by Tim Powers
Vickery took Castine’s suede-sleeved elbow and followed, and then led her quickly north along the sidewalk, away from where he had parked his Saturn. Old brick apartment buildings with fire escapes lined both sides of the street, and the bushy curbside trees were easily a dozen feet tall.
“We’ll turn left on Seventh,” he told Castine quietly, “go through a few stores, take a taxi or two. Make sure we’re not being followed.”
He was breathing deeply, still shaky from the tightrope they had just walked with Galvan.
“That story about a London buyer saved us,” said Castine. “Oh—and it was nice of you to put me down for a third.”
“I had to sound serious.” He flexed his hands and stretched. “Your celebrity clergyman was a good touch too.”
“But England is eight hours ahead! All the banks closed hours ago.”
Vickery was looking up and down the street, noting cars and alleys; there were no unbarred ground-floor windows, and all doors were presumably locked, but a U-Haul truck was parked at the curb a few yards ahead, and near it an apartment gate stood open, braced by an upended couch. “She doesn’t know that.”
“You better hope she doesn’t check it out. She seems thorough.” Castine was looking around too. “God help us when she eventually learns you made the whole thing up.” She glanced at Vickery. “You figure you can get a taxi?”
“If I can find a pay phone. A taxi’ll come if we call and say we want a long trip, like to Universal Studios. And if we ask nice, the driver’ll do some checking and evasion moves.”
“I’ve never been to Universal Studios. I hear it’s fun, lots of cool rides.”
“Well, we won’t be doing any of that today. We’ll just get out of one taxi, duck around a couple of corners, and then get in another.”
“Oh well.” Castine glanced up and down the street. “If you do get your book back,” she said, “and if there were a buyer.” She looked up at him. “Would you sell it?”
“What, for a million-four?”
“Let’s say.”
“You’ll think I’m crazy, but . . . ” His voice trailed off.
A bright green Audi with a bicycle strapped on the roof had passed them slowly, and now its brake lights came on. “You watch around and behind,” he told Castine.
The Audi was stopped in the middle of the street, and two empty hands appeared over the bicycle’s front wheel. “Let me talk!” came a yell from the car. “I can help you!”
Vickery caught Castine’s eye and jerked his head toward the open apartment gate, and they hurried forward to stand by the upended couch. Vickery’s hand was in his jacket pocket, and both of Castine’s hands were in the pockets of her suede coat.
“Step out of the car,” called Vickery.
“Let me park it.” The driver’s hands withdrew, and the car swerved forward and stopped at a red curb a few yards ahead. The hands waved out of the window again, and then the driver’s side door opened and a young man stepped out, his arms raised.
He wasn’t wearing the red suspenders, but Vickery recognized him by the round glasses and the eccentric shaved-on-the-sides haircut. After a moment, Vickery beckoned him over with his free hand.
A goateed teenaged boy in a black T-shirt had stepped out of the apartment doorway, and his narrowed eyes switched from Vickery to the young man in the street and back.
“My brother,” Vickery told him. “He’s going through a bad divorce.”
Castine nodded sadly.
The young man from the Audi was close enough to hear Vickery’s explanation, and visibly wilted—a touch Vickery admired.
The teenage boy nodded and stepped to the back of the U-Haul truck and rattled the latch on the roll-up door.
Vickery motioned the young man to follow as he and Castine walked a few yards down the sidewalk.
“My name’s Elisha Ragotskie,” said the young man quietly when Vickery halted. He looked left and right nervously. His white shirt was wrinkled, as if he’d slept in it, and he hadn’t shaved recently—but that might have been just a fashion statement. “I can tell you what’s going on, if—”
“Tell us first,” said Vickery. “What does Harlowe want with us?”
“How do you know his name?” When Vickery impatiently waved the question aside, Ragotskie went on, “You know about the twins? He’s going to use them as imps for his egregore now, since you two didn’t work out. I—I’m sorry, I was stressed!—I tried to—yesterday—”
“Kill this woman,” said Vickery quietly. “Go on.” He remembered one of the ghosts under the bridge last night saying something like Quoth the raven nevermore. Had that last word been this egregore?
“Well, either of you, really,” said Ragotskie, “to break the pair. I’m sorry, Ms. Castine! I just wanted to stop the egregore, and it looked like you two were going to be the necessary imps. I never imagined he’d go with the twins!”
The boy in the T-shirt was still yanking at the latch on the back of the U-Haul truck, and Ragotskie peered in that direction. Turning back to Vickery, he asked, “Is somebody stuck in that truck?”
“He’s just trying to open it,” said Vickery. “You were there in February, when Harlowe’s people stole a book from me. Do you—”
“But he must be stuck inside! We should—”
Vickery just frowned at him in baffled annoyance, but Castine grabbed Ragotskie’s arm. “Do you,” she asked urgently, “see the boy in the black T-shirt standing by the back of the truck? Dark hair, got a little beard?”
Ragotskie blinked at her, then looked again at the truck with the rattling latch. “Uh,” he said, “no?”
Castine turned a frightened look on Vickery. “You spoke to it in a complete sentence, with not even any Faraday cage chicken-wire in between.”
Vickery’s face was suddenly cold. “Don’t look at it. There’s an alley back this way—come on, both of you.”
The skinny figure in the black T-shirt, still idiotically yanking on the truck’s door handle, was evidently a ghost—a spontaneous, unsummoned one.
Ragotskie opened his mouth but shut it when Castine glared at him, and he followed her and Vickery further down the sidewalk toward the opening of a narrow alley.
Vickery was looking back over his shoulder, and he muttered, “Shit,” for the ghost was now lurching after them. Its shadow on the sunlit sidewalk was just a churning blur.
A picture of Bob Marley was visible printed on its T-shirt; Vickery abruptly realized whose ghost it must be, and his steps faltered—and he felt bound to look at it. I made it, he thought.
The thing was only a couple of yards away now; it opened its mouth and said, “You think you’re so big. I don’t need a stun-gun—I can take you.”
Its mouth opened wider then, and its features began to curdle—and its chameleon tongue, hardly visible in the direct sunlight, looped out of its mouth-hole and struck Vickery in the chest. And then for a prolonged moment Vickery was staring into his own gray-bearded face, six feet away and getting closer, or bigger.
“I can take you.” Either it spoke those words again or they replayed forcefully in Vickery’s mind.
There was no breeze, but he was suddenly cold all the way through his flesh to his bones, and though the lines of buildings in his peripheral vision remained vertical, he felt himself tipping into a fall that would not end when he hit the pavement—
As if from a distance, he heard Castine’s voice call, “Two and two is four, and nothing else!”
The elongated tongue fell away, or evaporated. Vickery was able to hop back, regaining his balance, and glance at her. Just as she had done last night, she was holding up four fingers. She’s right, he thought dazedly. It is four.
Vickery shook himself and didn’t look again at the ghost’s face. “Six and six is twelve,” he said hoarsely, “and squared is—” He paused, for at the moment he had no idea what twelve squared was.
“A hundred and forty four!” said Castine. To Vickery, she muttered, “Give it s
tuff we can do on our fingers! It’s got to see it.”
The ghost had halted; its mouth was closed, and it was swaying back and forth. It seemed less tall than it had been a moment ago. “I’m as good as you,” it muttered angrily. “And I’m gonna be in your book, mixing it up with your daughter, what do you think of that?”
“Five and five!” said Castine loudly, holding up the spread fingers of both hands.
“Is ten!” called Vickery, pointing at Castine’s hands.
“Isn’t either,” grumbled the ghost.
Vickery held up his own hands, with his fingers stretched out—it must look as if he and Castine were surrendering—and said, “And ten is twenty, see? Look! There’s no place for you here.”
For a moment the very air seemed bent, stressed.
Then the ghost turned around, turned again to face them, and then began spinning rapidly, so rapidly that in seconds it was just a blur; and then it disappeared with a whump that stirred dust on the sidewalk.
“Terminal z-axis spin,” whispered Castine.
CHAPTER EIGHT:
Last Bus to Oblivion
Ragotskie was blinking around in evident confusion.
Vickery rubbed one hand over his face.
“You okay?” asked Castine anxiously. “This is twice in less than twenty-four hours for you.”
“Sure.” There was a taste like pennies and sour milk in his mouth, and he turned and spat into the gutter. “Excuse me. Sure. Yes.” He noticed that his shirt was damp, and clinging to him. “We can talk in the alley,” he added, and he was careful to walk steadily as he led the way. His heart was thudding rapidly and he concentrated on breathing in and out.
“It looked like you, for a second!” said Castine, who was walking close beside him, evidently prepared to catch him if he should stumble.
“I know,” said Vickery shortly, “I was there.”
When all three of them were in the narrow, shaded passage between high brick walls, Vickery looked down the length of it and saw that after about a hundred and fifty feet it opened out at the far end onto a paved lot. He sighed deeply, then turned to Ragotskie. “You didn’t see that thing?”
“No. Was there a ghost? I’ve never—”
“We’re miles from any freeway current, and I don’t know why it should have appeared here, now. Have you got some kind of mobile hotspot on you?”
“I—oh!—I guess I do. Heh. I had it hooked over my rear-view mirror.”
He reached around toward his back pocket, and Vickery caught his arm. “Very slowly.”
“I don’t have a gun. You took my gun yesterday.” Ragotskie fumbled at the back of his black jeans, then held out a dirty white sock.
“What the hell is that?” demanded Vickery.
“Oh my God, Sebastian,” said Castine wonderingly, “I think it’s the sock I wiped the blood off my face with, last year, right after we came out of the Labyrinth!”
Ragotskie nodded jerkily. “Right, I stole it out of Harlowe’s Chevy Tahoe yesterday, at MacArthur Park. It tilts toward you,” he said, nodding to Castine. “It’s how I’ve followed you.”
She took it out of his hand and stuffed it into her left coat pocket. Ragotskie just bobbed his head, obviously anxious to please.
“I recognized the ghost,” said Vickery, feeling sick. “It was that kid I hit in Canter’s.”
“Pratt?” said Ragotskie. “I heard they had to open his skull. He was nineteen.”
Nineteen, Vickery thought. I made that shambling travesty out of him, and I can’t apologize, explain.
“I should . . . check the street,” he muttered; and with a vague wave he stumbled to the mouth of the alley and just blinked up and down the sunlit street, breathing deeply. I’ve now certainly killed four men, in the course of my life, he thought. Three men and a boy, rather.
He made himself pay attention to the moving cars—and saw a gray SUV turn onto the street from Eighth. It might have been a Chevy Tahoe.
Over his shoulder, he said, “Ragotskie, does Harlowe have a way to track you?”
Immediately Ragotskie was standing beside him, staring south; then he stepped back quickly, pulling Vickery with him. “They must have had a tracker on my car all along! Agnes can’t have known about it. She’d have told me.”
The SUV was moving slowly up the street. Within seconds it would be in sight of Ragotskie’s parked Audi and in line with the alley.
Vickery waved toward the far end of the alley and said, “Walk casually, and don’t look back. He won’t be looking for three people together.”
“He might be,” said Ragotskie miserably. “He might have held off on grabbing me in hopes I’d lead him to you two.”
“Swell,” said Vickery. “Walk casually anyway.”
Vickery took Castine’s elbow, and as they walked he scanned the doors and windows that faced the alley. The windows were all set in behind iron bars, and the doors were either padlocked or had two keyholes, indicating deadbolts. There was not even a trash can to hide behind.
“You got g-guns?” whispered Ragotskie. “If he sees us, shoot the lock off a door.”
“A handgun won’t do it,” said Vickery. “It’d just lock it worse.”
“You’d need a slug out of a shotgun,” said Castine, stepping carefully and watching the parking lot ahead.
Vickery heard a car engine in the alley behind him, and then the sound stopped and he heard car doors clunk open.
“Don’t speed up,” he said. He reached into his jacket pocket and closed his hand on the narrow grip of the Glock. To Ragotskie he said, “Do they have guns?”
“Taitz does.”
“Is he any good with it?”
“He’s killed people.” Ragotskie was walking with his head tilted back, as if wading through chin-deep water.
“Excuse me,” came a call from behind them, “you three? Police. We’d like to speak to you.”
“Keep walking,” said Vickery.
More quietly, in a voice just loud enough to carry down the alley, the voice at their backs said, “Stop or we’ll shoot.”
Castine had thrust her hands into her coat pockets, but what she pulled out wasn’t the revolver. She was holding the dirty white sock.
“I think we stop,” said Vickery.
Castine raised the somewhat white sock over her head and waved it back and forth; and to Vickery she said, “Call Pratt.”
Vickery winced, but had to concede that it was as good an idea as any. He took a breath and opened his mouth.
“I’ll do it,” said Ragotskie, though he didn’t look happy with the idea either. “I knew him.” He turned toward the street with his hands raised and said, “Hey, Pratt, come here, dude.”
A sourceless groaning cough,echoing between the close brick walls, might have been a reply.
“Let’s see everybody’s hands,” called the voice from the street.
“Pratt,” said Ragotskie again, hoarsely. “We forgot to tell you something.”
Vickery was about to turn around, but a shiver in the air made him pause. Again the stressful cough sounded in his ears.
“Pratt?” came Ragotskie’s oddly muffled voice. “Are you—lonely?”
“Pratt,” Vickery said, “it’s me.”
The air was suddenly cold, and Ragotskie stepped back and gave Vickery an uncertain look.
Vickery and Castine both turned around then, and Vickery’s incredulous gasp was simultaneous with Castine’s.
A human head was bobbing in mid-air only a couple of yards in front of them, the eyes rolling in the sockets and the beard-fringed mouth rattling open and shut more rapidly than Vickery would have believed possible; then with a sound like somebody vigorously flapping broken glass out of a blanket, there was a body below the head. A blur on the front of the black T-shirt resolved itself into the image of Bob Marley.
The mouth jiggled to steadiness, then pronounced, “Sick, so sick, call 911 . . . ”
Beyond the suffering figure,
two men stood in front of the SUV at the mouth of the alley, and Vickery saw them step back into the sunlight. One of them was gray haired and wearing an olive-green windbreaker.
“Stay—where you are!” that one called; the other, a younger man in a leather jacket, stood in the one-foot-forward Weaver stance with a pistol at eye level, clearly ready to shoot.
“Tell it,” grated Vickery, “to go after them.”
Ragotskie blinked at him. “He’s here? Okay. Those guys, Pratt,” he said more loudly, pointing at the two men, “Taitz and Foster, they left you to die on the street. Look—can you see them?”
“I want to go,” said the ghost. Its mouth wasn’t moving in synch with the sound of its words. “It’s too bright here, crowded. Where is no people?”
The man in the leather jacket called, “On the ground, face down! Now!”
Vickery spoke urgently toward Pratt’s ghost. “Behind you. Get in that van. Quick, they’re going to leave!”
“Yeah,” said Ragotskie, wincing as he looked toward the man with the pistol, “Pratt, you gotta catch the van! Last bus to oblivion!”
With a whimper, the ghost of young Pratt twisted toward the street, and a moment later it was crouching—and then it was loping on all fours, awkwardly but quickly, toward the SUV.
“Jesus God,” whispered Castine.
The man in the dark windbreaker, at least, could obviously see the thing—he grabbed his companion and they scrambled back into the SUV and slammed the doors. When Vickery heard the starter whine, he drew his gun.
The bottom curves of the front tires were visible against the sunlit pavement beyond, and he quickly fired twice. The gunshots echoed between the close walls like powerful hammer blows on a metal door, and dust blew out to the sides of the SUV and the front end sagged. The windshield wipers were working rapidly.
Forward or back? thought Vickery. “Crowd up, fast,” he said.
He and Castine sprinted toward the street, their guns raised and the sock flapping in Castine’s left hand. The ghost, perhaps frustrated at being locked out of the vehicle, had extruded a filament of glassy tongue that was now stuck to the driver’s window of the SUV, and the window was opaque white; but the driver had got the vehicle into reverse, and the vehicle rumbled backward in a sharp turn on its two flat front tires.
