by Tim Powers
Litter flies west, papers and leaves and long veils of dust from lots where the tractors wait for morning, and tonight a dry scrap cart-wheeled and skated through Santa Margarita’s nighttime streets; it clung briefly to high branches, skipped over the roofs of parked cars, and at one point did a slow jiggle-dance down the whole length of the north window sill at Guillermo’s Todo Noche Cantina. The only person who noticed it was the old man everybody called Cyclops, who had been drinking coffee at the counter for hours in exchange for a warm, lighted place to pass the night, and until the thing tumbled away at the west end of the windowsill he stared at it, turning his head to give his good eye a clear look at it.
It looked, he thought, like one of those little desiccated devilfish they sell at swap-meets; they cut three slits in the fish’s body before they dry it, so after it dries it looks as if it has a primate body and stunted limbs and a disproportionately large head with huge, empty eye sockets. When you walk out of the swap-meet area in the late afternoon, out of the shadow of the big drive-in movie screen, you sometimes step on the stiff little bodies among the litter of cotton candy and cigarette butts and bits of tortilla.
Cyclops had noticed that it danced west, and when he listened he could hear the warm wind whispering through the parallel streets outside like a slow breath through the channels of a harmonica, seeming to be just a puff short of evoking an audible chord. Realizing that this was no longer a night he needed shelter from, Cyclops laid two quarters on the counter, got to his feet and lumbered to the door.
Outside, he tilted back his devastated hat and sniffed the night. It was the old desert wind, all right, hinting of mesquite and sage, and he could feel the city shifting in its sleep – but tonight there was a taint on the wind, one that the old man smelled in his mind rather than in his nose, and he knew that something else had come into the city tonight too, something that stirred a different sort of thing than leaves and dust.
The night felt flexed, stressed, like a sheet of glass being bent. Alertly Cyclops shambled halfway across Main Street and then stopped and stared south.
After eleven o’clock the traffic lights stopped cycling and switched to a steady metronomic flashing, all the north-south lights flashing yellow for caution while the east-west ones, facing the smaller cross-streets, flashed red for stop. Standing halfway across the crosswalk Cyclops could see more than a mile’s worth of randomly flashing yellow lights receding away south down Main, and about once every minute the flashes synchronized into one relayed pulse that rushed up the long street and past him over his head, toward the traffic circle at Bailey, half a mile north of where he stood.
He’d stood there often late at night, coming to conclusions about things by watching the patterns of disorder and synchronization in the long street-tunnel of flashing yellow lights, and he quickly realized that tonight they were flashing in step more frequently than normal, and only in pulses that swept north, as if delineating a landing pattern for something.
Cyclops nodded grimly. The night was warped, all right – as much curvature as he’d ever seen. The Great Gray-Legged Scissors Men would be out tonight in force.
He squared his shoulders, then strode away purposefully up Main, the once-per-minute relay-pulse of yellow light sweeping past him overhead like luminous birds.
Benny Kemp carried his drink out to the dark porch and sat down on the bench that his father had built there more than fifty years earlier. Someone had once tried to saw it away from the wall, but the solid oak had proved too hard, and the attempt had apparently been abandoned before any serious damage had been done. Running his hand over the wood now in the absolute darkness, Kemp couldn’t even find the ragged groove.
He took a sip of his wine, breathing shallowly and pretending that the air carried the scent of night-blooming jasmine and dewy lawns instead of the smell of age-soured wood and rodent nests, and that it moved. In his imagination he watched moths bumble against the long-gone porch light.
He never turned on the real light; he knew that his cherished fantasy wouldn’t survive the sight of the solid wall that crowded right up against the porch rail. There was a doorway where the porch steps had once been, but it led into the entry hall of the apartment building his father’s house had been converted into, and all that was out there was a pay phone, cheap panelling peeling off the new walls, and, generally, a shopping cart or two. The entry hall and office had been added right onto the front of the old house – completely enclosing the porch and making an eccentric room of it – but he seldom entered or left the building through the new section, preferring the relatively unchanged back stairs.
He leaned back now and let the wine help him pretend. He’d never told any of the long string of renters and landlords that this was the house he had grown up in – he was afraid that sharing that information would diminish his relationship with the old building, and make it impossible for him to sit here quietly like this and, late at night, slide imperceptibly into the past.
The moths thumped and fluttered softly against the light, and, inhaling through the wine fumes, Kemp caught a whiff of jasmine, and then a warm breeze touched his cheek and a moment later he heard a faint pattering as jacaranda flowers, shaken from the tree out front, fell like a sower’s cast of dead butterflies to the sidewalk and the street.
He opened his eyes and saw the tree’s branches shift slowly against the dark sky, and coins of bright moonlight appeared, moved and disappeared in the tree’s restless shadow. Kemp stood up, as carefully as a man with a tray of fragile, antique glass in his hands. He moved to the porch steps, went gingerly down them and then stole down the walkway to the sidewalk.
To his right he could see the railroad yard and, beyond it, the agitated glow that was the freeway. Too … hard, Kemp thought, too solidified, too much certainty and not enough possibility. He looked left, toward the traffic circle. It was quieter in that direction and aside from the moon the only source of illumination was the flashing yellow of the traffic lights. The wind seemed warmer in that direction, too. Trembling, he hurried toward the circle; and though he thought he glimpsed a couple of the tall, lean people in gray leotards – or maybe it was just one, darting rapidly from this shadowed area to that – tonight, for once, he was not going to let them frighten him.
The wind was tunnelled stronger under the Hatton Park bridge, and a plastic bag in a shopping cart bellied full like the sail of a ship, and pulled the cart forward until it stopped against the sneakered foot of an old woman who slept next to it. Mary Francis woke up and looked around. The trash-can fires had all burned out – it had to be closer to morning than to dusk.
She sniffed the intrusive desert wind, and her pulse quickened, for there were smells on it that she hadn’t known in forty years, not since the days when this area was more orange groves than streets.
She fumbled in her topmost coat for one of her mirrors, and after she’d pulled out the irregular bit of silvered glass and stared into it for a few moments she exhaled a harsh sigh of wonder.
She had known this would happen if she worked hard enough at her collecting – and it seemed she finally had. Still staring into the mirror, she stood up and pushed her shopping cart out from under the bridge. In the moonlight all the scraps of cloth in her cart should have looked gray, but instead they glowed with their true color, the special sea-green that was the only hue of rag she would deign to pick up in her daily circuit of the trash cans and dumpsters – the never-forgotten color of the dress she’d worn at her debut in 1923. In recent years it had occurred to her that if she could find even a scrap of that dress, and then hang onto it, it might regenerate itself … slowly, yes, you couldn’t be in a hurry, but if you were willing to wait … and she suspected that if the cloth were with her, it might regenerate her, too … banish the collapsed old wrinkled-bedsheet face and restore her real face, and figure, not only re-create the dress but also the Mary Francis that had worn it …
And look, now on this magic night it had happened
. The face in the mirror was blurry, but it was clearly the face of the girl she’d never really stopped being. Oval face, big dark eyes, pale, smooth skin … that unaffected, trusting innocence.
She turned east, and the focus became clearer – but it was the what’s-this-I-found-in-the-back-of-yer-old-garage face. Quickly she turned west, and was awed by the beauty of her own smile of relief when the girl-face returned, more clearly now.
She was facing the traffic circle. Keeping her eyes fixed on the ever-more-in-focus image in the mirror, she began pushing her shopping cart westward, and she didn’t even notice the agile, faceless gray figures that dropped from trees and jackknifed up out of the sewer vents and went loping silently along toward the circle.
The traffic circle at Main and Bailey was the oldest part of town. Restaurants wanting to show a bit of local color always had to hang a couple of old black-and-white photographs of the circle with Pierce-Arrows and Model-T Fords driving around it and men in bowler hats and high collars sitting on the benches or leaning on the coping of the fountain. People in the restaurants would always look at the old photographs and try to figure out which way was north.
The flattened leathery thing that Cyclops had thought was a dried devilfish sailed on over the roof of the YMCA, frisbeed over the motorcycle cops who were waiting for someone to betray drunkenness by having trouble driving around the circle, and then like a dried leaf it smacked into the pool of the old fountain. It drifted to the tiled pillar in the center and wound up canted slightly out of the water against the tiles, its big empty eyes seeming to watch the rooftops.
“Are you okay?”
“Yes,” he croaked, concealing his irritation at her tone, which had seemed to imply that he must be either crazy or having a fit to jump out of bed that way; but if he had objected she’d reply, in hurt surprise, “All I said was, ‘are you okay?’,” which would put him two points down and give her the right to sigh in a put-upon way and make a show of having trouble getting back to sleep. “Just a dream,” he said shortly.
“Fine,” she said, and then added, just a little too soon, “I only asked.”
He suppressed a grin. She’d been too eager, and done a riposte when there had only been a feint. He gave her a wondering look and said, “Gee, relax, hon. Maybe you were in the middle of a dream too, huh?” He chuckled with a fair imitation of fondness. “We both seem to be acting like lunatics.” One-all, his advantage.
“What was the dream about?” she asked.
Oh no you don’t, he thought. “I don’t remember.” He walked to the window and looked down at Main Street. The palm trees were bending and he could hear the low roaring of the wind.
Debbie rolled over and began breathing regularly, and Roger knew that until she really did go to sleep any noise he made would provoke the rendition of a startled awakening, so he resolved to stand by the window until he was certain she wasn’t shamming. Of course she’d know what he was thinking and try to draw him into an error with convincing breathing-hitches and even – a tactical concession – undignified snortings.
He would wait her out. He stared down at the street and thought about his dream.
It was a dream he used to have fairly frequently when he was a child, though he hadn’t had it since coming to California. Jesus, he thought, and I came to California in ‘57, when I was six years old. What does it mean, that I’m having it again after almost thirty years? And – I remember now – that dream always heralded the arrival of Evelyn, my as-they-like-to-call-it imaginary playmate.
The dream tonight had been so exactly the same as before that when he woke up he’d thought at first that he was in one of the many bedrooms he’d had back east, in the year – 1956, it must have been – when his parents had been moving around so much. The dream always started with a train, seen from a distance, moving down a moonlit track across a field, with buildings a remote un-evenness on the dark horizon. Then, and it was never quite scary in the dream, the whistle wailed and the smokestack emitted a blob of white smoke; the smoke didn’t dissipate – it billowed but kept its volume like a splash of milk in a jug of clear oil, and when the train had disappeared in the distance the blob of smoke slowly formed into a white, blank-eyed face. And then, slow as a cloud, the face would drift into town and move up and down the dark streets, and at every bedroom window it would pause and silently peer in … until it came to Roger’s window. When it came to his, it smiled and at last dissolved away, and then there was the sense of company in his mind.
He remembered, now, the last time he’d had the dream; it had been the night before his parents abandoned him. He had awakened early the next morning, and when his mother had walked into the kitchen to put on the coffee pot he’d already fixed himself a bowl of Cheerios.
“Up already, Rog?” his mother asked him. “What have we told you about getting into the fridge without asking?”
“Sorry,” he’d said, and for at least a year afterward he had been certain that they’d abandoned him because he’d broken the rule about the refrigerator. “Evelyn’s back,” he remarked then, to change the subject.
His mother had frozen, holding the can of ground coffee, and her face had seemed to get leaner. “What –” she began harshly; then, in a desperately reasonable tone, “What do you mean, honey? She can’t be. I know she found us again after we moved from Keyport to Redbank, and all those other times since, but we’re in New York now, almost all the way to Buffalo, she can’t have followed us all that way. You’re just … pretending, this time, right?”
“Nah,” he’d replied carelessly. “But she says it was a long trip. How long since we moved away from Atlantic City?”
His mother had sat down across the table from him, still holding the coffee can. “Five months,” she whispered.
“Yeah, she flew over a river, the … she says Del Ware? And then she had to go around Phil-a-delph-ia, ’cause there was too many people there, and they – them all thinking, and wishing for things – started to bend the air, like too many people on a trampoline, and it would have bent all the way around and made a bubble, and she wouldn’t a been able to get out of it, back to real places. And then, she says, she went around Scranton and Elmira, and now here she is.”
The six-year-old Roger had looked up from his cereal then, and he realized for the first time that his mother was afraid of Evelyn. And now, standing at his bedroom window in Santa Margarita while Debbie pretended to be asleep in the bed behind him, it suddenly and belatedly occurred to him that it might have been Evelyn’s remarkable tracking abilities that had made his parents move so frequently during that year.
But why, he wondered, would they both so fear a child’s imaginary playmate? It wasn’t as if Evelyn could be seen, or move things, or say where lost watches and rings had got to … much less hurt anyone, like the “imaginary playmate” in the story by John Collier. The only one she got even remotely forceful with was me, censoring my dreams whenever I dreamed about things she didn’t like. And hell, when I first started talking about her, my Mom was just amused … used to ask me how Evelyn was, and even cut a piece of cake for her on my fifth birthday. It wasn’t until I started telling Mom things that Evelyn had told me – like that Evelyn was three years older than me, to the month – that Mom stopped finding the idea of an imaginary playmate charming.
Roger thought about the current unpaid bill from the private investigator. If he can find you before I become too broke to pay for his services, he thought, I’ll get a chance to ask you what bothered you about Evelyn, Mom – after I get through asking you and Dad about the ethics of sending a six-year-old boy into a drug store with a quarter to buy candy with, and then driving away, forever, while he’s inside. And it might be soon – if the investigator’s deductions from studying money-order records and Social Security payments are correct, and you and Dad really do live within blocks of here.
Someone was shouting furiously, down the street … and walking this way, by the sound of it. A male voice, R
oger noted – probably old Cyclops. What the hell is it that makes so many street bums shout? Old women at bus stops who make heads turn two blocks away with the volume and pure rage of their almost totally incoherent outbursts, men that walk out into traffic so that screeching brakes punctuate their wrathfully delivered catalogue of the various things they are not going to stand for anymore … and people who, like Cyclops here tonight, simply walk up and down the empty nighttime streets shouting warnings and challenges to imaginary enemies: it must be some kind of urban malady, new to civilization as far as I know. Maybe it’s contagious, and sometime it’ll be me and Debbie down there shaking our fists at empty stretches of sidewalk and screaming, Oh yeah, you sons of bitches?
He glanced back at Debbie. Her sooner than me, he thought. If her parents didn’t live in Balboa and own a boat and a cabin up at Big Bear, and lots all over hell, would I be intending to marry such a mean, skitzy specimen? No way. And if I do succeed in finding my parents, and if they prove to be as affluent as my memories of their cars and houses indicate they were, I’ll send this animated bird’s-nest of neuroses and obsessions back to her parents. My gain and their loss.
He shivered. The room wasn’t cold, but he’d felt a draft of … of success passing by; a breath of impending squalor stirring the dust under the bedroom door, and he thought the bills on the desk were softly rustled by a stale shift of air that somehow carried the smell of gray hair and temporary jobs, and trash bags full of empty cans of creamed corn and Spam and corned beef hash.
