Expiration Date

If they go faster than my machine, I will be able to go downhill as fast as they dare to and for hill climbing the electric motor is just the thing, so I will beat them there. On rough roads they will not dare to go faster than I will; and when it comes to sandy places, I am going to put in a gear of four to one which I can throw in under such circumstances, and which will give me 120 horse power of torque, and I will go right through that sand and leave them way behind.

—Thomas Alva Edison,

Electrical Review,

August 8, 1903

CHAPTER FORTY TWO

“I mean” she said, “that one ca’n’t help growing older”

“One ca’n’t, perhaps” said Humpty Dumpty; “but two can…”

—Lewis Carroll,

Through the Looking-Glass

THE morning air was raucous with the cries of the parrots that were swooping like livid green Frisbees from the telephone wires to the branches of the shaggy old carob trees along the Twenty-first Place curb, but when one of the apartment doors finally opened, the gray-haired fat man who came shuffling out ignored the clamoring exotic birds as though he were blind and deaf. He was clutching a sheaf of white business-size envelopes, and he tucked them into a rack under the bank of mailboxes out front.

The old man’s punctual in paying his bills, thought J. Francis Strube. The first of November isn’t until tomorrow, but tomorrow will be a Sunday, with no mail pickup.

Strube’s dark blue BMW was idling almost silently a hundred feet away from the apartment building, and certainly wasn’t blowing any telltale smoke out of the exhaust, but still he slid down a little in the leather seat, just peeking over the dashboard at the old man.

And he wasn’t sure. This fellow fumbling with the mail was about the right age, but Nicky Bradshaw had been athletically slim—and healthy. This man…he didn’t look well at all; he moved slowly and painfully, squinting up and down the street now with impotent ferocity. Strube slid down even lower in his seat.

The old man by the apartment building was plodding back along the walkway toward the door he had come out of; but he paused halfway there, and just stood, staring down toward his feet.

Strube’s lower back was cramping, and he sat up a little straighter in the seat.

And the old man curled one arm over his head and stretched the other out with his fingers spread, and turned on his heel in a 360-degree circle; then he paused again, let his arms fall to his sides, and opened the door and went back inside.

Strube had steamed the inside of his windshield by whispering a deep, triumphant “Hah!”

That had been the Spooky Spin, and even someone like himself, who had only seen reruns of the old “Ghost of a Chance” show, had to remember the way the Spooky character had always executed that move just before the primitive stopped-camera trick photography had made him seem to disappear into thin air.

Strube was whistling the “Ghost of a Chance” theme music—dooo-root-de-doodly-doot-de-doo!—as he punched into the telephone the Find Spooky number. Probably no one would be answering the line until nine or so, but he couldn’t wait.

It rang twice, and then, to his surprise, someone did answer. “Have you seen Spooky?” a woman asked with practiced cheer.

“Yes,” said Strube. “I’ve found him.”

“Well, congratulations. If we verify that it really is Nicky Bradshaw, you’ll be getting two complimentary tickets to the filming of the reunion show. Where is he?”

“It’s him. My name is J. Francis Strube, I’m a Los Angeles-based attorney, and I worked for him as a legal secretary when he had an office in Seal Beach in the midseventies. Also, I just this minute saw him do the Spooky Spin, if you’re familiar with the old show.”

After a pause, the woman said, “Really? I’m going to transfer you to Loretta deLarava.” The line clicked, and then Strube was listening to a bland instrumental version of “Mr. Tambourine Man.”

I should think so, Strube thought, sitting back in the seat and smiling as he kept his gaze locked on Bradshaw’s door. I imagine Loretta deLarava will have room for a quick-witted attorney on her staff.

“This is Loretta deLarava,” said a harsher woman’s voice now, speaking over background static. “I understand you’re the clever person who has found our missing Spooky! Where is he?”

“Ms. deLarava, my name is J. Francis Strube, and I’m an attorney—”

“An attorney?” There was silence on the scratchy line. Then, “Are you representing him?” deLarava asked.

“Yes,” said Strube instantly. Spontaneity wins, he thought nervously. Trust your instincts.

“Where is he?”

“Well, we want certain assurances—”

“Look, Mr. Strube, I’m on the E Deck loading dock of the Queen Mary right now.” Good God, Strube thought, she’s hardly two miles away across the harbor! “I’m doing a Halloween-related shoot about famous ghosts on board the ship today, and I had been hoping to find Bradshaw in time to at least get him in a couple of shots there, film him doing his trademark Spooky Spin on the Promenade Deck, you know?” She was sniffling. “You’re not going to take a piss, are you?”

Strube assumed this was some showbiz slang, meaning be an obstruction or something. Rain on my parade. “No, of course not, I just—”

“So what? Do you want us to interview you, too? It’d be a cinch. Prominent local attorney, right? The man who tracked down Spooky.’ And then we could discuss your client’s possible role in the reunion show later. How does that sound?”

Strube didn’t like her tone, or her apparent assumption that he was motivated by a desire for publicity; and he wished he could say something coldly dismissive to her.

But of course he couldn’t. “That sounds good,” he said. Then, despising himself, he went on, “Do you promise?”

“You have my word, Mr. Strube. Now where is he?”

“Well—in Long Beach, in the Twenty-first Place cul-de-sac by the beach.” Strube read her the address from the stenciled numerals on the curb. ‘I'll be there too,” he said, “and I’m confident—”

“Good,” she interrupted. “I knew somebody was confident. I should have guessed it’d turn out to be a lawyer.”

And the line went dead.

I guess she’ll be here soon, Strube thought timidly.

THE SHOUTING of the parrots made Sullivan open his eyes. He knew that he had been very nearly awake for some time; he remembered having dreamed of Venice Beach sometime during the night, but he couldn’t remember now if it had been Venice of 1959, 1986, or 1992, and it didn’t seem important.

A faint thwick from the kitchen made him lift his head—Kootie was sitting cross-legged on the kitchen counter, looking at Sullivan over the top of the Alice paperback, a page of which he’d just turned. Kootie touched a finger to his lips.

Sullivan turned his head sideways, and his neck creaked, and Elizalde opened her eyes and smiled sleepily.

“I guess we’re all awake, Kootie,” Sullivan said, speaking quietly just because it was the first remark of the day. He rolled over, got stiffly to his feet, and stretched. “How are you feeling?”

“Fine, Mr. Sullivan—Pete, I mean. Could I have cold pizza and Coke for breakfast?”

Maybe Edison is sleeping off the hangover, Sullivan thought. “Sure. I think I’ll pass, though. We’ll probably be leaving here in an hour or two, after a…a walk down to the beach. You sure you wouldn’t like to wait, and get something hot?”

“I like cold pizza. We hardly ever have pizza at home.”

“Tear it up then.” Sullivan yawned and walked into the kitchen to turn on the hot-water tap. He couldn’t remember now whether the water had ever got hot last night; well, there was always the hot water in the toilet tank.

“Uh,” said Kootie. “Could you help me down? My cut hurts if I stretch. I was halfway up here before I knew I couldn’t climb up.”

“Sure,” Sullivan said.

“Kootie,” said Elizalde, who had got up and now hurried over to the counter, “didn’t I tell you not to put any strain on it?”

“No, miss,” the boy said.

“Oh. Well, once we get you down from there—”Suddenly a fourth voice spoke, from the bedroom doorway. “Leave him where he is.”

Sullivan spun, and then froze. A man was standing there, pointing at them a handgun made from a chopped-down double-barreled 12-gauge shotgun. Focusing past the gun, Sullivan saw that the man had only one arm; then that he was wearing baggy camouflage pants and a stained windbreaker, and that his round, pale face was dewed with sweat. His gaze crawled over Sullivan’s face, to Elizalde’s, and to Kootie’s, like a restless housefly.

“Harry Houdini made a call from Long Beach last night,” the man said in a high, calm voice, “and as it happens I’m a big Houdini fan. But when I came down here I kept getting deflections, I couldn’t get any consistent directional for him. So I remembered this dead spot by the beach, like the wood where Alice lost her name. And then you all had a party last night. A man went to an Armenian restaurant, because his friends told him to order the herring; when it was served, it was alive, and the herring opened its eye and looked at him. He left, but his friends told him to go back the next night, so he did, and he ordered the herring again. But on the plate it opened its eye again, and he ran away. The next night he went to a Jewish restaurant instead, and ordered herring, and when the waiter brought him his plate the herring opened its eye and looked at him and said, ‘You don’t go to the Armenian place anymore?’”

Sullivan felt a drop of sweat roll down his ribs under his shirt, and he kept staring at the sawn muzzles of the gun, each barrel looking big enough for a rat to crawl down it. Elizalde had stepped in front of Kootie, but now none of them were moving.

“What do you want?” asked Sullivan in an even voice.

“I want to speak to Thomas Edison.”

“This is the guy that stabbed me,” whispered Kootie; then he shivered, and in a louder voice he said, “You have my attention. What did you want to talk about?”

“Unplug me,” the man said. “The rotten ghost is jammed in my mind, and I can’t…eat. When you did this to me in ‘29, I cleared it inadvertently, by injecting a quick ghost into a vein in my arm; that worked, but it blew my arm off. I can’t afford to do that again, even if I could be sure the ghost would only blow off another limb, and not detonate inside my heart. You did this, you must know how to undo it.” His wheezing breath was a hoarse roar, punctuated with little whistles that sounded like individual cries in an angry crowd.

“And then you’ll stab me again, right?” said Edison with Kootie’s voice. “Or just blow out my middle with that scattergun and catch the boy and me both, when we breathe our last breath. It’s a Mexican standoff.” Kootie looked up at Elizalde. “No offense, Angelica.”

Elizalde rolled her eyes in angry frustration. “For God’s sake, Edison!”

“I won’t,” said the one-armed man. Distant voices shouted in his lungs. “I’ll leave you alone, and subsist on ordinary ghosts. How can I assure you of this?”

Sullivan saw Elizalde’s eyes glance across the room, and he looked in that direction. The 45 was lying against the wall where she had slept. He knew she was thinking that a dive in that direction would make the one-armed man swing the shotgun away from Kootie and himself.

But she couldn’t possibly get the gun up and fire it before the shotgun would go off; and the shotgun wouldn’t have to be aimed with any precision for the shot pellets to tear her up. He spread his fingers slowly, to avoid startling the gunman, and closed his hand firmly on Elizalde’s forearm.

A whining buzz tickled Sullivan’s car, and he restrained his free hand from slapping at it.

“What the hell is this?” said the tiny voice of Sullivan’s father’s ghost. “I can’t get to the beach by myself—I’m tethered to my grave portrait, and it’s way too heavy for me to carry.”

Sullivan looked anxiously back at the one-armed man—but the man was apparently unaware of the ghost in Sullivan’s ear.

The barrels of the shotgun wobbled. “Well?” The man’s tiny eyes were fixed on Kootie’s face.

“I could write the procedure down,” said Kootie’s voice thoughtfully, “after you let us go, and leave it in some preagreed place. You’d have to trust me to do it, though.”

“Which,” said the one-armed man, “I don’t.” He kept his little eyes fixed on Kootie, but he rocked his head back and sniffed deeply. “There’s another ghost in here. If you tell me how to get unjammed, I’ll just eat it. That’ll keep me alive until I can go gel more.”

“No good,” said Kootie’s voice, “that’s Pete’s dad, and Pete’s sentimental about it. Besides, the procedure involves a bit of work on your part.” The boy’s face kinked in a crafty grin. “It’s not just crossing your eyes and spitting.”

The one-armed man stared impassively at the boy sitting on the counter. Finally he sighed. “Let me tell you a parable,” he said. “A man had a new hearing aid, and he was telling a friend how good it was. ‘It cost me twenty thousand dollars,’ the man with the hearing aid said, ‘and it runs on a lithium battery that’s good for a hundred years, and it’s surgically implanted right into the skull bone and the nerve trunk at the base of my brain.’ And his friend said, ‘Wow, what kind is it?’ and the man with the hearing aid looked at his watch and said, ‘Quarter to twelve.’”

Sullivan wished the story had been longer. Surely Nicky would…would somehow come along soon, and perceive this, and put a stop to it. The shotgun was steady, and the man was standing just obviously too far away for Sullivan to have any hope of leaping forward and knocking the short barrels aside before the gun would be fired.

“I’ll give you twenty thousand dollars,” the one-armed man said. “I’ll take that automatic that’s against the wall there, I can hold that on you without being conspicuous. We’ll go out and get the money, and you can tell me then, once I’ve handed it over to you. We’ll be out in public, I won’t be eager to shoot you out in a street. Once I’m unjammed, I can kill anybody and eat ’em, I won’t need you.”

Kootie’s head swung back and forth. “No. You’d still want Thomas Edison.”

The man’s pale face puckered in a derisive smile. “For that much money you’d have told me. You don’t even know how to do it, do you?” He shifted his stance and raised the gun slightly.

“Yes he does!” said Elizalde shrilly.

Kootie turned on her, scowling. “Damn it, Angelica, I do know how this fellow can do it. You don’t need to think you’re…helping some old fool run a bluff.”

“No, no,” said the one-armed man. “You might have known once—but you’re senile now. Hell, you’re what, a hundred and fifty years old?” He snickered. “I can see that you’re wearing a big set of those geriatric diapers right now.”

Kootie’s hands flew to the buttons on his shirt. “I can—damn you—prove you’re wrong.” He was smiling tensely, but his face was red. “This is an electric belt, urine would short it out!” His shaky fingers were making no progress at undoing the buttons. “You’re talking to someone who understands electricity, believe me! I recently received—”

“He’s just taunting you, Edison!” said Elizalde urgently. “Don’t let him get you excited. It’s not worth—”

“You just hired people who understood electricity,” the man with the shotgun interrupted, shaking his head with evident good humor. “You were always just doing dumb stuff like…what was it, trying to make tires out of milkweed sap? That’s proved to have been a real breakthrough, hasn’t it?”

“It happens I recently received a B.S.—”

“Oh really? Where’s your diploma?” The man laughed. “B.S. is right. Bullshit. Why don’t you go ahead and add a Ph.D.? Tiled higher and deeper.’”

Kootie was squirming furiously. “It’s not a, a ‘dipshit diploma,’ you ignorant—”

“So how do I do it, then, if you’re so smart?”

“Edison, don’t—” said Elizalde quickly—

But Kootie’s mouth was already open, and with it Edison said, “I already told you—cross your eyes and spit.”

And now the one-armed man was doing just that. His eyes crossed until the irises had half disappeared in the direction of his nose, as if the pupils might touch each other, behind his nose, and his mouth opened wide.

The barrels of the stumpy shotgun lifted and swung back and forth, and Sullivan pressed himself back against the kitchen counter. He glanced at Kootie, who just shrugged, wide-eyed.

It was as if the one-armed man had a speaker surgically implanted in his larynx—men’s angry voices, crying children, laughing women, a chaotic chorus was shouting out of his lungs.

He might have been trying to spit. His lower jaw rotated around under his nose, and his tongue jerked—and finally one of the voices, a woman’s, shrill and jabbering as if speeded up by some magical Doppler effect, rose and became louder and clearer.

And the one-armed man spit—and then gagged violently, convulsing like a snapped whip—

—As a glistening red snake shot out of his mouth. It was smoking even before it slapped heavily onto the floor, and the instant reek of ammonia and sulfur was so intense that Sullivan, who had involuntarily recoiled from its abrupt appearance, now involuntarily flinched from its fumes. And a chilly, laughing breeze punched past him and instantaneously buckled the blinds and shattered out the window.

Everyone was moving—Kootie had leaped from the counter and was colliding with Elizalde out on the floor in the direction of the broken window and the .45, the red snake-thing was slapping and hopping in front of the one-armed man, who was hunched forward with a rope of drool swinging from his mouth, and Sullivan made himself push off from the kitchen counter and vault over the spasming snake-thing to kick the hand that held the chopped shotgun.

Both shells went off, with a crash like a far-fallen truck slamming through the ceiling. Sullivan had jumped with no thought of anything beyond kicking the gun, and the air compression of the shotgun blasts seemed to loft him farther—his knee cracked the one-armed man’s head and then Sullivan’s shoulder and jaw hit the bedroom doorframe hard, and he bounced off and wound up half-kneeling on the floor.

The room was full of stinging haze, and through squinting, watering eyes he could see Elizalde and Kootie. They were up, moving, opening the front door, in the ringing silence of stunned eardrums. Unable to breathe at all, Sullivan crawled around the wet red snake, which was already splitting and falling apart, and scuttled painfully on his hands and knees toward the daylight and the promise of breathable air. His hands bumped against Houdini’s plaster hands, and he paused to grab them—but they disappeared when he touched them.

He hopped and scrabbled out through the door into the fresh air, rolling over the doorstep onto his back on the chilly asphalt. The breeze was cold on the astringent sweat that spiked his hair and made his shirt cling to him.

Nicky Bradshaw, wearing a sail-like Hawaiian shirt, was standing on the sidewalk, looking down at him with no expression on his weathered old face. Behind Bradshaw were two tensely smiling men in track suits—and each of them held a semiautomatic pistol.

Some kind of the new 9-millimeters, Sullivan thought bleakly; Beretta or Sig or Browning. Ever since Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon, everybody’s crazy about 9-millimeters. He looked down past his belt buckle, and saw Elizalde slowly crouching to place his old .45 on the pavement, watched closely by another of the smiling, trendily armed young men.

Sullivan’s nostrils twitched to a new smell—the burning-candy reek of clove-flavored cigarettes. And when a woman’s voice spoke, barely audible over the ringing in his ears, Sullivan didn’t even need to look to know whose it was. She had, after all, been his boss for eleven years.

“I’m glad they’ve come without waiting to be asked,” said Loretta deLarava. “I should never have known who were the right people to invite! Cuff ‘em all,” she added, “and get ’em into the truck, fast. Nicky and Pete I recognize, and this must be the famous Koot Hoomie Parganas, found at last—but I want all of them. Get anybody who’s inside. Find Pete’s van, and search it and this apartment for my mask. You know what to look for.”

Sullivan at last rocked his head around to look up at her. Pouches of pale flesh sagged under her bloodshot eyes, and her fat cheeks hung around her sparking cigarette in wrinkly wattles.

“Hi, stepmother,” he gasped, hardly able to hear his own voice. He hadn’t wanted to speak to her, or even look at her, but it was important to let the ghost of his father know who this was. He wasn’t sure how well the ghost could see, and in any case Loretta deLarava didn’t look anything like the Kelley Keith of 1959.

DeLarava frowned past him, sucking hard on the cigarette, and didn’t reply.

On one of the second-floor balconies, a white-bearded man in jeans and a T-shirt was looking down at this crowd in alarm. “Sol!” he yelled. “What’s going on? Was that a gunshot? What’s that terrible stink?”

“You’re the manager here, Nicky?” said deLarava quietly. “I don’t want your people to get hurt.”

Bradshaw squinted up at his alarmed tenant. “Health-code enforcement,” he grated. “Stay inside. These new renters have some kind of. Bowel disorder.”

“Jesus, I’ll say!” The man disappeared from the balcony, and Sullivan heard a door slam.

More by vibration in the pavement under his back than by hearing, Sullivan became aware of someone else striding up now, from the direction of the street. “Ms. deLarava?” a man said brightly. “My name is J. Francis—” The voice trailed off, and Sullivan knew without looking that he had noticed the guns. “I’m an attorney. I think somebody here is going to need one.”

“Cuff that asshole too,” said deLarava.

CHAPTER FORTY THREE

“Consider what a great girl you are. Consider what a long way you’ve come today. Consider what o’clock it is. Consider anything, only don’t cry!”

—Lewis Carroll,

Through the Looking-Glass

A couple of deLarava’s men hustled the handcuffed attorney to a new Jeep Cherokee at the curb out front; three others opened the back of a parked truck and tossed about a thousand dollars’ worth of red and black cable coils and clattering black metal light doors out onto the street to make room for the rest of her captives: Kootie, Sullivan, Elizalde, the one-armed man, and Bradshaw. Sullivan noted that Johanna had eluded capture, and he wondered if Nicky had in some sense anticipated this, and sent her safely away; if so, Sullivan wished Nicky had conveyed his misgivings to the rest of them.

A Plexiglas skylight cast a yellow glow over the interior of the truck. The captives were arranged along the truck’s right wall, with their cuffed wrists behind them; each pair of ankles was taped together and then taped at two-foot intervals onto a long piece of plywood one-by-six, which was then screwed into the metal floor with quick, shrill bursts of a Makita power screwdriver. The one-armed man wasn’t cuffed—deLarava’s men had simply taped his right arm to his body, with his hand down by his hipbone.

And deLarava stayed in the back with the captives when the truck door was pulled shut, leaning against the opposite wall while her driver backed and filled out of the cul-de-sac and then made a tilting left turn onto what had to be Ocean Boulevard.

“Nicky,” she said immediately, “remember that you’ve got an innocent woman and child in here with you. If you feel any kind of…psychic crisis coming on, I trust you’ll be considerate enough to let me know, so that my men can transfer you to a place where you won’t harm anyone.”

“Nothing ever excites me when I’m awake,” said Bradshaw, who was slumped below some light stands up by the cab. “And I’m not feeling sleepy.”

“Good.” She reached into the bosom of her flower-patterned dress and pulled out a little semiautomatic pistol, .22 or .25 caliber. “If anyone wants to scream,” she said, sweeping her gaze back and forth over the heads of her captives, “this will put a fairly quick stop to it, understood?”

“Lady,” said the one-armed man weakly, “I can help you. But I need to eat a ghost, bad. I just threw a couple of pounds of dead ectoplasm, and a good ghost, and I’m about to expire.” He was sitting next to Sullivan, against the door, and each one of his wheezing breaths was like a Wagnerian chorus.

DeLarava’s mouth was pinched in a fastidious pout, but without looking down at him she asked, “Who are you, anyway?”

The man was shaking, his right knee bumping Sullivan’s thigh. “Lately I’ve been calling myself Sherman Oaks.”

“How can Sherman Oaks help me?”

“I can…well, I can tell you that the boy there is carrying the ghost of Thomas Alva Edison.”

DeLarava gave a hiccuping laugh. “That I already knew,” she said, greedily allowing herself to actually stare at Kootie.

Sullivan looked angrily past Elizalde at Kootie. “Why in hell did you tell him how to unclog himself, anyway?”

Kootie flinched, and said defensively, “Mr. Edison didn’t tell him exactly how. He—” Kootie choked and spat. “I can speak for myself, Kootie. He did more than what I told him, Pete. He kicked the rotted one out by throwing out a good one.”

“After you told him the right…posture to assume,” said Sullivan.

“Pete,” said Elizalde, “let it go, it’s done.”

Meaning, Sullivan thought, don’t torment a senile old man who made a mistake out of wounded vanity.

“What do you all mean by ‘unclogged’?” asked deLarava, still staring at Kootie.

Sullivan looked up at her, and realized that Kootie and the one-armed man were looking at her too. This might conceivably be a bargaining chip, he thought.

“When you suck in a ghost that has rotted in an opaque container,” said Sherman Oaks, “your ghost-digestion gets clogged. Impacted, blocked. You can’t eat any more of them, and the ghosts already inside you get rebellious. I was that way. Now I know how to get clear of it, how you can Heimlich-yourself. Ptooie, you know?”

“Could we refer to them as ‘essences’?” said deLarava stiffly. “And use the verb ‘enjoy’?

“Where are we going?” asked Elizalde in a flat voice.

DeLarava squinted at her as if noticing her for the first time. “Pete’s Mex gal! One of my boys tells me you’re the crazy psychiatrist who’s been on the news. We’re all going to the Queen Mary.”

Sullivan’s leather jacket had been left back at the apartment, probably still balled up on the floor from having served as a pillow; and now through his thin shirt he felt fingers fumbling weakly at his left shoulder.

He looked at the man next to him, surprised that Oaks could have freed his single arm from the tape—and he saw that Oaks’ hand wasn’t free, was in fact still strapped down against his right hip; but Oaks was hunched around toward Sullivan, as if miming the act of reaching toward him with the arm that wasn’t there.

Breath hissed in through Sullivan’s teeth as he jerked away from Oaks in unthinking fright.

“What—” snapped deLarava, convulsively switching her little pistol from one hand to the other, clearly startled by his sudden move. “What is it?”

Sullivan realized that she hadn’t once looked directly at him, and that she apparently didn’t even want to speak his name. She plans to kill me at some point today, he thought; and because of that she’s too fastidious to acknowledge me.

He turned back to look at Sherman Oaks, and the tiny eyes returned his gaze with no expression; but the man now sniffed deeply.

You smell my father’s ghost, Sullivan thought. You know he’s in here with us.

At least the phantom fingers had moved away from him. “My shoulders are cramping up something terrible,” Sullivan said, deliberately, still staring at Oaks. Have we got a deal? he thought into the little eyes. I wont tell her you've got a “hand” free if you wont tell her about the ghost.

“Any discomfort is regretted,” said deLarava vaguely.

Sullivan looked back at the old woman. She was blinking rapidly, and her eyes, again fixed on the wall over the captives’ heads, were bright with tears.

“They could only find the thumb,” said deLarava hoarsely, looking right up at the skylight now. “Where are the hands?”

“Lost in the Venice canals,” said Sullivan at once. “I tried to fish them out, but they dissolved in the salt water like…like Alka-Seltzer.” Jammed behind him, his left hand was digging in his hip pocket; all that was in there was his wallet—containing nothing but ID cards and a couple of twenty-dollar bills—and his pocket comb.

“Why are we going to the Queen Mary?” asked Elizalde.

“To enjoy—” began deLarava; but her hair abruptly sprang up into a disordered topknot, drawing startled gasps from Kootie and Elizalde. And deLarava began to sob quietly.

Sullivan was aware of an itch in his right ear, but his father’s ghost didn’t say anything.

THE JEEP Cherokee was leading the procession, and when it turned left off Ocean onto Queen’s Way the two trucks followed.

J. Francis Strube didn’t dare hunch around in his seat, for the man in back was presumably still holding a gun pointed at him, but he could peer out of the corners of his eyes. They had driven past the new Long Beach Convention Center on the left, and past Lincoln Park on the right, and now they were cruising downhill toward a vista of bright blue lagoons and sailboats and lawns and palm trees. Out across the mile-long expanse of the harbor he could see the black hull and the white upper decks of the Queen Mary shining in the early-morning sunlight.

The car radio was tuned to some oldies rock station, and the driver was whistling along to the sad melody of Phil Ochs’s “Pleasures of the Harbor.”

For the past five minutes Strube had been remembering how cautious Nicholas Bradshaw used to be, when Strube had worked for him in 1975—refusing to say where he lived, never giving out his home phone number, always taking different routes to and from the law office. Maybe, Strube thought unhappily, I should have taken his paranoia more seriously. Maybe I was a little careless today, in the way I blundered into this thing. “Are we actually going to the Queen Mary?” he asked in a humbled voice.

The driver glanced at him in cheerful surprise. “You’ve never been on it? It’s great.”

“I’ve been there,” Strube said, defensively in spite of everything. “I’ve had dinner at Sir Winston’s many times. I meant, are we really going there now.”

“DeLarava’s scheduled a shoot there today,” the driver said. “I understood you were to be interviewed, along with that Nicky Bradshaw fellow. He was the actor who played Spooky, the teenage ghost in that old show. You must have seen reruns. He’s to do some kind of dance, was my understanding.”

Strube was squinting against his bewilderment as if it were a bright light. “But why am I handcuffed? Why all the guns?”

The man chuckled, shaking his head at the lane markers unreeling ahead of him. “Oh, she can be a regular Von Stroheim, can’t she? What’s the word? Martinet? I mean, you wanna talk about domineering? Get outta here!”

“But—what are you saying? What happened back there at that apartment building? You people threw all those wires and metal shutters out of the truck onto the street! And what was that awful smell?”

“Ah, there you have me.”

Strube was dizzy. “What if I try to get out, at the next red light? Would this man behind me shoot me?”

“Through the back of the seat,” said the driver. “Don’t do it. This isn’t a bluff, no, if that’s what you’re asking. The new automatics are ramped and throated so they have no problem feeding hollow-points, and it might not even make an exit wound, but it would surely make a hash of your vital organs. You don’t want that. In fact—” He slapped the wheel lightly and nodded. “In fact, if Sir Winston’s is open for lunch, we might be able to get her to spring for a good meal!”

“Never happen,” said the man in the back seat gloomily.

AFTER THEY had been driving for about ten minutes, stopping and starting up again and making some slow turns, Sullivan felt the truck stop and then reverse slowly down a ramp; and the skylight went dark, and he could hear the truck’s engine echoing inside a big metallic room. Then the engine was switched off.

Car doors chunked in the middle distance, and he could feel the shake of the truck’s driver’s-side door closing; footsteps scuffed across concrete to the truck’s back door, and the door was unlatched and swung open. The chilly air that swept into the truck’s interior smelled of oiled machinery and the sea.

“E Deck,” called a young man who was pulling a wheeled stepladder across the floor of the wide white-painted garagelike chamber. “We chased off the ship’s staff for the moment, and we’ve got guys around to whistle if they come back. They say they’ve turned off the power in the circuit boxes on the Promenade and R Decks, and the gaffers are off to patch in and get the Genie lifts and the key lights set up for the first call at ten.”

Test it with a meter anyway, thought Sullivan as his constricted left hand fingered his pocket comb. You don’t want to be hooking your dimmer-board to the lugs if somebody forgot, and there’s still a live 220 volts waiting for you in the utility panel.

Behind the fright that was dewing his forehead and shallowing his breathing, he was vaguely irritated at his suspicion that these efficient-looking young men might be better at the job than he and Sukie had been.

DeLarava was still sniffling as she clumped heavily down from rung to rung of the stepladder. “Get a couple of runners to take…the kid, and the old guy up by the front, and Pete Sullivan, he’s the guy in the white shirt…to that room they’re letting us use as an office. Gag the woman and the one-armed guy and leave them where they are for now.”

Sullivan looked at the one-armed man seated awkwardly beside him. Sherman Oaks seemed to be only semiconscious, and his breathing was a rattling, chattering whine, like a car engine with a lot of bad lifters and bearings. But the fabric of the man’s baggy brown-and-green trousers was bunching and stretching over the left thigh, as if kneaded by an invisible hand.

Does he have fingernails on that hand? wondered Sullivan. If so, are they strong enough to peel off the tape that’s holding down his flesh-and-blood arm? If he frees himself, and he’s left in here with Angelica, he’ll surely kill her to eat her ghost.

Should I tell deLarava about Oak’s unbound—unbindable!—hand? If so, he might in return tell her that my father’s ghost is on my person, and she’d fetch in some kind of mask and eat the old man with no delay.

Elizalde was sitting at Sullivan’s right, her taped ankles screwed down next to his, and he rocked his head around to look at her. Her narrow face was tense, her lips white, but she crinkled her eyes at him in a faint, scared smile.

“I’d bring Dr. Elizalde too,” Sullivan said. He was peripherally aware of an increasing ache in his left forearm; his fingers seemed to be nervously trying to pry the thick end-tooth off of his comb, which was a useless exercise since the comb was aluminum.

“Why would I want to bring Dr. Elizalde?” deLarava mused aloud.

“She’s a medical doctor as well as a psychiatrist,” Sullivan said, at random.

Sherman Oaks was singing in a whisper with each scratching exhalation now without moving his lips at all, and his voice seemed to be a chorus of children: “…Delaware punch, tell me the initials of your honeybunch, capital A, B, C-D-E…”

“In that case bring them all!” cried deLarava; though Sullivan thought it was Oaks’s eerie singing rather than his own suggestion that had changed the old woman’s mind. “Put cats in the coffee,” she sang wildly herself, “and mice in the tea, and welcome Queen Kelley with thirty-times-three!”

Sullivan recognized the bit of verse—it was from the end of Through the Looking-Glass, when Alice was about to be crowned a queen.

DeLarava kept her little pistol pointed at her captives, as a runner hopped up into the truck and knifed the tape off of everyone’s ankles.

“You want that lawyer that’s in the Cherokee?” the man asked.

“Leave him where he is,” deLarava said. “Lawyers are for after.”

The fingers of Sullivan’s left hand suddenly strained very hard at the end of the aluminum pocket comb, and with a muffled snap it broke, cutting his thumb knuckle. He palmed the broken-off end when the runner hopped down from the truck and began hauling Oaks’s legs out over the bumper.

After Oaks had been propped upright against the side of the truck it was Sullivan’s turn, and when he had been lifted down he stepped back across the floor to make room for Elizalde and Kootie—and Bradshaw, the shifting of whose bulk across the truck floor required the summoning of a second runner.

Down on the deck at last, Bradshaw hopped ponderously to shake the legs of his shorts straight. “I bet those guys were gay,” he muttered.

“Don’t try to shuffle away, Pete!” said deLarava sharply; and Sullivan was tensely sure that this direct address meant that she intended to kill him very soon indeed.

“Not me, boss,” he said mildly.

When at last Bradshaw was standing next to Kootie and Elizalde on the concrete deck, deLarava pirouetted back, then mincingly led the way down a white hallway while the runners prodded the captives along after her. “O Looking-Glass creatures,” called deLarava shrilly over her shoulder, “draw near. ’Tis an honor to see me, a favor to hear.”

Sullivan managed to catch Elizalde’s glance as they fell into step, and he gave her an optimistic wink.

It wasn’t completely an empty gesture—it had just occurred to him that the hands sticking out of his shirt cuffs might well be Houdini’s. The mask wasn’t complete—he wasn’t wearing the jacket with the detachable sleeves—but that was probably because he didn’t have the whole outfit, he wasn’t carrying the magician’s dried thumb; nevertheless the plaster hands had disappeared when he had touched them, back there in the funny apartment, and now somebody’s left hand was clutching a bit of broken metal.

Lurching along up at the head of the procession, Sherman Oaks was tall enough to have to duck under a couple of valves connecting the pipes that ran along under the low ceiling, but the room deLarava led them into was as expansive as a TV studio. Fluorescent lights threw a white glow over two low couches against the walls and a metal desk out in the middle of the floor and rolls of cable on stacked wooden apple-boxes in a corner; deLarava waved toward one of the couches and then crossed ponderously to the desk and lowered her bulk into the chair behind it.

To the pair of her employees who had herded her captives into the room, deLarava said, “Loop a cable through their cuffs—under the arm of the one-armed fellow—and sit them down on the couch and tie the cable where they can’t reach it.”

As soon as Sullivan had been tethered and pushed down onto the couch, again sitting between Elizalde and Oaks, he felt his thumb begin to pry at one of the narrow comb-teeth that had broken away with the thick end-tooth. To explain any muscular shifting of his shoulders, he leaned forward and looked to his right—Elizalde and Kootie were whispering together, and Bradshaw, at the far end of the long couch, was just frowning and squinting around at the walls as if disapproving of the paint job.

DeLarava waved the runners out of the room with her little gun. From the floor behind the desk she lifted a big leather purse, and with her free hand she shook it out onto the desktop. Three cans of Hires Root Beer rolled out, two of them solidly full and one clattering empty; and then a brown wallet thumped down beside the cans, followed by a ring of keys.

“You recognize these, Pete?” deLarava asked, staring down at the items on the desk.

CHAPTER FORTY FOUR

… and she had a vague sort of idea that they must he collected at once and put back into the jury-box, or they would die.

—Lewis Carroll,

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

SULLIVAN didn’t answer. He took a deep breath—and thought he caught a whiff of bourbon on the air-conditioned breeze.

“And I’ve got an electromagnet,” deLarava went on, “and some very specific music, and a schizophrenic who’s a better mask than you and your sister ever were. I don’t want a glut today, just your father—and, as long as they’re here, Thomas Alva Edison and Koot Hoomie Parganas.” She lifted her pouchy face and stared right into Sullivan’s eyes. “And, wherever he is, Apie will come when I call him,” she said. “Did you know that he and your mother had their honeymoon aboard the Queen Mary, in 1949?”

“No,” said Sullivan. Their father had never liked to talk to the twins about their mother, who had died in 1953, when they were a year old.

His left hand had broken off one of the narrow comb-teeth, and his fingers were prodding the tiny sliver of metal into the gap between the hinged single-blade swing-arm and the pawl housing of the cuff on his right wrist.

Sullivan was trying to remember what he’d read last night about Alice’s coronation party; he wished he could lean across Elizalde and ask Kootie, who’d been reading the book this morning. Sullivan’s fingers were still pushing the comb-tooth against the cuff, and, recalling the trick his hands had done yesterday inside the magically projected milk can in the cemetery lake, he tried to help—and immediately the tooth sprang out of his grip, and was lost forever down between the couch cushions.

A young man who was apparently the second assistant director leaned in at the doorway. “That producer guy, Neal Obstadt, is here,” he said. “He says you’re—Jesus!—expecting him!” the young man finished as a burly man in a business suit pushed right past him into the room. The newcomer’s iron-gray hair was clipped short, and the cut of his jacket didn’t conceal broad shoulders that Sullivan guessed were probably tattooed.

Sullivan’s heart beat faster at the thought that this intrusion might mean rescue—but the surge of hope died when the tanned cheeks spread back at the sight of deLarava’s five captives, baring white teeth in a delighted smile.

“Why, Kelley!” he said. “I don’t see how that boy there could be anyone but the famous Koot Hoomie Parganas! What a thoughtful,” he added, frowning abruptly “tithe.” He glared across the room at her now. “You’ve been eating ghosts for years right? You know how it works?”

“That will be all, Curtis,” deLarava said hastily to the young man in the doorway, who seemed relieved to be able to hurry away.

Neal Obstadt waved at the captives. “They’re secured?”

“Cuffed to a cable,” said deLarava.

“And I assume,” he went on, “that all five of your guests here will be dead before sundown?”

DeLarava rolled her eyes. “If you insist on subverting the civilized circumlocutions of—”

“You gonna kill ‘em or not? I don’t have all day, and neither do you, trust me.”

“Fuck you, Neal. Yes.”

“I can talk freely then. Some smoke dealer named Sherman Oaks sold me a dead ghost. Well, they’re all dead, aren’t they? But this one had gone rotten, and now it’s stuck in my head; it’s in the way, and I can’t eat any more ghosts. All that happens when I try is that I get the nitrous oxide—but I don’t get a life. The life in the dose just gets exhaled away. Does me no good. Have you run into this problem?”

“I’ve heard of it, yes,” deLarava began.

“I know how to undo it,” said Sherman Oaks—surprising Sullivan, who had thought the ragged one-armed man was nearly unconscious.

“So do I,” said Sullivan and Kootie in quick unison.

“My name is Sherman Oaksssss…” said the one-armed man.

He went on exhaling past the end of his sentence, and the breath didn’t stop, but kept whistling out of him as if his mouth were an opening in a windy canyon; and on that wind came the chanting voices of half a dozen little girls:

“There was a man of double deed

Sowed his garden full of seed.

When the seed began to grow,

‘Twas like a garden full of snow.”

Obstadt had reached into his jacket and smoothly drawn a stainless-steel .45 semiautomatic, cocked and locked. Sullivan blinked helplessly at Elizalde and nodded. Same kind of gun, he thought. God help us.

“When the snow began to melt,” the girls’ voices chanted on out of Sherman Oaks’s slack mouth,

“Twas like a ship without a belt;

When the ship began to sail,

Twas like a bird without a tail”

Behind Sullivan’s back, the strong fingers of his left hand quickly broke another narrow tooth off the comb-end, and again began working the end of it into the handcuff housing, in under the pawl wheel. This time he didn’t try to help his hands.

“When the bird began to fly,

‘Twas like an eagle in the sky;

When the sky began to roar,

‘Twas like a lion at the door.”

“The fuck is he doing?” shouted Obstadt. He pointed the pistol at Oaks and yelled, “Shut up!” Sullivan could see that the safety lever was down now.

The voices continued, with the businesslike diligence of a child’s jump-rope ritual; and Oaks’s mouth was slack, and his throat wasn’t visibly working; as the soprano syllables stitched his outrushing breath:

“When the door began to crack,

‘Twas like a stick across my back;

When my back began to smart,

‘Twas like a pen-knife in my heart;

When my heart began to bleed,

‘Twas death and death and death indeed”

Oaks’s eyes were crossed sharply together behind his nose. He was frowning and shaking his head, and Sullivan was sure this performance wasn’t voluntary; Sullivan guessed that it was some kind of after-effect of the unclogging the man had done back in the apartment.

DeLarava had stood up, and now Sullivan looked away from Oaks at her. Her face was as pale as bacon fat, and her mouth was trembling.

“My little girls!” she screamed suddenly. “That’s them! He’s the one who ate my little birth day girls!”

Then she was end-running around the desk, her blubbery arms swinging horizontally and her belly jumping under the flowered dress, and she flung herself onto her knees in front of Oaks and planted her lips over his still-exhaling mouth.

And the wind out of Oaks must have increased, for deLarava’s head was flung aside, and she teetered and windmilled her arms for a moment before sitting down heavily on the deck—and a smell of flowers and green grass tickled Sullivan’s nose, and the room was full of flickering shadows and quick tapping and anxious little cries.

All at once Sullivan could see several skinny little girls in white dresses—or it might have been one, very quick, skinny little girl—flashing around the room, like a carousel of hologram photographs spinning under a strobe light; then the apparition was gone, and he heard sobbing and laughter and light fluttering footsteps receding away down the hallway beyond the door, away from the direction of the trucks, farther into the maze of the ship.

Sullivan felt the tiny metal blade trip the pawl inside the cuff mechanism, and then the fingers of his left hand squeezed the cuff tight, and released it—and his left hand was free.

“You can have the Parganas,” wheezed deLarava as she rolled over onto her hands and knees and began dragging one big knee, and then the other, under herself, “kid. And Oaks.” She raised her obese body to her feet in one steady straightening, though the effort sent bright blood bursting out of her flaring nostrils and down the front of her dress. “Leave me the others.”

Then she took a deep breath and went charging out the door after the girl-ghosts. “Wait,” she was bellowing hoarsely as she clumped and caromed down the hall, “wait, I’m one of you too! Delaware punch! Tell me the—goddammit—”

Obstadt was still pointing the .45 at Sherman Oaks’s round face, but his finger was out of the trigger guard and he was looking after deLarava.

“Like that,” said Oaks in a frail voice.

Obstadt looked down at him over the sights. “What?”

“What I just did. That’s how you do it. I just now spit out those ghosts. To get cleared of the rotten one, hike one of your quick ones up to the top of your mind. Cross your eyes, hard, so you can see the quick one standing there on the diving board of your mind, and then exhale and spit. The live one goes, and knocks the rotten one out with it.”

Sullivan was still sure that Oaks’s latest seizure had been involuntary, and that the little girl-ghosts had simply forced their way out of him, past the now-compromised containment of his will; Sullivan guessed that the one-armed man was simply incontinent now, and would leak ghosts whenever he so much as sneezed. Nevertheless, Sullivan was a little surprised that Oaks would give the crucial information away with no security.

Sullivan had got his toes well back in under the couch, and he was watching Obstadt intently.

Obstadt stepped back, leaned against the desk, and crossed his eyes. Sullivan heard a creaking from down the couch to his right, and when he glanced that way he saw Bradshaw squinting and gathering himself as if for a rush, as if he’d forgotten that he was tethered. Sullivan caught the old man’s eye and frowned hard, shaking his head slightly.

Obstadt exhaled, leaning forward with the .45 pointing at the deck, and coughed; and he shook spasmodically, and his shoulders went up and his chin dropped onto his chest, then his shoulders fell and his head snapped forward and a black cylinder with ribs or folded legs ridging its sides came inflating out from between his gaping jaws, balanced for a moment on his teeth, and then fell and slapped onto the floor where it flexed muscularly. The irregularities on its sides separated and proved to be legs that waved uselessly in the fouled air.

Sullivan had flinched at the sight and the smell of the thing’s sudden appearance, but before Obstadt could straighten up Sullivan had sprung from the couch and whipped his right hand down in a fast arc past Obstadt’s jaw, so that the freed cuff cracked solidly against the back of the man’s head. Sullivan’s bar-time jolt of surprise, halfway through the move, had only made him hit harder.

The .45 went off with an eardrum-hammering bang and blew the black thing to wet fragments, and the ricochet rang around the metal room and punched a hole in the couch where Sullivan had been sitting; Obstadt was on his hands and knees, and from somewhere a fist malleted the back of his bloodied head, sending Obstadt’s face snapping down to the deck like a smacked croquet ball. Wind and a man’s shouting voice were blowing out of his mouth now.

Sullivan looked up—Oaks had freed himself from the gaffer’s tape, and it had been he that had punched Obstadt.

Sullivan’s right arm was paused across his body from the follow-through of his blow, and now he lashed it back up hard at Sherman Oaks’s face, which was looming over his own; the cuff just tore Oaks’s cheek, for Sullivan’s fingers had snatched at the chain, but Sullivan followed the blow with a solid kick of his left knee into Oaks’s groin, and the one-armed man convulsed double and fell over sideways into the stinking mess that had been the buglike expelled ghost. The other ghost Obstadt had exhaled, the one with a man’s voice, whirled gasping around the room and cycloned away in the hall.

Sullivan took one hitching half-breath, and the instant sting in his lungs made him decide not to breathe. He fished his comb out of his pocket and broke off another tooth, and when he had freed his right wrist he crouched to ratchet one cuff tightly around Oaks’s wrist and the other around Obstadt’s left ankle.

Then he tried to pick up the .45—but his fingers had suddenly gone limp, and all he could do was to push the weapon around clumsily; even by pressing the heels of both hands together, he couldn’t get a grip on the gun. Fuck it, he thought in despair, straightening up.

Still not breathing, though his eyes were watering from the harsh fumes of the sizzling, evaporating ghost, he reeled back to the couch, and his hands were suddenly strong and dextrous again as he leaned behind Elizalde and then Kootie and then Bradshaw and sprang free the left wrist of each of them.

He expelled the last exhausted air in his lungs in croaking to Elizalde, “Get the gun!”

Her nostrils were whitely pinched and her eyes were teary slits, but she nodded and quick-stepped to crouch by where Obstadt and Oaks, linked, were writhing in the wet, smoking mess. Elizalde snatched up the .45 without difficulty and tucked it into the waistband of her jeans, pulling the untucked sweatshirt hem over it.

“Out,” she barked, leading the way out the door and into the hallway.

Sullivan couldn’t tell how much of the screaming racket in his ears was external and how much was just the internal overload-protest of his eardrums, but at least the appalling smell seemed to be keeping deLarava’s employees back at the garage end of the hall.

Then he did hear something, from back in the direction of the garage—a familiar wailing laugh.

Elizalde was hurrying down the hall away from the garage, in the direction deLarava had gone, and Sullivan and Kootie and Bradshaw went stumbling hastily after her.

THE JEEP had been parked well in, right up against the inboard bulkhead of the garage area, and the trucks had parked behind it. At the boom-and-echoes of the gunshot, Strube’s guards had climbed out and rushed toward the hall; but they had been stopped by the fumes, and had joined the general rush out into the fresh air on the sunlit loading dock. Some men in undershirts had come inside from the dock carrying a burlap sack with a baseball cap on it and something thrashing inside it, and they hurried into the vacated hall.

Strube didn’t mind the smell. He hiked his left arm behind himself until he could reach the door handle with his right hand, and when he had timidly opened the door and stepped down to the deck, he wandered down the hall himself—slowly, so that any of deLarava’s men who might see him would be likelier to yell at him than shoot.

But apparently no one saw him. He walked past an open doorway and glanced in at two men rolling in a black puddle. The odd smell was strongest here, and one of the struggling men had only one arm, but Strube wasn’t curious. If he kept walking, he was sure to find an elevator or stairway that would lead him up to the tourist decks, where he could surely get someone to call the police for him; maybe he would be able to get a security guard to unlock the handcuffs.

And then what? He could refuse to press charges, and take a cab back to Twenty-first Place, where he had left his car. Then he would drive back to his office, to think. His venture into show-business law was proving to be more difficult than he had anticipated.

CHAPTER FORTY FIVE

“If that there King was to wake,” added Tweedledum, “you’d go out—bang!—just like a candle!”

—Lewis Carroll,

Through the Looking-Glass

BY the fluorescent tubes overhead, Sullivan could see that the hallway broadened out ahead of Elizalde—the port walls slanted outward with the hull, and were riveted steel with vertical steel crossbeams welded on, and the edges of the empty doorways on the inboard side were knobby from having been cut with torches—and in the far bulkhead, beyond a row of wheeled aluminum carts, he saw a tiny recessed booth with accordion bars pulled across it.

“Whoa, Angelica!” he called. “That’s an elevator.”

Elizalde nodded and skidded sideways and sprinted to the elevator. By the time she had pulled back the bars from the little stall, Sullivan was right behind her, and he took her arm as the two of them stepped into the telephone-boothlike box.

The walls were paneled in rich burl elm that was dinged and scratched at the tray-level of the wheeled carts. He folded up a hinged wooden seat and flattened him self against the elevator wall to make room for Kootie; and over the boy’s head he saw Bradshaw shuffling slowly across the deck.

“Come on, Nicky,” Sullivan called, thinking of the winged bag that had flown after them in the cemetery yesterday. “Hurry!”

“I don’t,” said Bradshaw, scuffling to a stop. “Feel so good. Motion sickness. I’d throw up in there. I’ll meet you. Later.”

The ringing in Sullivan’s ears had decreased to a shrill whining…and he was suddenly aware of an airy absence. He slapped his chest, feeling the angular hardness of the brass grave-portrait plaque, still in his scapular. “My father!” he said. “Is he with you, Nicky?”

Bradshaw paused, then shook his head. “But I’ll watch for him,” he said. “Go on now.”

Sullivan bared his teeth and clenched Houdini’s fists. His father might be anywhere down here. DeLarava might be anywhere down here. “Nicky, get in the elevator!”

Bradshaw smiled. “You know I won’t, if I say I won’t.”

“—Okay.” There’s nothing I can do, Sullivan thought. “Okay. Vaya con Dios, amigo”

“Y tu tambien, hermano,” said Bradshaw.

Sullivan pulled the folded gate out again across the gap until it clanged shut, and said, “We’ve got to go down a deck.”

“Down?” panted Elizalde. Her breaths were frightened sobs. “No, Pete—up! Sunlight, normal people!”

“I should have thought of this before,” said Sullivan. “Kootie, do you remember how Alice’s coronation ceremony got wrecked?”

The boy’s brown eyes blinked up at him. “The food at the banquet came to life,” he said, “and it didn’t want to be eaten.”

“Right, the leg of mutton was talking and laughing and sitting in the White Queen’s chair, and the pudding yelled at Alice when she cut it, and—and the White Queen dissolved in the soup tureen, remember? The bottles even came to life, and took plates for wings and forks for legs. And Queen Alice was knocked right out of the Looking-Glass world.” He punched the button that had a downward-pointing arrow on it. “We’ve got to find the after steering compartment.”

The little booth shook, and then with a hydraulic whine the deck outside started to move upward; before his vision was cut off by this ascending fourth wall, Sullivan heard the sirenlike laugh again, closer, and he saw Bradshaw shift heavily around to face the way they had come.

The bare bulb in the shelved, inlaid elevator ceiling made the faces of Kootie and Elizalde look jaundiced and oily, and Sullivan knew he must look the same to them.

Elizalde was shaking. “Goddamn you, Pete, what’s in this after steering compartment?”

“The degaussing machinery,” said Sullivan, trying to speak with conviction. “They’d have had to install it when the Queen Mary was a troopship during the war, to keep her hull from attracting magnetic mines; and there’s no way they’d have gone to the trouble of tearing it out, afterward. And the after steering room is the electrical spine of any ship—there’d have been a diesel engine there to run a sort of power-steering pump, so they could steer the ship from down there if the bridge was blown away. It’s the backup bridge, in effect, and I don’t suppose they’re using the real one for anything at all now, with tourists dropping snow cones all over everything. There’ll be live power down below still.” It’s certainly possible, he thought.

“So what?” Elizalde was leaning against the back of the car, her sunken eyes watching the riveted steel of the elevator shaft rising beyond the frail bars of the gate, and she spoke quietly in the confined space. “What the hell good is this old anti-mine stuff going to do us? Jesus, Pete, tell me you know what you’re doing here!”

“How did this apparatus keep the ship from attracting magnetic mines?” asked Kootie.

Sullivan looked down at the boy. “The mines had a specific magnetic polarity,” he said. “Once that was known, it was easy enough to forcibly reverse the ship’s own natural magnetic field by passing a current, through a set of cables around the hull.”

“But it’s turned off now?”

“Sure, it’ll be disconnected, but it’ll still be there.”

“And you think there’ll still be power there too. So you’re planning to reconnect it and crank up a big magnetic field; and,” it was Kootie’s little-boy cadences that went on, “you’re gonna wake up every dinner aboard.”

“It’ll draw ‘em out,” Sullivan agreed. From the walls, he thought, from the closets in the old staterooms, from the deck planks weathered by three decades of sunny summer cruises and North Atlantic storms. “And none of ’em will want to be eaten. It’ll be a mass exorcism.” Once drawn out, he thought, they’ll dissolve away in this alien Long Beach air. He remembered Bradshaw’s explanation of the L.A. CIGAR traps, and he hoped the dim old ghosts might somehow understand that this was…rescue? Liberation? Finishing the job of dying; say.

A breeze on his ankles made Sullivan look down past Kootie, and he saw that an edge of the elevator shaft had appeared down by their feet; the gap below it rode up until he could see another deck, dimly lit by electric lights somewhere. The elevator floor clanged against the painted steel deck, and he pulled the accordion gate aside. The bulkheads of the silent old corridors were ribbed and riveted, painted gray below belt-height and yellowed white above.

“This has got to be as close to water level as you can get,” he said, instinctively speaking quietly down here so close to the sanctum sanctorum of the vast old liner. “It’ll be right behind us, directly over the rudder.”

“Get these cuffs off us,” said Kootie.

“Oh, yeah.” Sullivan took out his comb, broke off another narrow tooth, and quickly opened the handcuff that was still un Kootie’s right wrist; then he did the same for Elizalde.

“Where did you learn that?” Elizalde asked as the cuffs clanked to the floor and she massaged her freed wrist.

Sullivan held up his hands, palms out, and wiggled the fingers at her. “If you hadn’t glued that plaster finger back on, I’d be missing one right now.” He started down the corridor toward the stern. “Come on.”

Ancient bunks, with brown blankets still tumbled on them, were bolted on metal trays to the steel bulkheads down here, and as he led Elizalde and Kootie past them Sullivan shuddered at the thought of coming back this way if he got the field up and at maximum intensity.

“That’s serious electrical conduit,” said Kootie, pointing at the ceiling.

Sullivan looked up, and saw that the boy was right. “Follow it,” he said.

A few steps farther down the hall the conduit pipes curved into the amidships bulkhead over a dogged-shut oval door, and Sullivan punched back the eight dog clips around the door’s perimeter; the door rattled in the bulkhead frame, and Sullivan realized that the rubber seal had rotted away. He prayed that he wasn’t the first person to open this door since the ship was docked here in Long Beach in 1967.

But there were lights burning inside the twenty-foot-square room beyond the door when he pulled it open; and they were new fluorescent tubes, bolted up alongside the very old lights, which were hung on C-shaped metal straps so that the recoil of the big wartime guns on the top deck wouldn’t break the filaments.

A diesel engine the size of a car motor sat on a skid supported by two I-beams laid down near the left bulkhead, with two banked rows of square batteries on shelves behind it; and Sullivan saw a new battery charger bolted to the bulkhead over them.

“They’re live!” he said, his shoulders slumping with relief. “See? This must be the ship’s backup power supply now, in case the AC from ashore goes funny. UPS for their computers, uninterrupted power supply so they don’t lose their data.”

“Groovy,” said Elizalde. “Hook it up and let’s get out of here.”

“Right.” Sullivan looked around and identified the reduction-gear box and the steering pump and the after steering wheel to his left, and so the three-foot-by-four-foot box on the right-hand bulkhead had to be the degaussing panel. He walked past it and began unlooping heavy coils of emergency power cable from the rack riveted to the bulkhead.

Sullivan was remembering another exorcism he had helped perform, at the Moab Nuclear Power Station in Utah in 1989.

The Public Utilities Commission had claimed that it would be cheaper to produce power elsewhere than to spend the millions needed to bring the reactor up to current safety standards—but the real reason had been that the site had become clogged with ghosts attracted to the high voltage. The things had clustered around the big outdoor transformers, and some had got solid enough to fiddle with the valves and switches and steal the employees cars.

The power line from the degaussing panel had been cut, just beyond the breaker, disconnecting the panel from the rest of the ship; but a post stuck out above the hack-sawed conduit, and Sullivan pulled the dusty canvas cover off the emergency power three-phase plug on the end of the post.

“They call these things biscuits,” he told Elizalde defiantly.

“Call it a muffin if you like,” she said, “today I’m not arguing.”

He picked up one end of the cable and separated the inch-thick wires protruding from the end of it. The red one he shoved into the positive hole, in the biscuit, and the black one he shoved into the negative hole. They fit tightly enough to support the weight of the cable. He would be getting direct current from the batteries, so he let the white wire hang unconnected.

The Moab station had in its time produced more than fifty billion kilowatt hours, enough power to light half a million homes for a quarter of a century. But he had stood in the control room and watched the dials as the power had fallen from fifty to twenty to three percent of capacity, and then a voice on the intercom had said, “Turbine trip,” and Sullivan's gaze had snapped to the green lights on the control panel in the instant before they flashed on, their sudden glow indicating that the circuit breakers were open and no electricity was being produced.

And as the superintendent reached for the switch that would drive the cadmium rods into the reactor core, killing the uranium fission, Sullivan alone among the technicians in the control room had heard the chorus of wails as the resident ghosts had faded into nothing.

He was setting up the same devastation now. The current he would shortly be sending through the degaussing coils in the length of the hull would wake up all the dormant, undisturbed ghosts aboard the ship; focused, they would venture timidly out of their housekeeping-tended graves, only to evaporate into nothingness when the drain on the batteries outstripped the ability of the recharger to counter it, and the magnetic field collapsed.

Perhaps sensing his unhappiness, Kootie and Elizalde wordlessly stepped aside as he dragged the other end of the cable across the painted steel deck to the stepped ranks of batteries against the left bulkhead.

Steel bars connected the terminals of each battery in a row to the next, and he wedged the inch-thick end of the red wire under the bar on the first battery in the top row, then did the same with the black wire to the first battery on the bottom row. He had now hooked up the degaussing panel, at the expense of the diesel engine’s starter motor.

As he straightened up, he softly whistled, in slow time, the first notes of reveille.

He walked back across the deck to the panel and, with a sigh, pushed the master switch up into the on position. There was a muffled internal click.

The needle of the first DC voltmeter on the face of the panel jumped to 30, but that one was only indicating full power from the batteries. Then he took hold of the rubber-cased rheostat wheel and started turning it clockwise; the second voltmeter’s needle began to climb across me dial toward 30, as the needle on the ammeter next to it moved more slowly up toward 150. For the first time in more than forty years, current was coursing through the wartime degaussing cables that ribbed the hull all the way from back here by the rudder to the bow a thousand feet north of him.

The deck had begun to vibrate under his feet, and a droning roar was getting louder; when he had cranked the wheel all the way over as far as it would go clockwise, the noise was so loud that Elizalde had to shout to be heard.

“What are you doing?” she yelled. “You’ve turned something on!”

“My God,” said Kootie, loudly but reverently, “that’s the noise of the screws. You’ve waked up the ghost of the ship herself!”

CHAPTER FORTY SIX

“What matters it how jar we go?” his scaly friend replied. “There is another shore, you know, upon the other side”

—Lewis Carroll,

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

OH,” Elizalde moaned, “let’s get out of here!” Sullivan backed away from the panel, and even Houdini’s hands were trembling. “Yes,” he said.

Sullivan led the way out of the after steering compartment and back down the corridor toward the elevator. The hallway reeked of sweaty bodies now, and he could hear a scratchy recording of Kitty Kallen singing “It’s Been a Long, Long Time” echoing from somewhere ahead of them.

Bony figures were shifting among the blankets on the bulkhead-hung bunks as Sullivan and Elizalde and Kootie hurried past; hands still translucent groped at Elizalde, and voices blurred by unformed mouths mumbled amorously at her.

The elevator motor was buzzing and rattling when they rounded the corner, but the car was coming down to this deck—and through the bars Sullivan saw the burlap sack with the black Raiders baseball cap on it slumped on the elevator floor, shifting furiously and yowling as if it were filled with cats.

Before he could grab Kootie and Elizalde and run, the cat noises stopped and the front flap of the bag fell away, and as the car clanked down to the deck a naked young woman, slim and dark-haired, stood up in it and blinked through the bars at Sullivan and beyond him. Her body wasn’t solidified yet—ribs showed faintly through the white softness of her breasts, and her loins were a wash of shadow.

Her eyes were bewildered brown depths, and already solid enough for Sullivan to see tears on the lashes. “Es esto infierno?” she asked.

Elizalde pulled back the gate. “Esto es ninguna parte,” she said. “Y esto pasara pronto.”

Is this hell? the ghost-woman had asked; and Elizalde had told her that this was nowhere, and would soon pass. Sullivan stared at the woman nervously, remembering the thing that had flown over the grass at the cemetery yesterday, laughing and clanking metal wings—and she stared back at him without any recognition, her imprinted malice having fallen away with the burlap sack under her bare feet.

The woman stumbled out of the elevator car, looked blankly around, and then walked uncertainly back toward where the bunks were hanging, and Sullivan paused as if to stop her or warn her; but Elizalde grabbed his arm and pulled him into the car.

‘Tumble a bunch of old books together,” she said. “Books so old and fragile that nobody can read them anymore. The pages will break off and get mixed up. Does it matter?”

Sullivan was sweating as he stepped into the car, crowding the wall to make room for Elizalde and Kootie. These limitless dim lower decks, with all their forgotten alcoves and doors and passageways, were suddenly potent, and darkly inviting, and he pushed the up button hard. “Let’s go all the way to the top,” he said hoarsely.

“Amen,” said Elizalde.

J. FRANCIS Strube had found a carpeted hallway and he had started running downhill along it, past silent doors recessed in the wood-paneled walls. The hallway curved up ahead of him to disappear behind the gentle bulge of the glossy ivory ceiling, as if he were sprinting around the perimeter ring of a very elegant space station, and he had assured himself that somewhere between here and the eventual bow he must run across someone who could help him.

But a grinding roar had started up under the carpet and the whole ship had moved slightly, as if flexing itself, arid he had lost his footing and fallen headlong; his hands had still been cuffed behind him, and though he had managed to take the first hard impact on his shoulder, his chin and cheekbone had bounced solidly off the carpeted floor.

Now he was up again, and walking, but he had to step carefully. Perhaps it was some Coriolis effect that made walking so difficult; he had to plant his feet flat, with the toes pointed outward, to keep from rolling against the close walls.

Over the droning vibration from below the deck he could presently hear children laughing, and when he came to a gleaming wooden staircase he saw a little girl with blond braids come flying down the banister; she rebounded from the floor and the wall like a big beach ball, and her long white dress spread out in an air-filled bell to let her sink gently to the carpeted landing.

Another girl came zooming down right behind her to do the same trick, and a third simply spun swan-diving down through the vertical space of the stairwell, graceful as a leaf.

“Up, up!” cried girl voices from the landing above, and when Strube stepped forward to tilt his head back and peer in that direction, he saw three more blond little girls stamping their feet with impatience.

All six of the girls seemed to be identical—sextuplets?—and to be about seven years old. How could they be doing these impossible acrobatics? They were a little higher up than he was—was the gravity weaker up in that ring? When he counted them all again, he got seven; then five; then eight.

“Girls,” he said dizzily; but the three or four on his level were holding hands and dancing in a ring, chanting, “When the sky began to roar, ‘twas like a lion at the door!” and the three or four above went on calling, “Up, up!”

“Girls!” he said, more loudly.

The several who had been dancing dropped their hands now and stared at him wide-eyed. “He can see us!” said one to another.

Strube was dizzy. His neck was wet, and he couldn’t shake the notion that it was wet with blood rather than sweat, but with his hands cuffed behind him he couldn’t reach up to find out.

“Of course I can see you,” he said. “Listen to me. I need to find a grown-up. Where’s your mother?”

“We don’t think we have a mother,” said one of the girls in front of him. “Where is your mother, please?”

This was getting him nowhere. “What are your names?”

One of the girls at the landing above called down, “We’re each named Kelley. We all became friends because of that, and because we couldn’t sleep, even though it was pitch dark.”

“In most gardens,” spoke up a girl in front of Strube, “they make the beds too soft, so the flowers are always asleep.”

“We came from a hard, noisy garden,” put in one who was sliding slowly down the banister. “We’ve got to go up,” she told her companions. “If there isn’t the sun, there’ll be the moon.”

“Who is taking care of you?” Strube insisted. “Who did you come here with?”

“We were thrown out of a dark place,” said one of the girls above. The four or five below were climbing the stairs now with graceful spinning hops. “Again,” put in another.

At least they seem to be well cared for, Strube thought. Then he looked more closely at a couple of them and noticed their pallor and their sunken cheeks, and he saw that their dresses were made of some coarsely woven white stuff that looked like matted cobwebs.

“Where do you live?” asked Strube, speaking more shrilly than he had meant to. His heart was pounding and his breath was fast and shallow; he realized that he was frightened, though not of these girls, directly.

“We live in Hell,” one of the Kelleys told him in a matter-of-fact tone. “But we’re climbing out,” one of her companions added.

Strube wasn’t able to think clearly, and he knew it was because of the bang his head had taken against the floor back up the hallway. His stomach felt inverted; he would have to find a men’s room soon and throw up. But he felt that he couldn’t leave these defenseless, demented children down here in these roaring, flexing catacombs.

“I’ll lead you out of here,” he said, stepping up the stairs after them. He had to hunch his left shoulder up and stretch his right arm to hold on to the banister, for the ship was rolling ponderously. “We’ve all got to get out of here.”

The girls looked down at him doubtfully from the landing. One of them said “Would you know the sun, or the moon, if you saw either of them?”

Jesus, thought Strube. “Yes. Definitely.”

“What if it’s just another painted canvas?” one of the girls asked.

“I’ll tear it down,” Strube said desperately. “The real one’ll be up there, trust me.”

“Come on, then,” a Kelley told him, and the girls whirled and leaped around him as he climbed on up the stairs. The gravity did seem to be weaker as one ascended higher, and he had to restrain himself from dancing with them.

A LIFT attendant had abruptly appeared in the elevator, cramping things terribly. He was an elderly man in a white shirt and black tie, and in a fretful English accent he demanded to know what class of accommodations Sullivan and Kootie and Elizalde had booked.

Sullivan glanced bewilderedly at Elizalde, and then said heartily, “Oh, first-class!”

“All the way!” added Kootie.

The old man stared at their dirty jeans and disordered hair, and he said, “I think not.” He pushed the button for R Deck, and a moment later the elevator car rocked to a stop. “The Tourist Class Dining Saloon is down the hall ahead of you,” he said sternly as he leaned between Sullivan and Kootie to slide open the gate, “just past the stairs. See that you go no higher up.”

Sullivan hesitated, and considered just throwing the old man out of the car and resuming their upward course; but he and Kootie and Elizalde were deep in the ghost world now, and they might well find the solid ghosts of security guards from the 1930s waiting for them on the higher decks.

“I think we’d better play along,” he said quietly to Elizalde. “We’re in good cover so far, and I doubt that Edison’s field shows up at all in this chaos.” He stepped out of the car onto a carpeted hallway.

After an agonized, tooth-baring whine, Elizalde followed him out, tugging Kootie along by the hand.

Behind them the gate slid closed, and the car began to sink away down the shaft.

The ship was alive with voices now, and Sullivan and his companions seemed to have left the rumble of the screws below them.

Many of the room doors were open, and laughter and excited shouting shook the tobacco-scented air, but when they peeked into the lighted staterooms they passed, they could see only empty couches, and mirrored vanity tables, and paneled walls with motionless curtains over the portholes.

At the open, polished burl walnut stairway they could hear children’s voices ascending from below; but the dining-room doors were ahead of them, and a steamy beef smell and a clatter of cutlery on china was accompanying the voices from beyond the closed doors, and Sullivan led the way around the stairs and pushed the doors open.

The noises were loud now, but the tables and chairs set across the ship’s-width hardwood floor were empty; though a chair here and there did occasionally shift, as if invisible diners were turning their attentions from one companion to another.

Sullivan took Elizalde’s cold hand, while she took Kootie’s, and he led them between the noisy tables toward the service doors in the far bulkhead; and though there were no diners visible, Sullivan tried to thread his way exactly between the tables, and not violate the body spaces of any ghosts.

They exited the dining room through the starboard service door, and now, among the kitchens, they saw people.

Nearly solid men in white chef’s hats were pushing carts in and out of open kitchen doorways, apparently oblivious of the unauthorized intruders; the dishes on the carts were covered with steel domes, and, since the kitchen staff didn’t seem able to see Sullivan and he hadn’t eaten at all today, he reached out and touched one of the covers on a cart that had been momentarily left against the hallway bulkhead. The cover handle was warmly solid, and he lifted the dome away.

From a bed of baby carrots and asparagus, a woman’s face was smiling up at him. Her eyes were looking directly into his, and when her lips opened to puff out a bourbon-scented whisper of “Hi, Pete,” he recognized her as Sukie.

Elizalde tugged at his arm, but he pulled her back, feeling the relayed shake as Kootie was stopped too.

“Hi, Sukie,” he said; his voice was level, but he was distantly surprised that his legs were still holding him up. He glanced sideways at Elizalde’s face, but she was looking down at the plate, and then at him, in frowning puzzlement.

“I guess she can’t see me,” said Sukie’s face. “You’ve spilled it all out onto the floor, haven’t you? How long can this magnetic charge last? Who’s your chick, anyway? She’s the one who was on the phone last night, isn’t she?”

“Yes.” Sullivan squeezed Elizalde’s hand. “The charge—I don’t know. An hour?”

“When I consider how my light was spent! And then I’ll be gone, and you’ll probably be sorry, but not near sorry enough. You’re in love with her, aren’t you? How do I look in a halo of vegetables? I’ll see if I can’t wish you something besides misery with her; no promises, but I’ll see what I can muster up. Haul your ass—and hers, too, I guess—and you got a kid already?—up to the Moon Deck. We also serve who only stand and gaff.”

Elizalde barked a quick scream and her hand tightened on Sullivan’s, and then the face was gone, and all that was on the plate was steaming vegetables.

“You saw her, didn’t you?” said Sullivan as he hurried on down the kitchen corridor, pulling Elizalde and Kootie along.

“Just for a second,” said Elizalde, having to nearly shout to be heard over the feverish clatter of pots and pans, “I saw a woman’s face on that plate! No, Kootie, we’re not going back!” To Sullivan, she added, “You were…speaking to her…?”

“It was my sister.” Sullivan saw a door in the white bulkhead at the end of the corridor, and he tugged Elizalde along more quickly. “She says I’m in love with you. And she says she’ll try to wish us something besides misery.”

“Well,” said Elizalde with a bewildered and frightened grin, “this is your family, after all—I hope she tries hard.”

“Yeah, me too, in spite of everything.” They had reached the door. “Catch up, Kootie, I think we’ve got another dining room to pass through.” He pushed open the door.

This dining room too was as wide as the ship, but the ornate rowed mahogany ceiling was fully three deck-heights overhead; ornate planters and huge, freestanding Art Deco lamps punctuated the middle height—and there were visible diners here.

All the men at the tables were wearing black ties and all the women were in off-the-shoulder evening dresses. The conversation was quieter in this vast hall, and the air was sharp with the effervescence of champagne. On the high wall facing them across the length of the dining room, a vast mural dominated the whole cathedral chamber; even from way over here Sullivan could see that it was a stylized map of the North Atlantic, with a clock in the top of it indicated by radiating gold bars surrounding the gold hands, which stood at five minutes to twelve.

“I’m not dressed for this,” said Elizalde in a small voice.

Sullivan looked back at her, and grinned at how humble she looked, framed in the glossy elm burl doorway, in her jeans and grimy Graceland sweatshirt. Kootie, peering big-eyed from behind her, looked no better in his bloodstained polo shirt, and Sullivan found that he himself was sorry he hadn’t found time to shave yesterday or today.

“Probably they can’t see us,” he told her. “Come on, it’s not that far.”

But as they strode out across the broad parquet floor, a white-haired gentleman at one of the nearer tables caught Sullivan’s glance, and raised an eyebrow; and then the man was pushing back his chair and slowly standing up.

Sullivan looked away as he hurried past the table-and pulled Elizalde along, glad to hear Kootie’s footsteps scuffing right behind her.

Men were standing up at other tables, though, all looking gravely at Sullivan and his two companions as they trotted through the amber-lit vista of white tablecloths and crystal wineglasses, and now the women were getting to their feet too, and anxiously eyeing the shabby intruders.

“Halfway there,” gritted Sullivan between his teeth. He was staring doggedly at the mural above and ahead of them. Two nearly parallel tracks curved across the golden clouds that represented the Atlantic, but only one track had anything on it—one miniature crystal ship, all by itself out in the middle of the metallic sea.

How could there be a room this big in a ship? he thought as he strode between the tables, tugging Elizalde’s hand. Polished wooden pillars, the vaulted ceiling so far away up there, and it must be a hundred tables spread out on every side across the floor to the distant dark walls recessed at the lowest level….

Someone among the standing ghosts began clapping; and more of them took it up, and from somewhere the full-orchestra strains of “I’ll Be Seeing You” began to play. All the elegantly dressed ghosts were standing and applauding now, and every face that Sullivan could see was smiling, though many were blinking back tears and many others openly let the tears run down their cheeks as they clapped their hands.

When he was close to the far doors, a crystal goblet of champagne was pressed into Sullivan’s hand, and when he glanced back, his face chilly with sweat, he saw that Elizalde and Kootie each held a glass as well. The applause was growing louder, nearly drowning all the old familiar music.

Elizalde hurried up alongside Sullivan and turned her head to whisper in his ear: “Do you think it’s poison?”

“No.” Sullivan slowed to a walk, and he lifted the glass and sipped the icy, golden wine. He wished he were a connoisseur of champagnes, for this certainly seemed to be first-rate. He blinked, and realized that he had tears in his own eyes. “I think they’re grateful at being released.”

At the door, on an impulse, he turned back to the resplendent dining room and raised his glass. The applause ceased as every ghost raised a glass of its own; and then the rich tawny light faded as the lamps on the Art Deco pillars lost power, and the music ceased (with, he thought, a dying fall), and finally even the background rustle of breathing and the shifting of shoes on the parquet floor diminished away to silence.

The dining hall was dark and empty now. The tables were gone, and a lot of convention-hotel chairs were nested in stacks against the bulkheads.

Sullivan’s lifted hand was empty, and he curled it slowly into a fist. “The field is beginning to fail already,” he said to Elizalde. “We’d better get upstairs fast.” He pushed open the door at his back.

Across a broad foyer was a semicircular bronze portal like the entry to a 1930s department store. Its two doors were open wide, and on the broad mother-of-pearl ceiling within Sullivan could see the rippling reflection of brightly lit water, and hear splashing and laughter; these doors apparently led to a balcony over the actual pool, which must have been one deck-level below. Sullivan thought the swimmers must be real people, and not ghosts.

Elizalde looked in the same direction and whispered, “Good Lord, stacked like a slave ship!”

An imposingly broad mahogany stairway opened onto the foyer to their left, and Sullivan waved Elizalde and Kootie up—the stairs were wide enough for all three of them to trot up abreast, though Kootie was stumbling.

“Did you see some bathing beauty in there?” Sullivan asked Elizalde as he hurried up the stairs, pulling Kootie along by the upper arm. “‘Stacked’ I get, but ‘like a slave ship’—is that good or bad?”

“I meant those bunks,” she panted, “you pig. Stacked to the ceiling in there, with soldiers all crammed in, trying to sleep. I didn’t notice any damn ‘bathing beauty.’”

“Oh…? What I saw was a balcony over a swimming pool,” he told her. Apparently the field hadn’t yet collapsed, but was out of phase. “What did you see, Kootie?”

“I’m looking nowhere but straight ahead,” said the boy, and Sullivan wondered which of the personalities in Kootie’s head had spoken.

Maybe one or more of the degaussing coils have been disconnected, Sullivan thought uneasily, at the substations along the length of the ship. I’ve got a big wheel spinning—is it missing some spokes? Is it going to fly apart?

“All we can do is get out of here,” he said. “Come on.”

They jogged wearily up two flights of the stairs, and then paused just below the last landing. Peering around the newel pillar, Sullivan assessed the remaining steps that ascended to the broad Promenade Deck lobby area known as Piccadilly Circus.

From down here he could see the inset electric lights glowing in the ceiling up there, and he could hear a couple of voices speaking quietly. Far up over his head on the other side, on the paneled back wail of the stairwell, hung a big gold medallion and a framed portrait of Queen Mary.

“Up the stairs,” he whispered to Elizalde and the boy, “and then fast out the door to the left. That’ll lead us straight off the ship onto the causeway bridge, across that and down the stairs to the parking lot. Ready? Go!”

They stepped crouchingly across the landing, then sprang up the last stairs and sprinted wildly across the open floor, hopping over loops of cable to the wide open doorway out onto the outdoor deck—and then all three of them just stopped, leaning on the rail.

The rail had no gap in it, and the causeway to the parking-lot stairs was gone. The stairs, the parking lot, all of Long Beach was gone, and they were looking out over an empty moonlit ocean that stretched away to the horizon under a black, star-needled sky.

CHAPTER FORTY SEVEN

“wish I hadn’t cried so much!” said Alice, as she swam about, trying to find her way out. “I shall be punished for it now, I suppose, by being drowned in my own tears!…”

—Lewis Carroll,

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

FOR a long moment the three of them just clung to the rail, and Sullivan, at least, was not even breathing. He was resisting the idea that he and Elizalde and Kootie had died at some point during the last few seconds, and that this lonely emptiness was the world ghosts lived in; and he wanted to go back inside, and cling to whoever it was whose voices they had heard.

He heard clumsy splashing far away below, and when he looked down he thought he could see the tiny heads and arms of two swimmers struggling through the moonlit water alongside the Queen Mary’s hull. The sight of them didn’t lessen the solitude, for he guessed who they must be.

Hopelessly, just in case the cycle might be breakable, he filled his lungs with the cold sea breeze and yelled down to the swimmers, “Get out of town tonight!”

He looked at Elizalde; who was half-kneeling next to him, stunned-looking and hanging her elbows over the rail. “Maybe,” he said, “I’ll listen to me this time.”

She managed to shrug. “Neither of us did yesterday.”

The spell broke when sharp, heavy footsteps that he knew were high heels on the interior deck approached from behind Sullivan, and he didn’t need to smell a clove cigarette.

He grabbed Elizalde’s shoulder and Kootie’s collar and shoved them forward. “Wake up!” he shouted. “Run!”

They both blinked at him, then obediently began sprinting down the deck toward the lights of the bow, without looking back; he floundered along after them, his back chilly in anticipation of a shot from deLarava’s little automatic.

But the big silhouette of deLarava stepped out of a wide doorway ahead of Elizalde and Kootie, and deLarava negligently raised the pistol toward them.

They skidded to a halt on the worn deck planks, and Sullivan grabbed their shoulders again to stop himself. He looked behind desperately—

And saw deLarava standing back there too.

“I’m not seeing a railing at all,” called both the images of deLarava, in a single voice that was high-pitched with what might have been elation or fright. “To me you’re all standing straight out from the Promenade Deck doorway. From your point of view, you can walk here by coming forward or coming back. Either way, get over here right now or I’ll start shooting you up.”

Elizalde’s hand brushed the untucked sweatshirt at her waist. The night sea breeze blew her long black hair back from her face, and the moonlight glancing in under the deck roof glazed the lean line of her jaw.

“No,” whispered Sullivan urgently. “She’d empty her gun before you half drew clear. Save it.” He looked at-the forward image of deLarava and then back at the aft one. “Tell you what, you two walk forward, and I’ll walk back.”

“And I’ll be in Scotland afore ye,” whispered Kootie. Sullivan knew the remark was a bit of bravado from Edison.

As Elizalde and Kootie stepped away toward the bow, Sullivan turned and walked back the way they had run; and as he got to the open Piccadilly Circus doorway he saw that Elizalde and Kootie were stepping in right next to him, both blinking in exhausted surprise to see him suddenly beside them again. The soft ceiling lights and the glow of another freestanding Art Deco lamp kindled a warm glow in the windows of the little interior shops at the forward end of the lobby.

DeLarava had stepped back across the broad inner deck, and she was still holding the gun on them; though Sullivan could see now that the muzzle was shaking.

“Do you know anything about all this, Pete?” deLarava asked in an animated voice. “There’s some huge magnetic thing going on, and it’s broken the ship up, psychically. Right here all the ghosts have waked up, with their own stepped-up charges, and they’ve curved their bogus space all the way around us, and this lobby area of this deck is in a…a closed loop—if you walk away from it, you find yourself walking right b-b-back into it.” She sniffed and touched her scalp. “Goddammit.”

The only other person visible in the broad lobby was a white-haired little old fellow in a khaki jacket, though the area had at some time been set up for a shoot—a Sony Betacam SP sat on a tripod by the opposite doorway, and the unlit tic-tac-toe board of a Molepar lamp array was clamped on a sandbagged light stand in the corner next to a couple of disassembled Lowell light kits, and power and audio cables were looped across the deck, some connected to a dark TV monitor on a wheeled cart. Nothing seemed to be hot now, but Sullivan could faintly catch the old burnt-gel reek on the clove-scented air.

It seemed to him that the ceiling lights had dimmed from yellow down toward orange, in the moments since he had stepped in from the outside deck.

With her free hand, deLarava snicked a Dunhill lighter and puffed another clove cigarette alight. “Is Apie here, Joey?” she asked.

Sullivan nervously touched the brass plaque under his shirt.

The old man in the khaki jacket was grimacing and rocking on his heels. “Yes,” he said. “And he can no more get out of here than we two can. We toucans.” He sang, “Precious and few are the moments we toucans sha-aare…” Then he frowned and shook his head. “Even over the side—that’s not the real ocean down there now. Jump off the port rail and you land on the starboard deck.”

“I think he tried it,” whispered Kootie bravely, “and landed on his head.”

Sullivan nodded and tried to smile, but he was glancing around at the pillars and the stairwell and the dark inward-facing shop windows. Keep your head down, Dad, he thought.

The ceiling lamps were definitely fading and the lobby was going dark—but reflections of colored lights were now fanning above the wide throat of the open stairwell on the aft side of the lobby, gleaming on the tall paneled back wall and the big gold medallion and the framed portrait, and from some lower deck came the shivering cacophony of a big party going on.

DeLarava stumped across the glossy cork deck to the top of the stairwell—a velvet rope was hung doubled at the top of one of the stair railings, and she unhooked one brass end, walked across to the other railing with it, and hooked the rope there, across the gap.

“Nobody go near the well,” she said, her voice sounding more pleading than threatening. “Joey—where is Apie?”

The Piccadilly Circus lobby was almost totally dark now, the lamps overhead glowing only a dull red, and Sullivan could see reflections of moonlight on the polished deck

Then, with the echoing clank of a knife switch being thrown, the white-hot glare of an unglassed carbon-arc lamp punched across the lobby from the forward corridor between the shops, throwing deLarava’s bulbous shadow like a torn hole onto the paneling of the stairwell’s back wall.

The lamp was roaring because of working off alternating current, but from the darkness behind and beyond the cone of radiance, a strong, confident voice said, “I’m here, Kelley.”

DeLarava had flung her hand over her face, and now reeled away out of the glare, toward the doorway that led out onto the starboard deck, on the opposite side of the lobby from Sullivan.

He spun away from the glaring light toward Elizalde and Kootie—and stopped.

Angelica Elizalde was still standing where she’d been, her hair backlit now against the reflected glare from the stairwell wall, but a portly old man stood between her and Sullivan, where Kootie had been a moment before, and Kootie was nowhere to be seen. Sullivan blinked at the old man, wondering where he had appeared from, and who he was.

Sullivan opened his mouth to speak—then flinched into a crouch a moment before a hard bang shook the air, and he felt the hair twitch over his scalp.

He let his crouch become a tumble to the deck, and he reached for Elizalde’s ankles but she was already dropping to her hands and knees. The old man who’d been standing between them had stepped forward into the glare, the tails of his black coat trailing out behind him as if he were walking through water.

Sullivan’s father’s voice boomed from the forward darkness behind the light “Step forward, Kelley!”

“Fuck you, Apie!” came deLarava’s shrill reply. “I just killed your other precious stinking kid!”

Sullivan grabbed Elizalde’s upper arm and pulled her into the deeper penumbra behind the cone of light. “Where’s Kootie?” Sullivan hissed into her ear as they crawled toward the wall.

“That’s him,” Elizalde whispered back, waving out at the old man in the center of the deck. Sullivan looked up, and noticed two things: the old man’s jowly strong jawed face, which in this stark light even looked like a figure in a black-and-white newsreel, was instantly recognizable from the photos he’d seen of Thomas Alva Edison; and the shadow the old man cast on the far aft wall above the stairs was the silhouette of a young boy.

This was the Edison ghost out and solid, and Sullivan knew deLarava would not want to damage it. “Give me the gun,” he whispered to Elizalde.

The two of them had scrambled forward, to the wall below one of the little interior windows on the port side, and Elizalde sat down on the deck and pulled the .45 from the waist of her jeans and shoved it toward him.

His hands wouldn’t close around it. “Shit,” he whispered, panting and nearly sobbing, “Houdini must have been a fucking pacifist! I guess he didn’t want his mask to be able to kill anybody! Here.” He pushed it back to her with the heels of his limp hands. “You’ve got to do it. Shoot deLarava.”

He looked up and squinted, trying to see the old woman on the far side of the pupil-constricting glare. Then a movement above the stairwell, out across the deck to his right, caught his attention.

A rapid clicking had started up, and the light narrowed to a beam as if now being focused through the lens of a projector.

In a wide, glowing rectangle of black and white and gray on the stairwell wall, Sullivan saw an image of the corner of a house, and a fat man frustratedly shaking the end of an uncooperative garden hose; Kootie’s shadow-silhouette had been replaced with a projected image of a boy, who was standing on the lush gray lawn with one foot firmly on the slack length of the hose behind the fat man. The man scratched his head and looked directly into the nozzle—at which point the boy stepped off the hose, and a burst of water shot into the man’s face.

“Plagiarism!” called the ghost of Edison, which, though solidly visible in the light, was itself now throwing no shadow at all. “That’s my ‘Bad Boy and the Garden Hose,’ from 1903!”

“Lumiere made it first, in 1895,” called Sullivan’s father’s ghost from the blackness behind the carbon-arc radiance to Sullivan’s left. “Besides, I’ve improved it.”

In the projected movie scene, the water was still jetting out of the hose, but the figure holding the nozzle was now a fat woman, and the gushing flow was particulate with thousands of tiny, flailing human shapes, whose impacts were eroding the fat woman’s head down to a bare skull.

Across the deck, deLarava screamed in horrified rage—then another gunshot banged, and the light was extinguished.

“Is that supposed to be sympathetic magic?” deLarava was screaming. “I’m the one that’s going to walk out of here whole, Apie! And everything will be what I say it is!”

“Shoot her, goddammit!” said Sullivan urgently, though Elizalde surely couldn’t see any more than he could in the sudden total darkness.

“I cant,” said Elizalde in a voice tight with anger, “kill her.”

Sullivan jumped then, for someone had tugged on his shirt from the forward side, away from Elizalde; but even as he whipped his head around that way he smelled bourbon, and so he wasn’t wildly surprised when Sukie’s voice said, “Get over here, Pete.”

“Follow me,” he whispered to Elizalde. He grabbed the slack of her sweatshirt sleeve and pulled her along after the dimly sensed shape of Sukie, stepping high to avoid tripping over cables, to the narrow forward area behind where the light had been.

Sukie proved to be solid enough to push Sullivan down to his knees on the deck, and into his ear she whispered, “Not hot.”

He groped in the darkness in front of his face, and his fingers touched a familiar shape—a wooden box on the end of a stout cable, open on one face with a leather flap across the opening. It was a plug box of the old sort known as “spider boxes” because of the way spiders tended to like the roomy, dark interiors of them. Like the carbon-arc lamp, this was an antique, and had surely not been among deLarava’s modern equipment. The spider-box devices had been outlawed at some time during the mid-eighties, when he and Sukie had still been deLarava’s gaffers, because of the constant risk of someone’s putting their hand or foot into one and being electrocuted.

But Sukie had said Not hot, so he pulled back the leather flap with one hand, then rapped the box with the other hand and held it out palm up.

Sukie slapped one of the old paddle plugs into his hand, and he tipped it vertical and shoved it firmly into the grooves inside the box. Then he let the flap fall over it and pulled his hands back. “Set,” he said. “Hot,” said Sukie, “now.”

And again a knife-switch clanked across a gap, right next to him now, and another carbon-arc lamp flared on with a buzzing roar, the sudden light battering at Sullivan’s retinas.

By reflected light he could see his father standing over him; Arthur Patrick Sullivan looked no more than fifty, and his hair was gray rather than white. He glanced down at Pete Sullivan, who was crouched over the spider box, and winked.

“I think we need a gel here,” said Pete’s father; and the old man reached around in front of the lamp and laid his palm over the two arcing carbon rods in the trim clamps.

Sullivan winced and inhaled between his teeth, but the hand wasn’t blasted aside; instead it shone translucently, the red arteries and the blue veins glowing through the skin, and his father was looking down the length of the room and smiling grimly.

On the stairwell wall another scene was forming—this time in color. (Flakes falling from the ceiling sparked and glowed like tiny meteors as they spun down through the beam of light.)

Glowing tan above, blue below—the bright rectangle on the wall coalesced into focus, and Sullivan recognized Venice Beach as seen from the point of view of a helicopter (though no helicopter had been in the sky on that afternoon).

In the colored light it was just Kootie standing and blinking in the middle of the deck; the boy shaded his eyes and glanced wildly back and forth.

“This way, Kootie!” called Elizalde, and the boy ran to her through the rain of flakes and crouched beside her, breathing fast.

In the projected image on the stairwell wall at the other end of the lobby, Sullivan could see the four tiny figures on the beach; three were staying by the patchwork rectangles of the towels spread on the sand, while the fourth, the white-haired figure, strode down to the foamy line of the surf.

One of the flakes from the ceiling landed on the back of Sullivan’s hand, and he picked it up and broke it between his fingers; it was a curl of black paint (and he remembered his father describing how Samuel Goldwyn’s glass studio had been painted black in 1917, when mercury-vapor lamps superseded sunlight as the preferred illumination for filming, and how in later years the black paint had constantly peeled off and fallen down onto the sets like black snow)

Loretta deLarava was clumping out into the light now from the far side of the lobby, her face and broad body glowing in shifting patches of blue and tan as she took on the projection.

“Nobody but me is getting out of here alive, Apie,” she said, pointing her pistol straight at the glowing hand over the light. “Prove it all night, if you like, to this roomful of ghosts.”

The white-haired little image in the projection had waded out into the surf, and now dived into a wave.

Just then from down the stairs behind deLarava came a young man’s voice, singing, “Did your face catch fire once? Did they use a tire iron to put it out?” It was a tune from some Springsteen song—and Sullivan thought he should recognize the voice, from long ago.

A movement across the lobby caught Sullivan’s eye—five or six little girls in white dresses were dancing silently in the open doorway on the starboard side, against the black sky of the night.

Now something was coming up the stairs; it thumped and wailed and rattled as it came. DeLarava glanced behind her down the stairwell and then hastily stepped back, her gun waving wildly around.

Even way over on the forward side of the lobby, Sullivan flinched away from the spider box when a lumpy shape with seven or eight flailing limbs hiked itself up the last stairs onto the level of the deck and knocked the velvet rope free of its hooks.

Then Sullivan relaxed a little, for he saw that it was just two men, apparently attached together; they were both trying to stand, but the wrist of one was handcuffed to the ankle of the other. He thought they must be Sherman Oaks and Neal Obstadt, but the man cuffed by a wrist had two arms with which to wrestle his companion, had one fist free to pummel against the other man’s groin and abdomen, two elbows with which to block kicks to the face.

Behind them, as if shepherding them, a young man stepped up the stairs to the deck, into the projected glare; he was broad-shouldered and trim in a white turtleneck sweater, with blond hair clipped short in a crew cut.

“Kelley Keith,” said this newcomer in a resonant baritone, and from childhood memories and the soundtrack of the old TV show Sullivan belatedly recognized the youthful voice of Nicky Bradshaw. “Listen to the hookah-smoking caterpillar—this mushroom’s for you. And it won’t pass away.”

The carbon-arc lamp over Sullivan’s head was roaring, and the paint flakes were falling more thickly, and, down the length of the lobby, projected right onto the blood-spattered fabric of deLarava’s broad dress now, the little figure in the surf was waving its tiny arms.

Crouching up forward by the spider box, Sullivan was clasping Elizalde’s hand in his right hand, and Sukie’s in his left.

“It’s not the real moon!” cried several of the little girls visible through the open doorway out on the starboard deck. “It’s painted! We’re still in Hell!”

“No, look!” shouted a man at the rail behind them. “It’s crumbling! The real sun is out there!” By the now-rumpled business suit and necktie and the blood-streaked white shirt, Sullivan recognized him as the lawyer whom deLarava’s men had driven away in the Jeep Cherokee; the man’s hands were still cuffed but he had got them in front of him, and he was holding a long broom that he was waving over his head as high as he could reach. Black paint chips fell down onto him like confetti.

“My baby ghosts!” screamed deLarava; she started ponderously out of the projected light toward the half-dozen little girls, but the man with the broom had swept a hole in the night sky out there, and a beam of sunlight (cleaner and brighter, Sullivan thought, than a 3200 Kelvin lamp through a blue gel) lanced down to the deck. The girls flocked to it, then broke up and dissolved in white mist and breathless giggling, and were gone, in the moment before deLarava ran through the spot where they had been and collided with the still-shadowed rail.

The carbon-arc lamp, working off AC and no doubt a choke coil or a transformer was flickering and glowing a deepening yellow. Sullivan’s father’s ghost lifted his hand away from the carbon rods, and the beam of light now just threw a featureless white glow down the lobby onto the far wall. Sullivan felt Sukie reach off to the side, and with an arcing snap the light went out, the carbon rods abruptly dimming to red points.

In the sudden silence the fat old woman backed across the exterior deck from the starboard rail, and in the open doorway she turned around to face the dark Piccadilly Circus lobby.

Her dress still glowed with the image that had been projected onto it, and the tiny white-haired swimmer, carried on her dress right out of the rectangle that had shone on the stairwell wall, was floundering below the shelf of her breasts.

She stomped slowly back in through the doorway and started across the lobby floor. “I will at least have Edison,” she said.

CHAPTER FORTY EIGHT

Come, hearken then, ere voice of dread,

With bitter tidings laden,

Shall summon to unwelcome bed

A melancholy maiden!

We are but older children, dear,

Who fret to find our bedtime near.

—Lewis Carroll,

Through the Looking-Glass

FROM aft by the stairs, the ankle-cuffed man stepped forward (dragging his flailing companion) into the dim glow projected by deLarava’s dress, and Sullivan saw that he was the gray-haired Obstadt. “No, Loretta,” Obstadt said hoarsely, kicking at the man attached to his foot, “you said I could have him. You work for me now. Get, back—”

And, crouched on the floor, the two-armed man who must nevertheless have been Sherman Oaks was jabbering urgently in what sounded to Sullivan like Latin.

DeLarava shoved her little gun at Obstadt’s belly and fired it. The bang was like a full-arm swing of a hammer onto the cap of a fire hydrant, and Obstadt stopped and bowed slightly, his mouth working. The man on the floor took the opportunity to lash his free fist twice, hard, into Obstadt’s groin, and Obstadt bowed more deeply.

Beams of sunlight lanced into the lobby from behind Sullivan, reflecting off the floor to underlight deLarava’s jowls, and he realized that the night sky was breaking apart on the port side too.

“Koot Hoomie Parganas,” said deLarava, moving forward again. Her dress still glowed in surging fields of tan and blue, and the tiny swimmer was waving its arms under her breasts.

Sullivan glanced past Elizalde at Kootie, who was sitting cross-legged in a nest of cables, his hair now backlit by reflected daylight. The boy seemed to have been forsaken by Edison—his wide eyes gaped in horror at the approaching fat woman, and his lips were trembling.

Elizalde stood up from her crouch beside Sullivan. “No,” she said loudly, stepping in front of the boy, “Llorona Atacado. You won’t replace your lost children with this boy.” And she jabbed her hand in the air toward deLarava’s face, with the first and little fingers extended. “Ixchel se quite! Commander Hold-’Em take you,” she said and she spit.

The saliva hit the deck between them, but deLarava reeled back, coughing and clutching the glowing fabric over her stomach as if the tiny drowning figure were sinking into her diaphragm. She blinked up at Elizalde from under her bushy eyebrows, and the barrel of the little automatic came wobbling up.

Sullivan was on his feet now, and he could see that Elizalde was not even going to think of raising the .45.

DeLarava’s gun was pointed from less than two yards away at the center of Elizalde’s Graceland sweatshirt—and as Sullivan leaned forward to grab Elizalde and yank her out of the way, his scalp contracted with the bar-time advance-shock of deLarava’s gun going off.

And so instead of trying to pull Elizalde back, he made his forward motion a leap into the space between the two women (in the moment when both of his feet were off the deck he whiffed suntan oil and mayonnaise and the cold, deep sea and, faintly, bourbon), and then the real gunshot punched his eardrums and hammered his upper arm.

The impact of the shot (and bar-time anticipation of the second) spun him around in midair to face the glowing figure of deLarava, and her second shot caught him squarely in the chest.

HIS FEET hit the deck but he was falling backward, and as he fell he heard the fast snap-clank of the .45 at last being chambered; and as his hip thudded down hard and he curled and slid and the needlessly ejected .45 round spun through the air, he saw Elizalde’s clasped hands raise the weapon toward deLarava, her thumbs safely out of the way of the weapons slide; the .45 flared and jumped, and the gunshot in the enclosed lobby was like a bomb going off.

Sullivan’s knees were drawn up and his right arm was folded over his chest, but his head was rocked back to watch deLarava’s fat body fly backward, sit boomingly on the deck, and then tumble away toward the starboard doorway in a spray of blood—

—Sullivan slid to a tense halt, staring—

But deLarava was at the same time still standing in front of Elizalde, and still holding the little automatic, though her arm was transparent; she was looking from Elizalde to the automatic in puzzlement, and the weight of the gun was pulling her insubstantial arm down toward the deck.

Then the top of her head abruptly collapsed from the eyebrows up, as the rubber bands imploded the frail ectoplasmic skull.

Sullivan’s chest felt split and molten, but he rolled his head around to scan the sunlight-spotted deck for a glimpse of his own freshly dead body. Surely deLarava’s chest-shot had killed him, and he was now a raw ghost about to blessedly dissolve into the fresh daytime air that was streaming in through the cracking night sky; after all, he wasn’t able to breathe—his lungs were impacted, stilled, and the only agitation in him was the thudding heartbeat that was jolting his vision twice every second….

My heart’s beating! he thought, with a shiver of dreadful hope. Suddenly he realized that he wanted to live, wanted to get away from here with Elizalde and Kootie and live….

DeLarava’s grotesquely pinheaded ghost was staring at its arm, which had been stretched all the way down to the deck by the weight of the little automatic. The translucent figure stumbled away forward toward where the carbon-arc light had been, and her arm lengthened behind her as the automatic slid only by short jerks after her across the polished cork deck.

Obstadt had reeled out through the open lobby doorway to the starboard rail. Beyond him, the induced black sky was breaking up, and Sullivan could see whole patches of luminous distant blue showing through it.

Obstadt’s tethered companion was up and hunching along beside him like a wounded dog—now the companion only had one arm, and Sullivan realized that it had certainly been Sherman Oaks all along, with his missing arm only temporarily provided by the ship’s degaussing field, which had been so magically stepped-up in this one segment of the ship. Oaks was wheezing like a hundred warped harmonicas, and his windbreaker and baggy camouflage pants were rippling and jumping and visibly spotting with fresh blood, as though a horde of starved rats were muscling around underneath.

The battered-looking lawyer who had been standing with the little girls was still holding the broom and staring stupidly up at the fragmenting sky—and Obstadt’s right hand lashed out and caught the man by the necktie. Obstadt strongly pulled him along the rail toward himself and opened his mouth wide over the lawyer’s throat.

But Nicky Bradshaw lumbered over to them and pulled Obstadt away. Bradshaw’s crew cut had lengthened messily in the last few seconds and was shot with gray now, and his turtleneck sweater was beginning to stretch over his belly, but he grabbed Obstadt’s coat lapels with both hands and boosted him up until the wounded man was nearly sitting on the rail; and then he braced his feet and pushed Obstadt over backward.

With a tortured roar and a useless flailing of arms and legs, Obstadt tumbled away out of sight below the deck, and Sherman Oaks was abruptly dragged upright and slammed belly-first against the rail, his single arm stretched straight downward as it took Obstadt’s pendulous weight.

“Nicky,” Oaks wheezed, “I worked with you at Stage 5 Productions in ’59! I can get you a ghost that’ll make you young again! Thus from infernal Dis do we ascend, to view the subjects of our monarchy!”

In the brightness of the sunlight that was shining over there Sullivan saw tears glisten on Bradshaw’s cheek—

But Bradshaw took hold of Oaks’s belt and lifted him over the rail—Oaks kicked but had no free hand with which to grab anything, and howled, though all his voices seemed to have lost the capacity to form words—and Bradshaw effortfully tossed the tethered pair away into the brightening abyss.

Away on the other side of the Piccadilly Circus deck, Sullivan cringed at the receding scream of a thousand voices.

Sullivan couldn’t roll over, but he saw Kootie look back toward the port deck to see if Obstadt and Oaks would land there—but there was no sound of impact from that direction. The supernaturally amplified magnetic field was obviously breaking down, and the two men had certainly fallen all the long way down into the walled lagoon that lay like a moat around the ship.

SULLIVAN HEARD Elizalde gasp, and looked across the lobby again—to see that Bradshaw had now climbed right up onto the starboard rail outside and was standing erect, balanced on it, with his arms waving out to the sides.

Bradshaw’s recently youthful and trim body was visibly deteriorating back into the gross figure of Solomon Shadroe, and with every passing second it became a more incongruous sight to see the fat old man tottering up there.

Bradshaw squinted belligerently down at the disheveled attorney, who had lurched back across the narrow section of outdoor deck and was leaning in the Piccadilly Circus doorway, panting. The attorney had evidently wet his pants.

“You okay, Frank?” asked Bradshaw gruffly.

The lawyer blinked around uncertainly, then goggled up at the fat old man standing on the rail; and he seemed to wilt with recognition. “Yes, Mr. Bradshaw. I—I brought all this—”

“Good.” Bradshaw blinked past him into the shadows of the Piccadilly Circus lobby. He was probably unable to see in even as far as where deLarava’s gorily holed body lay tumbled on the polished cork floor, but be called, “Pete, Beth—Angelica, Kootie—” The freshening breeze ruffled his gray hair, and he wobbled on his perch. “—Edison. I don’t want to spoil the party, so I’ll go. This here just wont last much longer.”

He might have been referring to the psychically skewed magnetic field, but Sullivan thought he meant his control over his long-dead body and his long-held ghost; and nervously Sullivan thought of the descriptions of the way Frank Rocha’s body had finally gone.

Then Bradshaw’s face creased in a faint, self-conscious, reminiscent smile—and he curled one hand over his head and stuck his other arm straight out, and he spun slowly on the rail on the toe of one foot; and, almost gracefully, he overbalanced and fell away out into empty space and disappeared.

Sullivan found himself listening for a splash—irrationally, for the water was a good hundred feet below, and Sullivan was sprawled on the other side of the Piccadilly Circus lobby, closer to the port rail than the starboard one from which Bradshaw had just fallen—but what he heard three seconds later was a muffled boom that vibrated the deck and flung a high plume of glittering spray into the morning sunlight up past the starboard rail.

The lawyer seemed to be sobbing now, and he ran away aft, his footsteps knocking away to silence on the exterior deck planks, and the footsteps didn’t start up again from some other direction.

SULLIVAN DISCOVERED that he was able to sit up; then that he could get his legs under himself and get to his feet. Elizalde hurried around to his right side and braced him up, and at last he dared to look down at his chest.

A button hung in fragments on his shirtfront and a tiny hole had been raggedly punched through the cloth, but there was no blood; and then with a surge of relief he remembered the brass plaque from his father’s gravestone, tucked into his scapular, over his heart.

“Your arm’s bleeding,” said Elizalde. “But somehow that—seems to be the only place you’re hit.” Her face was pale and she was frowning deeply. Sullivan could see the lump of the .45 under the front of her sweatshirt.

He looked down at his left arm, and his depth perception seemed to flatten right down to two dimensions when he saw that his shirtsleeve was rapidly blotting with bright red blood. “Hold me up from that side,” he said dizzily, “and maybe no one will notice. You’re a doctor, Angelica—can you dig out a bullet?”

“If it’s not embedded in the bone, I can.”

“Good—Jesus—soon.” He took a deep breath and let it out, feeling as disoriented as if he’d had a stiff drink and an unfiltered Pall Mall on an empty stomach. “Uh…where to?”

“The bridge is there again,” said Kootie anxiously, “the one that leads to the stairs and the parking lot. Let’s get off this ship while we can.”

Sullivan looked up, across the wide lobby. DeLarava’s body was still sprawled out there in the middle of the deck, but the lights and camera gear at the forward end of the room were all her modern equipment again. The little old man in the khaki jacket was crouched over one of the Lowell light kits, busily packing away the scrims and light-doors and humming. He didn’t look up when Kootie ran back there, snatched up a half-used roll of silvery gaffer’s tape, and hurried back to Sullivan and Elizalde.

“Kootie’s right,” said Elizalde, scuffling back around to Sullivan’s left side and hugging his bloody arm to her breast. “Let’s get back to Solville before people are able to wander in here and find this mess.”

“JOEY,” SAID a frail voice behind Sullivan, “stop them.”

Sullivan looked back at the film equipment and saw that deLarava’s fat ghost was leaning on the tripod, her translucent chin resting on the black Sony Betacam. Her head ended right above the eyebrows, constricted to a short, stumpy cone by the rubber bands; and her translucent ectoplasmic right arm was still stretched out for yards across the deck, the limp fingers of the ghost hand twitching impotently on the grip of the automatic pistol.

The old man by the light kit looked up. “Oh, I’ve seen these before,” he said cheerfully, speaking toward the ghost. “I should pop it into a marmalade jar, so somebody can sniff it. Crazy. No more point to it than catching somebody’s shadow by slapping a book shut on it. If you ask me.”

“Joey,” said the ghost in a peremptory but birdlike tone, “you work for me. You gentlemen—why, you all work for me. Joey, I seem to have dislocated my wrist—take the gun from my hand and kill those three.”

“I hear a voice!” exclaimed Joey, smiling broadly. “A blot of mustard or a bit of undigested beef, speaking to me! A sort of food that’s bound to disagree—not for me.” He stood up and bowed toward Kootie, who was nervously holding the roll of gaffer’s tape. “Thanks a lot, boy,” Joey said, “just the same.”

DeLarava’s ghost was fading, but it straightened up and drifted across the floor straight toward Sullivan, and its eyes, as insubstantial as raw egg-whites, locked onto his. “Come with me, Pete,” the ghost said imperiously.

Sullivan opened his mouth—almost certainly to decline the offer, though he was dizzy and nauseated at the hard sunlight, and giving a lot of his weight to Elizalde’s right arm—but the breath that came out between his teeth was sharp with bourbon fumes, and it whispered, “What number were you trying to reach?”

DeLarava’s ghost withered before the fumy breath, and the gossamer lines of the fat face turned to Kootie. “Little boy, would you help an old woman across a very wide street?”

“Physicists and sphinxes in majestical mists,” came the old man’s voice out of Kootie’s mouth. “I will go right through that sand and leave you way behind.”

The smoky shred that was deLarava’s ghost now swung toward Elizalde, and the voice was like wasps rustling in a papery nest: “You have no mask.”

The bloody fabric of the sweatshirt over Elizalde’s breasts flattened, as if an unseen hand had pressed there, and then a spotty handprint in Sullivan’s blood appeared on the sweatshirt shoulder, and smeared. Elizalde cocked her head as if listening to a faint voice in her ear, arid then said, almost wonderingly, “Yes, of course.”

Sullivan felt the bourbon-breath blow out of his mouth again. “This one is my family, too,” the voice said softly.

Then Elizalde’s shoulder twitched as if shoved.

—And out of Sullivan’s mouth Sukie’s ghost-voice added, “A. O. P., kids.”

As quick as an image in a twitched mirror, deLarava’s ghost folded itself around past Kootie and stood between the three of them and the roofed causeway off the ship. “No one passes” it whispered.

Kootie looked back at Sullivan fearfully; and in spite of his own sick-making pain, Sullivan noticed that the boy’s curly black hair needed washing and combing, and he noticed the dark circles under the haunted brown eyes; and he vowed to himself, and to the ghosts of his father and sister, that he would make things better.

“There’s no one there, Kootie,” he said. “Watch.” He stepped forward, away from Elizalde’s arm, and faintly felt the protesting outrage as deLarava’s fretful substance parted before him like cobwebs and blew away on the strengthening sea breeze.

Kootie and Elizalde hurried after him. Kootie looked up at Elizalde with a strangely lost look, and he waved the roll of gaffer’s tape he had snatched off the deck. He held it gingerly, as if he didn’t want to get any more of the glue on his fingers than he could help. “When we get to the stairs,” he said, “I figured you could tape Pete’s arm with this.”

Elizalde looked startled. “Of course. That’s a good idea…Edison?”

“No,” said Kootie, trotting along now between the two grown-ups. “Me.”

Halfway across the elevated walkway, Sullivan paused and began unbuttoning his shirt. “One last stop,” he said hoarsely.

He fished out the front-side wallet of his scapular and pried free of the torn plastic sleeve the brass portrait-plaque that he had taken off of his father’s gravestone yesterday evening. DeLarava’s bullet, a .22 or .25, had deeply dented the center of the metal plate, and the engraved portrait of his smiling father was almost totally smashed away.

Sullivan rubbed his own chest gingerly, wondering if the blocked gunshot had nevertheless cracked his breastbone; and he held the brass plate between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand.

“Goodbye, Dad,” he said softly. “I’ll see you again, after a while—in some better place, God willing.”

The piece of brass was warm in his hand. He hefted it and looked down at the shadowed water between the dock and the ship.

“I’ll take that,” said a whisper from behind Kootie.

Sullivan whipped his head around in exhausted alarm, but it was the ghost of Edison who had spoken, a smoky silhouette hardly visible out here in the breezy sunlight; the hand the old ghost was extending was so insubstantial that Sullivan doubted it could hold the brass plate, but when he held the plate out and let go of it, Edison supported it.

“I’ll take him, and go, at last,” Edison said faintly. “I hope it may be very beautiful over there.” Sullivan thought the ghost smiled. “On the way,” it whispered, “your father and I can talk about the…” and then Sullivan couldn’t tell whether the last word was silence or silents.

KOOTIE WANTED to say goodbye to Edison, but was shy to see the ghost standing out away from himself, tall and broad in spite of being nearly transparent.

But the ghost bent over him, and Kootie felt a faint pressure on his shoulder for a moment.

In his head he faintly heard, “Thank you, son. You’ve made me proud. Find bright days, and good work, and laughter.”

Then the Edison ghost stepped right through the railing and, still holding Peter Sullivan’s piece of brass, began to shrink in the air, as if he were rapidly receding into the distance; the image stayed in the center of Kootie’s vision no matter which direction he looked in—down at his feet, toward the buildings and cranes on the shore, or up at the mounting white decks and towering red funnels of the ship—so he turned to the walkway rail and gripped it and stared at the glittering blue water of the harbor until the image had quite shrunk away to nothing there.

And at last he stepped back, and took Peter Sullivan’s hand in his left hand and Angelica Elizalde’s in his right, and the three of them walked together to the stairs that would lead them down to the parking lot and away, to whatever eventual rest, and shelter, and food, and life these two people would be able to give him.