Expiration Date (37 page)

The big ghost must have stepped
way
out, at some point in this neighborhood, and just damn
flashed
the ghost populace, mooned them. That would energize and urgently draw every spirit lingering nearby. God knew why the big ghost had done it, for it couldn’t eat any ghosts itself.

What, thought Oaks uneasily. You just wanted somebody to chat with? Or did you do it simply to fox my radar this way?

Sherman Oaks felt tense, nearly brittle, and he kept calling to mind the collapsed, hijacked-flesh face he had seen on the steps to the parking level at the Music Center this afternoon. Who the hell
was
that, who
is
this big ghost?

The threads of association trailed away back into the blankness that was his life before the awakening of consciousness in the district of Sherman Oaks three years ago.

But he shook his head sharply. Enough idle chatter, he told himself, quit dishing the applesauce. If the compass is temporarily foxed, that only means that you’re back on a limited-to-visual footing. Get your footing moving—you know you’re on the right track, and you know he’s close.

“S
O WHAT
was the telephone
you
invented?” Kootie asked tiredly. He had walked down the side street, away from the streaking headlights of Wilshire, and was now
staring through a chain-link fence at an enclosed paved yard that was shadowed from the intermittent moonlight by surrounding buildings.

“Well, I had to stop work on it. I found I was able to call people who hadn’t died yet. What do you suppose this is?”

“Hadn’t
died?” Suddenly Kootie was uncomfortable with this conversation. “It’s an empty lot.”

“With, for once, no barbed wire on the fence. And it’s got a couple of old cars in there, that look like they’ve been there since Ford first rolled them off the production line. Damn Ford anyway.”

Kootie remembered having said
Damn Ford
when Raffle had seen the reward-for-this-boy billboard at the Music Center; and he realized that it must have been Edison talking then, and that he had been referring to Henry Ford, rather than to Raffle’s car.

Kootie found that he had curled his fingers through the chain link, and was looking up and down the empty sidewalk.

“What did Ford do to you?” he asked.

He wasn’t really surprised when he began helplessly climbing the fence, but he had certainly not expected the old man to be so agile. “Ow!” Kootie exclaimed breathlessly at one point, “watch the right ankle!—Oh, sorry.” The street was silent except for the rush of cars back on Wilshire and the immediate thrashing clang of the shaken chain-link.

Astride the crossbar at the top, Kootie’s body paused to catch its breath. “When I was dying,” said Edison, “Ford made my son catch my last breath in a test tube for him.” In deference to Kootie’s ankle, he didn’t just jump, but climbed down the other side.

At last unhooking his fingers from the chain-link, Kootie hurried across the cracked pavement of the enclosed lot to the nearest of the abandoned cars. Shaggy night-blooming jasmine bushes overhung the car, and crumpled plastic bags had been shrink-wrapped by Monday’s wind right onto the heavy leafy clusters, like butterflies captured in midnight poses against the fronts of car radiators.

When Kootie was crouched behind the fender, Edison went on in a whisper, “Oh, he meant well—just like he did when he built an exact replica of my Menlo Park lab, for his ‘Light’s Golden Jubilee’ in 1929, the fiftieth anniversary of my incandescent lamp. That must have confused a whole nation of ghosts and ghost trackers—Ford reconstructed the entire lab, even using actual planks from my old buildings, with the old dynamos and half-built stockticker machines on the benches inside, and all the old tools. And he even erected a duplicate of the boardinghouse across the street! And he trucked in genuine red New Jersey clay, for the soil around the buildings! And there
was
a villain hanging around me in those days, trying to hook out my soul—I fed the fellow a poisoned apple!—and it was against such people that Ford was trying to protect me. Oh, it’s hard to fault the.. the generous, sentimental old fool, even now, now that I’m hiding in an empty lot in Los Angeles in…what year is it?”

“1992,” said Kootie.

“Good…God
. I died sixty-one years ago.” Kootie had stopped panting after the exertion of climbing the fence, but now he was breathing hard again. “And I rattled my last breath into a test tube, which my son Charles then stopped up and
obediently
gave to Henry Ford.” Kootie found himself staring at his hands and shaking his head. “Where did
you
get it?”

Into the ensuing silence, Kootie said, flatly, “My parents had it. Hidden inside a bust of Dante. They’ve had it forever. Had it.”

“Inside
Dante
, eh? Just like I’m inside your head now. I guess I’m your built-in Virgil, though I’ve got to admit I don’t really know the neighborhood. I wonder when we get to El Paradisio? Huh. Sounds like a Mexican speakeasy.”

“So Ford was trying to protect you.”

“In his blundering way. Yeah, from ghosts and ghost hunters both—I stood out like a spiritualist bonfire. And—” Kootie’s shoulders shrugged. “It was to
honor
, me, too. A replica of the great man’s lab, the great man’s actual last breath! He was pleased to see his friends get
accolades
. He’d have been tickled to death—as it were—to know that I finally got a B.S.” Kootie could feel his pulse thumping faster in his chest. “And not an honorary one, either—it was earned! The faculty examined seventeen portfolios of my research! And this was at
Thomas A. Edison State College
—if you please!—in Trenton, New Jersey.”

“I…
dreamed
about that,” said Kootie softly, “Sunday night.” It, the thought of college, was the spur that finally made me put my run-away plan into action, he thought. Which has turned out to have put a lot of other stuff into action, too. “I must have been picking it up from you, you all worked up in the bust in the living room.”

The laugh that came out of his mouth then was embarrassed. “I guess I was excited about it myself. A little. Not that I put any stock in academic honors.” He shrugged again. “The news was all over the party line.”

“Yeah,” said Kootie, “I met some old lady that wanted to talk to you. Probably had a graduation present for you.” Kootie sighed, feeling bad about dead people. “What are you gonna do with the ghost in the film can?”

Kootie could feel that Edison’s mood was down too, and had been for the last several minutes; probably Kootie’s own melancholy was largely induced in his surrounding mind by the suggestion from Edison’s frail, contained ghost.

“The ghost in the film can,” said Edison. “If he hasn’t died in there yet, we could talk to
him
on my telephone. If we had my telephone with us I could work it. You might be able to as well—you strike me as another boy who’s carrying around some solid guilty link with a dead person or two, hm?”

“I…guess I am.” Kootie was too desolated and exhausted, here in the dark empty lot, to cry.

“There now, son, I don’t mean to stir it up.” Edison had Kootie sit down, leaning back against the car body. The wind was rustling softly in the fronds of a stocky wild
palm on the far side of the car, and the only sound on the breeze was the rapid
pop-pop-pop
of semiautomatic gunfire, comfortably far away.

“My telephone,” Edison said. “I got the ghost-telephone idea when a spiritualist paid Marconi to buy my Lehigh Valley grasshopper telegraph patents for him. It was originally a scheme to make two-way telegraphy possible on a moving train, by an induction current between plates on the train and telegraph wires overhead, with regularly spaced dispatcher stations along the way, hence ‘grasshopper.’
But
…they got a lot of random clicking, some bits of which turned out to be…oh, you know, idiot clowning:
Shave and a haircut, two bits
, and
Hey Rube
, and the beats of the
Lohengrin
wedding march and popular songs. Even so, I didn’t figure it out until the spiritualist bought the patents.” He yawned. “Up, son, I’ve got to set up the apparatus for our night’s worth of six signals.”

Kootie didn’t want to do any more work. Why was it always his muscles and joints that took the wear and tear? “What’s a six signal? I bet we don’t need it.”

“Tramp telegraphers have to tap out a signal every hour, all night long. Called a ‘six signal.’ It’s to show that you’re still awake, alert, ready to participate. I used to just hook up a clock to a rotary saw blade, so it sent the signals
for
me, right on time, while I napped.
Up
, lad, it won’t take but a few moments.”

Kootie struggled to his feet one more time, and then he took out the chalk and, crouching, drew a big oval all the way around the car, which, he now saw, was a wrecked old Dodge Dart, of God knew what color under the dust of years. This time he drew arrows radiating out from the circumference, and he spit several times outside the wobbly chalk line.

“That’ll make it seem that we’re up and about, in a number of places,” said Edison, “and for the night I can clathrate myself inside your head again—voluntarily this time!—with all hatches battened down. Then we’ll be as damn hard to find as a gray hat in a rock pile.” It seemed to Kootie that this simile had been derived from experience. “And we should sleep, and we should sleep.”

Edison used Kootie’s fingers to probe the car-door lock with a bit of wire he found on the pavement; but after a while he swore and tossed it away and just had Kootie punch in the wind-wing window with a chunk of concrete. Kootie’s arm was just barely long enough for his stretched-out fingers to reach the lock-post button.

Kootie stepped back and opened the door—wincing at the echoing screech of the ancient hinges—and then he leaned inside, breathing shallowly in musty air that somehow nevertheless had a flavor of new houses.

The seats and floor of the car proved to be stacked with dozens of ancient gallon paint cans that someone had once halfheartedly covered with a stiffened drop cloth, and Kootie had to lift some of the cans out and set them down on the pavement just to have room to sit with his legs stretched out. He didn’t know if the old man could feel the aching, stinging fatigue in his shoulders and knees—and in his hip, which pain he now remembered that the old man was responsible for—but
Edison didn’t argue when Kootie suggested that this was enough, and that they could sleep sitting up.

Kootie pulled the door closed—slowly, so that it wouldn’t squeal again. The broken wind-wing wasn’t letting in much fresh air, so he wrestled with the door’s crank handle and managed to open the passenger-side window several inches, enough to probably keep the fumes of mummified paint from overcoming him during the night. That done, he bent the old drop cloth snugly around his shoulders and shifted around until he found a position in which he could relax without setting off any big twinges of pain.

The empty lot was unlit, and it was very dark inside the old car.

Sometimes his father had come into Kootie’s room at bedtime and had haltingly and awkwardly tried to talk to the boy. Once, after Kootie had supposedly gone to sleep, he had heard his father, back out in the kitchen with his mother, dejectedly refer to the conversations as “quality time.” Still, it had been comforting, in its way.

“So you fixed up this phone,” he ventured now, speaking quietly in the close shelter.

“Hm? Oh, yes, that I did. Do you remember the story of Rumpelstiltskin? Your parents must have told it to you.”

No. Kootie’s parents had told him all about Rama and Koot Hoomie and Zorro-Aster and Jiddu Krishnamurti (in whose holy-man footsteps he had been intended to follow), and about self-realization and meditation, and the doings of various Egyptian holy men. But at least he had heard about Rumpelstiltskin in school. Thank God for school. “Sure,” he said now, sleepily.

“Well, you remember that the little man didn’t want anybody to know what his name was. That’s important if a person is like you and me—misfortunate enough to be tethered by a stout leash of responsibility to somebody who’s in the ghost world; it’s like we’ve got one loot outside of time, isn’t it, so that we react to noises and jolts just a split instant before they actually happen.”

“You’ve had that happen too,” said Kootie faintly, slumping farther down in the warming seat.

“Ever since I watched a playmate drown in a creek when I was five, son. So have a lot of unhappy people. And that..
antenna
we carry around makes us stand out to ghosts. They’re drawn to us, and without meaning any harm they can attach themselves to us and sympathetically induce the collapse of
our
time lines—kill us, like a parasite that kills its host.

“People like you and me, if we manage to live long, have generally had a
wanderjahr
, a time of wandering around untraceably, often luckily giving a fake name and fake birth date, while we get the time to figure out what the hell’s going on. I was a plug telegrapher when I was sixteen, that’s like an apprentice, and for years I rode trains all over this country, because there was always ready work for any class of telegrapher during the Civil War. Blavatsky was doing her wander-time around then too: Europe, Mexico, Tibet. What you learn, if you’re lucky, is that you need a mask if
you’re going to deal up close with ghosts. You can’t let them get a handle on
you,
not anything. Real name and real birth date, especially. Those are solid handles.”