“Sure, Gene,” she mumbled around the food in her mouth. She waved her free hand vaguely. “Stress. Listen, we’ve also got to get a lot of footage of the belowdecks areas—the crew’s quarters, the section up by the bow where the service men were bunked during the war—it’d be a good contrast, you know? To all the glamour of the top decks.”
“Well,” he said, sipping nervously at a Coors Light, “I guess you can edit to a balance in postproduction—but we cleared it with the Disney people for just the engine-room tour and the pool and the staterooms and the salons. There might not be accessible power sources down in the catacombs, and God knows what their routines are—they might tell us it’s too late to set it all up. It’d only be giving them two days’ warning, if you want to get everything in the can Saturday.”
“Well, we can at least do stills down there. A still photographer, and me, and my assistant carrying a portable stereo—that shouldn’t disrupt any employees.”
“You don’t need music to shoot stills, Loretta. And how are you going to use stills?”
DeLarava had looked past him and seen Ayres standing by the cash register. She waved, and said, “I’ve got to talk to this guy, Gene. Do what you can, okay?”
The man stood up, taking the storyboards with him. “Okay. If the PR guy’s in his office I’ll talk to him now, on my way out. I’ll call you and let you know what he says. Tomorrow I’ll be at the studio all day, and I’ll be back here Saturday, early, to make sure they rope off the areas from the tourists. I still don’t see why we had to film on Halloween. A weekday would have been less crowded.”
“Will you not be questioning my decisions, Gene? You gentlemen all work for me.”
Gene left as Ayres walked up, shrugging as they passed each other, and deLarava was crying again; she wanted to scratch her scalp, but didn’t dare, because she had stretched three rubber bands over it this morning. She had felt she had to, after the dream that had somehow left her to wake up crouched over the toilet in the stateroom’s bathroom, whispering to the water in the bowl.
Ayres sat down and promptly drank off the last inch of the Coors Light. “Your old boy Joey Webb is crazy,” he said. “He’s out at all hours on the beach with a metal detector and a jar of orange marmalade, singing that ‘Ed Sullivan’ song from Bye Bye Birdie.”
“Ed Sullivan? The moron. He’s not supposed to be looking for Ed Sullivan.”
“Could I have another of these, please?” said Ayres to a passing waitress. To deLarava he said, quietly, “I found out some things about the Parganas couple.”
“Okay…?”
“Well, they were crazy too. The old man, named Jiddu K. Parganas, was born in 1929. His parents announced that he was the jagadguru, which is apparently like a messiah, okay? The World Teacher. Theosophical stuff. There was a guy he was named for, named Jiddu Krishnamurti, who was supposed to be it, but he shined the job on in ’28. He got tired of the spirit world, he said, seeing ghosts crowding up the beaches all the time. Great stuff, hm? But our Jiddu, the one born a year later, didn’t work out too well. When he was twenty he got arrested for having burglarized the old house of Henry Ford, who had died two years earlier. The Ford executors hushed it up, but apparently Jiddu got away with a glass test tube. The Ford people hoked up another one to replace it, and nowadays the fake is on display in the Ford Museum in Greenfield Village in Michigan.”
DeLarava’s heart was pounding, and tears were again leaking out of her eyes. “Fake of…what?”
“It’s supposed to contain Edison’s last breath.”
“Edison?” My God, deLarava thought, no wonder the psychic gain is cranked up so high around here since Monday! No wonder Apie is coming out of the sea, and every ghost in town needs only a sneeze to set it frolicking. I guessed that the Monday-night torture-murder wasn’t a coincidence, and that the kid had run away with someone heavy—but Edison!
“Yeah,” said Ayres blandly, “the guy that invented the lightbulb. Anyway, Jiddu married a rich Indian woman who was also into this spiritual stuff, and they seem to have formed a sort of splinter cult of their own, just the two of them. They bought the house in Beverly Hills, where they were killed Monday night. The police are aware of the place—they’ve had to answer a lot of complaints from the Parganases and their neighbors. A lot of drunks and bums used to come around demanding to talk to somebody named Dante or Don Tay.”
“That would have been the mask,” said deLarava softly. “They kept it in a hollowed-out copy of The Divine Comedy or something.” She waved at Ayres. “Never mind. Go on.”
“Some comedy. Their kid, this Koot Hoomie that you’re looking for, was born in ’81. His teachers say that he was okay, considering that his parents were trying to raise him to be some kind of Hindoo holy man. Have you got any calls?”
“Hundreds,” she said. “People have grabbed every stray kid in L.A. except Koot Hoomie Parganas.” She thought of the boy out there in the alleys and parking lots somewhere, eating out of Dumpsters and sleeping all alone under hedges…and last night’s dream came back to her, forcefully.
She was crying again. “I’ve got to get some air,” she said, blundering up out of her chair. “Tell Joey Webb to keep looking—and tell him to keep an eye on the canals.”
THE SEA was too full of imagined ghosts, waked up and opposing her, and the carpeted corridors and long splendid galleries seemed suddenly bristly with hostile ectoplasm accumulated like nicotine stains over the decades, so she fled to the Windsor Salon on R Deck.
She liked the Windsor Salon because it had hanging chandeliers, not the lights-on-columns that stood everywhere else in the ship, big Art Deco mushrooms with glowing mica-shade caps. The Windsor Salon had been built after the Queen Mary had been permanently moored in Long Beach, had in fact been built in the space of one of the now-useless funnels, and so it could afford the luxury of ceiling lights that would have swung and broken if the ship had been out at sea.
No parties of tourists were being shown through the room at the moment, so she collapsed into one of the convention-hotel chairs and buried her face in her hands.
She had dreamed of a group of little girls who were camping out on a dark plain. At first they had played games around the small fire they had kindled up—a make-believe tea party, charades, hopscotch on lines toed across the gray dust—bur then the noises from the darkness beyond the ring of firelight had made them huddle together. Roars and shouts of subhuman fury had echoed from unseen hills, and the drumbeat of racing hooves and the hard flutter of flags had shaken in the cold wind.
Perhaps the girls had gathered together in this always-dark wasteland because they all had the same name—Kelley. They had formed a ring now, holding hands to contain their camp fire and chattering with tearful, nervous, false cheer, until one of the girls noticed that her companions weren’t real—they were all just mirrors set up closely together in the dirt, reflecting back to her own pale, dirt-smeared face.
And her sudden terror made the face change—the nose was turned up, and became fleshier, the skin around the eyes became pouched and coarse, and the chin receded away, leaving the mouth a long, grinning slit. Kelley had known what this was. She was turning into a pig.
Loretta had driven herself up out of the well of sleep then, and discovered that she was kneeling on the tile floor of the little bathroom, crouching over the toilet and calling down, down, down into the dark so that Kelley might find her way back up out of the deep hole she’d fallen into.