Hawaiian U.F.O. Aliens

by Mel Gilden

  I said, 'You stole the truck and went through the spines, and didn't find the one you were looking for. But what you did find was a Certificate of Authenticity attached to each fake. Each certificate was signed by Busy Backson and showed her picture. You now knew that Lulu's Earth name was Busy Backson. How am I doing?'

  'You are most entertaining,' Pele said around gritted teeth.

  'It gets better. After you knew Lulu's real name, you looked her up in the phone book and found her phone number listed, but not her address. A lot of women are listed that way. You called her the same way you called the Big Orange Taxi Company from the Sparkle Room bar, and not quite knowing why, she showed up at the location from which you called. She looked around, saw nothing of interest to her, and drove home. You followed her in the truck. After you found out where she lived, you drove the truck a few blocks and ditched it.'

  I was making all this up, but it sounded good, and it must have been close to the way it happened because I could see by the looks on their faces that they bought the whole package, right down to its brand-new white sidewall tyres.

  Almost too softly to hear, Lono said, 'But we didn't find what we were looking for.'

  'I could see that by the all points bulletin you two put out, and by the meeting at Kilroy's later. Did you know that a lot of us spent the night in the Hall of Justice downtown because of your little gathering?'

  'Certainly you can't blame us for that,' Pele said.

  'No, I can't blame you for that, but your getting hauled in, too, would have been a nice thought, good for morale.'

  Pele said nastily, 'We may be stupid. We may be as guilty as you say. But you must help us or your friend will remain a magician forever.'

  'I guess it's the threats part of the evening,' I said.

  Lono said, 'Will you help us get home?'

  What could I do? I nodded and smiled. I said, 'Come on, I'll take you to it.'

  'You know where the slaberingeo spine is?' Pele said.

  'Isn't that why you're doing business with me?' I said, hoping I sounded more confident than I felt.

  'Must you answer a question with a question?'

  'Why not?'

  Lono smiled and put a hand on Pele's arm. He said, 'We haven't gone out since the meeting and not much before.'

  'I'll take you to the spine,' I said.

  The two of them spoke in that sideways language again, and decided they would chance it. I don't know what the big deal was. If things began to go sour, they could use their private exploding escape route.

  We got ready to go. The thorn bush had evaporated into nothing, just as had the thorn wall out by Harry's loading dock. I found Captain Hook and told him I'd be gone for a while, and would he like to stay here. He would. Boy, would he.

  On the way out, I let Pele and Lono go before me, and I stopped to speak to the receptionist. I said, 'You know, those two are the ones who threatened to destroy Los Angeles.'

  She nodded and smiled as if I'd just announced a cure for the common cold. She said, 'Absolutely. It'll be a wonderful effect.'

  'Effect?'

  'Absolutely. Turning the Hollywood Hills into volcanoes is the most spectacular trick ever done by a member of the Magic Palace.' She seemed really pleased about that. 'None of our other members would dream of spoiling it.'

  'Is that what Pele and Lono told you? That it's a trick?'

  'Well, sure. Isn't it true?' Doubt scampered across her face, leaving no mark.

  I leaned with one elbow on her table and told her a secret. I said, 'You know, sometimes the science of a sufficiently advanced race looks just like magic.'

  Confusion leaped onto her face and stayed. I nodded, and wished her a good night. Bill and I followed Pele and Lono out into the warm gusting wind.

  Chapter 29

  Fair Game For The Wind

  I PAID to get my car out of hock, and we rode down the hill. Pele and Lono in the back as if I were their chauffeur. The wind shuddered against the windows of the car, trying to get inside. Trash was caught up into whirlygigs that danced along the street. Anything not tied down was fair game for the wind that night.

  Above us, the Hollywood Hills still fulminated. Apparently Pele and Lono did not quite trust me. Which was just as well. I could have been guessing wrong.

  Pele and Lono watched me drive along Franklin, then up Highland to the Hollywood Freeway. Petulantly, as if I'd broken a promise, Pele asked 'Where, exactly, are you taking us?'

  'Changehorses,' I said, seeing how they liked it.

  'What's that?' Pele asked.

  'A townlet just north of LA County. Medium Rare lives there.'

  A lot of heavy breathing came from the back seat, but it wasn't young love, nothing Gino and Darlene would have been familiar with. Lono said, 'How would she get the spine?'

  'Busy Backson's brother, Gone-out, is a friend of hers.'

  'Gone-out Backson must have a lot of friends,' Pele said, her voice colder than the marble walls in the Hall of Justice.

  'But only one who could possibly have known about the big meeting. It was a private gig, with invitations going only to people who were professionals at keeping secrets. But you can't keep a secret long from somebody who knows astral projection. The call tipping the police went in to the switchboard about seven fifteen, before the meeting started, but not so long before that the clan hadn't already begun to gather. Hanging there like a ghost, Medium Rare saw what was going on. Or Rupee Begonia or one of their friends on the astral plane saw it and reported it to her. Either way, Medium Rare called the news in to the police, intimating these folks, being detectives, might know something about the Hollywood Hills volcanoes.'

  'What would the meeting be to Medium Rare?' Lono said.

  'If she had the spine, she wouldn't want anybody looking for it. Especially not anybody who might find it.'

  'She didn't know what those detectives were there for. The detectives didn't know, themselves.'

  'No. She was taking a chance, but not much of one. If she was wrong, she wouldn't lose anything. If she was right, she'd get what she wanted, which was time.'

  'Time for what?' Lono said.

  I imagined Pele sitting next to him, emotions on a low boil, face grim but on the edge of wild anger. I said, 'Time to use the spine, I don't know what for.'

  Pele's laugh was a glass shattering against a cement floor. It sounded a little hysterical. More breathing was done in the back seat. Lono said, 'So the spine wasn't even at Busy Backson's apartment when we looked for it.'

  'I don't know. I guess it doesn't matter. You didn't find it.'

  Pele and Lono sat in the back seat, silent and unmoving as two sacks of grain. The wind picked up as the Hollywood Freeway hooked into I-Five and headed north through a tunnel of darkness. It made blustery noises as it rocked the Belvedere. I rolled down the window, letting in wind that smelled strongly of dry, spicy plants and bounced through the car like a loose bundle of laundry fresh from the dryer. I closed the window and said, 'Can you handle the slab spine?'

  'What?' said Lono as if he'd been thinking about something else.

  'The slaberingeo spine is obviously unbalanced. Can you handle it without it attracting flower pots that drop onto your head from twelfth storey windows?'

  'We have a hyper-spanner.'

  'Good enough.'

  I took the Changehorses turnoff, and drove up into the mountains. If anything, the wind was stronger here. Tall trees scratched at the sky, trying to get a handhold, and bent from side to side far enough that they looked about ready to break off. Brush and twigs flew at us, and once I thought I saw a branch the size of a man's arm blow past. Through the crack between the top of the window and the body moulding came a strong, dusty smell of pine. Straight ahead, where the road cut through the trees, I could see the sky. Stars gathered in huge crowds, as clear and bright as headlights. I thought of Avoirdupois and what he could do with that: 'Headlights of the Gods!?'

  The road widened, and we were in
Changehorses. No light was showing anywhere, not even on the coffee shop or the bar. Pieces of tree leaped like deer across the cement apron between the pump islands of the gas station. I kept driving. I made the Belvedere climb the hill, and then climb harder when it turned onto the gravel side road. At the top, I almost ran into Merle.

  A lot of people joined Merle, and they crowded around us. I shouted to Bill to lock his door, and I locked mine. I didn't have time to notice whether everybody in the crowd had that distant look all Medium Rare's followers have, but they seemed determined to stop us without being actually angry. Some of them had sticks, but most of them pounded on the body and top of the car with their fists. I drove slowly through them, as if I were making headway through a deep river, and stopped in front of the main house.

  I felt silly just sitting there trying to see everything at once. Bill was crouching under the dashboard. I felt hot breath on my neck, and Lono whispered to me, 'She knew we were coming. She doesn't want us to come in.'

  'Yeah,' I growled. My eye caught on two somethings hanging in the sky among the snapping tree-tops. Despite all the wind, they were hanging there as steady as the stars I could see through them. They were gauzy somethings in the shape of women. One might have been Rupee Begonia. The other might have been Medium Rare. I couldn't hear what Medium Rare was saying. Even if I was outside the car and in still air I probably wouldn't have been able to hear her unless she focussed properly, but I could see her waving her arms around, ordering her troops to gang up on us. They began to rock the car.

  We could have sat in the car all night, or waited for Merle and his friends to break the windows and drag us out, or we could have just gone home. Going home would have been the smartest thing to do. I said, 'Can you do to those clowns what you did to Captain Hook?'

  'Make them magicians? But why?' Lono's breath came in hot gusts on my neck. Except for the crowd, I might as well have been outside.

  'Can you do it?'

  'We can do it,' Pele said.

  I turned to look at them. Each of them pressed a forefinger against the ceiling of the car. They watched their fingers, concentrating hard. I heard a buzz that got angrier and higher as I listened. The body of the car began to glow, and the crowd leaped away from it. The buzz went so fast it became a shriek. When it seemingly couldn't go any higher, it went higher and the car threw off a flash. Red lightning like snakes crawled over the people outside the car. They collapsed, and the red lightning crawled into the ground.

  Up in the sky. Medium Rare's arms hung limp.

  We waited for the people to get up. Bill nearly crawled into my lap, watching. We were all breathing at the same time, as if our lungs were harnessed together.

  A tall guy in a business suit stood up, looked around, frowned for a moment, then smiled as if he wanted to make sure we saw his back teeth. Merle got up. Then a woman dressed for the office. In ones and twos and threes, people stood up, all smiling at each other.

  Merle was closest to me, and as he pulled handkerchief after handkerchief from his fist, he began to sing in a low mournful voice, 'You ain't nothin' but a hound dog...' The guy next to him—a fat old man with a round, shiny head—ignored him. He was making change appear from the ear of another guy, who was busy wrapping his wrist watch in a dirty rag.

  Rabbits and lit cigarettes began to appear from nowhere. When the magic act was in full swing, I cracked my door and waited. Nobody noticed. I opened my door, stepped out, and gestured to the others in the car. We got out and ran up the stairs to the house.

  The door wasn't locked. I guess Medium Rare never expected us to get that far. Hoping that Edgar Allan was outside doing tricks, I crossed the giant's coffin and pulled open the sliding doors. Bill and Pele and Lono followed me up the spiral stairs to the second floor hallway. No horses came at us. I opened the second pair of sliding doors, and stepped into Medium Rare's octagonal spirit chamber.

  Chapter 30

  Cockeyed Opportunists

  THE black room had to be bigger than it looked. Gone-out Backson was standing behind Medium Rare, who was sitting on her milky, octagonal stool at her milky, octagonal table. Her eyes were shut. Gone-out was wearing a nice dark suit which the black velvet hangings made look as if it were powdered with chalk dust. Next to the table was a cardboard box big enough to hold a washing machine. It was filled with blowfish spine necklaces. One of them had probably been stolen from me in the parking lot of the Here Today—Gone to Maui Souvenir Company. One of them might have been a slaberingeo spine necklace, but I doubted it, because draped over the glass ball on the tripod was another spine necklace. A teardrop of lead was tied with string to one of the spines. That would be the ringer.

  Pele thought so, too. Hissing through her teeth, she took a step forward, but I put a hand on her arm. She looked at me, angry enough to spit hot lava in my face. I nodded in Gone-out's direction. He was pointing a pistol at us. Before anybody could do anything I'd regret later, I told him, 'The guy with that spine necklace always has bad luck, and you're standing close enough to get burned. If you fire that pistol, chances are it will jam or misfire. Or you could just blow your hand off.'

  'Shall we try the experiment?' It was the same polished voice sifted through the same lizard lips, but it had gone bad and turned nasty.

  I sighed and went on, 'You may not believe this, Gone-out, but you didn't get any taller or put on any muscle when you picked up that pistol.'

  He grinned confidently at me.

  Pele didn't like any of this. She swung up her arm and aimed her open hand at Gone-out. He didn't have time to duck out of the way, and didn't have the presence of mind to fire his pistol. The sparkly stream of water hit him right on the chest. It was a weak stream, like the spurt from a nickel squirt gun. Gone-out looked down at the wet spot. Pele looked at the palm of her hand.

  Lono pointed. A flash of green at Gone-out's feet left behind a single perfect red rose.

  'It's the spine,' I said. 'It's unbalanced.'

  I thought it was Gone-out's play, but he licked his lips and glanced at Medium Rare, and said nothing. I said, 'Ain't the waxworks grand? So lifelike.'

  Gone-out's gun wavered, but not enough.

  Pele and Lono watched us carefully, but made no move to get involved. Without their magic, they were just two tourists waiting for the Auto Club to arrive.

  Gone-out said, 'You are too clever by half. But Medium Rare is the one who has the necklace.'

  As if on cue—she may have actually been waiting for her name to be mentioned—Medium Rare's eyes fluttered open and she looked at us calmly. She put her hands on the octagonal table, on either side of the glass globe, and said, 'Thank you for bringing Pele and Lono here, Mr Marlowe. You may leave now. We have business to discuss.'

  'Then the welcoming committee outside was just for me.'

  'Too clever,' Gone-out said.

  'Indeed,' Medium Rare said. 'He is very clever to have discovered that I had the spine.'

  'Not clever. Just observant. You made a lot of mistakes.'

  'Hah,' said Medium Rare.

  'Think about it. You take the trouble to get me up here, strip me down to my soul, and introduce me to these two spirit friends of yours, Pele and Lono. You tell me you want to help them find their special spine necklace. But then you won't let me tell them about my friend the magician, or ask them where they are. What does that suggest to you?'

  'I'm sure you'll tell me,' Medium Rare said around a smile no warmer or more appealing than an old slice of toast.

  'It suggests that you wanted me to find the necklace, but for yourself, not for them. You were afraid that if I found it and was able to give it to Pele and Lono, I would do it and not cut you in at all. How am I doing?'

  Medium Rare said nothing. She wasn't smiling now.

  I forged ahead. 'If that wasn't enough, somebody called the police and told them there was a big party in the Oahu Room at Kilroy's. Could you be that somebody?'

  She said more of nothing.


  'But this is the best part. Without any help from you, I find these two that you say you want to help. Then, instead of your just giving them their necklace and wishing them good luck, you set it out like a piece of merchandise and say you have business to discuss.'

  'Are you quite finished?'

  'No. There's one more thing. You weren't surprised when Pele and Lono walked in here, solid as bricks and as transparent as an elephant's rear end. I think you knew all along that they weren't any more spirits than I am.'

  Medium Rare's fingers moved on the table. Behind her, Gone-out was looking at her, waiting to see what she would say. His gun, forgotten, was pointing at a corner of the room. I wasn't worried about him anymore, but I wasn't leaving, either. Not just yet.

  Medium Rare was not a criminal, not in the sense that she made her living at it. She was just a cockeyed opportunist. Therefore, when she did something wrong, and you caught her at it, she had to justify herself. That's what I was waiting for. I was waiting to hear what her game was.

  The silence was as dark and deep as the black velvet on the walls. Medium Rare stopped moving her fingers, but she didn't look at me. She looked into the glass ball full of smoke. She said, 'I know the wisdom of the ages.'

  I could have been clever then, but I nodded instead.

  Medium Rare went on, 'Being wise in this time, in this place, in this plane, is not easy. There is a con artist behind every crystal, a clever faker behind every out-of-body experience, a wishful thinker behind every story of reincarnation.'

  'The woods are full of them. And you, all alone in the open with a clear view of the sky.'

  'A clear view of the sky. Well-put for an unbeliever. With the world so full of jackanapes, I need proof that I am not just one more.'

  Quietly, as if to himself, Gone-out said, 'She is the beginning and the end. She is the Serpent of Time biting its own tail. She sees all, knows all, tells all.'

  As if Gone-out had said nothing, Medium Rare went on:

  'When I first met them, I knew Pele and Lono were not spirits. Spirits have no interest in earthly things like necklaces. Yet, they were not of this Earth either. The conclusion was obvious. They were from space. They had been in body where I had been only in spirit.'