“Did you see some bathing beauty in there?” Sullivan asked Elizalde as he hurried up the stairs, pulling Kootie along by the upper arm. “‘Stacked’ I get, but ‘like a slave ship’—is that good or bad?”
“I meant those bunks,” she panted, “you pig. Stacked to the ceiling in there, with soldiers all crammed in, trying to sleep. I didn’t notice any damn ‘bathing beauty.’”
“Oh…? What I saw was a balcony over a swimming pool,” he told her. Apparently the field hadn’t yet collapsed, but was out of phase. “What did you see, Kootie?”
“I’m looking nowhere but straight ahead,” said the boy, and Sullivan wondered which of the personalities in Kootie’s head had spoken.
Maybe one or more of the degaussing coils have been disconnected, Sullivan thought uneasily, at the substations along the length of the ship. I’ve got a big wheel spinning—is it missing some spokes? Is it going to fly apart?
“All we can do is get out of here,” he said. “Come on.”
They jogged wearily up two flights of the stairs, and then paused just below the last landing. Peering around the newel pillar, Sullivan assessed the remaining steps that ascended to the broad Promenade Deck lobby area known as Piccadilly Circus.
From down here he could see the inset electric lights glowing in the ceiling up there, and he could hear a couple of voices speaking quietly. Far up over his head on the other side, on the paneled back wail of the stairwell, hung a big gold medallion and a framed portrait of Queen Mary.
“Up the stairs,” he whispered to Elizalde and the boy, “and then fast out the door to the left. That’ll lead us straight off the ship onto the causeway bridge, across that and down the stairs to the parking lot. Ready? Go!”
They stepped crouchingly across the landing, then sprang up the last stairs and sprinted wildly across the open floor, hopping over loops of cable to the wide open doorway out onto the outdoor deck—and then all three of them just stopped, leaning on the rail.
The rail had no gap in it, and the causeway to the parking-lot stairs was gone. The stairs, the parking lot, all of Long Beach was gone, and they were looking out over an empty moonlit ocean that stretched away to the horizon under a black, star-needled sky.
CHAPTER FORTY SEVEN
“wish I hadn’t cried so much!” said Alice, as she swam about, trying to find her way out. “I shall be punished for it now, I suppose, by being drowned in my own tears!…”
—Lewis Carroll,
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
FOR a long moment the three of them just clung to the rail, and Sullivan, at least, was not even breathing. He was resisting the idea that he and Elizalde and Kootie had died at some point during the last few seconds, and that this lonely emptiness was the world ghosts lived in; and he wanted to go back inside, and cling to whoever it was whose voices they had heard.
He heard clumsy splashing far away below, and when he looked down he thought he could see the tiny heads and arms of two swimmers struggling through the moonlit water alongside the Queen Mary’s hull. The sight of them didn’t lessen the solitude, for he guessed who they must be.
Hopelessly, just in case the cycle might be breakable, he filled his lungs with the cold sea breeze and yelled down to the swimmers, “Get out of town tonight!”
He looked at Elizalde; who was half-kneeling next to him, stunned-looking and hanging her elbows over the rail. “Maybe,” he said, “I’ll listen to me this time.”
She managed to shrug. “Neither of us did yesterday.”
The spell broke when sharp, heavy footsteps that he knew were high heels on the interior deck approached from behind Sullivan, and he didn’t need to smell a clove cigarette.
He grabbed Elizalde’s shoulder and Kootie’s collar and shoved them forward. “Wake up!” he shouted. “Run!”
They both blinked at him, then obediently began sprinting down the deck toward the lights of the bow, without looking back; he floundered along after them, his back chilly in anticipation of a shot from deLarava’s little automatic.
But the big silhouette of deLarava stepped out of a wide doorway ahead of Elizalde and Kootie, and deLarava negligently raised the pistol toward them.
They skidded to a halt on the worn deck planks, and Sullivan grabbed their shoulders again to stop himself. He looked behind desperately—
And saw deLarava standing back there too.
“I’m not seeing a railing at all,” called both the images of deLarava, in a single voice that was high-pitched with what might have been elation or fright. “To me you’re all standing straight out from the Promenade Deck doorway. From your point of view, you can walk here by coming forward or coming back. Either way, get over here right now or I’ll start shooting you up.”
Elizalde’s hand brushed the untucked sweatshirt at her waist. The night sea breeze blew her long black hair back from her face, and the moonlight glancing in under the deck roof glazed the lean line of her jaw.
“No,” whispered Sullivan urgently. “She’d empty her gun before you half drew clear. Save it.” He looked at-the forward image of deLarava and then back at the aft one. “Tell you what, you two walk forward, and I’ll walk back.”
“And I’ll be in Scotland afore ye,” whispered Kootie. Sullivan knew the remark was a bit of bravado from Edison.
As Elizalde and Kootie stepped away toward the bow, Sullivan turned and walked back the way they had run; and as he got to the open Piccadilly Circus doorway he saw that Elizalde and Kootie were stepping in right next to him, both blinking in exhausted surprise to see him suddenly beside them again. The soft ceiling lights and the glow of another freestanding Art Deco lamp kindled a warm glow in the windows of the little interior shops at the forward end of the lobby.
DeLarava had stepped back across the broad inner deck, and she was still holding the gun on them; though Sullivan could see now that the muzzle was shaking.
“Do you know anything about all this, Pete?” deLarava asked in an animated voice. “There’s some huge magnetic thing going on, and it’s broken the ship up, psychically. Right here all the ghosts have waked up, with their own stepped-up charges, and they’ve curved their bogus space all the way around us, and this lobby area of this deck is in a…a closed loop—if you walk away from it, you find yourself walking right b-b-back into it.” She sniffed and touched her scalp. “Goddammit.”
The only other person visible in the broad lobby was a white-haired little old fellow in a khaki jacket, though the area had at some time been set up for a shoot—a Sony Betacam SP sat on a tripod by the opposite doorway, and the unlit tic-tac-toe board of a Molepar lamp array was clamped on a sandbagged light stand in the corner next to a couple of disassembled Lowell light kits, and power and audio cables were looped across the deck, some connected to a dark TV monitor on a wheeled cart. Nothing seemed to be hot now, but Sullivan could faintly catch the old burnt-gel reek on the clove-scented air.
It seemed to him that the ceiling lights had dimmed from yellow down toward orange, in the moments since he had stepped in from the outside deck.
With her free hand, deLarava snicked a Dunhill lighter and puffed another clove cigarette alight. “Is Apie here, Joey?” she asked.
Sullivan nervously touched the brass plaque under his shirt.
The old man in the khaki jacket was grimacing and rocking on his heels. “Yes,” he said. “And he can no more get out of here than we two can. We toucans.” He sang, “Precious and few are the moments we toucans sha-aare…” Then he frowned and shook his head. “Even over the side—that’s not the real ocean down there now. Jump off the port rail and you land on the starboard deck.”