The breeze twitched at his hair, and then a small voice in his ear said. “Call me Fishmeal.”
Sullivan didn’t move. The voice might be that of any random ghost. He seemed to remember that the line was from the beginning of Moby Dick.
“On the freeways,” the voice went on, “there you feel free.”
Sullivan’s heart was suddenly beating hard enough to shake his shoulders. That phrase was familiar—it was something his father had always said to the twins, though the old man had only lived to see the earliest of the Southern California superhighways—the 110 to South Pasadena, and the one that he had always stubbornly gone on calling the Ramona Freeway, though it had been renamed the San Bernardino Freeway four years before he died.
Sullivan’s mouth opened, but all the things there were to say overwhelmed him, and he just exhaled a descending “Ssshhhhh.”
“You’re a good boy” said the tiny buzzing voice, “and I know you wont slap me, even though I am an insect.”
Sullivan’s hand was cold and shaking in Elizalde’s, and he guessed that she was looking at him in concern, but he held his head still.
“What kind of insect?” he whispered.
“Good, then you don’t—” began the voice—
But it was interrupted by the wailing hyena laughter from the shadowy trees.
Elizalde’s free hand gripped his, hard. “It’s that laughing bag,” she whimpered. “The thing Kootie and I saw today—the thing that spoke on the phone.”
“Swing south,” buzzed the voice, “past Fairbanks to the Paramount wall, there’s a tunneling effect there, the field of the movies overlaps a bit and blurs things; then just cut north to the entrance.”
“Back the way we came;’ said Sullivan, pulling Elizalde away from the juniper bush and the stone Virgin. “But we can go around this other side of the lake.”
“What about your father?”
“He’s in my ear,” Sullivan told her. And he remembered the scene in the railway carriage in Through the Looking-Glass, and he added with weary certainty, “He’s a gnat.”
Elizalde obviously hadn’t understood what he had said, but let herself be hurried along up the east shore of the lake.
Trying to run smoothly so as not to jar his head and possibly dislodge his father, Sullivan nevertheless kept glancing across the lake, toward the setting sun. The figures on the far-side slope were beginning to fragment; an old woman would take a tottering step and then abruptly be a child running, and a figure on a bench would close a book and stand up and suddenly be two figures. One pedestrian became a motorcycle and rider, and silently sped away over the grass, bounding over gravestones as if they were hurdles.
Up by the Cathedral Mausoleum, Sullivan and Elizalde crossed the grass through a cluster of stones with Armenian names, each of which had an unlit candle in front of it and a dish for burning incense, and then they had sprinted across the road and were hurrying past the west side of the mausoleum, toward the stairs above the lake grave of Douglas Fairbanks.
“Scuttle fast and low through the little valley past these stairs,” Sullivan whispered, “and then when we’re among the trees—”
A sudden, shocking racket from the west slope of the Douglas Fairbanks lake made them both instantly crouch and bare their teeth—it was a loud metallic squealing drowned out by idiot laughter.
A thing was flapping toward them from the trees beyond the road to the west, about ten feet above the grass and muscling its way rapidly through the twilight air; it flexed through a slanting beam of golden sunlight, and Sullivan saw that it had long metal wings but its body was a swinging burlap bag with a baseball cap bobbing on top.
Elizalde’s razory scream seemed to shake leaves out of the overhanging willow branches, and she let go of Houdini’s plaster right hand—and it disappeared.
Sullivan’s hand was abruptly empty too; but when he glanced down he saw that he was wearing a black formal jacket with white shirt cuffs just visible at his wrists.
And then he felt the sleeves of the jacket snap loose above the elbows when the jacket and pants twisted him to his left, toward the stone stairs that led down to the lake.
“Whoa, Nellie!” buzzed Sullivan’s father in his ear.
Elizalde too had turned toward the stairs. She was shorter suddenly, and plump, and her hair was up in a wide bun above the high collar of her lacy white blouse; but the eyes in the unfamiliar round face were Elizalde’s brown eyes, and white showed all the way around the irises.
“It’s the mask,” said Sullivan jerkily as he found himself scuffing down the stone steps toward the water. “Relax and go with it—I think we’re about to start wading.”
His unfamiliar shoes stepped right off the bottom step into the warm water, and sank to the ankles in silt; then his long shirtsleeves pulled his arms forward and he was diving.
He braced himself to land flat and not strike his knees or elbows on the bottom—but there was no bottom, and he was swimming breathlessly in choppy cold water. Cold salt water.
He gasped in sudden shock, stiff with vertigo even though he was supported by the water. He didn’t know where he was, or even if he was still conscious and not hallucinating.
The splashing of his clumsy strokes was echoed back to him by a close wall which was not the wall of the Cathedral Mausoleum but, only yards away, the vertical black steel hull of a ship too vast to be comprehended from way down here.
Someone on a deck far above cried, “Get out of town tonight!”
Sullivan could hear Elizalde splashing along next to him, but in the quickly lowering darkness he couldn’t see her. Some current kept bumping him against the steel hull of the ship and bumping Elizalde against him, even when they both swam sharply out away from it—and then he heard a metallic boom as Elizalde collided with a wall on her side; apparently the two of them were now swimming through some narrow channel.
And the walls were sharply concave now, curling up around him. The light was gone, and Sullivan’s knees had somehow got jammed up under his chin by the rounded metal that was now underneath him too.
He was shivering violently at the speed and force of whatever was happening—but then it stopped, and he was encapsulated underwater, in darkness.
He could feel the struggling bony pressure of Elizalde crowding hard at his back, and he knew that she was being tightly constricted by the wall on her side. They were completely submerged in solid water now, with no smallest pocket of air.
A metal floor was shoved up against Sullivan’s shoes, and the echoes of his scraping soles told him that there was a lid very close over his head. He and Eiizalde had got trapped inside some kind of closed cylinder full of water. Sullivan’s ear canals chugged and bubbled as they were icily filled, and his heart hammered at the mental image of his father lost again under seawater.
Sullivan reached out to push against the wall in front of his face, and he felt tightly ratcheted handcuffs cut into the skin of his wrists. Elizalde was thrashing furiously against his back.
With her shaking him, he couldn’t even get his legs under himself to batter his head against the lid, and he was about to lose the breath that was clenched inside his lungs by blowing it all out in a helpless scream—when he became aware that his hands were busy.