Read Online Expiration Date by Tim Powers - Free Book Online

at one point, and among the tall weeds beyond he could see empty twelve-pack beer cartons and a couple of blankets and even a sort of little tent made from an upended shopping cart. Sullivan glanced up and down the road, and at a moment when no cars were in sight he ducked through the gap and sprinted to the shade of the nearest palm tree. He picked his way through a dense hedge of blue-flowered vinca, and after a few seconds noticed that he wasn’t walking on dirt anymore—the soles of his black leather shoes were brushing dust and drifts of leaves off of paving stones that had been laid in the 1920s.
    The stairs were broad between the low corniced walls, but were thickly littered with bricks and chunks of masonry and the brown palm fronds that had been falling untended for five decades; and sycamore branches hung so low in places that he practically had to crawl from step to step. When he had scrambled up to the second landing he paused to catch his breath. The air was still and silent and fragrant with eucalyptus, as if Laurel Canyon Boulevard and all of Hollywood were very far away. He couldn’t even hear any birds or insects.
    A row of once-white marble pillars supporting nothing anymore ran along the top of a wall across the stairs from him, and below the wall a dead stone fountain poked up from a bank of dried leaves; the ruined architecture all looked Greek, or at least Mediterranean, and it occurred to him that time didn’t seem to pass here—or, rather, seemed already to have passed and left this place behind. Probably that’s why they don’t tear it all down, he thought. It’s too late.

    H E WAS now three-quarters of the way up the dusty, overgrown slope. To his right was a little stone bridge over a dry streambed, and though both of the wide cement railings still arched over the gully, the middle six feet of the bridge’s floor had long ago fallen away. A weathered two-by-six beam spanned the gap, and he remembered that in 1986, at least, the beam had been sturdy enough to bear his weight.
    He discovered that it still was, though it was springy and he had to stretch his arms out to the sides to keep his balance. On the far side he paused to wipe the dusty sweat off his face; he thought about lighting a cigarette, but looked around at all the dry brush and glumly decided he’d better not.
    Then he froze—someone was moving around below him, clumsily, through the litter on one of the clogged side terraces. Sullivan couldn’t hope to see the person through the shaggy greenery below, but in the weighty silence he could hear someone mumbling and scuffling around.
    One of the bums that live here, he thought. It doesn’t sound like a cop or a caretaker; still, the bum might draw the attention of such people, and I don’t want to get kicked out of here myself before I retrieve the mask. They might fix the fence, or evenpost guards, before I could get back. This place is a historical landmark, after all, though nobody seems to pay any attention to it.
    He tiptoed through the fieldstone arch ahead of him and picked his way up a side stairway, which, being narrower, was relatively clear of debris. His fast breathing sounded loud in the still air.
    There was another arch at the top, and he paused under it, for he was at the broad main terrace of the hill now, and he’d be visible crossing the cement pavement that stretched between the jungle below and the odd house in front of him.
    The pavement was clear up here, and he let himself light a cigarette. Sukie, he recalled, had brought a flask, on that…March?…day in ‘86. That’s right, March—it had been Good Friday afternoon, which had seemed like a good day for burials.
    At first the two of them had thought that
this
house—this narrow two-story building, brick below and stuccoed above, with castle-like crenellations along the roof as if the owner were ready to hire archers to repel attack from below—must be Houdini’s mansion, and they’d been