Last Call: Expiration Date Part 18

"Is it okay," said Kootie before Edison could go on, "if I hold a couple out for Mr. Edison?"

"Well ... a couple," allowed the ghost.

Edison again took over Kootie's tongue. "You have the advantage of me, sir. Your name was-?"

"Call me g.a.y.l.o.r.d." Pink-tinged hands appeared in front of the coat, and the two-dimensional fingers managed to unfasten the buckle-but when the ghost tried to pull the belt from around itself, the heavy cables fell through its insubstantial flesh, and clattered on the pavement; one of the hands wobbled forward, though, palm-up, and Kootie poured the mints into the hand, which was able to hold them. Kootie was careful to hold back two of them.

Kootie's hand slapped to his own face, and his mouth caught the pair of mints and chewed them up furiously. Then, only because it was his own mouth talking, he was able to understand the mumbled words "Pick up your d.a.m.ned belt and let's go."

Kootie crouched and took hold of the belt. The heavy metal bands of it were as cold as the night air, not warmed as if someone had been wearing it. As he straightened and swung it around his waist he noticed that it must have weighed five or six pounds, and he wondered how the ghost had managed to carry it.

When he looked around, he saw that he was alone on the sidewalk, and that the dark street with its population of rushing cars had regained its depth and noise, and no longer seemed to be a moving picture projected onto a flat screen.

Edison had swallowed the chewed-up mints. "I said let's go."

Kootie started forward again, trying to figure out the working of the buckle as he limped along. "This is pretty neat, actually," he said.

"Poor doomed old things," said his voice then, softly, and Kootie just listened. "G.o.d knows where we are, the real us. Heaven or h.e.l.l, I suppose, or simply gone-in any case, probably not even aware of these lonely scramblings and idiot ruminations back here." Kootie's hand had pulled the capped black plastic film canister out of his pocket, and now shook the thing beside his ear. "I wonder who this poor beggar was. I invented a telephone, once."

Edison seemed to have paused, and Kootie put in, "I thought that was Alexander Graham Bell."

"I wasn't talking about that telephone. Bell!-all he had was Reis's old magnetotelephone, a stone-age circuit with 'make and break' contact interruption, good enough for tones but lousy for consonants. Showing off in front of the King of South America or somebody at the Centennial Exhibition in '76, with his voice not hardly carrying along the wire from one end of a building to the other. He recited Hamlet's soliloquy- 'For in that sleep of death what dreams may come / When we have shuffled off this mortal coil ...' Two years later, with my carbon transmitter and induction coil, I held a loud-and-clear conversation with the Western Union boys across a hundred and seven miles, New York to Philadelphia!" Kootie snorted, to his own startlement. " 'Physicists and sphinxes in majestical mists!' A test phrase, that was, for checking the transmission of sibilant syllables. Think all that was easy? And Bell could hear! He had a very soft job of it."

Again he held the black container up to Kootie's ear and shook it; the mint rattled inside. Then he put it back in Kootie's pocket. "Nymph," he said softly, apparently to the night sky, "in thy orisons, be all my sins remembered."

Kootie's footsteps had turned left, south down a side street, and the high reinforced windows of the buildings were dark. Up ahead on the right was a chain-link fence with some yawning lot beyond it. Kootie was rubbing his arms again in the chill, and he hoped Edison was feeling it too, and realizing that they'd need to find a safe place to sleep before long.

It occurred to him that Edison had not explained the telephone he had invented.

CHAPTER 25.

There was a short silence after this, and then the Knight went on again.

"I'm a great hand at inventing things. Now, I daresay you noticed, the last time you picked me up, that I was looking rather thoughtful?"

"You were a little grave," said Alice.

-Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Gla.s.s IN THE GLARE OF the streetlight at the southeast corner of Park View and Wilshire, glittering flies were darting around in the chilly air like metal shavings at a machine shop. Sherman Oaks waved them away from his face, keeping his mouth closed and breathing whistlingly through squinched nostrils, for the flies were harkening to the mult.i.tude-roar of his exhalations, and on this night of all nights he was not going to condescend to consume such trash even accidentally.

He had called the exchange back a couple of hours ago, and the router had told him that Neal Obstadt had agreed to putting up forty grand for the fugitive Parganas boy against Oaks's pledged thousand doses of smoke.

The lady who had put up the $20,000-reward billboards had been eliminated from the exchange listings, and replaced by Obstadt.

As a receipt, the router had played for Oaks Obstadt's authorization message: Yeah, tell this Al Segundo or Glen Dale or whoever he is that I'll fade him-but if he hoses me on the smokes, his own a.s.s is smoke.

Sherman Oaks had irritably got off the phone and resumed his anxious search of the streets around Union and Wilshire- And then about an hour ago a glance at his knife-pommel compa.s.s had shown the needle pointing west so hard that it didn't wobble at all, and moved only to correct for his own motion.

He had immediately thrashed his imaginary left arm in a furious circle, but the only blinks of heat it felt were weak and distant and fleeting-human lives flickering out uselessly, in deaths that simply tossed the ghosts up to dissolve in the air. Naive psychics were impressed when occasionally they sensed this routine event, but Oaks was only interested in the coagulant ghosts that hung around and got snagged on something.

He hadn't been able to sense the big one. It must still have been contained in the boy. But at least it was still distinct and una.s.similated, and at the moment it was in its excited state, for his compa.s.s needle was pointing at it.

He had hurried west-and at Park View Street his compa.s.s had gone crazy.

Someone, almost certainly the big ghost working the boy's hands, had drawn a lunatic ghost lure in chalk on the sidewalk, and had spat in the center of it; and now all the broken-down ghost fragments that inhabited the houseflies around the MacArthur Park lake had swarmed out and were circling the intricate chalk marks as if trying to follow some prescribed hopscotch pattern in their flight. The ones that landed on the chalk lines seemed to be dying.

The flies alone wouldn't have hampered Oaks too badly, for their charges were very weak even in excited swarms like this; but when he stood on the Park View curb and looked down at the compa.s.s at his belt, he saw that the needle was jigging and sweeping back and forth across nearly ninety degrees of the compa.s.s face. From at least Sixth Street in the north to Seventh in the south, the city blocks ahead were waked up. Every ghost in every building was agitated and clamoring. Office workers tomorrow would probably be seeing magnetically induced distortions on the screens of their computer monitors, and if they'd left their purses in their desks they'd find that their automatic teller cards were demagnetized and no longer worked. And even hours from now the offices would still be chilly with the cold spots where the ghosts had drawn up their energies.

The big ghost must have stepped way out, at some point in this neighborhood, and just d.a.m.n flashed the ghost populace, mooned them. That would energize and urgently draw every spirit lingering nearby. G.o.d 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 h.e.l.l was that, who is this big ghost?

The threads of a.s.sociation 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 compa.s.s 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.

"So 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. d.a.m.n Ford anyway."

Kootie remembered having said d.a.m.n 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. s.h.a.ggy night-blooming jasmine bushes overhung the car, and crumpled plastic bags had been shrink-wrapped by Monday's wind right onto the heavy leafy cl.u.s.ters, like b.u.t.terflies captured in midflight 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... G.o.d. 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 embarra.s.sed. "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 gra.s.shopper 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 s.p.a.ced dispatcher stations along the way, hence 'gra.s.shopper.' 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 partic.i.p.ate. 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 G.o.d knew what color under the dust of years. This time he drew arrows radiating out from the circ.u.mference, 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 d.a.m.n 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 b.u.t.ton.

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 pa.s.senger-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 G.o.d 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 foot 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 h.e.l.l'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 cla.s.s 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."

Edison blew a chuckle out of Kootie's mouth. "One time in the early seventies I had to go to City Hall in Newark to pay real-estate taxes-last day, big fine if I didn't-and the fellow behind the desk was one of the big solidified ghosts, who had managed the no doubt difficult task of sc.r.a.ping together enough alertness to hold a county job, and he asked me what my name was. Hah! I had to pretend I couldn't remember! And pay the fine! My own name! Everybody in line thought I was an imbecile."

Kootie yawned so widely that tears ran down his cheeks, and it interrupted Edison's monologue. "So who did you call that was still alive?" he asked. "That must be embarra.s.sing-'Hi, George, what are you doing there? Did you just this morning die or something?' "

Breath whickered out of his nostrils as Edison laughed softly. "That's just about exactly how it went. In 1921 I had got the spirit phone working: it required summoning back the ghost of my dead playmate-by then I had managed to cauterize the bit of him that had been stuck to me, sort of the way I'm stuck to you right now-and energizing him in a strong electromagnetic field. He was still my antenna. And then his augmented charge was amplified dramatically with an induction coil, and then he was ... the operator.

"I was trying to call a man named William Sawyer, who had died forty years earlier; Sawyer was an electrical inventor who claimed to have come up with the electric lamp before I did, and wanted me to buy him out. I told him to go to h.e.l.l, I just left him in the dust, and then he came around to my place when I was giving an exhibition, right after Christmas in, it must have been, '79. Sawyer came drunk, yelling and shouting that it was all fake, and he broke a vacuum pump and stole eight of the electric lamps, which I didn't have a lot of in those days. In the years after that, I had some opportunities to help him-and I didn't do it. I hadn't forgotten the theft and the vandalism, you see, and whenever I was asked about him I made sure to drip-I mean, made sure to drop-some unflattering statements about him. He turned into a drunk, and wound up killing a man, and he died before he could go to prison. So, forty years later, I was trying to get him on the phone to ..." Kootie's hands lifted.

"... Apologize?"

After a few seconds of silence, Edison said, softly, "Yep." He exhaled. "But you get a crowd on that line, it's a party line, and everybody wants to talk. When they heard who was calling, somebody picked up, and I found myself talking to a mathematician who I had fired the day before! I was flabbergasted, and I said something like, 'Lord, Tom, did you kill yourself today?' All he wanted to do was recite poems to me, so I hung up and went round to his house. It developed that he had had a nervous breakdown, but had not in fact died. So I hired him back. But I had learned that people can sometimes throw ghosts in moments of high stress, and those ghosts can sometimes wander away just exactly the same as though the people had died. They are the same."

"So ... you quit work on the phone because of that?"

Suddenly agitated, Edison said, "Those aren't the people, the people you harmed, those ghosts. It's like trying to make amends to somebody's car, after they've parked it and walked away. Blavatsky was right when she claimed that the spirits called up by mediums are just animate sh.e.l.ls. You can talk to the ghost of your dead uncle Bob, but Uncle Bob himself doesn't know anything about it. Chesterton said that, I believe." He shook Kootie's head. "What you've got to do is somehow rehire the sons of b.i.t.c.hes."

Rehire my mom and dad? thought Kootie. "But ... they're dead. What do you do about that?"

For nearly a whole minute there was silence.

Then, quietly, "Don't look at me, son, I'm one of 'em myself. Go to sleep now."

A fleeting impression of a candle being blown out and a door being closed, and then Kootie was alone in his own head again. Before loneliness could creep up on him he closed his eyes, and he was instantly asleep.

Beyond the dust-crusted gla.s.s of the car's windows, out on the sidewalk past the end of the lot and the chain-link fence, a silhouette came shuffling along from the direction of Wilshire Boulevard. Only one arm swung as it ambled along, though the torso rocked as though another arm were swinging alongside too. The head was turning to look one way and another, with frequent pauses to glance down at the figure's waist, but the silhouette registered no change in its pace as it walked on down the sidewalk, past the lot, and disappeared to the south.

CHAPTER 26.

"... I wonder what'll become of my name when I go in? I shouldn't like to lose it at all-because they'd have to give me another, and it would be almost certain to be an ugly one. But then the fun would be, trying to find the creature that had got my old name! That's just like the advertis.e.m.e.nts, you know, when people lose dogs-'answers to the name of "Dash": had on a bra.s.s collar'-just fancy calling everything you met 'Alice,' till one of them answered! Only they wouldn't answer at all, if they were wise."

-Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Gla.s.s BY ELEVEN O'CLOCK IN the morning, Hollywood Boulevard was a crowded tourist street again, and it was the signs overhead-movie marquees, names of ethnic fast-food restaurants, huge red Coca-Cola logos, and the giant infantry soldier over the army-surplus store-that caught the eye. But when Sullivan had driven down the boulevard at dawn, it had been the pavements that he had watched; empty lanes still blocked by last night's police barricades, litter in the gutters, and solitary junkies and long-night male and female prost.i.tutes shambling wearily toward unimaginable refuges in the gray shadows.