side-lit white face, an older man’s face—with a white ascot knotted under the chin; and as Kootie stared, gaping and disoriented, the lines of a formal old claw-hammer coat coalesced out of the shadows under the face, and an unregarded background shadow that might have been a building was now a top hat. Cars on the street were just blurs of darkness, moving past as slowly as moon shadows.

  Kootie thought the image was some kind of black-and-white still projection—the light on it didn’t correspond to the direction of the moon or the nearest streetlight—until the white mouth opened and moved, and Kootie heard the words, “I only have one left.” The voice was low, and reverberated as if speaking in a room instead of out here on the street, and the lips didn’t move in synch with the sounds.

  The figure still seemed to be some kind of black-and-white hologram.

  Neither Kootie nor Edison had kept the boy’s body moving. Halted, Kootie was aware of sweat on his forehead chilly in the night breeze. “One what?” asked Edison wearily.

  “Belt.” The ghost, for Kootie was sure that’s what this thing was, opened its coat, and Kootie saw that the figure wore, as a sort of bulky cummerbund, a belt made of bundled wire. A little flashlight bulb glowed over the buckle. “Fifty-eight dollars and fifty cents, even now.”

  “We don’t need a belt,” Edison said; but, “What does it do?” asked Kootie. It was heady for the boy to realize that, on this night, he would believe nearly any answer the ghost might give.

  “Well,” said the ghost in its oddly contained and unsynchronized voice, “it could have cured Bright’s disease and intestinal cancer. But it banishes paralysis and restores lost hair color and stops attacks of homicide. It’s called the I-ON-A-CO, like the boy said. It’s a degaussing device—you can sleep safely, if you’re wearing it.”

  “I don’t have fifty-eight dollars,” Kootie said. For the first time since hurrying out of Jumbo’s whatever-it-had-been, he opened his hand. “I’ve got mints, though.”

  The ghost came into clearer focus, and a tinge of color touched its white face. “Out of respect for Thomas Alva Edison,” it said, and its words matched its lip movements now, “I’ll take the mints in lieu of the money.”

  “He’d rather have had the mints in any case,” said Edison grumpily. “And you never thought that I might want ’em.”

  “Is it okay,” said Kootie before Edison could go on, “if I hold a couple out for Mr. Edison?”

  “Well … a couple,” allowed the ghost.

  Edison again took over Kootie’s tongue. “You have the advantage of me, sir. Your name was—?”

  “Call me Gaylord.” Pink-tinged hands appeared in front of the coat, and the two-dimensional fingers managed to unfasten the buckle—but when the ghost tried to pull the belt from around itself, the heavy cables fell through its insubstantial flesh, and clattered on the pavement; one of the hands wobbled forward, though, palm-up, and Kootie poured the mints into the hand, which was able to hold them. Kootie was careful to hold back two of them.

  Kootie’s hand slapped to his own face, and his mouth caught the pair of mints and chewed them up furiously. Then, only because it was his own mouth talking, he was able to understand the mumbled words “Pick up your damned belt and let’s go.”

  Kootie crouched and took hold of the belt. The heavy metal bands of it were as cold as the night air, not warmed as if someone had been wearing it. As he straightened and swung it around his waist he noticed that it must have weighed five or six pounds, and he wondered how the ghost had managed to carry it.

  When he looked around, he saw that he was alone on the sidewalk, and that the dark street with its population of rushing cars had regained its depth and noise, and no longer seemed to be a moving picture projected onto a flat screen.

  Edison had swallowed the chewed-up mints. “I said let’s go.”

  Kootie started forward again, trying to figure out the working of the buckle as he limped along. “This is pretty neat, actually,” he said.

  “Poor doomed old things,” said his voice then, softly, and Kootie just listened. “God knows where we are, the real us. Heaven or hell, I suppose, or simply gone—in any case, probably not even aware of these lonely scramblings and idiot ruminations back here.” Kootie’s hand had pulled the capped black plastic film canister out of his pocket, and now shook the thing beside his ear. “I wonder who this poor beggar was. I invented a telephone, once.”

  Edison seemed to have paused, and Kootie put in, “I thought that was Alexander Graham Bell.”

  “I wasn’t talking about that telephone. Bell!—all he had was Reis’s old magnetotelephone, a stone-age circuit with ‘make and break’ contact interruption, good enough for tones but lousy for consonants. Showing off in front of the King of South America or somebody at the Centennial Exhibition in ’76, with his voice not hardly carrying along the wire from one end of a building to the other. He recited Hamlet’s soliloquy— ‘For in that sleep of death what dreams may come / When we have shuffled off this mortal coil …’ Two years later, with my carbon transmitter and induction coil, I held a loud-and-clear conversation with the Western Union boys across a hundred and seven miles, New York to Philadelphia!” Kootie snorted, to his own startlement. “ ‘Physicists and sphinxes in majestical mists!’ A test phrase, that was, for checking the transmission of sibilant syllables. Think all that was easy? And Bell could hear! He had a very soft job of it.”

  Again he held the black container up to Kootie’s ear and shook it; the mint rattled inside. Then he put it back in Kootie’s pocket. “Nymph,” he said softly, apparently to the night sky, “in thy orisons, be all my sins remembered.”

  Kootie’s footsteps had turned left, south down a side street, and the high reinforced windows of the buildings were dark. Up ahead on the right was a chain-link fence with some yawning lot beyond it. Kootie was rubbing his arms again in the chill, and he hoped Edison was feeling it too, and realizing that they’d need to find a safe place to sleep before long.

  It occurred to him that Edison had not explained the telephone he had invented.

  CHAPTER 25

  There was a short silence after this, and then the Knight went on again.

  “I’m a great hand at inventing things. Now, I daresay you noticed, the last time you picked me up, that I was looking rather thoughtful?”

  “You were a little grave,” said Alice.

  —Lewis Carroll,

  Through the Looking-Glass

  IN THE GLARE OF the streetlight at the southeast corner of Park View and Wilshire, glittering flies were darting around in the chilly air like metal shavings at a machine shop. Sherman Oaks waved them away from his face, keeping his mouth closed and breathing whistlingly through squinched nostrils, for the flies were harkening to the multitude-roar of his exhalations, and on this night of all nights he was not going to condescend to consume such trash even accidentally.

  He had called the exchange back a couple of hours ago, and the router had told him that Neal Obstadt had agreed to putting up forty grand for the fugitive Parganas boy against Oaks’s pledged thousand doses of smoke.

  The lady who had put up the $20,000-reward billboards had been eliminated from the exchange listings, and replaced by Obstadt.

  As a receipt, the router had played for Oaks Obstadt’s authorization message: Yeah, tell this Al Segundo or Glen D
ale or whoever he is that I’ll fade him—but if he hoses me on the smokes, his own ass is smoke.

  Sherman Oaks had irritably got off the phone and resumed his anxious search of the streets around Union and Wilshire—

  And then about an hour ago a glance at his knife-pommel compass had shown the needle pointing west so hard that it didn’t wobble at all, and moved only to correct for his own motion.

  He had immediately thrashed his imaginary left arm in a furious circle, but the only blinks of heat it felt were weak and distant and fleeting—human lives flickering out uselessly, in deaths that simply tossed the ghosts up to dissolve in the air. Naive psychics were impressed when occasionally they sensed this routine event, but Oaks was only interested in the coagulant ghosts that hung around and got snagged on something.

  He hadn’t been able to sense the big one. It must still have been contained in the boy. But at least it was still distinct and unassimilated, and at the moment it was in its excited state, for his compass needle was pointing at it.

  He had hurried west—and at Park View Street his compass had gone crazy.

  Someone, almost certainly the big ghost working the boy’s hands, had drawn a lunatic ghost lure in chalk on the sidewalk, and had spat in the center of it; and now all the broken-down ghost fragments that inhabited the houseflies around the MacArthur Park lake had swarmed out and were circling the intricate chalk marks as if trying to follow some prescribed hopscotch pattern in their flight. The ones that landed on the chalk lines seemed to be dying.

  The flies alone wouldn’t have hampered Oaks too badly, for their charges were very weak even in excited swarms like this; but when he stood on the Park View curb and looked down at the compass at his belt, he saw that the needle was jigging and sweeping back and forth across nearly ninety degrees of the compass face. From at least Sixth Street in the north to Seventh in the south, the city blocks ahead were waked up. Every ghost in every building was agitated and clamoring. Office workers tomorrow would probably be seeing magnetically induced distortions on the screens of their computer monitors, and if they’d left their purses in their desks they’d find that their automatic teller cards were demagnetized and no longer worked. And even hours from now the offices would still be chilly with the cold spots where the ghosts had drawn up their energies.

  The big ghost must have stepped way out, at some point in this neighborhood, and just damn flashed the ghost populace, mooned them. That would energize and urgently draw every spirit lingering nearby. God knew why the big ghost had done it, for it couldn’t eat any ghosts itself.

  What, thought Oaks uneasily. You just wanted somebody to chat with? Or did you do it simply to fox my radar this way?

  Sherman Oaks felt tense, nearly brittle, and he kept calling to mind the collapsed, hijacked-flesh face he had seen on the steps to the parking level at the Music Center this afternoon. Who the hell was that, who is this big ghost?

  The threads of association trailed away back into the blankness that was his life before the awakening of consciousness in the district of Sherman Oaks three years ago.

  But he shook his head sharply. Enough idle chatter, he told himself, quit dishing the applesauce. If the compass is temporarily foxed, that only means that you’re back on a limited-to-visual footing. Get your footing moving—you know you’re on the right track, and you know he’s close.

  “So what was the telephone you invented?” Kootie asked tiredly. He had walked down the side street, away from the streaking headlights of Wilshire, and was now staring through a chain-link fence at an enclosed paved yard that was shadowed from the intermittent moonlight by surrounding buildings.

  “Well, I had to stop work on it. I found I was able to call people who hadn’t died yet. What do you suppose this is?”

  “Hadn’t died?” Suddenly Kootie was uncomfortable with this conversation. “It’s an empty lot.”

  “With, for once, no barbed wire on the fence. And it’s got a couple of old cars in there, that look like they’ve been there since Ford first rolled them off the production line. Damn Ford anyway.”

  Kootie remembered having said Damn Ford when Raffle had seen the reward-for-this-boy billboard at the Music Center; and he realized that it must have been Edison talking then, and that he had been referring to Henry Ford, rather than to Raffle’s car.

  Kootie found that he had curled his fingers through the chain link, and was looking up and down the empty sidewalk.

  “What did Ford do to you?” he asked.

  He wasn’t really surprised when he began helplessly climbing the fence, but he had certainly not expected the old man to be so agile. “Ow!” Kootie exclaimed breathlessly at one point, “watch the right ankle!—Oh, sorry.” The street was silent except for the rush of cars back on Wilshire and the immediate thrashing clang of the shaken chain-link.

  Astride the crossbar at the top, Kootie’s body paused to catch its breath. “When I was dying,” said Edison, “Ford made my son catch my last breath in a test tube for him.” In deference to Kootie’s ankle, he didn’t just jump, but climbed down the other side.

  At last unhooking his fingers from the chain-link, Kootie hurried across the cracked pavement of the enclosed lot to the nearest of the abandoned cars. Shaggy night-blooming jasmine bushes overhung the car, and crumpled plastic bags had been shrink-wrapped by Monday’s wind right onto the heavy leafy clusters, like butterflies captured in midflight poses against the fronts of car radiators.

  When Kootie was crouched behind the fender, Edison went on in a whisper, “Oh, he meant well—just like he did when he built an exact replica of my Menlo Park lab, for his ‘Light’s Golden Jubilee’ in 1929, the fiftieth anniversary of my incandescent lamp. That must have confused a whole nation of ghosts and ghost trackers—Ford reconstructed the entire lab, even using actual planks from my old buildings, with the old dynamos and half-built stockticker machines on the benches inside, and all the old tools. And he even erected a duplicate of the boardinghouse across the street! And he trucked in genuine red New Jersey clay, for the soil around the buildings! And there was a villain hanging around me in those days, trying to hook out my soul—I fed the fellow a poisoned apple!—and it was against such people that Ford was trying to protect me. Oh, it’s hard to fault the … the generous, sentimental old fool, even now, now that I’m hiding in an empty lot in Los Angeles in … what year is it?”

  “1992,” said Kootie.

  “Good… God. I died sixty-one years ago.” Kootie had stopped panting after the exertion of climbing the fence, but now he was breathing hard again. “And I rattled my last breath into a test tube, which my son Charles then stopped up and obediently gave to Henry Ford.” Kootie found himself staring at his hands and shaking his head. “Where did you get it?”

  Into the ensuing silence, Kootie said, flatly, “My parents had it. Hidden inside a bust of Dante. They’ve had it forever. Had it.”

  “Inside Dante, eh? Just like I’m inside your head now. I guess I’m your built-in Virgil, though I’ve got to admit I don’t really know the neighborhood. I wonder when we get to El Paradisio? Huh. Sounds like a Mexican speakeasy.”

  “So Ford was trying to protect you.”

  “In his blundering way. Yeah, from ghosts and ghost hunters both—I stood out like a spiritualist bonfire. And—” Kootie’s shoulders shrugged. “It was to honor me, too. A replica of the great man’s lab, the great man’s actual last breath! He was pleased to see his friends get accolades. He’d have been tickled to death—as it were—to know that I finally got a B.S.” Kootie could feel his pulse thumping faster in his chest. “And not an honorary one, either—it was earned! The faculty examined seventeen portfolios of my research! And this was at Thomas A. Edison State College—if you please!—in Trenton, New Jersey.”

  “I … dreamed about that,” said Kootie softly, “Sunday night.” It, the thought of college, was the spur that finally made me put my run-away plan into action, he thought. Which has turned out to have pu
t a lot of other stuff into action, too. “I must have been picking it up from you, you all worked up in the bust in the living room.”

  The laugh that came out of his mouth then was embarrassed. “I guess I was excited about it myself. A little. Not that I put any stock in academic honors.” He shrugged again. “The news was all over the party line.”

  “Yeah,” said Kootie, “I met some old lady that wanted to talk to you. Probably had a graduation present for you.” Kootie sighed, feeling bad about dead people. “What are you gonna do with the ghost in the film can?”

  Kootie could feel that Edison’s mood was down too, and had been for the last several minutes; probably Kootie’s own melancholy was largely induced in his surrounding mind by the suggestion from Edison’s frail, contained ghost.

  “The ghost in the film can,” said Edison. “If he hasn’t died in there yet, we could talk to him on my telephone. If we had my telephone with us I could work it. You might be able to as well—you strike me as another boy who’s carrying around some solid guilty link with a dead person or two, hm?”

  “I … guess I am.” Kootie was too desolated and exhausted, here in the dark empty lot, to cry.

  “There now, son, I don’t mean to stir it up.” Edison had Kootie sit down, leaning back against the car body. The wind was rustling softly in the fronds of a stocky wild palm on the far side of the car, and the only sound on the breeze was the rapid pop-pop-pop of semiautomatic gunfire, comfortably far away.

  “My telephone,” Edison said. “I got the ghost-telephone idea when a spiritualist paid Marconi to buy my Lehigh Valley grasshopper telegraph patents for him. It was originally a scheme to make two-way telegraphy possible on a moving train, by an induction current between plates on the train and telegraph wires overhead, with regularly spaced dispatcher stations along the way, hence ‘grasshopper.’ But … they got a lot of random clicking, some bits of which turned out to be … oh, you know, idiot clowning: Shave and a haircut, two bits, and Hey Rube, and the beats of the Lohengrin wedding march and popular songs. Even so, I didn’t figure it out until the spiritualist bought the patents.” He yawned. “Up, son, I’ve got to set up the apparatus for our night’s worth of six signals.”