Forced Perspectives

by Tim Powers

  “We share a common outweighing purpose,” said Fakhouri. “It was he who told me of this house. He is loyal to the wishes of his old mentor, who was also killed. I—” Fakhouri paused, considering, and he glanced cautiously at the twins. “I want to stop an Egyptian thing from destroying innocent people, as a fellow civil servant did, fifty years ago.”

  “Booty,” said Castine.

  Fakhouri sighed. “You know more than I would like. Yes, that’s what the hippies of the time called him.”

  “I’d like to ask these girls some questions,” said Vickery.

  “No,” said Fakhouri. “I think you do mean to help—but the best way is for you both to go away. You can provide only hindrance to me.”

  “To you and Santiago,” said Vickery. “He thinks we should hang around.”

  “The boy should have more faith. You must not . . . hang around. You put yourself and this woman in mortal danger—immortal danger!—by remaining in Los Angeles.”

  “What is the . . . Gurgur fire?” asked Castine.

  “You have the name wrong,” Fakhouri told her, “and I will not correct you. And it is nothing of importance.”

  One of the girls tipped her styrofoam cup to her mouth and caught a chunk of ice, and began crunching it.

  “We got that from you,” exclaimed Castine, “didn’t we? You’re why we’ve found ourselves chewing ice cubes!”

  The twins suddenly looked distressed. “Did we hurt your teeth?” said one in a near wail. “Sorry!”

  Vickery remembered the things he and Castine had found themselves involuntarily saying at Boardner’s, six hours ago. “And the ‘little crocodile’ line,” he said, “and the thing about pouring the waters of the Nile on every golden scale. The bits from Alice in Wonderland. Those were from you two?”

  “We hear you sometimes,” explained the other, earnestly, “and reach out and touch you. You’re the other IMPs, we can’t help it.”

  “None of you will be IMPs,” Fakhouri burst out. “And even if this Harlowe chooses another pair, I will see to it that the egregore fails again, as it did fifty years ago.”

  “That was a different one,” said Castine. “ . . . Wasn’t it?”

  “That October night in 1968,” said Fakhouri, “is in a, a time-bubble, un . . . unpopped?”

  “A fifty-year time-spike,” said Vickery.

  “Just so. It is the work of another, but Harlowe intends to—” Fakhouri paused for a brief, humorless smile, “—to take over the long-dormant account, as it were. He has already set in motion the opening of the bubble or time-spike, the release of the enduring potential of that night. Already people are falling in and out of the emerging mind. Without IMPs, the mind would be a vast idiot, and that is marginally better than that it should have intelligence and purpose. But you must trust that I will choke it into utter oblivion, by means of—”

  “Something new, I bet,” said Lexi or Amber.

  “Do hush, child!” Fakhouri pleaded. “If Harlowe were to learn—”

  He paused, listening; and Vickery had heard it too: a faint knocking.

  Castine had jumped at the sound. Now she took a shuddering breath, and whispered, “It’s somebody at the back door.”

  The twins started to get up, but Fakhouri raised a hand and in a harsh whisper said, “Halt!” He threw Vickery a tense, questioning look.

  Vickery thought about the ghost repellers that Hipple had kept in a box on a nearby shelf—but even if they had still been there, a ghost had to be induced to look at them, and there wasn’t nearly enough light in the room for them to be effective.

  “It’s probably that Pratt boy again!” whispered Castine.

  Vickery’s chest felt suddenly hollow.

  “His jaw got pushed into his brain,” said one of the twins. Fakhouri waved sharply at her and she clapped her hands over her mouth.

  The knocking sounded again, no louder but somehow more forceful.

  “’Tis the wind,” whispered the other twin, “and nothing more.”

  Vickery slowly turned his head to look toward the door, the frame of which was dimly discernible in the candle light.

  Pratt, he thought, I killed you, and now here you are, knocking at a door. Can I apologize, explain? Do you have something to say to me? Can I refuse to hear it, after putting you where you are?

  “Think up some math,” he told Castine, and got to his feet. “I better . . . oh hell, I have to see what he wants. Don’t anybody look it in the eye, or talk to it.” He gave the twins a sharp glare. “Understand?”

  Castine looked up at him, wide-eyed. “Sebastian,” she said, “why? It’ll probably go away if we ignore it.”

  Now a low groan sounded from outside the door.

  “If it’s Pratt, he’s come for me,” Vickery said. “I’ll listen to him. I owe him that.”

  “It,” said Castine, “it’s not a person, it’s not who he was.”

  “It’s some part of him.”

  He walked around the couch to the back door. He took a deep breath, then reached for the doorknob, twisted it, and pulled the door open.

  A cold, pine-scented breeze rushed into the house, and Vickery was squinting out at the remote glow of Beverly Hills in the darkness to the south; but the view rippled, as if with impossible heat waves, and he stepped back when he realized that the distortion was caused by some nearly invisible thing hanging in mid-air only a few feet out from the doorway.

  It was an upright shape, and it darkened into the outlines of a man and stepped forward across the threshold and into the room.

  Now it was nearly as solid-seeming as a real person, though blurry around the edges. Vickery got an impression of a light-colored shirt and dark pants. Its face was in shadow.

  “Is Agnes here?” the ghost wheezed then, as it moved forward.

  Vickery heard Castine say, hoarsely, “Ragotskie?”

  “The whole world is lit up,” said the ghost, “I hear babies crying, I watch them glow, the tar’s bubbling, and the Legion are gunning their Harleys and Harlowe’s afraid they’ll catch him with his Shantihs down. We’ve got to get Agnes away from there!” It stretched one arm behind it, and when its wobbly fingers touched the door, it slammed shut, shaking the house.

  The ghost peered around the room, and Vickery was glad to see the twins and Castine and Fakhouri look away from it. Fakhouri’s fists were clenched, and Vickery thought it was not from fear, but from a wish that the ghost would shut up.

  “Where,” said Vickery, then glanced at Castine. Don’t talk to them in complete sentences, he thought.

  She nodded in comprehension. “Is,” she said.

  “She?” finished Vickery.

  “She’s at the church,” said the ghost, clearly struggling to speak distinctly, “looking at me on the floor. She had to do it, I stuck my knife into Foster.” The thing bobbed its hands up and down its torso, then let them drift loose. “I left it there, I guess. It was pretty heavy. I’d like to get it back—it’s in Foster’s stomach, okay?”

  “Okay,” breathed Vickery.

  “Let,” said Castine, and with one hand she made a quick lifting gesture toward Vickery.

  “Un,” he said, “Agnes?”

  Castine rocked her head back in evident impatience, then said, “Be our.”

  Ragotskie’s ghost was looking from one of them to the other, seeming to listen.

  “Concern,” said Vickery with assurance.

  Castine nodded. “You.”

  Vickery shrugged. “Can?”

  “Go gently.”

  The ghost was leaning forward, with its head cocked, apparently attentive.

  “Into that good night,” finished Vickery in one breath.

  “Poor creature,” added Castine.

  “Not,” said the ghost. It groaned and clutched at its head. “Not till . . . Agnes! . . . is just Agnes. The world is lit up. But I can’t see. I can’t find her.”

  The thing opened its mouth, and Vickery crouched, ready to j
ump to one side if its tongue should come springing out; but it seemed to want to say more.

  Before it could speak, if it had even meant to, it spun around in a circle; and rotated again, and again, faster and faster but silently, and then it simply wasn’t present anymore, and the candle flames fluttered in a quick buffet of imploding air.

  A chorus of exhaled breaths followed it.

  Castine sat back and dragged her fingers through her hair. “I don’t think she deserved him,” she said.

  “Does that door lock?” Fakhouri asked. When Vickery shrugged, he said, “At least brace a chair against it.”

  Vickery crossed to the door and brushed a hand along the frame, and felt a dead-bolt knob. He twisted it, and heard a bolt thump.

  Castine hiked around on the couch to look in his direction. “I hope you’re not disappointed . . . ?”

  “That it wasn’t Pratt?” Vickery returned to the couch and let himself collapse onto it. “No. No, that’s not a meeting I’d wish for.” He leaned back to look toward the kitchen. “I know where Hipple hid a bottle of brandy. It might still be there.”

  Castine nodded emphatically, but Fakhouri just picked up one of the styrofoam cups and swirled the remaining ice in it. “I’ll abstain,” he said. “But prepare your refreshments. And then,” he added, glancing at the twins, “we can sit together and keep silent on many important subjects.”

  An extension cord had been run into the sacristy, and a clamp light was now attached to a cabinet door, pointing upward. In the reflected glow, an elderly member of the Singularity team who Loria knew only as Scooter was on his knees, mopping up the last of the blood with a big car-wash sponge. Simon Harlowe paced back and forth in front of the sink counter, overseeing the clean-up. His cowboy boots were a brighter red than the blood. Loria leaned against the wall by the nave door, puffing on a cigarette.

  “You didn’t have to,” Harlowe said to her. “We could have questioned him.”

  “You weren’t here.” She took a last, deep drag on the cigarette and tossed it toward the sink; it bounced off the cabinet and landed on the floor in front of Scooter, who wordlessly scooped it up with his sponge.

  You weren’t here, Loria thought.

  The fast confrontation that had occurred an hour and a half ago was still painfully vivid in Loria’s mind.

  She had only been back at the church for half an hour, still shaky from having nearly been hit head-on by several cars after Vickery had knocked her car sideways on Crenshaw; and she had been alone in the sacristy when she had heard scratching at the back door. Peering out through the little window, she had seen Elisha Ragotskie waving and mouthing something.

  She closed her eyes now, remembering.

  The door had squeaked when she unbolted it and pulled it open, and Ragotskie had winced behind the lenses of his silly Harry Potter glasses. “Shh! Agnes, the egregore is going to fail, just like it did in ’68—I know this! People are probably going to die, down in Topanga Canyon tomorrow night, and you mustn’t be one of them! I may not like you or trust you, but I love you, and I do want you to live. You’ve got your car—you and I have got to get away from—” he waved around, apparently at everything, “—all this.”

  “Elisha!” said Loria in a shrill whisper. “Did you take Amber and Lexi?”

  “The twins? No—they’re gone? That’s good. Come with me!”

  Loria gave a jerky wave and shook her head—and she wondered if the egregore could succeed, with neither Vickery and Castine nor the twins. What if that whole self-renouncing apotheosis simply didn’t happen, tomorrow night? What would she be left with?

  Elisha, for all his vanities and foolishness, clearly cared about the identity that was Agnes Loria, found Agnes Loria worth taking huge risks for—what if his opinion of her was truer than her own dismissive one?

  “My car,” she had told him, “won’t drive right. A fender is rubbing a wheel now. And anyway—damn it, Elisha,—”

  And then Foster had stepped up out of the darkness behind Ragotskie and grabbed his right arm and twisted it behind his back. Ragotskie exhaled through clenched teeth and with his free hand groped around at his belt.

  Loria pulled Harlowe’s .22 from her jacket pocket and pointed it at the struggling pair.

  “Stop it!” she cried. “Foster, let go of him! Look, I’ve got a gun!”

  She stepped aside as Foster and Ragotskie reeled into the room. Ragotskie was gripping a knife in his left hand now, a lethal-looking length of gleaming steel, and he jerked it down and sideways. Foster grunted and bent forward.

  And the gun in her hand sprang upward with a flash of blue light and a loud snap. Both men tumbled to the floor, and both seemed for a few moments to be trying to get up again, then sagged in final relaxation.

  Loria dropped the gun and hurried to them, and she crouched beside Elisha. His glasses were broken and had fallen off, and in the clamplight’s reflected glow she saw lines of bright red blood criss-crossed down his cheek from a little round puncture in his temple. His eyes were open, but empty.

  Her own head was ringing, and she sat down and pushed herself away from him. “Oh, Elisha!” she whispered, “I’m sorry! You damned idiot, I’m so sorry!”

  Curious about the noise, several of the Singularity staff had come in from the nave then, and it wasn’t until they rolled Foster’s body over that she saw the knife hilt standing up from his solar plexus. Loria had gone out into the nave and sat down in one of the pews.

  Then Harlowe had burst into the church through the front doors with the news that Nunez’s ear had been shot nearly off of his head, and that the car pursuing the twins’ kidnapper had crashed, and Castine and Vickery were still in the wind; and when he had made his way to the sacristy and stridently demanded an explanation for the bodies on the floor, Loria had managed to recount what had happened. He’d had to be told twice more before he had believed it. Then he had knelt down and roughly searched Ragotskie’s body, looking for the bloody sock, but found only $360 and receipts for a six-pack of beer, half a dozen sandwiches, a quilted jacket and a Smith and Wesson hunting knife. Harlowe had ordered several of the Singularity staff to drag the bodies out to the meeting hall at the back of the church.

  The sacristy floor was now clean, to the eye at least, and Scooter got to his feet and turned to the sink to wring out the sponge under running water.

  Harlowe gave Loria a baleful look and said again, “We could have questioned him.” His forehead was misted with sweat. “This night has been a rout.”

  “I was trying to save Foster,” said Loria; knowing that in fact she hadn’t meant to fire the gun at all, and certainly not at Elisha. “Can it still be done?” she asked urgently, “the egregore?” Don’t, she thought, tell me I’m condemned to this distinct Agnes Loria identity, with the memory of having . . . taken Elisha’s blood pressure!

  “Yes.” Harlowe nodded firmly. “Yes, one way or, or another. And we’ll cover this incident, don’t worry.”

  Loria felt her shoulders begin to relax, and she tried to push out of her mind the image of Ragotskie’s slack, blood-streaked face. “Nunez got shot? What happened?”

  “Oh—following your directions, he cornered Vickery and Castine, and shot at them. I warned him that Taitz said they seemed pro! They shot back, and now Nunez needs to have his ear sewed back on! One of us must do it. He tried to give chase anyway, but they evaded him and drove away, God knows where. Are they quick, or what? You were right yesterday, I was too hasty in ordering them killed.” He raised both fists, then let them fall to his sides. “Damn, but they could be good IMPs, in spite of their link to the past! That could even be a strength, turned in the right direction.”

  “Still? How? The sock is gone.”

  “We have,” Harlowe said, glancing at his watch, “twenty-six hours in which to find them—and I’ve set out some trip wires that might still yield something. And I believe we do still have Lexi and Amber.”

  “Simon,” Loria said hesi
tantly, “no we don’t. Somebody took them, remember?”

  “I’m not senile, Agnes! I mean I’m pretty sure we still have them spiritually. They colored in the Ba image again yesterday, do you remember? Renewed their initiation, opened the apps again after closing them with their dip in the ocean. It won’t matter where their bodies are, they don’t need to be present when the rest of us hold hands and launch the egregore tomorrow night—it will sweep up all initiated members when it ascends.” He raised a hand and then waved it off to the side, as if acknowledging and dismissing an objection; and he added, hesitantly, “Their thoughts, my awareness of their thoughts, has been . . . flickering for a couple of hours now—but that’s probably just because I’m so very tired.”

  “Flickering?” Loria had been relieved to hear that the twins were still candidates to be the egregore’s switchboard, its IMPs, its thalamus, but Harlowe’s evident uncertainty and exhaustion revived her worries. “Like what, like they’re jumping in and out of the ocean again, from time to time?”

  Harlowe squinted at the ceiling; and after several seconds, during which Loria wondered if he had heard her, he said, softly, “As if they’re jumping off the edge of the world into the big ocean outside.” He shook his head sharply and exhaled. “And back. They’re still with us, mostly. They’re still initiated. The, uh, app is still open . . . mostly.”

  “Mostly.” For a moment Loria was consciously aware of the faint vibration that was always going on in her mental background; it was a promise of immortality without awareness of self, and she clung to it. “Okay. But Simon, whoever took them wants to stop the egregore. He might kill them. What then?”

  Harlowe seemed to sag, and for a moment it was very evident that he was in fact over sixty years old; his red hair and cowboy boots seemed all at once ludicrous, even pathetic. “Then,” he said hollowly, “we go to plan C.”