by Tim Powers
“Hidden up a tree,” the boy said. “They’re safe.”
Fakhouri exhaled, feeling a good deal of the tension leave him. He turned to Vickery. “Where is the woman who was with you?”
After a long, wary look up toward the hilltop, Vickery turned his attention to the shopping bag, and felt around inside it. “Harlowe’s still got her.”
“Good,” said Fakhouri. “I mean,” he went on quickly, “it’s good that you’re separated, I wish no harm to her. But there are still some hours before midnight—you must get on an airplane to a place far away, a very different time-zone, so that we may hope at least that your internal circadian clocks will be at odds—”
“I’m going to find her, and free her,” Vickery said. He started walking back toward the highway, and the other two fell into step on either side of him. “Do you know who that is, up on the hill?”
“It’s the brujo you talked to here,” Santiago told him, “this afternoon. He called to the men who caught you.”
“Chronic,” said Vickery. “Of course he’d stay for the event. It’s a revival of his show, really.”
Fakhouri stopped, then had to trot to catch up. “Not the same Chronic, surely,” he said.
“The guy that tried to spark up an egregore in ’68,” confirmed Vickery, peering with evident unease back through the trees that now hid the top of the hill. “He’s old, but he’s spry.”
Santiago nodded as he trudged along. “Peligroso, dangerous.”
The sea wind was colder on Fakhouri’s damp face, and he did not look back. Chronic, Khalid Boutros’ old adversary, he thought—still alive? Khalid, you failure! All you did was postpone the crisis! And you left me, a branch office General Intelligence Directorate research clerk, to deal with the diabolical prophet who has outlived you and may prevail after all!
“You must not fly away to another country,” Fakhouri said decisively now. “The boy and I will need your help in doing the exorcism. You are evidently familiar with . . . guns, trouble.”
“So is Castine,” said Vickery. “We need her with us.”
“But we must all stay here! We cannot know when Harlowe will begin the conjuring of his Shaytan.” Fakhouri peered anxiously at Vickery’s resolute profile. “Do you even know where she is?”
“No,” Vickery said, and he hefted the shopping bag as he strode along the path. “But I’ve got an old sock in here that’ll lead me to her.”
Fakhouri was sure he must have misunderstood, but he dismissed it. He considered drawing his revolver and pointing it at Vickery—but to what end? He could hardly hold the man at gunpoint here for several hours, much less force him to cooperate in placing the hieroglyph placards and the lanterns . . . and Vickery could probably take the gun away from him in any case.
Fakhouri looked past Vickery at Santiago. “You stay, at least. We must hope Mr. Vickery will come back here in time.”
“Miss Castine still owes me ten dollars,” Santiago said, matching Vickery’s pace.
“She does not,” Vickery told him.
Fakhouri groaned almost silently, and clenched his fists. He cast a glance to his left, at the slope beyond the creek and the plain, and prayed that no wandering vagrant would find the lamps and the fire-boxes—or climb a tree and find the sigils!—then said, hoarsely, “I think I must go with you, to be sure you return. I cannot do this thing alone.”
“You stay here,” Vickery told him. “We’ll come back, don’t worry.”
“I will worry no matter what happens. But I will not worry about where you are. I shall come with you.”
Vickery laughed quietly and looked at him. “You’ve still got your gun? Sure, come along.”
Fakhouri sighed and put his chilled hands in his pockets. One way or another, he told himself firmly, I will see that the egregore dies, and Lexi and Amber are freed.
The car on the shoulder was visible ahead now, and as they hurried toward it Fakhouri noted, with what blunted surprise he was still capable of, that its body was covered with grotesque clown faces. Dignity was clearly a casualty in this insane undertaking.
Harlowe and one of the ChakraSys girls were off somewhere, trying to track Vickery by means of the cloth which Loria had blotted with his blood, but the rest of the ChakraSys personnel—the Singularity team, as they called themselves—had relocated from the church down on Pico to Don Foster’s triangular white house on Easterly Terrace in the Silverlake district. Castine was in handcuffs now, but they were a good deal less constricting than the duct tape had been.
Foster, Castine now knew, had been one of the two men who had tried to capture them in the alley yesterday, and Ragotskie had indeed killed him with a knife last night, just as Ragotskie’s ghost had said.
Members of the Singularity team were coming and going from the house on various errands—including, an hour ago, the fetching of a half a dozen pizzas—and, siting on a bright yellow couch that matched the living room’s table and chairs, Castine was only able to estimate that there were at least ten of the Singularities, as she thought of them. Track lighting on the ceiling cast a stark illumination on their faces, most of which variously reflected anxiety, muted excitement, or glowing serenity at the prospect of their imminent group apotheosis. Even the burly fellow standing by the kitchen counter, with a bandage taped around his head and dried blood streaking his neck and staining his shirt, was smiling benevolently, if vaguely, at everyone.
The man who had been introduced to Castine as John Taitz was an exception. His right hand was heavily bandaged, and a dew of sweat on his forehead told her that he was in pain. She heard one young man, and then a woman, assure him that in less than four hours he would have left his injured body behind, but his answering smiles had been forced.
Paintings on the living room walls were just streaks of evidently random colors, and the books in the one visible bookcase were arranged by height, so that their top edges formed a smooth descending slope, and their spines had all been painted the same shade of yellow as the furniture. Someone had taped cardboard cutouts of a black cat and a green-faced witch to the inside of the front door, presumably in a half-hearted acknowledgment of Halloween. The room was too hot, and smelled of pizza and trendy colognes and sweat.
The Singularities had greeted Castine warmly when Harlowe had delivered her to the church on Pico two hours ago, and several of the women had solicitously cut the duct tape from her wrists, and, with cheerful efficiency, replaced them with the handcuffs; and when any of them caught her eye now as they bustled from room to room, they smiled and sometimes even winked conspiratorially. Castine found herself smiling back.
For the past couple of hours she had been aware of a faint humming in her mind—something like the carrier wave on a radio tuned to a silent station. It became more perceptible whenever she was within a yard of one of these Singularities, and she had been assured that it was just “interference fringes” caused by the overlap of two people’s auras; and that her sensitivity to it was a result of her “initiation,” when she had looked at the image in the coloring book.
She wondered if Vickery or Fakhouri were having any success, out there in the world, at stopping the egregore. She knew she should be assessing her situation here, looking for ways to escape—but it wasn’t easy to concentrate on complicated sequential thoughts in this crowd of noisy conversation and frequently intruding auras.
The couch sagged, and when she looked to her left she saw that Taitz had sat down at the other end of it. She was sure that the lines in his face weren’t usually as deep as they were tonight.
“That guy in the kitchen?” he said to her. “With the surgical tape all over his head? That’s Chino Nunez. You shot his ear off, last night. Or that Vickery guy did.” He gingerly lifted his bandaged right hand. “And Vickery shot a couple of my fingers off. Well, they’re going to have to come off, it looks like.”
Several people, in pairs, had drifted away down a hallway; one young man approached Castine, then saw the handcu
ffs and moved on. She wondered if these were last-minute amorous trysts, and hoped there were at least several bedrooms.
She rolled her wrists in the handcuffs. “You were going to kill us,” she said carefully to Taitz. Sweat glistening on his scalp under the buzz-cut gray hair. She could see the grip of a holstered semi-automatic under his open windbreaker.
Taitz sat back. “That’s true,” he said. “Other times, like now, we’re not supposed to kill you.” He looked around the crowded room with evident disapproval. “Like college kids on spring break. And I never liked Don Foster.”
“I don’t like his taste in furnishings—”
But Taitz talked over her. “I was worried his ghost would come after me—or Ragotskie’s, or Pratt’s again. Today I went to a thrift store and bought three cheap rings and a pair of pants and a shirt and shoes. All second-hand. I was—”
“Hiding from their ghosts,” Castine interrupted now. “Making yourself unrecognizable behind other people’s imprinted personalities on those things.” She glanced at his shirt and left hand, and went on, “But you’re not wearing the rings, and your shirt isn’t on backward. And I bet those are your shoes, not second-hand.”
Taitz had been visibly startled by her observations, but now he frowned and nodded. “You went to Hell last year, and came back, didn’t you? It figures you’d know about things like that. No, after an hour I threw all that stuff away. Hiding from their ghosts like that, it was like—”
Castine remembered Vickery’s willingness, albeit a reluctant willingness, to meet Pratt’s ghost last night, though in fact it had turned out to be Ragotskie’s ghost that had come knocking at Hipple’s door over nothingness. “Like cowardice,” she said.
“Okay,” he said gruffly, “yes. I bought that stuff so if they came looking for me, they’d see, yeah, imprints of other people. Pratt’s ghost scared me, yesterday.” He looked around the room again, then scowled at her. “You got a problem with that?”
“It scared me too. All ghosts scare me.”
“Well, you’re a girl, that’s fine. But me—I’m damned if I’ll hide from ’em.”
“Okay,” said Castine.
He bared his teeth, possibly because of the pain in his hand. “But I’m going to, aren’t I? Hide from them? And hide from my fucked-up hand—sorry. And from another ghost, God help me; I bumped my girl Hannah off the freeway in ’86, up in Santa Clara.” He blinked rapidly, looking at the bare fingers of his left hand, and Castine wondered if some of the dampness on his face might actually be tears. “Yeah, I’m going to hide in the big egregore cloud,” he went on, “where even I won’t have any imprint.” Now he looked up at Castine. “And you’ll be there too—or not be, there.”
Castine thought of Agnes’ remark: We’re out of cream, so I made it with no milk. Yes, she thought, it is like that—all of us individuals who have been initiated with the hieroglyph will, in effect, not be, in the transcendent egregore. Not as individuals, anyway.
It startled her to see Agnes herself come hurrying over to the couch. She was tucking a cell phone into the pocket of her jeans. “Ingrid,” she said, “Simon’s having a bad time tracking Vickery. It seems Vickery lost his qualification when he jumped into the ocean—who knew? Hi, John,” she added to Taitz. “Just a few more hours now, hon.”
Taitz’s sweating face lost all expression, and Castine guessed that he didn’t like Agnes calling him hon.
“We’ve got to find him,” Agnes went on, “and get him re-initiated, in like the next three hours. Simon was tracking him just fine at first, and he thinks Vickery went to that Galvan woman’s garage, but then the signal stopped, and when Harlowe asked Galvan about it she got real angry and said she hadn’t seen him. The signal started up again an hour or so later, from somewhere southwest, but stopped again after half an hour, and the bloody altar cloth hasn’t wiggled since. Where would he go?”
He’s in one of Galvan’s stealth cars! thought Castine. That’s why you can’t track him. And Galvan didn’t say so, even though it sounds as if he stole it. Can she be an ally, to some degree, now? Or does she just want her own revenge?
But why would Sebastian have been out of her car for half an hour? Southwest?
Well, of course. To fetch the sock with my blood on it.
So he’ll find his way here. If I want to hide, like Taitz says—from the memories of the man I killed last year, and the fiancee whose death I was responsible for, and the whole accumulation of things I’ve done and things I’ve failed to do, which I’ve never worked up the nerve to take to a priest in Confession—then I’ll warn Agnes that I’ve got to be taken away from here, and shifted from place to place evasively.
Or I can say nothing and let Vickery find me, in which case I’ll probably end up keeping those guilts and shames . . . and one brave day uncover them, acknowledge them, to God. It would be a lot of sins! I haven’t been to Confession in decades.
Putting off answering Agnes’ question, Castine said, “He lost his initiation? When he jumped overboard?” Agnes nodded. “So he can think clearly again.”
“We all think clearly,” Agnes snapped; then after catching an ironic glance from Taitz, she added, grudgingly, “When we’re not getting too close to one another, anyway. But when we’re all together in the egregore, it’ll think perfectly. So do you know where he might be?”
If I give a phony location, thought Castine, Agnes is likely to have me take her there. And that would impede Sebastian finding me.
Choose, she thought.
“No,” she said, and the word was a long exhalation. “Maybe he took off—Las Vegas, San Francisco, Mexico, I don’t know.”
“I think you took too long to answer. John,” Agnes said to Taitz, “I think she knows where he is. We’ve got to get him and initiate him again, very damn soon.”
Taitz gave her a strained grin and reached up with his left hand to touch the grip of his holstered gun. “You want me to pistol-whip her? Shoot her in the hand maybe, like her pal did to me?”
“Oh,” Agnes said, and shrugged spasmodically, “maybe!”
Taitz looked at Castine and rocked his head. “Well, I’d feel bad about that . . . but soon I won’t feel anything at all, right?”
Castine flexed her forearms against the restraint of the cuffs, uselessly, and backed her heels against the base of the couch, ready to jackknife forward.
“Right!” Agnes gave Castine a wide-eyed excited look. “He’ll do it! So tell me where Vickery is!”
“Actually,” said Taitz, drawing the word out, “I won’t. Even just for a couple of hours, I don’t need to carry one more guilt.”
Agnes hissed in exasperation and looked around the room, perhaps assessing the capacity for brutality of the other Singularities. After a moment she clicked her tongue and leaned down over Taitz. The proximity made her frown in concentration.
“Nobody’s had cause to take your blood pressure, John,” she said. “But it could happen.” She quickly took a step back and shook her head. “I’m sorry, that’s not what I meant to say. I mean, if we have to go with the twins, wherever they are—”
“Maybe you weren’t thinking clearly,” said Taitz. “I got a buzz when you leaned in close. But if I die before midnight, you can bet my ghost’ll find its way into the mix. Your god-machine’ll get vapor lock.”
“It’s your god-machine too, John!” Agnes protested. She gave Castine an angry look, as if Castine must have said something to shake Taitz’s faith. She went on to Taitz, “Vickery took that Garden Secrets book, or whatever it was, but Harlowe’s now got an even better way to keep ghosts out of the assembly. He’s got Biloxi out right now scouting up parts for it.”
“Vickery got his book back?” said Castine, resolutely playing for time. “When?”
“It was in Harlowe’s knapsack,” said Agnes impatiently, “on the boat. Vickery took it over the side with him. Harlowe thinks the . . . baptism in the sea probably wiped the ghosts out of it.”
�
�What’s the better way to keep ghosts out?” Castine persisted. Sebastian, she thought, I hope you’re close!
“What?” said Agnes. “Oh—it turns out ghosts are repelled by . . . certain sorts of pictures, images . . . ”
“The uncanny valley,” said Castine, nodding. When Agnes gave her a blank look, she went on, “People like realistic pictures of faces—paintings, statues—and the more realistic they are, the more everybody find them interesting. The approval line, like on a graph, goes up. But if the images get too realistic, they start to give people the creeps, and the approval line drops. That drop is the uncanny valley. It’s when a face looks pretty much totally real, but you can just barely tell it’s not a genuine human.”
“That’s right,” said Agnes. “Harlowe sent Biloxi out to buy a whole bunch of such things—big stills from movies like that Polar Express, and any very realistic mannikins he can get hold of, even a sex robot or two if he can find any for sale. Harlowe’s going to set them up around the site, so any curious ghosts that come wandering up will be repelled.”
She had been speaking softly, almost absently, and now her hand darted forward to Taitz’s chest and snatched the gun from his holster. He had reflexively tried to block her with his bandaged right hand, but it had rebounded uselessly from her wrist, and he was now sitting back, gasping, his face white.
Agnes was staring wide-eyed at Castine. “Last chance,” she said, “to tell me where he is. The gun Vickery took into the sea with him wasn’t loaded, because I couldn’t bear to shoot anybody again. But this one’s loaded, and I can bear it for a couple of hours if I have to. So—where is he?”
Castine opened her mouth to give a fake address at last, but at that moment the sound of breaking glass in the kitchen caused all the Singularities, including Agnes, to look in that direction—and on the other side of the room the front door was kicked open, and in walked Sebastian Vickery, in a tweed coat and wool trousers now, followed closely by Lateef Fakhouri still in his rumpled plaid sports coat. Both were holding guns.
