Forced Perspectives

by Tim Powers

  “Mulholland?” She gave him a blank look, then her eyes widened. “Not—not Hipple’s old place?”

  Vickery rocked his head, acknowledging her reluctance. The small-time blackmailer, extortionist and ghostmonger known as Jack Hipple had lived in an eccentric house down a hillside from Mulholland Drive, and neither he nor Castine had pleasant memories of time spent there.

  “His house would never pass a code inspection,” Vickery pointed out, “especially with that back door, so I bet it’s vacant, and I doubt anybody’s bothered to tear it down. Anyway, that clearing with his mailbox is out of sight of the highway. Nobody’ll see the car.”

  “You did hear that singing, right? Up in the freeway nest there?” When he nodded again, Castine went on, “that was ghosts, wasn’t it?”

  Vickery poked at the ruptured hose. “Most likely.”

  “And,” Castine went on, “we saw—how many ghosts at Hipple’s place, last year?”

  “Uh, four. No, five, counting Hipple’s own, on that last visit.”

  “The first time I spent the night with you, it was in a tomb. This is worse.”

  “At least we’re chaste,” Vickery observed drily.

  “I hope it counts for something.”

  Twenty minutes later Vickery had taped up the torn hose and refilled the radiator and the coolant reservoir, and when he started the engine the tape didn’t leak and the needle on the temperature gauge quickly moved to a point comfortably left of vertical. He and Castine got in, and the woman in the apartment didn’t reappear to complain about the puddle of coolant on the pavement as he backed carefully down to the street.

  CHAPTER TWELVE:

  Likewise, I’m Sure

  Vickery cut over to Western Avenue and then drove north in the slow lane, and though the Saturn drew some amused looks from other drivers, it was only passed by two police cars, and both times Vickery switched on the windshield wipers in the hope that the metal arms and rubber strips flapping back and forth in mid-air in front of his face and noisily striking the top of the dashboard would give the illusion of a windshield behind them; and in fact neither of the police cars slowed. Castine, bundled up in the yellow blanket against the chilly headwind, was several times reduced to helpless, anxious laughter. The fan belt whined now every time he started forward from a stop light, and he hoped he wasn’t losing the alternator; the car wouldn’t go far working off the battery alone, especially with the headlights on.

  At Franklin Vickery turned left, and then for a dozen blocks he was mostly driving down the narrower street between quiet apartment buildings; at Highland he turned right, and after passing the Hollywood Bowl parking lot they were driving up Cahuenga Boulevard, with the sparsely lit darkness of the Hollywood hills looming at their left and the rushing headlights of the 101 freeway beyond a fence to their right.

  Finally he made a left-hand loop onto Mulholland Drive, and they were away from city streets. Except for widely-spaced streetlights, the only illumination was from the Saturn’s headlights, which showed occasional reflector posts and driveways and clusters of momentarily-vivid red bougainvillea flowers in the otherwise featureless darkness; twice Vickery glimpsed For Sale signs swinging on one-armed frames, and he wished they didn’t suggest gallows.

  The road was all curves and sharp switchbacks, and the moon seemed to swoop capriciously around in the sky. The headwind through the empty windshield frame was much colder up here in the hills, and Vickery was about to ask Castine to share the blanket when he braked suddenly, fairly certain that the headlight beams had swept the familiar driveway on the left.

  He saw no glow of reflected headlights behind him, so he quickly reversed and then steered into the driveway.

  The Saturn’s right headlight had begun to blink on and off in response to bumps in the road, and before Vickery had driven halfway down the curved, descending track,the light gave a final extra-bright flash and went out with evident finality.

  By the remaining headlight he saw the clearing at the bottom of the driveway, and a broken post where the mailbox had once stood—and, partly hidden behind a big rosemary bush, a white compact sedan.

  “Oh shit,” said Castine. “Somebody’s here. Let’s go.”

  Vickery slid the gear shift to park and turned off the remaining headlight. “We were lucky to get here without a curious cop pulling us over because of no windshield,” he said. “Driving with one headlight too would make it impossible. And I don’t like the noise from the fan belt.” He sighed and switched off the engine. “Let’s at least take a look.”

  “Furtively,” suggested Castine, opening her door and stepping out onto the packed dirt.

  Moonlight frosted the border of webbed glass around the windshield frame and threw deep black shadows under the clustered trees that bordered the south end of the clearing. Vickery pulled the key out of the ignition and got out of the car, closing the door quietly. Castine shook out her hair, and Vickery heard the patter of glass fragments hitting the dirt.

  He led the way to the south edge of the clearing and into the weeds beyond, and then he was scuffing down a dirt slope with his arms held out in front of him to catch any branches in his path. He could hear Castine hopping and sliding along behind him. The air down among the trees was even colder than it had been up in the clearing,and was sharp with the smell of pine.

  The darkness was relieved by occasional flickering patches of moonlight, but Vickery had to grope his way, and he tried to grab tree trunks or branches for balance—though several times he wound up sitting down and sliding. Hipple had hung hooded robes with oval mirrors for faces on several of the trees, but if any were still in place, they were invisible now.

  The wooded slope, he knew, extended all the way down Franklin Canyon to Sunset Boulevard three or four miles away; he recalled that the one-time actress Gale Reed apparently now lived just below Sunset, and if his view weren’t blocked by trees bending in the wind, a light at her house might have been part of the boulevard’s blurry bright line.

  He was expecting the first of two concrete trenches that crossed the hillside, and so he didn’t fall over it. He bent to feel the bottom of it, and it was full of dry leaves. When Hipple had been alive, water had flowed through it.

  “Trench here,” he whispered back to Castine, “with another a few yards further down.”

  “I remember,” came her exasperated whisper.

  When they had both crossed the second dry trench, Vickery paused to look around for the short statue that had stood nearby, but it wasn’t visible either. But Hipple’s house, he recalled, was not far below this point.

  He and Castine both tried to move more quietly now, though they still slipped and fell from time to time, sliding through drifts of leaves and sending pebbles rolling ahead of them. At last they halted, panting, for just beyond a wide oak trunk they could see the one-story clapboard house in a level moonlit clearing. The roof bristled with TV antennas, and the house’s eaves extended well out past the walls, and in their deep shadow Vickery could see faint, flickering light in the dozens of tiny windows.

  Then he noticed that a vertical shape on the front step was a person standing there. A gasp from Castine let him know that she had seen it too.

  “A ghost?” she whispered, almost too faintly for him to hear.

  The figure stepped out into the moonlight. It was a young girl, perhaps twelve years old, in overalls; and with the suggestion of a ghost fresh in his mind, Vickery’s first, irrational thought was that it was Mary, his never-conceived daughter. But this girl had dark hair, and was taller . . . and she cast a distinct shadow in the moonlight.

  “Welcome, little fishes!” she called cheerfully.

  Vickery clasped his hands together to stop them shaking, then wiped his chilled forehead. Mary is gone, he told himself. She was never anything but gone.

  He heard the distinctive metallic creak of a screen door opening, and another girl came out of the house. She too was dark-haired and wore overalls.
>
  A voice from inside the house said, “Is someone there? Get back inside!”

  The girls giggled and retreated into the house, and a man emerged; a gun gleamed in his half-raised hand, and Vickery recognized him by his moustache and his sport coat, which even in the moonlight was visibly plaid.

  Castine had recognized him too. “It’s Omar Sharif!” she whispered.

  Vickery spread his hands and walked out from behind the tree. He cleared his throat and called, “We’ve met,” as Castine shuffled up beside him.

  “Oh!” said Lateef Fakhouri. “You two!” He didn’t raise the gun to eye level, but he didn’t lower it either. “You told me you would fly away. Did you follow us here?”

  “No,” said Vickery, “we—”

  “What makes you come here?”

  “Good question,” muttered Castine.

  “Harlowe’s men tried to kill us an hour ago,” Vickery said. “If you walk up to the mailbox clearing, you’ll see my car with bullet holes in it, and the windshield shot out.” He ventured to lower his hands. “We couldn’t drive back to where I live, and both of us have been here before—it seemed like a good, hidden place to spend the night.”

  “This is true?” said Fakhouri. “I can kill you both, be sure of it.”

  Castine spoke up. “If you want to walk back up the hill, we can show you the car.”

  After a brief hesitation, Fakhouri muttered, “I think you had better come in. Did you know this man who lived here, Jack Hipple?”

  After a moment’s hesitation, Vickery and Castine walked across the clearing and followed Fakhouri into the house. The air inside was a few degrees warmer, and at least they were out of the wind.

  The front room was softly lit by the flickering glow of a dozen candles on windowsills and otherwise empty shelves, and the flames resumed their steady teardrop shapes after Fakhouri closed the door. The couch and table and chairs and the old analog TV set were where Vickery remembered them, but the computer was gone, along with the paintings that had hung on the walls and everything that had been on the shelves. The remembered smell of latakia tobacco was replaced now by the aroma of barbecued chicken, and Vickery noticed a Pollo Loco bag and three styrofoam trays and cups on the table. A dark hallway opened on the left, and the two girls stood there, staring with evident interest at Vickery and Castine.

  Fakhouri seemed distracted, but he had not put down the gun. “They’re just normal candle flames,” he said, then waved toward the couch. “I think it’s best if you sit down. This house is abandoned, there is no electricity or water. Candles, luckily.”

  Castine had looked from the two girls to Fakhouri, raising her eyebrows and clearly expecting an introduction; but Fakhouri had ignored her look, and she was now peering around at the bare walls and the cobwebby television set and, warily, at the door in the south wall. She and Vickery remained standing, and for several seconds no one spoke.

  “Why wouldn’t they be normal flames?” Castine asked finally.

  “I mean they are not grafts from the Baba Gurgur fire.” Fakhouri looked from Castine to Vickery, then closed his mouth and looked chagrined at having answered her question.

  “You lost me,” said Vickery. “And yes, we did know Hipple, though not as friends. Uh . . . did you know him?”

  “No. You knew he is dead?”

  “Yes.” Hipple’s ghost, thought Vickery, is even now in a pinecone at the hub of a pinwheel on the roof of my trailer, back in Barstow. “There’s probably still some bloodstains on the floor behind the couch there.”

  The girls both hurried around the couch and peered uselessly into the deep shadows. “Blood?” said one.

  “Did you kill him?” asked the other. “We can’t watch the TV without electricity.”

  “No,” said Vickery. Could these girls, he wondered, be the twins Ragotskie had mentioned? Harlowe’s nieces? Why are they with Fakhouri? “We found his body,” he added, “some time afterward.”

  The girls had quit looking behind the couch and now stood beside the table. “We know you,” said one of them. “You saw the woman get shot on the porch.”

  Castine nodded and said, “The two little girls on a boat. We both sensed you.”

  “Likewise, I’m sure,” said the other. She bobbed in what might have been a curtsy. “We’re Lexi and Amber.”

  Fakhouri exhaled and rolled his eyes. “Yes, tell everyone.” He sat down in a chair by the television and rubbed his forehead. “Girls, our visitors are—”

  “Betty Boop and Colonel Bleep, if you don’t mind,” said Castine.

  Fakhouri nodded. “Yes. Better so.”

  “You two,” said Castine, “pushed us into that vision, yesterday morning. We nearly crashed our car.”

  “We didn’t mean to push you,” said one of the girls. “Just touch you. But when we did, it popped out.”

  The other girl nodded solemnly. “It made Uncle Simon fall down, and Miss Loria said a bad word.”

  “So did I, as I recall,” said Castine, remembering Vickery’s car spinning off onto the shoulder on the drive south from Barstow. “Harlowe saw it too? Your Uncle Simon?”

  “Only because you did,” said the first girl.

  Vickery looked away from the twins to Fakhouri. “What brings your party here?”

  “Endless trouble of a serious kind!” Fakhouri shifted awkwardly in his chair. “But this place? The man Hipple has been mentioned several times when I’ve spoken to people about the many local . . . er, unnatural situations, and this derelict house was described by a young person I spoke to. It seemed, as you say, a safely hidden refuge, involving no explanations—nor credit cards!—nor, I had hoped, visitors.” He nodded toward the bare shelves and added, “It has evidently been selectively looted at some time, but there is dust over all, now.”

  The girls had sat down on the carpet. One of them picked up a styrofoam cup from the table and began slurping through a straw.

  Vickery looked at Castine and shrugged, and they both stepped around the table and sat on the couch.

  “We had to stop at a—a fast-food outlet,” said Fakhouri, “after witnessing what may have been a fatal car crash! And then—do you know about the door back there?” he added, nodding toward the south wall. “Was there a balcony there once? I nearly walked out through it!”

  Vickery recalled that the door opened on a sheer hundred-foot drop. “No. Hipple was a blackmailer, as much as anything, and he often got information from ghosts . . . who seemed to prefer a door that didn’t need to be walked up to.”

  “Car crash?” said Castine.

  Fakhouri frowned moodily at her, then shrugged. “I am about rescuing these . . . Amber and Lexi,” he said, “these girls. Excuse me, it has been a dreadful evening. From a church on Pico Boulevard. From their uncle, who has plans to put their poor minds in a blender! To make a spiritual kind of Godzilla, if I may speak frankly.”

  “And they chased us!” exclaimed one of the girls. “But we fixed ’em.”

  Fakhouri was staring at the low beamed ceiling. “Harlowe’s associates saw us leave, and pursued us in a car. And Lexi and Amber guessed which person was probably driving, and—and the car turned into a telegraph pole. That is, it struck a telegraph pole. I am afraid people in the car must have died.”

  “They wanted to take us back to the church,” explained one of the girls, “or the boat in the new marina.”

  “But Mr. Fakhouri showed us something—new,” said the other. “A hier-o-glyph.”

  “We looked at it real hard,” agreed the other girl, “and now we’re new.”

  “Sometimes,” amended her sister. “When we are, it feels like jumping off the edge of the world into the big ocean outside. Other times, our uncle’s app is still open.”

  Fakhouri waved sharply at them to be quiet, then gave Vickery a look that was at once defiant and apologetic. “Pardon,” he said, “I almost entirely believe you are not working with Harlowe, but nevertheless if he should capture you . . .
and interrogate . . . ”

  “Likewise, I’m sure,” said Castine.

  “We know about a hieroglyph,” said Vickery, not looking at the twins. We fixed ’em, he thought with an inward shudder. “If it’s the same one, it’s showed up in some coloring books, and it’s supposed to be dangerous to look at.”

  “That is the other hieroglyph,” said Fakhouri. He added, with evident new worry, “Have you seen one of these coloring books?”

  “We’ve got a couple,” said Vickery. “We’ve only glanced quickly at the hieroglyph.” Castine frowned at him, and he told her, “I’m revealing none of our plans. And Santiago trusts him.”

  “And you trust Santiago?” Castine said. “Seb—uh, Colonel Bleep—” She rolled her eyes and went on, “For one thing, I think Santiago has probably killed people, at least one person.” When Vickery raised his eyebrows, she said, “He saw the spirit of your . . . your personal ghost, if you recall, outside that Catholic church last year.”

  That’s true, thought Vickery, Santiago saw the ultra-frail ghost of my never-was daughter—and the only people who can see ghosts are people who have been intimate with someone who died within the possibility-widening field generated by the freeways; and though Santiago is surely too young to have had sex with anybody, “Ending someone’s earthly life for him is about as intimate as you can get,” as Jack Hipple himself had once said.

  The twins were listening avidly. “You have a personal ghost?” asked one; and the other said, “I think it’s who cuts his hair.”

  The three adults might not have heard them. “It is conceivable,” said Fakhouri slowly, leaning forward and clasping his hands, “that the boy has killed a person. If so, I make no doubt that it was justified. But if he has the ability to see ghosts, it is from the deaths of his father and mother. They were killed on the San Diego freeway three years ago, trying to cross it. He was with them, but was not himself struck by any car.”

  “Oh,” said Vickery; then, “He’d have been about ten years old.”

  “Last year he told us,” said Castine in a softened voice, “that the leather bands he wears on his wrists contain the subsumed—fossilized—ghosts of his mother and father.” She looked across the table at Fakhouri. “He didn’t tell us how they died. You must inspire confidence.”