Expiration Date (78 page)
Authors: Tim Powers
He might have been referring to the psychically skewed magnetic field, but Sullivan thought he meant his control over his long-dead body and his long-held ghost; and nervously Sullivan thought of the descriptions of the way Frank Rocha’s body had finally gone.
Then Bradshaw’s face creased in a faint, self-conscious, reminiscent smile—and he curled one hand over his head and stuck his other arm straight out, and he spun
slowly on the rail on the toe of one foot; and, almost gracefully, he overbalanced and fell away out into empty space and disappeared.
Sullivan found himself listening for a splash—irrationally, for the water was a good hundred feet below, and Sullivan was sprawled on the other side of the Piccadilly Circus lobby, closer to the port rail than the starboard one from which Bradshaw had just fallen—but what he heard three seconds later was a muffled
boom
that vibrated the deck and flung a high plume of glittering spray into the morning sunlight up past the starboard rail.
The lawyer seemed to be sobbing now, and he ran away aft, his footsteps knocking away to silence on the exterior deck planks, and the footsteps didn’t start up again from some other direction.
S
ULLIVAN DISCOVERED
that he was able to sit up; then that he could get his legs under himself and get to his feet. Elizalde hurried around to his right side and braced him up, and at last he dared to look down at his chest.
A button hung in fragments on his shirtfront and a tiny hole had been raggedly punched through the cloth, but there was no blood; and then with a surge of relief he remembered the brass plaque from his father’s gravestone, tucked into his scapular, over his heart.
“Your arm’s bleeding,” said Elizalde. “But somehow that—seems to be the only place you’re hit.” Her face was pale and she was frowning deeply. Sullivan could see the lump of the .45 under the front of her sweatshirt.
He looked down at his left arm, and his depth perception seemed to flatten right down to two dimensions when he saw that his shirtsleeve was rapidly blotting with bright red blood. “Hold me up from that side,” he said dizzily, “and maybe no one will notice. You’re a doctor, Angelica—can you dig out a bullet?”
“If it’s not embedded in the bone, I can.”
“Good—Jesus—soon.” He took a deep breath and let it out, feeling as disoriented as if he’d had a stiff drink and an unfiltered Pall Mall on an empty stomach. “Uh…where to?”
“The bridge is there again,” said Kootie anxiously, “the one that leads to the stairs and the parking lot. Let’s get off this ship while we can.”
Sullivan looked up, across the wide lobby. DeLarava’s body was still sprawled out there in the middle of the deck, but the lights and camera gear at the forward end of the room were all her modern equipment again. The little old man in the khaki jacket was crouched over one of the Lowell light kits, busily packing away the scrims and light-doors and humming. He didn’t look up when Kootie ran back there, snatched up a half-used roll of silvery gaffer’s tape, and hurried back to Sullivan and Elizalde.
“Kootie’s right,” said Elizalde, scuffling back around to Sullivan’s left side and hugging his bloody arm to her breast. “Let’s get back to Solville before people are able to wander in here and find this mess.”
“
J
OEY
,”
SAID
a frail voice behind Sullivan, “
stop them.
”
Sullivan looked back at the film equipment and saw that deLarava’s fat ghost was leaning on the tripod, her translucent chin resting on the black Sony Betacam. Her head ended right above the eyebrows, constricted to a short, stumpy cone by the rubber bands; and her translucent ectoplasmic right arm was still stretched out for yards across the deck, the limp fingers of the ghost hand twitching impotently on the grip of the automatic pistol.
The old man by the light kit looked up. “Oh, I’ve seen these before,” he said cheerfully, speaking toward the ghost. “I should pop it into a marmalade jar, so somebody can sniff it. Crazy. No more point to it than catching somebody’s shadow by slapping a book shut on it. If you ask me.”
“
Joey
,” said the ghost in a peremptory but birdlike tone, “
you work for me. You gentlemen—why, you all work for me. Joey, I seem to have dislocated my wrist—take the gun from my hand and kill those three.
”
“I hear a voice!” exclaimed Joey, smiling broadly. “A blot of mustard or a bit of undigested beef, speaking to me! A sort of food that’s bound to disagree—not for me.” He stood up and bowed toward Kootie, who was nervously holding the roll of gaffer’s tape. “Thanks a lot, boy,” Joey said, “just the same.”
DeLarava’s ghost was fading, but it straightened up and drifted across the floor straight toward Sullivan, and its eyes, as insubstantial as raw egg-whites, locked onto his. “
Come with me, Pete
,” the ghost said imperiously.
Sullivan opened his mouth—almost certainly to decline the offer, though he was dizzy and nauseated at the hard sunlight, and giving a lot of his weight to Elizalde’s right arm—but the breath that came out between his teeth was sharp with bourbon fumes, and it whispered, “
What number were you trying to reach?
”
DeLarava’s ghost withered before the fumy breath, and the gossamer lines of the fat face turned to Kootie. “
Little boy, would you help an old woman across a very wide street?
”
“
Physicists and sphinxes in majestical mists
,” came the old man’s voice out of Kootie’s mouth. “
I will go right through that sand and leave you way behind.
”
The smoky shred that was deLarava’s ghost now swung toward Elizalde, and the voice was like wasps rustling in a papery nest: “You
have no mask.
”
The bloody fabric of the sweatshirt over Elizalde’s breasts flattened, as if an unseen hand had pressed there, and then a spotty handprint in Sullivan’s blood appeared on
the sweatshirt shoulder, and smeared. Elizalde cocked her head as if listening to a faint voice in her ear, arid then said, almost wonderingly, “Yes, of course.”
Sullivan felt the bourbon-breath blow out of his mouth again. “
This one is my family, too
,” the voice said softly.
Then Elizalde’s shoulder twitched as if shoved.
—And out of Sullivan’s mouth Sukie’s ghost-voice added, “A. O. P.,
kids.
”
As quick as an image in a twitched mirror, deLarava’s ghost folded itself around past Kootie and stood between the three of them and the roofed causeway off the ship. “
No one passes
” it whispered.
Kootie looked back at Sullivan fearfully; and in spite of his own sick-making pain, Sullivan noticed that the boy’s curly black hair needed washing and combing, and he noticed the dark circles under the haunted brown eyes; and he vowed to himself, and to the ghosts of his father and sister, that he would make things better.
“There’s no one there, Kootie,” he said. “Watch.” He stepped forward, away from Elizalde’s arm, and faintly felt the protesting outrage as deLarava’s fretful substance parted before him like cobwebs and blew away on the strengthening sea breeze.
Kootie and Elizalde hurried after him. Kootie looked up at Elizalde with a strangely lost look, and he waved the roll of gaffer’s tape he had snatched off the deck. He held it gingerly, as if he didn’t want to get any more of the glue on his fingers than he could help. “When we get to the stairs,” he said, “I figured you could tape Pete’s arm with this.”
Elizalde looked startled. “Of course. That’s a good idea…Edison?”
“No,” said Kootie, trotting along now between the two grown-ups. “Me.”
Halfway across the elevated walkway, Sullivan paused and began unbuttoning his shirt. “One last stop,” he said hoarsely.
He fished out the front-side wallet of his scapular and pried free of the torn plastic sleeve the brass portrait-plaque that he had taken off of his father’s gravestone yesterday evening. DeLarava’s bullet, a .22 or .25, had deeply dented the center of the metal plate, and the engraved portrait of his smiling father was almost totally smashed away.
Sullivan rubbed his own chest gingerly, wondering if the blocked gunshot had nevertheless cracked his breastbone; and he held the brass plate between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand.
“Goodbye, Dad,” he said softly. “I’ll see you again, after a while—in some better place, God willing.”
The piece of brass was warm in his hand. He hefted it and looked down at the shadowed water between the dock and the ship.
“
I’ll take that
,” said a whisper from behind Kootie.
Sullivan whipped his head around in exhausted alarm, but it was the ghost of Edison who had spoken, a smoky silhouette hardly visible out here in the breezy sunlight; the hand the old ghost was extending was so insubstantial that Sullivan
doubted it could hold the brass plate, but when he held the plate out and let go of it, Edison supported it.
“
I’ll take him, and go, at last
,” Edison said faintly. “
I hope it may be very beautiful over there
.” Sullivan thought the ghost smiled. “
On the way
,” it whispered, “
your father and I can talk about the
…” and then Sullivan couldn’t tell whether the last word was
silence
or
silents.
K
OOTIE WANTED
to say goodbye to Edison, but was shy to see the ghost standing out away from himself, tall and broad in spite of being nearly transparent.
But the ghost bent over him, and Kootie felt a faint pressure on his shoulder for a moment.
In his head he faintly heard, “
Thank you, son. You’ve made me proud. Find bright days, and good work, and laughter.
”
Then the Edison ghost stepped right through the railing and, still holding Peter Sullivan’s piece of brass, began to shrink in the air, as if he were rapidly receding into the distance; the image stayed in the center of Kootie’s vision no matter which direction he looked in—down at his feet, toward the buildings and cranes on the shore, or up at the mounting white decks and towering red funnels of the ship—so he turned to the walkway rail and gripped it and stared at the glittering blue water of the harbor until the image had quite shrunk away to nothing there.
And at last he stepped back, and took Peter Sullivan’s hand in his left hand and Angelica Elizalde’s in his right, and the three of them walked together to the stairs that would lead them down to the parking lot and away, to whatever eventual rest, and shelter, and food, and life these two people would be able to give him.
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