Forced Perspectives

by Tim Powers

  “To your left!” shouted Castine, but Agnes was pointing Taitz’ gun past Castine, at Taitz himself.

  “Drop it!” yelled Vickery, and for a frozen moment the tableau held: Vickery’s semi-automatic trained on Agnes, who was aiming squarely at Taitz’ face with his own gun, and the Singularities in the kitchen end of the room gaping uncomprehendingly.

  Then Agnes opened her hand and the gun fell to the carpet, and thumping and footsteps sounded in the hall and Vickery stepped wide to cover that corner of the room too. Fakhouri kept his own revolver pointed horizontally toward the middle of the group of Singularities. Fakhouri was squinting and grimacing as if against a bright light, but his gun was fairly steady.

  “Ingrid,” Vickery said, “up!” She stood up from the couch and hurried across the floor to him, and without looking away from the half-dozen people beyond the sights of his gun, Vickery called, “Who’s got keys for the handcuffs?”

  The group clustered by the kitchen, and the figures stopped in the hall, shifted and muttered, but none of them answered.

  A voice behind Fakhouri said, “I can open ’em after we leave,” and when the speaker stepped into the light Castine recognized Santiago; and when she noticed that the boy’s hands were empty, she recognized the .40 caliber Sig Sauer that Vickery was holding, and she was glad Santiago had let him borrow it.

  Looking back toward the couch, she saw Agnes glance quickly from the gun on the floor to Taitz, and there was urgency in the look she gave him; but Taitz shook his head.

  “You’ve still got the twins,” he said, and hiked himself forward on the couch to kick his gun across the carpet toward her. “Take my blood pressure, if you want—I bet I won’t be scared off by your sex robots.”

  But Santiago darted in and snatched up the gun and then hurried back to the doorway as he tucked it into his sweatshirt pocket.

  Then everyone jumped and several people screamed as Chino Nunez suddenly roared and came charging out of the kitchen into the living room. Fakhouri’s gun went off with a stunning bang, and in the next second Taitz had swung a leg to the side and tripped Nunez, who crashed to the floor, the bandage taped over his ear quickly blotting red. Bits of paper were spinning in the air, and Castine saw a gash across the yellow spines of the books where Fakhouri’s bullet had gone.

  Her ears were ringing, but she heard Taitz say to her, “Get out of here, will you?”

  She nodded jerkily and turned toward the door. Vickery had grabbed the white-faced Fakhouri and shoved him out onto the front step, and Santiago was already outside.

  “Don’t anybody poke your heads outside for five minutes,” yelled Vickery, “or the next shot won’t be for show. You’re all on the verge of immortality, right? So it’d be a shame to lose it now.”

  With his free hand he waved Castine behind him, and as she hurried down the walkway she looked around at the cars parked up and down the narrow street and the yellow school bus right out front. A streetlight shone on a car double-parked down to her left, blocking the street, and big full-color wide-eyed clown faces all over the car made it impossible to guess what make it might be.

  An uncanny damned abyss, she thought.

  Vickery grabbed the arm of her jacket and hustled her toward it. “That Cadillac,” he said. Fakhouri and Santiago had already run to it and were hastily getting into the back seat.

  When she was in the passenger seat and Vickery had got in and started the engine, she gingerly reached up with both hands and unknotted the dirty sock from behind the rear-view mirror post. She could feel that a handful of coins had been tucked into the toe of it so that it would work as a pendulum.

  Vickery drove fast past the parked bus. When she waved the sock in his peripheral vision, he nodded and said, “Don’t need it now. Just don’t get lost again.”

  “You stole this car from Galvan?” Castine asked.

  “Had to,” he said, his eyes on the narrow, curving asphalt in the car’s headlights. “She didn’t want to detour to pick you up.”

  “Well, thanks.” She pulled her seatbelt across and found the slot for it. “I’ll want to hear about that.”

  “I’ll want to hear why that guy won’t be scared by sex robots,” Vickery said. “I would be.”

  Castine laughed, probably for the first time since breakfast at Canter’s this morning, if she had laughed at anything then.

  From the back seat, Santiago said, “You got a paper clip?”

  “A paper clip?” Vickery made a left turn onto Silver Lake Boulevard, heading south toward Sunset to get on the Glendale freeway. “Actually, we do,” he said. “Ingrid, on the floor by your feet there’s Mr. Fakhouri’s shopping bag.” He glanced at Fakhouri in the rear-view mirror. “We never did get you some more Turkish apricots, sorry!”

  “You have behaved in a regrettably high-handed manner all along,” said Fakhouri.

  Vickery bobbed his head in rueful agreement, then went on to Castine, “Ragotskie’s papers are in there, and there’s a paper clip on the old coloring book.” He reached up and turned on the dome light on her side.

  Castine bent down and groped among the papers with her cuffed hands. After a few seconds she dragged the old coloring book out; it tore into limp fragments, but she found the paper clip and pulled it free, then turned around in her seat to hold it out to Santiago.

  “Stay like you are,” the boy said, and he began unbending the paper clip. When he had straightened half of it out, he pinched it half an inch from the end and pressed the end against the no-doubt-bulletproof window glass until it bent at right angles. Then he fitted the makeshift key into the keyhole of one of the cuffs and twisted, and the rotating arm sprang loose; a few moments later he had opened the second one too, and the cuffs clattered to the floor behind the front seat.

  Now Santiago’s hand stretched from the back seat, and in his palm was Taitz’s semi-automatic. “You take this,” he said to Vickery, “and give me my gun back.”

  “Whose?” asked Castine drily, for the boy had taken it from a dead government agent last year; but she took the Sig Sauer from Vickery when he pulled it out of his coat pocket and handed it across the seat-back to Santiago, and took from the boy’s hand Taitz’s gun.

  After a moment of thought, she gave it to Vickery, and he put that in his pocket. Looking at her watch, she asked, “Where are we going now? The egregore is set to fire in only about three hours.”

  “We’re going to call up a ghost,” he said. “Try to, anyway.”

  Fakhouri muttered in the back seat, and when she glanced back she saw Santiago just finishing making the sign of the cross.

  “I could have killed someone!” Fakhouri burst out.

  “It was an effective move,” Vickery assured him, “deliberate or not.”

  Castine turned to Vickery. “Were you thinking of going down there and sticking a ghost into Harlowe’s fuel line? Agnes says he’s going to keep ghosts back by setting up a bunch of uncanny valley images around the site.”

  “There was a guy,” said Vickery, “who tried to warn Chronic about a different way an egregore might go wrong. We need to find out what that way was. Is. And,” he added, “in that bag we’ve also got his signature, to call up his ghost with.”

  “Whose signature?” asked Castine; then, “Oh, in that book Gale Reed gave you. Her husband, Stanley Ancona.” She rubbed her temples and nodded. “So we’re going to the La Brea Tar Pits.”

  Fakhouri made an unhappy sound in the back seat.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN:

  The Night Is Breathing

  “They’re both gone now!” said the young lady in the passenger seat of Harlowe’s Chevy Tahoe. Harlowe believed her name was Avalon.

  “The Castine woman can’t be gone,” he said. “It’s just the turns in this street making it look that way.”

  The two altar cloths, the blood on them still damp, hung from strings in a wire frame on the dashboard. A few moments ago the one with Vickery’s blood on it had finally shown a re
sponse again, tilting forward parallel with Castine’s, but now both of them did seem to be swinging loosely.

  Harlowe pressed the gas pedal, and the glowing windows of the houses along Silver Lake Boulevard rushed past more quickly.

  Cars were parked at the curbs, and he had to swerve carefully when headlights came sweeping down the boulevard in the other direction; and now he had to brake and partly turn in to a driveway when an oncoming car came fast around a curve ahead, pretty much taking up both lanes.

  He honked angrily as it rushed past, and he got a glimpse of tinted windows and—of all things!—three or four huge clown faces printed on the body of the car.

  “Halloween in L.A.,” commented Avalon. “But your rags are just dangling, no tilt.”

  Harlowe’s phone chirped, and he fumbled it out of his pocket as he straightened the SUV and sped up again.

  “What?” he said when he had turned the phone on and swiped the screen.

  “Vickery was just here,” came Loria’s tense voice, “with some kid and a guy who I think is the Egyptian, and they took Castine away with them. They’re gone. They had guns, I couldn’t do anything!”

  “Damn it! Where the hell was Taitz? And Nunez?”

  “They were useless. The kid, whoever he is, took Taitz’s gun.” Harlowe heard an angry voice in the background, and then Agnes again: “Are the twins online?”

  Harlowe probed mentally for his awareness of the twins’ mentation, but the once-constant incomprehensible rattling of their thoughts was again gone.

  “No,” he grated.

  That clown car that passed us, he thought. It must have been them, or probably was. Vickery must have some way of blocking the psychic signature of his blood, and now he’s extended it to Castine too. The blood cloths are no good. Can I turn around and chase that car, catch up with it? And even then, can this Avalon girl and I stop them and overpower them? They’ve got guns, and now they’ve got Taitz’s gun too.

  “No,” he said again, and he let the vehicle slow down. Easterly Terrace was coming up soon anyway, and there was no longer any reason to hurry. “I’m afraid we—” and he paused to take a deep breath, “—go to Plan C.”

  From the phone, Loria’s voice asked, “What is that, exactly?”

  “Never mind,” he said. Mind, he thought, never again.

  He ended the call and hiked up in his seat to pull the copy of The Yage Letters from his jacket pocket. By touch he slid the half-tab of blotter acid from between the pages, and in the moment when the SUV was passing under a streetlight he glanced down at Janis Joplin’s exaggeratedly weeping eyes.

  Through tears in his own eyes he peered at the warmly lighted windows in the houses they were passing, imagining the rooms behind them and envying the lives of the people who lived in them.

  He tried to call up fond images from his own life, but all he could think of was the trailer outside of Salinas in the ’80s, and the homeless intruder he had killed with a knife.

  He sighed and laid the strip of paper on his tongue.

  “What was that?” asked Avalon.

  “Never . . . mind.”

  Vickery found a parking space on Wilshire, in front of a Starbucks under the towering Screen Actors Guild building, across the face of which swirled projected cartoon ghosts and vampires. He shook out Castine’s bloodstained sock for quarters to put in the parking meter. Castine took the sock and shoved it in her coat pocket.

  Vickery recalled that Johnny’s Pizzeria and Callender’s Grill were further up the block to the west, and even at ten o’clock at night there were pedestrians wandering among the planters and walkways that separated the businesses from the street. Several people paused to stare and laugh uneasily at the Cadillac, and one little boy in a Batman costume, whom Vickery felt was out way past his bedtime, started crying at the sight of it and pulling his mother away.

  Tucking Stanley’s book into the side pocket of his coat beside his newly-bought wire cutters, Vickery led his mismatched group west along the sidewalk. Wilshire Boulevard glittered with white and blue headlights and red taillights and neon signs, but the wind was cold and blowing from straight ahead. He wished he’d bought a flannel shirt instead of this lightweight cotton one, at the thrift shop where he’d got the coat and trousers and shoes he was wearing, and he saw that Castine was shivering even in her suede coat. When they hurried past the Callender’s Grill, where he had occasionally stopped for coffee and pie when he had worked out of the Los Angeles field office of the Secret Service, he saw that it was closed and out of business; and he was reminded again that the Los Angeles he knew was rapidly becoming a city that didn’t exist anymore.

  They crossed Curson Avenue, and Castine paused by the stylized copper panther poised above a sign that read, LA BREA TAR PITS & MUSEUM. She cocked her head dubiously at the brightly-lit padlocked gates, and at the tall, close-set iron bars that were the enclosing fence; but Vickery caught her eye and waved further down the sidewalk.

  “I’ll show you the way kids used to sneak in at night,” he said, and kept walking. Castine followed, trailed by Fakhouri and Santiago. Headlights rushing past on their left pushed their shadows ahead and swept them aside.

  “We can’t stay out of the car for long,” Castine said as she hurried to keep up with Vickery. “Harlowe’s got some cloths with our blood on them, and when we’re not in Galvan’s stealth car they swing toward us.”

  “They can only have been swinging for a couple of minutes now,” said Vickery. “We’ll try to be quick here.”

  “You’re limping,” she pointed out.

  “Harlowe shot at me when I was jumping out of the boat. Nicked my leg.” He glanced at her. “I had to jump, he got his gun out too fast and he was shooting at me, and Agnes’ damn gun wasn’t loaded—”

  “Good God, Sebastian, don’t apologize! You found me again.”

  Vickery reached over and squeezed her shoulder.

  Beyond the iron bars on their right they could now see spotlit statues of mastodons and, closer to the street, the wide black water that was perpetually agitated as bubbles of tar broke the surface. Already the breeze smelled like a newly topped asphalt road.

  This at least is one part of Los Angeles, Vickery thought, that will still be here even after Los Angeles itself is gone. Gale Reed’s husband, Stanley Ancona, found an enduring place to hide from spirits.

  Tall eucalyptus trees and toyon bushes hid the view of the water for several hundred feet then, and Vickery stopped his group at a driveway where another pair of padlocked gates interrupted the fence. Two iron bollards flanked the driveway just outside the gates.

  “We rest here,” Vickery told his companions, “until there’s no traffic near us, east or west.” Turning away from the street, he pulled Taitz’s gun out of his pocket; he popped the magazine out and hefted it, then pulled the gun’s slide back far enough to see the base of a round in the chamber. He let the slide snap back and pushed the magazine back into the grip until it clicked. He put the gun back in his pocket.

  Castine looked at her watch and pursed her lips.

  Fakhouri was staring open-mouthed at the gate. “Do you propose,” he asked hoarsely, “that we trespass? It would be certainly unwise.”

  He then looked ahead down the boulevard, and Vickery recalled that the Egyptian Consulate, where he and Castine had dropped off Fakhouri and the twins this morning, was only a block west of where they stood.

  “You should wait for us here,” Vickery told him. “If cops or somebody comes rattling at the gate, act confused and start shouting at them in Arabic. Okay? We’ll hear you.”

  “I will be confused,” said Fakhouri, clearly relieved at not being asked to climb over the gate. “And I might start shouting in Arabic.”

  Vickery turned to Santiago. “You want to wait?”

  “I’ll climb over,” the boy said. “But if there’s trouble I’ll ditch you and go with Mr. Fakhouri. We got stuff we still gotta do.”

  “Understood.” To
Santiago and Castine, Vickery said, “You notice that the gates have flat top rails—no spikes. You hold onto a rail, put a foot on the top of one of those bollards, and then you hop up and straddle the gate and let yourself down on the other side. Santiago, you might be too—”

  “I can do it,” the boy said. He looked at the sky, but no stars could be seen in the charcoal scrim of ambient light, and he shrugged. “It must be getting late.”

  Vickery waited until a red light back at Curson stopped traffic from that direction; and Wilshire curved here, so that headlights from the other direction lit the median palm trees more directly than this recessed driveway.

  He gripped the top rail and boosted himself up with a foot on the top of the bollard, wincing as the move tugged at the cut in his thigh, and a moment later he had dropped to the cement pavement on the other side. He hurried to the right to crouch beside the fence, hidden from the street by a row of yucca shrubs outside the bars.

  Soon he heard the gate rattle and then shoes hit the pavement, and he hissed when Castine stepped away from the gate and looked around. She had just crouched beside him in the yucca shadows when Santiago joined them.

  A cement walkway paralleled the fence, leading back toward the water. Vickery pointed across the walkway and down, indicating that there was a descending slope on the other side, then pointed to the right, in the direction of the entrance they had passed.

  Bent low, the three of them hurried across the cement strip, and when they were out of sight of Wilshire Boulevard they moved quickly. The smell of tar was stronger now. Within a minute they had climbed through a thicket of toyon and stepped over another row of yuccas, and found themselves in a paved clearing beside the walkway. Between two widely-spaced metal benches was a tilted waist-high sign that doubtless had some facts about the tar pits printed on it, and beyond it was a wire grid fence, low reeds, and then the expanse of water reflecting the lights of the museum building on a prominence a hundred yards farther away.