by Tim Powers
“I’ll have Beatrice delete the picture somehow.” Reed turned to Vickery and said, “Is this some fandom project? Have you been grubbing around in bad old gossip? I can’t imagine why you think I’d want to hear about it.” She reached one spotted, skeletal hand toward the bell on the beside table.
“This man,” said Vickery, “his name’s Harlowe, has got the sigil, the hieroglyph, from Chronic’s old coloring books, and people on the street are already speaking his thoughts, involuntarily. He’s going to launch it again tonight, unless we can stop it. We’re sorry to intrude on you here—but we need to know what made the egregore fail in ’68.”
“And we want to get a young woman out of it altogether,” added Castine, which irritated Vickery. We never promised Ragotskie that we’d get his Agnes free, he thought. And he is dead.
Reed’s hand faltered and fell.
“You do know what we’re talking about,” said Vickery.
“I,” the old woman admitted hesitantly, “heard about it. Back then. This Chronic fellow was supposedly dangerous. He knew some people I knew, and they were scared of him. They’re surely all dead by now.” It was impossible to read the expression in her perpetually narrowed eyes. “And I heard he had some project, and yes, it was called egregore, whatever that means. But I didn’t have anything to do with it.”
“You were there,” said Castine flatly, “in that house in Topanga Canyon, on that night. You were standing beside Chronic on the spiral staircase when he shot somebody.”
“We saw you,” said Vickery. “The past hasn’t always receded out of sight.”
For fully half a minute, during which Vickery heard the front door open and close, none of them spoke. Finally Reed bowed her head and ran her bony old fingers through her thinning, vividly blonde hair.
“All these years later,” Reed said, as if to herself, “here come da judge.” She squinted at her two clearly unwelcome visitors. “I’ve fled it, down the nights and down the days. For years I could still feel that faint, damned, maddening buzz in my head! Three years ago I managed to silence it, by nearly silencing myself.”
We read about that on the TMZ website, thought Vickery.
Reed sighed deeply. “Do you young folks remember Hollywood Squares? That TV game show was a bright, blessed haven for years, even though I had to climb a little . . . spiral staircase to get up to my square, every time!” She coughed and cleared her throat. “But I can’t help you. It was just a very bad time in L.A., spiritually. Something went wrong with Chronic’s new god, that terrible night—I really think some people disappeared, or appeared out of nowhere! Thin air! Sandstorm’s gang of motorcyclists rode up and there was a fight, with guns!—but Chronic was more scared of some fellow outside with a lantern, I remember. People were actually killed, though it never made the papers . . . I don’t know what went wrong, besides everything.”
She was silent, and Vickery wondered if this was all she would say. Finally Reed’s marionette mouth opened again.
“My husband knew it would fail,” she said in a soft, quavering voice. “He and I were supposed to be the egregore’s switchboard, because of . . . what we were. But Stanley did a lot of historical research on olden-days egregores,” she said, nodding toward the bookshelves, “and he found some problem. It was something scary, he wouldn’t tell me what it was because we were already grafted into the egregore, such as it was—but he tried to get Chronic to stop the project.”
She waved one frail hand. “It was too late. Stanley never really recovered from the disaster, and I couldn’t guide him back to sanity; he nearly took me down there with him.” She closed her eyes. “He spoke in complete sentences, that night, to . . . the wrong sort of person.”
“A ghost,” said Castine.
Reed just stared at her.
Vickery recalled that Reed’s husband, Stanley Ancona, had left her in 1968. “Would it be possible to talk to your husband?”
“Stanley,” whispered the old woman, “had to hide from the spirits, like a Pharaoh, after that. They wanted to take him, he said, take his place, and he didn’t want to be one of them, ever. Dot Palmer, you remember her? She was in Billy the Kid Versus Dracula, with John Carradine. Chronic told us he killed her that day.” Her voice strengthened. “Heart failure while hiking, the papers said! Yes indeed, nothing stops your heart like a bullet does!”
“On the porch of that house,” ventured Castine.
“That awful old house full of sand, yes, her blood was still on the steps when we arrived there that evening. And then Sandstorm’s bikers rode up, and it was just . . . bedlam, bloody murder!” She frowned and closed her eyes. “His name was Sandstrom, but we all called him Sandstorm, he was the leader of the motorcycle gang, the, uh . . . ”
“Gadarene Legion,” said Vickery.
“Yes!” Reed shivered and opened her eyes. “I remember! Yes, Chronic shot him, too, in the arm. He’d know what it was that went wrong that night—I think he was it.”
“Is Sandstorm still alive?” asked Castine.
“I doubt it. Who is, besides me?” Reed was staring at the wall now; or, thought Vickery, through it, to the past. “The Legion had a clubhouse,” Reed went on, sounding mildly surprised at the recollection, “in Topanga Canyon, below Camp Wildwood—Sandstorm kept the Egyptian sigil at the clubhouse, until Chronic stole it and reproduced it in his coloring books. Sandstorm said it kept all the members of the club together, in allegiance to the club, allegiance to the Legion! . . . even the ones who had died.”
“Do you know where the clubhouse was,” asked Castine, “exactly?”
“I certainly never went there!” Reed scowled at Castine for a few heartbeats, then shrugged. “Dot did, poor girl. She said the path to it was right across from a rock that looked like . . . somebody.”
Vickery heard the front door open, and footsteps approaching through the entry hall. Beatrice appeared in the bedroom doorway and said, “No paper yet.” She looked from Vickery to Castine and added, “I think it’s time you two left.”
Castine turned back to Reed. “Who did the rock look like?”
“I don’t remember, child. Beatrice, call the Times and complain. They’re always late. Do it right now, before you forget.”
Beatrice blinked. “I’ll call them on the landline. My phone’s in my room, charging.”
“Inefficiency everywhere.” Reed looked back at Vickery.
“You two don’t come back, I’ve told you everything I remember. It’s all I can do to help.” She laid back and closed her eyes.
Vickery glanced uncertainly at Castine, then shrugged. He nodded to Beatrice, and he and Castine walked out of the bedroom. They were halfway down the entry hall when they heard Reed’s frail voice behind them: “Wait!”
They hurried back up the hall and around the corner to the bedroom.
Beatrice was standing tight-lipped beside the bedroom door, and Gale Reed was sitting up in bed and pointing an unsteady finger at a bookshelf. “There was a book my husband thought was important. You can take it, it’s the one with black tape over the back of it. I’ve never opened it, and it seemed wrong to dispose of any of his things—but—giving it up to you, on this day—I believe it’s all that’s left that I can do, to pay him what I owe. Finally.”
Vickery nodded and reached up to the high shelf. The book was heavy, and a drift of dust came down with it when he pulled it free. He opened his mouth, but the old woman in the bed made a chopping motion to silence him.
“If it has a title,” she said, “Don’t read it to me. Now take yourselves, and it, at long last forever out of my sight.”
Vickery made a sort of bow, and he and Castine left the room again and walked down the hall to the front door.
When they had stepped outside into the chilly morning breeze and pulled the door closed, Castine said, “What’s the book?”
Vickery opened the dusty old volume, and the first leaf was the age-tanned title page. “Wow, published in 1837! It’s, u
h, The Epidemics of the Middle Ages. No. 1. The Black Death in the Fourteenth Century. No. 2. The Dancing Mania. And Stanley wrote his name in the top margin. I don’t know, we’ll have to look at it later.”
“Where to now?”
“There’s the address on Pico,” Vickery said as they walked down the driveway to the car. “That’s probably where Ragotskie’s Agnes killed him. I gave him the address last night in the freeway nest, and he was headed there, and the next time we saw him—well, we didn’t see him, we saw his ghost.”
He opened the trunk and slid the book into Fakhouri’s Trader Joe’s shopping bag. Castine was already in the car, and he got in on the driver’s side and started the engine.
Castine glanced at her watch. “It’s early yet.”
“Sure. Okay, let’s try for the rock that looks like somebody. We might find something, even after all this time.”
Harlowe had told the Singularity crew in the church nave to lock the front door, sit down in the pews, and not make a sound. He and Agnes Loria sat in two chairs in the sacristy, staring wordlessly at Harlowe’s iPhone, which sat on the counter by the sink. A fly was looping around in a slanting beam of morning sunlight, and Harlowe had to keep reassuring himself that its buzz was too faint to be picked up by the phone’s microphone. He had thought of putting a strip of tape over the microphone slot, but he wasn’t certain it would stop sound, and in any case he didn’t want to jiggle the phone at all.
He leaned to the side and breathed into Loria’s ear, “What’s the rock that looks like somebody?”
Loria, holding her own phone and watching the screen of the iPad in her lap, just shrugged. She pointed at the map on the iPad screen, which showed a green dot on Sunset Boulevard, not far from Beverly.
Harlowe hoped Beatrice Kittredge kept her phone fully charged. And he was glad that Taitz and Foster had been so very thorough in tracking down everybody who had been involved with the Chronic egregore fifty years ago, and in offering each of them ten thousand dollars if they could reliably report anybody showing new interest in it. Taitz said he hadn’t been able to talk to Gale Reed, but had given Harlowe’s number to Reed’s housekeeper companion . . . who had called the number only a few minutes ago.
Beatrice had carried her phone outside while “a man with a gray beard and a woman with reddish hair” talked to Gale Reed about things that had happened in 1968, and for the renewed promise of ten thousand dollars, she had given Harlowe the license number of the couple’s car; and then, for the emphatic promise of an additional ten thousand, she had reluctantly given Harlowe her Apple ID and password and agreed to hide her phone in their car without ending the call.
Harlowe had got the idea from Ragotskie. Loria had found a phone with a dead battery in a map pocket of her car, and guessed that Ragotskie had hidden it there on Monday night to listen to directions from the Waze app on her iPad.
Immediately after talking to Beatrice, Loria had gone to iCloud.com and entered the woman’s data, and now she and Harlowe could watch the green dot which was Beatrice’s phone moving west on the screen’s representation of Sunset Boulevard.
Harlowe was running short of action-qualified personnel. Two fingers of Taitz’s right hand had turned black, and Nunez’s torn ear, cleaned and smeared with Neosporin and bandaged back onto his head, had nevertheless got infected, and he was running a fever; and the car Nunez had been driving last night needed a new headlight, windshield and rear window, and Loria’s station wagon couldn’t be driven without abrading a tire against a fender. The car that had pursued the twins’ kidnapper was totalled.
Harlowe had sent Tony and Biloxi, the former ChakraSys sales manager, out in Biloxi’s prized Camaro, and Loria was texting them directions so that they could follow Vickery and Castine. Harlowe had not trusted either of them with the monitoring iPad.
As soon as Vickery and Castine stopped somewhere and looked likely to stay a while, like for lunch, Harlowe and Loria would drive there in the Tahoe, join Tony and Biloxi, and, one way or another, get Vickery and Castine into the Tahoe and restrained. In the meantime, Harlowe wanted to hear what they might say.
A woman’s voice, presumably Ingrid Castine’s, came out of the phone’s speaker: “You said there’s dried apricots in the trunk? We should have got ’em out.”
“You just had pork chops and eggs!” said a voice that must have been Vickery’s.
The phone relayed a creaking which was probably Castine shifting on her seat, and she said, “Peril seems to make me hungry.”
The phone was silent then. That exchange had been worthless. Harlowe glanced down at the iPad in Loria’s lap, and saw that the green dot had turned south on Beverly Drive.
A fluttering started up at the other end of the counter, on the far side of the sink; Harlowe’s first horrified thought as he leaped up from his chair was that one or both of Pratt’s disembodied hands had escaped the Secret Garden book—but it was the book itself making the noise. Its pages were fluttering wildly, as if in a high wind.
“You hear that?” came Vickery’s voice from the phone. When the woman murmured an apparent negative, he went on, “Something funny with the exhaust, maybe?”
Harlowe shut the book and pressed both hands onto it, holding it closed—against palpable resistance!
“I don’t hear it now,” said Vickery.
Harlowe could hear a faint, muffled voice coming from the book; he could feel the vibration of it in his sweating palms. With a wild glance at Loria, he picked up the book and shuffled to the nave door; but it was closed, and he didn’t have a free hand.
Holding the vibrating book shut in one tightly-gripping hand, he opened the door with the other. And as soon as he had stepped out onto the altar dais and closed the door behind him, the book squirmed out of his grasp and went flapping to the floor.
And, very faintly, he heard a little girl’s voice saying, “When the sky began to roar, ’twas like a lion at my door; when my door began to crack, ’twas like a stick across my back . . . ”
For a moment Harlowe just gaped down at the thing in horror. Had the infusion of Pratt’s ghost revitalized the little-girl wraith? Un-fossilized her?
He bent down and made himself pick up the book—a dozen members of the Singularity team, sitting in the church pews, were staring at him—and he hurried to the stairway door.
Down in his room, he locked the book in a trunk under his cot; and when he had hurried back upstairs and quietly opened the door to the sacristy behind the altar, Loria looked up at him and shook her head. The phone was emitting only a low roaring sound.
When he closed the door and crossed to where she was sitting, and leaned down, she whispered, “They’ve turned on the car’s heater, and I guess it’s aimed straight at wherever Gale Reed’s companion hid her phone.”
“Keep listening,” whispered Harlowe. “I’m going to go downstairs and . . . worry about that damned book. I’m—I’m not sure it was a good idea, after all, to put Pratt’s ghost into it.”
Vickery turned west on Santa Monica Boulevard, and after they crossed Wilshire the broad green lawns and sunlit white Romanesque church towers of Beverly Hills gave way to a less intimidating Starbuck’s and a Walgreen’s drugstore and a McDonald’s. After several miles Santa Monica Boulevard ended at Ocean Avenue, with nothing ahead but the wide green median and its bending palm trees, and the glittering blue band of ocean beyond. Vickery made a right turn and drove for half a mile with tall white geometrical hotels on his right and bicycle paths and palm trees on his left, and then he turned left onto the California Incline, the street that slants down across the face of the ocean-fronting bluff to beach level at Pacific Coast Highway. The sky was a bright clear blue, but there was a wind from the sea, and he left the heater on.
As he drove north on PCH, the beach and the ever-folding surf swept past steadily on his left, but after the first couple of miles the steep slope on his right was hidden behind a high, stout wooden fence, presumably holding back potentia
l landslides. After another mile, the fence gave way to four-foot-tall concrete Jersey barriers, which disappeared in turn after another quarter mile, leaving the weedy, rocky slope crowding right up to the highway shoulder.
The road curved to the west along the coast toward Malibu, and at Topanga Canyon Boulevard he turned right, inland, leaving the sea to dwindle away in the rear-view mirror as the road wound between wooded slopes.
“Watch for a rock that looks like somebody,” Vickery told Castine. “I’ve got to keep my eyes on the road.”
She peered around. “I don’t see any rocks, just bushes and trees—sycamore and oak, mostly. I guess we left all the palm trees behind at the beach.”
Vickery swung the steering wheel back and forth as the road curled up through the canyon and passed in and out of shadow. After a while he noticed a number of oddly shaped rock outcrops flanking the pavement, but Castine didn’t remark on any of them. When they had driven several more curving miles, he said, “I think we’re coming up on Wildwood. Still nothing?”
“I haven’t seen—” she began; then she pointed ahead and exclaimed, “There’s Freddie Mercury! See that rock?”
Vickery slowed and peered ahead. A rock in the cliff face to the left did look vaguely like a head.
“Freddie Mercury wasn’t around when Dot Palmer was alive,” he said.
“Well maybe she thought it looked like Valentino or somebody, but it’s the only face we’ve seen.”
A dirt track bent away between two steep slopes on the opposite side of the road.
On this side a weedy bank was just wide enough for Vickery to pull the car over, out of the way of other vehicles. He edged up onto it, slid the gearshift into park and looked across the road. The car was tilted, and Castine had to bend down over the steering wheel to look in the same direction.
“Worth a try?” Vickery asked.
“If it’s the right place, there might still be something up there. Gale Reed thought the Sandstrom biker guy was what went wrong with the egregore.”
