“Today.” He led her around the front of the van to the side doors. “A guy, an old friend of mine, tried to turn me over to a woman who wants to eat my father’s ghost; I think she wants to capture me, use me as a live lure. The old friend threw an egg at me as I was driving out of there.” He unlocked the forward of the two side doors and swung it open. The light was still on inside—the battery could sustain a light or two for a full day without getting too weak to turn the motor over. “Beer and Coke in the little fridge there, if you like.”
Elizalde looked at him intently for a moment, then stepped lithely up into the van.
She leaned one hip on the counter around the sink, and Sullivan noticed to his embarrassment that the bed was still extended, and unmade. I must not really have meant to meet her, he thought defensively.
“Sorry,” he said. “I wasn’t anticipating company.” And what is that supposed to mean? he asked himself. He threw her a helpless glance as he climbed up and pulled the door closed.
“You’ve got to wash off the egg,” she said, and for a moment he thought she had meant on your face. Then he realized that she meant the egg on the outside of the driver’s door.
“Is it important?”
“I think it’s a marker,” she said, “and more than a visible marker. Like a magical homing device. Raw eggs have all kinds of uses in magic. I should get out of this van right now, and walk away, mask or no mask. You should too, in a different direction.”
Sullivan sat down on the bed. “I’ve got a place we can go where the psychic static will drown out the egg’s signal. I’m pretty sure. Anyway, there’s certainly a hose at this place, we can wash it off.” She didn’t seem crazy, and he was tired of spinning through his own circular thought-paths over and over again. “I think we should stick together.”
“That’s what Peter Sullivan thinks, huh.” She stepped around him and sat down in the passenger seat, watching him over her shoulder. “Okay, for a while. But let’s at least be a moving target.” She looked forward, out through the windshield, and stiffened.
Sullivan stood up and hurried to the drivers seat with the key.
Outside in the parking lot, several people were standing on the asphalt a few yards away from the front bumper, shifting awkwardly and peering. Sullivan knew that he and Elizalde had been alone in the parking lot a few moments earlier.
“Ghosts,” he said shortly, starting the engine. “Fresh ones, lit up by our overlapping auras.” He switched on the headlights, and the figures covered their pale faces with their lean, translucent hands.
He tapped the horn ring to give them a toot, and the figures began shuffling obediently to the side. One, a little girl, was moving more slowly than the rest, and when he had clanked the engine into gear he had to spin the steering wheel to angle around her.
“Damn little kid,” he said, momentarily short of breath. The way clear at last, he accelerated toward the Ocean Boulevard driveway.
Elizalde pulled the seat belt across her shoulder and clicked the metal tongue of it into the slot by the console. “I saw her as an old woman,” she said quietly.
He shrugged. “I guess each of ‘em is all the ages they ever were. He or she was, I mean. Each one is—”
“I got you. Put on your seat belt.”
“The place is right here,” he said, pushing down the lever to signal for a left turn.
THE FIRST faucet Sullivan found, on the end of a foot-tall pipe standing in weeds at the corner of the Solville lot, just sucked air indefinitely when the tap was opened. He walked across the dark lot to another, ascertained that it worked, and then drove the van over and parked it. He carried a big sponge out to scrub the outside of the driver’s door, and then had to go back inside for a can of Comet, but at last all the chips and strips of dried egg had been sluiced off the van, and he locked it up.
Elizalde carried a beer in from the van to Sullivan’s apartment, and when she popped it open foam dripped on the red-painted wooden floor. The only light in the living room was from flame-shaped white bulbs in a yard-sale chandelier in the corner, and Sullivan berated himself for not having thought to buy a lamp somewhere today. At least there were electrical outlets—Sullivan noticed that Shadroe had put six of them in this room alone.
Sullivan had carried the plaster hands inside, and he laid them against the door as though they were holding it closed.
“This is your safe place?” Elizalde’s voice echoed in the empty room. She twisted the rod on the Venetian blinds over the window until the slats were vertical, then walked to the far wall and ran her long fingers over a patched section where Shadroe had apparently once filled in a doorway. “What makes it safe?”
“The landlord’s dead.” Sullivan leaned against another wall and let himself slide down until he was sitting on the floor. “He walks around and talks, and he’s in his original body and he’s not…you know, retarded—he’s not a ghost, it’s still his actual self inside the head he carries around. I believe he’s been dead for quite a while, and therefore he must know it, and be taking steps to keep from departing this…”
“Vale of tears.”
“To use the technical term,” Sullivan agreed. “The place must be a terrible patch of static, psychically. The reason I think he’s aware of his situation is that he’s made it a terrible patch physically, too, a confusing ground-grid. All the original doors and windows seem to have been rearranged, and you can see from outside that the wiring is something out of Rube Goldberg. I can’t wait to start plugging things in.”
“Running water can be a betrayer too.”
“And he’s messed that up. I noticed earlier today that the toilet’s hooked up to the hot water. I could probably make coffee in the tank of it.”
“And have steamed buns in the morning,” she said.
Her smile was slight, but it softened the lean plane of her jaw and warmed her haunted dark eyes.
“Hot cross buns,” added Sullivan lamely. “Speaking of which, do you want to order a pizza or something?”
“You don’t seem to have a phone,” she said, nodding toward an empty jack box at the base of one wall. “And I don’t think we should leave this…compound again tonight. Do you have anything to eat in your van?”
“Makings of a sandwich or two,” he said. “Canned soup. A bag of M&M’s.”
“I’ve missed California cuisine,” she said.
“You were out of town, I gather,” he said cautiously.
“Oklahoma most recently. I took a Greyhound bus back here, got in late Tuesday night. Drove through the Mojave Desert. Did you ever notice that there are a lot of ranches, out in the middle of the desert?”
“I wonder what they raise.”
“Rocks, probably.” She leaned against the wall across from him. “‘Look out, those big rocks can be mean.’ And on cold nights they put gravel in incubators. And, ‘Damn! Last night a fox got in and carried off a bunch of our fattest rocks!’”
“‘Early frost’ll kill all these nice quartzes.’”
She actually laughed, two contralto syllables. “Don’t get excited now,” she said, “but your dead man’s got the heat turned all the way up in here, and not a thermostat in sight.” She unzipped the front of her jumpsuit and pulled down the shoulders, revealing a wrinkled Graceland sweatshirt; and when she pulled the jumpsuit down over her hips and sat down to bunch it down to her ankles, he saw that she was wearing faded blue jeans.
She began untying the laces of her sneakers, and Sullivan made himself look away from her long legs in the tight denim.