Un buen santo to encomiendas, she thought, quoting an old saying of her grandmother’s. A fine patron saint you’ve got.
At a red light, she leaned her elbow on the little steel cowl over the signal-change button on a curbside traffic-light pole—and then gasped with dizziness and heard the thump of the seat of her jeans and the grocery bag hitting the sidewalk in the instant before her vision jumped with the jar of the impact.
People were staring at her, and she thought she heard borracha!—drunk!—as she scrambled back up to her feet; the light box on the pole across the street had finally begun flashing WALK, and she hoisted her bag in both arms and marched between the lines of the crosswalk toward the opposite curb, sweat of embarrassment chilly on her forehead. Not until she heard a wet plop on the pavement by her foot, and looked down just in time to see an egg from her torn bag hit the asphalt, did she realize that she was on bar-time again.
She stepped up the curb so carefully that any bar-time effect was imperceptible, and then she crossed the sidewalk and leaned against the brick wall of a mariscos restaurant, panting in the steamy squid-and-salsa-scented air that was humming out of a window fan.
It could be just Sullivan nearby, she told herself nervously; he said we can have that effect when we’re together, our antenna fields overlapped and making “interference fringes”—it happened with him and his twin sister all the time, he said. Or it could be Frank Rocha, resonating in the sidewalk in forlorn response to the scuff of my sneakers (though the dried thumb in my shoe should be keeping any spiritoids from recognizing me). Maybe I just got confused, and thought I heard the egg break on the street before it really did; I haven’t had a decent night’s sleep, a decent meal, in—
But of course she was standing right across the street now from 15415 Beverly. She looked up, slowly and sullenly; the two-story building had been repainted, but she couldn’t recall now anyway whether the fire had streaked the outside walls with soot. The windows of what had been her conference room had glass in them again, and between the glass and the curtains hung a green neon sign reading PSYCHIC—PALM READER.
Good luck to you, she thought bitterly to the present tenant. You’ll never host as good a show as I did.
ON THAT final Wednesday evening, that Halloween night, Frank Rocha had arrived very drunk. A week had passed since the night when she had read his clumsy letter, and, mostly out of guilt and uncertainty, she had let him stay at the meeting in spite of his condition. At one point early in the evening he had taken his hand out of hers, and had fumbled at something inside his leather jacket; after a muffled snap!, he had shuddered and coughed briefly, then returned his hand to hers, and the séance had proceeded. The smoke from the candles and incense had covered any smell of gunpowder, and Frank Rocha had continued to mumble and weep—no one present had realized that he was now dead, that he had neatly shot himself squarely through the heart with a tiny .22 revolver.
Later, in the darkness, he had again pulled his hand free, but this time it had been to squeeze her thigh under the table; not wanting to hurt his feelings, she had thought for a while before reaching down and firmly pushing his hand away. Luckily she had had her face averted from him.
With a blast of scorching air that hit her like a mailbag dropped from a tram, Frank Rocha’s body had exploded into white fire. Elizalde and the person who had been sitting on the other side of him were ignited into flame themselves and tumbled away in a screaming tangle of bodies and folding chairs, and everyone was dazzled to blindness by the man-sized, magnesium-bright torch that had been Frank Rocha.
And then the séance had started to be for real.
ELIZALDE LOOKED away from the white building across the street and made herself take deep, slow breaths.
Hoping to reassure herself, she dug the plastic compass out of her jeans pocket and looked at it—
But it was pointing southeast, straight ahead down Beverly toward the Civic Center.
The compass needle didn’t wobble in synch with any of the cars or pedestrians she could see. Unlike the readings she had got earlier at the abandoned Volkswagen and the barroom door, this one seemed to be some distance away.
There’s a…a ghost down that way, she thought carefully, trying to assimilate the idea. A big one.
A furniture truck made a ponderous low-gear left turn onto the boulevard from Belmont Avenue, and little Toyotas and big old La Bamba boat cars rattled along the painted asphalt, up toward Hollywood or down toward City Hall, and crows and pigeons flapped around the traffic lights or pecked at litter on the sidewalks in the chilly sunlight…but there was a big ghost awake and walking around somewhere clown Beverly in the direction of the Harbor Freeway.
THE GHOSTS had arrived at the séance sometime during the confused moments when curtains were being torn down from the windows and bundled around the people who had been set afire; Frank Rocha himself was a roaring white pyre that no one could get close to.
Half of Elizalde’s hair had been burned off, and after she’d been extinguished herself she had scorched her hands and face in a useless attempt to throw a curtain over Frank Rocha, but what she today remembered most vividly was the agony of listening to the shattering, withering screams.
The hallway doors had opened, and a lot of people had begun to come in who didn’t even seem to notice the fire; and they hadn’t walked in, but seemed to glide, or float, or flicker like bad animation. The light had been wrong on most of them—the shadows on their faces had not been aligned with the flaring corpse on the floor, and when their faces had happened to turn toward it, the incongruously steady shadows had abruptly looked like holes.
Others appeared from the ceiling—several of these were oversized infants, impossibly floating in midair, with the purple umbilical cords still swinging from their bellies, and their huge faces were red and their mouths hideously wide as they howled like tornadoes.
Bloody, mewling embryonic chicks pecked and clawed at Elizalde’s scorched scalp, and fell into her face when she tried to cuff them off.
Instead of running for the ghost-crowded doors, everyone had seemed to be scrambling to the corners, down on their hands and knees to be below the churning burnt-pork-reeking smoke. The clothing burst away from three of her patients, two women and a man, to release long fleshy snakes, which lifted like pythons as they grew, and then dented and swelled to form grimacing human faces on the bulbous ends.
The faces on the flesh-snake bulbs, and the shadow-pied faces of the intruding ghosts, and the red faces of the giant infants, and the blood-and-smoke-and-tear-streaked faces of Elizalde’s patients, all were shouting and screaming and babbling and praying and crying and laughing, while Frank Rocha blazed away like a blast furnace in the middle of the floor. By the time his unbearably bright body had shifted and rolled over and then fallen through the floor, the big windows had all popped and disintegrated into whirling crystalline jigsaw pieces and spun away into the darkness, and people had begun to climb out, hang from the sill, and drop to the flower bed below. Elizalde had dragged one unconscious woman to the window, and had then somehow hoisted the inert body over her shoulder and climbed out; the jump nearly broke her neck and her knees and her jaw, but when the fire trucks had come squealing across the parking lot Elizalde had been doing CPR on the unconscious patient.