by Tim Powers
The megaphone was turned off with an echoing snap, and Vickery heard cursing and splashing in the creek, some distance behind Santiago. It seemed clear that the woman who had been pursuing the boy found it more urgent to take her place in the line over there.
Santiago glanced up the hill and without any further word began scrambling through the weeds, up the slope. The sheet of cardboard he carried flapped in the wind.
Vickery took Castine’s elbow, and they turned and resumed their previous course along the dark path. “I think Santiago’s woman abandoned the chase, but heads up.” He drew Taitz’s gun.
Castine nodded. “Where are we, uh, going?”
“Where else?”
She made a soft khaa sound that expressed both fear and resignation, but she followed him as he led the way along the creek bank.
At one pont he leaned back to get a view of the hill through a gap in the overhanging branches, and then stepped to the side and looked more carefully. “There’s . . . a guy walking down, along the path,” he said. “It’s got to be Chronic.”
“Then hurry. You still got Ragotskie?”
Vickery’s left hand darted to his pocket and kneaded the fabric, and he exhaled through clenched teeth. “Got him.”
This creek-side path was a curl of lesser darkness between the trees. They moved along quickly, and after a dozen paces Vickery didn’t need to waste breath asking Castine if she heard the inorganic singing that had started up, lilting from the treetops and the dense wild bushes. “What’s that one?” she panted. “That’s ghosts singing, isn’t it?”
“Yes.” The night seemed colder,and hostile. “That’s ‘House of the Rising Sun.’ Hold up,” he added then, for dimly in the shadows he could see the low brick wall they had noted this afternoon. The calla lilies were pale beacons in the shadows.
This was where the terrible old house had stood, and he was sure that Harlowe and his lined-up followers would shortly march across the creek and come here, to the same spot where the egregore had been partially awakened in ’68.
“We’re at ground zero,” he said.
Vickery had seen a row of signs standing out on the plain, and apparently each one had the image of a man’s face on it; probably those were intended to provoke the uncanny valley effect in ghosts drawn to the event. It was clear that there were ghosts on this side of the creek, in the trees and underbrush, but Harlowe must mean to have his people carry the repelliing signs across with them.
Castine had slid to a stop in the darkness. “Ghosts are awake and singing. Let’s call Ragotskie.”
Vickery stepped up onto the low brick embankment, wincing as the damp fabric of his trousers slid across the gash in his thigh, and he and moved a few yards up the slope. When Castine had followed and was standing beside him, he dug in his shirt pocket and carefully took out the little firing pin. He raised it, then looked at Castine. “What’s his first name?”
“Elisha. I’ll do it. Drop it into my hand without touching me. Carefully!”
Vickery squinted at the pale oval of her face, then followed the line of her throat and arm until he could make out her upturned, tar-spotted palm. He lowered his own hand over hers and let go of the firing pin.
She closed her fist and stepped back. “Good.” Holding the thing between thumb and forefinger now, she lifted it, and with her free hand she pulled the old sock from her coat pocket. She took a deep breath, glanced nervously at Vickery, then called, “Elisha, we need your help to free Agnes.” She and Vickery both waited, but the only sounds were the ghost voices singing.
“Elisha Ragotskie,” Castine went on, “Agnes needs you now.” She gave Vickery an anxious look. “Where’s the damn sigil? Ragotskie’s ghost has to look at it!”
At that moment the amplified voice boomed again from out there among the tents: “When I count to three, all hold hands, and the two on the ends raise your free hands—they’ll clasp together when we become God! And—” More thumping and feedback followed, and then Harlowe’s voice rang out, singing, “We’ll leave behind this old gray shore, climb to the sky!”
Vickery looked up in alarm. “God,” he whispered, “Harlowe’s doing it out there, not here where the house was! How the hell do we get into the middle of them?”
“Cross the creek, quick,” said Castine breathlessly, “we’ve got to do it before they all—”
“One!” called the amplified voice.
“But the face on those signs—!”
“Two!”
Vickery heard heavy footsteps in the brush above him, and when he turned he saw the shape of a tall man striding down the last loop of the terraced slope as if down a stairway.
“Three, hold hands!” boomed the amplified voice from the plain.
And the branches overhead suddenly thrashed, and Vickery and Castine both involuntarily exhaled as the air was sucked out of their lungs; a moment later a gust of wind rocked them back on their heels, and when they inhaled they both coughed at the harsh metallic scent of ozone.
For an instant Vickery squinted against sudden, relatively bright yellow light—he glimpsed a stained plaster wall in front of him, and a window, and sand under his feet—
—And the night closed in again. He opened his mouth to ask Castine if she had experienced the flash vision too, but a silhouette figure was now standing between her and himself. It was rocking forward, bending over, as if it had stomach cramps. Vickery could hear Harlowe’s people shouting in rapid unison now, out on the plain.
“Where is Agnes?” the close figure said in a groaning voice.
“She—damn it—needs you,” said Castine, with a nervous glance past Vickery, “we just need to wade—”
“No,” said Vickery, “a bridge—”
Again the vision of a shabby, sand-floored room intruded on Vickery’s senses.
He stepped back from the window, which showed only featureless black night, and turned around.
By the sickly yellow glow of bare light bulbs dangling on cords, he saw Castine standing a few feet away, her coat and trousers streaked with tar and mud; the form of Elisha Ragotskie, looking solid and three-dimensional here, was hunched and bracing itself on the wall beside her. It wore round black-frame glasses and a white shirt and red suspenders, just as Ragotskie had when they’d first seen him. The ghost singing wasn’t audible now, and music was playing from speakers somewhere—Vickery recognized the eerie guitar of Jimi Hendrix’s “And the Wind Cries Mary.”
A dozen other people were in the room—men in robes or worn denim, young women in cut-off shorts or long skirts, faces with beards, arms with tattoos, amid smells of incense and marijuana and sweat and patchouli oil—several of them were sitting on a couch against the far wall, a couple by the window to Vickery’s right, and a cluster around the foot of a spiral staircase to his left. The conversations were loud, but overlapping and indistinct. A man carrying a bottle of Mateus rosé wine blundered into Vickery and lurched away across the sand toward the staircase, with a mumble that might have been an apology.
And hanging on the wall across from Vickery, above the couch, was the wooden board with the carved man-headed hawk figure on it.
Vickery shuddered and turned to Ragotskie’s ghost. “You need to—”
“You said save Agnes,” the thing croaked. Its face was pale and misted with sweat. “Where have all the flowers gone?”
“You need to look at the image on that board,” said Vickery, pointing, “to save Agnes.”
A couple of the people on the couch were now staring in evident puzzlement toward the newly-materialized trio. One young woman wearing a feathered hat and a woolen shawl took off a pair of rainbow sunglasses and called something Vickery didn’t hear, and pointed past him. Glancing behind, Vickery saw nothing but an open door and several people standing on a porch outside . . . and two or three lights bobbing in the distance. He returned his attention to Ragotskie’s ghost.
Castine was wringing her hands. “You need to be initiated!”
“I’m initiated already,” the thing said, peering around past its shoulder at her.
No, you’re not, thought Vickery. Elisha Ragotskie was, but you’re not him, even if you think you are. God help you, you’re not even a you.
“You’ll be a toxin in the egregore!” whispered Castine. “Look at it again!”
“I’m the opposite of naked,” the thing said wonderingly, looking down at itself. “I’ve got clothes, but there’s nobody in them.”
Vickery thought he heard the sound of engines over the music now, but a movement on his left caught his attention.
Chronic had continued walking down the hill path, but now he was stepping down the spiral staircase, and Vickery only recognized him because he had seen the man in the echo visions. Just as he had appeared in them, as he had looked in 1968—just as he had looked when he’d shot Dot Palmer on the porch right outside—Chronic was young and clean-shaven, wearing a green paisley Nehru jacket, with tangled brown hair hanging to his shoulders. This was the first time Vickery had seen him thus in full color.
And walking down the stairs in front of him was a woman who appeared to be in her mid-30s, in an embroidered linen blouse and black Capri pants.
A huff of breath from Castine made Vickery turn his head.
“That’s Gale Reed!” she whispered. “Her ghost, I mean! Did we make her die this morning?”
“Maybe not,” muttered Vickery. “It’s 1968 here.”
The sound of engines outside was louder now.
Chronic was speaking, though Vickery couldn’t hear what he said over the music, and he slapped the shoulder of the woman below him on the stairs. Then he paused and looked past her, toward the doorway.
Vickery turned in that direction, and stepped back, for a big, dark-haired man in a leather jacket had stepped in. He appeared to be in his late 20s, but Vickery knew it must be Sandstrom.
Castine must have realized it too, for she called, “Look out!” in the moment before Chronic pulled the revolver from under his jacket and pointed it at Sandstrom.
The gunshot was loud in the confined space of the room, and for a stunned moment Vickery saw Sandstrom as a double exposure; the young man tumbled to the piled sand at Vickery’s feet, while the bald-headed old Sandstrom whose barn Vickery and Castine had visited this afternoon was still standing; and Vickery realized that they had experienced this moment, from Sandstrom’s point of view, while sitting in the Nissan in the Canter’s parking lot this morning.
And now half a dozen angrily shouting men crowded in through the doorway, and pushed past the elderly Sandstrom as if they didn’t see him. Vickery got a quick impression of beards and leather jackets, but he saw pistols and shotguns in their hands—he spun to knock Castine backward onto the sand as his own hand slid into his jacket pocket and closed on the grip of Taitz’ gun.
He threw himself down on top of Castine, and when he turned his head he had to peer past the ankles of the Ragotskie ghost, which was still standing. The members of the Gadarene Legion who had stumbled out across the drifted sand began shooting,and the battering hammer-strokes of the guns was punctuated by screams; Vickery saw bodies jerk and fall, and he had the gun out now, ready to kill any of the berserk intruders who might turn their attention toward himself or Castine. Plaster chips were flying, and the air was suddenly sharp with the sulfur smell of burnt gunpowder and the copper smell of blood.
From the staircase Chronic fired repeatedly into the Gadarene Legion group, and Vickery saw one of them punched right back out through the doorway. The young woman in the feathered hat had got to her feet, but a blast from one of the Gadarene shotguns spun her around and threw her face-down onto the sand.
Over the screams and the gunshots, Vickery heard Chronic wail, “Cayenne!”
Castine stretched out her right arm and tugged at the cuff of Ragotskie’s pants; the ghost tumbled down as if she had snapped a string it had been suspended from. Its face was toward her, gaping through the round glasses in horrified incomprehension.
She pointed past it at the board on the far wall. “Look at the sigil!”
“Will the wind ever remember?” the ghost mumbled. “But for her, yes.” It obediently rotated its head, and Vickery thought the board on the wall seemed to shake—though that might have been just the effect of stray shot pellets hitting it in the resounding bedlam.
The Ragotskie ghost was crumpling inward like a deflating balloon, and the sigil on the wall was definitely changing now. It shrank, and became dimmer—
And all the light was extinguished, and Vickery and Castine were lying on the dirt above the low brick wall in the sudden darkness; one spot of lesser darkness in Vickery’s sight was a rectangle above him and a few yards away, and when he forced his eyes to focus on it, he saw that it was the sigil board that white-bearded Chronic was now holding over his head, and again Vickery was reminded of Moses carrying the tablets down from Mount Sinai.
People were splashing and chanting now in the creek behind Vickery, and someone was standing to his left; and when the person stepped back he fell off the low brick wall and sprawled onto an inert body lying in the path.
Sandstrom rolled to his feet and stared down at the body.
“It’s Coastal Eddie!” Sandstrom barked, and Vickery recalled that the unlit lamp in Sandstrom’s barn was reserved for the arrival of Coastal Eddie’s ghost.
Sandstrom looked up from the body toward old Chronic, who was standing a few yards up the slope, and Sandstrom’s bared teeth seemed to catch all the glimmering light as he pulled a gun from his belt.
But now a crowd of people came stamping and panting up from the creek bank behind him, chanting in fast unison, and they shouldered the bald old man aside as they crossed the path and scrambled up over the low brick wall, all facing Chronic and the board he held up in both hands. Many of them were waving the Polar Express signs, and Vickery was glad that Castine had already got Ragotskie’s ghost to look at the sigil and surrender to initiation.
The air seemed to shiver with a powerful but subsonic roar, and again Vickery caught the oily-metal smell of ozone.
He saw threads or webs that seemed to be blown in on the wind, but they thickened and began to glow, and in moments the crowd was enmeshed in a rippling incandescent grid that curved up along the hill and to the sides, possibly enveloping the field beyond the creek and even Pacific Coast Highway on the other side of the hill—
And it was alive, and the breath stopped in Vickery’s throat as its transcendent attention simultaneously focused on each person. Vickery felt that it was aware of every proton and neutron and electron in his body, and every neural spark in his brain. His small identity was being crushed by its nearly infinite one.
The flexing grid was unfolding in more directions than there were, from its unfathomable entirety down to scales far below human comprehension, and it formed Klein-bottle funnels that snaked out and attached themselves to the heads of Harlowe’s followers; no funnel warped out toward Vickery’s head, nor—he registered as he recoiled away from the psychic drainings—toward Castine’s.
He was distantly aware of something like a jellyfish lying in the dirt beside him, and when one end of it managed to hike itself up, he saw its tiny wobbling head—eyeless, blind but struggling—and the little slack ribbons that had once resembled red suspenders.
A golden filigree funnel bent out of the grid, or out of the treetops or the sky, and touched Ragotskie’s diminished ghost.
And the grid sprang apart there, and then in other places, and a leprous, pewtery sheen spread out across the fractal web and dimmed its golden luminosity—and through its fading, wounded gray fabric Vickery saw a lantern flare at the top of the hill. The egregore web folded from everywhere and receded toward the light.
The crushing weight was abruptly lifted from Vickery’s mind. An irregular drumbeat of feet stamping the ground made him get up even as Castine was pushing at his chest.
People were crowded around them i
n the darkness, all furiously contorting and hopping now; over their grunting gasps he heard ghosts singing again, more loudly than before, and it was some familiar song. Vickery gripped the shoulder of Castine’s coat and pulled her to her feet.
Looking around tensely, he thought of Stanley Ancona’s words—dancing for days, till they dropped. The egregore hadn’t had time to commit suicide, but it had clearly died; been killed. He noticed that some of the figures around him were not dancing, but singing—and the elbows and ducking heads of the dancers passed through those.
“Half of these are ghosts!” whispered Castine.
Vickery pushed her toward the creek bank. “Cross running water,” he told her, “and look at your feet, not at them.” It occurred to him that the song the ghosts were singing was now Fogwillow’s “Elegy in a Seaside Meadow.”
Vickery and Castine shoved and ducked their way through the crowd of dancing or singing figures, and as they splashed into the cold, rushing water of the creek, Vickery glanced back.
For a moment a gap in the churning crowd let him see Sandstrom, who had climbed back up onto the brick wall; Chronic was standing a few yards higher up the slope, uselessly gesticulating now, and the old Gadarene Legionnaire raised his pistol and fired it at him. The sound of the shot was muffled by singing and stamping feet, but the muzzle flash made a stark strobe-light tableau of the moment, fixing in Vickery’s memory the image of a torn black dot between Chronic’s white eyebrows.
CHAPTER TWENTY:
Thanks a Lot, Girl, Just the Same
For several ecstatic seconds Agnes Loria had felt her self dissolving in the multidimensional golden matrix of the egregore, all her memories fading like dreams as she awakened to an infinitely vaster universe; she was a massless and unaware virtual particle in instant interactions among identical particles—
