by Tim Powers
“I’ll just leave ’em here. In fact, if I could just go to sleep on this couch—”
“Sleep later, and right now bring them into the kitchen. I am in this for my health.”
Crane just stared at the note on the back of the photograph of Lady Issit while Mavranos shuffled the photographs from the other envelopes around on the kitchen table and read the notes attached to them.
“So who are these people?” he asked. He looked up, then snapped his fingers at Crane. “Hmm? What’s this…category you’re a part of?”
Crane blinked and looked up. “Oh, they’re—a couple of ’em I recognize. Poker players. One of them was in a game with me in ’69, in a houseboat on Lake Mead. He won a big pot, what in this game is called the Assumption. He—” Crane sighed. “He took money for the hand. So did I. These others were probably at one of the other lake games that week, and I bet they won some Assumptions, too.”
Crane looked back at the note on the picture of Lady Issit. For the dozenth time he read, “Diana Smith—possibly living with Ozzie Smith—address unknown—urgently FOLD.” He realized that his heart was pounding and his palms were damp. “I’ve, uh, got to get in touch with somebody,” he said.
“You can use the phone.”
“I don’t know where she is. And I don’t know anybody that would.”
“I got no Ouija board, Pogo.”
Urgently FOLD.
He thought of the awed care with which he had held her during the long drive back from Las Vegas in 1960, and of the portrait she’d done of him, and he tried to remember what each of them had said the last time they’d talked, when she’d called him after he’d put the fishing spear through his ankle. When she’d been fifteen.
He’d dreamed that she got married. He wondered if she had children. She’d be thirty now, so she probably did. Maybe her psychic link was with the children now, and no longer with him.
Mavranos had got up and slouched back into the living room; now Crane heard him say, quietly, “Blue van just pulled up, and three guys got out of it; they’re heading for your place.”
What’s in the pot is gone, Ozzie had always said. It ain’t yours anymore. You might win it, but until you do, you gotta regard it as spent, not chase it.
“Up on your porch now,” Mavranos said.
Of course, when the antes or blinds have been high, so high that it’s as much as you’re worth to stay in a dozen hands, why then you gotta play looser.
“Lights on in your living room,” Arky said. “Kitchen now. Spare bedroom. Real bedroom, too, probably, but I can’t see it from here.”
And if the antes have been so big that guys are staying just because of it, sometimes you can bet everything you’ve got and win with a damn poor hand.
Crane turned the photograph over and looked at the pregnant woman. Then he got up and walked into the living room and stood beside Mavranos. Crane watched the silhouettes moving in his house. One was obviously the fat man. He must have met the van somewhere nearby.
“I’ve got to get in there,” he said.
“No way tonight—and these guys’ll probably watch the place for a couple of days. What’s in there that we can’t get somewhere else?”
“The phone.”
“Shit, I told you you could use mine.”
“It’s gotta be that one.”
“Yeah? Tell me why.” He was still staring out the window.
Crane looked at Mavranos’s lean silhouette, the narrowed eyes glinting in reflected streetlight glow. The man looked like a pirate.
Can I trust him? Crane wondered. He’s obviously got some sort of stake in this situation, but I’ll swear he’s a loner, not associated with any of these—these murky thrones and powers and assassins. We’ve been sociable neighbors for a while, and he always got along with Susan.
And God, it would be wonderful to have an ally.
“Okay,” Crane said slowly. “If we both tell the other guy everything we know—I mean, that he knows—himself—about this stuff—”
Mavranos was grinning at him. “You mean we lay our cards on the table.”
“That’s it.” Crane held out his right hand.
Mavranos enveloped it in his own callused, scarred right hand and shook it firmly twice. “Okay.”
Eighteen hours later Crane was crawling on his hands and knees across the floor of his own living room toward the telephone, his right eyelid stinging and his cheek saltily wet.
The intruders had turned off the lights when they had left, but the blinds were raised, and the traffic and neon signs and streetlights of Main Street gave the room a flickering twilight glow in the middle of this Friday night.
Ten minutes earlier Mavranos had driven his car up to the curb in front of Crane’s house and had got out and walked up to the front door, to attract the attention of anyone who might be watching the place. After knocking and getting no response, he had gone back to his car, leaned in through the open window, and honked the horn three times—two shorts and one long.
Crane had been in the alley behind the house.
At the first of the short blasts Crane pushed his way through his dilapidated back fence; the second honk blared as he was sprinting across his dark, unkempt back lawn, and when the third began, he punched a leather-gloved hand through his bedroom window, brushed the glass splinters away from the bottom edge of the frame, and dived through and scrambled across the bed.
By the time the horn stopped he was standing beside the bed. The air was warm, almost hot; the heater had been running all night and all day and half the night again, and of course the stove was on.
He took off Arky’s work glove and tossed it onto the floor.
The bedroom had been ransacked. The blankets and sheets had been torn off the bed, and the mattress had been slashed, and the bureau drawers had been dumped out on the floor.
He walked down the hall to the bathroom, stepping carefully in the darkness and bracing his hands on the walls, for the floor was an obstacle course of scattered magazines and books and clothes. The bathroom was completely dark, and he groped through the litter of boxes and bottles that had been spilled out of the medicine cabinet into the sink.
He hadn’t been able to stop yawning, and his palms were damp.
Among the litter in the sink he had come across the rubber bulb and the bottle of saline solution, and he’d shrugged. As long as you’re here, he thought.
Working by touch, he poured some of the solution into the coffee mug that was miraculously still on the sink. He reached a finger up to his face and pushed inward on the side of his right eye. With a sort of inner sploosh the plastic hemisphere came loose from the Teflon ring that was attached to two of the muscles in his eye socket. The medial rectus, he remembered, and the lateral rectus. He’d had the ring put in in about 1980. Before that he’d had a glass eye, and once a month he’d had to go to the eye man to have it taken out and cleaned. Now it was a task to be done every day at home, like cleaning contact lenses.
He carefully put the artificial eye into the mug and then used the bulb to suck up some of the saline solution and begin squirting it into the cavity of his empty eye socket.
He hadn’t done it this morning, so he squirted it out thoroughly. Irrigating the cavity, his doctor always called it.
Finally he couldn’t pretend any longer that he hadn’t finished. What had he come in here for?
Oh, he thought. Right. Rubbing alcohol and a sterile pad and a roll of sterile gauze bandage. He replaced his artificial eye, yawned again, then began groping through the darkness. He didn’t seem able to take a deep breath.
I bet they cut it, he thought now, crawling across the living-room floor and blinking the excess solution out of his eye. I bet they did. He was dragging along the bandages and the bottle of rubbing alcohol, wrapped in a shirt from the laundry hamper.
He lifted the telephone down from the table and picked up the receiver and then took a deep breath and let it out slowly when he heard the d
ial tone. They had not cut the phone line.
Well, he thought.
He replaced the receiver carefully.
He ran trembling fingers through his hair and glanced around.
All his telephone books, he saw, were gone—not only the ragged spiral-bound notebook with inked entries, but the big Pacific Bell white pages and yellow pages, too. I guess people write numbers in those as well, he thought, in the margins and back pages, and maybe draw asterisks by some of the printed ones, like to distinguish one particular Jones from among a column of them. I wonder what sort of calls all my old friends are going to get.
He peeled a couple of yards off the roll of sterile gauze and tucked the long strip under his leg.
He leaned back, and for nearly a minute he looked up through the window glass at the dark, shaggy head of the palm tree out front swaying in the night breeze. He didn’t dare raise his head high enough to be seen from outside, but he could crouch here and watch the palm tree. It’s outside the hole I’m in, he thought. All it has to do is suck up nutrients and get ready for tomorrow’s photosynthesis session, like every other day.
At last he sighed and pulled Arky’s Schrade lock-back knife out of his pocket and opened it. Smoke marks mottled the broad four-inch blade, from Arky’s having held it over a lit burner on his stove, but Arky had said to use rubbing alcohol, too, if possible.
Crane twisted the cap off the plastic bottle and poured alcohol over both sides of the blade. The stuff reeked sharply, and it chilled his thigh when he shook a couple of liberal splashes of it onto the left leg of his jeans. He was shivering, and his heart was thudding coldly in his hollow chest.
He had to keep reminding himself that he had thought this out a hundred times during these last eighteen hours, and had not been able to see any other way out.
With his right hand he held the knife upright on his left thigh, the point pricking him an inch or two to the outside of where he figured the femur was; his left hand, open, hovered over his head as he gathered his courage.
He was panting, and after a few seconds his nose caught a new depth and mellowness in the alcohol reek. He glanced away from the knife—
—and then stared at the opened bottle of Laphroaig scotch that was standing on the carpet, with a half-full Old Fashioned glass beside it. They had certainly not been there when he had crawled across the floor three or four minutes ago.
“Scott,” came Susan’s voice softly from the shadows beyond the bottle. He looked up, and he thought he could see her. The diffuse, spotty light made camouflage of the patterns on her clothing, and her face was turned away, but he was sure he could see the fall of her black hair and the contour of one shoulder and leg.
“Don’t, Scott,” she said. “Why hurt yourself to get her when you can have a drink and get me?”
Crane’s face was dewed with chilly sweat. “Is that what you are?” he asked tightly. “Drink? Delirium tremens? Did I bring that bottle out? Am I talking to myself here?”
“Scott. she’s not worth this. have a drink and let me—”
No, he thought, this can’t be a hallucination. Arky saw it twice yesterday, this figure, this creature.
“Come into the bedroom. Bring the bottle.”
He could hear a chitinous rustling as the vague figure in the corner stood up. Would it go into the bedroom, or would it come toward him?
It’s not Susan, he reminded himself nervously. Susan’s dead. This thing has nothing to do with Susan, or nearly nothing. At most it’s a psychic fossil of her, in her shape and with some of her memories but made of something else.
It was coming toward him. The light climbed the approaching figure—slim legs, hips, breasts. In a moment he would see its face, the face of his dead wife.
As if he were slamming a door against something dreadful, he slammed his hand down with all his strength onto the butt end of the upright knife.
Breath whistled in through his clenched teeth, and the room seemed to ring with a shrill, tinny whine. The pain in his stabbed leg was a scalding blackness, but he was cold, freezing, and the blood had come so fast that the knife hilt standing up from his thigh was slick with it, and his scrabbling hands slipped off the hot, wet wood of the grip. At last he got a good hold on it and pulled, but the muscles inside his leg seemed to be gripping the blade; it took all his strength to tug the thing up and out of himself, and he gagged as he felt, deep in his leg, the edge cutting more flesh as it was dragged free.
He squinted around at the dim room. The thing that had seemed to be Susan was gone.
His hands were heavy and clumsy as he laid the bandage on the cut in his sopping jeans—Should have took the pants off first, he thought dizzily—and then dragged up the length of gauze and tied it off around his leg, as tightly as he could, over the bandage.
His heart, which had been racing before he stabbed himself, seemed to have slowed and taken on a metallic clanking, sounding like a weary old man pitching horseshoes. He thought he could smell the kicked-up dry dust.
Shock, he told himself. Lean back, put your feet up on the couch, elevate the wound above the heart.
Try to relax your rib-cage so you can breathe deep and slow.
Go ahead and hold the leg as tight as you like.
The refrigerator’s compressor-motor turned on, then after a minute clicked off again. A siren howled by down Main Street, and he listened to it, vaguely hoping that it might stop somewhere nearby. It didn’t.
Come on, he thought; call.
Blood was seeping out from under the bandage and running up his thigh and soaking the seat of his pants. The rug will be ruined, he thought; Susan will—
Stop it.
He looked at the glass of scotch. He could smell the smoky, welcoming warmth of it, of her—
Stop it.
The ringing of the telephone jolted him awake. How long had it been ringing? He fumbled at it and managed to knock the receiver off.
“Wait!” he croaked, scrabbling at it with blood-sticky hands. “Don’t hang up, wait!”
At last he got the fingers of one hand around it and pulled it across the wet rug and lifted its weight to his ear.
“Hello?”
He heard a woman’s voice. “Scott! What happened? Are you all right? What happened? I’m calling paramedics if you don’t say something!”
“Diana,” he said. He took a deep breath and made himself think. “Are you at home?”
“No, Ozzie made me promise—it doesn’t matter, what—”
“Good,” he said, talking over her. “Listen to me, and don’t hang up. I don’t need paramedics. God—give me a minute and don’t hang up.”
“You sound terrible! I can’t give you a minute—just tell me what happened to your leg.”
“I stabbed myself, I—”
“How badly? Quick!”
“Not too bad, I think, I did it with a sterilized knife and made sure to hit the side away from that big artery—”
“You did it on purpose?” She sounded relieved and very angry. “I was at work, and I fell right over! The manager had to use my sign-off number on the register and make one of the box boys drive me home! Now I’m clocked out, and I don’t get sick pay till I’ve been there a year! What was it, a game of Amputation Poker?”
He sighed deeply. “I needed to get in touch with you quickly.”
She seemed to be coughing softly. Then: “You what? You must be crazy, I can’t—”
“Goddamm it, listen to me!” he said harshly. “I may pass out here, and I probably won’t be able to get to this phone again. You and Ozzie—and me—somebody wants to kill us all, and they’ve got the resources to find you and him the way they’ve found me. Is Ozzie still alive?”
She was quiet for a moment. “Yes,” she said.
“I need to talk to him. This has to do with that game I played in on Lake Mead in ’69. There was something Ozzie knew—”
“Jesus, it’s been more than a minute. I’m out of here—stay by the
phone—I’m crazy, but I’ll call you from another booth.”
He managed to juggle the receiver back onto the phone. Then he just lay on the floor and concentrated on breathing. Luckily the room was warm. A deep, throbbing ache was building in his leg behind the steady heat of the pain.
The phone rang, and he grabbed the receiver. “You?” he said.
“Right. Ozzie made me promise not to talk to you on a traceable phone, especially now, twenty years later. Talk.”
“The people that killed your mother want to kill you. And me, and Ozzie. Don’t know why. Ozzie knows why, or he wouldn’t have ditched me. To save us all, I need to talk to him.”
She inhaled. “You’re doomed, Scott,” she said, and there seemed to be tears in her voice. “If you are still Scott. What did I give you for your birthday in ’68?”
“A crayon portrait of me.”
“Shit!” she sobbed. “I wish you were already gone! No, I don’t. Scotty, I love you. Good-bye.”
There was a click in his ear, silence, then the dial tone. He gently hung it up, then sat there for a while and stared at the telephone.
He was bleakly sure that he could stab himself again, in the other leg, or in the belly, and she wouldn’t call again.
Tears of self-pity mingled with the sweat and saline solution on his face.
Forty-seven-year-old one-eyed gimp, he thought. He laughed through his tears. What made you imagine you could help anybody? She’s smart to kiss you off. Any person would do the same. Any real person.
His leg seemed to have stopped actively bleeding, though it throbbed with pain, and the section of rug he was lying on was spongy and slick with cooling blood.
Eventually he reached out and picked up the glass of scotch.
For several minutes he just lay there and inhaled its heady fumes. If he was going to drink it, he was going to drink it, so there was no hurry. Anything that might be waiting in the bedroom could continue to wait. He’d probably have to get fairly drunk, anyway, to be fooled. To get the—the suspension of disbelief.
