Three Days to Never (27 page)

“And we could build this,” said the flat voice on the radio. “Not so difficult.”

Marrity shook his head. “I said ‘among other things.' Anyway, what you do is, you press your hands into the Chaplin handprints and then you send two astral projections of yourself to targets you've set up—one on a mountain, one at sea level or lower, while your body stays in the middle ground somewhere, standing barefoot on the gold electrodes. You guys know about astral projections, right? That way you're existing in three time shells at once—they're only slightly different, but the
maschinchen
amplifies tiny differences and imposes a combined-wave signal through the electrodes in the floor. You're not in any one time shell anymore at this point, see, you're smeared across three of them. And for your safety you
need
three of, of ‘you'—to spread out the recoil that's coming up soon. Einstein only had two, in 1928: himself on a mountain in the Alps and a projection in the valley below him. It was enough to spread him across some time shells, but the recoil still nearly killed him.”

Through the ragged hole in the windshield Marrity could see a sidewalk shaded by jacaranda trees. It all seemed a lot farther away than it could really be.

”‘Among other things,'” said the Rascasse voice. “What other things?”

Marrity wished he could get out of the car. In spite of the fresh air blowing in through the torn windshield, the smell of burnt plastic was making him sick, and his bent leg ached all the way up to the hip.

“In 2006 I wiped some of the dust off the glass cylinder the condensers are in,” he said hoarsely, “and looked in it with a flashlight. Einstein, or Lieserl, had painted Hebrew letters on the ten condensor plates. I couldn't rotate them, or see the letters in toward the axis, but in several places I saw the Hebrew word
Din,
which is the name of one of the ten
Sephirot,
the ten world emanations of God. In his letters to
Lieserl, Einstein seems to have equated
Din
with determinism. Judgment with no mercy mixed in, I gather. No indeterminacy, no uncertainty. Anyway, I couldn't have copied out all the letters on the plates without taking the thing apart.”

“And now the Mossad has it,” said Golze. His voice was frail, and when Marrity looked at the fat man in the driver's seat beside him, he wondered if Rascasse's optimistic diagnosis was correct; Golze appeared to be dying. Perhaps Rascasse knew he was, and wanted him to die. Maybe Rascasse won't need to have killed Nobodaddy, Marrity thought—maybe he can just
prevent
him.

“And,” Marrity went on, “you couldn't build the Chaplin slab.”

“Are you close?” wheezed Golze irritably. “We're sitting in a parked car with the windshield—fuck—broken out.”

“Five minutes since we left from Echo Park,” said Rascasse's voice, which seemed to be just shaking the air now, independent of the radio's speaker. “We're on the 101 now, soon to hit the Pasadena freeway junction. Just a few more minutes. What's the Chaplin slab? Why wouldn't…Shirley Temple's do as well?”

Marrity realized what had been nagging him about the way Rascasse was speaking—it was all in iambic pentameter.

“The slab,” he said, “is a sort of kink in time—in conjunction with the machine, it works like a catalyst, it makes it easier to get out of the time stream. My sister, Moira, took out a restraining order against me, in 2003—claimed I was a dangerous drunk!—but one day when she wasn't home, I broke into her stupid house and found some letters from Chaplin to Grammar, written in 1933 and '34.” He smirked, distracted by the memory. “They may have been romantically involved! Grammar would only have been thirty-one in '33, and Chaplin—”

“Goddammit,” said Rascasse's voice, “how's the slab a kink in time?”

“Right, right.” Marrity frowned but went on, “Well, Chaplin was with Grammar in '33, when she jumped back in time, and he got dislocated too, for a moment. He found
himself occupying his 1928 body, kneeling next to Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks in the Chinese Theater forecourt, pressing his hands into wet cement. A moment later he was back in the Kaleidoscope Shed and it was 1933 again, but”—Marrity shrugged—“it was the 1933 Chaplin who made those handprints in 1928. The slab, just by existing, is a violation of sequential time.”

“We're on the Pasadena freeway now,” said Rascasse's disembodied voice.

Still in iambic pentameter, Marrity noted. His hands were trembling, and he clasped them together as if in prayer.

A
fter the bus had pulled up alongside the battered car and Marrity had helped Golze climb aboard, Rascasse's voice from the bus radio had told the driver to go back to Hollywood and pick up Charlotte Sinclair; and again Marrity had noticed that Rascasse spoke in iambic pentameter.

N
ow the bus was parked in streaky palm-tree shade in a remote corner of the Alpha Beta parking lot at Pico and La Cienega, idling with the air-conditioning running, and Charlotte was sprawled across the left-side seats just behind the Baphomet head's cabinet, blinking sleepily and seeing through old Marrity's eyes on the other side of the aisle. Golze was slumped next to Marrity, against the window frame, and when Marrity glanced at him she saw that the fat man's face was deadly pale behind his sparse beard. She assumed that Rascasse's body was still lying on a bunk in the
back of the bus, but nobody had looked there and she hadn't the energy to ask.

She was about to feel in her purse for the half-pint of Wild Turkey when, through old Marrity's eyes, she saw the pointer on the electronic Ouija board swoop up to the letter
T
in the upper-right corner. Nobody remarked on it.

Rascasse's voice rang out of the empty air behind the driver. “Paul's right. We need to take the Daphne girl.”

Charlotte had jumped in surprise and now she wished someone would look around. Take it easy, she told herself—if Rascasse can project his awareness, it should be no trick for him to project his voice. She took a deep breath and let it out.

Today the bus smelled like a slum restroom: bleach and excrement. She didn't let herself think about the young man she had helped lure aboard, last night; instead she recalled what the bodiless voice had just said.

“Why the child?” she asked.

Nobody answered her, and then Marrity's view swiveled around to her. She couldn't tell if she needed lipstick—nobody had looked squarely at her when they'd picked her up, and now her head was just a silhouette against the bright window at her back.

“Daphne,” Marrity said, “burned up the Chaplin movie.” His voice was a hollow monotone, and she wished Golze would look at him.

But Golze was just staring at his curled hands in his lap. “We
need
the damn
movie,
” he said. “We need sideways too, not just up and down.”

“These two are going to take her to Palm Springs,” Marrity went on, “and somehow cause her never to have existed. I won't remember her, or any of this, after.”

Charlotte just said, “Ah.” And neither will I, she thought. I suppose that's another thing that's actually possible—deleting people from the universe.

She looks like I used to.

Charlotte recalled the stories she'd heard about the anomaly Einstein had supposedly left in a tower in Palm
Springs—an anomaly that could short out a person's lifeline, so that person had never existed.

And I waved at her, this afternoon, because she looked like my…my “little daughter”: my uncorrupted younger self. Two little girls—one to disappear, literally without a trace, the other to finally get a life.

“Now, Mr. Marrity,” said the disembodied voice from the air, “if you would please just open up the cabinet you see in front of you.” Rascasse's voice didn't really sound organic—it was like someone using a violin bow to play a xylophone. “Go on, it isn't locked.”

“Damn head never knows anything,” muttered Golze from beside Marrity. “How many times did we ask it to find Einstein's daughter?”

Marrity's viewpoint ascended jerkily as he got to his feet and focused on the pairs of opposed brass cones that were the cabinet's handles.

“Last time I was here,” Marrity said, sounding shaky, “nineteen years ago by my watch, this is where you kept that black head.”

“It still is,” said Charlotte, and she shifted her perspective to the driver, who was metronomically switching his gaze back and forth between the rearview mirrors and the empty pavement in front of the parked bus. It was much more restful than seeing the damned head.

But the cabinet behind the driver was still right in front of her, and she heard the latch snap and the doors creak open, and she caught the shellac and spice and old shoes smell of the thing.

“Thank you,” said Rascasse's ringing voice. “And would you now say ‘
Find me,
' please.”

“Find me,” said Marrity in a baffled tone.

And Charlotte could hear the head whispering again. It was only one voice this time: “Two days I sat beside my body, staring at the holes in my chest.”

It had said this before, she recalled.

“Thank you for letting us know where they are,” said Rascasse's voice. Charlotte frowned in puzzlement, then re
membered that ghosts existed backward; presumably Rascasse was trying to get an answer to a question before asking it.

She sighed and switched to Marrity's perspective.

Through it she could see the afternoon sunlight glinting on the polished black brows, and on the silver plates tacked to the cheek and jaw. From the height of Marrity's vision she could tell that he was still standing.

Surreptitiously she felt in her purse for the bottle.

M
arrity took solace in the faith that he would soon forget all of this. No, not forget it—never have experienced it.

“I went to my grandfather,” came the whisper from the forever slightly parted coal lips, “to find out who I am, where I came from.”

“Thank you for telling us where they are now,” said Rascasse again. If he was impatient, his high-pitched inorganic voice didn't reflect it.

“But I have no mother, really,” came the whisper, more faintly now. “Only children.”

“You've told us where your children are,” said Rascasse, like a hypnotist. “Where are your children now? Thank you for telling us.”

Your children? thought Marrity; but he had to strain to hear the whisper now: “My mother will hide them,” it said, “or try to. Everyone who dwells here is safe.”

Everyone who dwells here is safe.

Marrity's breath had stopped. That was the sign over Grammar's back door. What else had the thing said?
I went to find my grandfather
…
holes in my chest
…
children…my mother will hide them…

Abruptly the skin on his arms tingled and his vision narrowed to include only the glittering black-and-silver head, as his body understood before his mind permitted itself to.

A moment later he was out of his seat and halfway down the aisle, gripping the bar on the back of one of the seats, gasping for breath and ready to vomit.

“That's my
father
!” he yelled hoarsely. He was facing the back of the bus and blinking rapidly. “That's—what am I—that's
my father's head
.”

“Shit!” muttered Golze at the front of the bus.

“Turn it off!” Marrity shouted. “Can he
see
me?”

Rascasse's voice seemed to come from right in front of Marrity. “The ghost is gone. The imbecilic thing gave us no clue to where to find your self—your younger self. I'd hoped that when
you
asked, it might tell us—I guess it doesn't know.”

“It did tell us,” came Golze's weak voice. “The Ouija board pointer moved before Marrity said, ‘Find me.' Before is after, for ghosts. Hinch, back the truck around to face south.”

“It pointed to the letter
T,
” said the woman in sunglasses, whose real name was apparently Charlotte.

“No,” grated Golze, “it pointed in a direction.”

The bus vibrated as Hinch started the engine, and then the shadows and light moved across the seats as the bus backed around in a wide circle in the parking lot, and Marrity saw the supermarket swing past outside the left-side windows. The bus slowed to a halt, facing south now.

The Ouija board pointer now rested on the pin at the letter
A
.

“The young Frank Marrity,” said Golze distinctly, “is now behind us. Northeast of here.”

“He's in the hills, I'll bet,” chimed Rascasse. “This vehicle is far too big and slow. Hinch, radio to Amboy—tell them we need full support.”

T
here's no towels,” said Daphne meekly.

Frank Marrity was sitting on the floor against the kitchen cabinet, next to Bennett, and he looked up and saw Daphne shivering in the hall entry in her old jeans and blouse, which were now visibly wet.

He got to his feet, leaving the bottle beside Bennett. “Not even any curtains,” he agreed. “Sorry, Daph, I should have thought of that before I said you could take a shower. You could sit downstairs by the windows, it's sunny there.”

His voice echoed in the empty house. Until Daphne had spoken, the only sounds had been from outside: birdcalls, faint sounds of car motors, a helicopter thudding over the hills.

“It's been half an hour again,” said Moira. She was leaning against the rail, her back to the sloped ceiling of the living room on the lower level.

Marrity peered at his watch. Sure enough, it was 12:35. He turned to the telephone as Daphne pattered barefoot down the stairs.

As soon as he had dialed the number, the Jackson man said, “Hello?” apparently before the phone had even rung.

“It's me, it's been—”

“Right. Where are you?”

Daphne's voice echoed up from the living room behind and below Moira: “Dad, can I lay out on the deck? You can see the Hollywood sign real close!”

“It's inaccessible,” said Bennett, still sitting on the floor. “And the only street it overlooks is across the canyon.”

“Go with her, would you, Moira?” said Marrity. Into the phone he said, “We're at the top of—” And then he paused to ask Bennett, “Where are we?”

Moira sighed and pushed herself away from the rail.

“Go up—give me that.” Bennett stood up and took the phone. “Go up Beachwood till it loops sharp to the right and becomes Hollyridge, which heads back downhill. I'm his brother-in-law. The sister, correct. We're the third house downhill after the Hollyridge dogleg, on your right.” He paused, listening. “Yes, I'll turn it on.” He hung up the phone. “The porch light. He wants us to turn it on.”

“Do you know where the switch is?”

Bennett turned toward the door. “Gotta be by the—
hey
!”

Marrity had grabbed the pockets of Bennett's coat and yanked the pistol free and then lunged down the stairs, mostly sliding along the banister.

H
is attention had been caught by a sharp pain in Daphne's cracked ribs, and in the same instant he had expe
rienced her sensory impressions of a cloth pressed over her mouth and the breath driven out of her nose from hard constriction around her arms as she was abruptly lifted up backward; Daphne's jerky field of view was only of the converging treetops overhead, but she heard Moira grunt sharply. Marrity felt Daphne's bare heels kick at the aluminum-pole railing as she was hoisted over it.

When Marrity burst out onto the sunlit deck, a young man in a sweatshirt was outside the northside railing, facing him but leaning away; the man's tan-gloved hands gripped a rope moored to the railing, and he was clearly about to slide down to the dark slope below. Moira was sprawled on the deck planks behind Marrity, her hair over her face.

Daphne was gone.

Marrity lifted the pistol and fired it straight into the man's chest.

Marrity saw the man jerk his blond head forward and fall away from the balcony, and as the ejected shell flew through the open door into the living room, Marrity sprang to the rail and swung one leg over it, tucking the hot pistol behind his belt and grabbing the rope with both hands as the echoes of the shot rapped back from the far side of the canyon. The sound of the helicopter was louder out here.

He tried to go down the rope hand over hand but mostly slid, with the bristly rope burning the skin off his palms, his legs flailing uselessly in the rushing, empty air. He landed jarringly, sitting down on the body of the man he had shot, and rolled off and began crawling up the leafy slope even before he could suck air into his shocked lungs. His vision was dimmed, but he could see figures scrambling up the slope above him.

Y
ou said the girl and the woman were safely out of sight of the men,” said Hinch, opening the driver's-side door of the black BMW and swinging his legs out. “This is a mess.” The drone of the Bell helicopter that had landed on the cleared ground beyond the fence a hundred feet behind
the car was louder now, and hot, dusty air blew away the car's air-conditioned chill.

The driver's-side door slammed and Hinch was gone before Charlotte could answer. Through his eyes as he ran forward she saw three of Rascasse's men scramble up from the shadowed slope to the sunlit street pavement, carrying a flexing canvas bundle that would be the little girl.

Daphne was wrapped up, but Charlotte knew what she looked like.

The men with the bundle, squinting in the rotor wind, hurried up the sloping road past where Charlotte sat in the idling BMW. Through Hinch's eyes she had glimpsed herself in the passenger seat, and then he had run on past; now she saw the open gate on the far side of the road's crest, and the open door in the helicopter's bright blue fuselage, and a man inside waving. The tail rotor was a silvery blur, and the helicopter was bobbing on its landing-gear dampers.

When the men had tumbled Daphne into the cabin of the helicopter and slid the door shut, Hinch turned back toward Charlotte—and so she could see, beyond the front of the car, a man come clambering up the slope and then stand shielding his eyes from the glare and the rotor wind. He was holding a handgun and he was the thirty-five-year-old Frank Marrity, and Hinch's view was suddenly jolting as the back end of the black BMW increased in apparent size.