by Tim Powers
But Harlowe hiked himself up on the couch and reached behind him, and when he sat back down he was holding a semi-automatic pistol aimed halfway between Vickery and Castine. The muzzle look like nine-millimeters.
“I wouldn’t kill you,” Harlowe said, “but IMPs don’t need kneecaps.”
Vickery let himself relax, and Castine nodded. “They’ve got wings, as I recall,” she said.
Agnes looked up and smiled. “That’s angels. Imps are little devils.”
“That’s us,” said Castine.
Vickery realized with a hollow feeling in his chest that a moment for breaking free had passed. He wondered how the initiation was to be administered. Ragotskie had said it consisted of staring at the image in the hieroglyph, the hawk with a man’s bearded head—probably Harlowe had some plan for forcing him and Castine to stare at it. Vickery could think of several effective methods himself.
The boat leaned to port, as he’d expected. Through the window behind Harlowe, Vickery saw the squat Los Angeles Harbor Lighthouse slowly move past, and he knew they were clearing the breakwater and leaving the harbor for the open sea.
After another ten minutes the engines throttled down and shifted to neutral, and the steady rise and fall of the bow quickly became a random side-to-side rocking. Biloxi crouched, bracing himself against the aft bulkhead with one hand and holding the stun-gun with the other.
Agnes leaned forward and laid a sheet of paper on the card table. Vickery hardly needed to glance at it to recognize it as the hieroglyph image.
Agnes drew a small .22 revolver from the pocket of her bulky nylon jacket, and Biloxi edged closer to Vickery; the stun-gun electrodes were inches from his right cheek now.
Harlowe pointed his gun at Vickery. “Miss Castine,” he said, “until I tell you to stop, you will look closely at the figure on that piece of paper—and then live forever as a part of the ultimate transcendent serenity. You’ll do it right now, or I’ll shoot Vickery’s left kneecap off, in which case you’ll do it after that, because Vickery has another kneecap . . . and hands, arms, et cetera. If he thrashes around, Biloxi will subdue him electrically and we’ll carry on until you have done it.”
Castine had been staring into Harlowe’s eyes as he spoke, and now glanced down at the paper for a moment before turning her head to look at Vickery.
Her expression was apologetic. She spread her constricted hands for a moment if to say, What else can I do? but Vickery believed he saw relief in her eyes too, and he remembered what she had said at Canter’s this morning: I’m half tempted to dig out that damned coloring book and look hard at the picture.
Creepy old usses.
Vickery glanced at Harlowe, who was now looking directly at him. The gun was pointed down, and Harlowe’s finger was inside the trigger guard.
And Castine was already gazing intently down at the image.
For more than a minute, none of them moved except to lean slightly forward and back with the rocking of the boat.
At last Harlowe said, “Stop.”
Castine shivered, and the fingers of her close-bound hands spread again, slowly, like an opening flower. She looked up, toward Harlowe, and nodded.
“Now, Mr. Vickery,” Harlowe said, shifting the barrel of his gun toward Castine, “you’ll look directly at it for a while, or I’ll shoot Miss Castine in the knee. I’m not sure what a 9-millimeter round would do to a knee, but in any case it’s not necessary that our IMPs each have two working legs.”
Vickery looked into Harlowe’s eyes for another few seconds. Then, seeing no way out, he let his gaze fall to the image on the piece of paper. The fingers of his joined hands were tightly interlaced, as if in prayer; and in fact he was mentally beginning to recite the Our Father. Thy kingdom come . . .
After half a minute, the lines of the hawk body seemed to shimmer, and it threw Vickery’s prayer out of focus. It’s a bird, he thought then, showing me a direction . . . like the robin in The Secret Garden, which showed Mary the key to the walled garden.
The garden to which this hawk offered him the key was to be a secret too, in that nobody outside would know about it—because there would be nobody outside it.
Then his thoughts just drained away like a turbulent ocean quickly receding far back from a shore, exposing sunken ruins that the surf had generally hidden—and he couldn’t avoid awareness of Mary, the wraith of the daughter he should have had, and Pratt, the boy he had killed two days ago . . . and a man he had killed in a Los Angeles street last year, and two men in a desert arroyo north of Los Angeles five years ago . . . and his wife, Amanda, who had killed herself a year before that . . . and there was an implicit promise that the unnaturally withdrawing tide was just prelude to a returning tsunami that would cover all of these jagged black memories, obliterate them, and even himself, in its irresistible force.
And for a moment he felt that his hands were free—in fact he felt as though he had a thousand hands,holding forks, sliding through sleeves, typing on keyboards, touching other hands; and a thousand feet, walking on mountain paths, climbing stairs, pressing gas pedals—and in his vision was a kaleidoscopic confusion of unsynchronized glare and color and darkness and motion—
It all promised release from the myopic focus on individual identity and responsibility; the uncramping of needlessly constricted vision and experience, and he could feel the boundaries of his self beginning to relax—
“Stop,” said Harlowe.
Vickery blinked and exhaled—perhaps he had been holding his breath. His arms were still bound and he was still looking at the image, and he was aware now of a faint agitation deep in his mind, like a weak electrical current. At last he looked away from the seductive image, into Harlowe’s eyes, and saw cautious welcome there.
“Now I think you understand,” Harlowe said.
“Yes,” said Castine, and Vickery said, “Understand, yes.”
The tension in the lounge had loosened like an unstrung bow. Agnes had at some point pocketed her little gun, and when Harlowe nodded to Biloxi he tucked the stun-gun into his pocket.
“You can get those stowed below now,” Harlowe told Biloxi, and the young man picked up both of the fire extinguishers and clumped down the stairs with it.
Harlowe stood up and crossed to the cockpit door, and Vickery and Castine got slowly to their feet, holding their bound wrists in front of them as they swayed with the motion of the idling boat. Castine staggered, and when Vickery caught her shoulder with both hands he felt an increase in the buzzing in the depths of his mind.
Agnes was standing behind Castine. “You felt that, didn’t you?” she said. “That’ll happen whenever your aura overlaps another initiated soul’s.”
“Until tonight,” said Harlowe, sliding the door open and stepping out. Cold, salt-smelling air beat its way into the lounge, tossing the paper from the table. “After tonight we’ll all be one soul. One world-soul, soon.”
“Could I,” said Vickery, “see the book? My daughter?” He suspected that it was in the knapsack Harlowe had laid on the carpet.
And Harlowe glanced back into the lounge before replying. “You want to enter eternal life facing backward?” he asked.
“Just a look.” Vickery smiled and quoted a line from Milton’s Comus: “With backward mutters of dissevering power.”
“Our ceremony tonight will provide infinite dissevering power, don’t worry. Come out and view your future kingdom.” Biloxi had reappeared, sweating, and Harlowe looked at him and shook his head with a smile, briefly raising his own two hands pressed together at the wrists. Clearly he was reassuring Biloxi that the new initiates would not jump overboard with their arms bound.
He stepped through the doorway, and Vickery and Castine sidled carefully out onto the wet white deck after him, followed by Agnes and Biloxi. Beyond the gunwales the blue sea stretched away to the Long Beach skyline on the horizon.
Harlowe’s artificial-looking red hair was tossing about his head as he waved out at the coastlin
e. “Every person in every one of those buildings,” he said, speaking louder over the wind, “will eventually join us, be facets of the infinite jewel that will be God. Guiltless, because God is the definition of innocence, and joined only to everything.”
He turned to Vickery and asked, “Where are my nieces?”
Vickery had smoked marijuana in his youth, and the faint buzz at the core of his mind reminded him of that. He remembered sometimes fearing that the effect would never wear off; it always had, and he told himself that this would too.
“I,” he began, and though it was an effort not to say, Probably still at the Egyptian Consulate on Wilshire, he finished, “don’t know.”
“Huh. I’ll ask you again soon.” Harlowe turned and looked up. Vickery followed his gaze and saw Tony leaning on the rail of the fly bridge.
“Get us back in, Tony,” Harlowe called. “We’re whole.”
Tony nodded and stepped back out of sight. As the engines gunned and the boat surged forward in a long turn, Vickery took the opportunity to exaggeratedly sway and catch his balance.
“A bit dizzy,” he said, “maybe Ingrid and I should—”
“Yes, go back inside,” said Harlowe. “Agnes, maybe get them some coffee.”
“That’d be good,” said Castine, incidentally or deliberately looking unsteady herself.
Vickery stood aside to let her shamble into the lounge first, and when she stepped inside he appeared to lose his balance and tip forward against her.
“When we’re in the harbor,” he whispered into her hair, “I’ll wink. Follow my lead.”
She shook her head sharply and stumbled toward the padded bench and sat down. Agnes and Biloxi had followed them in, leaving the sliding door open. Harlowe stayed out on the deck, looking over the transom at their curving wake and the unbroken western horizon.
To Agnes, Castine said, “Does this ringing in the ears stop? I can’t think.”
“After midnight you won’t notice it at all,” Agnes assured her.
“Coffee helps,” said Biloxi.
Agnes nodded and gave Vickery and Castine an enquiring look.
“Black is fine,” said Vickery.
“Sugar,” said Castine, “but no cream.”
Agnes crossed to the stairs and thumped down to the galley. Vickery heard clinking and water running in a metal sink. After a few minutes she came back up, carrying a ridged cardboard tray with four plastic cups fitted into it.
She swayed gracefully to the table and set down two cups. “We’re out of cream,” she told Castine, “so I made it with no milk.” She set the tray on her side of the table and sat down on the couch, chuckling to herself.
Vickery picked up a cup, necessarily with both hands, and blew across the top of it. “When do we lose the duct-tape?” he asked, hoping it wouldn’t be before they docked—he wanted to take their captors by surprise when he, and ideally only a moment later, Castine, broke free of the wrist-restraints.
“Elisha Ragotskie,” said Agnes abruptly, “is dead.”
“We know,” said Castine. She picked up the other cup and took a tentative sip. “You’ve got mine,” she said to Vickery. After they had set the cups down and awkwardly switched them and picked them up again, she added, “We talked to his ghost last night.”
“You did?” said Agnes. “You did not. What did he say?”
Vickery hoped to note how she displayed anger. “He said you killed him.”
Biloxi opened his mouth and blinked in surprise, but Agnes just sat back. “It’s true, I did. It was an accident. And now he can’t be part of the egregore, even though,” and she waved toward the sheet of paper that was now on the floor beside Harlowe’s knapsack, “he was initiated.”
Vickery took the opportunity to note the exact position of the knapsack. Looking up, he told Agnes, “He still wanted us to get you away from all this.”
“He loved you,” added Castine.
“Tonight I won’t care,” said Agnes. “I don’t care now. Shut up. Where did you see him, his ghost, I mean? What else did he say?”
“He said he killed somebody named Foster,” said Vickery.
“And he said you were at a church,” Castine added; possibly she too was trying to get some kind of rise out of Agnes, for she went on, “I think that’s good, that you went to church.”
“I didn’t go to church,” said Agnes, finally with some heat, “I was at a building that used to be a church. And it wasn’t Catholic. I know you’re Catholic, we know all about you.” She turned her head to glare at Vickery. “You probably are too. I bet you both go to Confession all the time. Hah!”
Castine raised an eyebrow and smiled at her. “You were raised Catholic, weren’t you?”
Agnes smiled back at her. “Where did you go, driving up Topanga Canyon? You started up, then came back down.”
Castine shrugged, letting her own question go. “We were heading for the Mimosa Café,” she said, “but the car was overheating.”
Vickery had been worrying about Castine’s possible susceptibility to the initiation, and was relieved to hear her answer deceptively.
“They’ve got good vegan muffins there,” put in Biloxi. “And a koi pond.”
Agnes gave him a look of utter contempt. Turning to Castine, she said, “He felt you up when you were unconscious.”
“I never—!” sputtered Biloxi. “I—”
“After midnight, who cares?” said Castine. “Right?”
“Who cares about anything,” said Agnes quietly, “even now.”
None of them spoke after that. Vickery was unobtrusively flexing the muscles in his arms and legs and breathing deeply, to get his circulatory system to metabolize whatever morphine might still be in his bloodstream.
After a few minutes the fore-and-aft rocking of the boat became smoother, and he craned his neck to see out the window at his back—and he saw the harbor lighthouse at the end of the southern arm of the breakwater. They were in the harbor,and the marina was only minutes away. He sat back and waited, breathing slowly and letting his muscles relax.
When he heard the engines slow and saw the masts of boats outside, he turned and winked at Castine. She gave him a blank look, but that could have been for Agnes’ benefit.
He stood up, and raised his arms to rub his hands across his face. “Where’s,” he said breathlessly, “the bathroom? I”—he paused to jerk his head forward, lifting his chin—“I think I’m gonna be sick—”
Agnes was on her feet too, and she waved toward the cockpit deck. “Outside,” she said, “do it over the side. Not in here!”
To Castine, Vickery whispered, “Watch.” Then he raised his hands higher, over his head, and jerked them down, hard, so that his elbows grazed his ribs—and the overlapped bands of duct-tape broke.
His right arm rebounded out and drove his fist, middle knuckle protruding, into Biloxi’s solar plexus, and as the man jackknifed forward Vickery spun toward Agnes.
Her hand was already in the pocket of her jacket, but he slammed his left fist into the side of her head and yanked her hand free; her revolver went tumbling across the carpet, and he caught it in one hand and crouched to snatch up Harlowe’s knapsack with the other.
Castine had stood up, but her wrists were still bound.
“Break the tape like I did!” Vickery said urgently. Agnes was lying across the couch, shaking her head, and Vickery spun and was out the door—
But Harlowe had evidently heard the scuffle, and his gun was extended, pointing at Vickery’s legs; and even as Vickery raised Agnes’ gun and pulled the trigger twice, with no sound or recoil, Harlowe was firing wildly, the loud pops nearly overlapping one another as ejected shells flew out of his gun in quick succession.
Bits of fiberglass were spinning in the air and Vickery felt a hot lash across his left thigh and a kick against his right heel, and he swerved and converted his rush toward Harlowe into a long flat dive over the transom. In mid-air he felt a thrum in the knapsack strap as a b
ullet hit it.
He plunged into the sea, and though the water’s temperature was no colder than sixty degrees Fahrenheit, his mind went blank for a moment, and something seemed to shift in his head.
Then his thoughts rushed back in like air filling an opened vacuum, and he saw that he was only a few feet below the surface of the water; he quickly swam deeper, then looked up at the long dark hull of the boat, its spreading wake chopping up the brightly rippling patch of westering sunlight. He had let go of Agnes’ gun in the moment of mental absence, but a strap of Harlowe’s bubbling knapsack was still looped over his elbow, and he took a firm grip on it and pulled it down against its diminishing buoyancy. In the moment of diving over the transom, he had glimpsed rows of moored boats alongside a long dock, and when he looked ahead through the sunlit water he could make out at least one hull.
He paused to bend double and pull off his shoes, wincing as the fabric of his jeans was pulled across the gunshot groove in his thigh, and then began swimming toward the dock, using the undulating dolphin stroke to conserve oxygen. The knapsack was now just an inert drag, no longer bobbing upward.
Harlowe would probably not shoot to kill, but Vickery didn’t want him to know where he was, or even if he were still alive. He resisted the urge to surface and take a fresh breath.
And his lungs were tugging at his rigidly closed throat when he twisted to pull himself under a gritty black keel and then at last let himself bob to the surface in the shadow of a spreading bow, between hanging fenders that looked like black punching bags. He exhaled at last, and sucked in fresh air. At his back was a floating concrete dock, a narrow extension from one of the long main docks, its surface a foot over his head. His fast deep breaths echoed between the vertical face of the dock and the curved hull.
He hooked a couple of fingers into one of the boat’s drains and hiked his leg up; through the new rip in his jeans he could see the long cut in his thigh. It wasn’t deep, nor bleeding excessively.
