He was jammed up.
The “big ghost” that had been shining over the magical landscape of Los Angeles for the past four days had been the ghost of Thomas Alva Edison. It had been Edison's face on the collapsed ectoplasm figure at the Music Center, the day before yesterday. And now Edison had (again!) fed Oaks a rotted ghost—and it had jammed him up, and he was starving.
Oaks looked up at the sky, and he remembered mornings when he had snorted his fill the night before, and had had more unopened vials ready to hand. I’d like it always to be six o’clock on a summer morning, he thought, and I’m in a sleeping bag on some inaccessible balcony or behind a remote hedge, and my feet are warm but my arms and head are out in the cool breeze and I’m sweating with a sort of disattached, unspecific worry, and I’ve got hours yet to just lie there and listen to the traffic and the parrots flying past overhead.
The police would be after him. He had run away from that confusion in Inglewood yesterday afternoon, but his shots had probably hit both of the cops in that patrol car, and his fingerprints were all over the inside of the SCE truck, and the van in the back of it. And the police probably still had his fingerprints on file; he now remembered that he had held several custodial jobs in hospitals, during the fifties and sixties, catching fresh death-ghosts and lots of the tasty, elusive birth-ghosts.
He’d have to get rid of the revolver—a “ballistics team” would be able to tell that it was the weapon that had fired on the police car. Oaks should have no trouble finding some street person who would take it in trade for some other (certainly less desirable) sort of gun.
But the police, unfortunately, weren’t his main problem.
He twitched, and turned to the ghost sitting nearest him on his left. The man was breaking off fragments of mortar from between the cinder blocks of the wall, and eating them.
“You’ll choke,” Oaks rasped.
“Hyuck-hyuck. Choke on this” said the ghost, without any gesture. “I’m choking,” said Oaks. “If you choke on one of those rocks, a Heimlich maneuver could unblock it, right? How can I unblock a spoiled ghost from my mind-pipe? Do you know?”
The ghost wrinkled his spotty forehead in a frown, and then began counting off points on the fingers of one hand. “Okay, you got stones in your ears and a magnet up your nose, right? And toads have got a stone in their heads. The Venerable Bead. And plenty of people have got shrapnel and metal plates in them, and steel hips. Check it out. Learnest Hand Hemingway used to save the shrapnel that came out of his legs and put it in little bowls so that his friends could take the bits as souvenirs; and eat them, of course, to get a bit of Hemingway.” He smiled. “Everything is a Learnest experience. The golden rule to be in-got at the College of Fortuitous Knox. Fort You-It-Us Knocks.” (The unattained pun made the intended spelling clear.) “It’s important to feel good about yourself. This morning I met somebody I really like—me.”
“That’s good,” said Oaks hopelessly. “Tell him hello from me, if you ever run into him again.”
There was apparently no help to be had from the ghosts themselves. Oaks was choked, and the only way he knew how to unjam himself was likely to kill him. This time. Instead of just costing him another limb.
He could remember all kinds of things now. He remembered that Thomas Alva Edison had choked him this way once before—or at least once before—in 1929. Small surprise that the flattened face on the Music Center parking-level stairs had looked familiar! No wonder the Edison logo on the side of the truck had upset him! He should have paid attention to his forebodings. Thomas Alva Edison had never been any good for him.
AS THE shock-loosened memories had come arrowing up to the surface of his mind, one right after another, during his endless odyssey last night, Oaks had learned that he had always been an ambitious fellow, setting his sights on the most powerful people around and then trying to catch them unguarded so that he could snatch out of their heads their potent ghosts.
He had pursued the famous escape artist Harry Houdini for at least sixteen years—fruitlessly. Houdini had evaded every trap, had been effectively masked, psychically inaccessible, at every face-to-face confrontation. Houdini had even given protection to his friends: there had been a writer of horror stories in Rhode Island to whom Houdini had given his own severed thumb in June of 1924; Houdini had had his plaster mask-hands made by then, and could assume them and make them flesh any time he liked, and so he didn’t need the original-issue thumb anymore, and besides, Houdini had probably known that he himself was only a couple of years from death at that point. In Los Angeles, Houdini had even picked up some kind of electric belt for this writer friend, an electromagnetic device that could supposedly cure all kinds of ailments, including Bright’s disease and cancer—which pair of illnesses the writer died of in 1937, in fact, for he had been skeptical of the belt and disgusted by the thumb, and had got rid of them.
Houdini himself had been untouchable, a genuine escape artist…even though Oaks had eventually managed to arrange his physical death on a Halloween. It had been useless, for even in the moment of his dying Houdini had eluded him. Trying to catch Houdini had always been like trying to cross-examine an echo, wound an image in a mirror, sniff out a rose in an unlighted gallery of photographs of flowers.
Houdini’s parents must have known right from his birth that their son had a conspicuous soul, for they had taken quick, drastic steps to hamper access to it. Confusingly, they had given him the name Erik, which was the same name they’d given to their first son, who had died of a fall while still a baby; and within weeks of Houdini’s birth they had moved from Budapest to London to goddamn Appleton, Wisconsin!—and given an inaccurate birth date for him.
Slippery name, vast distance from his birthplace, and a bogus birthday. Worthless coordinates.
And the boy had compounded the snarling of his lifeline by running away at the age of twelve to be an itinerant boot polisher for the U.S. Cavalry. When that proved to be an unreliable career, he had just drifted, riding freight trains around the Midwest—begging, doing manual labor on farms, and learning magic from circus sideshows. With no real name or address or nativity date, his soul had no ready handles, and such ghost fanciers as might have been intrigued by the weirdly powerful boy were no doubt left holding a metaphorical empty coat while the boy himself was safely asleep in a probably literal outward-bound boxcar.
Sherman Oaks had certainly been pursuing Houdini by 1900, when the magician was twenty-six years old (Oaks had no clue as to how old he himself might have been), but Oaks had not ever managed to get Houdini’s soul squarely in his sights.
In the moment of opening up the jaws of his mind for the kill, for the forcible extraction of another self from its living body, his plain physical vision always became a superfluous blur, and he relied on the sensed identity coordinates of the other self, like a pilot making an instrument landing by following a homing beam in bad weather.
Just when he would be zeroing in on the thing that was “Houdini,” it became something else, and the real Houdini would be gone.