by Tim Powers
And in a bedroom in a run-down old apartment building in Long Beach, south of Los Angeles, a fourteen-year-old boy was jolted awake—out of a dream of a woman running madly through rows of grapevines and clutching in her hand an ivy-wrapped staff that somehow had a bloody pinecone stuck on the end of it.
Koot Hoomie Sullivan had sat up in bed at the shock of the vision, and now he swung his bare feet out from under the blankets onto the wooden floor. His heart was still pounding, and his left hand had gone numb though his watchband was comfortably loose.
He glanced out the window, past the lantana branches that pressed against the glass; the carob trees and the parachute-draped van outside were casting long shadows across the broken concrete, and he could hear wild parrots shouting in the tree branches. It could hardly be seven o’clock yet—he was certainly the first person awake in the apartment—but the warm interior air was heavy with the smell of burning coffee.
“Call me Fishmeal,” he whispered, and shivered. He had not smeared mud on the foot of his bed at all this winter, and he had eaten several slices of rare London broil for dinner last night—he had even been allowed to drink a glass of champagne at the stroke of midnight!—but nevertheless he was again, clearly, experiencing the sense of being nearly able to see the whole American West Coast in some off-the-visible-spectrum frequency, as if with eyes underground as well as in the sky, and almost hear heartbeats and whimpers and furtive trysts and betrayals as if through the minute vibrations of freeway-shoulder palm trees and mountain sage and urban-lot weeds. And below the conscious level of his mind, faintly as if from distances remote beyond any capacity of natural space, he thought he could hear shouts and sobs and laughter from entities that were not any part of himself. When he had felt this sense of expanded awareness before, it had generally been in breathless dreams, or at most in the hypnagogic state between sleep and waking, but he was wide awake right now.
He stood up and got dressed, quickly but thoughtfully—Reeboks, and comfortable jeans, and a loose flannel shirt over the bandage taped onto his ribs; and he made sure the end of his belt was rotated into a Möbius twist before he buckled it.
He blinked as he let his gaze drift over the things in his room—the tasco 300-power reflector telescope in the corner, the framed black-and-white photograph of Thomas Edison on the wall, the coin-collection folders, the desk with clothes and a pair of in-line skates piled carelessly on it.
He jumped in surprise, and an instant later a woman’s voice mournfully exclaimed “Oh hell!” somewhere in the parking lot outside the window.
“It’s bar-time showtime, folks,” Kootie whispered self-consciously, and he opened the bedroom door and stepped out into the hallway that led to the open kitchen and the living room.
He could hear someone moving around in his adopted-parents’ bedroom, but he wanted to have something specific to say before he talked to them—so he hurried to the front door and unhooked the feather-fringed chain and unbolted the door.
The woman who was the property owner was just walking around the corner of the building from the parking lot as Kootie shuffled across the threshold and pulled the front door closed behind him; and her brown face was streaked with tears. “Oh, Kootie,” she said, “all the beasties are dead!”
They were already dead, Kootie thought—but he knew what the woman must mean. The morning air was sharply chilly in his curly, sweat-damp hair, but the breeze was still scented with the night’s jasmine, and he felt ready to deal with this particular crisis. “Show me, Johanna,” he said gently.
“Over by the trash cans and Mr. Pete’s van.” She was plodding heavily back the way she had come, her bathrobe flapping around the legs of her burst spandex tights. Over her shoulder she said, “I gave them some new gravel last night—could that have poisoned them?”
Kootie remembered his dreamed vision of the woman in the vineyard with the bloody, ivy-wrapped staff, and as he followed Johanna around the corner into the slantingly sunlit parking lot, he said, “What killed them was nothing that happened around here.”
He trudged after her across the broken checkerboard of asphalt and concrete, and when he had stepped around the back end of the parachute-shrouded van he stopped beside her.
The beasties were obviously dead now. Three of them were sprawled on the pavement and in the ice plant here, their gnarled old hands poking limply out of the thrift-store shirt cuffs, their mouths gaping among the patchy gray post-mortem whiskers, their eyes flat and sheenless behind the scavenged spectacles.
Kootie shook his head and clumsily ran the still-numb fingers of his left hand through his curly black hair. “Terrific,” he said. “What are we going to do with them?”
Johanna sniffed. “We should give them a burial.”
“These people died a long time ago, Johanna,” Kootie said, “and these aren’t their bodies. These aren’t anyone’s bodies. The coroner would go nuts if he got hold of these. I doubt if they’ve got any more internal organs than a sea-slug’s got … and I always thought their skeletons must be arranged pretty freehand, from the way they walk. Walked. I doubt they’ve even got fingerprints.”
Johanna sighed. “I’m glad I got them the Mikasa glass candies at Christmas.”
“They did like those,” Kootie agreed absently. Her late common-law husband had got into the habit of feeding the shambling derelicts, and for the last three Christmases Johanna had bought decorative glass treats for the things, in his memory. They couldn’t eat organic stuff because it would just rot inside their token bellies, but they had still liked to gobble down things that looked like food.
“Good God,” came a man’s voice from behind Kootie; and then a woman said, softly, “What would they die of?”
Kootie turned to his adopted parents with a rueful smile. “Top of the morning. I was hoping I’d be able to get a tarp over ’em before you guys got up, so I could break it to you over coffee.”
His adopted mother glanced at him, and then stared at his side. “Kootie,” she said, her contralto voice suddenly sharp with alarm, “you’re bleeding. Worse than usual, I mean.”
Kootie had already felt the hot wetness over his ribs. “I know, Angelica,” he said to her. To his adopted father he said, “Pete, let’s get these necrotic dudes stashed in your van for now. Then I think we’d better go to Johanna’s office to … confer. I believe this is going to be a busy day. A busy year.”
He nearly always just called them “Mom” and “Dad”—this use of their first names put a stop to further discussion out here, and they both nodded. Angelica said, “I’ll get coffee cooking,” and strode back toward the building. Pete Sullivan rubbed his chin and said, “Let’s use a blanket from inside the van to lift them in. I don’t want to have to touch their ‘skin.’ ”
Angelica Sullivan’s maiden name had been Elizalde, and she had the lean face and high cheekbones of a figure in an El Greco painting; her long, straight hair was as black as Kootie’s unruly mane, but after she put four coffee cups of water into the microwave in Johanna’s kitchen, and got the restaurant-surplus coffee urn loaded and turned on, she tied her hair back in a hasty ponytail and hurried into the manager’s office.
A television set was humming on the cluttered desk, but its screen was black, and the only light in the long room was the yellow glow that filtered in through the dusty, vine-blocked windows high in one wall. A worn couch, sat against the opposite wall, and she stepped lithely up onto it to reach the bookshelves above it.
She selected several volumes from the shelves, dropping them onto the couch cushions by her feet, and took down too a nicotine-darkened stuffed toy pig; then she hopped down, sniffed the air sharply, and hurried back into the little kitchen—but the coffee was not burning.
A sudden hard knock at the door made her jump, and when she whirled toward the door she saw Kootie’s face peering in at her through the screened door-window; and then the boy opened the door and stepped in, followed by Johanna and Pete.
�
�You’re not on bar-time, Mom,” said Kootie, panting. “You jumped after I knocked on the door; and Dad jumped after I flicked cold hose-water on his neck.”
Pete’s graying hair was wet, and he nodded. “Not much after.”
Johanna was staring at Kootie without comprehension, so he told her, “Bar-time is when you react to things an instant before they actually happen, like you’re vibrating in the now notch and hanging over the sides a little. It’s … ‘sympathetically induced resonation,’ it means somebody’s paying psychic attention to you, watching you magically.” He looked at Pete and Angelica. “I’ve been on bar-time since I woke up. When Johanna found the beasties, I jumped a second before she yelled, and when we went back to the apartment to wash our hands just now, I reached for the phone an instant before it started ringing.”
Kootie led the three of them out of the kitchen into Pete’s long dim office.
“It was one of your clients on the phone,” Pete told Angelica, “Mrs. Perez. She says her grandparents’ ghosts are gone from the iron pots you put them in; the pots aren’t even magnetic anymore, she says. Oh, and I noticed that your voodoo whosis is gone from the cabinet by our front door—the little cement guy with cowrie shells for his eyes and mouth.”
“The Eleggua figure?” said Angelica, collapsing onto the couch. “He’s—what, he’s the Lord of the Crossroads, what can it mean that he’s gone? He must have weighed thirty pounds! Solid concrete! I didn’t forget to propitiate him last week—did I, Kootie?”
Kootie shook his head somberly. “You spit rum all over him, and I put the beef jerky and the Pez dispenser in his cabinet myself.”
Pete was sniffing the stale office air. “Why does everywhere smell like burning coffee this morning?”
“Kootie,” said Angelica, “what’s going on here today?”
Kootie had hiked himself up to sit on the desk next to the buzzing black-screened television set, and he pulled his shirt up out of his pants—the bandage taped to his side was blotted with red, and even as they looked at it a line of blood trickled down to his belt. “And my left hand’s numb,” he said, flexing his fingers, “and I had to rest twice, carrying the dead beasties, because I’ve got no strength in my legs.”
He looked up at his adopted mother. “We’re in the middle of winter,” he went on, in a tense but flat voice. “This is the season when I sometimes dream that I can … sense the American West Coast. This morning—” He paused to cock his head: “—still, in fact—I’ve got that sense while I’m awake. What I dreamed of was a crazy woman running through a vineyard, waving a bloody wand with ivy vines wrapped around it and a pinecone stuck on the end of it.” He pulled his shirt back down and tucked it in messily. “Some balance of power has shifted drastically somewhere—and somebody is paying attention to me; somebody’s going to be coming here. And I don’t think the Solville foxing measures are going to fool this person.”
“Nobody can see through them!” said Johanna loyally. Her late husband, Solomon “Sol” Shadroe, had bought the apartment building in 1974 because its architecture confused psychic tracking, and he had spent nearly twenty years adding rooms and wings onto the structure, and re-routing the water and electrical systems, and putting up dozens of extraneous old TV antennas with carob seed-pods and false teeth and old radio parts hung from them, to intensify the effect; the result was an eccentric stack and scatter of buildings and sheds and garages and conduit, and even now, more than two years after the old man’s death, the tenants still called the rambling old compound Solville.
Pete Sullivan was the manager and handyman for the place now, and he had dutifully kept up the idiosyncratic construction and maintenance programs; now his lean, tanned face was twisted in a squinting smile of apprehension. “So what is it that you sense, son?”
“There’s a—” Kootie said uncertainly, his unfocused gaze moving across the ceiling. “I can almost see it—a chariot—or a … a gold cup? Maybe it’s a tarot card from the Cups suit, paired with the Chariot card from the Major Arcana?—coming here.” He gave Johanna a mirthless smile. “I think it could find me, even here, and somebody might be riding in it, or carrying it.”
Angelica was nodding angrily. “This is the thing, isn’t it, Kootie, that was all along going to happen? The reason why we never moved away from here?”
“Why we stopped running,” ventured Pete. “Why we’ve been … standing our little ground.”
“Why Kootie is an iyawo,” said Johanna, sighing and nodding in the kitchen doorway. “Why this place was first built, from the earthquake wreck of that ghost house. And the—”
“Kootie is not an iyawo,” Angelica interrupted, pronouncing the feminine Yoruba noun as if it were an obscenity. “He hasn’t undergone the kariocha initiation. Tell her, Pete.”
Kootie looked at his adopted father and smiled. “Yeah,” he said softly, “tell her, Dad.”
Pete Sullivan pulled a pack of Marlboros out of his shirt pocket and cleared his throat. “Uh, ‘it’s not a river in Egypt,’ ” he told his wife, quoting a bit of pop-psychology jargon that he knew she hated.
She laughed, though with obvious reluctance. “I know it’s not. The Nile, denial—I know the difference. How is this denial, what I’m saying? Kariocha is a very specific ritual—shave the head, cut the scalp, get three specially initiated drummers to play the consecrated bata drums!—and it just has not been done with Kootie.”
“Not to the letter of the law,” said Pete, shaking out a cigarette and flipping it over the backs of his fingers; “but in the … spirit?” He snapped a wooden match and inhaled smoke, then squeezed the lit match in his fist, which was empty when he opened it again. “Come on, Angie! All the formalities aside, basically a kariocha initiation is putting a thing like an alive-and-kicking ghost inside of somebody’s head, right? Call it a ‘ghost’ or call it an ‘orisha.’ It makes the person who hosts it … what, different. So—well, you tell me what state Kootie was in when we found him two years ago. I suppose he’s not still an omo, since the orisha left his head, voluntarily … but it did happen to the boy.”
“I saw him when he was montado,” agreed Johanna, “possessed, in this very kitchen, with that yerba buena y tequila telephone. He had great ashe, the boy’s orisha did, great luck and power, to make a telephone out of mint and tequila and a pencil sharpener, and then call up dead people on it.” She looked across at the boy and smiled sadly. “You’re not a virgin in the head anymore, are you, Kootie?”
“More truth than poetry in that, Johanna,” Kootie agreed, hopping down from the desk. “Yeah, Mom, this does feel like it.” His voice was unsteady, but he managed to look confident as he waved his blood-spotted hand in a gesture that took in the whole building and grounds. “It’s why we’re here, why I’m what I am.” He smiled wanly and added, “It’s why your Mexican wizard made you give a nasty name to this witchery shop you run here. And this is the best place for us to be standing when it meets us. Solville can’t hide us, but it’s a fortified position. We can … receive them, whoever they might be, give them an audience.”
Angelica was sitting on the couch, flipping through the pages of her battered copy of Kardec’s Selected Prayers. Among the other books she had tossed onto the couch were Reichenbach’s Letters on Od and Magnetism, and a spiral-bound notebook with a version of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida hand-copied into it, and a paperback copy of Guillermo Ceniza-Bendiga’s Cunjuro del Tobaco.
“How far away are they?” she snapped, without looking up. “Like, are they coming from Los Angeles? New York? Tibet? Mars?”
“The … thing is … on the coast,” said Kootie with a visible shiver. “Sssouth? Yes, south of here, and coming north, like up the 5 Freeway or Pacific Coast Highway.”
CHAPTER 2
Our doctors say this is no month to bleed
—William Shakespeare,
Richard II
THE CAGED CLOCK HIGH on the green-painted wall indicated exactly eleven, and most of the
patients were already filing out the door to the yard for their fifteen-minute smoking break, following the nurse who carried the Bic lighter, and Dr. Armentrout was glad to leave the television lounge in the care of the weekend charge nurse. The big, sunny room, with its institutional couches and wall-mounted TV sets, looked as though it should smell of floor wax and furniture polish, but in fact the air was always redolent with low-rent cooking smells; today he could still detect the garlic-and-oil reek of last night’s lasagna.
The common telephone was ringing behind him as he puffed down the hallway to his office; each of the patients apparently assumed that any call must be for someone else, and so no one ever seemed to answer the damned thing. Armentrout certainly wasn’t going to answer it; he was cautiously elated that he hadn’t got his usual terrible dawn wake-up call at home today—the phone had rung at his bedside as always, but for once there had been, blessedly, only vacuous silence at the other end—and for damn sure he wasn’t going to pick up any ringing telephones that he didn’t have to answer. Resolutely ignoring the diminishing noise, Armentrout peeked through the wire-reinforced glass of the narrow window in his office door before turning the key in the first of the two locks, though it was nearly impossible that a patient could have sneaked inside; and he saw no one, and of course when he had turned the key in the second lock and the red light in the lockplate came on and he pulled the door open, the little room was empty. On the weekends the intern with whom he shared the office didn’t come in, and Armentrout saw patients alone.
He preferred that.
He lowered his substantial bulk into his desk chair and picked up the file of admission notes on the newest patient, with whom he had an appointment in less than a quarter of an hour. She was an obese teenager with a dismal Global Assessment Score of 20, diagnosed as having Bipolar Disorder, Manic. Today he would give her a glass of water with four milligrams of yellow benzodiazepine powder dissolved into it; instantly soluble and completely tasteless, the drug would not only calm her down and make her suggestible but also block the neurotransmissions that permitted memorization—she would remember nothing of today’s session.
