But Sukie had said Not hot, so he pulled back the leather flap with one hand, then rapped the box with the other hand and held it out palm up.
Sukie slapped one of the old paddle plugs into his hand, and he tipped it vertical and shoved it firmly into the grooves inside the box. Then he let the flap fall over it and pulled his hands back. “Set,” he said. “Hot,” said Sukie, “now.”
And again a knife-switch clanked across a gap, right next to him now, and another carbon-arc lamp flared on with a buzzing roar, the sudden light battering at Sullivan’s retinas.
By reflected light he could see his father standing over him; Arthur Patrick Sullivan looked no more than fifty, and his hair was gray rather than white. He glanced down at Pete Sullivan, who was crouched over the spider box, and winked.
“I think we need a gel here,” said Pete’s father; and the old man reached around in front of the lamp and laid his palm over the two arcing carbon rods in the trim clamps.
Sullivan winced and inhaled between his teeth, but the hand wasn’t blasted aside; instead it shone translucently, the red arteries and the blue veins glowing through the skin, and his father was looking down the length of the room and smiling grimly.
On the stairwell wall another scene was forming—this time in color. (Flakes falling from the ceiling sparked and glowed like tiny meteors as they spun down through the beam of light.)
Glowing tan above, blue below—the bright rectangle on the wall coalesced into focus, and Sullivan recognized Venice Beach as seen from the point of view of a helicopter (though no helicopter had been in the sky on that afternoon).
In the colored light it was just Kootie standing and blinking in the middle of the deck; the boy shaded his eyes and glanced wildly back and forth.
“This way, Kootie!” called Elizalde, and the boy ran to her through the rain of flakes and crouched beside her, breathing fast.
In the projected image on the stairwell wall at the other end of the lobby, Sullivan could see the four tiny figures on the beach; three were staying by the patchwork rectangles of the towels spread on the sand, while the fourth, the white-haired figure, strode down to the foamy line of the surf.
One of the flakes from the ceiling landed on the back of Sullivan’s hand, and he picked it up and broke it between his fingers; it was a curl of black paint (and he remembered his father describing how Samuel Goldwyn’s glass studio had been painted black in 1917, when mercury-vapor lamps superseded sunlight as the preferred illumination for filming, and how in later years the black paint had constantly peeled off and fallen down onto the sets like black snow)
Loretta deLarava was clumping out into the light now from the far side of the lobby, her face and broad body glowing in shifting patches of blue and tan as she took on the projection.
“Nobody but me is getting out of here alive, Apie,” she said, pointing her pistol straight at the glowing hand over the light. “Prove it all night, if you like, to this roomful of ghosts.”
The white-haired little image in the projection had waded out into the surf, and now dived into a wave.
Just then from down the stairs behind deLarava came a young man’s voice, singing, “Did your face catch fire once? Did they use a tire iron to put it out?” It was a tune from some Springsteen song—and Sullivan thought he should recognize the voice, from long ago.
A movement across the lobby caught Sullivan’s eye—five or six little girls in white dresses were dancing silently in the open doorway on the starboard side, against the black sky of the night.
Now something was coming up the stairs; it thumped and wailed and rattled as it came. DeLarava glanced behind her down the stairwell and then hastily stepped back, her gun waving wildly around.
Even way over on the forward side of the lobby, Sullivan flinched away from the spider box when a lumpy shape with seven or eight flailing limbs hiked itself up the last stairs onto the level of the deck and knocked the velvet rope free of its hooks.
Then Sullivan relaxed a little, for he saw that it was just two men, apparently attached together; they were both trying to stand, but the wrist of one was handcuffed to the ankle of the other. He thought they must be Sherman Oaks and Neal Obstadt, but the man cuffed by a wrist had two arms with which to wrestle his companion, had one fist free to pummel against the other man’s groin and abdomen, two elbows with which to block kicks to the face.
Behind them, as if shepherding them, a young man stepped up the stairs to the deck, into the projected glare; he was broad-shouldered and trim in a white turtleneck sweater, with blond hair clipped short in a crew cut.
“Kelley Keith,” said this newcomer in a resonant baritone, and from childhood memories and the soundtrack of the old TV show Sullivan belatedly recognized the youthful voice of Nicky Bradshaw. “Listen to the hookah-smoking caterpillar—this mushroom’s for you. And it won’t pass away.”
The carbon-arc lamp over Sullivan’s head was roaring, and the paint flakes were falling more thickly, and, down the length of the lobby, projected right onto the blood-spattered fabric of deLarava’s broad dress now, the little figure in the surf was waving its tiny arms.
Crouching up forward by the spider box, Sullivan was clasping Elizalde’s hand in his right hand, and Sukie’s in his left.
“It’s not the real moon!” cried several of the little girls visible through the open doorway out on the starboard deck. “It’s painted! We’re still in Hell!”
“No, look!” shouted a man at the rail behind them. “It’s crumbling! The real sun is out there!” By the now-rumpled business suit and necktie and the blood-streaked white shirt, Sullivan recognized him as the lawyer whom deLarava’s men had driven away in the Jeep Cherokee; the man’s hands were still cuffed but he had got them in front of him, and he was holding a long broom that he was waving over his head as high as he could reach. Black paint chips fell down onto him like confetti.
“My baby ghosts!” screamed deLarava; she started ponderously out of the projected light toward the half-dozen little girls, but the man with the broom had swept a hole in the night sky out there, and a beam of sunlight (cleaner and brighter, Sullivan thought, than a 3200 Kelvin lamp through a blue gel) lanced down to the deck. The girls flocked to it, then broke up and dissolved in white mist and breathless giggling, and were gone, in the moment before deLarava ran through the spot where they had been and collided with the still-shadowed rail.
The carbon-arc lamp, working off AC and no doubt a choke coil or a transformer was flickering and glowing a deepening yellow. Sullivan’s father’s ghost lifted his hand away from the carbon rods, and the beam of light now just threw a featureless white glow down the lobby onto the far wall. Sullivan felt Sukie reach off to the side, and with an arcing snap the light went out, the carbon rods abruptly dimming to red points.
In the sudden silence the fat old woman backed across the exterior deck from the starboard rail, and in the open doorway she turned around to face the dark Piccadilly Circus lobby.
Her dress still glowed with the image that had been projected onto it, and the tiny white-haired swimmer, carried on her dress right out of the rectangle that had shone on the stairwell wall, was floundering below the shelf of her breasts.
She stomped slowly back in through the doorway and started across the lobby floor. “I will at least have Edison,” she said.