Expiration Date

  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 honey-bunch, 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 fumy 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 roomy 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 44

  … and she had a vague sort of idea that they must be 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 th
oughtful,” 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 put 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.