Three Days to Never (14 page)

“If it was five coins they'd have been stumped,” Golze said. “They're like some primitive culture, with five numbers: one, two, three, four, and countless.”

Rascasse was leaning on the folded-down desk to look outside through one of the starboard bus windows. Charlotte shifted to his perspective, and was able to see the dots of orange light on the mountains.

“Fires all the way up from here to Humboldt and Trinity and Siskiyou,” Rascasse said softly. “All started from lightning strikes at about noon yesterday.”

“Well,” said Golze, “A .50-caliber bullet will rip up dust under it as it goes by. And Lieserl Marity was moving a whole hell of a lot faster.”

A
lot of rest you'll be getting in here,” said Marrity.

He had pushed the heavy door nearly closed, but the voices and squeaking wheeled carts outside the room were still just as audible. The hospital hallways had a scent like the chlorophyll wood shavings at the bottom of a hamster's cage, but this room still smelled of lemon custard and beef gravy, even though a nurse had taken away Daphne's tray of pureed brown and white and yellow stuff half an hour ago. On the wall behind Daphne's bed was taped a page of typescript headed “Swallowing Instructions.” There seemed to be a dozen crucial points. Daphne couldn't see it from where she lay.

A gauze pad was taped across her throat. Two of her ribs had been cracked during the useless Heimlich maneuver, but they hadn't required any tape or bandage.

Daphne picked up the pencil on the wheeled table beside her bed and wrote sleep pill probly on the top page of the pocket notebook he had fetched from the truck. Ask fr you too. The clear plastic bag on the IV pole swayed when she wrote; fortunately the tube was taped to her arm above her wrist where the needle was inserted, so it wasn't likely to be pulled out.

Marrity glanced at the blue canvas cot the nurse had brought in for him to sleep on after he had turned down the offer of a “cardiac chair,” which had seemed to be a half-size hospital bed, complete with an electric motor bolted to the underside of it.

“I'll be fine,” he told Daphne. He was sitting in one of the two plain wooden chairs in this half of the room; the other chair had a cotton square like a diaper laid across its seat, and he hadn't wanted to ask why.

St. Bernardine's Hospital had transferred Daphne here to the Arrowhead Pediatric Hospital after her emergency throat
surgery, and Marrity was pleased that his frantic knife cut of this afternoon had only required four stitches in the skin of her throat. The surgeon had done “undermining,” put in a row of sutures under the skin, to leave a negligible scar while still keeping the wound securely closed.

Marrity had called Cal State San Bernardino to cancel his Modern Novels class for tomorrow, and he was planning to sleep in his own bed as soon as Daphne was released in the morning. Sleep all day.

There was another bed in this room, farther from the door, but it was empty at the moment and Marrity hoped it would stay that way. The emergency room at St. Bernardine's had seemed to be full of hoboes who just wanted painkillers, and he didn't want another stranger imposed on his daughter when she was so helpless—she looked very frail in this up-tilted hospital bed, with the thin sheets and threadbare blankets tumbled around her. He would have fetched Rumbold for her, if Rumbold had not been burned up and buried.

She was idly drawing spirals on the pad, and his spirits fell further at the familiar sight of her bitten-down fingernails—then he saw that she had written more words.

Yr father was at Alfredo's?

“Yes,” Marrity said. He didn't want to make her write more, so he added, “I guess he probably followed us.”

She drew two dots with a V between them: frowning eyes.

“I agree.” Marrity shifted in his chair. “He did seem to be very upset by…it all.”

Daphne wrote some more:
You saved my life.
She didn't look up from the paper.

“Um—yes. I was glad to be able to.”
must have been hard to do—cut me

He nodded, though her head was still lowered and her face was hidden behind her brown bangs.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, it was very hard to do.”

A spot appeared on the paper; and then another.
I love you

“I love you too, Daph,” he said. He wanted to get up out of the chair and try to hug her, but he knew it would embarrass her; they never talked this way ordinarily. Marrity had always assumed that their avoidance of sentiment was an Irish thing, but today he had learned that they were not Irish. A Serbian thing, then.

“I'm—proud of you,”
she whispered, still looking down.
“I hope it leaves a scar—excuse to brag about you.”

“Don't stretch your voice box. They say it won't leave much of a scar at all. But—thanks.”

She nodded and sat back against the sloping mattress and smiled at him, and when she closed her eyes she didn't open them again; and after a few moments Marrity took from his coat pocket a beat-up paperback copy of
Tristram Shandy
that he always kept in the truck. His briefcase was in the truck too, but he wasn't in the mood to read student papers and he didn't want to look at Grammar's old Peccavit letters in here.

He stood up to switch off the fluorescent tube over her bed, noting the spotty horizontal line of chips in the wall plaster at the height of the bed frame—what did they do, play bumper cars with the things?—and then he pulled the bed curtain closed on the hall side and resumed his seat, reading by the light from the hallway.

The book's chapters were short, and when he came to the black page at the end of Chapter Seven he found himself staring into the blackness, and exhaustion gave the page a faint green border. Vaguely he wondered if there might be words hidden in the black field.

He only realized that he had gone to sleep in the chair when he began to drift back into wakefulness. He could hear voices from a television—he knew it was television because he recognized the show that was playing. It was…some cartoon that used to come on very late at night when he and Moira had been in early grade school; irritatingly 1950s-style animation, blocky characters with huge square heads and barrel bodies and tiny pointed feet. Both eyes on the same side of their nose, like in dumb old Picasso pictures.

One character was named Matt, and was always coming home drunk, with his hair spiky and his shirt untucked, and he'd bang on his own locked front door and yell, “Can I come in? Say I can come in!”

Grammar had caught them watching it one night, long after bedtime, and told them that they couldn't watch it anymore. Marrity had assumed it was the late hour, rather than the show iself, that had prompted the ban.

Matt was saying it now: “Can I come in? Say I can come in, Daphne!”

That made Marrity open his eyes. Had Matt's wife been named Daphne?

Daphne was awake in her hospital bed; Marrity could see the gleam of her eyes staring at the far end of the dark room, where the glowing television was mounted high on the wall. Marrity blinked at it himself—it was showing the same program he remembered, the sketchy black-and-white figures who moved only in precisely repetitive gestures. Probably to save animation work.

Marrity noticed that the curtain around Daphne's bed had been pulled all the way open, though he hadn't heard the rollers move in the track on the ceiling.

Then, “Daphne, don't say it!” came a man's voice from behind him, and Marrity came fully awake with a start.

A man was silhouetted against the now open door, with one hand gripping the door frame and the other hand pulling something out of his ear.

Marrity scrambled to his feet, and the paperback book smacked on the linoleum floor.

“Why not?” said Daphne in a hoarse voice, and Marrity realized that she was only half awake. He couldn't see her expression in the dim light from the TV.

“Say I can come in, Daphne!” repeated the cartoon voice from the television. “The mountains are burning!”

“Why shouldn't she let him in?” Daphne asked the figure in the doorway. She turned back to the television, and by the gleam of her teeth Marrity knew that she had opened her mouth.

“No, Daph,” said Marrity loudly. He was suddenly sure that it had not been the late hour that had made Grammar forbid them to watch this show; and, irrationally, he suspected now that it had not appeared on any TV set except for Grammar's. “Don't say anything. Don't—strain your voice box.”

Daphne stared at her father, and didn't speak.

“Daphne!” called the voice from the television. “Just nod, if I can come in! When the fires are out it will be too late.”

“Daph, don't move,” said Marrity, stepping toward the television set. He wasn't at all sure he believed that this animated cartoon was actually talking to his daughter, but he could feel the hairs standing up on his forearms.

“You can't turn it off,” said the man in the doorway, speaking quickly, “it's not turned on. Tell Matt to go away.”

Marrity swayed with sudden vertigo, but he clung to the urgency in the stranger's disorienting words.

“Go away—Matt,” he said hoarsely to the blunt outlines of the face on the screen.

For a moment the eyes that were just black circles on the featureless white face seemed to stare at him from the screen, and Marrity felt sweat chilling his forehead as he helplessly stared back. Then the pen slash of a mouth began opening and closing, and the unsynchronized voice said, “When thou cam'st first, thou strok'st me and made much of me.”

It was a line from
The Tempest
—
The Tempest
again!—and Marrity automatically responded with Prospero's reply to Caliban: “‘Hence, hagseed!'” The jagged outlines of the figure shifted, so Marrity went on dizzily, “‘Shrugg'st thou, malice? So, slave; hence!'”

“Schneid mal die Kehle auf,”
the thing said, and then its already minimal face sprang apart into random lines.

The screen went dark—and Marrity backed away from it fast. He suspected that if he could stand on something and feel the top of the television set, it would be cold.

Or maybe very hot.

“Exit Caliban,” he said in a whispery exhalation. Then he turned to face the man in the doorway. “What was that?”
His voice shook. “And who are you?” He crossed to Daphne's bed and switched on the fluorescent light over her.

The man stepped into the room. He was wearing a dark suit and tie, and gray leather gloves, and he appeared to be in his forties. “My name is Eugene Jackson,” he said. “I'm with the National Security Agency.” He was shifting his weight from one foot to the other, apparently impatient.

Marrity squinted at him. “And what was that cartoon? It was—it was talking to my daughter! What did it mean about the fires? How could it talk to her?” He forced himself to gather his routed thoughts. “National…Do you have some identification?”

Daphne was clearly wide awake now, clutching the bleach-paled blankets around her shoulders and blinking unhappily at the stranger.

Y
es, it was talking to your daughter.”

Lepidopt reached into his inner jacket pocket and pulled out a badge wallet and showed Marrity his plastic NSA card; it was the current configuration—not that Marrity would know—with the blue band at the top edge that indicated a field agent, and the pattern of computer punch holes along the left side that would provide a scanner with the name “Eugene Jackson,” and a null identification number.

He was far, far beyond the bounds of ordinary caution here. This was not how or where he would have preferred to approach Marrity—but when he'd seen the figure on the television screen, he'd had to pull out his earplugs and jump in. He gripped the little rubber plugs in his narrow right fist, aching to screw them back into his ear canals, but he was paying very close attention to the man and the girl.

Clearly Marrity had not expected the dybbuk on the television, nor anything like it. That was good and bad—it meant Marrity wasn't committed, but it also meant he didn't know very much about what he was playing with.

“What…
was
it?” asked Marrity.

Lepidopt pushed the heavy door almost closed, and stood next to it so as not to be seen from the hall. He wished he could close it all the way, and make it impossible for the sounds of the nearest nursing station to reach him. What would happen, in the moment before a ringing telephone would be audible here? Would he simply drop dead of a massive stroke?

“We're hoping,” he said, “that you'll be able to help us figure out what that was. We know it has to do with Peccavit.”

“Einstein,” said Marrity blankly.

“Yes, Einstein. And your grandmother, and Charlie Chaplin.”

Marrity took a deep breath and let it out. “How is it—you're a government agency, right? Like the FBI? How is this something you'd be involved with?”

Get what you can here and now, thought Lepidopt. And quick. Marrity won't leave the girl alone to talk somewhere else, and fortunately he's only half awake now.

“Einstein,” Lepidopt said, forcing himself not to speak too quickly, “was involved in paranormal research, contacting the dead. This sounds incredible, I know—but remember that cartoon thing you just saw on the television. He, Einstein, was very secretive about it, but we want to know what he discovered.” Lepidopt waved his free hand. “There are dead people we'd like to interview. And pioneers are careless—Humphrey Davy poisoned himself with fluorine, and Madame Curie killed herself by handling radium. Only later on did people discover precautions that those pioneers should have taken. Einstein exposed himself and his children to”—he glanced at Daphne, who was listening avidly—“to dangers. Your grandmother took a lot of precautions, but it may be that some of the consequences of her father's work caught up with her yesterday. And we can detect paranormal events; we believe, in fact, that one occurred yesterday afternoon at four-fifteen, in San Bernardino, within a small area that includes your house. Did you expe
rience any kind of”—he waved his gloved fist toward the dark television set in the corner—“intrusion at that time?”