Three Days to Never by Tim Powers Page B

Rascasse, Golze had opened the cabinet doors with evident reluctance.
    Charlotte had had to fight down sudden nausea. It seemed to her that the head always smelled worse—like hot rum spiced with “blood and honey and the scrapings of old church bells,” as Thurber had once written—when it wasagitated. And even though it had no eyes, she always imagined that it was looking at her.
    Golze had gingerly lifted the tarry-black head and its wooden base out of the cabinet and shuffled around to the windows with it held out at arm’s length, to let the thing, as he said, “scope the traffic,” but though the head seemed to quiver with more excitement when he carried it back to the galley and held it up to the back window, none of the vehicles nor anything in the sky had seemed unusual.
    Rascasse had curtly told Charlotte to scan the nearby perspectives, but she got nothing more significant than a view of the dashboard of a car or truck, and a rust-flecked white hood. Nothing that looked like opposition.
    Charlotte had tried to avoid seeing the awful black head, but at one point while she was using Rascasse’s eyes he had looked straight at it.
    Polished black skin clung tightly to the eyeless skull, and paisley-shaped panels of silver filigree had been glued or tacked onto the forehead, cheeks, nose and chin, like metal Maori tattoos—probably to cover worm holes, Charlotte thought nervously—and a slack ribbon around its neck swung back and forth underneath the wooden stand. “Charlie Chaplin’s hat,” Golze and Rascasse called the ribbon. According to Golze it was the liner ribbon from a hat that had once belonged to Chaplin, cut now and fitted with a button and loop.
    Charlotte had hastily switched to the driver’s point of view.
    Golze had eventually put the head back in its cabinet and closed the doors, wiping his hands afterward. Only then had Charlotte taken a deep breath.
    At 4:10 p.m., though, the head had begun moaning again behind its closed doors, and again the electronic Ouija board had rapidly indicated meaningless numbers and letters; but, luckily before they could open the cabinet again, Rascasse had got a frantic call from the Amboy compound, reporting that the old woman’s gadget had disappeared—dropped right out of the perceptions of all the remote viewers.
    Rascasse had immediately made another call to the seismology lab at Cal Tech, but there had been no earthquakes within the last half hour. Apparently the gadget had been briefly activated again—too briefly to hope to triangulate it—but had disappeared without having been used.
    They were headed back to the L.A. office now, and Charlotte had long since calmed her nerves with the bourbon. Rascasse would surely get the device soon, whatever it was, and there was nothing she could do to help right now.
    She knew that she could look at the highway ahead, and see the lights of windows in the darkness—distant kitchens and bedrooms and living rooms—but she didn’t exert herself to look. Right now she didn’t want that heimweh, that homesick longing for strangers’ lives. She was too distressingly close now to getting a life for herself.
    Golze had said he could never sleep on the bus, but usually Charlotte could—the noise and the rocking took Charlotte back to her childhood.
    From the age of eight until the age of nineteen, when she had been honorably discharged because of disability, Charlotte Sinclair had been one of several children working for the United States Air Force in a remote string of Minuteman ICBM missile silos in the Mojave Desert south of Panamint Springs. She and the other children had spent most of their days and nights in the underground Launch Control Centers, each of which was a compact three-story house suspended inside a concrete sphere on “shock isolators,” four huge compressed-air shock absorbers, and the floor had constantly tilted