North of Hollywood Boulevard the 101 freeway cuts through the Cahuenga Pass, with Mulholland Drive tracing the hill ridges to the west and the half-mile-long Hollywood Reservoir, which Lucy always said had the silhouette of a scared cat, lying just over a rise to the east. Beyond the reservoir the hills ascend to a crest at Deronda Drive before falling away again toward Beachwood Canyon, and old Benjamin’s house stood, as it had for at least a hundred years, on the western downhill side of Deronda. The house was three stories, with the street-facing front door on the top floor and two downstairs floors at lower levels on the slope. Below the bottom floor, accessible by a new set of cement stairs, was an unpaved lot almost wide enough to accommodate the eight cars now parked in it, though an old Volkswagen van and a 1990s Buick were blocked in.
The house had stood unmoved through a dozen earthquakes and landslides over the years, though slopes and structures around it had several times slid downhill in the direction of the reservoir. In 1948, so the family story went, a landslide had broken off one side of a swimming pool up the hill across the street from the front door, and though the water had poured down the slope and through a row of cypress trees and had flooded the pavement, the water had splashed up and stopped just short of the old man’s property, as if at an invisible wall. Lacking sandbags, the family had hastily shoveled piles of dirt against the front edge of the halted water to provide an explanation for its unnatural restraint, though in fact it all flowed away down the street so quickly that neighbors never even had a chance to notice its odd hesitancy at the border of the old man’s place. New owners of the house up the hill had put in another swimming pool sometime in the sixties, and Benjamin had laid in a stock of impressive-looking sandbags in case it should happen again.
In the other direction, a balcony on the middle floor looked west across the descending slopes of roofs and trees to the reservoir and the distant freeway, and the glass door had been slid open.
Benjamin’s eldest daughter had stepped out of the house and carefully set a martini glass on the balcony rail as the wind from the west fluttered her short green-striped white hair. “We need to get custody of him,” she said. “He should not have been driving.”
“If we can get some kind of custody,” said her older brother, who had walked out behind her, “then it’s really a good thing he was driving.” His black Adidas sweatsuit was tight over his abdomen, and he tugged absently at the waistband. “It could be the best thing we could have hoped for.”
“Colin!” came a call from inside. “Imogene! No talking privately.”
Imogene reached for her glass and knocked it off balance, but she quickly frowned at it and it righted itself, having spilled only a few drops of gin. When she had picked it up and she and her brother had stepped back into the dining room, the man who had called them waved to a couple of unoccupied chairs at the long mahogany table that ran the length of the room. Seven people were already seated, and a couple more stood over drinks by the bar in the corner. The breeze through the open sliding glass door carried the scents of mesquite and sage, and afternoon sunlight reflected off the polished table and threw patches of light on the ceiling beams.
“We weren’t saying anything secret, Blaine,” said Imogene. “Just that we need to get him put away someplace.”
At the other end of the table a chubby fellow with a two-day beard stubble said, “We’ve got to find him first—find his talisman, I mean. When exactly did he die?”
Colin had sat down beside Imogene. He looked at his watch and said, “Six hours and a bit ago, according to the Highway Patrol. I expect he’s at Forest Lawn by now.”
“Forest Lawn by Griffith Park? Burials there start at around seven or eight thousand dollars.”
“That’s hardly our immediate—” began Blaine, but he halted when footsteps sounded on the stairs. “Lucy,” he said quickly to a girl standing by the bar, “did you call anyone else? You didn’t call Vivian, did you?”
“No,” said Lucy, the youngest of them. Her dark hair was parted in the middle and hung straight down to her narrow shoulders, and she was wearing a baggy pullover sweater and a plaid skirt. “The only one I called who isn’t here yet was Tom.”
“The old man’s court fool,” said Colin.
“Better than an ex-wife,” muttered another of the siblings, a lean middle-aged man in a Polo shirt who liked to be called Skipper. “She’d still boss us all around like we were kids.”
Colin and Imogene exchanged a superior glance. They had both moved out of the house by the time Benjamin had married Vivian.
From the stairs now came a clatter that could only be old Benjamin’s rack of fencing foils being knocked off the wall.
Blaine’s gaze rolled toward the ceiling. “He comes, like the catastrophe of the old comedy.”
“I suppose that’s from something,” said Imogene, with a weary sigh.
Skipper nodded morosely. “Lear, act two. Enter Edgar, the fool.” A wasp had come in through the open door and was buzzing around the table; he pointed at it, and it flared brightly and fell smoldering to the table.
One of his sisters clicked her tongue and swatted the thing off the table with her hat. “I suppose you expect poor Lucy to re-wax the—” She halted, for Tom had finally shuffled into the room.
Tom blinked around in confusion. He couldn’t remember the last time all of his siblings, from all three of his father’s marriages, had been in one room together. The only one he really knew was Lucy, who must now be about seventeen; before he had moved out two years ago, he and Lucy had been the only ones who still lived here with the old man. Since then it had been just Lucy.
“Hallo, Tom,” called Evelyn, one of the middle-range older sisters. “What’s the good word?”
Tom had never known any answer to that, though Evelyn always asked it, and he just shook his head and then pushed his disordered dark hair back from his sweaty forehead.
“Lucy didn’t drive you,” remarked Imogene. “How did you get here, Tommy?”
“Walked,” he said. “Up from the bus stop at Westshire.”
“With feet for oars,” observed Blaine, “plying with speed your partnership of legs.”
“Housman,” said Skipper gloomily, “ ‘Fragment of a Greek Tragedy.’ ”
Walking self-consciously toward the bar, Tom took quick, sidelong glances at his siblings, noting changes. There was Blaine, going bald and apparently making up for it with a gray goatee over his black turtleneck sweater; Tom recalled that Blaine was sometimes able to read minds, and played poker a lot at the Bicycle and Commerce casinos because of that, but Benjamin had said that Blaine relied so heavily on his occasional advantage that he never properly learned the strategies of the game, and wound up living almost entirely on the allowance Benjamin provided. And at the other end of the table were Colin and Imogene; Imogene claimed to be a fortune-teller to movie stars, and for all Tom knew, it was true, though she had never brought any around when Tom had lived here. Colin drove a convertible Porsche but did nothing at all that Tom was aware of. Both their faces were smoother and glossier than when Tom had last seen them, and he guessed that they had “had work done.” Everybody said the old house badly needed to have work done, and Tom had only the vaguest idea of what the phrase might mean.
“Lucy,” Evelyn went on, “you’ve been living here with him. Where would he hide something like that?”
Lucy handed Tom a can of Coke, without his asking, and he smiled his thanks. The two of them were the only ones who didn’t drink.
Lucy, he thought, was looking thinner than she had when he had last seen her, and she was surely too young for the new lines in her cheeks. Her sole gift was that she could sometimes chill things, so in spite of her age she was generally the bartender, though her efforts tended to make the room uncomfortably warm. All Tom could do in the way of the uncanny was to conjure up smells during moments of stress—usually the aroma of Ovaltine.
A chessboard lay at one end of the bar, with the various pieces arranged in four rows. Tom idly picked up one that looked like a castle.
Lucy looked past him. “Like what?”
“A talisman,” said Evelyn. “Like . . . a box, a picture . . . ” She waved at Tom and added, “A chess piece! But it’ll have his horoscope sign on it, Libra. That’ll either be a picture of scales—that’s those two dishes on chains that you weigh things in—or the constellation itself; it looks like a kid’s drawing of a house, with bent walls.”
“Do we destroy it?” asked the chubby fellow. Tom was surprised to recognize him as Alan, who, years ago now, had tried without success to teach him to swim.
“No, idiot,” said Imogene. “What, you want toothaches, bad eyes—?”
“Cancer,” added Colin, “strokes . . . ”
Blaine stood up and stepped toward the bar. Tom was still holding the chess piece, but hastily replaced it when Blaine gave him a crooked grin and said, “You up for a game, Tommy? Shall I spot you that rook? Hmm? No?”
Blaine played chess a lot at the Los Angeles Chess Club and frequently pointed out that he was rated a Class A player, which was apparently the best.
Tom’s hands were shaking, and he had set the castle piece on the edge of the board; it fell over and rolled off the bar and hit the floor, and Tom bumped his head bending to pick it up.
Blaine shook his head and turned toward the table. “If we can find the talisman, and get custody, get him contained,” he said, “we can threaten him with its destruction, if need be. And we can probably keep him quiescent by telling him we’re looking for a body he can move into. We’ll use a Ouija board—have him list what characteristics he’d like, how we should prepare the person—and then we could tell him we’re searching high and low for somebody. We could string it out for years!”
An old man with a long white beard stirred at the far end of the table. It was William, who Tom was pretty sure was Benjamin’s eldest son, probably over ninety by now. He was always frowning and dignified, but Lucy said he looked like a sidekick in a western movie, who would at some point do a comical dance in the dusty street outside the saloon. “How will you contain him?” he asked in a gravelly voice.
“Uh,” said Blaine, “Colin?”
Colin frowned. “Sink his talisman in some non-conductive fluid like glycerin so he won’t arc and get one of us. And in some solidly moored container, so he can’t shake it over. We’ve got to—”
“Glycerin’s hygroscopic,” objected Alan. “It attracts water, which would have minerals in it, so before long it would be a conductor. Transformer oil is what you want.”
“What if it’s a houseplant?” demanded William testily. “A bonsai tree?”
“Lucy, did he have a bonsai?” asked Blaine.
Lucy just shook her head and shrugged.
“Then we can make a Faraday cage out of coat hangers and tinfoil or something,” said Colin impatiently. “But we have to find it.”
Evelyn leaned back and looked at the ceiling. “It’s a big house,” she said, “the wizard’s castle. Cluttered up with a hundred years’ worth of junk.”
“And he might have it off-site,” added Alan. “God knows who might touch it.”
A woman Tom didn’t even recognize shoved her chair back and stood up. “Oh, why did he think he could still drive, at his age?” she wailed. “Damned old fool.”
Beside Tom, Lucy clenched her fists. “The Highway Patrol says the other car cut him off!” she burst out. “And he was smarter than any of you!”
That was certainly true. Tom himself was barely able to read and write, but though many of the other siblings were MENSA members, they had little to show in the way of accomplishments, while old Benjamin had read Greek and Latin and could do math that was all parentheses and Greek letters, and had written books on philosophy and physics, and had even written several volumes of poetry. When Tom had still lived here, he had often wandered through the old man’s top-floor library, pulling down books and trying to understand them. He had always been chagrined, and vaguely surprised, to find that he could not. “Said the Madwoman of Chaillot,” muttered Imogene.
“We need to search the house, top to bottom,” said Alan. “Lucy, are there rubber gloves somewhere? A lot of them?”
“Search in pairs,” interjected Skipper, “and not ones who are friendly with each other, like Colin and Imogene.”
Colin and Imogene looked at each other with mutual disdain. “Friendly?” whispered Imogene, shaking her head.
“Or Tom and Lucy,” said Evelyn. “In fact, Tom shouldn’t—” Abruptly an old rotary-dial telephone on a bookshelf beside the bar began ringing. Several people at the table jumped, and Blaine slapped Lucy’s hand away when she reached for the receiver.
“That’s him!” exclaimed Evelyn. “He’s been listening to us! You and your . . . transformer oil!”
“Shut up!” said Blaine. “I’ll get it.”
“Put it on speaker!” called Colin.
“You don’t trust me? Anyway, this doesn’t have a speaker.” Blaine picked up the receiver. “Hello?” After a few seconds he shook his head and hung up. “Nothing, nobody there.”
“Oh, he was there all right,” said old William. “And as soon as he gets another body, he’ll be here. Displeased.”
“Shut up!” said Blaine again, more loudly. “What if it was him? He hasn’t got a body yet. So let’s find his damned talisman before he gets one. Pair up, everybody, and no allies together.”
“Tommy should leave,” said Evelyn. “Gertrude said he was bad luck or something. No offense, Tommy! And Lucy should just wait here in the dining room.”
Gertrude had been Tom’s mother, Benjamin’s wife before Vivian. All Tom knew about her was that she had been some sort of fortune-teller, and had killed herself in 2005. He had been a small child at the time, and he had no recollection of her, though in old photographs she was beautiful. He had never heard that she’d said he was bad luck, but he was far too intimidated in this crowd to ask about it.
“Yes,” said Imogene, “he couldn’t understand what sort of thing to look for anyway. Tom, it’s been lovely seeing you, but you might as well scram.”
Tom had been enjoying the air-conditioned draft on his face, but he took one last sip of his Coke and set the can down on the bar. “Okay.”
“I’ll drive you back to your apartment,” said Lucy. “And I should go see to things at Forest Lawn. You and I are the ones who knew him best, but they don’t want our help here.”
The woman who had called Benjamin an old fool bared her teeth and made pushing-away gestures. “Oh, Lucy, don’t say that. It’s just that you might be on his side.”
“We’re all on his side,” protested Blaine. “We want what’s best for him, which is . . . ”
“To step down,” suggested Colin. “Wizard emeritus.”
“Give somebody else a chance,” agreed Skipper, narrowly eyeing his siblings.
Tom and Lucy crossed to the stairs leading down, and behind him Tom heard Imogene laugh and say, “Who will bell the cat?”
The floor below the dining room was a maze of tiny interconnected rooms, all fretted from floor to ceiling with shelves, and no room big enough for more than one chair. The inner ones were lit by dim yellow lamps attached to the ceiling, and all of them were permeated with the vanilla smell of old book paper and, faintly, the tarry reek of the old man’s pipe tobacco. As Tom and Lucy threaded their way along the shortest path through the rooms to the bottom door and the stairs down to the parking lot, Tom glanced wistfully at all the book spines facing him on the shelves.
“What are all these about?” he asked Lucy, waving at a shelf they were passing.
“Down here are all the books that lost their charm for him,” said Lucy. “Religion, mostly—Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, George MacDonald. He decided they weren’t good for his psyche, but lately I seem to spend most of my time down here.”
Tom reflected that he knew no more now than he had before he’d asked. “My— ” he began; then he started again: “Do you know why my mother would have said I was bad luck?”
Lucy paused in one of the doorways to look back at him. “No, I never heard anything like that. Evelyn’s head is just full of old gossip and superstitions jumbled together anyway.” She gave him a troubled look, and the air was a few degrees cooler. “You want to come along with me to Forest Lawn?”
“I— No, not yet. I’m sorry. I just—”
She nodded. “Never mind; I know.” She led the way through another tiny room. “I think you and I were the only ones who loved him.”
“What happens if they don’t find his . . . talisman? If nobody finds it?”
“I don’t know.” They had reached the back door, and she pulled it open. Sunlight spilled across the worn wooden floor, and they could hear the breezes moving across the hills. Lucy’s plaid skirt fluttered around her thin legs. “Maybe he’d just be—you know, dead.”
Tom was squinting in the sudden glare. “Is that maybe the best thing?”
“The way they all talk—maybe.”
Tom followed her down the cement steps.
“They’ve got me blocked in,” Lucy said crossly. “I’m going to have to drive over the flower bed to get out.”
“That’s okay, I can walk back down to Westshire.”
“No, I couldn’t stand staying in the house with them. The flowers are all dead anyway.”
Tom’s apartment was in an old building on Franklin, and when he had waved good-bye to Lucy as she drove away in her Buick, he trudged up the dozen red-painted steps to the front door. His rooms were on the second floor at the back, with windows overlooking a parking lot and garage and the back windows of another apartment building.
As he trudged down the dim corridor toward his door—tired, and glad Lucy had saved him the walk back to the bus stop—he saw a streak of daylight across the carpet. His door was partly open, and he caught the scent of cigarette smoke.
He stopped, then slowly stepped forward and pushed the door open.
The kitchen was straight ahead, with its view of palm trees and roofs and other people’s windows, and the living room was to the left, but a curl of smoke hung in the air to the right, in his bedroom doorway.
He swallowed. “Who’s there?”
“Come in, Tommy,” said a woman’s voice, and when he took the two steps to the doorway and looked in, he saw by the glow through the Venetian blinds that Vivian was sitting on his narrow bed. Half a dozen tobacco pipes were laid out on the bedspread next to her purse, and a cigarette smoldered in a saucer on the bedside table.
“Did Benjamin give you these?” she asked him.
Tom hadn’t seen Vivian since she and Benjamin had got divorced five years earlier; she was wearing a white pantsuit and a fur cape today, with a crescent of pearls around her corded neck, and white kid gloves made her long fingers look like crab legs.
He gathered that she was referring to the pipes. “Yes. He thought I might like to smoke them.”
She stood up and retrieved her cigarette and tucked it between her lips, and the coal glowed in the dim room. “Uh huh,” she said, each syllable a puff of smoke. “Did you?”
Tom shrugged and shook his head. “I can’t keep them lit.”
Vivian leaned down and picked up one of the pipes. She stared at it, then said, “Dunhill. And you’ve got a Castello, and a Sasieni Four Dot— these are expensive pipes.”
“He’s generous. Was.”
She cocked her head. “To you?”
“Sure. To us all. This apartment, the allowance . . . He gave me those books there . . . ”
“Fragments shored against your ruin,” Vivian muttered. Tom noticed that her breath smelled of liquor. She stepped past him to the dresser, on the top of which stood an uneven row of books, hardcover and paperback.
“Turn on the light, Tommy,” she said, and when he had reluctantly flicked the switch on the wall, she ran her gloved hand up and down over the top edges of the books.
“Andre Norton, Heinlein, Brackett,” she noted, and her fingers paused on a tall black hardcover book. “Lovecraft, The Outsider. That one’s worth some money, even banged up like this.” She pulled it out and flipped it open to look at the endpapers; the cover, attached now only by threads, nearly fell off. The page edges were marbled, and she held the book up in both hands and stared at the pattern of red and blue swirls on the block of pages for nearly half a minute, before shaking her head and turning it over to look at the endpapers in the back. Finally she gripped the book by the spine and shook it. A bus pass fell out and fluttered to the floor.
“My bookmark,” said Tom ruefully. “I guess I never would have got very far.”
“I’d sell it if I were you. I don’t know if the allowances are going to continue now.” She slid the book back in its place on the dresser. “Why these books?”
“I liked that movie Star Wars. He thought I might like science fiction books. But,” he added miserably, “I’m too dumb.”
She was riffling through the other books, shaking them and peering at the covers. “No Libra,” she muttered, “picture or constellation.” She put the last one back and turned to face him.
“When you were about five,” she said, “he spent a week playing checkers with you—just talking to you and moving the pieces back and forth, over and over again, while you watched.”
Tom blinked. “Oh.”
“My Jaguar won’t go faster than a hundred and forty-nine miles per hour,” she went on, “not that I’d ever want to go near that fast. But it’s got a limiter, a governor, installed by the manufacturer. James Watt invented governors for engines in the eighteenth century. When an engine gets close to going faster than somebody wants it to, the governor chokes off the fuel.”
Tom had no idea what to say, and simply stared at her.
She looked down and grimaced. “It’s contemptible of me to feel virtuous for trying to explain it to you. I’m taking two of the pipes, Tommy. You don’t smoke them, and the bird’s-eye grain on them could arguably look like the five brightest stars in Libra.”
“Don’t take him!” exclaimed Tom; and now the close air was rich with the malty smell of Ovaltine.
Vivian sniffed, and smiled crookedly. “He said he used to bring you Ovaltine, when you were sick. I’m sorry you’re upset, Tommy. I am taking them.”
His shoulders slumped. He couldn’t prevail against his stepmother. “What will you do with him?” he asked dejectedly.
“Keep him from you kids, mainly. It was hell being married to him, but I don’t want them having custody of him.” She grinned, but Tom could tell it wasn’t a happy expression. “I loved him, you see. All of us did.”
Tom knew she meant Benjamin’s wives. “My mother killed herself.”
Vivian ground out her cigarette in the saucer. “Because she loved him and she loved you too. Hah! What’s a mother to do, eh?” She dropped two of the pipes into her purse and snapped it shut, then pushed him aside and walked into the short hall.
Tom followed her. “Was I bad luck for him?” He hadn’t been out of breath after climbing the stairs, but he was panting now. “Evelyn says my mother said I was. She was a fortune-teller, right?”
Vivian turned around and leaned against the door. “Oh, Tommy! Damn it, you loved him too, didn’t you? You and Lucy. You were his last kids; I never gave him any. And I think you were the first ones he paid attention to, took some responsibility for. He used to play that Sinatra song, ‘Soliloquy,’ from Carousel—it’s about a guy wondering if he’ll be a good father to a son or a daughter. He— But your mother wasn’t a fortune-teller, she was an oracle.” She looked past him at the kitchen. “You don’t have any liquor, I suppose.”
“No, I— Coffee, Coke—”
“Never mind. I’m driving and I don’t need another DUI.” She opened her purse, fished out a flat silver box, and opened it. Six cigarettes were lined up inside, and she took one out and lit it with a blocky silver lighter.
“You weren’t any child of mine,” she said, exhaling smoke, “but Benjamin felt he had to explain. Your mother apparently used to burn leaves and go into trances sniffing the smoke, and one time in a trance she told him that you—you’d have been maybe four years old—told him you’d one day outsmart him, and he’d die because of it.” She stared at him in apparent puzzlement. “He could have killed you—but he loved you.”
“Outsmart him? That’s—” Tom was at a loss for words.
“I know. Impossible. See you around, kid.” She turned and opened the door, and then she was hurrying away down the corridor.
Tom closed the door, bolted it, and shambled back into the bedroom. He looked at the four pipes that still lay on the bedspread; he had been keeping his father’s talisman without even knowing it, and somehow he had let Vivian take it. At least she would keep it away from Blaine and Colin and Imogene. At least she loved him.
“I’m sorry, father,” he said softly to the remaining pipes.
He bent to pick up his bus pass bookmark from the floor, and looked at the black spine of The Outsider. Vivian had said it was worth some money, and that the allowances might stop. If they did stop, he supposed he’d have to go live at his father’s house again, and every single room of it would now be a place where his father was achingly absent.
Sadly he pulled The Outsider out from between the other books— and he nearly dropped it, for it was heavier than he remembered, heavier than it had seemed when Vivian had been handling it. And it brought back a sudden vivid memory of the moment the book had passed from his father’s hands to his; it had been early on a spring morning last year, and Tom had still been in his pajamas when the old man had surprised him by showing up at his door with the book.
For a moment now Tom just stood beside the dresser, with no recollection of what he had been doing; then he looked at the book in his hands and at the computer sitting on his desk in the corner, and nodded.
He crossed to the desk and pulled out the chair and sat down, laying the book beside the keyboard. He knew how to get to Google, and now he brought it up and typed in sell lovecraft book. He had to flip open the book to see how to spell Lovecraft.
What appeared on the monitor screen were a lot of eBay and AbeBooks pages, but he knew he could never figure out how to sell the book through those sites; and there were a lot of sites that just seemed to be people bragging that they had Lovecraft books. But at last he found a bookseller’s list with a sidebar saying that he bought books. The man was in L.A., so Tom nervously punched the 818 area-code number into his phone.
When a man’s voice answered, Tom cleared his throat and haltingly explained that he wanted to sell a copy of Lovecraft’s The Outsider.
After getting a description of the title page, the bookseller said, “Maybe. What condition is it in? Does it have a dust jacket?”
“I don’t think so. What’s a dust jacket?”
“Jeez. The paper cover that wraps around the book and folds in at the boards. It’d be blue.” When Tom admitted that it had nothing like that, the man asked, “Are the pages browned around the edges?”
“Not brown—they’re colored. If you hold the book up, there’s swirls of red and blue that go across all the page edges.”
“It’s marbled? Who would have done that? And I suppose the marbling ink soaked into the pages?”
Tom opened the book in the middle. The outer edges of both exposed pages were darkened in a band an eighth of an inch wide.
“Yes,” he said. “About as wide as a toothpick.”
“Weird. I can only imagine what sort of vise somebody had to hold it in, to do that. Are the covers loose?”
“Well, they’re almost off. It’s just threads holding them on.”
A sigh. “It’s a curiosity, a token for somebody who wants to be able to say he owns an Outsider. Nothing more than that. I guess I could give you a hundred bucks for it.”
“I’ve got to think about it,” Tom said, and ended the call.
So much for that.
He laid the book on the desk and frowned for a moment at the apparently undesirable marbled staining, and he reached out to push the book away; but the heel of his hand only caught the top board, and the spine rolled flat, spreading the vertical stack of pages into a slope.
And the marbling was gone, replaced by a black rectangle with white spots on it.
Tom blinked in surprise and leaned forward, touching the spread pages. The narrow line of darkness at the edge of each page, which he had thought was the marbling ink soaking into the paper, was, he realized, something else: each was a thin segment of an image that was only visible when the pages were fanned out. Someone—his father?—had apparently spread the book’s pages in this way and then painted a picture across the eighth-of-an-inch-exposed page edges, so that the picture would disappear when the book was closed. The marbling, Tom reasoned, had been done afterward, to provide an explanation for the narrow dark band along the outer edge of each page. The picture was apparently not meant to be discovered.
But what was it? Eight white dots on a black background, arranged like a wobbly, peaked structure—
—like a kid’s drawing of a house, with bent walls, Evelyn had said. Libra . . . the constellation itself.
Tom knew that constellation meant an arrangement of stars in the sky.
And Blaine had said, If we can find the talisman . . . we can threaten him with its destruction.
Tom’s heart was pounding. Vivian doesn’t have it, he thought; it isn’t one of the pipes. I have it, it’s this book. I have him, with me.
He slowly pulled the top board back level with the bottom one, restoring the book to its ordinary rectangular shape, and as the pages lined up again the constellation disappeared, replaced by the innocuous marbled pattern.
He stood up, his hands trembling as he held the book. I should hide it, he thought—Blaine and the others might come here and take away anything Benjamin ever gave me, just on the off chance that one of the things might be the talisman.
Under the bed, he thought, in the cupboard, under a couch cushion— dumb dumb dumb! Think!
But instead of a hiding place, he found himself thinking of the pages of the book. When he had opened it in the middle to see if marbling ink had soaked into the pages, he had seen narrow lines on the outer edges of both exposed pages, the one on the right and the one on the left. The line on the right had been part of the picture of stars. What about the line on the left? Was it part of a picture that would be visible if the book’s pages were fanned out the other way?
He laid the book back down on the desk and turned it over. Hesitantly he pushed back the board that was now on top, rolling the spine flat and spreading the pages into a ramp.
And the breath froze in his throat and his scalp tightened, for he was staring into the wrinkled face, into the glittering eyes, of his father, and his father’s eyes seemed to be fixed on Tom’s with eager recognition. The picture was intensely realistic, a photograph, a hologram . . .
Tom wasn’t able to look away, but a shrill humming started up in his throat as the mouth of the face in the picture moved, opened and closed, and the sparse gray hair shifted as if in some otherworldly breeze. Tom’s own head was full of the smell of Ovaltine.
His phone buzzed in his shirt pocket, and he fumbled it free, turned it on, and blindly swiped his thumb across the screen. And his father’s voice now rattled out of the tiny speaker.
“Tommy!” said old Benjamin, and a moment later the face in the picture mouthed the syllables. “Is that you?”
Tom just stared at the moving picture.
“Ah, it is.” The face frowned, and when the voice on the phone spoke again, it was synchronized with the face’s lips: “I hope you’re alone!”
Tom started to say Yes, but his father was speaking again. “Good, good boy. If anybody comes in, c-c-close this book. I see your desk—you’re in your apartment. Is the door locked? Ah, yes.”
Tom hadn’t yet spoken. And it occurred to him that his father’s image was looking up at him; it was Tom himself who was looking down at the desk. Was his father looking through Tom’s eyes?
“Never mind that,” said Benjamin. “Where’s Lucy?”
“She’s at,” Tom began; his father’s voice interrupted with “At Forest Lawn,” but Tom doggedly finished his sentence: “—at Forest Lawn. I can speak!”
“Sorry, boy,” said the voice from the phone, “of course you can, of course you can. Forest Lawn, good; they can cremate that body after I meet Lucy.”
Tom’s view of the book blurred away, and for a moment he seemed to be standing in a paneled office, looking at a middle-aged man in a dark suit and tie who was holding a sheaf of papers. The man was speaking, but the only word Tom was able to recognize was one he had just heard—cremate.
Tom shook his head, and the vision dissolved, leaving him swaying unsteadily in front of his desk, still staring down at the face in the book pages. The vision had seemed to be a memory, though certainly not one of his own.
He sat down and tried to remember what his father had been saying. “Meet Lucy?” he said finally. “You want me to show her this book?”
“Yes, Tommy. Pay attention now. You’re slippery.”
And a phrase popped into his head: Mea culpa, sed non maxima! Tom didn’t know Latin, but the thought felt as if it meant something like, My own fault, but not serious.
“I could call her,” said Benjamin’s voice, “but she won’t—” A thought flickered over the surface of Tom’s mind, snatched away too quickly for him to catch. “She won’t be upset if it’s you who calls her. Tell her you need to see her, have her come here.”
“Okay. But—I can’t—” Tom struggled to find the words to describe the problem. He sensed that his father knew what he was trying to express, but was courteously letting him say it for himself. “I’d have to end this call,” Tom said finally, “to call her.”
The head in the picture seemed to nod, and the voice from the phone said, “That’s fine. Just have her come to your apartment and touch the book, and open it, as you did.”
“It’s heavier now,” said Tom. “The book. Vivian picked it up a few minutes ago, and it didn’t look heavy.”
“Vivian was there in your apartment? It couldn’t have been today, Tommy, not if she touched it.”
“Well, she had gloves on.”
“Oh, there you are then. She was always cautious! But Lucy won’t be wearing gloves.”
The word gloves hung in Tom’s mind, and evidently in Benjamin’s too, for Tom got a quick image of one glove being pulled off a hand and tossed aside, to be quickly replaced by another, which buttoned at the cuff.
Baffled and uneasy, Tom tried to look away from the picture on the book pages, and discovered that he could not.
It panicked him. “Let go!” he grunted, gripping the desk with his left hand for traction but still unable to move his head. He gasped, and again smelled Ovaltine.
“Don’t fight me, Tommy!” said the phone in his right hand. “I’ve always known what’s best for you all, haven’t I?”
“You’re wearing me right now,” Tom said breathlessly, “but you want to wear Lucy. And button her on.”
For a moment the phone was silent; then, “I wondered if you’d reciprocally see my thoughts too,” came his father’s voice. “But that’s pretty good, Tommy! Inference, extrapolation from an analogy! I was right to take precautions with you.” Tom watched as his right hand raised the cellphone. “Now call Lucy, get her over here, there’s a good boy.”
Tom tried without success to push his arm back down; but he took a deep breath, glad that he still had control of his lungs and throat. “I won’t,” he said. “You’re going to . . . take her body, be her, now that you got killed yourself.”
“No, no, Tommy. I just want to—” began his father’s voice.
“Now you’re lying to me!” Tommy blinked away tears, still staring helplessly into his father’s eyes. “I can tell. It’s like . . . it’s like you’re talking in another direction.”
Again there was no voice from the phone for several seconds. Then his father said, “Try to understand, Tommy, she won’t be gone. It’s just that I’ll be with her, I’ll be—”
“Controlling her! Doing what you want, not what she wants!”
“Yes, and she’ll have a better life for it! Look at her now, lonely, introverted—but young! With me, she’ll travel, study, write! She’ll thank me for it one day, you’ll see. Or she would.”
“G-get married? Have children?”
“Who knows? Hormones . . . Eventual offspring might be a—”
“All what you decide, not what she wants.”
Tom wasn’t touching the book, but the pages shifted slightly, so that the face seemed to be peering from behind a screen of thread-thin horizontal white lines; a moment later the pages had realigned, and the face was clear again.
“Tommy, damn it, will you just—? What I decide has always been best for you all—and I’ll consider her preferences, to the extent that—”
“You won’t even know what her . . . preferences are. I’ll call her, all right—and tell her all this, let her make up her own mind if it’s so good for her.”
“No, you won’t, trust me. If I have to—”
“I can’t believe you’d want to do this! You! Even I can see it’s a terrible thing!”
“Tommy, think! If it was wrong, I wouldn’t ask you to do it, would I? Don’t make me take harsh—”
Tom interrupted with the question he had to ask. “Why don’t you want me?”
The eyes on the book pages narrowed and the brows contracted, and for a moment the mouth opened slackly. Then the lips firmed up, and his father’s voice said, “Okay, Tommy, okay. I guess you deserve an answer.” The phone was silent then, but just when Tom was about to speak, his father went on, “Seventeen years ago I did something I had to do, but which I’m not proud of. You were five years old, and for a week we played checkers for an hour every day. It was hypnosis, for openers, but then I used my particular gift to climb into your head, like I’m doing now—and I embedded a powerful command into the fabric of your memory.”
“A governor,” ventured Tom.
“ . . . I suppose it was that, yes. How did you—? But I’ve given you a good life, haven’t I, Tommy? You’ve never wanted for anything. And knowledge is but sorrow’s spy, as Davenant said. I felt I had to—”
“Was this Davenant one of the books I couldn’t read?”
A sigh rattled out of the phone. “Yes, Tommy. Yes. Listen, an oracle told me that you would one day outsmart me, as she put it, and cause my death, so— Oh. I see you already know it was your mother. Understand, I could easily have simply killed you, to prevent that. But I loved you. I love you still. So, instead, I gave you a block against learning, against being capable of systematic thought. You see? So that you could never in any instance—”
“Outsmart you.” Tom took a deep breath and let it out. “All these years.”
“But! I can remove it! You were an extraordinarily bright boy, and you can be again! You can learn, you’ll be able to read Tolstoy! In Russian! Dante in medieval Italian! Read Einstein’s tensor calculus field equations!”
“Beat Blaine at chess.”
“Yes! But it will take some work to remove the block. I’ll need to hypnotize you again and sort through your memories, with backward mutters of dissevering power, in Milton’s phrase, to excise that specific one. Drugs might be required, but I can assuredly do it.”
Tom sighed. His neck was aching because of the prolonged inclination of his head. “But not while you’re just in this book here.”
“No. I’d need to be in a body.”
“Lucy’s.”
“You know it’s something she would want to do. And I know you’d never do anything that would cause her death. The oracle’s prophecy will prove to have been wrong.”
“I would never have done anything to cause your death, either. I don’t care what my mother said.”
Tom thought of the books he had so often pulled down from the shelves over the years, hopelessly trying to puzzle out each first page, and then slid back into their places—The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night in three boxed volumes, Flatland, Fear and Trembling, and a hundred others—and he imagined their paragraphs now opening like flowers, lighting like candles, parting like cobwebbed shutters to reveal the unbounded extent of a whole living world. And he imagined understanding the now-incomprehensible relationships that linked things into developing patterns: atoms, chess pieces, stars, people . . . .
And this book he could close and put away. He need never look at it again.
And that would be good, he thought, because if he were to do as Benjamin advised, and then years later look into this book again, the picture on the page edges might be Lucy’s face. It would be her eyes staring up into his.
Even if he never looked, it would still be Lucy’s face hidden in the pages, behind the marbling.
“I,” he whispered fearfully, “won’t do it. I cant. I’m sorry. I’ll warn her.”
Tom felt as if he were standing on the terribly narrow top of a very high wall, looking up. He had never disobeyed his father before, and he was dizzy with the dislocation of it.
“You can do as I say,” said the voice from his phone, “and have everything. Or, if you’d rather, you can disobey me and have nothing. It would take external effort to remove the governor I stitched into your memory, but right now, as I withdraw from this intrusion into your mind, I can simply take all of your memory away with me. Delete all, no careful differentiation. You’d probably still have language, and basic skills like buttoning a shirt, but you wouldn’t even know who you were, much less what year it is, or what country you’re in, or who Lucy is.”
Tears were running down Tom’s cheeks, but when they dripped from his chin they fell to the carpet in front of the desk, not on the book. “My . . . going-away present, from you,” he said hoarsely. “First you give me the governor, then you erase me.”
“No, Tommy, that won’t happen,” his father said softly, persuasively, “because you’ll do what I say, and then everybody will be better off.”
Tom thought again of his sister’s face, not yet lost. “I can’t,” he whispered. “It’s not—one of the things that can happen.”
“Ah, Tommy, I’m afraid I made it impossible to reason with you! Sic fiat. ” The flavor of the phrase let Tom know that it meant something like, So be it.
In his peripheral vision Tom saw his own right hand lay the phone down beside the book, and then pull open the top drawer; it lifted out a Bic pen and an envelope, and Tom watched as his hand wrote out words in its habitual blocky capitals:
BENJAMIN CAN RETURN—
BUT FIRST YOU MUST CAREFULLY READ THIS BOOK.
Tom had tried to make his hand resist his father’s control, but hadn’t even managed to make any of the letters wobble. Now his father was speaking from the phone again—with at least some perceptible effort, since Tom was trying to impede the old man’s thoughts.
“Now—you’re stronger than I thought, Tommy!—now I’ll call Lucy, and I won’t say anything. She’ll recognize your number and call back, and when there’s—let me speak!—when there’s no reply, she’ll undoubtedly come over here, and read this message. And now I’ll leave you, Tommy—sadly. I wish you had trusted me.”
But while Benjamin had been concentrating on speaking, Tom had regained enough control of his right hand to draw two deeply pressed lines through some of the letters it had written. And as he did it, he made himself think of nothing but Lucy holding her phone.
“Yes,” said Benjamin, catching that insistent image, “she’ll answer. And I’m sure she’ll be here soon. But you—”
A rushing sound echoed from the phone.
Tom whimpered involuntarily as he felt his memories squashed discordantly together, seized, and uprooted.
“—won’t know who she is,” said Benjamin’s voice.
The young man blinked around at the room he found himself in. There was a bed, a desk, a black-bound book lying beside a boxy plastic thing—someone lived here. He held still and listened, but heard nothing but a low background susurration, remote and constant.
Faintly on the air he could catch two smells—one acrid, and one malty and mildly sweet. Neither one seemed unfamiliar in his nose. He let himself relax, cautiously.
Do I live here? he wondered.
An envelope with writing on it lay beside the computer’s keyboard, and he leaned forward to peer at it. It read,
BENJAMIN CAN RETURN—
BUT FIRST YOU MUST CAREFULLY READ THIS BOOK.
The crossing-out lines were heavily scored into the paper, and he considered the letters that remained untouched:
B URN
THIS BOOK
The pen beside the envelope seemed to have been used to write the words, and he picked it up and let his hand copy BURN THIS BOOK below the previous writing. The handwriting was the same.
Evidently he himself, whoever he might be, had written the message. It was seeming more likely that he did live here.
And, perhaps anticipating this loss of memory, he had left this message where he would be sure to see it. At one time he had apparently wanted himself to read the black book, so that someone named Benjamin might return . . . from someplace . . . but had then emphatically changed his mind.
He could surely trust himself, couldn’t he?
A flat, glass-covered rectangle on the desk began making a chiming sound. He stared at it in bewilderment, and after a few seconds it fell silent.
He reached out to touch it, then thought better and withdrew his hand. There was no telling what the thing might be.
Like the last few images in a dream, glimpsed for a moment upon waking before disappearing forever, he caught a fleeting impression of a castle falling, and a voice that said, a house, with bent walls . . .
Then the faintly recollected shreds were gone, like the last swirl of water going down a drain.
He walked out of the bedroom into a narrow kitchen, and looked out the window over the sink; he didn’t know why he was looking at the buildings across the parking lot. Certainly none of them were falling down, if that’s what had been in his mind.
Without thinking about it he reached to the side, opened the refrigerator, and lifted out a can of Coca-Cola; and he had popped it open and taken the first sip before it occurred to him that he had known—or at least his hand had known!—that there would be a Coke in there, on that shelf.
It seemed obvious that he did indeed live here. He should find the bathroom and look at himself in a mirror! See if there might be any sort of toothache remedy, for one of his back teeth had begun throbbing.
B URN THIS BOOK
But first he should probably carry out the order he had left for himself. The big letters, and the forceful lines through some of them, implied that it was important. When he had written that message, he had certainly known more than he knew now.
He walked back into the bedroom and put the Coke down on the desk, and picked up the black book. It was light, clearly very old and frail, and the covers appeared to be about to fall off. Past its time, he thought. He carried it out into the kitchen and pulled open the oven door, and laid the book on a pan that was in there.
He twisted the knob all the way to the left and instinctively switched on the fan over the stove. The old pages would probably catch fire pretty quickly.
But he turned back toward the bedroom—he had noticed other books in there, a row of them on a dresser—and he was suddenly aware of a powerful urge to read them, and then find out how to get more.
He knew nearly nothing, and he had no idea what the books might be about, but he was somehow certain that he would get a lot more out of them now than he ever had before.