Earthquake Weather

by Tim Powers

  “I’m Koot Hoomie Parganas,” he said.

  Abruptly Kootie could feel the old man whom Mavranos had called Joe staring at him, and Kootie glanced sideways at him in surprise—and the old man was obviously blind, his eyelids horribly sunken in his dark, furrowed face—but nevertheless the old man was suddenly paying powerful attention to him.

  Kootie looked back at the man and woman shivering on the driveway.

  Kootie heard footsteps rapping down the steps from the kitchen door, and he sensed that it was Angelica. “¿Tiene la máquina?” he asked, without looking around: Do you have the machine?

  “Como siempre,” came Angelica’s voice coldly in reply. As always.

  “No need for your máquinas,” said the blond woman, stepping out from behind her companion. Her tight jeans emphasized her long slim legs, and her flimsy white blouse was bunched up around her breasts as she hugged herself against the cold. “Sorry, I can’t have been listening. Did you all say Koot Hoomie Parganas is here, or not?” She laughed, rocking on the soles of her white sneakers. “Have we even asked yet?”

  “I’m him,” Kootie said, irritated with himself for being distracted by her figure. “What did you want me for?”

  “I—well, short form, kiddo, I need you to tell me how to find a dead king and restore him to life. Does this make any sense to you? Could we talk about it inside?”

  “No,” said Angelica and Mavranos in unison; but a moment later Mavranos muttered, “Restore him to life?”

  Kootie gave the woman a quizzical smile. “Why is it your job,” he asked quietly, “to restore this dead king to life?”

  She tossed her head to throw her thatch of blond hair back from her face, and she stared at Kootie. “Amends,” she said in a flat voice. She raised her hands, palms out, as if surrendering. “These are the hands that killed him.”

  Kootie’s heightened senses caught not only the rustle of Angelica’s hand sliding up under her blouse, but also the tiny snick of the .45’s safety being thumbed off.

  Kootie glanced sideways and caught Mavranos’s eye, and nodded.

  “You two don’t appear to be armed,” Mavranos said cheerfully, “but we are. I reckon you can all come in, but keep your hands in sight and move slow.”

  Plumtree didn’t pull her injured hand away when Cochran gently took it, and the two of them followed the boy with the funny name across the dark lawn to the apartment building’s open front door. Cochran was walking slowly and keeping his free hand open and away from his body—he had glimpsed the black grip of the automatic under the blouse of the tall, dark-haired woman who had come out of the kitchen, and he was suddenly sober, and taking deep breaths of the cold night air to keep his head clear.

  We’ve blundered into some kind of crazy cult, he thought, and Janis—or Cody, probably—has got them mad at us. Watch for a chance to grab her and sneak out, or find a phone and call 911.

  His heart was pounding, and he wondered if he might actually have to try to prevent these people from injuring Janis, or even killing her.

  “How did you find this place?” called the man with the graying mustache from behind them as they stepped up to the front door and began walking up a carpeted hall. The place smelled like some third-world soup kitchen.

  Cochran decided to protect poor Strubie, who had paid them the hundred dollars to keep out of this. “A psychiatrist at Rosecrans Medical Center gave us the address—” he began.

  The hall opened into a long room with a couch against the near wall and a desk with a TV set on it against the opposite wall. The TV set’s screen was glowing a brighter white than Cochran would have thought possible, and as the others crowded in behind him one of the two teenage boys on the couch leaped up and snatched the plug out of the wall socket.

  “Thanks, Ollie,” said the man who had followed them in. “The ghost that was torqueing the TV is apparently the deceased wife of my old pal Spider Joe here, this old gent with the curb feelers on his belt.” He now stepped to the bookshelves behind the couch and reached down a stainless-steel revolver, which he held pointed at Cochran’s feet. “Everybody sit down, hm? Plenty of room on the floor, though the carpet’s wet in spots. And don’t move those pots, they’re catching leaks.”

  The old man who was apparently called Spider Joe shambled across the threadbare carpet and slid down into a crouch beside the kitchen doorway, and the antennae standing out from his belt scraped the wall and knocked a calendar off a nail; and as Cochran sat down beside Plumtree in front of the desk he wondered if the ghost of the old man’s wife might be snagged on one of the metal filaments. The woman with the automatic and the boy with the funny name stood beside the couch.

  “Let’s get acquainted,” said the man holding the revolver. “My name’s Archimedes Mavranos, and the lady in the kitchen is Diana, the guy beside her is Pete, and this lady with the máquina is Pete’s wife Angelica. The boys on the couch are Scat and Ollie. Kootie you know.” He raised his eyebrows politely.

  Cochran had resolved to give false names, but before he could speak, Plumtree said, “I’m Janis Cordelia Plumtree, and this is Sid Cochran.” She pronounced his name so precisely that Cochran knew she had restrained herself from saying Cockface or something. For God’s sake behave yourself, Cody, he thought. The long room was hot and smelled of garlic and fish and Kahlua, and he could feel sweat beading on his forehead.

  Water was thumping and splashing into a saucepan by his feet, and he looked up at the mottled, dented, dripping ceiling, wondering how heavy with water the old plaster was, and whether it might fall on them. “It’s, uh, not raining,” he said inanely. “Outside.”

  “It’s raining in San Jose,” spoke up a heavy-set woman who had stepped up to an open door at the far side of the room. She spoke shyly, with a Spanish accent.

  “Oh,” said Cochran blankly. San Jose was three hundred and fifty miles to the north, up by Daly City and San Francisco. “Okay.”

  “And that’s Johanna,” said Mavranos, “our landlady. I wasn’t asking how you got this address,” he went on, “just now, but how you physically got here.”

  “In a taxi,” said Plumtree. When Mavranos just stared at her, she added, “We were in Carson. We told the driver the address, and he … drove us here.”

  “Dropped us at the corner,” put in Cochran. “He didn’t want to drive up to the building.”

  “So much for our protections here,” said the pregnant woman in the kitchen doorway. Cochran focused past the bobbing antennae of Spider Joe to get a look at her, and was startled to see that she was completely bald.

  “No,” said Kootie, “the space is still bent, around this building. The driver must have been somebody.” He stepped forward now, and leaned down to extend his right hand to Cochran. “Welcome to my house, Sid Cochran,” he said.

  Cochran shook his hand, and the boy turned to Plumtree. “Welcome to my house, Janis Cordelia Plumtree.”

  Plumtree gingerly reached up with her swollen right hand, and the boy clasped it firmly; but Plumtree’s cry was one of surprise rather than pain.

  “It doesn’t hurt!” she said. She held up her right hand after the boy released it, and Cochran could see that the swelling was gone. She flexed the fingers and said, “It doesn’t hurt anymore!”

  Cochran made himself remember the hard crack of her fist hitting the linoleum floor last night, and how this evening her knuckles had just been dimples in the hot, unnaturally padded flesh of her hand. He looked from Plumtree’s metacarpal bones, now visible again under the thin skin on the back of her hand as she bunched and straightened her fingers, to the face of the boy standing in front of him, and for a moment in the garlic-and-Kahlua reek the boy was taller, and the brown eyes under his curly hair seemed narrowed as if with Asian epicanthic folds, and the unregarded blur of his clothing had the loose drapery of robes. Cochran’s abdomen felt hollow, and he thought, This is a Magician. A real one.

  “No,” said Kootie to him softly, once more just a teenag
e boy in blue jeans and a flannel shirt, “something different than that.”

  Cochran closed his own right hand, still warm from the boy’s grip; and he relaxed a little, for he no longer believed that these people meant to harm him or Plumtree.

  Kootie looked past him. “Ah, my dinner,” he said. “I hope you all don’t mind if I eat while we talk.” He patted the flannel shirt over his left ribs. “I’m bleeding, and I’ve got to keep up my strength.” He hiked himself up onto the desk and crossed his legs like a yogi. “If any of you are hungry, just holler—we’ve got lots.”

  The bald woman was carrying in a steaming, golden bowl cast in the form of a deeply concave sunfish, and the rich smell of garlic and fish broth was intensified; Angelica followed her back into the kitchen, and reappeared with a bottle of Mondavi Chardonnay and a bowl of some sauce for Kootie, while Diana brought steaming ceramic bowls for the two teenage boys who were sitting on the far end of the couch. Kootie was pouring the wine into a gold goblet that was shaped like a wide-mouthed fish standing on its tail.

  Had a gold haddock, thought Cochran. “What is it?” he asked.

  “Bouillabaisse,” Kootie answered, stirring some orange-colored sauce into his bowl. “According to old stories, a bunch of saints named Mary—Magdalen, Mary Jacob, Mary Salome, maybe the Virgin Mary too—fled the Holy Land after the crucifixion and were shipwrecked on the French Camargue shore, at a place that’s now called Les-Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, and the local fishermen served them pots of this. Ordinarily I just have grilled sole or tuna sandwiches or H. Salt or something, but—” He waved his spoon toward Diana and the two boys on the couch. “—it’s the traditional restorative dinner for fugitive holy families.”

  “I heard you can’t make real bouillabaisse in this country,” said Plumtree. “There’s some fishes that it needs that you can only get in the Mediterranean.”

  “Rascasse,” Kootie agreed, “and conger eel, and other things, yeah. But there don’t seem to be any kinds of loaves and fishes that can’t show up in the back of Arky’s old red truck after he’s driven it around town.”

  “This lady,” Mavranos broke in, waving his revolver in the direction of Plumtree without quite pointing it at her, “says she’s the one who killed Scott Crane.”

  In the silence that followed this statement Cochran stared down at the carpet, wishing he had a glass of Kootie’s wine. He could feel the shocked stares of the bald lady and the teenagers on the couch and the Mexican lady in the back doorway, and he knew they were directed at Plumtree and not at him; and he found himself thinking about the twenty dollars Plumtree had swindled from young “Karen” at the ice-cream place, and the purse she had stolen from the lady at the bar, and wishing he weren’t sitting next to Plumtree here.

  “Benjamin, our four-year-old,” said bald Diana softly, “did say it was a woman, at first. He says it was a man that did it, but that it was a woman who walked up, and then changed into a man.”

  “Benjamin’s my godson,” said Mavranos, “but he’s a … chip off the old block. Half of what he sees is more like stuff that’s going on in some astral plane than stuff going on in any actual zip code. Still, he did say that. And,” he went on, “Miss Plumtree claims that she’s come here now to … restore the king to life.”

  “Is that possible?” asked Diana quickly. Cochran suddenly guessed that Diana was this Scott Crane person’s widow, and in vicarious shame he kept his eyes on the carpet.

  “Well, I want to listen to what she has to say,” said Mavranos, “but I’m pretty sure it’s not, no. Sorry. Scott’s gone on to India, we established that right away—obviously there’s no pulse or respiration, and there are no reflexes, and the pupils are way abnormally dilated and don’t respond at all to light. And he’s cold. And the spear is in his spine. We haven’t been able to do an EEG for brain-wave activity, but the electron brush-discharge in Pete’s carborundum bulb doesn’t flicker when the body is wheeled past it with nobody else in the room, and the Leucadia place isn’t sustained anymore, not even the rose garden—his ashe is completely gone. And he hasn’t risen on the third day or anything.”

  Johanna spoke from the back doorway: “Did you try to call up his ghost?”

  “Any ghost of him wouldn’t be him,” Mavranos said wearily, stepping back and rubbing his eyes with his free hand, “any more than a—goddammit, an old video or tape recording, or a pile of holograph manuscript, or an old pair of his pants, would be him.”

  “I was possessed by the ghost of Thomas Alva Edison for a week in ’92,” said Kootie, looking up from his golden bowl, “and that ghost was as lively as they come; and I have some understanding now of what the king is … what he does, what he monitors. And I’ve got to say that even Edison’s ghost wouldn’t have had the scope for the job.”

  “Jesus, lady,” Mavranos burst out, “if you are the one that killed him, how did you get to him? He was castled!”

  “A knight’s move,” said Plumtree flatly. “I’m not the same person, necessarily, from moment to moment, so I can’t be psychically tracked if I don’t want to be. And I approached from around below the grounds, from the beach, with the whole half-globe of the Pacific’s untamed water at my back. And I used a spear that was already inside his defenses—I was told that he had injured himself with it, once before—and my own blood was on the spearpoints, so I was in the position of overlapping his aura.” She frowned. “And I—there was something about a phone call—he was in a weakened state. And it was midwinter, the shift of one year to the next—the engine of the seasons had the clutch out, coasting.” She looked up at Mavranos and shrugged. “I—this person talking to you now—I didn’t set it up, or do it. I just … cooperated, went along with somebody else’s plan. And I don’t know who that ‘somebody else’ was.”

  “He accidentally shot himself in the ankle with a speargun, in ’75,” said Diana. She visibly shifted her weight from one foot to the other, as if in sympathy. “I remember it.”

  “So,” said Mavranos, “did you have any … ideas, about how you’d go about bringing the king back to life?”

  “Yes,” Plumtree said. “And then I was told that Koot Hoomie Parganas could probably do it too. I came looking for him—figuring he could at least help me, somehow. See, I don’t know exactly how I’ll go about it.”

  “How did you plan to do it?” Mavranos asked with heavy patience. “Approximately.”

  “Where is the body?” Plumtree countered.

  “Do you need the body, to do your trick?”

  She shivered. “I hope so. But I suppose not.”

  “If you even reach out toward his foot,” Mavranos told her, “I’ll shoot you away from him, please trust me on that.” He gestured toward the kitchen doorway with the revolver, which Cochran estimated was at least .38 caliber, and which appeared to be fully loaded—he could see the holed noses of four hollow-point bullets in the projecting sides of the cylinder.

  “Let’s adjourn to the next room,” Mavranos said.

  Cochran stood up when Plumtree did, and followed her into the fluorescent-lit kitchen.

  The white-robed body of a powerfully built, dark-bearded man was lying on a long dining-room table in there. A three-inch metal rod stood up out of his beard above his throat.

  “Shit!” exclaimed Cochran. “Is this him, is this guy dead?” His mouth was dry and his heart was suddenly pounding. Forgetting Mavranos’s threat to Plumtree, he stepped forward and touched the figure’s bared forearm—the flesh was impossibly cold, as cold as an ice pack, and he stepped back quickly. “You can’t keep a dead guy in here. Have you called the police? Jesus! Are you all—”

  Angelica had walked up to him, and now put her hands on his shoulders and pushed down hard. His knees buckled, and he sat down abruptly on a chair that Diana had slid behind him a moment before.

  “He is dead,” Angelica said to him clearly. “The only symptoms he doesn’t show are livor mortis, which is the discoloration caused by blood settling
in the lowest areas of the body, and any evidence of decomposition. These may be signs that your girl can do something. Take a deep breath and let it out—would you like a drink?”

  “No! I mean—hell yes.”

  Cochran heard a clink behind him, and then Diana was pressing a glass of amber liquid into his shaking hand. It proved to be brandy.

  “Do something?” he said breathlessly after he’d drunk most of it and helplessly splashed the rest onto the front of his T-shirt. “What you can do is call the—the coroner. All this supernatural talk is just—entertaining as hell, but it’s all crap, you’ve got—”

  “This is all supernatural,” said Pete Sullivan loudly, overriding him. “From this undecaying body here all the way down to the TV in the other room. It’s all real, independent of whether you believe it or not.”

  Pete smiled tiredly and went on in a quieter voice. “Hell, we had a—a piece of string!—here, that an old man in Mexico gave to Angelica; it couldn’t be severed. Just ordinary cotton string, and you could have cut it or burned it in two with a match, or just pulled it apart in your hands—if you could have got around to it! But somehow every time you’d try, something would interrupt—the phone would ring, or you’d cut yourself with the scissors and have to go get a Band-Aid, or the cat would start to throw up on some important papers, or you’d accidentally drop the string down behind the couch. I suppose if you really cornered it and forced it, you’d find that you’d suffered a stroke or a heart attack, or got knocked down by a random bullet through the window—and the piece of string would be on the floor somewhere, still whole.” He shook his head. “None of these things make logical sense, but they’re true anyway. If you insist on the world being logical at every turn, you’ll eventually be forced to retreat all the way into genuine insanity, I promise you.”

  “Bring me the goddamn piece of string,” said Cochran loudly. “I’ll break the son-of-a-bitch for you!”

  Angelica stood back and crossed her arms. “We lost it.”