CHAPTER TEN:
Little Frisbees
Vickery’s studio was a flat-roofed room added onto the back of a small one-story stuccoed house on 16th Street in Long Beach. He had attached a ladder to the outside wall, and laid boards across the roof and put up railings, making a elevated deck of the rooftop. Poles at the four corners supported a retractable tarpaulin for shade. Down in the studio were cabinets and a refrigerator and a long table crowded with spray cans and coffee cups bristling with paintbrushes. Below a window that by day looked out on an overgrown backyard was a stack of variously-sized blank canvases, while finished paintings leaned beside the door and a half-finished view of a mountain stood on an easel by the other window. The studio had no air-conditioning and smelled of spray-sealer, so Vickery had opened all the windows and then he and Castine had climbed up to the roof. They now sat in a couple of nylon-web beach chairs beneath the fluttering half-retracted tarpaulin. Vickery had brought along the bottle of Maker’s Mark and two hastily-rinsed coffee cups.
For several minutes neither of them spoke, then Castine asked, “What does gelid actually mean?”
“Really really cold.”
“Huh.” She took another sip of bourbon and stretched her feet out across the boards. “What are you going to do?”
“Well, speaking of cold, I’ve got some Stouffer’s frozen dinners in the studio refrigerator, and I was thinking of putting them in the microwave. Would you like lasagna or Beef Stroganoff?”
“I meant what are you going to do about . . . all this trouble today?”
“Oh—I think I’ll probably hide out here for a while. Then, if things still seem agitated in a week or so, figure a way to sell the trailer to a fictitious name and relocate it—at least to a different county, maybe out of state.” He glanced at her. “How about you?”
“Beef stroganoff, please. And I am sorry! Again! For wrecking—unwittingly helping to wreck—your life. Again.” She shook her head. “Actually I think I might be okay. With a good lawyer, I bet I could just get fired. I’m a civilian. The thing is, nobody saw me pepper spray Yoneda, and the effects will have worn off by now, undetectable. The Jeep—well, I was authorized personnel, so I don’t think running off in it was theft, exactly.” She smiled crookedly. “And at least I left it at a church, right? I’ll have to get another job pretty quick, though. Huh. I wonder how much lawyers charge.” She scratched her scalp over her old bullet scar. “What was the other word? Not enodsperm.”
“Endothermic. A reaction that absorbs heat. As opposed to exothermic, which is a reaction that releases heat.” He stared up at the overcast sky and recited, “‘But at what gelid, endothermic cost?’ What was the bit before that?”
“Something about the three Fates. And hundred-handed guys that wanted to steal their threads.”
Vickery frowned thoughtfully. “Whatever it was that happened in the riverbed was endothermic.”
“And how. In Wiltshire we measured some sudden drops in temperature at crop circle sites, but never near as cold as that.” Castine clasped her elbows and shivered. “Stroganoff?”
“Right.” Vickery stood up. “I’ll fetch Notchett’s papers too. Give me ten minutes, and don’t finish the bourbon.”
“I promise,” she said, “nothing.”
Fifteen minutes later they were eating out of plastic trays with plastic forks. Vickery had brought up a battery-powered work light and hung it on a rope that supported the tarpaulin. Scents of garlic and onions and sour cream contended with the reek of diesel exhaust on the chilly night air.
At last Vickery set his tray aside and picked up the papers Plowman had given him.
“What have we got,” he said. He pulled the loose pages free of the paperclip on the stapled booklet. “Let’s see. ‘The Moriai who hold existence firm . . .’ Well that’s unorthodox, the Moriai are the Fates, and they measure out the length of a person’s life, they don’t hold existence firm. And it says Clotho ‘generates the thread that binds.’ Again, that’s not how the myth goes, the threads are lifetimes, they don’t bind anything. ‘Lachesis, who spins out its tiny length’—okay, though it’s discouraging to call lifetimes ‘tiny.’ Then ‘Atropos, who ties it in a knot and clips it off.’” Well that’s right.”
Castine had finished her dinner and set her tray on the floor planks. “I don’t think he’s talking about lifetimes,” she said. “I think he’s using—this is a translation Frankie Notchett made, right?—I think he’s using that myth as cover to talk about something else.” She leaned over and tapped the paper. “See, it gives line numbers, 218 A through 218 J—I bet in the actual Greek Thingummy, line 218 is just followed by line 219, without these . . . ten extra lines.”
“Theogony.”
“That’s what I said. And Ourang-Outang—” She peered at the paper. “‘restrains the stranger hundred-handed ones/ Who every season hope to steal the threads,/ And weave them into wings wherewith to fly/ Even beyond the reach of Chaos . . .’”
Vickery squinted out past the edge of the roofs at the lights of Long Beach. “Ouranos,” he said absently, “not Ourang-Outang. It’s a different spelliing of Uranus.”
Castine said nothing to that.
“So let’s suppose,” Vickery went on slowly, “that in this poem Frankie was writing about our hundred-handed, or big-handed, creatures—our cortical homunculi, as Tacitus said—wanting to steal these threads that hold existence firm.”
“But the threads are tiny, it says here. How are they going to hold anything firm?”
“Tiny threads,” said Vickery, “knotted and cut off, passed around among the three Fates. And they hold existence firm.” He looked across the paper at Castine. “At Cole’s you told me that there’s electromagnetic screw-ups at your crop circles?”
“Right, phones and radios don’t work half the time, and if you fly a drone directly over one, it totally loses power. Sometimes they’ve just exploded.”
“And gravity lost power back there—when we were in the trailer, and again when we went to look at the riverbed after it was all over, and everything was frozen and there was that column of snow. Which I don’t think was frozen water.”
“Nitrogen, you said.”
“Or methane, maybe; that doesn’t have to be quite as cold to freeze.” He lifted the bourbon bottle and refilled his coffee cup. “Gravity, electromagnetism, and—and the tiny threads that hold existence firm.”
Castine didn’t say anything.
“But where would they go?” said Vickery, half to himself. “I can see reactions to their sudden absence, new equilibriums, but—they can’t just disappear.”
“Who,” said Castine, “the homuncular guys?”
“No. Forces.” He stood up and paced to the railing overlooking the backyard. “Plowman said the UFOs we saw weren’t physical objects—he said they’re real, though—as real as the splash when you throw a pair of shoes into a swimming pool. Disrupting the surface, see? The actual things aren’t at the surface, but the surface experiences their interaction. And the surface is all we know, our whole universe.”
“Of course,” said Castine. “That explains everything. But shoes? Did that homunculus we saw even have feet? I don’t recall. Now gloves—if it had gloves, you could throw one in a pool and float six people on it.” She nodded firmly.
Vickery gave her a sour grin. “You ever hear of a book called Flatland? It describes two-dimensional creatures that live in a plane, a two-dimensional surface, like . . . like animate oil smears on the surface of a pond, say, who can’t comprehend the air above, or the water below, because their whole world is the surface of the pond. Everything they see is straight ahead, visible only as either a dot or a horizontal line, because horizontal is all they’ve got.” He held his palm out flat and moved his hand back and forth. “The only way they’d could know that something was circular would be if they moved all the way around something they saw as a straight line and it didn’t get wider or narrower as they went around it.”
“Like parameciums on a microscope slide.”
“Okay, assuming there was no room for them to go over or under each other. Now what if one of them threw a, a frisbee at another of them, but, before it reached its target, we leaned in from above and poked one of your microscope slides into the surface, at a slant, so the frisbee went scooting up the slide?”
“The parameciums would figure it just vanished.”
“Right, but it still had its momentum, it was still moving just as fast as when the little guy threw it—just in a direction the parameciums can’t comprehend.”
“Up. Out of the pond surface. Out of their universe.” She took a sip of bourbon and breathed, “Oh, this is nice after Beef Stroganoff.”
Vickery returned to his chair. “Maybe I’m crazy. But the forces of gravity and electromagnetism are conveyed by force-carrying particles—gravitons and virtual photons.”
“Little frisbees.”
“Well, they don’t exactly have mass. But yeah. And it seemed like they were getting deflected away, back there by the riverbed. The forces were still working, probably . . . just somewhere besides where we were.”
“You think we’re the equivalent of flat parameciums, to whatever sort of aliens are dipping into our . . . reality?”
Vickery drained his cup and shrugged. “Right now I think it.”
“Okay,” Castine went on, “so the peculiar-handed creatures are stealing our gravity and electromagnetism, at crop circles. I get the frisbees—where do the threads come in?”
“There’s another force. Two more, actually, but the strongest of all is the one that holds quarks together in protons and neutrons. There’s three quarks in each of those, and this force extends from one quark to another and no further; extremely powerful, but very short range.”
“Ah. A tiny length, and Atropos ties it in a knot and clips it off. Does this force have frisbees too?”
“Sure. They’re called gluons, and they—”
“Sebastian! Frankie’s ghost said that! He quoted the ‘weave them into wings’ line, and then he said something about ‘glue on.’”
Vickery tried to remember what the ghost had said, but didn’t recall that. “Are you sure?”
“Yes. Frankie’s way ahead of you. Was. So why would it get real cold—real gelid!—if the homuncular guys steal the gluon frisbees?”
“Well, I think the universe has no choice but to instantly reconnect the quarks. Restore the stolen force, replace the hijacked frisbees. And to do that it has to suck energy, a whole lot of it, from the surroundings. Endothermic as all get-out.”
Castine frowned. “They do it more, lately. It wears off pretty quick, but—just in the last month or so, sometimes it’s got cold enough in crop circles to make metal break like glass. And there’s stories about funny gravity lately too. It used to be just the electrical stuff getting messed up.”
Vickery shifted uneasily in his chair. “Well, I guess if they only do it at crop circles . . .”
“But there’s more crop circles all the time. All over the world. And there’s gravity screwups now, too, and extreme drops in temperature.”
Like leaks in our gas tank, Vickery thought. He pulled his phone and battery out of his pocket and opened the back of the phone. But surely, he thought as he fitted the battery into the slot, it’s a really enormous gas tank! He held the phone’s power button down for several seconds, then laid it on the planks beside his chair.
He poured more bourbon into both cups, then raised his and inhaled across the aromatic surface of the liquor. Far out among the night-time streets of Long Beach a siren wailed into audibility and faded. The stars were lost behind dim, low-hanging clouds. He took a sip and set the cup aside.
“Your phone’s awake,” said Castine.
Vickery glanced down and saw that its screen was glowing. He sighed and picked it up and ran a finger across the screen. There was a tiny red 1 over the phone icon.
“I’ve got a message.” He touched it, then tapped in his password and held the phone to his ear, and after the automated voice noted that the call had occurred at 8:32 PM, an hour and a half earlier, he leaned sideways in his chair so Castine could listen in.
“Mr. Ardmore,” came a woman’s angry voice from the little speaker, “this is Trudy Plowman, Mr. Shithead’s daughter in Yucaipa. FedEx delivered some damn radar machine here today, and he was here just now and took it. He ordered it, paid for it with my Visa numbers, in my name! You tell him if he doesn’t return that thing tomorrow I’m calling Visa and telling them it’s fraud, identity theft—nine-hundred dollars! Shit!”
The call ended. Vickery tapped the top number listed under Recent.
“Radar?” he said to Castine as the phone made the connection. “He said there must have been radar at Giant Rock, I wonder if he wants to . . .”
The call went to voicemail, but Trudy Plowman broke in as soon as Vickery identified himself.
“I’ll tell him to return it immediately,” Vickery said, interrupting her repetition of the complaint she’d made in her recorded message, “but to know where he is, I need to know exactly what the radar machine was.”
“What? Why? Nine hundred—!”
“If I know what it is,” said Vickery patiently, “I’ll know where he plans to use it.”
“Oh. Let me get the receipt.” Trudy Plowman was back on the phone almost immediately. “Wide Range Underground Detection Locator. Ground Penetrating Radar. Does he think he’s going to find gold? That damned old—”
“I’ll deliver your message if I find him,” said Vickery, “and I’ll let you know.” He tapped the red dot while Trudy Plowman was still talking, and immediately turned his phone over and pried out the battery.
“I know where he’s going to be tomorrow,” he told Castine, “the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, where I first met him. He was in the parking structure off Hill Street that day, working a pair of copper wire dowsing rods. I guess he figures he needs more sophisticated technology.”
“Are you going to tell him to return his radar gadget? It’s rough he charged it to his daugher’s Visa.”
“It’s a family dispute, and he wouldn’t listen to me anyway.”
“She’ll probably call you back.”
“I may never put the battery back in.” He looked at his watch, then folded Notchett’s papers and slid them into his pocket. “It’s after ten,” he said, “and it’s been a . . . an eventful day. I’ve got a folding cot in the studio, and these chairs recline.” He raised his hand to prevent any protests. “And the guest gets the cot.”
“Okay.” Castine got to her feet. “Is there a bathroom?”
Vickery dug his keys out of his pocket and held one up as he handed them to her. “The door by the ladder leads you into the hall, and it’s on your left. The old guy who owns the house is asleep by now, but lock the door just in case.”
She nodded, holding the key. “Plowman said the crop circles are epitaphs over graves.”
Vickery stood up and folded his chair. “I remember,” he said, and tossed the chair down onto the shadowed grass.
“And he also said they’re Lazaruses. I wonder if all of them are going to rise from their graves at once. Take all the frisbees.”
“Could be.” Vickery picked up the plastic trays and dropped them into a bucket at the corner of the roof.
“If the aliens—the living ones that we can’t perceive, not their deformed, mass-bound ghosts—if they see the Earth like Notchett’s map, then—”
“Then what Notchett called their crash lines are parallel, I remember.” He unhooked the worklight from the tarpaulin rope and held it up.
“Yeah,” said Castine, walking carefully toward the ladder at the edge of the roof, “and all the force-disrupting columns standing up over the crop circles are parallel too, vertically. All over the world, all pointing straight up in the same direction, from that perspective.”
Castine had said, I wonder if all of them are going to rise from their graves at once, and it fleetingly reminded him of an old Steppenwolf song lyric. And he recalled the lines from Notchett’s translation of the Cosmogony: “every season hope to steal the threads,/ And weave them into wings wherewith to fly/ Even beyond the reach of Chaos . . .” and Notchett’s afterthought line, “But at what gelid, endothermic cost?”
Vickery spoke reluctantly. “Plowman said there’s a—that is, he said Notchett told him there’s a ‘grave too deep’ under downtown L.A., and when I saw him at the cathedral messing around with dowsing rods—I bet he was trying to locate it. Maybe he meant it’s too deep for them to rise out of.”
Castine was already a couple of rungs down the ladder, but looked up, the house key gleaming in her hand. “You think he means to push the things into it?”
“No. He’s—I guess he’s always been—a sort of oracle. He learns how things work, and once in a while he’ll tell somebody something. Like giving us these papers.”
“Do you think anybody is going to push the things into the grave?”
“Notchett might have. Probably there’s other people.”
Castine nodded. “Plowman seemed to know a lot more than just what’s in those papers.”
“He doesn’t want to see you again. Me either, by association.”
She stepped down another rung, and now only her face was visible above the edge of the roof. She opened her mouth as if to say something, then just stared at him.
Vickery sighed. “We can talk about it tomorrow. There’s more frozen dinners for breakfast.”
Nobody had noticed that the Hispanic teenager who mowed the front and back lawns of the old house appeared in the afternoons on his puttering 125-cc Honda motorcycle and left the place in the mornings; unsurprisingly, since the house was at the far end of a cul-de-sac, between a radiator repair shop and a City of Bellflower Vehicle Maintenance Station. The 1950s ranch-style house had been vacant since 2004, to judge by the newspapers the boy had found scattered on the floor when he first took up covert residence.
His phone was now charging at an electric socket that he could reach through the folding security gate of the radiator repair shop’s garage. Back in the house, he had parked his motorcycle in the dark kitchen, and blankets were hung over the bedroom window so that the light from his battery-powered lantern wouldn’t show outside.
He was sitting on the cement floor, surrounded by shoe boxes, and as he sorted through their oddly-assorted contents he metally replayed Galvan’s phone call: Santiago, I think Sebastian Vickery’s back in town. You’ve found him for me in the past—you think you can do it again? I could put the word out among the freeway-side gypsies, but I just want to know where he is, I can get in touch with him myself. I’ll pay you a hundred dollars and a month’s free food at any of my taco trucks.
Among the contents of the boxes were a couple of handguns with dubious histories, a set of lockpicks, several forged driver’s licenses, a small New Testament and a half-pint bottle of peppermint schnapps with an inch of clear liquor still in it . . .
The only things he always kept on his person were the handgun he had taken from an unconscious and possibly dead government agent three years ago, and the leather bands around his wrists, into which were subsumed the ghosts of his mother and father, killed by a hit-and-run driver on the 5 Freeway while sneaking into the country with their then-twelve-year-old son.
Santiago pushed an emptied shoe box aside and opened a fresh one; and it was evidently from the right time, for on top of the litter inside was a medallion that had belonged to an old man called Isaac Laquedem, who had taken Santiago in and taught him how to stay alive in the cold streets of Los Angeles after the deaths of his parents. Santiago lifted it aside and set it down carefully; then pulled from the box a four-inch wire framework with a tangle of brown fabric stiffened around it.
He carefully pried at the fabric until he had separated it into two handkerchief-sized squares of hard, wrinkled linen; and he wiped his fingers on his shirt, for the brown color and the stiffness were dried blood.
A year and a half ago, after killing Isaac Laquedem, Simon Harlowe had decided that Sebastian Vickery and Ingrid Castine were essential parts of the group mind he wanted to start up, because after they drove one of Galvan’s taco trucks into some kind of hell, and came back again, they were supernaturally loosened in a way that fitted Harlowe’s plans. Even their blood was weird—a blot of it anywhere would be detectably pulled toward the living body it came from. And to be sure of not losing track of Vickery and Castine, Harlowe had got blood from Vickery on one of these cloths and blood from Castine on the other.
Got it pretty liberally, Santiago thought now, eyeing the twisted brown shapes.
On the night of Halloween in 2018, in a clearing at the bottom of Topanga canyon, Vickery and Santiago had both shot Simon Harlowe, and Santiago clung to the conviction that it had been his bullet that had killed the man.
Earlier on that day Santiago had learned that Harlowe had been tracking Vickery by using one of these cloths as a directional pendulum, and before fleeing the scene of the shooting Santiago had quickly peered through the windshields of the cars parked on Topanga Canyon Boulevard, and spotted this wire framework with its attached dark cloths on the dashboard of a Chevy Tahoe. Always alert for something that might prove to be of value to someone, the boy had broken the car’s window and snatched the frame and the cloths, and then fled.
He had thought of selling the cloths to Vickery, but the man had disappeared immediately after that violent night.
But now Vickery was apparently in L.A. again. Santiago would not sell him out to Galvan and her “secret agent types”—Vickery was a friend, or something close to that—but he might give Vickery a chance to outbid Galvan.
Santiago gingerly picked up one of the stiff cloths, and didn’t detect any lateral pull. He lifted the other, and again saw no tilt in the way it hung from his thumb and forefinger.
Santiago untied one of his shoes and pulled the shoestring out through all the grommets, and he tied it around a corner of one of the cloths and held it up.
The cloth was dangling at an angle that diverged visibly from the vertical. One of them is back, he thought. He untied the shoestring and tied it onto the other cloth, and held it up. It too hung at an unnatural slant, and in the same direction.
Vickery and Castine are both back, thought Santiago, and certainly together. He let go of the shoestring and sat back.
Twice in the last three years Vickery and Castine had been in L.A. together, and both times it had been connected with a big disaster about to happen, which in their clumsy ways they helped to cancel. And only a couple of hours ago something very weird had happened in the L.A. River down by Rosecrans; and Santiago had heard that a bunch of flying saucers had zipped around over the Mojave Desert this morning.
Santiago made his irregular living by keeping track of what was going on in the paranormal or supernatural subcultures of Los Angeles—following people, watching the tides of the indeterminacy fields the freeways generated, acting as courier for people who didn’t trust conventional means of communication.
Whatever Vickery and Castine were involved in was probably something he should take into his considerations.
He lifted the medallion, its string still stiff in places with old Laquedem’s blood—once magical in the same way that Vickery’s and Castine’s blood was, but with no living body anymore for it to point toward—and he draped it around his neck and tucked it inside his shirt.
Santiago began putting the rest of the mementos and guns and tools back in the shoe boxes, but he ket the bloody cloths to one side, and when he stood up he glanced around uncertainly, then carried them into the kitchen and put them in the refrigerator. The house had no electricity and the refrigerator wasn’t cold, but he doubted that he’d be able to sleep if he imagined the cloths slowly moving across the floor in the dark.