by Tim Powers
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN:
A Revival of His Show
As Anita Galvan accelerated onto the 110 north, Vickery was hiked around in the passenger seat to keep an eye on the traffic behind them—and they had been moving along in the fast lane for a couple of miles, sometimes speeding up but more often slowing as brake lights flashed ahead of them, when the freeway began to slope upward to bridge Highway 1. Squinting past Santiago through the back window, Vickery was able to see a dozen of the following vehicles. One of the furthest back was a gray SUV.
“I think Harlowe may be following us,” he said, relaxing back into his seat. “Pretty far back.”
Santiago didn’t turn around, but his eyes narrowed and he squeezed the medallion in his fist.
“We weren’t followed out of the marina,” said Galvan, not even glancing in the rear view mirror. “If it’s him, he probably put a GPS tracker on you. Search your clothes, your . . . well you don’t have shoes.” She exhaled through her nose, and Vickery knew she was restraining herself from remarking again about the waterfront smell of his clothes.
Vickery twisted around to look back again, but the lane had leveled out and he could no longer see the boxy gray vehicle back there.
He remembered struggling back to consciousness in Harlowe’s SUV; and he touched the cut on his forearm where Agnes had stuck a knife point into him. She had cut Castine too. Don’t mix them up, Harlowe had said right after that. If one of our IMPs should get away in the next few hours, per impossibile, we want to be sure we’re using the right tracker.
“I’m carrying a tracker all right,” he said hopelessly. “It’s my bloodstream.” Galvan gave him a quick, irritable look, and he went on, “They cut us both, and got our blood on a couple of handkerchiefs. Our blood, our whole bodies, Castine’s and mine, are like FM radios, and everybody else is AM. Every bit of us resonates—”
“What the fuck are you—”
“A cloth with my blood on it will be drawn to me,” Vickery interrupted loudly, “like a compass needle.”
“Mr. Laquedem had that kind of blood too,” put in Santiago.
Galvan rocked her head, considering it. “He wants you alive, you said.” Her voice was thoughtful. “How bad does it mess him up if you’re dead?”
Vickery choked out one syllable of a startled laugh. “The egregore would still happen, boss,” he said. “I’m not indispensible—to him. I believe I am, to you.”
“Sure, sorry, just looking at all my options. Okay. But I’ll drive, understand? You always leave my vehicles in Hell. Now tell me exactly what it is you’re going to do on Topanga Canyon Boulevard.”
Vickery understood that she was proposing to drive to her yard on Eighth Street and switch to one of her supernatural-stealth cars—which, modified as they were with aura-damping and attention-deflecting measures, probably would block the otherwise betraying resonance of his blood.
Vickery was turned around in his seat again, trying without success to get a glimpse of the gray SUV. “I’m going to retrieve something I left there this afternoon,” he said, “right before Harlowe shot us with trank darts. It’ll let me find Castine.”
“Anything else?” demanded Galvan. “Anything that helps us kill Harlowe’s thing?”
“We need Castine’s help.”
“No, we don’t,” said Galvan in a reasonable, almost kindly tone. “You look for her after we stop the Eleanor thing from happening at midnight. My car, my rules—and you got no gun, or shoes, even. You’re working for me again.” She gave him a sidelong look. “So what are we doing instead? We’ve got to get you into my stealth car so they can’t trace you, and we’ve got less than seven hours till midnight.”
Vickery paused long enough before answering to make it seem that he was considering alternatives and then giving in. “Okay,” he said gruffly, “but after midnight you help, right? I save Carlos and the kids, you help me save Ingrid.”
“That works,” said Galvan. “You have to win, at this, to get her back.” She flexed her fingers on the steering wheel. “Now we gotta get to my yard before Harlowe catches up with us.”
To Vickery’s surprise, she didn’t begin passing other cars, much less driving along the narrow shoulder, as he had half expected; she even shifted to a slower lane, and Vickery could again see the gray SUV half a dozen cars behind them.
At one point when Vickery was looking back, Santiago caught his eye. “Maybe,” said the boy, “she figures he’ll run out of gas.”
But Galvan moved into the fast lane, and when she had driven north as far as the Carson district and was about to pass the exit lane that connected to the westbound 405 freeway, she yanked the wheel to the right, forcing a tour bus to slam on its brakes and begin to slide sideways; she crossed its lane and the next one, to a cacophony of honking horns, and sped along the diverging connector lane. The lane curved under the 405 and then straightened out as it joined that freeway, and they were heading due west. Traffic was lighter here on the 405, and she was able to get into the fast lane and maintain a steady sixty miles per hour.
Vickery realized that he had been holding his breath, and he exhaled now. “Pretty good,” he said, “but they’ll still follow us. Me.”
“Not by that connector,” said Galvan, “no way they followed us off. They’ll probably get off up at Artesia to go west, but we’re gonna exit up here at 182nd and scoot back east, and then maybe crank up Western to the 105 and get back on the 110.” She laughed. “As soon as they start chasing us one way, we’ll already have gone another.”
And for the next half hour she crisscrossed through Downey and Compton and Vernon, from freeways to surface streets and onto freeways again, past used car lots and run-down vaguely-Christian churches and around landscaped freeway islands, with the westering sun glaring through the windshield one minute and out of the mirrors the next—and at last she steered the Buick up the driveway into her yard.
She drove quickly past the rows of cars and the Airstream trailer and braked to a stop in front of the long maintenance bay, and she was out of the car while it was still rocking.
“Tom!” she yelled, “keys in the Caddy? Get the cover off, quick.”
The bald, heavy-set yard manager sprang nimbly to a covered vehicle parked beside the tan Honda that Vickery and Castine had been in yesterday; and when he had pulled the cover off of it, Vickery was able, after a few seconds, to recognize it as a new Cadillac sedan with a big front end and an air-intake vent on the hood . . . but the car body was entirely covered with gaudy vinyl decals of photo-realistic clown faces in vivid color, which made the car seem bulbous and misshapen. Vickery knew that this would be Galvan’s main stealth car, with run-flat support rings inside the tires, which in turn would be filled with air brought in from Nevada, and an air-filter peppered with dust from Oregon, and, under the interior upholstery, wire netting connected to the battery and insulated with woven human hair. And lately Galvan generally had pig blood in vinegar added to the coolant of her stealth cars.
Vickery and Santiago got out of the Buick, and Vickery said quietly to the boy, “You want a ride?”
Santiago nodded, and Vickery said, “Be quick.” By then Galvan was in the Cadillac and gunning the engine. “Get in,” she yelled around the still-open door, “Harlowe will probably be along any minute.”
Vickery stepped around the front bumper, then halted and leaned down to peer under the car. “You got a coolant leak, boss.”
Galvan was immediately out of the car, glaring at Tom as she braced one hand on the hood to bend down and look—and as Vickery straightened up, he pushed off from his left foot and rolled his right shoulder and drove his fist very hard into the pit of Galvan’s stomach. Even as she exhaled a hoarse whoop, folded backward and rolled away, he had scrambled around and got into the driver’s seat and pulled the door closed.
Santiago was already in the passenger seat, and Vickery pulled the gear shift into drive and stomped on the accelerator, feeling the ridges on th
e pedal through his threadbare sock. The car roared out of the repair bay and past the trailer and the cars to the street, and Vickery yanked it into a hard right turn.
Santiago fastened his seat belt and pushed his unruly black hair back. “You want to find the Castine woman first,” he said, sitting up straighter to see over the dashboard.
“She’s part of getting it done,” muttered Vickery, alternately glancing at the rear-view mirror and watching the traffic ahead and the little metronome on the dashboard.
All of Galvan’s stealth cars were equipped with metronomes like this. The pendulums were capped with bits of leather or wood or bone into which ghosts had been fossilized, and the pendulums clicked very rapidly back and forth in strong fields of expanded possibility around freeways, or in response to supernatural attention being directed at the cars—but this one was swaying only with the motion of the car.
Santiago hiked up in his seat to look back, then sat down again. “Yo creo Galvan thinks you’re in love with Castine.”
Vickery quickly passed a bus and made a left turn onto Irolo, intending to get to the 10 freeway via Vermont, a few blocks east, while Galvan would expect that wherever he was heading, he would take the more direct Western Avenue. He was speeding between more rows of apartment buildings behind narrow lawns and low hedges, and he was wrinkling his nose—the car interior smelled of curry, possibly some santeria supernatural-evasion measure. No doubt his sea-soaked clothing would leave it smelling even more peculiar.
“Galvan’s a romantic,” he said, “under all the barnacles.”
“She’s gonna kill you.”
Vickery swung left onto James Wood Boulevard, driving now no faster than the other cars in the lanes. He was peripherally aware of drivers turning to stare at the clown faces on the Cadillac, and he remembered driving this way with Castine, last May, in the taco truck they had stolen from Galvan.
“She’d want to kill me anyway,” Vickery said, “for something, sooner or later. It’s how she is.”
He remembered Castine throwing a phone out the window of the taco truck, that day. “Oh yeah,” he said now, “grope around under the seat, or in the console. There’ll be a smart phone somewhere—Galvan can track it.”
Santiago nodded, and when he pulled a cell phone from under the seat, he pushed the button to lower the window and threw the phone out. “Mr. Fakhouri will probably be there, where you’re going,” he said as the window hummed up again. “He’ll be mad—I was supposed to stay there. But I think he may be only crazy. you have a plan—what is it?”
Vickery remembered what Sandstrom had said. “I’m going to introduce a ghost into the egregore. That—I’m told—will stall its engine.”
“Introduce,” echoed Santiago. “How will you do that? ‘Egregore, this is a ghost. Ghost, meet Mr. Egregore.’”
“I’m not sure how,” said Vickery. After a moment he added, “Holler if you see a thrift store. I’ve got to get a pair of shoes. And a coat and pants. And a pair of wire-cutters.” He wondered how difficult it would be to peel apart the waterlogged bills in his pocket.
A nervous yawn tugged his jaw open and brought tears to his eyes—and he realized, belatedly, that the faint buzz or vibration in his mind had stopped at some point.
The sun had set more than an hour ago over the dark curve of the sea, but remote red and gold terraces of clouds still silhouetted the hill above Pacific Coast Highway and the lone figure standing at its crest.
Three hundred yards inland, on a broad stony slope that rose higher but nevertheless seemed dwarfed by that hill’s placement against the sea and sky, Lateef Fakhouri sat shivering in the sea breeze. Beside him on the dirt sat two oil lanterns, unlit, and two closed iron boxes that trailed wisps of smoke in the wind.
Below him, between his slope and that stark hill with its lone sentry, the broad, amphitheater-like field was in shadow, and the length of Topanga Creek was only traceable by the trees that followed its curling length.
The boy Santiago was gone. Fakhouri had tried calling both of his phone numbers several times in the last hour, but had got no answer.
Perhaps the boy would return. Perhaps he had not lost the two placards with the Nu hieroglyph printed on them; on an empty counter at Staples, Fakhouri had restored them to full potency by gingerly filling in his obscuring Wite-Out streaks with a gray felt pen.
And now, after so much careful preparation, where were they? Fakhouri cursed himself. He should not have entrusted crucial tools to a feral boy.
Fakhouri’s phone had chimed several times, but the calling number had been the consulate’s, and he hadn’t answered. Doubtless the consular authorities were wondering what on earth to do with the two little girls he had left with them. But even if some crisis had arisen, he wouldn’t be able to deal with it until after midnight; and by then the girls’ minds might very well be gone. He knew his felt-pen rendition of the Nu hieroglyph, viewed by the girls through frosted glass, had freed them only partially, intermittently; Fakhouri had taken the girls away from Harlowe physically, but their minds, their selves, were still at risk.
He sighed and glanced at the iron boxes beside him. The sticks of smoldering punkwood were still smoking. Without either of the Nu sigils, he would not be able even to achieve as much as Boutros had.
Could he simply walk into the midst of Harlowe’s invocation, and shoot the man? He shook his head. Even if he did, even if he could, the egregore would not be stopped.
The frail identities of Lexi and Amber would be dissolved in it, blended away in the homogeneous mix of all the other initiated souls; and Fakhouri would surely continue to be plagued with the dream of the two little girls he had seen so long ago in the Manshiyat Naser district of Cairo, sitting on a high pile of garbage bags in the back of a pickup truck.
He closed his eyes.
In the dream, the two girls wandered away down the narrow streets where the walls were hidden by bales of refuse, and even the balconies overhead and the roofs above them were clogged with huge, stained sacks; and the Zabaleen, the people of Garbage City, crouched in the open archways, dividing piles of trash into categories—paper in one bin, broken glass in another, fragments of dirty cloth in still another. And when the two girls approached them, the Zabaleen began unemotionally dividing the girls into their various parts, legs in one bin, arms in another—
Fakhouri shook off the dream-memory of the two young, blank-faced heads being tossed into a bin already half full of heads.
He leaned back against a weed-cushioned rock and looked around the borders of the shadowed field below him—and he saw an odd-looking car pull over on the Topanga Canyon Boulevard shoulder a hundred yards away down to his left. In the twilight, the car seemed to be painted in camouflage, blobs of light and dark. Its headlights went out and the passenger side door opened.
Two people climbed out of it, a man and a boy, and as they began to walk away from the highway, along the path on the other side of the creek, he was sure they were Sebastian Vickery and Santiago.
Fakhouri stood up, breathless with sudden hope, and eagerly watched their progress. The boy wasn’t carrying the placards, but he had come back, and probably he had hidden them in this natural amphitheater somewhere.
Fakhouri had climbed this inland hill from the north side, and he glanced anxiously at the figure at the top of the shore-side hill—but it was a remote silhouette against the fading light in the west, and he couldn’t tell if it was aware of the two new arrivals on the scene.
Leaving his lanterns and fire-boxes on the slope, he hurried down a track that would take him to the amphitheater floor, but, wary of the figure on the seaward hill, he didn’t call to Vickery and Santiago.
Vickery must have heard his scuffling progress, though, for he looked across the field to his right,and up, and when Santiago followed his gaze and said something, they both stopped.
Fakhouri’s wingtip shoes were clumsy on the shadowed pebbly incline, but by flailing his arms for balance he m
anaged to reach the plain in under a minute, and he hurried across the weedy dirt to where Vickery and the boy stood between two trees on the other side of the creek. Santiago was still in his sweatshirt and jeans, but Vickery was now wearing a tweed coat and gray trousers, and Fakhouri felt less foolish when he saw that Vickery too was wearing black dress shoes.
The darkly moving water was a good dozen feet across, and Fakhouri didn’t want to shout. But from his elevated perch he had noticed a bridge back by the highway, and he waved to Vickery and then made a looping gesture back in that direction, and held up the spread fingers of one hand, hoping it conveyed, five minutes.
Vickery nodded, and he and Santiago resumed walking west through the trees along the far bank.
Fakhouri swore under his breath—they might have waited for him to catch up!—but began loping wearily toward the bridge, five hundred feet to the east.
When he had crossed the bridge and made his way back through the trees on the other side of the creek, and reached what he believed was the point where Vickery and Santiago had paused, he didn’t see them ahead of him in the varying depths of shadow. He trotted on, heavily, his shirt coldly damp with sweat, the holstered revolver knocking against his ribs, and his heart thumping alarmingly under it all. What in the name of all that was holy could Vickery and Santiago be doing? There wasn’t time for wandering about.
After another few yards he heard, above his own panting breath, shrubbery being agitated ahead; and within a few more paces he was finally able to halt, leaning forward and bracing his hands on his knees to catch his breath, for Santiago was standing in the path and Vickery was just straightening up from having been grubbing around in a stand of weeds. He was now holding a shopping bag.
“You didn’t call to us,” Vickery said, just loudly enough for Fakhouri to hear him. “Who else is around?”
Fakhouri lifted one hand to wave at the hill slope behind Vickery. “A man,” he said. “At the top.” He made himself stand up straight, and he tugged his cuffs back into place. “Santiago,” he said, “where are the hieroglyph placards I entrusted to you?”
