by Tim Powers
And then the matrix broke, curdled, folded away, and she was aware of dirt against her physical cheek and pain in a joint that was inescapably a part of her individual body. Nerves in limbs that were her own twitched with the impulse to get up and jump and stomp her feet, but the pain in—yes, it was her knee—quelled it.
She rolled over and forced her arms and legs to lie still. Breathing deeply, she tried to remember what had happened.
She had seen the crooked old house appear among the trees on the other side of the creek, its windows lit and its open door spilling out ascending chords from an electric guitar—and then she had watched in bewilderment as a motorcycle, and then three more, rode from the direction of Topanga Canyon Boulevard across the flat field between the hills. She got a quick impression of extended front forks and low back ends as the wild-haired leather-clad bikers swerved between trees—and sometimes seemed to ride straight through trees!—and then they stood up on the footpegs to ride right across the creek.
Yes, and she had leaned over the distracted figure of Harlowe and gripped his shoulder in the same moment that gunfire had begun popping and booming over there, and Harlowe’s four-foot image of the sigil had torn free of its frame and gone scything away in the direction of the impossible house.
She had slapped Harlowe’s face and yelled, “It’s happening over there!”
Harlowe had looked around in confusion, but by the time he faced the creek, the house had disappeared and his followers were racing away in that direction.
Then, for a brief few seconds, the egregore had been alive—all-forgiving, inclusive.
And after those few precious seconds it had died and been pulled away.
Agnes sat up now, clenching her fists against the rhythmic twitching in her muscles, and she pulled herself up onto the picnic bench. She blinked in the glare of the light bulbs strung along the fringe of the tent roof, and saw that Harlowe was still sitting on the other side of the table.
Blood streaked his mouth and chin, and he was gripping the edges of the table as his feet clopped and scuffed under it. His gaze was fixed toward the hill beyond the creek, and when Loria looked in that direction she saw the bright yellow dot of a lantern at the top of the hill.
“The night has been choked,” he said hoarsely, pointing one spasming finger toward the hill. “That boy with the contrary sigil—he threw God into the sea.”
Choked, thought Loria. We had nirvana—we were God!—and then it was snatched away.
I’d rather never have had it at all, she thought dazedly, than to have it experience me, accept and engulf me, and then go away and leave me intolerably stranded here and now.
She sighed, emptying her lungs, and made herself take notice of here and now.
She knew that most of Harlowe’s people were still on the other side of the creek; she couldn’t see them through the impenetrable blackness of the clustered trees, but she could hear their fast, imbecilic chanting and the drumroll of their stamping feet. Even out here, a couple of hundred feet from the concentration of that mob, Loria could feel the impulse in her muscles to get up and dance—clumsily, mindlessly. Clearly it was affecting Harlowe too.
One figure was only a hundred feet away, gyrating and flailing, but headed this way. Its spasms lessened as it moved closer to the table, away from the creek. She focused her despicably limited eyesight on it, and when the person reeled up into the tent’s light, she recognized Tony. He was carrying an old wooden board.
“It was here,” Tony said, frowning and still helplessly bobbing in place. His face was wet, possibly from having splashed through the creek. “I was in it!”
Harlowe blinked up at him. “Did you see it fly to the light on the hill? It’s banished, gone forever. All fled, all done, the sea has won.”
“But I have its sigil,” Tony said, “look!” He held up the board, and Loria saw that a carved wooden image of the familiar man-headed hawk was attached the front of it. “And old guy over there had it, but somebody shot him.”
“That looks to me,” said Harlowe—carefully, as if choosing words were like picking up pieces of broken glass—“like a null set, containing nothing now.” He took a deep breath and went on, “How many boys did I tell you to kill, only Tony?”
“The twins are here somewhere,” Tony protested, “they made me cut him loose and let him go.” He looked past the table and added, “Here they are, you can ask them.”
Agnes was peering at two small figures who were hurrying up from the perimeter, each carrying one of the Polar Express signs—but at a sudden gunshot she jumped and whipped her head around.
Tony was tumbling backward to the dirt, and Harlowe was lowering a pistol that had kicked up in recoil.
He swiveled around on the bench, and Loria flinched as the line of the gun barrel swept across her.
But it was pointing now at the twins. “You let him drown it!” he said. “You—reptiles—I’m alone forever now, look!”
The girls dropped their signs. Loria saw that their hair was wet, and they were shivering. “Don’t yell at us,” warned one.
“Our mom and dad used to yell at us,” added the other, hugging herself. “You told us yourself what to do about that.”
Harlowe’s weirdly disorganized mind must have recalled that the twins were capable of making him drop the gun, or even turn it on himself, for he quickly raised it.
Loria tried to lunge across the table, but her twitching arm slipped on the wooden surface and her face was down when the gunshot cracked the air; but when she looked up, Harlowe was leaning back, his hand empty. It took several blinking seconds for Loria to realize that the gleam on the shoulder of his torn black pullover was blood, from a fresh bullet wound.
Someone had shot him; Loria understood that much. But when she squinted out at the darkness surrounding the tent, she saw at least half a dozen people backing away and muttering, and none of them seemed to be armed. She was tensed, but no more shots followed.
Harlowe’s left hand was tentatively touching the bloody rip in his sweater; his mouth was opening and closing but producing no detectable sound.
Loria got unsteadily to her feet. Briefly she thought about putting some sort of makeshift bandage on Harlowe’s wound; then she just stepped around him and looked down at Tony. His eyes were open, staring emptily at the night sky, and she didn’t see any rise and fall of his chest, and she didn’t care anyway. Harlowe’s gun must have fallen under the bench, but she bent down and, with both hands, lifted the board Tony had dropped.
One figure was running this way, and Loria looked up. The person who came puffing up to the table was the moustached man who had burst into Foster’s house with Vickery, three hours ago—his pants and shoes were sopping wet below a plaid sport coat, and he held a revolver still pointed at Harlowe.
In an oddly accented voice, he said, “Girls, you must come away with me,” and Lexi and Amber hurried around the table to him. The gun was wobbling in his hand now, and he lowered it to point at the dirt.
“You shot Uncle Simon,” observed one of the girls. “Is it over?”
“Let’s get Pollo Loco again,” the other said brightly. Then, looking past the stranger, she called, “Not at that house with no TV!”
Loria had to squint at the blackly-smeared couple who had pushed their way through the cluster of bystanders into the light, and she recognized Sebastian Vickery and Ingrid Castine.
The two of them hurried to the table, though Vickery seemed to be limping. Loria noted their filthy clothes and Castine’s wet hair. What on earth had they all been doing?
Castine looked from Harlowe, pale and mumbling and gingerly touching his bleeding shoulder, to Tony’s body sprawled motionless on the dirt, then turned to the man who had shot Harlowe. “Get these girls out of here,” she said.
The man nodded and muttered something to her. He dropped his revolver into his coat pocket, then took the girls’ hands and hustled them away toward the path that led back to Pacific Coas
t Highway.
They were passed by another short figure that came loping up toward the tent—a boy, holding a gun that looked too big for his hand. When he stepped into the ring of light and brushed a lock of black hair away from his face, Loria saw that it was the boy who had brought what Harlowe had called the contrary sigil, and who, it seemed, had somehow caused the egregore to fail and vanish.
The boy quickly took in the situation and then said to Castine, “You still owe me ten dollars.”
“What?” Castine looked exhausted. “Oh God, I do not, shut up.” To Vickery, she said, “The girls are all right, let’s go.”
He nodded. “Right, back the way we—”
Still holding the board Tony had dropped, Loria stepped back to face Castine and Vickery and the boy. “Look at him,” she cried, nodding toward the withdrawn figure of Harlowe. “He’s nothing now—I have nothing now!” She raised the inert sigil board and shook it. “This is dead now. But what happened? What did you do?”
Santiago looked back in the direction Fakhouri and the girls had gone, clearly not sure himself what had been done here tonight.
Vickery was tugging at the shoulder of Castine’s muddy coat, but she pulled free and stepped up to Loria. “We didn’t do it,” she said harshly. “Maybe Fakhouri and Santiago helped—disposed of the damned thing into the sea—but Elisha Ragotskie’s ghost raised up its poor ruined head and sacrificed itself—to p-poison the thing—!” She took a deep breath, then shook her head and turned away. To Vickery she said, “Yes, let’s get back to the world.”
“I hate him, you know!” said Loria loudly, “I—”
Fast stamping footsteps sounded now from the direction of the creek, and Loria turned that way. A flash and ear-stunning pop were simultaneous with a hard knock against the board she was holding.
She stepped back to catch her balance, dropping the board, and then Ingrid Castine slammed into her from the side. Both of them tumbled to the dirt as a second shot split the air where Loria had been standing.
“They’re all gone, lost!” yelled the shooter, who she now saw was a bald-headed old man in a ragged leather jacket. “But the sigil is mine!” The gun was in his left hand, and moving to aim at her again.
Vickery had to step around Santiago to get a clear shot, and when Sandstrom swung the gun down toward the two women on the ground, Vickery fired two fast shots into the man’s chest; and even as Sandstrom tumbled forward, Harlowe suddenly bent down and groped under the bench. When he straightened up he was holding a small-caliber revolver.
He raised it toward Santiago, and two simultaneous gunshots battered the air; Harlowe was kicked sideways across the bench and rolled off it onto the dirt, face down.
In the moment of ringing silence that followed, Vickery looked at Santiago, and saw the boy slowly lower the semi-automatic that he was holding now in both hands. Vickery tipped his own gun up.
“My shot hit him first,” the boy said loudly. “For Mr. Laquedem.”
“Okay,” said Vickery.
Sandstrom’s right hand was moving, and Vickery swung his gun down to point again at the man; but Sandstrom was extending his arm across the dirt to touch the fallen board. Breath was hitching in the old man’s throat, but he managed to pronounce, hoarsely, “In some times.” He coughed, and went on, “Not all.” His body shivered then, and he was still.
Vickery turned toward the two women. Castine and Agnes were both getting to their feet. A number of people were hanging back in the darkness outside the reach of the lights, clearly wary of the gunfire.
“We need to be somewhere else, right now,” Vickery said to Castine. He turned to Santiago. “You too—get lost, quick.”
The boy nodded and sprinted away toward the row of upright signs and the inland hill.
Agnes was staring down at Harlowe’s body. After a few moments she kicked one of his red cowboy boots. The foot rocked loosely.
She squinted up at Castine. “I wish you hadn’t knocked me out of the way of that bullet.”
“I didn’t do it for you,” Castine said. She brushed her disordered hair back with a tar-spotted hand, and exhaled. “We promised Ragotskie that we’d save you. I got to deliver on it.”
“Save me,” said Agnes scornfully. She turned and began plodding away in the direction of Topanga Canyon Boulevard, where Vickery supposed they had parked the bus.
“We’re out of here,” he said to Castine, stepping out of the light in the direction Fakhouri and the girls had gone, and he instinctively took her hand.
Castine gasped, and he felt her hand twitch in his—but no vision intruded on them, and they were simply striding quickly across the dark field.
“Do we just,” said Castine, waving back with her free hand, “leave them? All . . . that?”
“You want to stay and talk to the police?”
In spite of the pain in his leg that impeded his stride, she had to release his hand and hurry to keep up with him. They skirted wide around the creek, and Vickery glanced across it toward the spot where the spiral staircase house had intruded into 2018 from 1968, and where a lot of Harlowe’s people were still grunting and spastically dancing in the shadows under the trees.
In less than a minute they had reached the dirt road where they had been shot with tranquilizer darts almost twelve hours earlier, and Vickery caught Castine’s shoulder and slowed their pace; but there was no sound of sirens on the wind, and he didn’t see any reflections of police car lightbars.
It wasn’t until they had stepped around the posts of the traffic-blocking gate and hurried to the edge of the Pacific Coast Highway pavement that Vickery saw two patrol cars approaching at high speed a hundred yards to his left, and now the night was pierced with flashing red and blue LED lights. The cars turned left onto Topanga Canyon Boulevard, and he could see more approaching from the same direciton.
No other headlights were visible at the moment. He took Castine’s hand again—again with no psychic consequence—and they sprinted across the highway.
They stepped between two low wooden barriers on the other side, onto a driveway that paralleled the highway—and then Vickery saw a man plodding along it in their direction.
Walk on by, Vickery told himself—but the man stopped when they were about to pass him. Vickery slid his hand into his pocket and closed it on the grip of his gun.
Two more police cars turned north on Topanga Canyon Boulevard.
“I saw it jump the hill,” the man said, his voice barely audible above the crash of the surf, “and ground itself in the sea.” Vickery noticed that he had left a trail of wet footprints that gleamed in the white radiance of a streetlight behind him.
Castine stopped too, and peered at him. Hesitantly, she said, “Taitz?”
Taitz! thought Vickery. A surge of adrenalin coursed through his weary muscles, and he drew his gun and raised it in the man’s direction.
Castine said, “You—went into the water?”
Taitz lifted his empty hands, one of which was heavily bandaged, and even in the shadows Vickery saw the man’s tired, ironic smile. “I’m damned if I’ll hide,” he said to Castine. “Damned if I don’t, too, but at least I’ll still be me. With all my own sins.” To Vickery he added, “I believe that’s my gun you’ve got.”
Vickery just nodded.
“You,” said Castine hesitantly, “want a ride?”
Vickery gave her a quick, incredulous look, but Taitz shook his head.
“Thanks a lot, girl, just the same.” And he trudged past them along the pavement.
For several seconds Vickery and Castine looked back, watching him recede in the night; then Vickery took Castine’s elbow firmly, and they began walking back east along the highway shoulder.
“Sorry,” she said. “I just thought—”
“It worked out.”
They strode from one pool of streetlight to the next, and then doggedly on to the one after that. Vickery looked back several times, but Taitz was no longer visible. The wi
nd from the sea on their right was cold, and even Vickery was shivering. He took off his tweed coat and draped it over the shoulders of Castine’s suede coat, though really it could only add weight. But she nodded, walking fast.
A flatbed tow truck with yellow lights flashing sat in the entry to the side road where he had parked Galvan’s Cadillac, and a red sports car with a smashed front end had been winched up onto the bed of it.
Now what, Vickery thought. He stepped around the rumbling grille of the truck, and as he pulled the Cadillac’s keys from his pocket a young man in a sweatsuit strode around from the other side.
“That your car,” he demanded, “with goddamn clowns all over it?” When Vickery nodded and pressed the fob button to unlock the Cadillac’s doors, the man went on, “Two little girls hijacked me, that’s my fucked-up car on the tow truck, and they made me drive into oncoming traffic! Another car already got towed away, it’s a miracle nobody got killed! Your damn clown car made ’em think there was a carnival or something down on the beach!”
Castine had opened the passenger side door, but turned to look back at the man. She was squinting against the tow truck’s lights. “Two little girls had guns? Knives?”
“No,” the man said, “they were—hypnotists!”
“Gotta expect that on Halloween,” said Vickery with a shrug, opening the driver’s side door and getting in, wincing as he flexed his cut thigh. Castine was already huddled in the passenger seat. There was room to the right of the tow truck, and Vickery started the engine and carefully backed past it, turning the steering wheel to the left, until his back bumper tapped a stop sign post. He shifted to drive, steered onto PCH and accelerated east. Two more police cars passed him, going the other way.
“Turn on the heater,” Castine said.
“It’s already on. It’ll be hot in a minute.”
She sat back and closed her eyes. “The police are going to find . . . one unholy mess back there. But I am glad that Taitz uninitiated himself, and didn’t turn all spazzy like the rest of them.”
