Forced Perspectives

by Tim Powers

  A sheet of paper was paper-clipped to the back of the coloring book, and Castine pulled it free and laid it on the table. Several curving lines had been drawn on it, with an X close to one line.

  “A map,” said Castine.

  “With no orientation at all, not even an arrow to point north.”

  “Well, that’s a street or highway,” said Castine, touching a double line. “The single lines are smaller streets, probably.”

  Vickery shrugged and laid it aside. “It’s no use unless you already know where it is.”

  The waitress walked up to their booth with a tray, and set the Kahlua-and-milk and the beers on their table.

  When he had thanked her and she had walked back to the bar, Vickery said, “Ragotskie says we should figure out what went wrong with that egregore in ’68, and make it happen again now.”

  “Probably Harlowe knows what went wrong then,” said Castine. She paused to take a sip of her drink, and pointed at the printout pages.

  Vickery picked up the sheaf of typescript that had been under the coloring books and looked at the top page.

  “‘When DeMille learned what the set technician had done,’” he read quietly, “‘he excavated a long trench and had the entire City of the Pharaoh set—walls, gates, sphinxes and all—pulled down and buried. His explanation was that he didn’t want low-budget movie companies to come in later and use his costly sets in their own films—and in fact that probably was a factor in his decision. But his main purpose in obliterating the set was to be sure of burying the perilous image.’”

  Vickery looked up. “It seems to start in media res.”

  “‘Perilous image’ is suggestive,” said Castine. “We’ll have to—” She stopped talking, for a woman had walked up to their booth and stopped. Vickery laid the printout pages on top of the coloring books.

  The woman had short-cropped dark hair, and wore a white blouse untucked over faded blue jeans. It occurred to Vickery that she could very believably dress as a short, wiry cowgirl, too, if a movie character like that should become popular.

  “Hi, Rachel,” he said. “In civvies today?”

  “I’m not gonna sit,” she said. “I phoned around and got hold of a guy. He used to live up in Laurel Canyon—he stayed at Frank Zappa’s log cabin for a while, and Peter Tork’s house—and I met him and showed him your picture. It scared him.”

  Rachel picked up Castine’s glass. “What’s this,” she said, “chocolate milk?”

  “Kahlua and milk,” said Castine.

  “Okay then.” Rachel tilted it up to her mouth and swallowed till it was empty. “He said it looked like an old house that used to be down in Topanga Canyon,” she went on. “Somebody filmed an indie movie there in the ’60s, called What’s the Hex? And a lot of famous people used to go to parties there, but it was all witchcraft rituals and drugs. Charles Manson stayed there for a few weeks, but it freaked him out and he left. It got wrecked in a flood and torn down in ’69, but in ’68 there was some kind of bad night there, and several people got shot. An L.A. biker gang was involved, he thinks they were called the Gardena Legion, and it may have been them that started the trouble, like the Hell’s Angels did at Altamont.”

  She clanked Castine’s emptied glass down on the table. The ice rattled.

  “Are you sure you won’t have a—another drink, Rachel?” said Vickery. “That all seems very long ago. Before any of us were born.”

  Rachel wiped her mouth on her sleeve. “Well, this old guy I talked to, he’s a groundskeeper now at—at a place in L.A., and back in January a couple of guys came to him and said to call a number if he heard about anybody showing an interest in that place, or what happened there on that bad night in ’68. The guys gave him a card and said he’d get big money if he should hear anything and tell them about it. After they left he just tore up the card, but he told me that there is a guy going around asking questions about it, an Egyptian, and he’s got a gun. He’s only maybe forty years old, but in ’68 there was another Egyptian involved, a guy they called Booty, and he had some connection with the Gardena Legion. And my . . . source says he heard from a pal of his from the bad old days, who said he got a visit from these two guys too, also around January. It looks like they were finding everybody from that scene who’s still alive, saying let us know if anybody’s asking about that night. Which you sort of are.”

  Rachel picked up one of Vickery’s beers and drank most of it in four big swallows.

  She put the glass down and exhaled. “That’s all I’ve got, and I’m not going to sell you out—I think it’d boomerang, for one thing. My source, who made me promise to forget his name, said I should forget about the house, too, and everything he told me. I only came here now because you paid me. That helps, because I’m going to stay off the boulevard for a while.” She gave Vickery a taut smile and said, “It’s been nice knowing you, on the whole.”

  Then she turned away, and there was just her rapidly receding back as she strode down the length of the bar to the street door.

  Castine slowly picked up her glass, looked at it, and put it down. “Booty,” she said.

  “Omar Sharif’s predecessor,” said Vickery. “Also trying to retrieve—and destroy, I bet—that missing artifact.”

  Castine lifted they printout pages and looked at the two coloring books. “A tall order, to confiscate and destroy every copy of these things.” She leaned back and sighed deeply. “What the heck?” When Vickery gave her a blank look, she added, “The title of the movie.”

  “Oh. Hex. What’s the Hex? We should check it out. I wonder if it’s on YouTube.”

  Castine shivered. “It would be . . . unsettling . . . to see that terrible old house in a video. Even though I’ve seen it in person, sort of, too many times.”

  “I’m just glad to hear it was torn down in ’69. We’ve got to get to the library, look some things up.”

  “Too bad we can’t just . . . stay off the boulevard for a while, like Supergirl.” She lifted her glass, then sighed and put it down again. “But you’re right,” she said, “We’ve got to chase this stuff more effectively than it chases us. So let’s read the rest of it. How doth the little crocodile improve his shining tail!”

  “Uh.” Vickery blinked at her. “What?”

  She seemed disconcerted. “I—” She cleared her throat and hummed for a moment. “I don’t know why I said that. It’s from one of the Alice in Wonderland books. I’m tired, my mind’s wandering!” She shook her head and waved at the papers. “Well?”

  “Okay,” said Vickery slowly. “It’s kind of long—maybe you ought to have something to eat? They’ve got pretty good nachos here, chicken wings—”

  “If I wanted a snack,” said Castine impatiently, “I’d have had those French fries in your car. You said Philippe’s.”

  “Right. Would you like a . . . whole drink, in the meantime? Or coffee?”

  “I’m fine.” She got up and stepped around the table to slide into his side of the booth. “We can both read it.”

  “Let me know if I read too fast for you.”

  “As if.” She squinted down at the printout.

  Vickery nodded, then after a moment he too began scanning the paper.

  The account in the printout proved to be fragmentary. After the mention of Cecil B. DeMille burying the set of a movie—Castine was sure it must have been The Ten Commandments, which was made sometime before talking pictures—the narrative spoke of a “sigil” that had been buried in 1927 down in San Pedro by the Port of Los Angeles, specifically on a street called Paseo del Mar. Over the next two years, according to the printout, the buried sigil had “moved toward the sea,” and in 1929 it had pulled the whole clifftop neighborhood down to the sea with it, houses, streets, a hotel and all. The narrative jumped then to an account of an unnamed occult motorcycle gang in 1965 digging up the sigil from among those broken pavements and foundations on the San Pedro shore.

  Castine tapped the page. “That’d be the—w
hat did Supergirl say was the name of that biker club?”

  “The Gardena Legion. Gardena’s down in the South Bay area. By San Pedro, in fact.”

  The text began now to deal with a person, evidently a man, identified only as “the guru.” The guru was a rock guitarist who, according to the printed pages, “was one of the Laurel Canyon hangers-on in 1965, and had the dubious distinction of being banned from Cass Elliot’s house on Woodrow Wilson Drive, apparently for having stolen some cash from her. the guru was already aware of the sigil that was in the possession of the biker club, and was making plans to steal it from their Topanga Canyon clubhouse. They were using it only to sustain the group identity of their club, including members who (with some frequency) died in highway accidents or clashes with the other violent, occult-inclined motorcycle clubs from Los Angeles and San Bernardino counties. the guru had grander, in fact world-spanning plans. He stole the sigil from the biker club’s clubhouse, and soon printed the sigil in his coloring books, copies of which I was able to acquire in 2016 . . . ”

  Vickery looked around, and lowered his voice. “Okay, the sigil is that complicated figure in the coloring books.”

  Castine nodded. “Obviously. And obviously this guy who the Elliot person didn’t like is the hippie rock musician Ragotskie mentioned, who tried to start an egregore in the ’60s.”

  “Obviously,” echoed Vickery. He looked across at her. “Cass Elliot was in the Mamas and Papas.” When she gave him a blank look, he added, “Jeez, Ingrid—California dreamin’, on such a winter’s day—”

  “Whatever.” She touched two words on the page. “That’s twice he forgot to capitalize ‘the’ at the beginning of a sentence.”

  “Guy’s careless,” observed Vickery, pausing to take a sip of beer before leaning over they page again.

  “The biker club, the printout went on, fully the eponymous swine, attacked the guru’s group when they were in the midst of consummating the birth of the guru’s egregore, further down the canyon. Several people, including the guru’s wife/woman/girlfriend, were apparently killed. The biker club suffered casualties as well, and subsequently disappears from the roster of Los Angeles cult groups.”

  Vickery felt Castine shiver beside him. “That’s how you kill an emerging egregore?” she said. “Kill the members? I don’t see us doing that.”

  “There’ll be another way. Omar Sharif didn’t look like he’d do that. What do you bet,” he added, flipping to the next page, “that we know the place where this attack happened?”

  “What, that old house? Ugh—I do not want to see the rest of that day.”

  The next few pages of the printout dealt with Harlowe’s acquisition of the ChakraSys business and the organization of his egregore-to-be, which he referred to as: “the Singularity project—e pluribus unum. It was synthe guruity that I found ChakraSys just as I was ready to initiate the Singularity.”

  Castine frowned. “Synthe guruity? What’s that mean, synthetic guruhood?”

  “I guess so,” said Vickery. “So what’s he trying to say, that it was through being a fake guru that he found ChakraSys?”

  Castine was silent, and when Vickery started to speak, she quickly raised her hand to stop him. He sat back and let his right hand slide into his jacket pocket, wondering if she had seen some sign of surveillance or imminent attack. He looked down at one of his beer glasses, trying to scrutinize the bar peripherally.

  “Sorry,” said Castine. “I think I—look.” She tapped the page in front of them. “The word he wanted there was pretty clearly synchronicity. It was synchronicity that he found ChakraSys just when he had a use for it, right? Not . . . synthetic guruity. And on the other pages, the T isn’t capitalized when ‘the guru’ is the beginning of a sentence.”

  “Okay,” said Vickery, relaxing and looking at the words she was pointing at.

  “So after his first draft of this file, before he printed it out, he did a quick find-and-replace on the whole file, see? In the first draft he must have used the actual name of this rock guitarist, but afterward he replaced the name with ‘the guru.’ And in the places where the guy’s name was at the beginning of a sentence, find-and-replace substituted the replacement words—‘the guru’—which of course started with a lower-case T!”

  Vickery leaned forward excitedly. “So if the word should have been synchronicity but got changed to synthe guruity, then the replaced word was—”

  “Chronic,” said Castine.

  “What kind of name is Chronic?”

  She shrugged. “It was the ’60s.”

  Vickery picked up his second glass of beer and took a gulp. “He did it before, too—” Putting the glass down, he pulled out a few of the pages they’d already read, and riffled through them. “Look. He says, ‘The biker club, fully the eponymous swine, attacked the guru’s group.’ According to Supergirl’s friend, the club’s name was the Gardena Legion. But what’s swinish about Gardena? Her friend remembered it close, but wrong.”

  “Well, I’ve never been to Gardena.”

  “What does the name ‘Legion’ suggest? Along with ‘swine’?”

  Castine picked up her glass, noticed once again that it was empty, and put it down. She cocked her head. “Of course. ‘My name is Legion, for we are many.’ That’s what the demons in the possessed guy told Jesus, in the gospels. And when Jesus cast the demons out of the guy, they went into a herd of pigs—swine—and they all ran off a cliff. The famous Gadarene Swine. Poor old pigs.” She tapped the page. “Yes, Harlowe did another find-and-replace here, didn’t he? The name of the biker club must have been the Gadarene Legion.”

  “Sure. Supergirl’s friend apparently never heard the gospel story, and remembered it as Gardena. Like I said, close.”

  On the last page of the printout was what appeared to be a poem, but Vickery pointed out that it was the lyrics of the Fogwillow song, “Elegy in a Seaside Meadow.”

  “What the Dumpster man was singing,” said Castine. “We should have talked to him.”

  Vickery remembered falling down in surprise when the old man had appeared in the Dumpster, and then scurrying away backward. “Oh well,” he said shortly. He finished his second beer. “You sure you don’t want a drink?”

  “I’m fine. What’s next?”

  He slid the papers and booklets back into the envelope. “We should look up a bunch of this stuff on a computer in the library,” he said. “I’ve got a San Bernardino County library card, but it won’t work here. Without a card, you only get fifteen minutes on the computers, so let’s—”

  Castine slid out of the booth. “I’ve got an L.A. County one that’s still valid,” she said; “well, not on me, but I remember my card number and PIN number. I’m sure I can get us on for a full hour.” She waited till he had stood up, then said, “Are we going back to Barstow tonight, after we meet with Ragotskie?”

  “And pours the waters of the Nile,” said Vickery flatly, “on every golden scale.” Then he gave her a look that must have expressed his sudden alarm, for she took a step back and her eyes were wide.

  “You didn’t mean to say that,” she whispered, “did you?”

  He shook his head, then cleared his throat and hummed briefly, confirming control of his own voice; just as, he recalled with a chill, Castine had done a few minutes earlier. “Was that,” he said carefully, “from the Alice books too?” When she nodded, still wide-eyed, he went on, “Yes, Barstow tonight.”

  Castine took his black-nylon-clad elbow, careful not to touch his hand with hers, as they hurried toward the door.

  “Pull over here,” said Harlowe. “There she stands.”

  “And welcomes little fishes in,” piped one of the twins in the back seat of the station wagon, “with gently smiling jaws!”

  Agnes Loria spoke over them. “It’s a church,” she said flatly as she eyed the building at the corner of Fedora and Pico; indecipherable graffiti made black squiggles across the white wall facing the street, and two shopping carts stoo
d on the over-long grass inside the fence. The next building to the west was a discount center with ATM and EBT signs in the window. The neon light over its doors was on already.

  “It’s my only other property in L.A.,” said Harlowe, sounding nettled, “and it’s vacant. Our stuff is mostly moved in already, the computers and furniture.”

  The twins were now peering out at the four-story Romanesque bell tower and the red-painted steps leading up to the wide, arched doors. Loria was already thinking about the trouble she would no doubt have in keeping them out of the tower.

  “I don’t go much for churches,” she said. She had pulled to the curb, but had still not turned off the engine.

  “It’s what we have,” said Harlowe. “Your damned rogue boyfriend made the Sepulveda place impossible.”

  The twins giggled in the back seat. Loria switched off the engine and opened her door. “You know he’s not my boyfriend,” she said tiredly. “Okay, just so it’s not Catholic.” The breeze from the west carried the smells of barbecue and cooling sidewalks. Loria looked across the street at a row of narrow, brightly lit shops behind luxuriant old curbside trees, then back, disapprovingly, at the church.

  “No no,” Harlowe assured her, getting out on his side and opening the back door for the twins, “some kind of Protestant sect.” His burgundy-red hair fluttered in the breeze as he pulled a set of keys from his pocket and unlocked the gate. “You need to put your bourgeois childhood behind you, kid.”

  “Or sink it.” Loria herded the twins ahead of her as Harlowe relocked the gate behind them and led the way up the walk to the steps and the tall, iron-bound wooden doors. The doors were unlocked, and he tugged one open and stood aside.

  Inside the vast nave; fading daylight through the stained glass windows high up on the west wall was dimmed by a couple of standing lamps on the broad dais at the far end, on which several of the Singularity crew were busy stacking boxes on a wide table, no doubt the one-time altar. A pulpit off to the left was crowded with half a dozen more lamps. The still air smelled of mildew and damp plaster.