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 damned 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. “God knows where we are, the real us. Heaven or hell, 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 magneto telephone, 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 TWENTY FIVE
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-Glass
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 multitude-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 ass 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 compass 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 unassimilated, and at the moment it was in its excited state, for his compass needle was pointing at it.
He had hurried west—and at Park View Street his compass 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 compass at his belt, he saw that the needle was jigging and sweeping back and forth across nearly ninety degrees of the compass 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 damn flashed the ghost populace, mooned them. That would energize and urgently draw every spirit lingering nearby. God knew why the big ghost had done it, for it couldn’t eat any ghosts itself.