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CHAPTER SIX:

Epitaphs Over Lazaruses

Vickery parked his camper truck at the curb of one of the central lanes of the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, and when he climbed out onto the asphalt pavement he squinted around in the freshening afternoon breeze. The lane was lined with tall palm trees, but the green grass on either side was streaked with the shadows of randomly placed pine and juniper and oak trees, with variously sized headstones of black or white marble receding to apparent infinity under the mingled canopies of foliage. Plowman could be watching from anywhere, and Vickery slowly turned in a circle, making his face visible in every direction.

Castine had stepped out onto the grass, and because of anxiety about traffic cameras and facial recognition software she was wearing newly purchased sunglasses and a knitted cap. She had also bought a long black trenchcoat, and altogether looked nothing like the woman who had been at Giant Rock eight hours earlier.

“Where’s the tomb we slept in three years ago?” she asked.

Vickery waved behind them. “In the southwest corner. Probably it’s not vacant anymore.”

“I wonder if the sleeping bags are still in it.” She turned to peer down a cypress-lined walkway. “Anything your man Plowman tells us is going to be upsetting, isn’t it?” She nodded, as if glumly agreeing with herself. “But at least he’s crazy, right?”

“We can only hope.”

She sighed. “I’d like to find out something that could somehow vindicate me.” She gave him a frail smile. “Us.”

Vickery nodded ahead, toward where a pyramidal tomb blocked the view of the mausoleum, and Castine looked in that direction. A tall, burly old man was trudging across the grass, his eyes hidden behind mirrored aviator sunglasses and his hands in the pockets of a worn and scuffed brown leather jacket. He was bald and clean shaven, and as he came closer, deep lines in his tanned face became evident. A cigarette was tucked in one corner of his mouth, trailing smoke on the breeze.

He stopped walking when he was several yards away from Vickery and Castine, and rocked on his heels, twisting his head one way and the other as if to let each of his eyes get a look at them.

“So were you out at Giant Rock this morning?” he asked Vickery. His voice was a cavernous rumble, with a hint of New Jersey in the vowels. When Vickery nodded, the old man went on, “Forget it all and hope nobody got your license number. You think you know something about this stuff, but trust me, you’re a kid who’s used to sandboxes trying to comprehend the Great Basin Desert. And there’s Gila monsters. Go home and watch UFO videos on Youtube.”

Vickery thought about the ominous interest Naval Intelligence had taken in him, and about Castine’s predicament . . . and about the thing she had seen in a crop circle two nights ago.

“We’re involved,” he said. “And, uh,” he added with a self-conscious shrug, “this isn’t our first rodeo.”

Castine rolled her eyes.

Plowman squinted from one of them to the other. To Vickery, he said, “Frankie told me you wouldn’t listen to good advice. I thought you’d have a bit of sense. Especially,” he added, nodding toward Castine, “if you got a girl along.”

“I can take care of myself,” said Castine.

“I bet.” The old man looked back the way he’d come, then shook his head and exhaled. “Okay. You’re both adults and apparently sober. So who who was there, this morning? Military, with radar?”

“No,” Vickery said. “There was a van that probably had government agents in it—Sensitive Assignment Specialists?” He glanced at Castine, who nodded. “But it exploded and they all must have been killed. Probably a bomb—”

“And UFOs!” said Castine. “In the sky!”

“I heard about the bomb,” said Plowman thoughtfully. “Russians, Chinese? A more covert power?” The mirror lenses of his sunglasses turned toward Castine. “What? UFOs? Those weren’t actual objects, sweetheart. And they don’t usually show up except when they’re drawn by dual-band radar, most often X-band and S-band frequencies overlapping. Military.”

Castine evidently didn’t relish being called sweetheart. “Not actual objects?” she said stiffly. “They cast shadows.”

Plowman shook his head dismissively. “Sure, and they reflect everything in the electromagnetic spectrum . . . and then some. But think about it, kid. Physical objects of any appreciable mass couldn’t change direction instantly at hypersonic speeds. They are real, though—as real as the splash when you throw a pair of shoes into a swimming pool. But what did you mean by throwing them in, eh? That’s the question.” To Vickery, he said, “Something crashed near there, last night. What was that?”

“It was a faked UFO. Some guys went out in trucks and brought it back—it looked like it was originally a translucent glass or ceramic sphere with an aluminum cube in it, about ten feet in diameter, but it was all busted up.”

Plowman was frowning. “Wings? An engine?”

Vickery shrugged. “These guys said they got all there was. And it was just this broken glassy stuff and bent metal.”

Castine was visibly getting impatient. “We need to ask you—” she began.

“Hold your horses, girl. Ardmore, that makes no sense. Why would they—”

All three of them jumped then, for a young man in a sweatshirt and jeans had just stepped out from behind a narrow marble tomb a few yards away across the grass. His brown hair was in tangled disarray but didn’t shift in the breeze.

“Frankie my boy!” exclaimed Plowman, starting toward him.

Vickery had recognized Frankie Notchett, but his chest felt suddenly hollow and cold, and he caught Plowman’s arm. “Wait a sec, Pierce.”

Behind him he heard Castine’s sudden gasp.

Notchett’s mouth was opening and closing, and then he said, “The stranger hundred-handed ones, who every season hope to steal the threads—”

“What?” said Plowman to Vickery; then, to Notchett, “What?”

Castine was close behind Vickery. “Don’t look at it—”

“—And weave them into wings—Listen to me! They’ll take . . . and . . . glue on . . .” Notchett paused, shaking, then opened his mouth very wide.

Castine threw herself at Plowman’s knees while Vickery yanked him to the side; the big man toppled, and all three of them wound up rolling on the grass as something hissed through the air above them.

“Get,” said Castine through clenched teeth, “away from it!”

She and Vickery managed to drag Plowman back to the asphalt and around the front bumper of Vickery’s truck.

Plowman sat up on the pavement, glancing quickly around. “Frankie!” he yelled, “get down!” He squinted at Vickery. “Snipers?”

“It’s not Frankie,” said Castine, panting, “it’s his ghost.”

“Bullshit, girl,” said Plowman, getting to his feet.

Vickery had stood up, and was peering across the truck’s hood at the figure that still swayed in front of the tomb. Its long tongue had retracted back into its face.

“Wherewith to fly,” it called, “even beyond the reach of Chaos—”

“Two and two is four,” said Vickery clearly, “and four squared is sixteen. Take off your shoes to count it if you don’t believe me.”

The Frankie Notchett apparition looked down at its shoes, which were now flickering—black dress shoes at one moment, white sneakers in the next. “That’s your opinion,” it muttered.

“And minus sixteen it’s nothing!” said Castine, standing now beside Vickery. “Think about it—it’s cold math, etched in stone—nothing!”

“You think you’re so smart—” The figure in jeans and sweatshirt spun to face away from them, then was facing them again, and a second later it was spinning so rapidly that its face was a blur. Then with a soft thump that shivered the air it was simply gone.

Plowman stared open-mouthed at the spot where the ghost had stood; then he snatched off his sunglasses and turned to Castine.

She spread her hands. “A ghost. I’m sorry. Frankie is dead.”

“Dead?” Plowman’s mouth worked. “What was the math for?”

“Ghosts . . . hate it.”

“I’m not crazy about it myself, dammit, but I’m still here.”

Castine rolled her eyes. “Ghosts happen because of a field the freeways throw, interaction between moving and stationary free wills. It’s a violation of determinism, okay? But math is pure determinism, no wiggle-room, and if you can get a ghost to look squarely at it, the ghost’s virtual wave form—its possibility—collapses.”

After a few seconds Plowman said, “Uh huh.” He turned to Vickery. “Who’s your girl?”

“An old friend. I trust her.”

“We need to know—” Castine began, then just looked at Vickery and widened her eyes.

Vickery nodded and said to Plowman, “What was it Frankie wanted to show me, a week ago?”

“His ghost,” whispered Plowman, squinting again at the empty patch of grass in front of the tomb. “I’ll be damned. I saw ’em when I worked here, but they just sat on their tombstones in the middle of the night, and sang. Not like this.” He slowly put his sunglasses back on.

Vickery repeated his question, and Plowman squinted irritably at him. “Maybe this isn’t your . . . what did you say? First rodeo? Huh. Cute. But believe me, this isn’t stuff you’ll be happier for knowing.” He glared at Castine, who had glanced at her watch. “You got somewhere to be, math girl? You’re better off there, believe me.”

Castine dropped her hand and shook her head.

“Frankie wanted me to know it,” said Vickery.

The old man sighed, looked back at where Frankie Notchett’s ghost had stood, then patted his jacket pocket. “He sent me three copies of some of his data, and said I should pass one on to you. I brought one along, in case you had no more sense than he has. Had. You get the copy I spilled coffee on.”

He pulled a sheaf of papers out of an inner pocket and passed it across the truck’s hood to Vickery. “It’ll scare you away, if you can understand it.” He looked over his shoulder. “Shit! You’re sure that was Frankie’s ghost? Not some kind of astral projection?”

“No,” said Castine. “The extended tongue—and you’re lucky it didn’t hit you—and the changing shoes, and the terminal Y-axis spin. That’s a ghost, beyond—”

Plowman interrupted, speaking to Vickery. “So they killed him? Why the hell? I’m just glad some of their Sensitive Assignment Specialists got blown up! What were they doing out there this morning?” Before Vickery could answer, he went on, “Why would they drop a fake UFO?”

“It was disinformation,” said Castine, “to discredit any saucer nuts who’d be fooled and say it was real. But it was mainly a decoy to draw you, and Sebastian here.” She spread her hands. “They didn’t know real UFOs would show up.”

“Sebastian?”

Castine clicked her tongue. “William Sebastian Ardmore, to his friends.”

Plowman tilted his head back, facing Castine, and for several seconds he didn’t speak. Finally he said, “Who are we talking about? NSA, CIA? The Russians?”

She glanced uncertainly at Vickery.

“I think you can tell him,” said Vickery. “I think he’s an ally.”

“Emeritus, at most,” growled Plowman. “For remote consultation.”

Castine exhaled and then took a deep breath. “Well, it’s the Office of Naval Intelligence,” she said, “but I think it’s an off-the-record sort of operation. I can’t imagine who’d blow up the van they had there . . .”

“And you know all this how, darlin’?”

Castine looked again at Vickery, who nodded.

“Until last night,” she said, pushing out every word against evident reluctance, “I was a civilian employee of the Office of Naval Research. I was doing . . . crop circle work in England, in Wiltshire, but last night I was reassigned to ONI, and they sent me to Giant Rock this morning to identify Bill Ardmore.”

“She warned me off before they could grab me,” put in Vickery, “and then she went AWOL.”

“And they want you too,” said Castine to Plowman. “Because of something you know, and might have told Bill.” She pointed at the papers in Vickery’s hand. “Maybe what’s in there.”

“Something I know.” Plowman took a long look around at the trees and the headstones. “I know a lot of weird things, and I don’t like the way the government is likely to use ’em. What’s crop circle work?”

“I, uh—well, it’s classified. Hah! And anyway, it’s got nothing to do with this business today.”

“Frankie didn’t agree,” Plowman said. “Along with air-shows like what you saw, there’ve been sand-angels around Giant Rock for as long as anybody’s been going out there. Hm? That’s patterns that showed up in the desert—crop circles without the crops, you might say. Have you figured out what your crop circles are?” He laughed shortly and waved around at the headstones studding the grass. “Epitaphs. Over Lazaruses. Lazari?”

“They’re graves?” said Castine. “Of what?”

“Of the ones who throw shoes into the pool. They mistake overlapping radar waves for the splash of shoes that somebody else threw in, see? So they do a counter-step—uselessly, but they keep doing it. They don’t think, exactly. And when they fall into the pool themselves, as it were, then they can’t help but show up as physical objects, with actual mass. But they’re ghosts, then.”

Castine burst out excitedly, “Do they look like creatures with huge hands?”

Plowman’s sunglasses reflected her wide-eyed face. Slowly he said, “Sometimes, yeah. Sometimes they’ve got a hundred hands.” To Vickery, he added, “And Frankie said there’s a grave too deep, under downtown L.A. When you first met me, at the cathedral, I was trying to track its lines.” He took a breath as if about to say more, then looked toward Castine and just exhaled. “There’s notes on the photocopies you’ve got there.”

He shoved his hands in his pockets and stepped back. “You’re on your own. Good luck.” He turned and began walking away.

“How can we get in touch with you?” Vickery asked.

“You can’t,” the old man called back over his shoulder, “and don’t waste your time trying to follow me. Your girl’s too much of a hot potato for me to be any kind of ally, sorry.” Walking backward for a few paces, he added, “AWOL or not, they’ll find her, and you, and most likely do you like they did Frankie. Not me.”

Then Vickery saw only Plowman’s receding back.

A full minute later, after the old man had disappeared around the mausoleum, Vickery said, thoughtfully, “He must have had sex with somebody who died near a freeway sometime.”

“Yuck, thank you,” said Castine, walking back to the truck and opening the passenger side door. “I’d rather picture him having killed somebody by a freeway.”

Vickery nodded and dug the keys out of his pocket. Each of them had learned that ghosts could be seen only by people who had an intimate connection with someone whose life had ended in the weird freeway-generated field, and a now-dead ghostmonger had told them, Ending someone’s earthly life for him is about as intimate as you can get.

Vickery and Castine had both been intimate, in one way or the other, with people who had died within the freeway field.

He got in and laid Notchett’s notes on the seat.

“This was a bad idea, meeting him,” Castine said as she slid in on the passenger side and closed the door. “If Lubitz’s people do get hold of him, he can tell them that Bill Ardmore has the information, now. And they evidently killed that Frankie guy.”

Vickery nodded ruefully. “True. But they’re not likely to catch Plowman in the next hour or so.” He touched the papers on the seat. “Let’s go to my place and at least see what we’ve got.”

He pushed the gear shift into first and drove ahead; but immediately had to put on the brakes.

Peering ahead through the dusty windshield, Castine said, “Are they all drunk? Some funeral.”

At least a dozen well-dressed men and woman were milling around on the grass and in the lane. Several had fallen down and, despite energetic aid from their companions, were having difficulty getting back up again.

One corpulent old man’s tuxedo became a pair of striped pajamas for a moment, and then was a tuxedo again.

“Don’t look at them,” Vickery said sharply.

“Oh. Yeah.” Castine’s face was taut. “Back out of here.”

But the figures were moving aside, waving Vickery on.

“I think they mean to let us pass.”

“They’ll break your windows with their tongues. Back out.” A year and a half ago they had seen an SUV’s window shattered by the intense cold of a ghost’s tongue.

Vickery glanced at the side mirror. “They’re behind us too. Solid. We go ahead.”

Castine looked at the mirror on her door, then just nodded, tight-lipped.

With the tires barely rotating, the truck slowly moved forward, and some of the ghosts actually bowed and curtsied as the old vehicle passed them. Some blew kisses. Several took off hats that disappeared moments afterward.

Sunlight fragmented by green leaves slanted along the lane, and from the corner of his eye Vickery saw that the ghost mouths were all opening and closing in unison, and then he became aware of their frail voices, singing. He didn’t recognize the melody, but it seemed to express fond reflection, wistful retreat.

For several moments they all held one sustained note, and for those moments their appearances didn’t change; then the melody shifted and they were again a confusion of flickering clothing.

He glanced at Castine, and she was blinking rapidly.

Vickery passed the last of them just below the steps to the mausoleum, and when he looked again at the mirror the lane behind him was empty except for a few dry leaves spinning across the asphalt. He looked for some trace of fading silhouettes among the shrubbery on either side, but there was nothing.

He turned left and accelerated to ten miles an hour; and he rolled down his window, glad of the cool, jasmine-scented breeze on his damp face.

“Poor forsaken shells,” said Castine in a hoarse whisper. “What are we, royalty?”

“They, uh, were looking at you.”

“Well I’m not coming back here, ever.” She raised her arm to press the cuff of her trenchcoat to her eyes. “Dammit, Sebastian, when did this sort of thing become our lives?”

Vickery didn’t anwer; he just sped up, recalling the tracery of lanes that would lead them back to the entrance and Santa Monica Boulevard.


“Explain,” said Rayette Yoneda.

She was standing six feet away from Tacitus’s rented white Honda in the back parking lot of the IHOP, grateful for the shade of the restaurant’s blank back wall, for she was wearing her jacket. Beyond the wide parking lot, one-story houses sat quietly amid palm and Joshua trees. She could feel the hot desert wind fluffing her short hair, and the only sound was the faint mutter of the idling Honda’s exhaust.

The gray-bearded old man lifted his hands from the steering wheel. “I’m afraid I got you into trouble,” he said. “I didn’t mean to.”

Yoneda made a beckoning hurry-up gesture.

“There’s a group,” Tacitus went on quickly, “what you might call militant UFO sympathizers, the, uh—the Zeta Reticuli Chess Club. Zeta Reticuli is a star you can only see in the southern hemisphere, and they believe the UFO aliens come from a planet orbiting it. The chess club folks think you people have live aliens in captivity at Area 51, and they believe you want to capture more, to do experiments on, and the chess club will do anything, break the law, to stop you.”

Yoneda mentally cursed herself for having waited two and a half hours for this evident madman to show up, and for having spent that time sitting in a back booth in the IHOP, to the decreasingly concealed impatience of the waitresses, when she could have got a few hours’ sleep. But she wanted to know why Tacitus thought she was a government agent.

“What is ‘my people’?”

“I saw you draw a gun and get on your phone when the van full of agents blew up. You’ve got to be Air Force Intelligence.” He waved impatiently. “But the thing is, I called the chess club people and told then that, and I told them where you’re staying. And from what they said then, I got the idea that they were going to send some people to that motel to get you.”

Yoneda supposed it was possible. Sourly she wondered if the people sent to get her would have been as elderly and out of shape as this specimen.

Could there be any credit in reporting on this chess club group, if in fact this crazy old guy wasn’t just fantasizing? It would be nice to salvage something from this disastrous day.

“You don’t actually know where Plowman lives, do you?” she said.

Tacitus narrowed his eyes for a moment, then shook his head. “That was a bluff. But I do know the address of the guy who drove off in the camper truck. I got his license plate number, and one of the, uh . . . chess club members is a cop, and he got me the name and address. The guy lives in Long Beach, I can take you there. I’d like to talk to him myself, as it happens. I got the idea you were following him before your . . . girlfriend? . . . pushed you out of your Jeep.”

Vickery! thought Yoneda. Finding him would go a long way toward redeeming this failure. But ONI surely checked with LAPD and the DMV for the address of any Sebastian Vickery. This Tacitus fellow might not be bluffing now—I never told him it was a Jeep that I was driving, so he must at least have seen Vickery’s truck.

“What was the name?”

“Ah.” Tacitus found a cigarette from somewhere on the passenger seat and flipped it into his mouth. “Of course.” He paused to light it. “You people have access to the DMV too,” he went on, speaking through smoke, “and if you knew the guy’s name, your lot could just go there and get him.” He gunned the engine. “Get in.”

“That’s all bullshit, about the chess club, isn’t it?”

“We can talk on the way.”

Yoneda looked around at the empty parking lot, snapping her fingers in uncomfortable indecision. Short of beating up this old man, it seemed unlikely that she could get him to tell her the name Vickery was using; and in fact the old man was seeming to be tougher than he had a few hours ago. He seemed more alert now, and he’d even lost the trace of a southern accent. Going with him would mean standing up the two agents Lubitz was sending out, when they arrived at the motel at five . . . but she had her phone.

“Nobody’s likely to look in that box,” said Tacitus, nodding toward the corner of the building, where a box that had once contained bottles of ketchup sat on the asphalt. “Your people will find your phone there, I imagine.”

Yoneda laughed and stepped back. “On your way, saucer boy.”

Tacitus shrugged and smiled, and clicked the Honda’s engine into gear.

But I don’t want to report that I got this far and then let it go, Yoneda thought dizzily. I can’t let the screw-up stand. It went badly today, she had said into the wind phone, thinking of her father, but I’ll make up for it.

She stepped in front of the Honda, holding up her phone; and when Tacitus rocked the car to a halt, she walked to the ketchup box, held the phone six inches over it, and let it drop.

Tacitus reached across the console to open the passenger-side door.


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