by Tim Powers
For the past two weeks, Fakhouri had been exploring the occult subculture of Los Angeles. His knowledge of Khalid Boutros’ visit fifty years earlier—and Fakhouri’s own Egyptian name and Ministry of Antiquities credentials—had led to a few confidential, nervous referrals, and at last, a few days ago, he had managed to purchase the privilege of igniting some sticks of punkwood from an “eternal flame” that was maintained in a garage in San Pedro.
The flame’s caretaker was the self-described High Priestess of a local coven. She had told Fakhouri that the flame was a direct continuation of the Baba Gurgur fire that had been burning for thousands of years in Iraq, and that her grandmother, a previous High Priestess, had acquired the relayed combustion from it in 1928. The flame had been carefully kept burning ever since in an oil drum in the grandmother’s garage.
The grandmother had died in the ’40s; the man who had originally acquired the flame, one Claude Wystan, had gone blind from drinking bootleg gin and killed himself in the ’30s; and this current High Priestess had been in a hurry because she worked as a waitress in a nearby Denny’s, but she gave him an old coffee can to carry the smoldering punkwood in.
Fakhouri had driven quickly back to the Egyptian Embassy on Wilshire and used the smoldering sticks to light an oil lantern, and the junior staff had been strictly ordered to keep the oil replenished in the lantern so that the ancient combustion wouldn’t go out.
Then Fakhouri had found a bottle of Bic Wite-Out and drawn random white squiggles on Khalid Boutros’ old photograph of the Nu hieroglyph, and got a Staples store to make a four-foot-tall cardboard blow-up of it. He trusted that the random white lines would prevent the symbol from having any effect on the Staples employees, and he would be able to “erase” the lines later with a gray felt marker.
He had looked up ChakraSys Incorporated, the source of the new coloring books, and had then researched its CEO, Simon Harlowe: the man’s vagabond past, his troubled family, and, most of all, his current pursuits, associates, and activities; and it had become clear enough that Harlowe intended to consummate the interrupted egregore of 1968, on the fiftieth anniversary of that aborted attempt.
And on Halloween night, when Simon Harlowe would try to complete the long-delayed birth of the Ba-enabled egregore, Fakhouri intended to be present, and to illuminate the potent Nu hieroglyph with the ancient flame. It was the method he believed Khalid Boutros had used to defeat the quickening 1968 egregore, and he was cautiously confident that it would do the same for Harlowe’s, two days from now. The Nu hieroglyph would surely negate the Ba one.
Streetlights had come on at some point. The yellow station wagon turned inland at Beach Boulevard, and Fakhouri let a couple of cars merge into his lane ahead of him as he made the same turn; the station wagon was still clearly visible, and not going fast.
But Boutros’ use of the Nu hieroglyph in 1968 might not be effective now. Fakhouri suspected that this launching of the egregore would be more powerful—people on the streets, who had no connection to it, had in the last few days begun helplessly speaking the thoughts of Harlowe and his cultists. Fakhouri had heard nothing about such an effect occurring in Los Angeles in 1968. The victims recovered their own consciousnesses within seconds, with only momentary disorientation afterward—but might that possession soon become irreversible?
What if Harlowe’s revitalized, Ba-quickened egregore could simply roll over the Nu sigil, now, even when that sigil was illuminated by the primordial Iraqi flame?
And what if it had been some other factor, unrecorded or completely unsuspected by old Boutros, that had stymied the egregore in 1968?
As a precaution, Fakhouri should really have some other tactic in readiness too, to prevent the egregore from attaining coherence, agency, mentation—irresistible dominance.
According to a neurologist to whom he had described the matter as a theoretical hypothesis, such an entity would need the equivalent of a switchboard or computer router, a communication nexus, analogous to the two cooperating halves of the thalamus in the human brain. And since the egregore was to be made of human minds instead of physical neurons, it would probably require a reciprocating pair of minds that suffered from something like what psychiatrists called dissociation. This idea seemed to be borne out by Harlowe’s pursuit of Vickery and Castine, who were said to have fallen into the afterworld and come back with a compromised connection to normal sequential time; but Vickery and Castine were in the wind now. Perhaps they had taken Fakhouri’s advice after all, and got on a flight to a distant city; in any case, Harlowe had not caught them and didn’t seem likely to.
The yellow station wagon had sped up, and Fakhouri passed a slower-moving Volkswagen to keep it in sight.
But Harlowe had adopted his brother’s two pre-teen daughters, after their parents’ puzzling suicide, and it was a matter of public record that the girls had been treated for psychological ailments. Depending on what sorts of ailment . . . could Harlowe be planning to use those girls as replacements for Vickery and Castine? They seemed to be part of his inner circle, in spite of their age, so they must certainly have been initiated by now with the Ba figure in the coloring books.
Today he had watched the two girls through binoculars, and he had been bothered by an old memory. For no discernible reason, Lexi and Amber had reminded him of two Coptic girls he had seen many years ago in Manshiyat Naser, the Garbage City of Cairo, east of the El-Nasr Road at the base of the Mukatam Hills. He had been there on official business, tracing Pharaonic artifacts believed to be smuggled out of Egypt by way of that trash collecting district; and the two Coptic girls, perched on top of a load of malodorous bags in the back of a battered old Chevrolet pickup truck, had appeared to be in no more peril than any other of the Zabaleen, the “garbage people,” the untouchables whose lives were spent sorting through Cairo’s refuse. Undoubtedly the girls had had families, which had probably specialized for generations in salvaging some particular categories of stuff from the collected trash of Cairo—broken glass, or plastic bottles, or old discarded food for the ubiquitous pigs of the district. Undoubtedly they were Christians, with the blue cross tattooed on their wrists. But after he had returned to his office in Lazhogli Square, three miles to the west, he had been troubled by the thought that he should somehow have saved them from their inherited predicament, and to this day his sleep was sometimes disrupted by a nightmare in which those two Zabaleen girls figured.
The yellow station wagon slowed for a moment by a Starbuck’s, then sped up and caught the last seconds of a green traffic light at the intersection, and Fakhouri had to step on the accelerator to cross after them before the yellow light turned red.
Within the last few hours Harlowe’s ChakraSys team had vacated their office on Sepulveda, and Harlowe’s boat, the Black Sheep, had been moved from its berth at a Santa Monica marina. Fakhouri told himself—firmly!—that he was following the Loria woman this evening only to discover Harlowe’s new center of operations.
He would not even consider making any plan to abduct the twins.
He quailed even at the thought of committing such a perilous felony, in a foreign country. He reminded himself that Harlowe’s nieces were entirely unlike those two Coptic girls, who in fact were probably mothers of children of their own by now.
It was foolish to imagine that abducting the twins—even though it would be saving their souls, really—would relieve him of the troubling memory of two girls sitting on top of trash bags in the back of a pickup truck in Manshiyat Naser.
But he might get a smaller, more easily portable facsimile of the Nu hieroglyph.
The dirt road that curled away to the northeast from Vickery’s trailer park was just a flattened track across the desert, paralleling the 15 freeway and a line of power poles to the left. The sun had set, and their path was only discernible as a consistent gap between sparse weeds, but Castine didn’t suggest that he turn on the headlights. The dry wind from the south was still warm, blowing sand against the passenge
r side window until she rolled it up.
“So what do you, you know, do,” she asked, “in Barstow?” Her voice was resolutely light. “Besides talk to ghosts?”
“Oh,” he said, not looking away from the dim path, “under-the-table handyman work and car repair. And I, uh, manage events for the St. Joseph Catholic Church. Retreats, carnivals. Picnics, mostly. And I read a lot.”
“No . . . girl?”
“Oh.” The question had taken him by surprise, and he didn’t look away from the path. “It wouldn’t—well, no, nothing serious. I don’t think it’d be fair to get a girl involved with . . . ”
“Somebody like us.”
“Well—right, exactly.” He went on quickly, “And I hit the library pretty often, use their computers. I’ve got the TOR browser on a flash drive, so I can check the deep and dark webs to watch traffic in ghost-inhabited objects—which there’s a lot of, actually, and my . . . my copy of The Secret Garden might show up on one of those.” He smiled uncomfortably. “It’s been eight months since I’ve been able to read to her.” He took a deep breath and let it out. “And I’m always careful to delete any traces afterward, and then click through a lot of general news or UFO websites, in case somebody should get curious and look at the computer’s history. But I keep searching.”
He saw Castine shake her head.
“And,” he went on stolidly, “yes, I do ask the ghosts about it. I told you they can sometimes sense subsumed entities, personalities—even ones that never—”
“Never actually existed,” said Castine.
Vickery nodded. “Pencil notes that never got inked in, on God’s ledger. I have to get the ghosts to look past the pinwheels on my trailer roof, but when I’ve done that they’ve told me several times that they sense one near the ocean. I’ve tried to track that one more closely by setting up impromptu nests down south beside the 405 and the 710, but the ghosts there haven’t come up with anything more precise—just ‘by the sea,’ with no details.”
He shifted his hands on the wheel—the path slanted away from the freeway here, and a branching path ahead would take them straight to the south side of the overpass.
“Almost there,” he said, watching in the dimness for the path. “And now I know a bit more about the people who stole the book. I can ask different questions.”
Castine huffed air through her nose. “Sure, you know how a couple of them dress.” After a moment she went on, grudgingly, “And, okay, you know it may involve some sort of Egyptian artifact.”
“And—maybe—a wrecked old house in a canyon, with a panhead Harley Davidson parked out front, and a long-haired lean-faced guy who stands on the porch.”
Castine shifted on the seat to face him. “I never saw that! Was that what you saw when you blanked out in the park this afternoon?”
“Yes. And I was closer to the house than I’ve been in past visions.”
“Oh shit. That means I will be too, next time I see it.”
She was silent as he carefully steered to the left onto the side path, toward the freeway, and braked the car to a stop between the weeds, far enough from the bridge so that it wouldn’t show in any headlights circling around the offramp.
He picked up a pack of cigarettes from the seat beside him and tucked it into his shirt pocket, then opened his door and stepped out onto the shadowed dirt. The dry wind that stirred his hair smelled faintly of sage.
Castine had got out on her side and plodded around to stand beside him. “Lead the way,” she sighed.
Back at the trailer, Vickery had left the little Glock and tucked a Colt Government Model .45 semi-automatic into the pocket of his old corduroy jacket, and had given Castine a .38 Special revolver; and when he pulled his gun out now, she did the same.
“You threaten ghosts with guns?” she whispered as they began walking toward the freeway bridge.
“Sometimes,” replied Vickery quietly. “They still know what guns are. But it’s always possible that some living person has crawled up onto my shelf, and any such are likely to be as crazy as the ghosts.”
The sweep of the curved freeway offramp was up an embankment, and when no oncoming cars were visible, Vickery led Castine around it to the underside of the bridge. They stepped carefully up the dark dirt slope, and Vickery caught Castine’s denim-sleeved arm to stop her when they were still a couple of yards short of the shelf at the top. With his free hand he dug a little LED flashlight out of his pocket, and, after glancing back to be sure no cars were in view on the freeway, played its bright beam along the length of the shelf. The only thing visible was a wooden frame halfway along the length of it.
“That’s my chicken wire barrier,” he said, switching off the flashlight and putting it back in his pocket. All that could be seen now was the dimly starlit pavement out on either side of the bridge. “You can put the gun away,” he added, pushing his own .45 into his belt and leaning forward to feel the slope as he climbed. “If you’re still hungry,” he added, “I’ve got an old peanut can full of M&Ms up there.”
“I’m good,” said Castine, following him up to crouch on the narrow strip of flat dirt in almost complete darkness. Their heads brushed the cement underside of the freeway bridge until they sat down.
An eighteen-foot-wide load-bearing wall stood down there at the edge of the freeway, blocking their view of any car that might stop directly below them, but the occasional cars that flashed past were only momentarily eclipsed by it. Vickery dug the cigarette pack out of his pocket.
The close cement slab overhead and the dry dirt they were sitting on were suddenly visible when he snapped a Bic Lighter and lit a cigarette . . . and then lit another, and another. The flame went out, and by feel he pushed the cigarettes through the hexagonal gaps in the chicken-wire barrier; they fell to the dirt on that side and made three glowing red dots in the darkness. He handed Castine the lighter, then groped to the side until he found a can propped against the wall. He popped the plastic lid off it, shook some M&Ms into his hand and tossed them through the wire.
“We could do with a few more cars before we start singing,” he said quietly. “A sustained current.”
He heard Castine shift around, and then she said, “Singing?” Her voice echoed under the bridge, and she went on more softly, “Are you kidding? Singing what?”
A pair of headlights appeared in the west, and shortly another pair was visible behind it.
“The song that works best is ‘What a Wonderful World.’ You must know it, everybody does.”
“Sure, Louis Armstrong, but—what, ghosts like it?”
“Come on, before the cigarettes go out.”
Vickery began to sing the wistful, half-melancholy song, and after a few syllables Castine joined in. Vickery couldn’t see her face, but her contralto voice blended smoothly with his tenor, and she was evidently enjoying it in spite of herself. Vickery found himself wishing that no conjuring would happen, that they could sing the old song uninterrupted, just the two of them out here in the lonely Mojave Desert.
The cars flashed past under the bridge, briefly hidden behind the wall, and as they reappeared on the other side and receded to the east, something bumped into the chicken wire barrier from the other side.
Their song stopped abruptly, and Vickery heard Castine scramble back away from the barrier.
“I thought you said they weren’t substantial now!” she hissed.
“I said less!” whispered Vickery.
And from the other side of the barrier a woman’s hoarse voice said, “Don’t look at me! I’m dead!”
Vickery made the sign of the cross and took a deep breath. “We can’t see you,” he said. “Have a cigarette—I lit it for you.”
In the darkness, one of the coals on the other side of the chicken wire rose into the air, and when it brightened for a second, Vickery glimpsed a high forehead and glittering eyes between locks of dark hair; then he felt smoky air brush his face and there was nothing to see but the bobbing coal.
Vickery frowned. This was the first time out here that one of them had been able to pick up a cigarette; much less actually draw smoke though it. Previously they had just rolled them around in the dirt.
“Thanks,” came the voice. “You could be dead too, if you’d just try.”
“Not today.” He could hear Castine breathing behind him, but aside from the puff of smoke a moment ago, there was no breath audible from the ghost. “Can you see,” he went on, “if there are any strings attached to either of us? Or any kind of flags, beepers, beacons? Can people see where we—”
“No, Steve,” said the ghost, in a new, breathy voice, “there are no strings tied to you. Not yet.”
Vickery recognized the line—Lauren Bacall, in To Have and Have Not. He had noticed before that ghosts often quoted bits of dialogue from old movies. Scraps of memory somehow retained.
“There’s people trying to find us, this woman and me,” he went on. “Can you see them?”
There was silence from the other side of the barrier for so long that Vickery believed the ghost had dissipated; and he jumped when its voice quavered, “Ba ba black sheep, have you any souls?”
The wood-frame barrier creaked, as if the ghost were leaning on it from the other side. Vickery hiked himself back, trying to remember how sturdily he had built it.
We should get out of here, he thought—but if this ghost is more present than the others have been, I do have to ask it more questions.
“They have—” Damn, he thought, this would be hard enough with a living person; “—some connection to an old house in a canyon, two stories, and the bottom story is full of sand—”
“Spiral staircase!” called Castine breathlessly.
