Houdini? Jonah and the whale? God knew what memory had started to surface there—something from the time before he had come into this present continuity-of-consciousness three years ago, in the district of Sherman Oaks, from which he had whimsically taken this present name. Again he wondered, briefly and uneasily, how old he might really be, and when and how he might have lost his left arm.
To his right, across the street, the elevated pools around the Metropolitan Water District building reflected the watery blue sky. Oaks calculated that the time could hardly be even an hour past noon, but the pale sun had already begun to recede, having come as far up above the southern horizon as it cared to in this season. North was behind him, and the thought prompted him to sneak a glance down at the pommel of the survival knife he wore inside his pants.
When he had stolen the knife, its hollow hilt had been full of things like fishhooks and matches. He had replaced that stuff with reliable compact ghost lures—a nickel with a nail welded to the back so that it could be hammered into a wooden floor, where it would confound the patient efforts of ghosts to pick it up, and some pennies stamped with the Lincoln profile smoking a pipe, another surefire ghost-attention holder—but he had valued the screw-on pommel, which had a powerful magnetic compass bobbing around in its glass dome.
But right now the compass was pointing firmly, uselessly, north. And his gone left arm was still sensing nothing at all. The ghost was effectively hidden inside the boy’s mind now—Oaks was sure that that was what had happened—and, at least for as long as the ghost remained concealed, Oaks would have to track Koot Hoomie Parganas without any psychic beacons or Hansel-and-Gretel trails at all. And now, when he found the boy, he would probably have to kill him to get the big ghost out and eat it—and of course eat the boy’s ghost too, as a garnish. A parsley child.
It occurred to Sherman Oaks that he might be smart to get to a telephone—and damn quick.
He walked faster, and then began jogging, hoping that in spite of his stained windbreaker and camouflage pants he looked like someone getting exercise and not like somebody in murderous pursuit.
CLOUDS AS solid and white as sculptured marble were shifting across the blue vault of the sky, south from the San Fernando Valley and down the track of the Hollywood Freeway, graying the woods and lawns of Griffith Park and tarnishing the flat water of the Silverlake Reservoir. Chilly shade swept over the freeway lanes and across the area of wide dirt lots and isolated old Victorian houses west of the Pasadena Freeway, and the squat wild palms shook their shaggy heads in the wind. Pedestrians around Third and Sixth Streets began to move more quickly…though one toiling small figure on the Witmer Street sidewalk didn’t increase its pace.
Kootie was limping worse than ever, but he made himself keep moving. Raffle had been meticulous about divvying up their panhandling income, and Kootie had a pocketful of change as well as forty-six dollars in bills—eventually he would get on a bus, and then get on another, and eventually, ideally, sleep on one, and then tomorrow think of some durable sanctuary (—church, stow away on a ship, hide somewhere on a “big rig eighteen-wheeler” go to the police, hide in a—). But right now he needed the sensation of motion—of ground being covered—that only working his legs and abrading the soles of his shoes could give him.
Kootie had stopped being angry at Raffle, and was instead panicked and dismayed at having lost the only person in Los Angeles, in the world, who’d cared to help him. Kootie was certain that if he hadn’t been such a stupid kid, he could somehow have talked Raffle out of turning him in, and they could right now have been driving to get Raffle’s dope somewhere, happy in the car, with Fred licking their faces. Kootie winced as he stepped down off a high curb, and he wondered what Fred was doing now; probably right this minute Fred was sharing Kootie’s own personal heated-up tamale with Raffle in some safe parking lot.
Kootie’s pelvis and right hip ached, as if he’d recently tried doing one of those Russian crouch-and-kick dances and then finished with a full butt-to-the-floor split—but he was trying not to think about it, for the mysterious muscle strain was a result of whatever had gone on during the time he had been blacked out at the Music Center, when the ghost of the old man had been in control of his body.
God only knew what the old man had done. Fallen awkwardly? Karate-kicked somebody? Kootie would have expected more dignity from Thomas Alva Edison.
There it was, he had thought about it. The ghost had been Edison—as in the SCE logo, painted on the doors of the Halloween-colored black-and-orange trucks, Southern California Edison—the guy that invented the lightbulb. Kootie’s parents had always told him not to play with lightbulbs, that there was a poisonous “noble gas” in them; in school he had found out that they’d been thinking of neon lights, and that neon wasn’t poisonous anyway. But there had been a poison in the glass brick hidden in the Dante statue, for sure.
Noble gas my ass, he thought defiantly as he blinked away tears. You old…shithead! What were you doing in that test tube inside the glass brick anyway?
Duh, he thought, replying for the absent Edison, I dunno.
You got my mom and dad killed! And now everybody wants to kill me too.
Duh. Sorry.
Moron.
Kootie remembered the face on the top of the bloody framework he had pulled off of himself, but a shudder torqued through him, almost making him miss his footing on the cracked sidewalk. It was apparently far too soon to think about that episode, and he found that he had focused his eyes on the stucco walls, bright orange even in the shadow of the clouds, of a ninety-nine cent store on the corner ahead of him. Two pay telephones were perched under metal hoods on a post by the parking-lot curb.
Al, he thought nervously, quoting the old woman who had moaned to him out of the pay-phone receiver on Fairfax this morning, where am I gonna meet you tonight?
Al. Alva. Thomas Alva Edison. And in the hallucination he’d had—
Again he shied away from the memory of being dislocated out of his own body—but he was sure that it had been the Edison ghost that the old woman had been trying to talk to. She had known the name—the nickname!—of the ghost Kootie had been carrying around. To the people who live in the magical alleys of the world, Kootie thought, that ghost must have been sticking out like a sore thumb.
But the ghost was gone now! Kootie had left it torn and deflated on the steps at the—
Involuntarily he exhaled, hard enough to have blown out a whole birthday-cake-full of candles, if one had been here. (Raffle had told him that in these neighborhoods they generally hung paper-skinned figures from trees on kids’ birthdays, and then beat the things with sticks until they split apart, at which point the kids would scramble for the little cellophane-wrapped, hard candies that spilled onto the dirt from the broken paper abdomens.)
The ghost was gone now, that was the important thing. Maybe telephones would work, for .Kootie, now.
He flexed the fingers of his right hand and slowly reached down and dug in his jeans pocket for a quarter. Who would he call?
The police, for sure.
Kootie’s teeth were cold, and he realized that he was smiling. He would call the police, and the one-armed bum wouldn’t follow him anymore, not after the bum stumbled across the—