Forced Perspectives

by Tim Powers

  During the straight forty-mile drive up the 15 freeway north of Hesperia, Vickery eventually realized that it wasn’t the few other cars on the sun-baked lanes that Castine kept hitching around to look at, but the flat expanses of the desert itself, dotted with star-thistle and saltbush weeds, stretching away to distant foothills.

  “Civilization again soon,” he told her finally. “Just a bit more curvature.”

  She nodded. “We should have got some Cokes or something,” she said absently, “when we stopped in Hesperia.” She slid lower in her seat, as if to avoid being seen—though the nearest car was a hundred yards ahead of them. “The sun’s going down,” she said faintly, “but I’m glad the sky is still blue.”

  Vickery nodded sympathetically without looking away from the onrushing pavement. The Labyrinth afterworld had had the appearance of a desert ringed by low hills, with a highway curving through it, but the turbulent sky there had been various shades of brown.

  “I know what you mean,” he said. “When I first moved out here, I liked to drive with the windows down, so I could be sure it was fresh air outside.” At the moment the car’s air-conditioner was set to the maximum, and he was keeping an eye on the temperature and battery gauges.

  “What if we were to see that house,” said Castine, with a visible shiver, “now, way out there in the desert?”

  Vickery’s lips pulled back from his teeth. “With a figure standing on the roof—beckoning.”

  “Shut up! Where the hell do you live, anyway?” She plucked bewilderedly at the denim jacket she was now wearing. “Yesterday I still had a—an identity!”

  In Hesperia they had found a Ross Dress for Less store, and she had bought entirely new clothing and shoes; they had stashed her old things, including her billfold, in a locker at the Greyhound bus station. She had kept only her driver’s license, which was now in the front pocket of her new jeans. The Hollywood baseball cap she had left in a shopping cart.

  Eventually a little cluster of buildings became visible on the flat horizon ahead, and within a few minutes Vickery was driving past it—an outlet mall, with Target and Skechers and Old Navy stores and broad parking lots ringed with young camphor trees.

  “Barstow in just a couple of miles,” he said, “though you can’t see much of it because of the concrete-block sound walls. Not that there’s much to see anyway.”

  And in fact tan sound walls were virtually all there was to be seen of Barstow, and Vickery drove through it in only a couple of minutes. Out past the east end of town, the view on either side of the highway was nothing but tumbleweeds and a few anonymous buildings in the distance, and low hills on the horizon.

  Castine looked back. “We’re in the desert again,” she said uneasily. “I think you passed it.”

  “Nearly there.”

  Soon an overpass loomed ahead, and Vickery eased the car into the right lane. “That’s Old Highway 58, coming up,” he said. “When we pass under it, look at the little shelf up where the slope meets the underside of the bridge. That’s where I’ve got my nest. We’ll drive out to it later.”

  “To talk to ghosts, I suppose,” said Castine as Vickery steered the Saturn around the offramp and under the freeway bridge, heading north now. The sun was above the remote bumpy horizon to his left, and he swung the visor to the side to shade his eyes.

  “There’s a few things I want to check,” he agreed.

  “Ghosts are all idiots.”

  “True, but they do love to talk.”

  The highway curled around to the northwest for half a mile, and then there were widely spaced houses visible ahead, and Vickery made a left turn onto a two-lane road flanked by occasional old trailers and houses set well back from the narrow pavement.

  Having traced a long loop, Vickery drove under an overpass of the 15 freeway that they’d traversed a few minutes earlier, and soon steered right, into the driveway of a small trailer park. His own single-wide trailer was around to the rear of the fenced-in area, its back side facing a mile of empty scrub with railroad tracks beyond.

  He stopped the Saturn beside a set of wooden steps that led up to a narrow wooden porch and the trailer’s front door, and at last switched off the engine. In the ensuing quiet, he could hear country-western music from a nearby radio mingling with the rustle of dry wind in the bordering trees.

  Castine had opened the passenger-side door and swung her legs out onto the gravel, but paused to stretch before climbing stiffly out. The warm air smelled of heated stone and creosote.

  “Eight hours in a coach airline seat, and now two hours in a car,” she said. “I’ll never stand up straight again.” She stepped unsteadily away from the car and shut the door. “I hope we’re not going back to L.A.”

  Vickery closed the driver’s side door. “Not today.”

  Castine looked over the top of the car at the trailer, probably noting the row of spinning pinwheels mounted on the roof. “Have you got a spare room?”

  “The couch in the living room opens to a bed,” he said as he started up the steps. “I’ll take that.”

  “Oh, I can take the couch. You’ve already—”

  “You’re the guest, no arguing.” He unlocked the door, and it opened with a squeal when he tugged on the knob.

  She spread her hands in wry surrender and followed him in.

  They were in the dim kitchen, with a round formica-top table and the refrigerator six feet ahead. He switched on a ceiling light and said, “I’ll get the air going,” and hurried to the left, past the table. A moment later a light came on there in a small living room, and then the clatter of an air conditioner started up.

  “Come on in,” he said. “It’ll be cool in a couple of minutes.”

  Castine stepped around the kitchen table into the living room, and Vickery imagined her response to the old couch and pair of easy chairs, the coffee table with a couple of issues of the New Oxford Review on it, the two standing lamps with yellowed parchment shades, the mismatched rugs partly covering the linoleum floor, and the bookshelves around the windows and over the back door. The place, he realized for the first time, smelled of coffee and motor oil. Could be worse, he thought.

  “Get you a drink?” he said. “Sit down, or sprawl on the couch if you’d rather.”

  “I think I’ll sprawl.” She lowered herself onto the couch, resting her head on one arm and her ankles up on the other. “This is the first time I’ve relaxed in . . . lots of hours. Are we for sure safe here, from . . . whoever?”

  “I think so. Drink?”

  “Oh . . . whiskey, if you’ve got any, with ice. Bourbon, rye, scotch, whatever. You think so?”

  Vickery stepped into the kitchen. “Well, we’ve certainly got no electronic tags on us now,” he called as he opened a cabinet over the sink, “nothing rational. As for irrational, each of those pinwheels on the roof has a bit of organic stuff—wood, bone, leather—”

  “—With a terminally subsumed ghost in it,” guessed Castine.

  “Right. Mounted at the hub. When they’re all whirling—and it’s always windy here—they project definitive nullity, nobody here, to most kinds of supernatural scanning.” He fetched down a bottle of Maker’s Mark bourbon and a couple of glasses. “At least I’m pretty sure they would, if anybody were to come snooping around with dowsing rods or a ghost guide or anything like that.”

  He opened the freezer and took an ice-cube tray to the sink and banged the cubes out into a bowl. “I’ve even got Jack Hipple’s pinecone in one of them.”

  “Hah!” came Castine’s voice from the living room. “He’s doing some good at last.”

  Last year they had learned that frightened or exhausted ghosts—or even animate potentials-of-persons that never quite achieved actual existence—could be fixed forever into organic objects, as Vickery had saved his never-conceived daughter in a copy of The Secret Garden. And the ghost of a magic-dabbler and blackmailer called Jack Hipple had at one point collapsed itself into a pinecone, and Vickery had ke
pt it.

  “I hope he gets termites,” said Vickery now.

  He shook ice cubes into the glasses, sloshed a liberal measure of bourbon into each, then picked them up and carried them into the living room.

  “I’ve seen several of Hipple’s ghost portraits on eBay,” said Castine as she took a glass from him. “Thanks! They go for a couple of hundred bucks, usually. People collect this stuff.”

  Vickery sat down in the easy chair closest to the couch. “I remember he thought the paintings were tethers, to keep a ghost from dissipating. I doubt they still work, if they ever did.”

  Castine took a big sip of her drink and then set the glass on a magazine on the table. “And now you want to go talk to some ghosts—in your nest under the 15 freeway. That’s still possible, I gather.”

  “Sporadically, these days.” He took a liberal sip of his own drink. “There’s a dirt road that takes you to the overpass, and I drive out there a couple of times a week, and the freeway provides enough rapidly moving free wills to generate the old current.”

  She waved her hand in a circle indicating the surrounding area. “Your neighbors wonder about that?”

  “There’s a lot of dirt roads that lead out into the desert in every direction from here, and I make sure I’m seen taking them all, at one time or another. I get in a good deal of shooting practice in real remote spots. That’s covert, but I always conspicuously take a metal detector, and I’ve dropped a few hints about Roswell and the Von Daniken books.”

  “So Bill Ardmore is a saucer nut.”

  “If anybody was to wonder about him, sure. A UFOlogist. I’m going to cook us up something to eat, and then we can drive out to my freeway nest. I’ve got eggs, bacon, onions, cheddar cheese—how about a big old omelette?”

  “Drive out tonight? It’s—it’ll be dark.”

  “The 15 has a fair amount of traffic at all hours, since it’s the way from L.A. to Las Vegas and back, so there’ll be current. And the ghosts come through clearer after sundown—I think ultraviolet interferes with their composition.”

  “And they don’t attack you?” she asked, clearly remembering one they had encountered last year in the Hollywood Forever cemetery.

  “I dragged a roll of chicken wire to the shelf under the bridge, and made a barrier, like a Faraday Cage. It’s an old trick I learned from the freeway gypsies in L.A. Does an omelette sound good? Or I could do scrambled eggs, fried eggs—”

  “But you just had a, an episode, a vision of that awful house, a couple of hours ago! What if it were to happen again, out—” She waved toward the window, clearly meaning: out there in the desert, at night!

  “I’d come out of it again pretty quick,” he said stolidly. “Either one of us would.” He tipped up his glass for another sip and got one of the ice cubes as well as a mouthful of bourbon.

  “I’ll go with you,” she said firmly, “in the morning.”

  For several seconds neither of them spoke. Vickery chewed the ice cube.

  Then, “You’ll be safe here,” he said gently. “Lock the doors, and I’ll give you a gun. And when I come back, I’ll knock—” He reached out and rapped knock-knock-knock, knock on the table, “—before I put the key in the lock, so you’ll know it’s me. I shouldn’t be more than two hours.”

  “Oh, damn you, I’ll go along,” she said angrily. “Omelette, cooked through, not runny. And I want a gun anyway.”

  Vickery nodded respectful acknowledgment and stood up to go back into the kitchen.

  Only a few surfers still bobbed on the darkening waves out past the surf line, and a chilly onshore breeze had driven most of the beachgoers to pack up their towels and coolers and head for their cars, and the parking lot was a good deal emptier now than when the woman with the two pre-teen girls had arrived. The three of them scuffed quickly now through the loose sand around the volleyball nets, their shadows stretching out in front of them to the parking lot pavement. The woman wore a blue cotton dress that fluttered around her legs, and a leather purse swung on a strap over her shoulder; her eyes were hidden behind sunglasses and her mouth was a tight line. The girls wore identical Batman T-shirts and denim shorts, and they glanced at each other and bit their lips to keep from giggling.

  “Oops!” whispered one of them to the other, and then they both looked away, shaking as they hurried to keep up with the woman.

  Six notes of Strauss’ Death and Transfiguration chimed faintly in the wind, and the woman snatched a phone out of her purse. “This is Agnes,” she said, angling the phone through her disordered chestnut hair, “speak up, it’s windy.” Then, “We’re leaving right now, as a matter of fact.” She nodded emphatically as she walked. “Yes, I think you could call it that! A big black hole event on the beach. Yes—yes, a whole family, six people, at least, all babbling in unison. Something about Dr. Zhivago, and buying clothes in Hesperia. What? I said Dr. Zhivago—How should I know? No, this family was drunk, they didn’t connect it with us. Yes, all of them, they had a jug of wine under a blanket, I should have called the cops.”

  The three of them had reached the pavement, and the woman paused to take off one of her flat canvas shoes and knock sand out of it. The girls were barefoot. “No,” snapped the woman, bracing the phone awkwardly between her ear and her shoulder, “I wouldn’t really have called them. I’m not an idiot.” She took off her other shoe. “No,” she went on, “just therapy wading, not even up to their knees! I know—” she glanced at the girls, “—their history. Here, I’ll let Amber explain.”

  She thrust the phone at one of the girls.

  “I’m Lexi,” the girl said, but she pushed back her wind-blown brown hair and took the phone. “Hello, Uncle Simon.” After a few seconds she said, “Well, we were wading, and Lexi slipped—”

  “I thought I slipped,” said the other girl.

  “And so I caught her, to keep her from falling. Yes, by the hand, but we were just holding hands for a second! We didn’t mean to start that family all squawking away!”

  She nodded several more times, blinking away tears. “Don’t let Agnes leave us here! We won’t do it again!”

  The other girl was now wringing her hands and glancing anxiously back at the sparsely populated shore and the sea beyond.

  “Make her promise not to leave us here!” said the girl with the phone. A moment later she held it out toward Agnes Loria. “He wants to talk to you.”

  Loria was shaking sand out of her other shoe, and now took the phone impatiently with her free hand. “Agnes again,” she said. “Elisha? Yes, he’s texted me a few times, but I haven’t had time to reply.” She frowned then, her shoe evidently forgotten in her hand. “He did?” She listened intently, then said, “Of course he will. I’ll let you know where.” Again she was silent, and Lexi and Amber exchanged nervous looks.

  “And the twins,” Loria went on, “should I—oh! Okay. Holiday Harbor Marina now? Where’s that?” She dropped her shoe to dig a pen and an envelope out of her purse, and she scribbled briefly on the envelope. She lifted the pen and didn’t speak for a few seconds, then glared at the girls. “No, I was far enough away, but I felt the black hole effect—like I was a big super centipede. Right, we’ll see you there.”

  Loria tucked her phone and the pen and envelope back in her purse and put on her shoe. She was frowning.

  “The sun’s going down,” wailed one of the girls. “We’ll die out here!”

  “Ass—asphyxiate,” sobbed the other.

  Suddenly the thoughts in Loria’s mind all collapsed, replaced by an impression of frightened fluttering, like a bird helplessly falling in vacuum. She could feel that her hands were extending, fingers spread, and after a few seconds she was aware that she was holding two other hands.

  Then her thoughts flooded back, and she took a quick step to catch her balance. She saw that she was holding the twin’s hands. At least they weren’t touching each other.

  Loria mentally replayed the recent conversation. “Don’t be silly,” she
said, a bit breathlessly, “I’m not going to abandon you. You’re both part of the big family, right? Come on.” She let go of their hands and started toward the car, which was parked at the back of the lot, by the narrow road that separated the beach from the big waterfront houses. “But I think I’m going to make you two wear gloves, all the time.”

  “We can’t wear gloves,” objected the one that Loria was pretty sure was Amber. Tears still streaked the girls’ faces, but their momentary despair was evidently forgotten. “Without fingerprints, there’d be no difference between us, and we’d melt.”

  Loria’s face was still chilly with a dew of sweat. It was them, again, she thought. They were in my mind for a moment, and this time they made me hold their hands because they were afraid of being abandoned. A week ago I found myself violently tearing open a bag of Doritos, after I had told them they couldn’t have any. I wish their identities—identity?—would stay in their heads!

  “Did your boyfriend do something wrong?” asked the probable Lexi now.

  “Is Uncle Simon mad at him now?” piped up the other girl.

  “How cheerfully he seems to grin,” said Lexi, “how neatly spread his claws!”

  That was a quote from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Loria wished the girls had never got hold of a copy of the book.

  “Oh, shut up, shut up,” she breathed, “poor demented things.” More loudly, she went on, “Get in the car, we’re going to spend the night on the Black Sheep. It’s berthed somewhere down in Wilmington now.”

  “It’s birthed!” said one of the girls. “Uncle Simon has to slap its ass, make it cry, or it won’t breathe.”

  The two of them ran awkwardly ahead toward Loria’s yellow station wagon. I’ll have to tell Simon about it, she thought. He hates hearing alarming news about the twins, but I’ll have to tell him.

  A hundred yards away, at the other end of the parking lot, Lateef Fakhouri stood beside his pearl-white Nissan, watching the woman and the two girls get into the station wagon. He shrugged out of his tan-and-orange plaid sportcoat and tossed it across the front seat, then hurriedly got in and started the engine. The station wagon drove to the parking lot entrance and turned right onto Pacific Coast Highway, and Fakhouri followed at a discreet distance.