“I think he tried it,” whispered Kootie bravely, “and landed on his head.”
Sullivan nodded and tried to smile, but he was glancing around at the pillars and the stairwell and the dark inward-facing shop windows. Keep your head down, Dad, he thought.
The ceiling lamps were definitely fading and the lobby was going dark—but reflections of colored lights were now fanning above the wide throat of the open stairwell on the aft side of the lobby, gleaming on the tall paneled back wall and the big gold medallion and the framed portrait, and from some lower deck came the shivering cacophony of a big party going on.
DeLarava stumped across the glossy cork deck to the top of the stairwell—a velvet rope was hung doubled at the top of one of the stair railings, and she unhooked one brass end, walked across to the other railing with it, and hooked the rope there, across the gap.
“Nobody go near the well,” she said, her voice sounding more pleading than threatening. “Joey—where is Apie?”
The Piccadilly Circus lobby was almost totally dark now, the lamps overhead glowing only a dull red, and Sullivan could see reflections of moonlight on the polished deck
Then, with the echoing clank of a knife switch being thrown, the white-hot glare of an unglassed carbon-arc lamp punched across the lobby from the forward corridor between the shops, throwing deLarava’s bulbous shadow like a torn hole onto the paneling of the stairwell’s back wall.
The lamp was roaring because of working off alternating current, but from the darkness behind and beyond the cone of radiance, a strong, confident voice said, “I’m here, Kelley.”
DeLarava had flung her hand over her face, and now reeled away out of the glare, toward the doorway that led out onto the starboard deck, on the opposite side of the lobby from Sullivan.
He spun away from the glaring light toward Elizalde and Kootie—and stopped.
Angelica Elizalde was still standing where she’d been, her hair backlit now against the reflected glare from the stairwell wall, but a portly old man stood between her and Sullivan, where Kootie had been a moment before, and Kootie was nowhere to be seen. Sullivan blinked at the old man, wondering where he had appeared from, and who he was.
Sullivan opened his mouth to speak—then flinched into a crouch a moment before a hard bang shook the air, and he felt the hair twitch over his scalp.
He let his crouch become a tumble to the deck, and he reached for Elizalde’s ankles but she was already dropping to her hands and knees. The old man who’d been standing between them had stepped forward into the glare, the tails of his black coat trailing out behind him as if he were walking through water.
Sullivan’s father’s voice boomed from the forward darkness behind the light “Step forward, Kelley!”
“Fuck you, Apie!” came deLarava’s shrill reply. “I just killed your other precious stinking kid!”
Sullivan grabbed Elizalde’s upper arm and pulled her into the deeper penumbra behind the cone of light. “Where’s Kootie?” Sullivan hissed into her ear as they crawled toward the wall.
“That’s him,” Elizalde whispered back, waving out at the old man in the center of the deck. Sullivan looked up, and noticed two things: the old man’s jowly strong jawed face, which in this stark light even looked like a figure in a black-and-white newsreel, was instantly recognizable from the photos he’d seen of Thomas Alva Edison; and the shadow the old man cast on the far aft wall above the stairs was the silhouette of a young boy.
This was the Edison ghost out and solid, and Sullivan knew deLarava would not want to damage it. “Give me the gun,” he whispered to Elizalde.
The two of them had scrambled forward, to the wall below one of the little interior windows on the port side, and Elizalde sat down on the deck and pulled the .45 from the waist of her jeans and shoved it toward him.
His hands wouldn’t close around it. “Shit,” he whispered, panting and nearly sobbing, “Houdini must have been a fucking pacifist! I guess he didn’t want his mask to be able to kill anybody! Here.” He pushed it back to her with the heels of his limp hands. “You’ve got to do it. Shoot deLarava.”
He looked up and squinted, trying to see the old woman on the far side of the pupil-constricting glare. Then a movement above the stairwell, out across the deck to his right, caught his attention.
A rapid clicking had started up, and the light narrowed to a beam as if now being focused through the lens of a projector.
In a wide, glowing rectangle of black and white and gray on the stairwell wall, Sullivan saw an image of the corner of a house, and a fat man frustratedly shaking the end of an uncooperative garden hose; Kootie’s shadow-silhouette had been replaced with a projected image of a boy, who was standing on the lush gray lawn with one foot firmly on the slack length of the hose behind the fat man. The man scratched his head and looked directly into the nozzle—at which point the boy stepped off the hose, and a burst of water shot into the man’s face.
“Plagiarism!” called the ghost of Edison, which, though solidly visible in the light, was itself now throwing no shadow at all. “That’s my ‘Bad Boy and the Garden Hose,’ from 1903!”
“Lumiere made it first, in 1895,” called Sullivan’s father’s ghost from the blackness behind the carbon-arc radiance to Sullivan’s left. “Besides, I’ve improved it.”
In the projected movie scene, the water was still jetting out of the hose, but the figure holding the nozzle was now a fat woman, and the gushing flow was particulate with thousands of tiny, flailing human shapes, whose impacts were eroding the fat woman’s head down to a bare skull.
Across the deck, deLarava screamed in horrified rage—then another gunshot banged, and the light was extinguished.
“Is that supposed to be sympathetic magic?” deLarava was screaming. “I’m the one that’s going to walk out of here whole, Apie! And everything will be what I say it is!”
“Shoot her, goddammit!” said Sullivan urgently, though Elizalde surely couldn’t see any more than he could in the sudden total darkness.
“I cant,” said Elizalde in a voice tight with anger, “kill her.”
Sullivan jumped then, for someone had tugged on his shirt from the forward side, away from Elizalde; but even as he whipped his head around that way he smelled bourbon, and so he wasn’t wildly surprised when Sukie’s voice said, “Get over here, Pete.”
“Follow me,” he whispered to Elizalde. He grabbed the slack of her sweatshirt sleeve and pulled her along after the dimly sensed shape of Sukie, stepping high to avoid tripping over cables, to the narrow forward area behind where the light had been.
Sukie proved to be solid enough to push Sullivan down to his knees on the deck, and into his ear she whispered, “Not hot.”
He groped in the darkness in front of his face, and his fingers touched a familiar shape—a wooden box on the end of a stout cable, open on one face with a leather flap across the opening. It was a plug box of the old sort known as “spider boxes” because of the way spiders tended to like the roomy, dark interiors of them. Like the carbon-arc lamp, this was an antique, and had surely not been among deLarava’s modern equipment. The spider-box devices had been outlawed at some time during the mid-eighties, when he and Sukie had still been deLarava’s gaffers, because of the constant risk of someone’s putting their hand or foot into one and being electrocuted.