Expiration Date

  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 wall 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 47

  “I 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 and twitching 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 clovescented 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 mo-ments we toucans sha-a-are …” 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 whitehot glare of an unglassed carbon-arc lamp punched across the lobby from the forward corridor be
tween 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 can’t” 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 project
ed 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.