by Tim Powers
“In spite of that,” agreed Castine. “He loved her. His ghost still does.” She sat back, watching as Vickery wove through the traffic. “I don’t think he did the right thing when he tried to poison me or shoot me, but—” She shrugged. “You’ve got to admire his devotion to her. Even after he’s dead.”
Vickery contented himself with just saying, “I’m gonna take Santa Monica Boulevard all the way down to PCH.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN:
Ground Zero
Beyond a scanty, scarcely glimpsed fringe of parking lots and lifeguard station that rushed past on their left, the dark sea was an unmoving boundary of the world. Vickery didn’t bother looking at his watch since he was driving as fast as he could, edging around slower cars and catching the last moments of yellow traffic lights, and when he had passed the brightly lit Arco station at Topanga Canyon Boulevard he cut sharply left, across oncoming traffic, and braked to a rocking halt in front of a yellow gate blocking cars from Topanga Beach Drive.
“You’re on the wrong side of PCH,” said Castine. “And,” she added, looking at the instrument panel clock, “it’s twenty till apocalypse.”
“The ocean’s on this side,” he said, opening his door and stepping out of the warm car interior into the cold sea wind, “and you’ve got to lose your initiation.”
“Shouldn’t we deal with the egregore . . . first?” she said as she got out. “Or even uninitiate me tomorrow? It’s freezing out here!”
Vickery stepped around the seaward side of the gate. A wire fence blocked the way down a slope to the beach, but the fence extended only about twenty feet past the gate. “We need you fully yourself,” he said. “And if we fail, and the egregore does take off, you don’t want to still be one of the initiates.”
“No, I—I don’t,” she said resignedly. She closed her door and followed him to the downward-sloping pavement on the other side of the gate. “Aren’t you cold? My pants are soaked!”
“Mine too,” said Vickery with some sympathy.
At the far end end of the fence he stepped off the pavement onto a weedy slope. The overcast sky provided a dim glow, by which he could see a narrow path below, and beyond it, surf breaking on a wide, pebbled beach. He started to reach out his hand to help her down, but she shook her head.
“I’m not touching you,” she said as she followed him in a hopping, sliding descent. “All we need is another echo vision, now.”
At the bottom of the slope, Castine paused and rubbed her hand across her mouth as she looked at the breakers. The crash and roar of the surf was louder here. “You’re diving in too, right?”
“I can’t, I’ve got Ragotskie’s firing pin in my pocket. Sea water would probably wipe him out of it.”
“Huh. You got to dive in when the sun was up.” Castine took a deep breath and let it out, then shrugged out of her coat and handed it to him. “Sometimes I wish I’d never placed that ad in the Times.” She kicked off her shoes and, after a moment’s hesitation, began unbuckling her belt. “And I suppose I’ve—”
From up on the highway came a screech of brakes and a slam of metal on metal; Castine and Vickery both paused, looking up the slope.
And Vickery heard shoes slithering on wet pebbles to his left.
He spun in that direction and saw a man hurrying toward them across the beach by the surf line; he was carrying a swinging lantern and a rectangular object that flapped in the wind, and after a tense moment Vickery relaxed, recognizing Fakhouri.
Soon the man had trudged to within a couple of yards of them. Vickery noticed that a small metal box swung on a chain below the lantern, and smoke was wisping away from it on the wind.
“I do hope,” Fakhouri panted, “that was not my new rental car.”
Vickery spread his open hands.
“What are you,” Fakhouri went on, “doing down here?” He took a deep breath and said, “Go make sure the boy Santiago is on top of the hill!—with his own lantern!”
“Ingrid needs baptism first,” said Vickery. He looked back up the slope, doubtful that the car crash could be unrelated to the occult events of this night, and he saw two small figures on the road up there, making their way along the fence.
When they began sliding down the slope, Vickery recognized them. They were Harlowe’s twin nieces, still wearing their overalls.
“Ya rab!” cried Fakhouri, “it is the girls!” He called, “Why are you here, disobedient children?”
The girls came scampering up across the crunching pebbles, and one of them said, “We’re supposed to be here, our uncle said so.”
“Well,” added the other, “we’re supposed to be over by the hill, but we want to close all the apps first.” She smiled at Vickery and Castine and added, “We could tell you were down here, so we made the man in the car stop.”
“He kind of crashed, we made him stop so fast,” admitted her sister.
“Was it one of the Consulate staff?” asked Fakhouri, rocking his head back to look at the sky. “One of the people I left you with?”
“No, we made them let us leave. This was a man driving on the street. He said a lot of mean things to us!”
“But he drove us here anyway,” said the other girl. “Topanga Beach,” she added, evidently proud of remembering the name.
Castine crouched beside them. “What do you mean, close the apps?”
“It’ll be cold,” said one of the girls, and she pointed past Castine at the surf. “We’ve got to get all the way under.”
Castine nodded. “That makes sense. I’ll go with you, okay?” When the girls nodded gratefully, Castine straightened up and turned to Vickery and Fakhouri. “We’ll leave our . . . outer clothing, at least, up here. You gentlemen may stare up the slope till we rejoin you.”
Vickery looked up and down the dark beach; there was no one else in sight. “Okay. Be quick—and just go out far enough so you can submerge, like waist deep. Your mind goes blank for a few seconds when the—” He paused to glance at the girls, “—when the effect happens.”
Fakhouri was muttering under his breath, but he and Vickery obediently shuffled around to face inland.
“I left them in some degree of safety!” Fakhouri burst out, just loudly enough to be heard over the surf and the chilly breeze. “Now they have crashed another car, and with some innocent in it this time!”
Not at all confident that they would accomplish anything here tonight, Vickery was surprised to realize that he was feeling an odd, bleak exhilaration. He nodded and looked down at lantern and the cardboard placard the other man was holding. “Whaddaya got?”
“This,” said Fakhouri, waving the cardboard, “is an image of the Nu hieroglyph, which will extinguish Harlowe’s—Chronic’s!—Ba hieroglyph, if I am standing in the sea and the Santiago boy is properly equipped on the hill.”
“And you’ve got coals in the little box there, to light the lantern with?”
“Punkwood embers, with combustion descended from the Baba Gurgur fire. A long story.” He gave Vickery a mournful look. “What is your own plan?”
“We’re aiming to get a ghost to look at Chronic’s hieroglyph.”
Fakhouri sighed, clearly restraining himself from turning around to see how Castine and the girls were faring. “You and I, my friend, sound—and behave!—like lunatics.”
“Only game in town. Listen, I don’t care what Ingrid said, I’m going to—” He turned back toward the sea, but saw a flurry of clothing and heard a protesting squeak, so he faced the slope again; and less than a minute later, Castine and Lexi and Amber came hurrying up to where he and Fakhouri stood. All three were shivering, and their hair was sopping wet.
“The g-girls saved me,” said Castine. “I think I—passed out.”
“We’ve done it before,” said perhaps Lexi.
“Couple of times,” added the one who might have been Amber.
Looking at the bedraggled girls and Castine, Vickery’s momentary exhiliration blew away in the cold wind. “Let’
s,” he said, eyeing the slope and imagining the hill and the dark field beyond the highway, “get to the other side.”
Santiago had crossed the bridge over the creek silently in the deep shadows of the surrounding trees, but just as he started toward the path whose zig-zag course would have led him to the top of the hill, a hard impact between his shoulders knocked him off his feet. His unlit lantern with its attached tinderbox flew out of his hand and disappeared in the shrubbery, and he landed on his belly, lying on his gun and Fakhouri’s cardboard placard.
Before he could roll over, two strong hands clamped on his wrists and drew them together, and then he felt a plastic cable-tie zipped tight around them. Next moment the hands grabbed his upper arms and hoisted him to his feet and then patted him down. The pistol was pulled from his pocket and a man’s voice said, “Whoa! Let’s see what the boss says about you.”
The man slid the gun into the waistband of his pants; then, gripping Santiago’s bound wrists in one hand and the placard in the other, he marched the boy back across the unsteady bridge and across a patch of dirt toward one of several small tents that had been set up in the field between the two hills and Topanga Canyon Boulevard. Strings of lights glowed around the tent roofs, and a generator purred in the distance. A couple of dozen people were milling around, their smiling or troubled faces visible when they drifted close to the tents. Santiago looked longingly at the tree branch from which he had watched the capture of Vickery and Castine this afternoon.
He was being shoved toward a picnic table under one of the tents, where two women sat on either side of a man in a black turtleneck sweater; they seemed to be trying to calm him down.
“Nobody’s going to interrupt it,” one of the women was telling him, her voice tight with evident impatience, “we’re entirely above-board—we’ve got the general liability insurance and the Temporary Special Events permit from the cops. Tony and Biloxi are—”
“Who’s the fellow with the officer’s hat, then?” the man demanded, rubbing his eyes. “Everywhere I look, Agnes, there he is! He’s really there.”
Agnes shrugged, but the other woman said, “Oh—that’s a train conductor’s hat. It’s a computer-generated image of Tom Hanks, from the movie Polar Express. Biloxi got a dozen posters of him and put ’em up all around the site, to scare off ghosts. It’s not real.”
“But does it really speak?” The man dropped his hands. “The sky is breathing!” he said. “I can hear it!” He looked past Agnes at Santiago and his captor. “What’s this?”
“Tony,” said Agnes, “I don’t think this is—”
“I caught this kid,” said the man who was marching Santiago forward by jerking upward on his wrists. “I took a gun from him, and he was carrying this.” Tony’s hand extended from behind Santiago, holding out the cardboard sheet with Fakhouri’s hieroglyph printed on it.
The man in the turtleneck sweater reared back, his eyes wide. “It’s the sea, crowding up!” he yelled. “Tony—if anyone can still hear me!—take this fish away and kill it, and bury its contrary sigil.” Harlowe was now looking frantically back and forth at his hands on the table, as if he couldn’t see them.
“Mr. Harlowe,” said the other woman hastily, “It’s a boy. Just lock him in the—”
Harlowe looked up. “Kill it, kill it!” he shrilled, and Tony shoved Santiago away from the table, away from the lighted tents.
“Outside the perimeter!” called Agnes. “We can’t have a ghost in here.”
Pushed from behind, Santiago had to walk or fall. He trudged ahead, away from the lights, and was directed between two of a row of signs—looking back as he passed them, he saw that each bore the image Harlowe must have been talking about, a moustached man in an official-looking hat.
Santiago knew that Tony still had his gun; but the man would probably look around after he halted at a good place for an execution, well away from the lights, and Santiago was mentally rehearsing a backward stomp on the man’s instep and a quick whirl to . . . well, to kick him in the balls and then head-butt him if he bent forward, or kick the gun out of his hand, or something. Maybe lunge backward and knock him over, and then hope to get teeth to his throat? Santiago’s heart was pounding in his chest, and he found he was counting his paces, hoping for a high number.
Footsteps thudded behind them—and not the heavy impacts of adult feet. A moment later two little girls had overtaken them and were walking through the weeds alongside Santiago. He noticed that their hair clung damply to their foreheads.
“You’re walking the wrong way,” said one. “You’ll miss the show.”
“Lexi, Amber,” said Tony, his voice sounding strained, “you girls go on back to your uncle. This is none of your business.”
“Get help,” said Santiago tightly. “This man means to kill me with that gun he’s got in his belt.”
The girls let their shoulders slump and stared past Santiago. He heard Tony yelp, and the cardboard sheet dropped, and then he heard something thump on the dirt. Tony’s hand released his bound wrists.
Animation returned to the girls’ faces, and one of them giggled. “He doesn’t have a gun.”
“He has a knife, though,” said the other. “Tony, cut that ribbon off him. What are you being so mean for?” Her voice became louder: “Cut it off him!”
Tony grunted and his feet scuffed on the dirt, but after a few seconds Santiago heard a click, and then felt the cold spine of a knife blade pass between his wrists, and his hands sprang apart. He stepped quickly away from Tony and turned to eye him warily. The man looked angry and scared.
“Go back to where Uncle Simon is,” one of the girls advised Tony. “You’re only getting into trouble out here.”
Tony opened his mouth, but it shut abruptly, rocking his head back. He swiveled around, flailing his arms, and hopped forward, then began running back toward the tent.
The girls went running away after him without a glance at Santiago. He considered calling out to thank them, then just crouched to pick up the gun and the placard.
He shivered. Those girls made Tony drop the gun and let me go, he thought. Without touching him! What the hell is that?
He was glad they had done it, and glad they were gone.
He peered back toward the tent where Harlowe, apparently insane now, sat with the two women; and when Tony and the girls ran up to it, the Agnes woman stood up and glared out into the darkness in Santiago’s direction.
He slid the gun back into his sweatshirt pocket and hurried away, sidling between the groups of restless people toward the waving trees by the creek. He intended to quickly work his way back west along the bank to the bridge, retrieve his lantern and tinderbox—which he prayed had not broken open—and then climb the hill. He wasn’t sure he would have time, before imminent midnight, to follow the widely diverging doglegs of the hill path, and decided to simply climb straight up the slope, thrashing his way though the irregular areas of shrubbery and crossing segments of the ascending path as he came to them.
Another row of signs stood ahead of him, each of these also bearing the image of the man in the hat. He stepped between two of them and hurried on, and when he reached the clustered trees and bushes that flanked the creek, he looked back—and for a moment Agnes was clearly visible in the light from one of the tents. She was moving in his direction, and he was pretty sure she was holding a gun.
He ducked into the deep shadows around the trees. The wind was rustling the leaves in the branches overhead, and the creek provided a steady rippling whisper, and he didn’t worry about the fainter sounds his sneakers made, brushing through weeds and scuffing over rocks. He was very aware of the weight of his own gun swinging at his side. When he passed a gap in the trees he glanced out across the narrow plain, but didn’t see Agnes among the people around the lighted tents. He listened intently for any sounds of someone coming along the bank behind him, but heard only the wind and the creek.
He reached the bridge, and when he crossed it he stop
ped and looked up toward the top of the hill. A dark spot was moving laterally across the pale hillside, and Santiago realized that it was the head of a man walking along the dogleg path. The man had a beard, and was descending.
Santiago knew it must be the old brujo who he had confronted in the ruins below the San Pedro cliffs this morning, the one Vickery had called Chronic. Santiago had seen him walk up this hill this afternoon—and now he was walking down. The boy quickly swept his gaze over the steep, bumpy slope, trying to estimate a route that would take him to the top without intersecting Chronic’s looping descent.
Then Santiago crouched and gripped the gun in his pocket, for two figures were picking their way along the path ahead of him. They were a man and a woman, and the man turned and looked back.
“Santiago!” he whispered, and the boy recognized the figures of Vickery and then Castine.
Vickery let his hand fall out of his pocket. The overcast sky and the lights on the tents beyond the creek provided enough diffuse illumination for him to have recognized Santiago in the dimness. The boy was carrying what appeared to be a sheet of cardboard.
Santiago was clearly reassured to see them, and to hear Vickery’s shoes scuff in the dirt.
“You’re not ghosts!” Santiago whispered. “You got away from the tar and the monsters!”
“No thanks to—” began Castine, but Vickery waved her to silence. Santiago had, after all, told them that he’d leave with Fakhouri if there was trouble at the tar pits.
Santiago jerked his head back toward the bridge. “There’s a woman maybe coming behind me with a gun.” He turned to the side and crouched beside a clump of tall weeds, and when he straightened up he was holding a duplicate of the lantern Fakhouri had, right down to the metal box swinging from it on a chain. The boy held the unlit lantern up, and was visibly relieved to see a wisp of smoke trailing from the box.
All three of them jumped then, for a screech of electronic audio feedback sounded from the field on the other side of the creek, and then an amplified voice that Vickery recognized as Harlowe’s boomed out: “How doth the little crocodile—” A loud clattering followed, and then another man’s voice echoed through the trees: “All of you are supposed to get in a line now, come on—it’s almost time, folks—” The voice was interrupted by “And pour the waters of the Nile on every golden scale!” and then resumed, “Damn it, line up, please! Shit, can you get him back—?”
