Forced Perspectives

by Tim Powers

  Someone named Leo Marlin was listed as both the writer and director, and under Stars were listed three names: Gale Reed, Dot Palmer and Van Conlon. The full cast and crew were listed in a column below—only Reed and Palmer were represented by thumbnail photographs, the rest just by default gray ovals.

  Castine scrolled down through Company Credits and Technical Specs, and paused at Soundtracks. The only name in that category was Fogwillow.

  Vickery was looking over her shoulder, and nodded when she pointed at the name. “See if Wikipedia has an article about the movie,” and Castine exited IMDb and checked the movie title in Wikipedia. There was an article, but it was short, and provided nothing that they hadn’t learned from IMDb.

  Castine looked up Dot Palmer, Gale Reed, Leo Marlin and Van Conlon.

  Dot Palmer, originally one of the Gazzari Dancers on the TV show “Hollywood A Go-Go” and later a promising young actress, “died of heart failure while hiking” in 1968. What’s the Hex? was Leo Marlin’s only film credit, though he had been in some TV ads; he was killed during a robbery of his home in 1968. The only information on Van Conlon was that he died of a heroin overdose in, unsurprisingly at this point, 1968.

  Gale Reed, born in 1933, was apparently still alive, and had a fairly lengthy Wikipedia page. She had starred in a number of B-movies, most notably the 1957 romantic comedy Catch That Blonde! She was married twice, and her second husband, Stanley Ancona, had left her in 1968; she had evidently never remarried. After taking small parts in negligible movies in the ’60s, she had eventually subsided into being one of the stars on the TV game show “Hollywood Squares” for many years, finally retiring to do fundraising for a number of animal rescue organizations. A link at the bottom of the page led to a 2014 Los Angeles Times article with a picture of Reed on one of “her annual visits” to the La Brea Tar Pits to hang a wreath on the fence around the lake, in memory of all the mastodons and saber-tooth tigers who had died there over the millennia.

  “She probably lives in L.A.,” mused Vickery, “if she can regularly visit the tar pits at age eighty-four.”

  “If she still does that.”

  “It’d be interesting to talk to her. See what Pipl has on her.” But Pipl proved to have nothing at all under “Gale Reed.”

  Castine clicked back to Reed’s name in Google, and then clicked on Images. The monitor screen filled with a long gallery of pictures, mostly glamorous publicity photos of Gale Reed from the ’50s, or Catch That Blonde! movie posters, or shots of her in one of the brightly-lit cubes of the “Hollywood Squares” set. Scrolling down, Castine found more recent pictures of Reed, several taken as she was hanging wreaths on the fence around the La Brea Tar Pits. Her hair was still gold but her eyes were now obviously narrowed by face-lifts. Castine scrolled further down.

  “Whoa.” Vickery pointed at one image, a photo of a person on a gurney being wheeled by paramedics past a long hedge, with a brick-fronted Tudor-style house obliquely visible to the right.

  “That doesn’t look good,” said Castine, clicking on the image and then on the Visit button. What came up was a 2015 article at the TMZ website, headed “Hollywood Squares Star Hospitalized.”

  Castine expanded the page, and Vickery leaned in to read the article with her. It appeared that—yes, it was her—Gale Reed had suffered a grazing bullet wound in the head; the explanation she had given to police was that she had been cleaning an old gun, and an overlooked round in the chamber had been discharged accidentally. Police had considered placing her on a 51-50 hold, involuntary 72-hour commitment to a psychiatric ward for evaluation, but she had apparently talked her way out of that.

  Castine scratched at the old gunshot scar on her own scalp. “I should have been 51-50’d last year,” she muttered, “for even getting myself into that . . . lethally crazy situation.”

  “I wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t got into it,” remarked Vickery.

  “Dear dead days.” She leaned back in the wooden chair and tapped the monitor screen. “According to the L.A. Times, Reed was back to hanging wreaths at the tar pits the following year.”

  “Go back to that picture of her with the paramedics,” said Vickery, “and expand it.”

  She clicked back, and he peered at the image. “That street sign in the background,” he said, “white, with the raised section along the top—you can’t read the street name, but they only have street signs shaped like that in Beverly Hills. And—that big white house on the hill in the distance, I know where that is, you can see it from lots of places along Sunset. Her house is in the Flats, just . . . a bit south of Sunset, and on the east side of some street.”

  “I wonder why she shot herself.”

  Vickery raised his eyebrows. “It was an accident, weren’t you paying attention?”

  “Oh yeah. You want to what, pay her a visit?”

  “She was in the movie that was filmed at that house we see in the echo-visions. And she seems to be the only one involved in it that didn’t die in ’68.”

  “You think you can find her place, just from that picture?”

  “In Google Maps we can sort of fly over the area in a virtual helicopter.”

  When Castine had got Google Maps up, Vickery took hold of the mouse and swept the perspective to the area of Los Angeles south of Sunset and north of Santa Monica Boulevard. Then he clicked on Satellite View and tapped on the + button until he could see individual houses. He moved the map sideways, tracing Sunset.

  “Okay, there’s that big white house on the hill, see? So let’s look at the houses fairly south of that.”

  “There’s a million of them! And I just see the roofs!”

  “Nah, watch.” Vickery zoomed in on one street, waited till the image had come into focus, then clicked on 3D, and the viewpoint dipped to show the fronts of the houses. He clicked on the curved arrow in the margin and the view rotated so that they could see the houses from a different angle.

  For the next twenty minutes Vickery moved the view along one street after another, several times pausing to drag the little yellow-man icon to a spot in front of a likely-looking house and drop it to street-view; and finally they were looking at a Tudor-style house with a diagonal hedge out front. Vickery backed the viewpoint down the street a few yards, and the image was virtually identical to the TMZ picture.

  Castine nodded, and he clicked out of street view and hit the – button several times to get a broader view of the area, and Castine wrote down the nearest cross streets.

  Vickery stood back. “We should,” he said, “try to verify that the house from our visions is actually in that movie. Supergirl’s friend might have got it mixed up with some old ‘Green Acres’ episode.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  Castine shifted her chair back and looked—wistfully, Vickery thought—toward the ranks of end-on bookshelves on the other side of the long room, and the several visible people engaged in presumably normal pursuits. Then she slid her chair forward and resolutely faced the monitor again. “Okay. How?”

  “YouTube.”

  Castine sighed heavily and clicked back to the Google screen and from it to YouTube. Slowly she typed in, What’s the Hex?—and then even more slowly moused the pointer up to the question-mark icon and clicked it.

  A stack of images appeared on the left side of the screen, with captions off to the right; and in among a lot of videos about Hex Girls and Hex Color Codes, there was a picture of a surfer and the caption What’s the Hex? Trailer. Castine spread the fingers of both hands, then delicately clicked on it.

  The trailer video was sixty seconds long, and the first twenty seconds were just shots of young people surfing, and then a bit of conversation, about ghosts, between two men in front of a ramshackle beachside restaurant called The Raft. But after that it cut to a follow shot of a motorcyclist riding down a dirt path between sparse trees and bare hills, and when the motorcycle rounded a curve, the view was of—the house.

  Vickery heard Castine’s hiss of indrawn bre
ath, and he realized that he had winced and clenched his teeth.

  It was the first time they had seen the place in normal daylight, but it was precisely the same building that had appeared in their visions: the gables, the wooden steps, the sharply sagging porch, the broken windows—and now Vickery could see that it was even more decrepit than he had been able to discern by echo-light in the visions. Sun-grayed paint remained only in patches, and the shingles of the roof were discolored and eroded.

  The motorcyclist got off his bike and started toward the house just as a man in garish zombie makeup came lurching out of the front door. In a new camera angle from the side, the motorcyclist drew a gun and fired several shots at the creature, but it came plodding down the steps unfazed, and seized him by the throat, and his histrionic scream was the end of the video.

  Castine clicked out of YouTube and sat back, and Vickery straightened up. For a moment neither of them spoke, then Vickery exhaled. “Oscar caliber, for sure.”

  “Oh shut up. Don’t be flippant right now.” She was looking away from him, and he suspected it was because she didn’t want him to see tears in her eyes. “This makes it real.”

  “I know. Sorry.”

  She wiped her eyes on her sleeve and looked around at the booth as if it had been tainted by what the monitor had shown them. “Our hour’s about up. I’d like to be moving. Anywhere, just moving.”

  Philippe’s is the oldest continuously operating restaurant in Los Angeles—a big, noisy, brightly-lit place with long red wooden tables on a floor scattered with drifts of sawdust. The warm air is always redolent of bacon and roast beef. Castine and Vickery waited in one of the lines at the long counter and eventually ordered beef dip sandwiches and cole slaw, with a glass of Frog’s Leap merlot for Castine and a bottle of Dos XX beer for Vickery, who also ordered a purple pickled egg. They carried their trays to the far end of one of the tables, several yards away from the nearest of their fellow diners.

  “It’s been a long time since breakfast,” commented Castine, taking a bite of the broth-dipped end of her sandwich. “I might have another of these—I bet it’ll be cold up in that clearing by the freeway.”

  “And Ragotskie might very well not show up,” said Vickery. He drank some beer and took a bite of his pickled egg. “I don’t know how much more he can tell us anyway, and I don’t know how he imagines we might help him get his girl away from . . . ” He glanced aside at the family sitting down the table from them.

  “Quoth the raven,” said Castine. “Yeah, best not to drop keywords carelessly. You might set off a black hole.” She had a sip of her wine. “I think we should help him if we can. He seems like a decent sort.”

  Vickery had tipped up his beer mug for another swallow, and nearly choked on it. “A great guy,” he agreed, setting the mug down and wiping his mouth, “aside from having tried to poison you and shoot you yesterday.”

  “He was doing it to save this girl he loves,” said Castine. She gave him a tired, rueful smile. “I don’t know, you’re right—as gallantry goes, it is a bit extreme.”

  “If he can get an advantage with her by setting up a trap for us, he will.” Vickery bit off the end of his sandwich. “So,” he said, chewing, “we enter from above, by way of the freeway shoulder. That way—”

  Castine had been glancing around the long, high-ceilinged room, and she now caught Vickery’s eye and said, “Look straight down at your plate till I tell you something.”

  Vickery was tense as he stared at his sandwich. “What’s up?”

  “Don’t meet his eye if he looks around, but check out the guy at he table behind you. The one with the backward baseball cap.”

  Like that narrows it down, thought Vickery. But her tone had been wary, not alarmed, so he picked up his beer again and hiked around on his stool and let his gaze range generally across the crowd; and he let it stop when he was facing the undershirt-clad back of a man at the next table.

  Beneath the reversed baseball cap the man’s hair was white—and as Vickery watched, it darkened to brown, and then faded back to white. The man’s bare, pale right arm was extended sideways, and his hand was snatching at the remains of a sandwich in front of the woman next to him, but she was talking to a companion and they both seemed unaware of it, and anyway the man’s fingers weren’t succeeding in moving the sandwich at all. In fact, Vickery noted with a chill, the man’s fingers were passing through the sandwich, without jiggling it at all.

  Vickery turned back to face Castine, and nodded. “They’re not uncommon,” he said, keeping his voice steady, “in a big city. It’ll dissipate soon.”

  “I should tell her not to eat that sandwich. It’s probably got all kinds of ghost germs on it.”

  Vickery smiled. “She’d probably—”

  He stopped talking, for a man behind Castine, an older man in a wool coat with wire-rimmed glasses perched on his patrician nose, was giving him a conspiratorial smile.

  Seeing Vickery’s fixed expression, Castine turned around to look at the man too.

  He looked from Vickery to Castine, and past them at the back of the apparently hungry ghost, and then he winked and nodded. In a cultured voice he said softly, “And we’re none of us in prison!” and gave them an ironic thumbs-up. Then he pushed his stool back, bowed and strode unhurriedly away toward the Alameda Street exit.

  “He—!” began Castine; then she went on just loud enough for Vickery to hear, leaning across the table toward him, “he’s a killer! And he thinks we are too!”

  Vickery spoke quietly. “Well we are, Ingrid. He knew that’s why we—and he—could see our friend behind me trying to pick up a sandwich.”

  “I know, last year, when I—and you—but those were self-defense! He obviously thought we were murderers! Uncaught! Like him!” She stared in the direction the man had gone. “You were a cop—catch him!”

  “Sure, citizen’s arrest. ‘This guy, whoever he is, evidently killed somebody somewhere, sometime!’”

  Castine’s shoulders slumped. “You’re right. But let’s move on. I feel all creepy now, like he gave us his . . . unblessing.”

  “Finish your sandwich,” said Vickery, picking up his own. “And your wine. God knows when we’ll eat and drink next.”

  He heard a faint thump and glanced behind him. The ghost had disappeared, and no one else seemed to have been able to see it. He shrugged and took another bite of his sandwich.

  “Poor old ghost,” muttered Castine. “If they sold ghost sandwiches here, I’d have got him one.”

  Lateef Fakhouri had parked his rented Nissan in the back lot of the discount center beside the church to which Simon Harlowe had apparently relocated his operation. The air inside the car was uncomfortably warm and smelled of motor oil, and it had been a relief, an hour ago, to get out into the cool evening breeze and step to the torn section of the chain-link fence that surrounded the narrow church grounds.

  It seemed unlikely that Harlowe’s people had had time to set up any security measures outside yet, and he had crouched through the gap in the fence and made his way silently through tall weeds and around a couple of old shopping carts to a back door. It was locked, but a narrow window in it gave him a dust-fogged view of a lighted stairway inside. He had been about to investigate the added-on building at the back of the church when he had seen people descending the stairway; he had stepped back then, to be in shadow, but watched intently.

  It had been the woman and the two girls whom he had followed from the Manhattan Beach parking lot yesterday evening: Harlowe’s evident Girl Friday, and his two nieces, who were pretty certainly destined to be the communication nexus of his egregore.

  All three of them had continued down the stairs, out of sight, and a few moments later Fakhouri had been startled by a light coming on beside his ankles; glancing down, he’d seen that it came from a long, narrow window set only a few inches above the dirt, with close-set iron bars over the glass—clearly in the wall of a basement.

  The glass wa
s frosted, and he had gingerly lain down prone on the weedy dirt with his ear only inches from the glass.

  There had been conversation, but to his annoyance he had only been able to hear the woman say loudly, “I don’t want to hear a goddamn peep out of either one of you!” and then the light had gone out.

  That had been an hour ago. Fakhouri had quietly got to his feet and gone back to his car, and sat in the driver’s seat in the gathering darkness and sweated and smoked up an entire pack of costly Cleopatra cigarettes, crushing each one out after only a few inhalations. His eyes stung now with smoke and sweat and possibly tears.

  If this scheme succeeded, and he managed to spirit away Harlowe’s nieces—kidnap them, to put it plainly—he would simply be taking them in order to stop the egregore. He could not, in all honesty, tell himself that he was doing it to rescue them, to make up for having left those two Coptic girls in the garbage district of Cairo.

  Still, he would be rescuing them. And it might put and end to the nightmares that he still suffered.

  He peered out through the fogged windshield at the sky. The night was about as dark now as it was going to get.

  “Damn it,” he said, and picked up the flashlight and the sheet of paper from the seat beside him. He got out of the car, and the night breeze was cold on his wet face.

  He carried the flashlight and the paper back through the gap in the chain-link fence to the low basement window, which was still dark, and again he lay prone on the dirt beside it. On the sheet of paper was a felt-pen tracing of the Nu hieroglyph from Khalid Boutros’ old photograph, and Fakhouri now slid the sheet between the bars and pressed it against the frosted-glass window, careful to have the inked side against the glass. Holding it there with one hand, he rapped the flashlight against the glass, then drew it back and switched it on, illuminating the paper.

  To the extent that the girls were initiated into the Ba hieroglyph, they should be drawn to this one, even as he would lead them, Pied Piper style, back to his car. That was his plan, but he wasn’t cheered to hear exclamations and activity start up now in the basement beyond the glass. After a few seconds it became quiet, but through his fingers on the paper he felt fingers brushing the glass on the other side.