Three Days to Never (24 page)

“Nearest…?” said Marrity, trying to remember. “Uh, Franklin and Beachwood, I guess. We're up in the hills.” He glanced at Moira. “Can we call the—what do you think of the idea of us calling the police? Or my sister's employer?”

“Don't call anyone else. Repeat,
do not
. Just sit still and call me again in half an hour.”

Daphne was tugging at Marrity's sleeve. “Something you've got to tell him!” she whispered.

“One second,” said Marrity into the phone; then he covered the mouthpiece and said, “What, Daph?”

“They've got to feed the cats!”

Marrity nodded and took his hand off the phone. “You still there?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“We have one condition, for our cooperation. A…gesture of good faith, on your part.”

“What is it?”

“You people need to put a twenty-pound bag of Purina Cat Chow in my kitchen. Lay it down flat, like a pillow, and then cut the whole top surface off. It's stiff paper, there're knives in the drawer to the right of the sink. They'll be all right for water, they all drink out of the toilets.”

“Your house is certainly under hostile surveillance.”

“That's why I'm asking a pro to do it, not one of the neighbors.”

The voice laughed. “Fair enough. We'll do it. Talk to you in thirty minutes.”

L
epidopt switched off his portable telephone and tucked the bulky thing into its carrying case. He shifted in the passenger seat to look around; they were on Fairfax, not far south of Hollywood Boulevard.

“Ernie,” he said to Bozzaris, “get to Lieserl's house right now—204 Batsford Street, in Pasadena—take the 101 south to the northbound Pasadena freeway, it ends very close to her place.”

Bozzaris visibly decided on the quickest way to the 101, then made a fast right turn onto Santa Monica Boulevard.

“And when we get there,” Lepidopt went on, “you go into the shed in the backyard and find the gold swastika on the floor. It might be under whatever the floor is, which I hope isn't concrete. Photograph the swastika, trace any wiring or machinery and photograph that, and then take it all out; we'll want to reassemble it at the Wigwam Motel. That other crowd has got the old twenty-first-century Frank Marrity.
He's with them voluntarily—he'll probably want to delay telling them about the machine in the old lady's shed until he's made some deal, got some assurances, but they might abbreviate that. So be quick.”

“The old guy knows this stuff about the shed?”

“It's got to be how he came back here, from the future.”

“Ah. You'll want me to drop you off somewhere.”

“No, I'll wait in the car, outside her house. None of that crowd has seen me before. If they arrive in the middle of your work, I think we'll kill them.”

The portable phone buzzed again, and Lepidopt thought Marrity must have thought of some other task like feeding the cats; but it was an old man's voice on the line.

“What?” said the reedy old voice.

Lepidopt's chest was suddenly cold, for he thought he recognized the voice. Easy enough, he thought, to make the phone ring again. Just push some electrons around, reactivate the circuitry that was activated a moment ago.

“Uh,” said Lepidopt hoarsely, “Sam?”

Peripherally he could see Bozzaris glance sharply at him.

“I don't know what it is,” said Sam Glatzer's voice. “But it's in a cement tepee. And it's also in a truck. This thing.”

“What is, Sam?” A moment later Lepidopt bared his teeth, belatedly remembering that it's no use asking ghosts questions before they've given the answers.

He was sweating. He had talked to a ghost only once before, and that had been during his training in Tel Aviv in 1968, in the trailer, with an instructor and other students—and the ghost hadn't been anyone he had known.

Another ghost voice intruded on the phone line now—a younger man, possibly drunk: “Two days I sat beside my body, staring at the holes in my chest.” Looking out the car window, Lepidopt noted that they were driving past the gray stone walls of the Hollywood Cemetery.

“Not that,” said Sam, “but a place that looks like that.”

“Okay,” said Lepidopt helplessly.

“I went to my grandfather,” said the other man's voice; a moment later the voice added, “to find out who I am, where I came from.”

Lepidopt gritted his teeth. The intruding voice was certainly a ghost too, so there was no point in telling him to be quiet.

“And it's in the Swiss Family Robinson tree house at Disneyland,” said Glatzer's voice, “in a manner of speaking.”

“Right,” Lepidopt said.
What
is, Sam? he thought. He tried to remember everything Sam had said so far.

“At the Chinese Theater,” Glatzer went on. “It's in a lot of places.”

“But I have no mother, really,” interjected the other voice, “Only children.”

“You know what a capacitor is, right?” said Glatzer. “Put the hand in when the cement was wet. It's more like a capacitor.”

“My mother will hide them,” said the other ghost voice, “or try to. Everyone who dwells here is safe.”

“The thing I thought was a gravestone,” said Glatzer.

Lepidopt sighed and wiped his forehead.

“Tell me about it, Sam,” he said, to pave the way for the things the old man's ghost had already said; for he had it now.

“They'll try to find my children,” said the other voice unhappily.

“Oren,” said Glatzer, “listen…”

Oren Lepidopt held the phone to his ear, but neither of the ghosts said anything more.

Lepidopt supposed that was the last thing he would ever hear Sam Glatzer say:
Listen…

Lepidopt switched off the phone. “That was Sam Glatzer,” he told Bozzaris. “His ghost. He says we've got to get the Charlie Chaplin footprint slab too. It's apparently part of the machine, and it's apparently in the shed too. It's a capacitor, he said.” He began punching numbers into the phone. “I'd better get some
sayanim
with a truck.”

Bozzaris's eyebrows were up, and he was nodding as he
watched the glittering lanes ahead of him. “How did Sam sound?”

Lepidopt laughed harshly. “Good. Rested.”

D
enis Rascasse's body was stretched across one of the bunks at the back of the parked bus. He was breathing through his open mouth, in ragged snores. The gash in his scalp had been rubbed with Neosporin and bandaged, but he was still unconscious and there were no plans to take him to a hospital. Young Hinch sat up front in the driver's seat, twisting a Rubik's Cube on each square of which he had painted a Hebrew letter.

Rascasse's attention was several miles away, at Echo Park. He had long since lost the body habit of seeing from two close-set points as if he were using organic eyes, and his perspective was broad—sunlight was gleaming off the lake in a million directions like a fire, and at the same time the lake was a placid jade green with no reflections at all; he could see all sides of every one of the trees around the lake and the undersides of the lotus lillies on the western shore. Nothing was “in front of” anything else.

But he couldn't focus on one of the rental boats on the lake.

He knew why. Golze and the elderly Frank Marrity were in that boat, and Golze must have removed the Chaplin's-hat ribbon from the Baphomet head and buttoned it around his own neck—almost certainly with a twist to make a Moebius strip of it.

Chaplin had made a lot of movies at Echo Park for Keystone Studios, back in the nineteen-teens. Chaplin had been a magician who took extensive masking precautions, and his lifeline was a tangle here; every time a director had said, “Cut!” there was a jig in his line, and in 1914 Chaplin had even made a movie in which he had completely submerged in the lake, as if in a baptism. Lots of kinks and false stops.

And Golze had now lit up that old spiderweb camouflage
pattern by wearing Chaplin's hat ribbon. Whenever Rascasse tried to focus on the boat, he found that he was instead looking away from the boat, in all directions at once. Even for a person as experienced in out-of-body perspectives as Rascasse, it was jarring and disorienting.

T
he elderly Frank Marrity squinted around in the sunlight at the palm and yellow-flowered acacia trees that ringed the little lake. From the boat on the water, he could see here and there a homeless person sleeping in the shade beside a shopping cart, and children and ducks on the asphalt walk that ringed the lake.

“Last time we talked,” he said, “it was on a bus. Do you still have that bus?” He leaned forward as he spoke, to be heard over the clanging and squeaking of the mechanical toy animals Golze had set into motion on the curved boards below their feet.

“Yes.” Golze rested on the oars, having propelled the orange-painted rowboat a good ten yards out from the shade of the roofed rental dock. He had loosened his tie and laid his tweed jacket across the blue vinyl cushion on the thwart between them, but his white shirt was already dark with sweat. For some reason the fat man was wearing a black ribbon choker, barely visible below his beard.

“When was this?” Golze asked.

A tin ape with a pair of cymbals had run down, and Golze picked it up and wound the key in its back. Luckily most of the toys were battery operated.

The old Frank Marrity shrugged as Golze set the rackety toy back down among its fellows. “It might have been right now, this date and this hour,” Marrity said. “I don't recall, exactly. For me, subjectively, it was quite a while ago—I was thirty-five years old.” He took a sip from his can of 7-Up, to which he had added enough vodka to dispel its coldness, and shuddered. The lake smelled like moss and algae and the breeze smelled like roof tar.

“I see,” said Golze. “Things, events have deviated, from
the way they originally happened? You can help keep these toys wound up.”

“Of course they've deviated.” Marrity carefully set his 7-Up on the thwart and then bent to pick up a dog with brown-and-white nylon fur and begin twisting its key. He wished he'd brought a hat; the sun overhead was hot on his scalp through his thinning gray hair. “For one thing, in my original experience of August 1987 my elderly father didn't visit me. That's who I've told my younger self that I am. My father. Our father. He believes it—I'm close enough to the right age, and of course I look like him, and I know the family history.”

“So he hates you?”

Marrity frowned as he put the dog down. “I think he does. Though he's more civil than
I
would be, if I met the old man.” Then with a shiver of loss he remembered that his father had been killed in 1955. “But of course the old man turns out not to be the bad guy we always thought he was.” And who is now? he asked himself rhetorically. Got to have a bad guy.

“What did we talk about,” Golze asked, “in the bus, when you were thirty-five?”

Marrity thought: You wanted Grammar's VHS movie, and I sold it to you. But the movie is gone, this time. And you also asked about Einstein's machine, which I didn't know about, then. Aloud he said, “You said you wanted to buy a machine my grandmother had, which had been designed by Albert Einstein.”

“And?”

“And I sold it to you, for fifty thousand dollars.” Close enough, he thought—I sold him the movie that time. “I want something else, besides money, this time.”

Golze smiled, obviously pleased. “And there was the movie too.”

“You mentioned a movie, but I didn't have that, whatever it was.” He picked up a big red plastic ant that had stopped moving.

Golze's good cheer was gone. “The
movie,
it was watched
at your house at four-fifteen p.m. two days ago! Before there were any divergences between your lifeline and your younger self's!”

That's right, thought Marrity, forcing himself not to reach for the 7-Up can. Instead he nervously twisted the key in the ant's belly. “Daphne—may have watched a movie—I was working—”

“Why are you lying? Your younger self has described it as a paranormal ‘intrusion' that occurred at four-fifteen on Sunday.” He leaned forward across the oars and smiled at Marrity, widening his eyes and showing his yellow teeth. “Why are you lying?”

Marrity exhaled. “Because it's
gone,
the movie's destroyed,” he said, relieved to be admitting the truth. “In my original life nineteen years ago, I sold it to you, but in this time line the VCR burned up with the movie in it when Daphne was watching it.”

“Burned up? You
know
it was burned up?”

“I saw the VCR in my, his, front yard. It was charred.” The ant had begun writhing mechanically in his hands, and he hastily set it down.

“And her teddy bear was burned too,” said Golze quietly. “And the stereo in Rascasse's car! Was this poltergeist? Telekenesis? Did she grab these things psychically?”

“I don't know. I wasn't there. She didn't have any psychic powers when she was
my
daughter.”

“Poltergeist!” Golze shouted it like a curse.

The fat man picked up the oar handles and rowed furiously to a spot several yards farther out. Then he let go of them and rubbed his red face with both chubby hands as the boat surged on for a yard or two and then rocked to a stop on the green water.

Marrity peered around at the distant new apartment buildings beyond Alvarado Boulevard, and in the other direction at the rental dock's little lighthouse, which looked as if it dated from the 1920s. And a man from the twenty-first century sitting in a boat between them, he thought.

Finally Golze said, “I believe you,” through his fingers.
“All our remote viewers reported that it simply disappeared; not just stopped being used, but dropped out of their perceptions entirely.” He lowered his hands and stared at Marrity. “Why would she have poltergeist powers in this time line?”

“I can't imagine. It's new to me.”

“Tell me the truth about our meeting nineteen years ago.”

“I
can
give you the machine.”

“The meeting.”

“Well, the blind girl was there, and after I gave you the movie, she stopped bothering to pretend she could see out of her own eyes. There were some vulgar jokes, when one of the men would go to the bathroom. She was pretty drunk, as I recall! And you had—I'm glad not to see it here—you had a mummified human
head,
which appeared to be alive.” He squinted at Golze, but the fat man didn't seem surprised, so they must have it in this time line too. “It made noises and wiggled its jaw, anyway.” He picked up the ape with the cymbals, which had run down again. “Like one of these toys. Why didn't you get all battery-operated ones?”

I'm talking too much, he thought as he wound it up. He put the ape down and took another sip of the lukewarm, fortified 7-Up and shifted on the blue vinyl cushion. He wondered if the cushions were supposed to serve as life preservers if the boat sank.

“The wind-up ones provide discontinuity,” Golze said shortly. “So you gave us the Chaplin movie, when you were thirty-five.”