Expiration Date (76 page)

“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.”