Expiration Date (52 page)

Oaks looked up at the sky, and he remembered mornings when he had snorted his fill the night before, and had had more unopened vials ready to hand. I’d like it always to be six o’clock on a summer morning, he thought, and I’m in a sleeping bag on some inaccessible balcony or behind a remote hedge, and my feet are warm but my arms and head are out in the cool breeze and I’m sweating with a sort of disattached, unspecific worry, and I’ve got hours yet to just lie there and listen to the traffic and the parrots flying past overhead.

The police would be after him. He had run away from that confusion in Inglewood yesterday afternoon, but his shots had probably hit both of the cops in that patrol car, and his fingerprints were all over the inside of the SCE truck, and the van in the back of it. And the police probably still had his fingerprints on file; he now remembered that he had held several custodial jobs in hospitals, during the fifties and sixties, catching fresh death-ghosts and lots of the tasty, elusive birth-ghosts.

He’d have to get rid of the revolver—a “ballistics team” would be able to tell that it was the weapon that had fired on the police car. Oaks should have no trouble finding some street person who would take it in trade for some other (certainly less desirable) sort of gun.

But the police, unfortunately, weren’t his main problem.

He twitched, and turned to the ghost sitting nearest him on his left. The man was breaking off fragments of mortar from between the cinder blocks of the wall, and eating them.

“You’ll choke,” Oaks rasped.

“Hyuck-hyuck. Choke on
this”
said the ghost, without any gesture.
“I’m
choking,” said Oaks. “If you choke on one of those rocks, a Heimlich maneuver could unblock it, right? How can I unblock a spoiled
ghost
from my mind-pipe? Do
you
know?”

The ghost wrinkled his spotty forehead in a frown, and then began counting off points on the fingers of one hand. “Okay, you got stones in your ears and a magnet up your nose, right? And toads have got a stone in their heads. The Venerable Bead. And plenty of people have got shrapnel and metal plates in them, and steel hips. Check it out. Learnest Hand Hemingway used to save the shrapnel that came out of his legs and put it in little bowls so that his friends could take the bits as souvenirs; and eat them, of course, to get a bit of Hemingway.” He smiled. “Everything is a Learnest experience. The golden rule to be in-got at the College of Fortuitous Knox. Fort You-It-Us Knocks.” (The unattained pun made the intended spelling clear.) “It’s important to feel good about yourself. This morning I met somebody I really like—me.”

“That’s good,” said Oaks hopelessly. “Tell him hello from me, if you ever run into him again.”

There was apparently no help to be had from the ghosts themselves. Oaks was choked, and the only way
he
knew how to unjam himself was likely to kill him. This time. Instead of just costing him another limb.

He could remember all kinds of things now. He remembered that Thomas Alva Edison had choked him this way once before—or at least once before—in 1929. Small surprise that the flattened face on the Music Center parking-level stairs had looked familiar! No wonder the
Edison
logo on the side of the truck had upset him! He should have paid attention to his forebodings. Thomas Alva Edison had never been any good for him.

A
S THE
shock-loosened memories had come arrowing up to the surface of his mind, one right after another, during his endless odyssey last night, Oaks had learned that he had always been an ambitious fellow, setting his sights on the most powerful people around and then trying to catch them unguarded so that he could snatch out of their heads their potent ghosts.

He had pursued the famous escape artist Harry Houdini for at least sixteen years—fruitlessly. Houdini had evaded every trap, had been effectively masked, psychically inaccessible, at every face-to-face confrontation. Houdini had even given protection to his friends: there had been a writer of horror stories in Rhode Island to whom Houdini had given his own severed thumb in June of 1924; Houdini had had his plaster mask-hands made by then, and could assume them and make them flesh any time he liked, and so he didn’t need the original-issue thumb anymore, and besides, Houdini had probably known that he himself was only a couple of years from death at that point. In Los Angeles, Houdini had even picked up some kind of electric belt for this writer friend, an electromagnetic device that could supposedly cure all kinds of ailments, including Bright’s disease and cancer—which pair of illnesses the writer died of in 1937, in fact, for he had been skeptical of the belt and disgusted by the thumb, and had got rid of them.

Houdini himself had been untouchable, a genuine escape artist…even though Oaks had eventually managed to arrange his physical death on a Halloween. It had been useless, for even in the moment of his dying Houdini had eluded him. Trying to catch Houdini had always been like trying to cross-examine an echo, wound an image in a mirror, sniff out a rose in an unlighted gallery of photographs of flowers.

Houdini’s parents must have known right from his birth that their son had a conspicuous soul, for they had taken quick, drastic steps to hamper access to it. Confusingly, they had given him the name
Erik,
which was the same name they’d given to their first son, who had died of a fall while still a baby; and within weeks of Houdini’s birth they had moved from Budapest to London to goddamn
Appleton, Wisconsin!
—and given an inaccurate birth date for him.

Slippery name, vast distance from his birthplace, and a bogus birthday. Worthless coordinates.

And the boy had compounded the snarling of his lifeline by running away at the age of twelve to be an itinerant boot polisher for the U.S. Cavalry. When that proved to be an unreliable career, he had just drifted, riding freight trains around the Midwest—begging, doing manual labor on farms, and learning magic from circus sideshows. With no real name or address or nativity date, his soul had no ready
handles,
and such ghost fanciers as might have been intrigued by the weirdly powerful boy were no doubt left holding a metaphorical empty coat while the boy himself was safely asleep in a probably literal outward-bound boxcar.

Sherman Oaks had certainly been pursuing Houdini by 1900, when the magician was twenty-six years old (Oaks had no clue as to how old he himself might have been), but Oaks had not ever managed to get Houdini’s soul squarely in his sights.

In the moment of opening up the jaws of his mind for the kill, for the forcible extraction of another self from its living body, his plain physical vision always became a superfluous blur, and he relied on the sensed identity coordinates of the other self, like a pilot making an instrument landing by following a homing beam in bad weather.

Just when he would be zeroing in on the thing that was “Houdini,” it became something else, and the real Houdini would be gone.

Once, in Paris in 1901. Oaks had psychically traced Houdini to a sidewalk cafe—but when Oaks walked up to the place with a gun in his pocket, seven bald men at the tables in front simultaneously took off their hats and bowed their heads, revealing the seven letters H-O-U-D-l-N-I painted one apiece on their shining scalps, and that grotesque assembly were as the only “Houdini” that was present.

Always in his stage act Houdini was untraceably switching places with his wife (whom he had taken care to marry in three different ceremonies); another favorite trick was escaping out of a big milk can that was filled with water and padlocked shut—so that each escape was confusingly like a reexperienced birth.
(Slippery!)
In Boston in the fall of 1911, Oaks had been closing in on Houdini—the magician was weakened with a fever and haunted by dreams of his dead older brother—when suddenly the magician’s psychic ground-signal was extinguished; Oaks had panicked, and expended far too much energy trying to find the ghost; and then, recuperating in defeat afterward, learned that the magician had had himself
chained inside the belly of a dead sea monster
during the eclipsed period. (The creature had been washed up dead on a Cape Cod beach, and was described as “a cross between a whale and an octopus.”)

In the 1920s Oaks had got closer. Houdini had begun a new career as an exposer of phony spiritualist mediums who weren’t entirely phony, and ghosts themselves had begun to threaten him. The famous Boston medium Margery gave a séance near Christmas of ‘24, and the ghost of her dead brother Walter announced that Houdini had less than a year to live. Houdini lived out the year, but on Halloween of 25, he was stricken with a “severe cold,” and after a brief, restless sleep stayed up all
night. Oaks had managed to get into Houdini’s hotel room, but the sick magician had climbed out the window and disappeared until showing up protected at the Syracuse train station the next day.

On the following Halloween, in 1926, Oaks had managed to end the chase. Houdini’s wife Bess got ptomaine poisoning from rat excrement that Oaks had managed to put into her dinner, and the magician had to travel without her masking presence. On October 11, in Albany, a ghost had been coached to walk translucently out onto the stage where a manacled Houdini was being hoisted into the air by his bound ankles and lowered into his Water Cell, a glass-sided tank from which he was supposed to escape; the ghost got itself caught in the pulleys, and Houdini was jokingly dropped a foot before the rope retightened, and a bone in his left ankle was broken. Houdini didn’t try to complete that trick, but bravely went on with the rest of his act. Then, on October 22 at the Princess Theatre in Montreal, a blurry-minded religious student was induced to visit the magician in his dressing room and try Houdini’s claim to be able to withstand the hardest punches; the student struck without giving Houdini any warning so that he could brace himself, and the four solid blows ruptured the magician’s appendix.

Houdini of course didn’t stop performing. He finished the run in Montreal the next day, and on the twenty-fourth he opened at the Garrick Theater in Detroit. But Oaks had known that the man was dying now. That night Houdini was admitted to Grace Hospital, diagnosed with streptococcal peritonitis.

And so Oaks had got what might have been the first of his janitorial jobs at a hospital. It took Houdini a week longer to die, and in that time Oaks managed to snag a few fresh ghosts—but when Houdini finally did die, at 1:26
p.m.,
he died masked. Oaks was ready to catch him, and strained numbingly hard after Houdini’s ghost when the magician died, but the old magician had been as slick as ever, and his ghost had darted away from Oaks’s grasp in a flicker of false memories and counterfeit dates and assumed identities.

Oaks had seized and devoured a splash of fresh ghosts—but they had nothing to do with Houdini. Later he learned that a baby girl had been born in the same instant as Houdini’s death, and he realized that what he had caught was the natal explosion of stress-thrown ghost-shells emitted by the newborn infant.

It had been tasty, but it had not been Houdini.

Spiritually depleted by the decades of that useless pursuit, Oaks had gone hungrily after the other psychically conspicuous figure of the time—Thomas Alva Edison. And he had had no luck there either.

S
HERMAN
O
AKS
boosted himself down off the cinder-block wall and shambled across the parking lot.

At some weary point last night he had got on a bus. He had dozed off, and when he’d snapped awake he had been sitting in a moving streetcar, one of the old long-gone Red Car Line, and he had passively ridden it south to the Long Beach Pike on the shore of Long Beach Harbor. He had got out of the streetcar and dazedly walked up and down the arc-lit midway, among the tattoo parlors and the baseball-pitch booths, startled repeatedly by the ratcheting clank of the Ferris-wheel chain and the
snap-clang
of .22 rounds being fired at steel ducks in the shooting gallery. The only lighted construct against the blackness of ocean had been the Cyclone Racer roller coaster—the
Queen Mary
had still been somewhere on the other side of the world, steaming across the sunlit face of the Atlantic.