by Tim Powers
Cochran turned to trudge back to the building. “You don’t know what you’ve been missing,” he said.
When the two of them had shuffled up to the door, the nurse said, “Dr. Armentrout wants to see you.”
“Good,” said Cochran stoically. “I want to talk to him.”
“Not you,” the nurse said. “Him.” She nodded toward the one-armed old man.
Long John Beach was nodding. “For the Plumtree girl,” he said. “He wants me on the horn. On the blower.”
“The usual thing,” said the nurse in obvious agreement as she flapped her hands to shoo the two men inside.
Armentrout knew it wasn’t Cody that knocked on his office door at three, because when he peeked out through the reinforced glass panel he saw that Plumtree had walked down the hall and was standing comfortably; Cody would have needed the wheelchair he had told the nurses to have ready.
He unlocked the door and pulled it open. “Come in … Janis?”
“Yes.”
“Sit down,” he told her. “Over on the couch there, you want to relax.”
The tape recorder inside the Faraday cage in the desk was rolling, and the telephone receiver was lying on the desk, with Long John Beach locked into the conference room on the other side of the clinic, listening in on the extension—Armentrout was psychically protected, masked. Beside the receiver on the desk was the box that contained the twenty Lombardy Zeroth tarot cards, along with a pack of Gudang Garam clove-flavored cigarettes and a box of strawberry flavor-straws, so he was ready to snip off and consume at least a couple of Plumtree’s supernumerary personalities—escort some of the girls off the bus, he thought with nervous cheer, kidnap a couple of Snow White’s dwarves. The better to eat you with, my dear. And if Cody chose to step out and get physical, he had the 250,000-volt stun gun in the pocket of his white coat. A different kind of Edison Medicine.
When she had sat down on the couch—sitting upright, with her knees together, for now—he handed her the glass of water in which he had dissolved three milligrams of benzodiazepine powder.
“Drink this,” he said, smiling.
“It’s … what?”
“It’s a mild relaxant. I’ll bet you’ve been experiencing some aches and pains in your joints?”
“In my hand, is all.”
“Well … Cody will appreciate it, trust me.”
Plumtree took the glass from his hand and stared at the water. “Give me a minute to think,” she said. “You’ve jumbled us all up here.”
Armentrout turned toward the desk, reaching for the telephone. “Never mind, I’ll have them give it to you intravenously.”
The bluff worked. She raised her bruised hand in a wait gesture and tilted up the glass with the other, draining it in four gulps; and if the desk lamp had flickered it had only been for an instant.
She now even licked the rim of the glass before leaning forward to set it down on the carpet; and when she straightened up she was sitting forward, looking up at him with her chin almost touching the coat buttons over his belt buckle.
“This is a highly lucrative position,” she said. “But I guess nobody can see us right here, can they?”
“Well,” said Armentrout judiciously, glancing from the couch to the door window as if considering the question for the first time ever, “I suppose not.” The drug couldn’t possibly be hitting her yet.
She reached out with her right hand and winced, then with her left caught his left hand and pressed it to her forehead. “Do you think I have a fever, Doctor?”
She was rubbing his palm back and forth over her brow, and her eyes were closed.
His heart was suddenly pounding in his chest. Go with the flow, he told himself with a jerky mental shrug. Without taking his hand away from her face he sat down on the couch beside her on her left. “There are,” he said breathlessly, “more reliable … areas of the anatomy … upon which to manually judge body temperature. From.”
“Are there?” she said. She pulled his palm down over her nose and lips; and when she had slid it over her chin and onto her throat she breathed, “Tell me when I’m getting warmer, Doctor.”
He had got his fingers on the top button of her blouse when the desk lamp browned out and she abruptly shoved his hand away.
“Shouldn’t there be a nurse present for any physical examination?” she said rapidly.
He exhaled in segments. “Janis.”
“Yes.”
“Who … was that?”
“I believe that was Tiffany.”
“Tiffany.” He nodded several times. “Well, she and I were in the middle of a, a useful dialogue.”
“Valerie has locked Tiffany in her room.”
“In the … dwarves’ cottage, that would be?”
Plumtree smiled at him and tapped the side of her head. “Exactly.” She had begun shifting uncomfortably on the couch, and smacking her lips, and now she said, “Could I go take a shower?”
Of course there was no tone of innuendo at all in the remark. “Your hair’s damp right now,” Armentrout told her shortly. “I bet you took a shower since lunch. You can take one after we’re done here.” He slapped his hands onto his knees and stood up, and crossed to the desk. With shaky fingers he fumbled a clove cigarette out of the pack and lit it with one of the ward Bics. He puffed on it, wincing at the syrupy sweet smoke, and then flipped open the purple velvet box.
“Well!” he said, spilling the oversized tarot cards faceup onto the desktop, though not looking directly at them. “I did want to ask you about New Year’s Day. You said you killed a man, remember? A king called, somehow, the Flying Nun? A week later Mr. Cochran saw a man who had a bull’s head, in Los Angeles. On Vignes Street, that means ‘grapevines’ in French; there used to be a winery there, where Union Station is now.” Pawing through the cards and squinting at them through his eyelashes and the scented cigarette smoke, he had managed to find the Sun card, a miniature painting of a cherub floating over a jigsaw-edged cliff and holding up a severed, grimacing red head from which golden rays stuck out like solid poles in every direction.
Now he spun away from the desk and thrust the card face-out toward her. “Did your king have a bull’s head?” He sucked hard on the cigarette.
Plumtree had rocked back on the couch and looked away. And Armentrout coughed as much from disgust as from the acrid smoke in his lungs, for there was no animation, no identity, riding the smoke into his head—he had missed catching the Janis personality, the Plumtree gestalt had parried him.
“Hi, Doctor,” Plumtree said. “Is this a come-as-you-are party?” She stared at him for a moment, and appeared to replay in her head what had last been said. “Are you talking about the king we killed? Look, I’m being cooperative here. I’ll answer all your questions. But—trust me!—if you hit us with the … Edison Medicine again, none of us will tell you anything, ever.” Her shoulders had slumped as she’d been talking. “No, he didn’t have a bull’s head. He was barefooted, and had long hair down to his shoulders, and a beard, like you’d expect to see on King Solomon or Charlemagne.” She rubbed her hand over her face in an eerie and apparently unwitting re-enactment of what she had done with Armentrout’s hand. “But I recognized him.”
Armentrout knew his shielded tape recorder would be getting all this, but he tried to concentrate on what the woman was saying. You let that Tiffany girl get you all rattled, he told himself; you don’t want to eat the Janis personality, you idiot, she’s the one you want to leave in the body, to show how successful the integration therapy was. You’re lucky you didn’t get her, in the clove smoke. “You … say you recognized him,” he said, nodding like a plaster dog in the back window of a car. “You’d seen him before?”
“In that game on the houseboat on Lake Mead in 1990. Assumption—it’s a kind of poker. He was dressed as a woman for that, and the other players called him the Flying Nun. Our mental bus navigator Flibbertigibbet was trying to win the job Crane was after, the job of being th
e king, which is why he had us there, playing hands in that terrible game; and he didn’t succeed—and he went flat-out crazy on Holy Saturday when Crane won … it, the crown, the throne.”
“Crane?”
“Scott Crane. I didn’t know his name until we all got talking together today; I thought Flying Nun was, like, his name, it might be a Swedish name, right, like Bra Banning? He was a poker player in those days.”
“I remember another man who wanted to be this king,” said Armentrout thoughtfully, “a local man called Neal Obstadt. He died in the same explosion that collapsed Long John Beach’s lung, two and a half years ago. And Obstadt was looking for this Crane fellow back in ’90—had a big reward offered.” He looked at her and smiled. “You know, you may actually have killed somebody, ten days ago!”
“What good news,” she said hollowly.
“Whatever you did could be the cause of everything that’s been different since New Year’s Day—I thought you were just delusionally reacting, the way Mr. Cochran almost certainly is.” He held up one finger as though to count off points of an argument. “Now, you couldn’t have got through all of Crane’s defenses, and abducted his very child, as you say you did, without powerful sorcerous help; you’d need virtually another king, in fact. Who could that be?”
“You got me.”
“I thought you said you’d be honest with me here. We can schedule another ECT tomorrow.”
“I—I’m being honest. I was alone. I don’t know whose idea the whole thing was.”
“One of you might have been acting on someone’s orders, though, right? On someone’s careful instructions.” He was sitting on the desk now, drumming his fingers excitedly on the emptied velvet box. “There was a boy around, a couple of years ago, living in Long Beach somewhere. He was a sort of proto-king, as I recall.” Armentrout wished he had paid more attention to these events at the time—but they had been other people’s wars in the magical landscape, and he had been content to just go on eating pieces of his patients’ souls on the sidelines. “His name was something goofy—Boogie-Woogie Bananas, or something like that. He could probably kill a king, or bring one back to life, even, if he wanted to. If he’s kept to the disciplines. Somebody, your man Crane, probably, brought the gangster Bugsy Siegel back to life, briefly, in 1990. You’ve seen the Warren Beatty movie, Bugsy? Siegel was this particular sort of supernatural king, during the 1940s. Yes, this kid would be fifteen or so now—he could be the one that sent you to kill Crane. Does a name like Boogie-Woogie Bananas ring any bells?”
Plumtree visibly tried to come up with a funny remark, but gave up and just shook her head wearily. “No.”
“His party had a lawyer! Were you approached by the lawyer? He had a pretentious name, something Strube, like J. Submersible Strube the third.”
“I never heard of any of these people.” Plumtree was pale, and perspiration misted her forehead. “But one of us went to a lot of trouble to kill Crane. Obviously.”
Armentrout pursed his lips. “Did you say anything to him, to Crane?”
“Sunday before last? Yeah. I wasn’t going to hurt his kid, this little boy who couldn’t have been five years old yet—God knows how I lured him out of the house, but I had the kid down on his back in this grassy meadow above the beach, with the spear points on his little neck—I suppose Flibbertigibbet would have killed the kid!—and when I found myself standing there after losing some time, I looked at the kid’s father standing there, Crane, and I just said, almost crying to see what a horrible thing I was in the middle of, I said, ‘There’s nothing in this flop for me.’ ” There were tears in Plumtree’s eyes right now, and from the angry way she cuffed them away Armentrout was sure that she was Cody at the moment. “And,” she went on hoarsely, “Crane said, ‘Then pass.’ He must have been scared, but he was talking gently, you know?—not like he was mad. ‘Let it pass by us,’ he said.”
“And what did you say?”
“I lost time then. When I could see what was going on again, Crane was lying there dead, with the spear in his throat, sticking up through his Solomon beard like a fishing pole, and the kid was gone.” Plumtree blinked around at the desks and the couch and the foliage-screened window. “Why did Janis leave, just now? You made her peel off, didn’t you?” Her expression became blank, and then she was frowning again. “And she’s crying in her bus seat! What did you do to her?”
Armentrout held up the card. “I just showed her this.”
But Plumtree looked away from it. And when she spoke, it was in such a level voice that Armentrout wondered if she’d shifted again: “Strip poker, we’re playing here?” She looked past the card, focusing into his eyes, and Armentrout saw that one of her pupils was a tiny pinprick, as was usual with her, but the other was dilated in the muted office light. The mismatched eyes, along with the downward-curling androgynous smile she now gave him, made him think of the rock star David Bowie. “I can be the one that wins here, you know,” she said. “I can rake in your investment, or at least toss it out into the crowd. Strip poker. How many … garments have you got?”
Armentrout was annoyed, and a little intrigued, to realize that he was frightened. “Are you still Cody?” he asked.
“Largely.” Plumtree struggled up off of the couch to her feet, though the effort made drops of sweat roll down from her hairline, and she stumbled forward and half fell onto the desk. She was certainly still Cody, who had taken the succinylcholine and the electroconvulsive therapy at dawn this morning. Armentrout hastily slid the delicate old tarot cards away from her.
She shook out a Gudang Garam cigarette and lit it.
“This phone is your mask, right?” she gasped through a mouthful of spicy smoke, grabbing the telephone receiver and holding it up. “Your nest of masks? What’s your name?” Armentrout didn’t answer, but she read it off the name plaque on his desk. “Hello?” she said into the telephone. “Could I speak to Richard Paul Armentrout’s mom, please?”
Armentrout was rocked by the counter-attack—she was trying to get a handle on his own soul! That handle! What personality in her was it that knew how to do this?—but he was confident that Long John Beach was psychotically diffractive enough to deflect this, and many more like it. “I t-took a vial of your blood,” Armentrout said quickly, “when you were first brought in here, because I thought I might put you on lithium carbonate, and we have to do a lot of blood testing to get the dosage right for that. I never did give you lithium, but I’ve still got the vial of your blood.” He was breathing rapidly, almost panting.
“That’s a big ace,” Plumtree allowed, “but you’ve lost one garment now, and I’ve only lost my … oh, call her one silly hat.”
Armentrout looked down at the cards under his hands, and his pelvis went quiveringly cold, followed a moment later by a bubbly tingling in his ribs, for he had no time here to squint cautiously sidelong at the distressing things, and was looking at them squarely. He snatched up the Wheel of Fortune card, the miniature Renaissance-style painting of four men belted to a vertical wheel—Regno, Latin for “I reign,” read the word-ribbon attached to the mouth of the man on top; the ones to either side trailed ribbons that read Regnabo and Regnavi, “I shall reign” and “I reigned”—and he shoved the card into Plumtree’s face as he took a cheek-denting drag on his cigarette.
The bulb in the desk lamp popped, and shards of cellophane-thin broken glass clinked faintly on the desk surface; the room was suddenly dimmer, lit now only by the afternoon sunlight streaking in golden beams through the green schefflera leaves outside the window.
Again Armentrout had got nothing but a lungful of astringent clove smoke. And he wasn’t facing Cody anymore. Plumtree had twitched away the card-concussed, vulnerable personality before he could draw it into the barrel of his flavored cigarette, had swept the stunned Cody back to one of the metaphorical bus seats or dwarf-cottage bunks, and rotated a fresh one onstage.
“Hello?” said Plumtree into the telephone again. “I’m
calling on behalf of Richard Paul Armentrout—he says he owes somebody there a tre-men-dous apology.” The coal on her cigarette glowed in the dimness like the bad red light that draws loose souls in the underworld in the Tibetan Bardo Thodol.
Armentrout dropped the card and fumbled in his coat pocket for the stun gun. I think I’ve got to put an end to this, he thought; punch her right out of this fight with 250,000 volts and try again tomorrow, after another ECT session in which I’ll give her a full 500 joules of intracranial juice. If she really can summon, from across the hundreds of miles of mountain and desert wilderness, my m—or any of my potent old guilt ghosts, and lead them all the way in past Long John Beach’s masks to me, they could attach, and collapse my distended life line, kill me. They’re all still out there, God knows—I’ve never had any desire for the Pagadebiti Zinfandel, confiteor Dionyso.
Nah, he thought savagely, that one-armed old man is a better sort of Kevlar armor than to give way under just two shots—and I will have this woman. The damp skin of his palm could still feel her chin, and the hot slope of her throat. Tell me when I’m getting warmer, Doctor.
He snatched up one of the tarot cards at random with one hand and the lighter with the other, and he spun the flint wheel with the card blocking his view of the upspringing flame; the card’s illuminated face was toward her, while he saw only the backlit rectangle of the frayed edge. Gaggingly, and fruitlessly, he again sucked at the limp cigarette—sparks were falling off of it onto the desk like tiny shooting stars.
“Let me talk to your m-mom,” he wheezed, knowing that multiples generally included, among their menagerie, internalized duplicates of their own abusive parents. Surely Plumtree’s distorted version of her mother wouldn’t be able to maintain this fight!
Plumtree’s body jackknifed forward off the desk and tumbled to the carpet. “Behold now,” she gasped in a reedy voice, “I have daughters which have not known man.” Armentrout recognized the sentence—it was from Genesis, when Lot offered the mob his own daughters rather than surrender the angels who had come to his house. “Name the one you want, Omar,” Plumtree’s strained voice went on, clearly not quoting now, “and I’ll throw her to you! Just don’t take me again!”
