Three Days to Never

by Tim Powers

  “We’d have to split it with Bennett and Moira,” her father said absently, his right foot gunning the accelerator while his left foot let the clutch out every few seconds in little surges. The gearshift lever was on the steering column, and it didn’t seem likely that he’d be reaching up to shift out of first gear anytime soon. “If there’s really gold under the bricks,” he added.

  Daphne nodded. “That’s right. If you don’t want to do what Grammar wanted you to do with it.”

  “As in, she told me about it, and didn’t tell them. Why is everybody going east out of L.A. on a Sunday afternoon?”

  Daphne nodded. “She knew they’ve got plenty of money already, and that’s why she told you. Her—last wishes.” Last wishes was a good phrase.

  “I’ll think about it. It might not be gold. Though—wow, look at that,” he said, his finger tapping the windshield. An old Lockheed Neptune bomber was flying north over the freeway ahead of them, its piston engines roaring. Its shadow flickered over a patch of cars a mile ahead.

  “There must be fires in the mountains,” Daphne said.

  “It’s the season for it. We’ll probably—” He paused, and glanced at her. “You’re worrying about me,” he said. “And it’s not to do with money. I—can’t quite get the reason, just a sort of image of me, and worry like some kind of steady background music.” He peered at her again. “What about?”

  Daphne shrugged and looked away, embarrassed that he had caught her thoughts. “Just—everybody leaves you. Your dad ran off and then your mom died in a car crash, and Mom died two years ago, and now Grammar.” She looked at him, but he was watching the traffic again. “I’m not going to leave you.”

  “Thanks, Daph. I won’t—” He stopped. “Now you’re shocked. What did you see?”

  “You think your mother killed herself!”

  “Oh.” He exhaled, and she sensed that he was finally near tears, so she looked out the side window at a railway bridge over a shallow arroyo. “Well, yes,” he said, with evident control, “I—now you mention it—I think she did. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have—I guess she just couldn’t handle it, foreclosure on the house, got arrested for being drunk in public—after my father—”

  Daphne had to stop him or she’d start crying herself. “Why were you on your guard,” she interrupted, “when Uncle Bennett and I mentioned broken clocks?” Her own voice was quavering, but she went on, “I said the time wasn’t right on her VCR in the shed, and he said something about a broken clock, and both times you thought for a second that we meant something else.”

  Her father took a deep breath, and managed a laugh. “It’s hard to explain. Ask your aunt Moira sometime, she grew up there too.”

  Daphne knew he’d say more if she didn’t say anything, so she stared out through the windshield, looking past the cars surrounding them. This far east of Los Angeles there weren’t housing tracts around the freeway, just two rows of tall eucalyptus trees. A railway line paralleled the freeway to the south, and occasional farmhouse-looking buildings were scattered across the foothills to the north; the mountains beyond the foothills were brown outlines in the summer smog.

  “Okay,” her father went on at last. “Grammar—what, had no respect for time. You know the way she carried on sometimes, as if she was still a teenager, like going to Woodstock; and she’d plant primroses in midsummer, and they’d thrive; food got cold real quick sometimes even though she just took it out of the pan, and other times it stayed hot for hours; well, a long time. It never surprised her. Maybe she was just pulling tricks on us, but time didn’t seem to work right, around her.”

  A big blue charter bus swerved into their lane ahead of them without signaling, and her father hit the brake and tapped the horn irritably. He didn’t mind if people cut him off, even rudely, as long as they used their blinkers. “Dipshit,” he said.

  “Dipshit,” Daphne agreed.

  “I know all this sounds weird,” her father said. “Maybe us kids imagined it.”

  “You remember it. Most grown-ups forget all that kind of stuff.”

  “Anyway,” he went on, “the Kaleidoscope Shed—one time Moira and I, when we were about eight and ten, found our initials carved in one of the boards of it, though we hadn’t done it; and then a year or so later we noticed that they were gone—the board didn’t even show a scratch—and we’d got so used to them being there that we carved ’em in again. And when we stood back and looked at it—I swear—what we had carved was exactly what had been there before. Not copied, see, but the same exact cuts, around the same bumps of wood grain. And then a year or so later they were gone again.”

  “Were they there today?”

  “I honestly forgot to look. I might have, after your ‘time’s wrong’ remark, but then Bennett showed up.”

  Daphne was watching the back of the blue bus ahead of them; it was speeding up and then slowing down. Under the back window, in a blocky typeface, was lettered helix. “Why did you call it the Kaleidoscope Shed?” she asked.

  “I should get away from Felix here, he’s probably drunk,” her father said. “Okay, sometimes the edges of the shed, the boundaries from wherever you were looking—rippled. And the shed made a noise too at those times, like a lot of wooden wind chimes or somebody shaking maracas. And sometimes it just looked less decrepit, for a while.”

  He pressed the brake and signaled for a lane change to the right, shaking his head. “She couldn’t stand it when my dad left—the police said she was drunk when her car went off the highway, and I don’t blame her for that, I don’t blame her for killing herself—my dad drove her to it, by abandoning her with two little kids and no money.”

  Daphne had known his thoughts were still on his mother even before he abruptly switched topics. She tried to blank her mind, but her father picked up her reflexive thought anyway.

  “True,” he said, “she abandoned us too. But she sent a note to Grammar, asking her to take Moira and me in, raise us, if anything ever happened to her. A couple of weeks later was the car crash. See, she entrusted us to her mother-in-law, she at least made some provision for us, not—not like him.”

  Daphne couldn’t help asking—her father so seldom talked about all this. “What became of him?”

  “I think he sent Grammar some money, the year he left. 1955. She got some, anyway. So he must have known where we were—but aside from that money, nothing. He’d be nearly sixty now.” Her father’s voice was hoarse and level. “He—I’d like to meet him someday.”

  Daphne was dizzy with the vicarious emotion, and she consciously unclenched her jaw. It was anger as bitter as vinegar, but Daphne knew that vinegar was what wine turned into if it was left to lie too long, and she knew, though her father might not, that his anger was baffled and humiliated love, longing for a fair hearing.

  “I always—” he began. “Grammar never seemed to wonder what had become of him, so I always figured she knew. He was her son, and—and she did treat me and Moira as her own children, loved us, after my mom dumped us on her.” He thumped the clutch down and shifted up to second, though a moment later he had to pull it back down to first again.

  “It is hard to understand why people kill themselves,” he went on quietly, as if to himself. “You look at the ways they do it—jump off buildings, shoot themselves in the mouth, pipe carbon monoxide into an idling car in the garage—what terrible last moments! I’d just eat a bunch of sleeping pills and drink a bottle of bourbon, myself—which probably shows I’m not a candidate.”

  “Portia ate hot coals,” Daphne said, relieved that the cramp of aching anger had passed. “Caesar’s wife. That’s pretty dumb—I always wondered why they named a car after such a dumb person.”

  Her father laughed, and she was pleased that he had known she was joking.

  “You’re looking at it like killing yourself, though,” she said. “The way they do it, real suicides, is like they’re just killing a person. Throwing somebody off a building is a rotten way to kill you
rself, but it’s a fine way to kill a person.”

  For a few seconds her father didn’t answer. Since Daphne’s mother had died two years ago, he had talked to Daphne as he would talk to an adult, and often she felt helplessly out of her depth; she hoped her last remark hadn’t been stupid, or thoughtless. She had pretty much been talking about his mother, after all.

  But, “That’s pretty good, Daph,” he said finally, and she could tell that he meant it.

  “What’s so weird about Grammar’s coffee grinder?” she asked.

  “Don’t I get a turn? Who’s the boy with the glasses and dark hair? I’ve been seeing him ever since we left Pasadena.”

  “I don’t—” Daphne could feel her face heating up. “He’s just a boy in school. What about the coffee grinder?”

  Her father glanced sideways at her, and it was clear that he was considering not telling her. She didn’t lower her eyebrows or look away.

  “Okay,” he said at last, returning his attention to the lane ahead. “Damn, that crazy bus has changed lanes too, look—maybe I could pass him now.”

  Daphne peered over the dashboard and the rust-specked white hood beyond the windshield. Though there were two cars between their truck and the bus, she thought she could see a face in the bus’s tinted high back window—but the face seemed to have silver patches on its forehead, cheeks and chin.

  She pushed herself back in the seat.

  “Don’t pass it, Dad,” she said quickly. “Slow down, get off the freeway if you have to.”

  He might not have seen the face, but he slowed down. “No harm getting off at Haven,” he said quietly. The Haven Avenue exit was almost upon them, and he swung the car through the lane on their right and directly onto the exit ramp, making the engine roar in first gear.

  “Her coffee grinder,” he said when they had got off the freeway and turned left onto Haven. It was empty country around here, and sprawling grapevines made still-orderly lines across the untended fields, leftovers from the days when this had all been wine country.

  “Well, somebody’s got part of the story confused,” he went on. “See, when Grammar called me today—what was it, eleven-thirty?”

  “About that, yeah.”

  “Well, when she called me she was using her coffee grinder. I ran it for a second in her kitchen back there, and the acoustics are unmistakable. She was still in her kitchen at—well, at the earliest!—eleven o’clock this morning.”

  “And the hospital at Mount Shasta called Aunt Moira when?”

  “About twelve-thirty.”

  “How far away is Mount Shasta?”

  “Five hundred miles, easy. Almost up at the Oregon border.” He shook his head. “Moira must have misunderstood the time somehow. Or I guess Grammar could have raced to LAX right after she called me, got straight onto a plane, direct flight, no layover, and then died just as she got off the plane…”

  Daphne simply understood that there was no way her great-grandmother could have got to Shasta, but that the old lady had done it anyway. And she was sure her father realized this too.

  “Did she build the Kaleidoscope Shed?” Daphne asked.

  “Hah. Yes. I don’t think she even hired anybody to help. But her father drew the plans, she said. I never met him—she called him Prospero, but as a nickname.”

  “Prospero from The Tempest? What did he do?—like for a job?”

  “I got the impression he was a violinist.”

  “What’s the bit, in The Tempest? About the creepy music?”

  Her father sighed. “‘Sitting on a bank,’” he recited, “‘Weeping again the King my father’s wrack, this music crept by me upon the waters.’”

  Daphne knew she’d be scared tonight in her bed, but that would be then—right now, among familiar fields and roads, and the hour no later than 3:30, she was just tense, as if she’d had several fast Cokes in a row. “I said she was a witch.”

  “She was a good mother to us,” he said. “But!” he added, holding up his hand to stop her reflexive apology, “it looks like she may have been something like a witch.” He turned right onto Foothill, the highway that used to be Route 66, still dotted with 1950s-era motels; travel time was predictable on surface streets, and Daphne knew they should be home by 4:30 at the latest. Her father added, “I think Grammar killed herself too.”

  Daphne didn’t answer; she knew he could tell she thought so too.

  Another World War II-era bomber roared overhead. There must be fires in the mountains here as well.

  Her father was teaching a summer school class in Twain to Modern at Cal State San Bernardino tomorrow, and he had a stack of papers to correct, so when he opened a beer and shuffled up the hall to his office, Daphne took a Coke from the refrigerator and walked into the living room. Two or three cats ran away in front of her, as usual acting as if they’d never seen her before.

  The kitchen and living room were the oldest parts of the house, built in 1929, when San Bernardino had been mostly orange groves. The house was built on a slope, and the newer sections were uphill—two bedrooms and two bathrooms that had been added on in the ’50s, and at the top end of the hall was a big second living room and her father’s office, built in the ’70s. The walls of the downhill end of the house were stone behind the drywall, and this living room by the kitchen was always the coolest part of the house.

  She fitted the Pee-wee’s Big Adventure cassette into the VCR slot and sat down on the couch across from the TV set. If her father wanted to watch the movie, she’d see it again with him, but usually he fretted till bedtime over his lecture notes.

  Remembered circus music spun behind the credits on the TV screen, and then the movie opened with a view of the Eiffel Tower painted on a billboard. This was Pee-wee’s dream, she recalled; he was about to be awakened by his alarm clock. In the dream a cluster of bicyclists streaked past the billboard, and Pee-wee was winning the Tour de France on his crazy red bike, yapping like a parrot in his too tight gray suit; then he had ridden past the finish line, breaking the yellow tape, and all the spectators lifted him off his bike and carried him to a bandstand in a green field—and after some woman had put a crown on his head, she and all the other people hurried away, leaving Pee-wee alone on the platform in the middle of the field—

  —and then it was a different movie.

  This was black and white, and it started abruptly, with no credits. There was jazzy atonal piano music, but shots of the ocean were accompanied by no surf sounds, and Daphne knew even before the first dialogue card appeared that this was a silent movie.

  It was about two sisters, Joan and Magdalen, living in a house on the California coast. One of the sisters was engaged to a simpleminded fisherman named Peter, and the other wasn’t; but the actresses seemed to switch roles from scene to scene, so that Daphne could only guess that the engaged sister was the one who met a glossy-haired “playboy novelist” and ran off with him to some glamorous big city, maybe San Francisco. Peter seemed upset by it, anyway. Everybody’s facial expressions were exaggerated, even for a silent movie—grotesque, almost imbecilic—and they all seemed to walk awkwardly.

  Daphne had never heard the sound-track music before, and it didn’t have any recognizable melody, but she kept being jarred by the absence of certain notes that the music had seemed to call for, as if she had tried to step up onto a curb that wasn’t there. She had no sooner wondered if the implied notes formed a concealed melody than she was sure that they did—she thought she could remember it and hum it, if she wanted to, but she didn’t want to.

  She was sweating, and she was glad she was sitting down. The couch, the whole living room, seemed to be spinning. Once when her mother and father had had a party, she had sneaked into the kitchen and poured a splash of each kind of liquor into an empty Skippy peanut butter jar—brandy, gin, bourbon, vodka—and taken it back to her room. When she had finished the “cocktail” and lain down on her bed, the bed had seemed to spin like this. Really, though, this was now more like t
eetering—as if the whole house were balanced on a pole over a pit without walls or a bottom.

  She was aware of her father’s hands—one hand holding a sheet of paper and the other holding a pencil and scribbling something in the margin; and the writing hand paused, for he was aware of her intrusion. In the bones of her head, over the jagged piano music, she heard him say, What’s up, Daph?

  She had to keep flexing her right hand to dispel the impression that another hand was holding it—a warm, damp hand, not her father’s. Someone standing behind her…

  Maybe it hadn’t been Peter’s fianceé who’d run away, because now in the movie he was marrying the sister who had stayed. But the wedding was taking place in some sort of elegant Victorian hotel—a white-draped table appeared to be an altar, and a man in black robes was standing behind it with his arms raised; he was wearing a crownless white hat that exposed his bald white scalp, and the brim of the hat had been cut into triangular points, like a child’s cutout of a star. He leaned down to press his forehead against the tablecloth, so that his bald head with the ring of triangles seemed to be a symbol of the sun, and then the bride was stepping up to the altar with a knife—there was a quick cut to the other sister, on the seashore, plunging a knife into the center of a starfish—

  —and suddenly Daphne realized that it had been only one woman all along, somehow split in two so that one of her could go away while the other stayed home—the woman was in two places at once, and so was Daphne—Daphne was standing up very tall from her father’s desk, tossing the paper to the floor and saying in her father’s voice, “Daph, who’s in the house?”

  And then the house lost its balance and began to tip over into the pit—for a moment Daphne couldn’t feel the couch under her, she was falling—and in a panic she grabbed with her whole mind.