Forced Perspectives

by Tim Powers

  “You saw that board,” she said, “hanging on the wall? That carved figure on it must have been the image in the coloring books,” he said, “without the distracting lines around it. Harlowe's sigil.”

  Vickery suppressed a shiver and nodded. “I think what we've been seeing is Halloween, 1968.”

  “Yes.” Castine opened her door, but didn’t step out yet. “Yes, I think it must be. Everything old is new again. Did you recognize the woman on the stairs?” When Vickery shook his head, she said, “You weren’t looking closely enough at the monitor when we Goggled her yesterday. It was Gale Reed, star of Catch That Blonde! And yeah, she looked about the right age, for 1968.”

  Vickery swung his legs out and stood up on the pavement and stretched. When Castine had got out too, and shut her door, he dug out the keyring and pushed the fob-button to lock the doors.

  “I’m going to have a Denver omelette,” he said.

  Simon Harlowe rolled over on the floor of the sacristy, sweating and clutching his elbow. “Bastards!” he hissed. “They threw that damned old vision at us again!” He scuffed at the floor with his boots, but got no traction. “Right before it happened, I had a sense of two people in a car, holding hands. Did you get that?”

  “Uh . . . yes, I think I did.” Loria had only sat down, though probably fairly hard, when the old-house vision had exploded into their senses.

  “That was Vickery and Castine! They did it on purpose!”

  “Your nieces,” said Loria, wincing and getting to her feeet, “opened us up to it. We should see if Tony’s all right. He was on the boat with us when it happened yesterday.”

  “Fuck Tony.” Harlowe stood up, in stages, awkwardly. He saw that Loria was looking at him in surprise, and he guessed it was because he seldom used profanity. “Excuse me, but I may have broken my elbow.”

  “The guy on the stairs, in the vision,” said Loria, “who pointed a gun at . . . us? is the same guy we saw in the vision yesterday, who had shot that woman on the porch . . . of the same house? Who is he? I think you know.”

  Harlowe almost said Conrad Chronic, but he stopped himself. Speaking that old name out loud, or the name Sandstrom of the Gadarene Legion, seemed like profoundly bad luck on this day of all days.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said. He wiggled his fingers and made a fist and gingerly bent his arm, and decided that his elbow wasn’t actually broken. “He failed, fifty years ago, and we’re going to finish what he started.”

  Loria’s eyes were wide. “That was the guy, the hippie musician guru? Was that the night, that we just saw, in 1968? Who was that woman?”

  “I don’t know who she was. None of that matters.” Harlowe looked around at the walls and cabinets and ceiling of the sacristy. More than ever he felt isolated and small and enclosed. “If Castine and Vickery give it some thought, they’ll contact me. Ragotskie knew how to get to this place, so they probably do too. And I still sense Lexi and Amber’s thoughts.”

  “Steadily, like before they started to flicker in and out last night?”

  “No,” he admitted irritably. “It’s still irregular, like . . . a rock that gets covered and uncovered by waves. But one way or another we will have our IMP function.”

  “By midnight tonight?” Loria raised one eyebrow and shook her head. “You better warm up Plan C.”

  “Plan C.” Harlowe suppressed a shudder. “Yes. Excuse me, I—I think I’ll lie down for a bit.”

  He hurried out of the sacristy without looking back at her, and crossed the altar dais to the stairs. Down in his room with the door shut, he stretched out on his cot and tried to read The Secret Garden, but the book jiggled in his hands—perhaps because he was trembling, perhaps not—and a memory from 1983 kept intruding.

  He had been twenty-six, living in a trailer a mile or so south of the Salinas city limits, and one midnight a vagrant had broken the lock on the door and come blundering in; Harlowe, in a panic, had killed the man with a knife, and the district attorney had ruled it a justifiable homicide . . . but the dreadful intimacy of that encounter with the man had profoundly shaken him. For weeks afterward he had been unable to sleep for more than a couple of hours at a time, and even then he was plagued by visions of the man’s close, wide-eyed, hotly-panting face. Finally one night he had opened his old copy of Burroughs and Ginsberg’s The Yage Letters and retrieved from between the pages a square-inch piece of paper with an R. Crumb drawing of Janis Joplin on it; it was blotter LSD, and he swallowed half of it. Later he estimated that he had taken roughly a 100-microgram dose.

  It was the first and only time he had taken LSD. After lying on his narrow bunk for an hour, he had been able to see individual photons spraying from the electric light, and when he had moved his hand in front of his face, it had been outlined with a rainbow aura, and left a glowing streak in the air behind it that was slow to fade; and then the elaborate accumulated structure that was Simon Harlowe’s identity had simply fallen apart, evaporated, and all that existed anywhere was a barren plain without any entity at all to perceive it.

  After subjective eons he had become aware of his body, and the trailer, and he had slept; and in the days that followed he had resumed his place in the cycle of eating and sleeping and working odd jobs. He was very nearly entirely the Simon Harlowe he had been before—but the part of his soul that was capable of intimacy was gone; and he knew that his identity was a provisional, cobbled-together artifice, adrift and alone in an infinite vacuum.

  Now he could hear people walking around on the church floor overhead. He tried to imagine that someone might have brought news about Vickery and Castine, and he found that he couldn’t imagine it. Mentally he strained to perceive the faint twittering of the twins’ thoughts, but it was once again absent. In the big ocean outside.

  Plan C.

  Harlowe sat up and put The Secret Garden aside, then stood and crossed to the box that held his few personal belongings. Crouching, he lifted out his copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and then found The Yage Letters.

  He carried the little book back to the bed, and flipped to the page where the top half of the blotter-acid tab sat like a bookmark. All that was left of the Janis Joplin image was her wavy hair and her closed eyes, with exaggerated tears on her cheeks.

  If his people failed to find Vickery and Castine—and if Lexi and Amber’s initiated presence continued to be sporadic and unreliable—then a dissolved mind, a living human brain with all identity washed out of it, might serve the IMP function. It could be an unconfined relay center, shunting impulses with no self boundaries to get in the way.

  And this time his identity wouldn’t come back. If Plan C worked, his personal ego death would be subsumed in the ego deaths of all the members of the egregore.

  He sat staring at Janis Joplin’s closed, weeping eyes, while the copy of The Secret Garden jiggled all by itself on the floor beside his cot.

  He prayed to the void that did not yet contain a God: Let this tab pass away . . .

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN:

  In Some Times

  Their food had arrived on the table by the time Castine came clumping down the stairs from the restrooms. She slid grumpily into the booth, across from Vickery. It was the same booth she had briefly occupied on Monday.

  “It would be nice not to have to go to the bathroom,” she said as she picked up her fork and regarded her pork chops and fried eggs. “Along with all the other maintenance chores—bathing, brushing your teeth—” She poked an egg yolk. “Even eating. You do all this stuff one day, and the next day it’s like you never did it, and you’ve got to do it all again.”

  “‘The routines of our proud and angry dust,’” said Vickery, rephrasing a line from A.E. Housman as he shook Tabasco onto his omelette, “‘are from eternity, and shall not fail.’”

  “They may be from eternity, but they’re not to eternity. Eventually we just die. I’m half tempted to dig out that damned coloring book a
nd look hard at the picture.”

  Vickery forced a laugh. “Sure, that’s a good idea. Like poor old Ragotskie said, soon enough you’d be one of the egregore’s discarded cells, wandering around crazy and starving.” He took a forkful of his omelette, chewed it, and washed it down with a gulp of beer.

  “Maybe. But by then I’d be in the Long Island Iced Tea that’s God. That starving body shambling around would no more be me than my ghost would.” She looked away from him,around the dining room. “Have we done such great things with our particular lives?”

  Vickery decided to let that one go. “So God doesn’t exist, yet?” he said. “How’d we all get here? You should go to Mass more often.”

  “God can time-travel,” she said, at last taking a bite of her egg and beginning to cut her pork chop. “He goes back in time and kicks off the Big Bang, to make all this, and us.”

  Vickery nodded. “You do know—right?—that everything you’re saying is total crap.”

  She forked a piece of pork chop into her mouth and rocked her head thoughtfully as she chewed. She swallowed and took a sip of coffee. “Yes. But wouldn’t it be nice to leave all the guilty memories behind? The old gray shore? I killed a fellow TUA agent last year . . . and got my fiancee killed by getting him involved in all that.” She raised her fork like a crossing-guard’s stop sign. “Yes, he turned out to be a shallow coward, but I did get him killed.”

  And I killed a man too, last year, Vickery thought. It was to save Ingrid, but he was a living person with memories and tastes and maybe a wife or girlfriend, and I did kill him. And on Monday I killed this Platt kid.

  “Our guilts are what make us us,” he said.

  “Well exactly. Creepy old usses.”

  “We sound like Ragotskie and his Agnes.” He thought of telling her that he didn’t want her to disappear, but realized that that would be, at best, irrelevant.

  Castine laughed. “You’re right. And this pork chop is good, I’m glad to be able to eat it. And really, you and I aren’t that creepy, considering.”

  “Comparatively,” agreed Vickery, hiding his relief and assuring himself that she’d just been irritable and contrary.

  “So Gale Reed,” he said, happy to change the subject, “was there for the first attempt at the egregore.”

  “If that’s what we saw. Okay, yeah, the sigil did seem to be on the wall there.”

  “So she’s probably actually an eyewitness to how it failed then. And if that was her house the paramedics were taking her out of, three years ago, we might be able to talk to her.”

  Castine was making short work of her breakfast. “What’s our cover story?” she asked around a mouthful.

  “We’re reporters doing a story on romantic comedies of the 1950s. Do we know enough about that genre, or about being reporters, to fake it? Maybe not. Okay, we’re grandchildren of Leo Marlin—he was the writer and director of What’s the Hex?—and we’ve been trying to find out about him. He was killed during a burglary of his home in ’68, you recall. Or we’re screenwriters hoping she’ll agree to do a cameo in a script we’re writing—we imagine that having a famous actress like her agreeing to be in it will make our screenplay more attractive to an agent.”

  “We sound pathetic.”

  “Pathetic’s okay. Or we’re movie memorabilia collectors, and we’ve found a cache of old publicity stills and lobby cards from Catch That Blonde! and we’re hoping she’ll autograph some, or buy some.”

  “What if she wants to see them?”

  “Well, we didn’t presume to bring them—we wanted to see if she was amenable—”

  Castine slid the last piece of pork chop around in the remains of the egg yolk. “I think the Leo Marlin angle would be a more natural way to bring the conversation around to Halloween of ’68. We could say our mom told us Reed was there.”

  “We can figure it out on the drive. You about ready?”

  “We should both get some clothes out of the car and change, first! And wash off, as much as one can with wet paper towels.” She shook her head glumly. “More coffee before anything. This is my first taste of it since I got two sips at your girl Galvan’s lot yesterday.”

  Vickery turned left off Sunset onto Lomitas Avenue, and then he was driving Fakhouri’s rented Nissan through the turns he remembered from looking at Google Maps in the library yesterday evening. The houses that weren’t hidden behind ivied walls were mostly two-story Moorish or Spanish or Colonial styles, with long, perfectly cropped green lawns and lots of arches and balconies.

  Castine’s lips were pursed. “I wish we didn’t look like such bums.” In the Canter’s lady’s room she had changed into khaki pants and a tan blouse, and had brushed most of the pine needles off the suede coat; Vickery was now wearing a new pair of blue jeans, a flannel shirt, and a black denim jacket.

  “We’ve looked worse,” he said. “She’s seen worse. That’s it on the left there.”

  Past a long, shoulder-high hedge, the two-story house they’d seen on Google Maps swung into view. Its steeply slanted gable roof, spiral brick chimneys, and half-timbered front with exposed wood framing around sections of white stucco, gave it a fairy-tale look, and Castine remarked, “She really ought to have a whole bunch of garden gnomes out front.”

  “We can pretend we’re selling those.”

  Vickery turned in to the long, curved driveway and switched off the engine. Birds chattered in the overhanging jacaranda trees, and when he opened the door the breeze smelled of jasmine.

  Vickery and Castine walked up to the iron-banded front door, and Vickery pressed a button in a brass plate on the door frame. He looked at Castine and held up crossed fingers, but lowered his hand when footsteps could be heard approaching inside.

  A bolt clanked, and the door was pulled open by an elderly woman in a blue linen skirt and jacket, with a small gold cross on a gold chain hanging at the front of her white blouse. She didn’t seem to be Gale Reed.

  “Ms. Reed?” said Vickery.

  The woman smiled in evident bafflement. “I’m sorry, I think you must have the wrong address.”

  “We’re trying to reach Gale Reed,” said Castine.

  Vickery was taller than the old woman, and at the far end of the long, tiled entry hall behind her he saw a white-sleeved elbow briefly emerge from behind a corner, and withdraw.

  “The actress?” said the woman. “I remember her—she was on that show with everybody stacked in boxes, with Paul Lynde. He was gay, you know.”

  “She knew our grandfather,” said Castine, “Leo Marlin. He directed a movie she was in, in 1966. We’ve been looking up people who knew him, and we were talking yesterday to a guy named Chronic, and he gave us this address—”

  A metallic clatter sounded from further back in the house, and the woman looked over her shoulder in alarm. “Oh, she’s fallen! Help me.”

  Vickery and Castine stepped into the house and hurried after the woman. The ivory-white entry hall was bare gray tile except for a couple of ornate console tables with mirrors above them, and a passage at the end of it opened to the left into a broad sunlit kitchen. And on the tile floor lay a capsized aluminum walker and, partially under it, a frail-looking old woman in a bathrobe. Her disordered, thinning hair was an unrealistic shade of gold. She was moving her legs and fumbling weakly with the poles of the walker.

  Vickery crouched beside her and slid his hands under her arms and knees and lifted her—she could hardly have weighed more than a hundred pounds—while Castine picked up the walker.

  “Carry her in here and lay her on the bed,” said the woman who had opened the door. “And thank you.”

  Vickery followed the woman away from the kitchen, down a corridor to the open door of a bedroom. The walls were all hung with bright tapestries between inset bookshelves, and Vickery carried the old woman to a baroque four-poster bed and laid her on the bedspread. The entry hall had smelled of floor polish, but the bedroom only carried a eucalyptus whiff of Ben-Gay.

 
; “Are you hurt, dear?” asked the woman who had followed him in. Castine had left the walker standing in the kitchen and was now peering over the woman’s shoulder.

  “Nothing broken,” croaked the old woman on the bed. For several seconds she just inhaled and exhaled and rolled her head back and forth on the pillow. Finally she said, “You can go, Beatrice,” and waved at a small silver bell on the beside table. “I’ll ring if I—need help.”

  “I think I should stay,” said Beatrice.

  “It’s all right. These people—you heard, I knew their grandfather.”

  Beatrice spread her hands, then nodded. To Vickery she said, “I’ll be in the kitchen. Come get me if she needs attention, any attention, do you understand?”

  “Yes,” Vickery told her.

  Castine stepped past Beatrice into the bedroom. “We understand.”

  Beatrice walked away, and when her footsteps were echoing in the kitchen, Gale Reed stared at Castine. The old woman’s eyes were uptilted slits in a face that seemed partially collapsed, but she fairly radiated alarm.

  “Chronic,” she said huskily, “isn’t dead? Are you sure it was him?”

  “You misunderstood,” said Castine gently. “we were talking to someone about this Chronic person. Who probably is dead, yes.” She glanced questioningly at Vickery, then went on, “But somebody is now trying to fire up Chronic’s egregore again.”

  For several seconds Gale Reed just blinked at her like a wary old cat. “I heard you clearly,” she said finally. “Leo Marlin wasn’t your grandfather, was he?”

  “No, ma’am,” said Vickery. “We want to talk to you about—”

  “He was a male chauvinist pig,” Reed said, still talking to Castine. “You’re lucky he wasn’t your grandfather. How did you get this address? It’s not in my name. Nothing is anymore.”

  Castine looked helplessly at Vickery, who just shrugged. “A picture of this house,” Castine said, “in Google Images. And then a search for it in Google Maps.”