Three Days to Never (32 page)

“This here's sort of a deprivation chamber, though not sensory,” said Canino with a squinting smile. “I've got to tape you in, but you'll have fresh air”—he clicked a switch with the toe of his boot, and a motor hummed and air was being blown into the tent—“and music.” He touched a dial, and faintly she could hear recorded strings and woodwinds now—vaguely classical in a comfortless “easy-listening” way.

“Deprivation of what?” she asked hoarsely, and in spite of the hot, acid-smelling air her jaw was tingling as if her teeth might start to chatter.

“Trouble,” said Canino kindly. “Sit down.”

Daphne took what felt like her last look at the world—the rock-crusted mountains against the darkening sky—and then sat down in the chair.

Canino picked up the roll of tape and began pulling off strips, cutting them free with his teeth.

“You ever hear the old rule, ‘Love thy neighbor,' Daphne?”

“Sure.”

Her right ankle was farthest from him, and he reached in under the chair to loop tape around the cuff of her jeans and the chair leg.

“How are you supposed to do that, really?” He pressed the edge of the tape down firmly. “Lots of neighbors aren't very nice.”

“Well, you can love them without liking them, my dad says.”

With a ripping sound, he unrolled another length of tape, and she heard his teeth click as he bit it off. He taped her left ankle to the chair leg.

“Your daddy's right. Did you ever have a cat or dog die, that you loved? Well, your mom died, didn't she?”

“Yes.” Daphne took a deep breath and let it out.

“But God loves us, right? That's what everybody says.” He pulled her right wrist down until it was against a slat of the chair's back, and grunted as he worked a piece of tape between the slats.

“Right,” said Daphne. “God loves us.”

“But He kills our cats and our dogs and our mothers. Pretty cruelly too, sometimes! Why is He always doing shit like that? I'll tell you a secret.”

“I don't want to hear any secrets.” Daphne was keeping her voice steady only with an effort.

Now Canino was holding her left wrist against the outside chair-back slat, and he was able to tape it down more quickly.

“It's like neighbors. God loves us, but He doesn't like us. He doesn't
like
us at all.”

Suddenly Daphne was aware of her father's love and ur
gent concern, and she knew he had been radiating these for at least the last several seconds.

I'm okay, Dad,
she thought, hoping he could catch the thought. She told herself not to be afraid, since her father could sense her fear. God might not like her, as Canino had said, but her father did.

Canino straightened up. “I'm going to have to turn off the light,” he said, “but you can look through that length of pipe at Palm Springs. See?” He switched off the overhead lightbulb and stepped back, out of the tent.

Daphne peered into the plastic tube, and there were the distant lights of the city, far, far below.

“I'll come out and see how you're doing in a while,” Canino said. He let the tent flap fall closed, and then she heard his boots scuff on the truck-bed boards, crunch into the dirt, and recede away.

Daphne stared longingly at the remote lights of restaurants and theaters and homes, and clung to her father's mind.

F
red was leaning against the cabin wall in the gathering darkness. Canino stopped beside him and pulled a pack of Camels from his shirt pocket.

“What with that music and the synchronized lights and all,” Canino said, “she'll be pretty dissociated, come dawn. Have a couple of the guys get that piece of oiled glass down the hill. You stay here.” He stretched. “I'm gonna get a beer, you want a beer?”

“I don't drink. The plan is to proceed with negating her?” Fred waved toward the truck and the tent.

“Oh shit yes. We can't negate Charlotte—she's been involved too long, we'd lose years. She's stupid, or she thinks we are. Hell, she's the one who fucked over that old guy in New Jersey, to get us the Einstein papers from Princeton! Remember, the old guy killed himself in jail afterward? Would we have got those papers anyway, without Charlotte?
Maybe, maybe not. And negating Charlotte wouldn't stop this kid from having burned up the Chaplin movie. Nah, it's gotta be the girl.”

“Kill her father?”

“Sure, why not? There's no way he won't be coming along with Charlotte tomorrow morning, so that should be easy. But,” he added, laughing softly, “by tomorrow noon he'll be alive again, in a brand-new world. He just won't ever have had a daughter.”

T
he twelve-sided motel room was crowded. Frank Marrity and Charlotte sat on the double bed with an ashtray on the bedspread between them, Lepidopt and Malk sat on the carpeted floor, and old Mishal was rubbing his eyes at the lamplit desk by the bathroom door. On the far side of the bed, blocking one of the knee-level windows, stood the concrete block Marrity had last seen in his grandmother's shed. Somebody had apparently been shooting at it since then—it was pocked and cracked in the right handprint and in the imprint of the cane, and the
S
in
Sid
had almost entirely been chipped off. Alongside the block were stacked four cardboard moving boxes with old cloth-insulated wires trailing out of the tops. The light in the narrow ceiling threw an antiquating sepia radiance over everything.

Marrity's Einstein letters lay on the table in front of Mishal, each page now in a clear plastic sleeve.

“I've read the letters,” Mishal said, leaning back from the desktop lamp that had made his face look like a skull.
“They're supplemental. Valuable, but Einstein assumed his reader already knew a lot of things we don't know.”

“I notice he gives page numbers for something called
Grumberg's Fairy Tales,”
said Lepidopt. “I could look that up.”

“His handwriting was no good,” said Mishal. “That's ‘Grimm bros,' and I know what story he's referring to. It's ‘Faithful John,' in which crows are represented as being able to see the past and future. Sequential events are on the ground, along roads the characters have to travel, but the crows live in a higher dimension, and can see what's in the future and past of the characters. He's explaining higher-dimensional perspective to his daughter.” He stretched. “Bert, did I see you making coffee?”

Malk leaned forward to look into the bathroom. “It'll be ready any minute.”

“We won't be having any for a while yet.
And
,” Mishal went on, “Einstein mentions having told Roosevelt—Einstein calls him the king of Naples in the letters, it's all in terms of characters out of
The Tempest
—having told him about the atomic bomb, but he says he didn't tell Roosevelt about this other thing he's discovered, which is the time machine. Or maybe it's the singularity you told us about,” he said, nodding to Charlotte. “Most likely they're both parts of the same thing. Right before his death in 1955 he writes that he's talked to ‘NB,' who visited in October, and he says NB fortunately has no clue about the time-machine possibility inherent in the math. Niels Bohr visited Einstein in October of '54.” He squinted at Marrity. “Basically all he does in the letters is tell your grandmother why she should destroy the machine in her shed.”

“She tried to,” said Marrity, “at the end.”

“And he mentions ‘the Caliban who is your chaste incubus,'” Mishal said. “That's the thing that showed up on your daughter's hospital-room TV set?”

“Maybe,” said Marrity. “It quoted one of Caliban's lines from
The Tempest.
You heard it,” Marrity said to Lepidopt.

Lepidopt nodded. “And it was trying to get your daughter
to let it into her mind. It said, ‘the mountains are burning,' and ‘when the fires are out it will be too late.' It's what your grandmother died to get rid of—she jumped sideways, as it were, across space instead of time, and she scraped the Caliban thing off, like a psychic barnacle.” He remembered that poor Bozzaris had been amused by the phrase, when they had talked in Newport Beach—only about twelve hours ago! “And the so to speak friction of it started all these fires in the mountains.”

“Caliban,” said Marrity. “What
is
it?”

“It's pretty clearly a dybbuk,” said Mishal wearily. “More correctly
dybbuk me-ru'ah ra'ah,
the cleaving of an evil spirit. More correctly still, it's an
ibbur,
the spirit of a man who has no proper place in the world, and has to find a host to cling to, to live in.” He looked at Lepidopt. “Are the fires still burning in the mountains?”

“They were today.”

“Then the
dybbuk
is still stalking your daughter,” Mishal said to Marrity. “But she's in no danger unless she invites him in; he can't penetrate her mind forcibly.”

M
arrity probed for Daphne's mind, but sensed only her ongoing attention to him, and uneasy boredom. Faintly he thought he could hear Muzak. He tried to project a smile and a clasping hand.

“How soon is dawn?” he asked.

“Hours yet,” said Malk. “We won't even leave here for hours yet.”

“We should
go
there,” said Marrity desperately, clenching his fists. “I should go there.”

“Go where?” asked Malk, not unkindly. “They won't be at that hospital until dawn, and they might be anywhere now. They could be holding your daughter in Cathedral City, Indio, Palm Desert—not to mention all the mountains around there. We've got to wait till dawn.”

“What do we do in the meantime?” asked Charlotte. Her
sunglasses were incongruous in this dimly lit little room, but nobody had commented on them. She was chewing her fingernails—Mishal had said they couldn't smoke tonight because it would repel ghosts.

“We need to know more than we know,” said Mishal. “And so we will mine some old science.”

Marrity saw Lepidopt frown for a moment.

“Nobody,” Mishal said, “saw any use in Richard Hamilton's matrix arrays until Heisenberg used them to work out his uncertainty principle seventy years later, right? And Fitzgerald's crazy guess that an ether headwind compressed objects in the direction they're traveling turned out to be an accurate description of what happened, though his explanation was wrong. The Riemann-Christoffel curvature tensor was considered a useless fantasy until Einstein needed it for General Relativity. In fact,” he went on, looking at Marrity, “your great-grandfather renounced the cosmological constant he had originally put into his General Relativity equations—he said including it had been the biggest blunder of his life—but according to Charlotte here, it wasn't nonsense after all. Well, I think he knew that himself, all along. He was simply—justifiably—afraid of it.

“I'm a physicist,” Mishal went on, “but I have to say that most physicists aren't comfortable with the reality they're supposed to be mapping. Most of them still start by setting up their problems in terms of Newtonian mechanics, and then only as they proceed do they shove in the quantum-mechanical concepts—like those old ‘color' postcards that were black-and-white photographs painted over with watercolors. They should
start
with the quantum eye, that wider perspective. It's the same with the supernatural factor: We learned not to add it in after the problems were defined, but to have those crayons already in our box from the start, alongside the quantum crayons.”

In a whisper Lepidopt asked, “Shouldn't we have been talking in whispers, all this time? And fasting?”

“You were a good student, Oren! But this time,” said Mishal, standing up and nodding toward the slab and the boxes on the far side of the bed, “I think we're close enough already.”

Charlotte was frowning. “Who'll come to us?”

“Ghosts,” said Mishal. “We're going to have a séance. Oren, open the whisky, if you would, and pour each of us a full glass.”

“First sensible remark all night,” said Charlotte. “Why do we want ghosts to come to us? I've met them, they're pretty useless creatures.”

“There's only four cups in the bathroom,” said Malk. “Plastic.”

“Frank and I can share,” said Charlotte.

“I expect the ghosts you've met are the ones that were leaning in from their side,” said Mishal, taking a freshly opened bottle of Canadian Club whisky from Lepidopt. “Talking backward and all. They make more sense if we visit them on their side.”

Malk had got up to fetch the plastic cups from the bathroom, and now he peeled cellophane off one and handed it to Mishal.

“Thank you.” Mishal poured amber whiskey into it and held the filled cup out to Charlotte, and Marrity watched it carefully so that she'd be able to take it without a fumble.

And why am I helping her deceive these people? he asked himself.

The old man filled Lepidopt's and Malk's plastic cups, then filled one for himself and clanked the bottle onto the table. “And,” he said, “talking to ghosts on their own turf is much easier if one is not excessively sober.” He raised his cup.

Charlotte took a deep sip and handed the cup to Marrity. I guess I'll start cutting back tomorrow, he told himself, and gulped a mouthful of the liquor; and when he had swallowed it and handed the cup back to her, he was grateful that Mishal's procedure, whatever it might be, required this.

Charlotte finished it and held the emptied cup out to Mishal.

“You're a good soldier,” the old man said, tilting the bottle over the cup as Marrity made sure to watch.

D
aphne was sleepy, but her ribs ached and the air being blown into the tent was colder now, and she wished she'd been wearing a sweater when she and her father had gone to lunch at Alfredo's yesterday. She was as aware of her father as if he'd been standing behind her chair; she tasted every mouthful of whisky that he swallowed, and she even felt that the alcohol was warming her.

The faint music from the speaker behind her seemed to have been lost in the airwaves for decades. It was some kind of brassy swing, but any liveliness in the melodies was dried out by the lifeless performance—she imagined a bandstand painted with glittery musical notes in a club out of an old Fred Astaire movie, with ancient, weary musicians in moth-eaten tuxedos swiveling their heavy saxophones this way and that.

The view of Palm Springs held her attention by default. White car headlights seemed to be streetlights that had come unmoored from their places in the ranks along the boulevards, and after a while she was able to make out the cycling pinpoints of red and green that were traffic signals. Houses were dots of yellow light, tormenting in their hints of families at dinner so far away.

A vocalist was accompanying the music now, and after a few moments Daphne was able to make out the nasally crooning words:

Daphne knew it was the thing that had shown itself as a cartoon on her hospital TV set last night. The wind from the blower on her jeans felt like fluttering hands.

“Daddy!” she yelled, but the audible yell was just an involuntary echo of her mental cry.

I
n the cabin the upright pipe by the stove suddenly split, shooting a burst of steam across the room. Golze screamed weakly as the hot vapor whipped at the hair on the back of his head, and his right hand clawed the wheel to roll his wheelchair forward in a quarter circle across the floor.

He blinked tears from his eyes as he squinted back at the pipe, which was just leaking a trickle of water now from the split section.

“She's doing this,” he snarled. “She's a poltergeist, she can set things on fire. You have to trank her.”

“Aw, she's just grabbing hold of something, it's a reflex,” said Canino, slouching forward to peer at the ruptured length of galvanized steel. “She was cuffed to that pipe, so vertigo made her grab it. It wasn't malicious.”

“My head is scalded,” Golze said. His right hand wavered up as if to feel the back of his head, then just fell to his lap. “She's dangerous.”

“You'll be getting a brand-new head soon,” Canino told him.

M
arrity had choked and sprayed whisky across the carpet and the tan wall, and now, on his feet and coughing, he burst out, “Christ, that thing's after her again, the triffid or whatever it is! You've got to—”

“There's nothing we can—do from here,” said Mishal solemnly. “She knows not to admit him.”

Marrity closed his eyes and thought,
Don't let him in, don't say anything. Don't let him trick you.

He was sweating, and he realized that a big part of his gnawing anxiety was the knowledge that his own older self was out there in Palm Springs, participating in this or at least not stopping it. Daphne's own father was letting this go on.

“Charlotte,” he said, “you called them before—call them again. I need to talk to the, the old guy who's me.” He focused his gaze on Mishal and made himself speak clearly. “Let her call them again.”

Mishal just raised his eyebrows and stared at him owlishly.

“If that triffid thing gets her,” Marrity went on, “she'll be linked to
it,
as well as to me.” Or even
instead
of me, he thought with a shudder. “They don't want that. If I tell them—”

“But they're not going to negate Daphne,” said Charlotte, “they agreed to negate me instead—”

“They'll still negate the girl, if they possibly can,” pronounced Mishal. “It was the girl who wrecked the movie component of Lieserl's completed machine.” He raised a finger at Marrity. “It's a dybbuk, not a tribb—not a triffid. And we need to be about summoning our ghosts.”

“It might actually help,” said Malk. When the others looked at him, he shrugged. “If we shake up the ghosts first, get their attention, by letting
young
Marrity call
old
Marrity, that's likely to help draw them when we do the actual séance. It'll be a curspic—a cons
pic
uous violation of normal reality.”