by Tim Powers
“But all are welcomed in,” Loria reminded him. “All compelled eventually, right? Everybody into the black hole.”
“Why do you talk this way, Agnes?” Harlowe was still shaky from the long moments when the twins’ mentation had seemed abruptly to stop. “You know the egregore won’t be predatory. I wish that term, black hole, had never gained currency among us. It’ll be inclusive, benevolent—ultimately it’s the God that people have looked for, and a million times thought they’d found.”
“I know, I know. I agree!” She nodded toward the lounge. “I’m just thinking about those poor girls.” The boat was rocking in the swell now, and Loria stepped carefully to the rail beside him. “I started to ask you something. How did her parents—hah! I’m falling into their point of view—how did their parents kill themselves, anyway?”
Harlowe was aware that if he’d been able to feel guilt and shame, he’d feel them now. “Damn it, Agnes,” he said, “it’s not helpful to talk about old individual concerns! Tomorrow night the thing which will be all of us will be able to . . . transcend such stuff. Apotheosis. Everything it does will be right, by definition.” He nodded; then glanced at her. “They pulled plastic bags over their heads.”
Loria rocked her head back, her eyes on the lounge doorway. “How did they restrain their hands?”
Harlowe suppressed the remembered image: the bodies of his brother and sister-in-law, sitting in two chairs on their patio deck. The plastic had been desperately indented over their gaping mouths. The twins had been in the house.
“It doesn’t matter now,” he said, affecting a grave tone.
“No,” agreed Loria. “But—how?”
“They—I don’t remember, and it’s not—”
“Their hands weren’t restrained, were they?”
Harlowe didn’t answer.
Loria nodded. “Huh.”
Through the open door of the lounge, Harlowe saw the twins mount the steps from below. They both wore blue corduroy overalls now, and their brown hair was pulled back in stringy wet ponytails. They shuffled awkwardly out onto the cockpit deck, squinting in the sun.
“You wanted us to look for that man and that woman,” said one of them sulkily. “Not just know they’re out there, but touch them, see what they’re seeing.”
“We had to close all apps, first, didn’t we?” demanded the other. “Clear the task bar.”
“It’s a new thing,” said the first girl, and Harlowe felt his scalp tighten and the hairs on the back of his neck stand up.
They weren’t saying new, they were citing the name of Nu, the Egyptian god represented by the sea, the personification of the abyss, the absence of all activity and awareness, the void from which identity had been made—the ever-patient universal identity-sink. Nu was the eternal counterpart of Ba, which, or who, was the essence of distinct identity.
The two forces had to be kept apart!
“The twins,” he said thickly, “can’t go in the ocean anymore, understand? No, not even wading.” Had it been, in effect, Nu that they’d been seeking when they had nearly drowned themselves off Little Coyote Point?
He stared at the two little girls as if he’d never seen them before.
“At least they resurfaced,” said Loria. “And now they’ve closed all their apps, whatever that means! They should have bandwidth free to locate your fugitives.”
“I think,” Harlowe said quietly to Loria, “we’d better re-initiate them—have them color in the picture again.” He was sweating, but he forced a smile and turned to the twins. “Sit down, Lexi, Amber. You were right to . . . close the apps. I was just—worried about you!” When the girls had sat down together on a lidded cabinet that contained a bait tank, he stepped to the starboard gunwale and leaned on it. “Yes, I would like you to look for that man and that woman. Can you sense them? Buy new clothes in Hesperia. Doctor Zhivago.”
One of the girls lifted her hand—Loria opened her mouth in alarm, but before she could say anything the other girl clasped the hand.
And Loria and Harlowe fell to their hands and knees on the deck.
Harlowe could feel that his palms were flat on the fiberglass deck, and he knew that his knuckles were only a foot from his face—but what he saw, as if through heavily tinted sunglasses, was a level view of a decrepit old two-story Victorian house. A man holding a revolver stood on the long, sagging porch while another man dragged a body—a woman in a long robe—down the steps to the dirt. The body left dark, gleaming streaks on the steps.
Harlowe turned his head, but the image stayed central in his vision; he lifted his hands to wave in front of his face, but they didn’t appear in his sight and he felt his forehead strike the cockpit deck. His hip and shoulder hit the deck then, and he rolled over, but there was no shift in what he was seeing.
Then he had to squint against a sudden blue sky and sunlight reflecting off the deck and the chrome ladder. He was lying on the wet deck, but the first thing he did was raise his hands and flex them, and he coughed in relief to see his fingers clearly.
“Fuck,” croaked Loria behind him. He rolled over and sat up. Loria was sitting against the transom gunwale, her head between her knees; the twins still sat on the sink cabinet, though they were no longer holding hands.
“We got that from them,” said one of the twins defensively. “Honest.”
“I think we pushed them a little, crowding in,” added the other.
Loria raised her head and gave Harlowe a haggard stare. “Did you . . . see that, too?” When he nodded, she went on, “We just saw a woman murdered somewhere.”
“It was,” said Harlowe as he laboriously got to his feet, “a long time ago.”
Loria slowly stood up, bracing herself against the gunwale. “What do you mean? How do you know?” She stared out at the broad sunlit face of the sea, as if to confirm that the vision had ended.
Harlowe just shook his head. How do I know? he thought. Because I recognized the face of the man holding the revolver. Conrad Chronic looked the same in this vision as he did in those old photographs online, and those were taken fifty years ago.
We got that from them, one of the twins had said. Honest. Vickery and Castine were somehow a connection to Chronic’s 1968 egregore, which had failed—spectacularly.
He pulled Loria to the rail and whispered, “I think—no, I’m sure—Vickery and Castine have to be killed too. Along with Ragotskie. All three. Damn.”
His head was only inches from hers, and he was aware of the increased mental vibration that he always experienced when standing very close to another initiate.
“Well don’t tell me,” she said, stepping away from him, “I’m the spiritual type. I’ve never taken anybody’s blood pressure, and I’m not going to start.”
“No, of course not, I don’t mean you. But—yes, get on the radio and tell Taitz.”
She was frowning at him. “I thought you wanted those two. For your IMPs.”
“They’re—no, they’re linked to—something I don’t see how we can incorporate, safely. I can’t take the chance.”
“Is it that old egregore? Those fifty-year-old coloring books?”
“The—dammit, the coloring books are neutral, but Vickery and Castine are apparently . . . tainted. Get on the radio. I—” He touched his bruised forehead. “I don’t think we should try again with the twins.”
“You’re being impulsive. We’ve spent all this time and effort trying to get Vickery and Castine—and now, if we find them, you just want them killed? You think the twins will do, as your IMPs?”
“The twins have disadvantages too,” Harlowe conceded, “but they’re already initiated—or if that app got closed,we’ll initiate them again to reopen it—and they’re willing participants, and they’re here. Vickery and Castine we’d have to catch, alive, and transport, and initiate. And I think they’re hostile.”
“I can see how they might be, at that.” Loria exhaled through pursed lips in a silent whistle. “Okay.”
/> She started to turn away toward the cabin, but Harlowe caught her arm, making them both wince. “Wait—for the next forty hours all of us have to be ready for the possibility of violence.” He reached into his coat, where he carried a small .22 revolver in a suede holster; he unclipped the holster and pulled it out, and, facing away from the twins, held it out to Loria. “Keep this with you.”
She looked down at the curved wood-sided grip protruding from the tan suede flap, then up at him. “No.”
“Damn it, it’s for self-defense! If one of these unsecured dramatis personae should kill you, you’d miss the apotheosis—you’d just be plain dead.”
She frowned at the little gun.
“You want to go on to some judgmental afterlife,” Harlowe went on, “or plain oblivion?—or live big, forever, here?”
She sighed and took the gun from his hand and slid it into a pocket of her bulky nylon jacket.
Even as he had helplessly watched the two men drag the woman from the porch in the penumbral dimness, Vickery had been aware of the car bucking and shaking, and the steering wheel jerking powerfully under his gripping hands. Now the car had evidently stopped, and was just rocking from side to side, but though Vickery swiveled his head toward where the windshield and rear-view mirror should have been visible, his vision showed him nothing but the men pulling the woman’s body down the last steps onto the dirt.
When light sprang up again, he was reassured to at least see the dashboard, for nothing showed through the windshield but whirling dust.
“Fuck!” exclaimed Castine. He glanced at her, and she seemed startled at having spoken.
The engine had stalled, and Vickery quickly started it again in case he was still out in the lanes; but in moments the dust blew away, and he saw that they were a dozen yards off the pavement, among sand and dry weeds. The car was at right angles to the highway, pointed out toward the desert.
Vickery just breathed in and out through his open mouth and waited for his heartbeat to slow down.
“Obviously,” said Castine, then paused to clear her throat. “Obviously you saw it too.”
Vickery nodded. “God knows what that did to the suspension. Anyway, how do I dare drive, anymore?” He shook his head, carefully. “We weren’t even touching each other!”
Castine opened her door and stepped out onto the sand. “I think a couple of people were,” she called, “somewhere.” She leaned in. “It’s kind of nice to step out—stretch and smell the breeze—after nearly dying.”
Vickery unclenched his fingers from the steering wheel. “Okay.” He levered open the door and swung his feet out onto the sand. “I was doing better than seventy!” he called.
“So drive slow from now on. We don’t need all that wind from the two missing back windows anyway.”
“We keep going?”
“Sure. You’d rather stay out here?” She got back into the car and pulled the door closed. “That was provoked in us. Just at the beginning of it, I got the impression of two girls, on a boat, holding hands. Did you sense that?”
“I—” Vickery thought about it. In the instant before the vision had eclipsed his view of the highway, there had been a sense of a couple of people—young people—and yes, rocking, though that had been nothing compared to the way the car had begun jumping and slewing a moment later. “A boat, you think.”
“In a marina, maybe? This won’t leave us alone—we’ve got to find a way out of it.”
The engine was running smoothly, and Vickery pulled his feet back into the car and glanced around, wondering how best to get back onto the highway. “Okay. But yeah, I’ll drive slow, and I’ll be ready to stand on the brakes.”
CHAPTER SEVEN:
Two and Two Is Four
During a one-minute-interval update on his iPad, Don Foster tapped back to the All Events page.
John Taitz was driving Harlowe’s Chevy Tahoe slowly north on Normandie, past more of the apartment buildings which, it seemed to him, made up most of Los Angeles.
They had just received Harlowe’s order that Vickery and Castine, as well as Ragotskie, were to be killed. Taitz briefly wished he’d had a drink or two before setting out.
“Where’s Ragotskie now?” he asked. Ragotskie’s car had been located in a parking lot yesterday afternoon, but by midnight he had not returned to it, and Harlowe had concluded that Ragotskie must have abandoned it; early this morning, though, the GPS tracker had been registering movement.
“As of thirty seconds ago, he was a block east of us,” said Foster, “on Mariposa. But check this out—at nine-thirty last night he was parked in the Holiday Marina lot for ten minutes! I thought he wasn’t supposed to know where the Black Sheep is berthed now, since he went rogue yesterday?”
“That’s right,” said Taitz, “he’s not.” I’ll have to tell Harlowe he has to move it again, he thought. He’ll love that.
“You think he followed the Castine woman there, with the bloody sock? How would she have found out about it?”
“I don’t think—no, he must have actually been at that weird restaurant on Seventh last night, and we just didn’t see him. He probably followed Loria to the marina. He’s obsessed with her.”
Foster settled back in the seat and tapped the iPad screen to get back to the one-minute-interval updates. “He’s only moved up half a block. I bet he’s parked.”
“Consulting the sock, probably. It’s a good sign that he’s driving around L.A.—Harlowe was afraid Castine and Vickery just ran straight east, like to Vegas.” Taitz steered the SUV to a strip of empty curb and shifted to park.
“I wonder if they’re still in that blue sedan,” said Foster. “What was that, some kind of foreign thing?”
“It looked like an old East German Trabant. Maybe Vickery drove it back from Hell last year.”
“Maybe he drove it back there again. He sure disappeared yesterday.” Foster scratched his bald scalp. “I’d still like to get a hat. And not just some tacky fishing hat bag thing.” He shifted around to look up and down this street, then said, “You think they’ll . . . offer resistance?”
“We’ll have no problems.” Right after getting Harlowe’s newest order, Taitz had swung through a parking lot and taken a pair of licence plates from a parked car and put them on the Tahoe, and the windshield and windows were fortunately tinted against the ubiquitous street cameras.
“Ragotskie’s nothing,” Taitz went on. “He’s got that little Beretta, but he couldn’t shoot anybody. And Ingrid Castine’s just an office clerk for some transportation agency back east. Vickery—he was a driver for that Galvan woman’s ghost-evasion car service, which didn’t look like a real carriage trade operation. He’s some kind of rootless loser. I don’t anticipate any problems.”
In killing three people, he thought. What kind of apotheosis is to be found at the end of this sort of road?
“Vickery’s good at evasive driving, for sure. And he got out of that deli pretty smooth. Bam! Bam!”
“Big deal,” said Taitz, “he sucker-punched poor Pratt and ran out.”
To Taitz’s annoyance, Foster drew his Glock 40 from the shoulder holster under his shiny new six-hundred-dollar black leather jacket, and pointed it at the floor. After he worked his hand on the grip for a moment, a luminous green dot appeared on the carpeting between his sneakers.
“A three-bet before the flop!” said Foster. “And this flop’s gonna be dealt face-down, oh yeah.”
“Put it away,” said Taitz, restraining himself from adding, idiot, “and watch your iPad.”
Foster was always using poker slang, which Taitz believed he got exclusively from YouTube videos; and using it now, breezily, minutes after they had received the order to kill Vickery and Castine as well as Ragotskie, was—if nothing else—shallow.
Taitz glanced with concealed distaste at Foster, who had put the gun away and was again peering at the iPad. And, Not just some tacky fishing hat bag thing. Oh, God forbid. And what is Foster going to contribute,
Taitz wondered, to the egregore? Sophomoric self-satisfaction? I can’t blame him, though, for wanting to subsume his glib, shallow self in the godhead.
I’m counting on it too.
At fifty-five, John Taitz had been the oldest employee of ChakraSys when Harlowe had bought the company in 2016. Until Harlowe’s arrival, the chakra therapy salon had occupied a space in a strip mall in San Jose, offering counseling on diet, and “workshops,” and exercises to keep the clients’ seven “chakras” functioning smoothly. Taitz had been privately skeptical of the whole affair—deep breathing and rainbow diets and forever tightening the Kegel muscles, which he gathered basically meant a person’s rear end—but Harlowe had brought a vastly bigger and more ambitious perspective to the whole business.
The egregore, the living cauldron into which they would all dump their unattractive selves.
John Taitz wondered what his own personality could contribute to the transcendent egregore. Before getting the job at ChakraSys, he had served time in Soledad State Prison for murdering a woman he had believed—still believed—he had loved.
They had been living together in an apartment in Santa Clara, and in the midst of a drunken argument in 1986 she had grabbed her car keys and stormed out; when she drove away in her car he followed her in his, and on the 101 freeway he had caught up with her at eighty miles per hour and swerved to force her off onto the shoulder. But his right front bumper had struck her car, which had skidded sideways and then gone tumbling right over the freeway embankment, into a parking lot below. Hannah had not been wearing her seatbelt. Two other drivers had witnessed the incident and pulled over, and their eventual testimony had led to his conviction for murder.
He lived each day now in stoic confidence that he would soon be able to cease being the person who carried the intolerable memory of yanking the steering wheel to the right, and the boom of the impact, and the glimpse of her car in the first of what must have been several rolls. And he had killed two other men since, for reasons that were incomprehensible to him now. Perhaps the egregore would need a capacity for weathering guilt.
