"They were today."
"Then the dybbuk is still stalking your daughter," Mishal said to Marrity. "But she's in no danger unless she invites him in; he can't penetrate her mind forcibly."
Marrity probed for Daphne's mind, but sensed only her ongoing attention to him, and uneasy boredom. Faintly he thought he could hear Muzak. He tried to project a smile and a clasping hand. "How soon is dawn?" he asked.
"Hours yet," said Malk. "We won't even leave here for hours yet."
"We should go there," said Marrity desperately, clenching his fists. "I should go there."
"Go where?" asked Malk, not unkindly. "They won't be at that hospital until dawn, and they might be anywhere now. They could be holding your daughter in Cathedral City, Indio, Palm Desert — not to mention all the mountains around there. We've got to wait till dawn."
"What do we do in the meantime?" asked Charlotte. Her sunglasses were incongruous in this dimly lit little room, but nobody had commented on them. She was chewing her fingernails — Mishal had said they couldn't smoke tonight because it would repel ghosts.
"We need to know more than we know," said Mishal. "And so we will mine some old science."
Marrity saw Lepidopt frown for a moment.
"Nobody," Mishal said, "saw any use in Richard Hamilton's matrix arrays until Heisenberg used them to work out his uncertainty principle seventy years later, right? And Fitzgerald's crazy guess that an ether headwind compressed objects in the direction they're traveling turned out to be an accurate description of what happened, though his explanation was wrong. The Riemann-Christoffel curvature tensor was considered a useless fantasy until Einstein needed it for General Relativity. In fact," he went on, looking at Marrity, "your great-grandfather renounced the cosmological constant he had originally put into his General Relativity equations — he said including it had been the biggest blunder of his life — but according to Charlotte here, it wasn't nonsense after all. Well, I think he knew that himself, all along. He was simply — justifiably — afraid of it.
"I'm a physicist," Mishal went on, "but I have to say that most physicists aren't comfortable with the reality they're supposed to be mapping. Most of them still start by setting up their problems in terms of Newtonian mechanics, and then only as they proceed do they shove in the quantum-mechanical concepts — like those old 'color' postcards that were black-and-white photographs painted over with watercolors. They should start with the quantum eye, that wider perspective. It's the same with the supernatural factor: We learned not to add it in after the problems were defined, but to have those crayons already in our box from the start, alongside the quantum crayons."
In a whisper Lepidopt asked, "Shouldn't we have been talking in whispers, all this time? And fasting?"
"You were a good student, Oren! But this time," said Mishal, standing up and nodding toward the slab and the boxes on the far side of the bed, "I think we're close enough already."
Charlotte was frowning. "Who'll come to us?"
"Ghosts," said Mishal. "We're going to have a seance. Oren, open the whisky, if you would, and pour each of us a full glass."
"First sensible remark all night," said Charlotte. "Why do we want ghosts to come to us? I've met them, they're pretty useless creatures."
"There's only four cups in the bathroom," said Malk. "Plastic."
"Frank and I can share," said Charlotte.
"I expect the ghosts you've met are the ones that were leaning in from their side," said Mishal, taking a freshly opened bottle of Canadian Club whisky from Lepidopt. "Talking backward and all. They make more sense if we visit them on their side."
Malk had got up to fetch the plastic cups from the bathroom, and now he peeled cellophane off one and handed it to Mishal.
"Thank you." Mishal poured amber whiskey into it and held the filled cup out to Charlotte, and Marrity watched it carefully so that she'd be able to take it without a fumble.
And why am I helping her deceive these people? he asked himself.
The old man filled Lepidopt's and Malk's plastic cups, then filled one for himself and clanked the bottle onto the table. "And," he said, "talking to ghosts on their own turf is much easier if one is not excessively sober." He raised his cup.
Charlotte took a deep sip and handed the cup to Marrity. I guess I'll start cutting back tomorrow, he told himself, and gulped a mouthful of the liquor; and when he had swallowed it and handed the cup back to her, he was grateful that Mishal's procedure, whatever it might be, required this.
Charlotte finished it and held the emptied cup out to Mishal.
"You're a good soldier," the old man said, tilting the bottle over the cup as Marrity made sure to watch.
Daphne was sleepy, but her ribs ached and the air being blown into the tent was colder now, and she wished she'd been wearing a sweater when she and her father had gone to lunch at Alfredo's yesterday. She was as aware of her father as if he'd been standing behind her chair; she tasted every mouthful of whisky that he swallowed, and she even felt that the alcohol was warming her.
The faint music from the speaker behind her seemed to have been lost in the airwaves for decades. It was some kind of brassy swing, but any liveliness in the melodies was dried out by the lifeless performance — she imagined a bandstand painted with glittery musical notes in a club out of an old Fred Astaire movie, with ancient, weary musicians in moth-eaten tuxedos swiveling their heavy saxophones this way and that.
The view of Palm Springs held her attention by default. White car headlights seemed to be streetlights that had come unmoored from their places in the ranks along the boulevards, and after a while she was able to make out the cycling pinpoints of red and green that were traffic signals. Houses were dots of yellow light, tormenting in their hints of families at dinner so far away.
A vocalist was accompanying the music now, and after a few moments Daphne was able to make out the nasally crooning words:
Now my charms are all o'erthrown,
And what strength I have's my own,
Which is most faint. Now 'tis true
I must be here confined by you…
Gentle breath of yours my sails
Must fill, or else my project fails.
Let your indulgence blot his sin—
Daphne, speak! And let me in!
Daphne knew it was the thing that had shown itself as a cartoon on her hospital TV set last night. The wind from the blower on her jeans felt like fluttering hands.
"Daddy!" she yelled, but the audible yell was just an involuntary echo of her mental cry.
In the cabin the upright pipe by the stove suddenly split, shooting a burst of steam across the room. Golze screamed weakly as the hot vapor whipped at the hair on the back of his head, and his right hand clawed the wheel to roll his wheelchair forward in a quarter circle across the floor.
He blinked tears from his eyes as he squinted back at the pipe, which was just leaking a trickle of water now from the split section.
"She's doing this," he snarled. "She's a poltergeist, she can set things on fire. You have to trank her."
"Aw, she's just grabbing hold of something, it's a reflex," said Canino, slouching forward to peer at the ruptured length of galvanized steel. "She was cuffed to that pipe, so vertigo made her grab it. It wasn't malicious."
"My head is scalded," Golze said. His right hand wavered up as if to feel the back of his head, then just fell to his lap. "She's dangerous."