by Tim Powers
Spider Joe strode out across the yard until his antennas scraped against the fender of the nearest pickup truck, and then he turned around and walked halfway back.
“I’m still a channel for them,” he said. “And they sometimes take possession of me like that, like the voodoo loas do to those Haitians. It’s never been the Fool before.”
Or Dondi Snayheever, I bet, thought Crane.
“Your father’s job,” Spider Joe went on. He shook his head. “You should have told me who you are. I think I would have done this over the phone, or through the mail.”
“I’m not—” Crane began.
“Shut up.” Mavranos and Booger had sat down on the steps, leaving Crane and Spider Joe standing facing each other. “Booger and I used to work for your father.” He rubbed his face. “I don’t ever talk about this, so listen. I was a miniaturist painter, trained in Italy since I was a kid to be one of the painters of the heaviest Tarot decks—the absolute goddamn hydrogen bomb of Tarot decks—the one known as the Lombardy Zeroth deck.”
He pointed at Crane. “You’ve seen one of mine, when you played Assumption.” He shook his head, and the hot breeze twitched at his gray beard. “There’s never more than a couple of guys in the world who can paint it, and even if you’re young and of sound mind and body, it takes a good year to paint a set. Or a bad year. And then you need a long vacation. Pretty well name your own price, believe me.”
He walked in a quick counterclockwise circle, as, it seemed to Crane, a Catholic might cross himself.
“Booger,” Spider Joe went on, “was a remora fish, doing errands for him in exchange for the elegantest sort of high life Vegas could provide, which even in the forties and fifties could be pretty elegant. There was a woman who was a threat to him, in 1960—Booger got close to her, became her friend, and…talked her into meeting her at the Sahara one night. Then Booger stayed away, and Vaughan Trumbill showed up instead, and he killed the woman. Her newborn baby daughter got away, but Booger had set it up for the baby to die, too.”
Involuntarily Crane glanced at the old woman. Her face was expressionless.
“I made him a deck,” said Spider Joe, “he had to have it for the spring of ’69. He used it. And then one day Booger and I were having a meeting with him.” Spider Joe’s fists were clenched, but he kept his voice even. “He was in one of the bodies he had just assumed after the game, a woman called Betsy, and while we were listening to him, she—he’d only been in the body for like a day or two—she came back up to the surface for a few seconds, the Betsy woman did, and it was her looking out of the eyes.”
Again Crane looked back at Booger. Her face still showed no emotion, but there were tears now on her wrinkled cheeks.
“She was crying,” said Spider Joe softly, “and begging us to—to hold her up, to do something to keep her from sinking away forever back down into the dark pool where the Archetypes move and individual minds just dissolve, way down in the depths.” He took a deep breath and let it out. “And then it was just him again. She was gone, back down into the darkness, and we—we found that we knew more about Death than we had before. Booger and I took our orders and walked out and walked right away from the world—away from our cars and houses and gourmet food and fine clothes, even our names—and never went back. Booger bit out her tongue, and I cut out my eyes.”
Crane heard Mavranos mutter, “Jesus!” behind him.
For a couple of seconds Crane just didn’t believe it. Then he stared at Spider Joe’s deeply furrowed cheeks, and remembered the psychic trauma of viewing the Lombardy Zeroth cards—and he tried to imagine the horror of learning, firsthand, that dead people don’t always just go away to oblivion but can come back, suffering, to confront you; and he thought that it might, after all, be true that this woman would choose to make herself mute rather than ever again be able to arrange a death with her lies, or that this man would make himself blind rather than ever again be able to paint another of those decks.
Spider Joe shrugged. “Your father’s job,” he said again. “Your father has almost got you, I have to tell you that. He’s already had you perform a human sacrifice, and—”
“When?” Crane shook his head. “I’ve never killed anybody!”
Except Susan, he thought. One of the random illnesses. Caused by me. And did I kill Diana, too?
“You may not have known you were doing it,” Spider Joe said, almost kindly, “but he handed you the knife, sonny, and you used it. Even in that brief reading it was as clear in your character profile as a birthmark. As I say, you might not have been aware. It would have been sometime this last week—certainly at night, and probably involving playing cards, and probably the victim was from someplace separated from here by untamed water—from over the sea.”
“Aah, God,” Crane wailed softly. “The Englishman.” A lot of goons in this country, the man had said. He was right, Crane thought now. A lot of goons that don’t even know they’re goons. He blinked rapidly and forced away the memory of the man’s weak, cheerful face.
“Your father’s job,” Spider Joe was saying yet again. “He is your father, so theoretically you could take it. I don’t know how. You need to consult an old King.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where would I find him?”
“I don’t know. A cemetery, probably—old Kings are nearly always dead Kings.”
“But how do I—”
“That’s it,” Spider Joe said. “The reading is over. Get out of here. I probably should kill you—I could—and I certainly will if you ever come back here again.”
The sparse, dry brush along the highway shoulder hissed in the breeze.
Mavranos had stood up and was walking toward the Suburban. “You have a nice day, too,” he drawled. “Come on, Scott.”
Crane blinked and shook his head, then found that he was plodding after his friend.
“Oh, there was one more thing,” called Spider Joe.
Crane halted and turned.
“You met your father the other day—his old, discarded body, anyway. When the Fool was in possession of me, I saw it. The body was playing Lowball Poker, for trash.” He turned back toward the trailer and walked toward Booger, his antennas cutting lines in the dirt.
“Well,” said Mavranos as he straightened the wheel and tromped on the accelerator, “that clears it all up, hah?” His window was rolled down, and as the gathering head wind began to toss his black hair around, he tilted up a new can of Coors and had a long sip. “All you gotta do is go ask some dead guy some questions. A dead guy who you don’t know who he is or where he’s buried. Shit, we could have this wrapped up by dinnertime.”
Crane was squinting out at the scattered low bushes and broken rocks that became a blur in the middle distance, fading out to the hard edge of the distant horizon against the blue sky.
“I thought he looked a hundred,” he said quietly. “Actually he’d be…ninety-one this year. What was it they were calling him? Not Colonel Bleep. Doctor Leaky.”
Mavranos gave him an uneasy smile. “Who’s this? Your dead King?”
“In a way. No, my real father’s body. It’s senile now, and I guess he doesn’t use it anymore, lets it wander around on its own. I remember him…taking me boating on Lake Mead, showing me how to bait hooks, and on my last day with him, when I was five, he took me to the Flamingo for breakfast and to the Moulin Rouge for lunch. It burned down in the sixties, I think.”
He shook his head and wished he could have one of Mavranos’s beers. A really cold beer, he thought, drunk fast and then uncoiling icily in your stomach…no. Not now that there was something to be done.
“He blinded my right eye, that evening. Threw a deck of those Lombardy Zeroth cards at me, and the edge of one split the eye. No wonder the Bitin Dog personality fit me—a broken-off piece of a hurt and abandoned little boy, cauterized to feel nothing.”
“Pogo, I’m really willing to try to believe you’re not crazy
, but you gotta help me a little, you know?”
Crane wasn’t listening to Mavranos. “Actually, I think if I’d known then, two days ago, who that was, that decrepit old man, I’d have…I don’t know, wanted to hug him, maybe, or even ask him to forgive me for doing whatever it was I did to make him mad at me. I think I still loved him, I think the bit of me that’s still a five-year-old kid did.” He shook one of Mavranos’s Camels out of a pack and struck a match, cupping the flame against the wind. “But that was before he had his fat man kill Ozzie.” He blew out the match and tucked it into the ashtray. “Now I think I’d like to cave in his blinking old head with a tire iron.”
Mavranos was clearly bewildered by all this, but he nodded. “That’s the spirit.”
Crane resumed watching the highway in both directions for the gray Jaguar.
He paid no attention to the big tan Winnebago RV with a bicycle-laden luggage rack on top and a GOOD SAM CLUB sticker on the back window. They passed it, and then it just chugged laboriously along in their dusty wake, never quite receding out of sight.
They stopped at a Burger King for lunch, and Crane ate two cheeseburgers while Mavranos managed to drink most of a vanilla shake. Crane thought Mavranos seemed to be having trouble swallowing.
They got a room for cash in a little motel on Maryland Parkway, and while Mavranos slept, in preparation for going to a pet store for a goldfish and then setting out on yet another night of chasing his statistical phase-change, Crane bought a succession of Cokes from the machine in the motel office, and for two hours he paced around the pool, staring into the water and trying to figure out where he might find a dead King.
When Arky came reeling back to the room at midnight, Crane was sitting up in the sleeping bag on the floor, doodling on a pad.
“Lights out, Pogo,” said Mavranos, his voice harsh with exhaustion, as he fell fully clothed across the bed.
Crane got up and turned out the light and got back into the sleeping bag, but for a long time he lay awake and stared at the ceiling in the darkness.
The moon was two days short of being full, and as Georges Leon carefully hung up the telephone, it irritated him that out here east of Paradise the moonlight shone in through the window of the big Winnebago more strongly than any artificial lights did. He didn’t like natural light, especially moonlight.
He wasn’t going to let himself get angry at the things Moynihan had said on the phone, or the kind of money Moynihan had demanded.
He could hear Trumbill clunking around in the little bathtub, and even with the air conditioner turned all the way up the chilled air smelled of celery and blood and liver and olive oil. Leon would wait for Trumbill to come out; he didn’t want to go in there and see the gross, tattooed naked body kneeling on the floor, the head and arms buried and rooting away in the appalling salad that the man had flung together in the tub.
Leon was in the bandy-legged old Benet body now—he’d have to make sure no one went on calling it Beany—and he dreaded trying to give harsh orders, convey authority, with it. The face was too round and red, the cheeks and eyes were too deeply etched with the fatuous grin Leon had let the thing assume when he had left it to its automatic-pilot job as a Poker shill at several casinos. He looked like Mickey Rooney. Even the voice, as he had helplessly noticed on the phone just now, kept trying to be squeaky.
Of course the beautiful Art Hanari body still rested in physical perfection in a bed at La Maison Dieu, but he did very much want to debut that body Wednesday night, at the first of the Holy Week games on the lake.
Well, that was only four days away. He could work out of Benet for that long.
And then on Holy Saturday he could begin assuming the bodies he had defined and paid for in 1969.
High damn time. This had been a long twenty-one years. It would be good to get into some fresh hosts. That Scott Crane looked all right—Leon glanced out the window to make sure Crane’s motel room was still dark—and several of the ones Trumbill had already captured and sedated looked damn good. People took better care of themselves these days.
He could hear water running now, and Trumbill grunting as he toweled himself off. The RV rocked a little on its shocks.
A few minutes later Vaughan Trumbill came stumping into the narrow room, his voluminous pants cuffs billowing around his bare blue and red feet, buttoning a sail-like shirt around his enormous belly. The bandage above his ear had begun to blot red again. The man’s blood pressure must be like the penstocks in Hoover Dam, Leon thought.
“They coming?” Trumbill asked.
“Not until tomorrow, he said. And it’s got to be away from crowds, and all he’d agree to do was haul away an unconscious body. I don’t think his guys will even be armed.”
The bandage wobbled as Trumbill’s eyebrows went up.
“Moynihan doesn’t know me,” Leon went on, keeping his voice level. “I said I was Betsy Reculver’s business partner, and he said I should have her call him, or at least Richard Leroy. I told Moynihan he should ask you about it all, and he just said he heard you’d been shot. How’s your arm and leg?”
Trumbill rolled his massive left shoulder. “Just feels strained now, like I’ve been digging ditches. Not numbed anymore. And I’ve been eating stuff to restore all the lost blood.” He glanced out the window at the dark motel room. “I hate head wounds.”
“You were lucky. Richard and the guard both took it square.” Leon touched the forehead he had now. “Twice in a week I’ve been shot right out of a body.”
Trumbill turned away from the window and stared at him impassively. “A drag, right?”
Leon grinned, then stopped when he remembered how the expression looked on this clown face. “At dawn I’ll call the garage,” he said “and have them send the Camaro over here. This thing can follow, but it can’t chase.”
“’Kay. And I’ve got the tranky gun loaded up.”
Leon sat down and shifted the chair to face the window. “I’ll take the first shift watching,” he said. “I’ll get you up at”—he glanced at the clock on the plywood wall paneling—“four.”
“’Kay.” Trumbill shuffled sideways into the back of the RV, where the bunk was. “Bathroom might be a little high by morning.”
“As soon as we’ve got Crane in a cage, we’ll sell this thing as is.”
The sun was up and the air was already hot when Crane, still disheveled from sleep, walked back from the motel office and kicked the room door. When Mavranos opened it, blinking in the daylight, Crane handed him one of the cold cans of Coke.
“They don’t have coffee,” Crane said, stepping inside and closing the door. “This’ll do; it’s caffeine at least.”
“Christ.” Mavranos popped the top, took a sip, and shuddered.
Crane leaned against the battered dressing table. “Listen, Arky,” he said, “did you ever do any scuba diving?”
“I was a city boy.”
“Damn. Well, you can wait in the boat.”
“That’s what I’ll do, all right. I’ll wait in the boat. Your dead King’s underwater somewhere?”
“I think he’s in Lake Mead,” said Crane. “I think his head is, anyway.”
Mavranos took another sip of the Coke, then put it down and stalked outside. Crane heard the truck door clunk, and when Mavranos came back in, he was carrying a dripping Coors can.
“I did see the flies buzzing around the cards,” Mavranos said slowly, after he’d taken a deep sip, “and I heard that guy Snayheever’s words coming out of Buggy Joe’s mouth. And those things were weird. And I’m willing to admit that there’s a lot of weird shit going on. But how the hell are you going to have a conversation with a cut-off head, underwater?” He laughed, though not happily. “And with a scuba gadget in your mouth?”
“Oh,” said Crane, slapping the air carelessly with the back of his hand, “as to that—I don’t know.”
Mavranos sighed and sat down on the bed. “Why do you think he’s in the lake?” he asked quietly.
“When Snayheever was on the phone to Diana, he said somebody tried to sink a head in Lake Mead.” Crane was pacing up and down the room now, talking rapidly. “Snayheever’s aware of a lot of this stuff, even if he is nuts, so maybe sinking severed heads in the lake is something people involved in this kind of shit do. And he made it sound like the lake didn’t take it and that it was foolish of the guy to have even tried, like the lake already has a head in it, see? And couldn’t hold another, not that kind anyway. Tamed water Lake Mead is, remember Ozzie saying that? Maybe it tames any stuff in it, too, so that’d be a good place to put an old King’s head, if you’re the new King and want to keep an old one down. And I don’t think it was my real father, the current King, who had me…shit, kill some poor Englishman at a Poker table at the Horseshoe. I think it was the king in the lake that did it, that made me do it, I think it was him that was grinning at me out of the Two of Wands card, with his head cut off and two metal rods through his head.”
Crane grinned wildly at Mavranos. “You with me so far?”
“You poor fucked-up son of a bitch.”
“And along with the severed-head Two of Wands, I had a strange King of Swords; it was an arm, with the hand holding a sword, poking up out of a body of water, like a weapon was being offered by somebody below the surface.”
Mavranos just looked puzzled and irritated—and terribly tired. “And…?”
“And when I’ve dreamed about playing Assumption on Lake Mead, I see the Fool dancing on a cliff edge, but I also see—sense, really—a giant deep in the lake, and even though I can’t see him, I know that he has only one eye.”
“Orpheus, in Greek myths—they cut his head off, and it kept talking for a while, making prophecies and such stuff.” Mavranos stood up. “Okay, okay. You’ve done scuba diving before?”
“Oh, sure. Last time I went, I shot a spear through my ankle.” He was smiling when he said it, but a moment later he winced, remembering that fifteen-year-old Diana had called him then, as soon as he’d got home from the hospital.
