by Tim Powers
A teenager! he thought as he absently kneaded the crotch of his baggy slacks. Obese! Manic! Well, she’ll be going home in a few days, totally cured and with no manic episodes in her future; and I will have had a good time and added some depth-of-field and at least a few minutes to my lifespan. Everybody will be better off.
With his free hand he brushed some patient’s frightful crayon drawings away from the rank of instant-dial buttons alongside the telephone. When the girl arrived he would lift the receiver and punch the button to ring the telephone in the conference room, where he had left good old reliable Long John Beach jiggling and mumbling in a chair by the phone—though it was possible that Armentrout wouldn’t need Long John Beach’s help anymore, if this morning’s reprieve from the hideous wake-up call was a sign of the times, a magical gift of this new year.
The ringing of this telephone, the one on his desk, snapped him out of his optimistic reverie; and under his spray-stiffened white hair his forehead was suddenly chilly with a dew of sweat. Slowly, his lips silently forming the words no, please, no, he reached out and lifted the receiver.
“Dr. Armentrout,” he said slowly, hardly expelling any breath.
“Doc,” came a tinny voice out of the earpiece, “this is Taylor Hamilton? Desk sergeant at the San Marcos County Sheriff’s branch? I’m calling from a pay phone in the back hall.”
Armentrout’s chin sagged into his jowls with relief, and then he was smiling with fresh excitement as he picked up a pen. For the past several years he had been alerting police officers and paramedics and psych techs all over southern California to watch for certain kinds of 51-50, which was police code for involuntary-seventy-two-hour-hold psychiatric cases.
“Taylor Hamilton,” noted Armentrout, consciously keeping the eagerness out of his voice as he wrote down the man’s name on a Post-it slip. “Got it. You’ve got a good one?”
“This lady seems like just what the doctor ordered,” said Hamilton with a nervous laugh. “I bet you anything that she turns out to have gone AWOL from your place yesterday.”
Armentrout had already pulled down an escape-report form from the shelf over the desk, and he now wrote 12/31/94 in the date box.
“I’ll bet you,” Hamilton went on, “one thousand dollars that she’s a runaway of yours.”
Armentrout lifted the pen from the paper. “That’s a lot of money,” he said dubiously. A thousand dollars! And he hated it when his informants made the arrangement sound so nakedly mercenary. “What makes you think she’s … one of mine?”
“Well, she called nine-one-one saying that she’d just half an hour earlier killed a guy in a field above the beach in Leucadia this morning, like right at dawn, stabbed him with a speargun spear, if you can believe that—but when the officers had her take them to where it supposedly happened and show them, there was no body or blood at all, and no spear; in fact they reported that the field was full of blooming flowers and grapevines and it was obvious nobody had walked across it for at least the last twenty-four hours. She told them it was a king that she killed there, a king called the Flying Nun—that’s solid ding talk, isn’t it? The officers are convinced that her story is pure hallucination. She hasn’t stopped crying since she called nine-one-one, and her nose won’t stop bleeding, and she says some guy rearranged her teeth, though she doesn’t show any bruises or cuts. And listen, when they first tried to drive her back here, for questioning?—the black-and-white wouldn’t start, they needed a jump; and when we’ve been talking to her in here the lights keep dimming and my hearing aid doesn’t work.”
Armentrout was frowning thoughtfully. The electromagnetic disturbances indicated one of the dissociative disorders—psychogenic amnesia, fugue states, depersonalization. These were the tastiest maladies he could cure … short of curing somebody of their very life, of course, which was ethically problematic and in any case contributed too heavily to the—
He shied away from the memory of the morning telephone calls.
But a thousand dollars! This Hamilton fellow was a greedy pig. This wasn’t really supposed to be about money.
“I don’t,” Armentrout began—
But she did go crazy on this morning, he thought. She might very well have been reacting to the same thing, whatever it might be, that saved me from my intolerable wake-up call. These poor suffering psychos are often psychic, and a dissociative, having distanced herself from the ground state of her core personality, might be able to sense a wider spectrum of magical effects. By examining her I might be able to figure out what the hell has happened. I should call around, in fact, and tell all my sentries to watch especially for a psychosis that was triggered this morning.
“—see any reason not to pay you a thousand dollars for her,” he finished, nevertheless still frowning at the price. “Can I safely fax you the AWOL report?”
“Do it in … exactly ten minutes, okay? I can make sure nobody else is near the machine, and then as soon as your fax has cooled off I’ll smudge the date and pretend to find it on yesterday’s spike.”
Armentrout glanced at his watch and then bent over the police-report form again. “Name and description?”
“Janis Cordelia Plumtree,” said Hamilton. “She has a valid driver’s license, and I Xeroxed it. Ready? DOB 9/20/67 …”
Armentrout began neatly filling in the boxes on the escape-report form. This morning a manic teenager on benzodiazepine, and, soon, a dissociative who was strong enough to interfere with both AC and DC … and who might also provide a clue to why Armentrout had been, at least for this morning, freed from the attention of all the resentful ghosts and ghost fragments!
This was already shaping up to be a fine year, though it was only eleven hours old.
When he finally hung up the telephone he looked at his watch again. He had five minutes before he should send the fax or expect the bipolar girl to be brought in.
He got his feet firmly under the chair and stood up with a grunt, then crossed to the long couch that couldn’t be seen through the door window, and lifted off of the cushions a stack of files and a box of plastic Lego bricks. Clearing the field, he thought with some anticipation, for the cultivation of the bipolar girl’s cure. The plowing and seeding of her recovery. And it would be a real cure, as decisive as surgery—not the dreary, needlessly guilt-raising patchwork of psychotherapy. Armentrout saw no value in anyone dredging up old guilts and resentments, ever.
Finally he unlocked the top drawer of the filing cabinet and rolled it partway out. Inside were only two things, two purple velvet boxes.
One box contained a battered but polished .45-caliber derringer for which he had paid a hundred thousand dollars a year and a half ago, its two stubby barrels chambered to take .410 shot shells as well as Colt .45 rounds; some spiritualist medium had found the blocky little gun on Ninth Street in downtown Las Vegas in 1948, and there was documentation to suggest that the gun had been used to castrate a powerful French occultist there; and Armentrout knew that a woman had killed herself with it in Delaware in October of 1992, shortly before he had acquired it. Probably it had inflicted injuries on other people at other times. The tiny gun was alleged, with some authority, to be able to shoot straight through magical protections that would deflect a bullet shot from a mundane gun: the French occultist had been heavily warded, but the person who had shot him had been his wife and the mother of his children, and so she had been inside his guard and able to wound him—and the gun had thus definitively shared in her privileged position, and was now reputedly capable of shooting the equivalent of supernatural-Teflon rounds.
Armentrout had never fired it, and certainly he wouldn’t be needing it for the bipolar teenager.
The other velvet box he lifted out of the file drawer.
He carried it to the low coffee table carefully. Inside the box were twenty cards from a tarot deck that had been painted in Marseilles in 1933. Armentrout had paid a San Francisco bookseller four hundred thousand dollars for the cards in 1990. Twenty card
s was less than a third of the complete tarot deck, and the powerful Death and The Tower cards were not among this partial set—but these twenty cards were from one of the fabulously rare Lombardy Zeroth decks, painted by a now-disbanded secret guild of damagingly initiated artists, and the images on the cards were almost intolerably evocative of the raw Jungian archetypes.
Armentrout had used the contents of this box on many occasions—he had awakened catatonics simply by holding the Judgment card in front of their glassy eyes, realigned the minds of undifferentiated schizophrenics with a searing exposure of The Moon, settled the most conflicted borderlines with the briefest palmed flash of The Hanged Man; and on a couple of occasions he had induced real, disorganized schizophrenia by showing a merely neurotic patient the Fool card.
For the bipolar girl today he would try first the Temperance card, the winged maiden pouring water from one jug to another.
And he would avoid looking squarely at any of the cards himself. When he had first got the deck he had forced himself to scrutinize the picture on each card—enduring the sea-bottom explosions they seemed to set off in his mind, clenching his fists as alien images arrowed up to his conscious levels like deep-water monsters bursting up into the air.
The experience had, if anything, only diminished his personal identity, and so he had not been in danger of attracting the notice of his … of any Midwest ghost … but locally he had been a clamorous maelstrom in the psychic water table, and for the next three days his phone had rung at all hours with southern California ghosts clamoring on the line, and after a few weeks he had noticed that his hair was growing out completely white.
And like a lock of unruly hair, he thought now as he picked up the escape-report form and turned his chair toward the fax machine, this teenage girl’s mania will be drawn out tight by the urgent attraction of the image on the card, and I will snip that bit off of her—
—and swallow it into myself.
She was at the door; he took the telephone receiver off the cradle, pushed the instant-dial button, and then stood up ponderously to let her in.
In the Long Beach apartment building known as Solville, Angelica Sullivan had been having a busy morning; she wanted to hover protectively over Kootie, but she had found that there were other demands on her time.
Over the rental-office door that faced the alley, she had last year hung up—reluctantly, for the business name had not been of her choosing—a sign that read TESTÍCULOS DEL LEÓN—BOTÁNICA Y CONSULTORIO. And it seemed that every client who had ever consulted her here had come blundering up to that rental-office door today, or at least called on the telephone; they were mostly Hispanic and black, dishwashers and motel maids and gardeners, on their lunch breaks or off work or out of work, and nearly all of them were jabbering with gratitude at having been abruptly relieved, at about dawn, of the various afflictions that had led them to seek out Angelica’s help in the first place. Most mentioned having been awakened by an earthquake, though the radio news station that Angelica had turned on hadn’t yet mentioned one.
Many of her people had felt that this deliverance needed to be formalized with ritual thanks, and so, with help from Kootie and Pete and Johanna, Angelica had harriedly tried to comply. In her role as a curandera she had got pots of mint tea brewing, and served it in every vessel in the place that would do for a cup, and Johanna had even dug out some of her late husband’s old coffee cups, still red-stained from the cinnamon tea that Sol Shadroe had favored; as a maja, Angelica had lit all the veladores, the candles in the glass tumblers with decals of saints stuck to the outsides; as a huesera she had got sweaty massaging newly painless backs and shoulder joints; and out in the parking lot, to perform a ritual limpia cleansing, six men in their undershorts were now crowded into a child’s inflatable pool that Kootie had filled with honey and bananas and water from the hose.
Cures of impotence, constipation, drug craving, and every other malady appeared to have been bestowed wholesale as the sun had come up, and in spite of Angelica’s repeated protests that she had done nothing to accomplish any of it, the desk in Pete’s office was now heaped with coins; whatever amount the pile of money added up to, it would be divisible by forty-nine, for forty-nine cents was the only price Angelica was permitted by the spirit world to charge for her magical services.
A few of her clients, like the one who had called Pete first thing in the morning, were unhappy to find that the spirits of their dead relatives were gone from the iron containers—truck brake drums, hibachis, Dutch ovens—in which they had dwelt since Angelica had corralled and confined them, one by laborious one over the last two and a half years; the candies left out for these spirits last night had apparently not been touched, and the rooster-blood-painted wind chimes that hung from the containers had rung no morning greeting today. Angelica could only tell these people that their relatives had finally become comfortable with the notion of moving on to Heaven. That explanation went down well enough.
Others with the same kind of problem were not so easily mollified. Frantic santeros from as far away as Albuquerque had telephoned to ask if Angelica, too, had found that her orisha stones had lost all their ashe, all their vitality—she could only confirm it bewilderedly, and tell them in addition about the total disappearance of the cement Eleggua figure that she had kept by her front door; and as the sunlight-shadows in the kitchen had touched their farthest reach across the worn yellow linoleum and begun to ebb back, Angelica began to get the first news of gang warfare in the alleys of Los Angeles and Santa Ana, skirmishes ignited by the absence today of the palo gangas that served as supernatural bodyguards to the heroin and crack cocaine dealers.
“Were those ghosts too?” asked Pete as he carried a stockpot full of small change into the kitchen and heard Angelica acknowledging the latest such bulletin.
“The gangas?” said Angelica as she hung up the phone for the hundredth time and brushed back stray strands of her sweaty black hair. “Sure. The paleros get some human remains into a cauldron, and it’s their slave as long as it stays under their control. That thing that was hassling us in ’92 was one, that thing that laughed all the time and talked in rhyming Spanish.”
“The canvas bag full of hair,” said Pete, nodding, “with the Raiders cap stapled on the top.” He grunted as he hoisted the pot up and dumped the coins in a glittering waterfall into the oil drum he’d dragged in an hour ago, which was now already a third full of coins. “I call it a good day, when things like that are banished.”
The kitchen, and the office and even the parking lot now, smelled of mint and beer and sweat and burning candle-wicks, but under it all was still the aroma of burning coffee. Angelica sniffed and shook her head doubtfully; she opened her mouth to say something, but a white-haired old grandmother bustled into the kitchen just then, reverently holding out a quarter and two dimes and four pennies in the palm of her hand.
“Gracias, Señora Soollivan,” the old woman said, pushing the coins toward Angelica.
Angelica couldn’t remember now what service this old woman was grateful for—some haunting ended, some bowel disorder relieved, some recurrent nightmare blessedly forgotten.
“No,” said Angelica, “I haven’t—”
But now a man in a mechanic’s uniform blundered into the kitchen behind the old woman. “Mrs. Sullivan,” he said breathlessly, “your amuletos finally worked—my daughter sees no devils in the house now. I got the cundida at work this week, so I can give you two hundred dollars—”
Angelica was nodding and waving her hands defensively in front of herself. She knew about cundidas—a group of people at a workplace would contribute some amount of each paycheck to the “good quantity” fund, and each week a different one of them got the whole pool; among the new-immigrant Hispanic community, to whom bank accounts were an alien concept, the cundidas were the easiest way to save money.
“I didn’t do anything,” she said loudly. “Don’t pay me for your blessings—somebody else has paid the price
of it.”
And who on earth can that have been? she wondered.
“But I need to pay,” the man said quietly.
Angelica let her shoulders droop. “Okay,” she said, exhaling. “If I run into your benefactor, I’ll pass it on. But you can only give me forty-nine cents.”
During Christmas week in 1993, Angelica had—finally, at the age of thirty-five—flown alone to Mexico City and then driven a rented car more than a hundred miles southeast to a little town called Ciudad Mendoza. Members of her grandfather’s family were still living in the poor end of the town, known as Colonia Liberación, and after identifying herself to the oldest citizens and staying with some of her distant relatives until after Christmas, she had got directions to the house of an old man called Esteban Sandoval, whom she was assured was the most powerful mago south of Matamoros. In exchange for the rental car and the cut-out hologram bird from one of her credit cards, Sandoval had agreed to complete and formalize and sanction her qualifications for the career she had fallen into a year earlier.
For three months Sandoval had instructed her in the practices of the ancient folk magics that are preserved as santería and brujería and curanderismo; and on the night before he put her on the bus that would take her on the first leg of her long journey back to her new American family, he had summoned several orishas, invisible entities somewhat more than ghosts and less than gods, and had relayed to her from them her ita, the rules that would henceforth circumscribe her personal conduct of magic. Among those dictates had been the distasteful name that she was to give to her business, and the requirement that she charge only forty-nine cents for each service.
Pete Sullivan accepted the exact change from the two people and walked over to toss it too into the barrel of coins.
