Expiration Date

by Tim Powers

  Then Sullivan relaxed a little, for he saw that it was just two men, apparently attached together; they were both trying to stand, but the wrist of one was handcuffed to the ankle of the other. He thought they must be Sherman Oaks and Neal Obstadt, but the man cuffed by a wrist had two arms with which to wrestle his companion, had one fist free to pummel against the other man’s groin and abdomen, two elbows with which to block kicks to the face.

  Behind them, as if shepherding them, a young man stepped up the stairs to the deck, into the projected glare; he was broad-shouldered and trim in a white turtleneck sweater, with blond hair clipped short in a crew cut.

  “Kelley Keith,” said this newcomer in a resonant baritone, and from childhood memories and the soundtrack of the old TV show Sullivan belatedly recognized the youthful voice of Nicky Bradshaw. “Listen to the hookah-smoking caterpillar—this mushroom’s for you. And it won’t pass away.”

  The carbon-arc lamp over Sullivan’s head was roaring, and the paint flakes were falling more thickly, and, down the length of the lobby, projected right onto the blood-spattered fabric of deLarava’s broad dress now, the little figure in the surf was waving its tiny arms.

  Crouching up forward by the spider box, Sullivan was clasping Elizalde’s hand in his right hand, and Sukie’s in his left.

  “It’s not the real moon!” cried several of the little girls visible through the open doorway out on the starboard deck. “It’s painted! We’re still in Hell!”

  “No, look!” shouted a man at the rail behind them. “It’s crumbling! The real sun is out there!” By the now-rumpled business suit and necktie and the blood-streaked white shirt, Sullivan recognized him as the lawyer whom deLarava’s men had driven away in the Jeep Cherokee; the man’s hands were still cuffed but he had got them in front of him, and he was holding a long broom that he was waving over his head as high as he could reach. Black paint chips fell down onto him like confetti.

  “My baby ghosts!” screamed deLarava; she started ponderously out of the projected light toward the half-dozen little girls, but the man with the broom had swept a hole in the night sky out there, and a beam of sunlight (cleaner and brighter, Sullivan thought, than a 3200 Kelvin lamp through a blue gel) lanced down to the deck. The girls flocked to it, then broke up and dissolved in white mist and breathless giggling, and were gone, in the moment before deLarava ran through the spot where they had been and collided with the still-shadowed rail.

  The carbon-arc lamp, working off AC and no doubt a choke coil or a transformer, was flickering and glowing a deepening yellow. Sullivan’s father’s ghost lifted his hand away from the carbon rods, and the beam of light now just threw a featureless white glow down the lobby onto the far wall. Sullivan felt Sukie reach off to the side, and with an arcing snap the light went out, the carbon rods abruptly dimming to red points.

  In the sudden silence the fat old woman backed across the exterior deck from the starboard rail, and in the open doorway she turned around to face the dark Piccadilly Circus lobby.

  Her dress still glowed with the image that had been projected onto it, and the tiny white-haired swimmer, carried on her dress right out of the rectangle that had shone on the stairwell wall, was floundering below the shelf of her breasts.

  She stomped slowly back in through the doorway and started across the lobby floor. “I will at least have Edison,” she said.

  CHAPTER 48

  Come, hearken then, ere voice of dread,

  With bitter tidings laden, Shall summon to unwelcome bed

  A melancholy maiden! We are but older children, dear,

  Who fret to find our bedtime near.

  —Lewis Carroll,

  Through the Looking-Glass

  FROM AFT BY THE stairs, the ankle-cuffed man stepped forward (dragging his flailing companion) into the dim glow projected by deLarava’s dress, and Sullivan saw that he was the gray-haired Obstadt. “No, Loretta,” Obstadt said hoarsely, kicking at the man attached to his foot, “you said I could have him. You work for me now. Get back—”

  And, crouched on the floor, the two-armed man who must nevertheless have been Sherman Oaks was jabbering urgently in what sounded to Sullivan like Latin.

  deLarava shoved her little gun at Obstadt’s belly and fired it. The bang was like a full-arm swing of a hammer onto the cap of a fire hydrant, and Obstadt stopped and bowed slightly, his mouth working. The man on the floor took the opportunity to lash his free fist twice, hard, into Obstadt’s groin, and Obstadt bowed more deeply.

  Beams of sunlight lanced into the lobby from behind Sullivan, reflecting off the floor to underlight deLarava’s jowls, and he realized that the night sky was breaking apart on the port side too.

  “Koot Hoomie Parganas,” said deLarava, moving forward again. Her dress still glowed in surging fields of tan and blue, and the tiny swimmer was waving its arms under her breasts.

  Sullivan glanced past Elizalde at Kootie, who was sitting cross-legged in a nest of cables, his hair now backlit by reflected daylight. The boy seemed to have been forsaken by Edison—his wide eyes gaped in horror at the approaching fat woman, and his lips were trembling.

  Elizalde stood up from her crouch beside Sullivan. “No,” she said loudly, stepping in front of the boy, “Llorona Atacado. You won’t replace your lost children with this boy.” And she jabbed her hand in the air toward deLarava’s face, with the first and little fingers extended. “Ixchel se quite! Commander Hold-’Em take you,” she said, and she spit.

  The saliva hit the deck between them, but deLarava reeled back, coughing and clutching the glowing fabric over her stomach as if the tiny drowning figure were sinking into her diaphragm. She blinked up at Elizalde from under her bushy eyebrows, and the barrel of the little automatic came wobbling up.

  Sullivan was on his feet now, and he could see that Elizalde was not even going to think of raising the .45.

  deLarava’s gun was pointed from less than two yards away at the center of Elizalde’s Graceland sweatshirt—and as Sullivan leaned forward to grab Elizalde and yank her out of the way, his scalp contracted with the bar-time advance-shock of deLarava’s gun going off.

  And so instead of trying to pull Elizalde back, he made his forward motion a leap into the space between the two women (in the moment when both of his feet were off the deck he whiffed suntan oil and mayonnaise and the cold, deep sea—and, faintly, bourbon), and then the real gunshot punched his eardrums and hammered his upper arm.

  The impact of the shot (and bar-time anticipation of the second) spun him around in midair to face the glowing figure of deLarava, and her second shot caught him squarely in the chest.

  His feet hit the deck but he was falling backward, and as he fell he heard the fast snap-clank of the .45 at last being chambered; and as his hip thudded down hard and he curled and slid and the needlessly ejected .45 round spun through the air, he saw Elizalde’s clasped hands raise the weapon toward deLarava, her thumbs safely out of the way of the weapon’s slide; the .45 flared and jumped, and the gunshot in the enclosed lobby was like a bomb going off.

  Sullivan’s knees were drawn up and his right arm was folded over his chest, but his head was rocked back to watch deLarava’s fat body fly backward, sit boomingly on the deck, and then tumble away toward the starboard doorway in a spray of blood—

  —Sullivan slid to a tense halt, staring—

  But deLarava was at the same time still standing in front of Elizalde, and still holding the little automatic, though her arm was transparent; she was looking from Elizalde to the automatic in puzzlement, and the weight of the gun was pulling her insubstantial arm down toward the deck.

  Then the top of her head abruptly collapsed from the eyebrows up, as the rubber bands imploded the frail ectoplasmic skull.

  Sullivan’s chest felt split and molten, but he rolled his head around to scan the sunlight-spotted deck for a glimpse of his own freshly dead body. Surely deLarava’s chest-shot had killed him, and he was now a raw ghost about to blesse
dly dissolve into the fresh daytime air that was streaming in through the cracking night sky; after all, he wasn’t able to breathe—his lungs were impacted, stilled, and the only agitation in him was the thudding heartbeat that was jolting his vision twice every second …

  My heart’s beating! he thought, with a shiver of dreadful hope. Suddenly he realized that he wanted to live, wanted to get away from here with Elizalde and Kootie and live …

  deLarava’s grotesquely pinheaded ghost was staring at its arm, which had been stretched all the way down to the deck by the weight of the little automatic. The translucent figure stumbled away forward toward where the carbonarc light had been, and her arm lengthened behind her as the automatic slid only by short jerks after her across the polished cork deck.

  Obstadt had reeled out through the open lobby doorway to the starboard rail. Beyond him, the induced black sky was breaking up, and Sullivan could see whole patches of luminous distant blue showing through it.

  Obstadt’s tethered companion was up and hunching along beside him like a wounded dog—now the companion only had one arm, and Sullivan realized that it had certainly been Sherman Oaks all along, with his missing arm only temporarily provided by the ship’s degaussing field, which had been so magically stepped-up in this one segment of the ship. Oaks was wheezing like a hundred warped harmonicas, and his windbreaker and baggy camouflage pants were rippling and jumping and visibly spotting with fresh blood, as though a horde of starved rats were muscling around underneath.

  The battered-looking lawyer who had been standing with the little girls was still holding the broom and staring stupidly up at the fragmenting sky—and Obstadt’s right hand lashed out and caught the man by the necktie. Obstadt strongly pulled him along the rail toward himself and opened his mouth wide over the lawyer’s throat.

  But Nicky Bradshaw lumbered over to them and pulled Obstadt away. Bradshaw’s crew cut had lengthened messily in the last few seconds and was shot with gray now, and his turtleneck sweater was beginning to stretch over his belly, but he grabbed Obstadt’s coat lapels with both hands and boosted him up until the wounded man was nearly sitting on the rail; and then he braced his feet and pushed Obstadt over backward.

  With a tortured roar and a useless flailing of arms and legs, Obstadt tumbled away out of sight below the deck, and Sherman Oaks was abruptly dragged upright and slammed belly-first against the rail, his single arm stretched straight downward as it took Obstadt’s pendulous weight.

  “Nicky,” Oaks wheezed, “I worked with you at Stage 5 Productions in ’59! I can get you a ghost that’ll make you young again! Thus from infernal Dis do we ascend, to view the subjects of our monarchy!”

  In the brightness of the sunlight that was shining over there Sullivan saw tears glisten on Bradshaw’s cheek—

  But Bradshaw took hold of Oaks’s belt and lifted him over the rail—Oaks kicked, but had no free hand with which to grab anything, and howled, though all his voices seemed to have lost the capacity to form words—and Bradshaw effortfully tossed the tethered pair away into the brightening abyss.

  Away on the other side of the Piccadilly Circus deck, Sullivan cringed at the receding scream of a thousand voices.

  Sullivan couldn’t roll over, but he saw Kootie look back toward the port deck to see if Obstadt and Oaks would land there—but there was no sound of impact from that direction. The supernaturally amplified magnetic field was obviously breaking down, and the two men had certainly fallen all the long way down into the walled lagoon that lay like a moat around the ship.

  Sullivan heard Elizalde gasp, and looked across the lobby again—to see that Bradshaw had now climbed right up onto the starboard rail outside and was standing erect, balanced on it, with his arms waving out to the sides.

  Bradshaw’s recently youthful and trim body was visibly deteriorating back into the gross figure of Solomon Shadroe, and with every passing second it became a more incongruous sight to see the fat old man tottering up there.

  Bradshaw squinted belligerently down at the disheveled attorney, who had lurched back across the narrow section of outdoor deck and was leaning in the Piccadilly Circus doorway, panting. The attorney had evidently wet his pants.

  “You okay, Frank?” asked Bradshaw gruffly.

  The lawyer blinked around uncertainly, then goggled up at the fat old man standing on the rail; and he seemed to wilt with recognition. “Yes, Mr. Bradshaw. I—I brought all this—”

  “Good.” Bradshaw blinked past him into the shadows of the Piccadilly Circus lobby. He was probably unable to see in even as far as where deLarava’s gorily holed body lay tumbled on the polished cork floor, but he called, “Pete, Beth—Angelica, Kootie—” The freshening breeze ruffled his gray hair, and he wobbled on his perch. “—Edison. I don’t want to spoil the party, so I’ll go. This here just won’t last much longer.”

  He might have been referring to the psychically skewed magnetic field, but Sullivan thought he meant his control over his long-dead body and his long-held ghost; and nervously Sullivan thought of the descriptions of the way Frank Rocha’s body had finally gone.

  Then Bradshaw’s face creased in a faint, self-conscious, reminiscent smile—and he curled one hand over his head and stuck his other arm straight out, and he spun slowly on the rail on the toe of one foot; and, almost gracefully, he overbalanced and fell away out into empty space and disappeared.

  Sullivan found himself listening for a splash—irrationally, for the water was a good hundred feet below, and Sullivan was sprawled on the other side of the Piccadilly Circus lobby, closer to the port rail than the starboard one from which Bradshaw had just fallen—but what he heard three seconds later was a muffled boom that vibrated the deck and flung a high plume of glittering spray into the morning sunlight up past the starboard rail.

  The lawyer seemed to be sobbing now, and he ran away aft, his footsteps knocking away to silence on the exterior deck planks, and the footsteps didn’t start up again from some other direction.

  Sullivan discovered that he was able to sit up; then that he could get his legs under himself and get to his feet. Elizalde hurried around to his right side and braced him up, and at last he dared to look down at his chest.

  A button hung in fragments on his shirtfront and a tiny hole had been raggedly punched through the cloth, but there was no blood; and then with a surge of relief he remembered the brass plaque from his father’s gravestone, tucked into his scapular, over his heart.

  “Your arm’s bleeding,” said Elizalde. “But somehow that seems to be the only place you’re hit.” Her face was pale and she was frowning deeply. Sullivan could see the lump of the .45 under the front of her sweatshirt.

  He looked down at his left arm, and his depth perception seemed to flatten right down to two dimensions when he saw that his shirtsleeve was rapidly blotting with bright red blood. “Hold me up from that side,” he said dizzily, “and maybe no one will notice. You’re a doctor, Angelica—can you dig out a bullet?”

  “If it’s not embedded in the bone, I can.”

  “Good—Jesus—soon.” He took a deep breath and let it out, feeling as disoriented as if he’d had a stiff drink and an unfiltered Pall Mall on an empty stomach. “Uh … where to?”

  “The bridge is there again,” said Kootie anxiously, “the one that leads to the stairs and the parking lot. Let’s get off this ship while we can.”

  Sullivan looked up, across the wide lobby. deLarava’s body was still sprawled out there in the middle of the deck, but the lights and camera gear at the forward end of the room were all her modern equipment again. The little old man in the khaki jacket was crouched over one of the Lowell light kits, busily packing away the scrims and light-doors, and humming. He didn’t look up when Kootie ran back there, snatched up a half-used roll of silvery gaffer’s tape, and hurried back to Sullivan and Elizalde.

  “Kootie’s right,” said Elizalde, scuffling back around to Sullivan’s left side and hugging his bloody arm to her breast. “
Let’s get back to Solville before people are able to wander in here and find this mess.”

  “Joey,” said a frail voice behind Sullivan, “stop them.”

  Sullivan looked back at the film equipment and saw that deLarava’s fat ghost was leaning on the tripod, her translucent chin resting on the black Sony Betacam. Her head ended right above the eyebrows, constricted to a short, stumpy cone by the rubber bands; and her translucent ectoplasmic right arm was still stretched out for yards across the deck, the limp fingers of the ghost hand twitching impotently on the grip of the automatic pistol.

  The old man by the light kit looked up. “Oh, I’ve seen these before,” he said cheerfully, speaking toward the ghost. “I should pop it into a marmalade jar, so somebody can sniff it. Crazy. No more point to it than catching somebody’s shadow by slapping a book shut on it. If you ask me.”

  “Joey,” said the ghost in a peremptory but birdlike tone, “you work for me. You gentlemen—why, you all work for me. Joey, I seem to have dislocated my wrist—take the gun from my hand and kill those three.”

  “I hear a voice!” exclaimed Joey, smiling broadly. “A blot of mustard or a bit of undigested beef, speaking to me! A sort of food that’s bound to disagree—not for me.” He stood up and bowed toward Kootie, who was nervously holding the roll of gaffer’s tape. “Thanks a lot, boy,” Joey said, “just the same.”

  deLarava’s ghost was fading, but it straightened up and drifted across the floor straight toward Sullivan, and its eyes, as insubstantial as raw egg-whites, locked onto his. “Come with me, Pete,” the ghost said imperiously.

  Sullivan opened his mouth—almost certainly to decline the offer, though he was dizzy and nauseated at the hard sunlight, and giving a lot of his weight to Elizalde’s right arm—but the breath that came out between his teeth was sharp with bourbon fumes, and it whispered, “What number were you trying to reach?”

  deLarava’s ghost withered before the fumy breath, and the gossamer lines of the fat face turned to Kootie. “Little boy, would you help an old woman across a very wide street?”