Earthquake Weather

by Tim Powers

  After a tense moment Cochran let his shoulders slump; he sighed and rubbed his face with both hands. “I suppose he’s really a king, too. What’s he king of, what was he king of?”

  “The land, for one thing,” said Kootie, who had followed them into the kitchen, “the American West. If he’s well, the land is well—right now he’s dead, and we’re in winter and having earthquakes all over. God knows what the spring will be like, or if there’ll even be one.”

  Cochran raised his head and stared at the dead man’s strong, bearded face. It was pale, and the eyes were closed, but Cochran could see humor and sternness in the lines around the eyes and down the cheeks. “How could he have been … in ‘a weakened state’?” he asked softly.

  Mavranos was frowning, and he passed the revolver from his right hand to his left and back again; Cochran could hear the bullets rattle faintly in the chambers. “We didn’t know how. He and Diana were having healthy babies—though this last couple of years the kids were getting bad fevers in the winter—and the land was yielding several crops a year! But there were signs—the phylloxera—”

  “The phylloxera had nothing to do with anything,” snapped Diana angrily from behind Cochran.

  “Okay,” Mavranos said. “Then I haven’t got a clue.”

  “What the hell’s a phylloxera?” asked Plumtree.

  “It’s not important,” Diana said. “Don’t talk about it.”

  Cochran said nothing—but he knew what phylloxera was. It was a plant louse that in the 1830s had inadvertently been brought from America to Europe, where it had eventually nearly wiped out all the vineyards—the fabulous old growths in Germany, and Italy, and even France, even Bordeaux. The louse injected a toxin that killed the roots, six feet under, so that the vine and the grapes up on the surface withered away and died; the eventual desperate cure had been to graft the classic old European vitis vinifera grapevines, everything from Pinot Noir and Riesling to Malvasia and the Spanish Pedro Ximenez, onto phylloxera-resistant vitis riparia roots from America. But now, just since about 1990, a new breed of phylloxera had been devastating the California vineyards, which were mostly grown on a modern hybrid rootstock known as AXR#1. Most of Pace Vineyards’ vines were old Zinfandel and Pinot Noir on pre-war riparia rootstocks, so the subterranean plague hadn’t hit them, but Cochran knew personally a number of winemakers in San Mateo and Santa Clara and Alameda Counties who were facing bankruptcy because of the expense of tearing out the infested AXR#1 vines and replanting with new vines, which wouldn’t produce a commercial crop for three to five years.

  He thought of what Kootie had said—If he’s well, the land is well. And he thought of the billions of minute phylloxera lice, busily working away … six feet under. The land, Cochran thought, has not been truly well for several years.

  “And he was always … less powerful, in winter,” Mavranos said, shrugging, “and stronger in summer. One of the tarot cards that represents him is Il Sole, the Sun card.”

  “This really is Solville,” said Angelica quietly, “while he’s here.”

  Kootie pointed at the withered bean sprouts in Angelica’s Gardens of Adonis pans on the counter by the door. “Solville in eclipse,” he said.

  “Not runnin’ a carny peep-show here,” said Mavranos gruffly “Back into the office, now.”

  “Wait a minute,” mumbled old Spider Joe, who had been peering in blindly through the doorway. “I’ve got to … put in my two cents’ worth.” He pushed his way into the kitchen now, his projecting curb-feelers dragging noisily through the doorframe and then twanging free to wave and bob over the dead man’s bare feet. One of the metal filaments whipped across Plumtree’s cheek, and she whispered “Shit, dude!” and batted it away.

  The white-bearded old blind man dug two silver-dollar-size coins out of the pocket of his stained khaki windbreaker, and for a moment he held them out on his outstretched palm. They appeared to be dirty gold, and were only crudely round, with bunches of grapes stamped in high relief on their faces, along with the letters TPA.

  “Trapezus, on the Black Sea,” exclaimed Kootie, “is where those are from. Those are about two thousand years old!”

  Spider Joe closed his hand, and when he opened it again the coins were United States silver dollars. “These are what he paid me with, nearly five years ago, for the tarot-card reading that led him to the throne.”

  “I remember,” said Mavranos quietly.

  “Well, he’s gonna need them again, now, isn’t he?—to pay for passage across the Styx, and for the drink of surrender from the Lethe River, over on the far side of India.” In spite of being blind, the old man shuffled forward, reached out and accurately laid one of the coins on each of the dead man’s closed eyelids.

  Mavranos’s face was stiff. “We okay now? Right, everybody out.”

  They all began shuffling and elbowing their way through the doorway back into the office, while Mavranos hung back with the revolver; a couple of Spider Joe’s antennae hooked one of Angelica’s bean pans off the counter and flung it clattering to the floor, spilling dirt and withered bean sprouts across the linoleum.

  CHAPTER 8

  Mark, silent king, the moral of this sport: How soon my sorrow hath destroyed my face.

  —William Shakespeare,

  Richard II

  KOOTIE WAS BACK UP on the desk beside the inert television, sitting cross-legged and finishing his fish stew. When everybody had resumed their places, he refilled his wine cup and said, “Who was this person who gave you my name and address?”

  “And when did he give ’em to you?” added Mavranos.

  “Dr. Richard Paul Armentrout, at Rosecrans Medical Center in Bellflower,” said Plumtree, who was sitting on the floor beside Cochran in front of the couch now. “This afternoon.” Apparently she too was respecting Strubie the Clown’s hundred-dollar bid to be left out of this picture.

  Mavranos frowned, his high cheekbones and narrowed eyes and drooping mustache making him look like some old Tartar chieftain. “He sent you here?”

  “No,” Plumtree said. “Sid and I broke out of the hospital, when the earthquake hit, a couple of hours ago. Armentrout didn’t even believe there was a king, much less that I had … helped to kill him, until he talked to me this afternoon. Then he said, ‘Oh, you must have had help, from somebody who was practically a king himself, like this kid from a couple of years ago.’ ” She looked up past Cochran at Kootie. “Which was you.”

  Kootie put the bowl aside and took a sip of the wine. “Why did you escape?”

  “Armentrout wants to find out what happened on New Year’s Day,” Plumtree told him, “and he wasn’t going to let us go until he was totally satisfied that he’d found out everything, using every kind of strip-mining therapy that his operating room and pharmacy have available; and even then I don’t think he’d have wanted us to be able to talk, after. He wouldn’t have killed us, necessarily, but he’d have no problem fucking up our minds so bad that between us we couldn’t string together one coherent sentence. This afternoon, just as a warm-up, he tried to break off and … consume a couple of my personalities.”

  “Your personalities,” said Angelica.

  “I’ve got MPD—that’s multiple—”

  “I know what it is,” Angelica interrupted. “I don’t think the condition exists, I think it’s just a romanticizing of post-traumatic stress disorder, best addressed with intensive exploratory psychotherapy, but I do know what it is.”

  “My wife was a psychiatrist,” remarked Pete, “before she became a bruja.”

  Plumtree gave Angelica a challenging smile. “Would you advise Edison Medicine for the condition?”

  “ECT? Hell no,” snapped Angelica, “I’ve never condoned shock therapy for any condition; and I can’t imagine anyone prescribing it for PTSD, or a hypothetical MPD.”

  “Edison Medicine,” came Kootie’s wryly amused voice from above Cochran. “It knocked me right out of my own head—and killed my dog.”


  One of Spider Joe’s antennae popped up from the carpet with a musical twang, making Plumtree jump against Cochran’s shoulder. He put his arm around her, and in the moment before she shrugged it off he noticed that she was trembling. Well, he was too.

  “Whatever,” said Pete, who had sat down on the couch. To Plumtree he went on, “You say he tried to eat some of your personalities. Was he masked, when he did this?” He absently tapped a Marlboro out of a pack and flipped the cigarette into the air; it disappeared, and then he reached behind his ear and pulled out what might have been the same cigarette, lit now, and began puffing smoke from it. “Like, did he have a … a pair of twins present, or a schizophrenic?”

  “He had a crazy guy on the extension phone, listening in,” spoke up Cochran. To Plumtree he said, “The old one-armed guy, Long John Beach.”

  For a moment no one spoke, and the only sound was the chaotic drumming of water splashing into the pots on the floor. Then, “A one-armed guy,” said Kootie steadily, looking hard at Pete Sullivan, “named after a local city.”

  “I—I thought he died,” said Angelica, who was standing beside the desk. “You mean the one who called himself Sherman Oaks, who wanted to kill you so he could eat the Edison ghost out of your head?”

  “Right, the smoke-fancier.” Kootie glanced at Plumtree. “Ghosts are known as ‘smokes’ to the addicts who eat them, and he used to eat a lot of them.”

  “Shit, he still does,” put in Cochran. “Though he’s down to Marlboros these days.”

  “I thought he was dead,” insisted Angelica. “I thought he blew up along with Nicky Bradshaw, when they both fell off the Queen Mary two years ago.”

  “With ‘a local man called Neal Obstadt,’ right?” said Plumtree. “Who was looking for Scott Crane in 1990? Armentrout mentioned this. The explosion killed the Obstadt person, according to him, but just collapsed a lung of this Long John Beach, or Sherman Oaks.” She grinned, breathing rapidly between her teeth. “I wonder what other names he’s used. Wes Covina. Perry Mount.”

  Cochran was embarrassed by her incongruous merriment, and nudged her. She nudged him back, hard, in the ribs.

  “Or in drag, as Beverly Hills,” Pete agreed absently. Then he stood up abruptly and looked around the room. “Well, he’s been here before—he knows the way here, too. We’d better get ready for him, and for this psychiatrist.”

  Angelica visibly shivered, and she touched the gun under her blouse. “We should just run, right now.”

  “We need to know where to run, first,” Pete told her. He stepped to the television set and clanked the channel switch a couple of notches clockwise. “Could you plug this thing in again, Oliver? We need some readings, Angie. Pennies, I’d think, for a fine-grain closeup-type picture. What year was Crane born in?”

  “Nineteen forty-three,” said Diana.

  The tanned teenager hopped up off the couch and plugged the TV set’s cord into the wall while Angelica pulled open a desk drawer and bumped glass jars around in it. “Pennies,” she muttered. “Nineteen … forty … three, there we are.” She lifted one of the little jars out and sat down on the couch. The set’s screen had brightened, and a woman in a commercial was talking about some new Ford car. Cochran and Plumtree hiked themselves forward on the carpet to be able to see the screen.

  Angelica shook the jar, and the half-dozen old pennies in it rattled and clinked—and the TV picture shifted to a newscaster reading the day’s winning lottery numbers. She shook the jar again, and now they were watching the portly, bearded figure of Orson Welles sitting at a restaurant table, waving a glass of wine and quoting the Paul Masson slogan about selling no wine before its time.

  Pete Sullivan caught Cochran’s glance and smiled. “Plain physics so far,” Pete said. “This is an old set, from the days when the remote controls used ultrasound frequencies to change channels and turn the sets on and off. The remote was a tiny xylophone, in effect, too high in frequency for anybody but dogs and TVs to hear. Nowadays the signals need to carry more information, and they use infrared.”

  “I get it,” said Cochran, a little defensively. He was still shaking, still enormously aware of the dead man on the table in the kitchen. He nodded. “The TV thinks her jingling pennies are a remote. Who are you, uh, hoping to consult, here?”

  Pete shrugged. “Not who—what. Just … the moment; right now, right here. The pennies she’s shaking are a part of now with a link to Crane’s birth year, and the pictures they’ll tune the TV to will be representative bits of now in the same field of reference—just like a piece of a hologram contains the whole picture, or a drop of your blood contains the entire physical portrait of you. It’s what Jung called synchronicity.”

  “Synchronicity!” sneered Angelica, who was shaking the jar again and staring at the screen. She stepped back and sat down on the couch, still shaking the pennies.

  “Angie thinks there are actual, sentient entities behind this sort of thing,” said Pete. “A querulous old woman, in this case—the same party that’s behind the Chinese I Ching, according to her.”

  “A straitlaced and disapproving old party,” said Angelica without looking away from the screen. “Sometimes I can almost smell her lavender sachet. Ah, we’re online.”

  Cochran peered at the screen curiously, but it was just showing a grainy black-and-white film of a blond woman brushing her hair.

  “It always starts with this,” said Pete, visibly tenser now. “That’s Mary Pickford, the old silent-movie star. A guy name Philo T. Farnsworth was the first guy in the American West to transmit images with a cathode-ray tube, in San Francisco in 1927, and he used this repeating loop of Mary Pickford as a demo.” He sighed shakily. “This isn’t a real-world, 1995 broadcast—we’re into supernatural effects now, sorry.”

  “You were getting spook stuff even before,” said young Oliver nervously. “Paul Masson hasn’t aired that Orson Welles ad for years.”

  “I think he’s right,” murmured Angelica from the couch.

  Spider Joe had been sitting silently against the kitchen wall, but now he reared back, and half a dozen of his antennae sprang up from the carpet. “Who just came in?” he barked, the sunken eyelids twitching in his craggy brown face.

  Cochran glanced fearfully at the open back door, but there was no one there; and Plumtree and Diana and Angelica had been craning their necks down the hall and toward the kitchen, but there was no sign or sound of any intruder.

  Kootie had directed an unfocussed stare at the ceiling, and now he lowered his head. “There’s no one new on the whole block.”

  Mavranos cleared his throat. “But, uh … your Mary Pickford has changed into a negro.”

  “And she got older,” noted the teenager who had been introduced as Scat, and who hadn’t taken his eyes off the screen since they’d all trooped back in from the kitchen.

  On the TV screen, the figure was in fact a thin old black woman in a high-necked dark dress now, sitting at a mirrored vanity table and brushing her hair—and though her jawline was strong and unsagging, her kinky hair now looked more white than blond.

  As if in response to Angelica’s hard shaking of the penny jar, the grainy black-and-white picture sharpened in focus, and an open window with a row of eucalyptus trees beyond it was visible in the wall behind the old woman; and sounds were audible—a faint, crackling susurration as the old woman drew the brush through her hair, an insistent knocking of the raised window shade bar against the window frame, and a clanging bell from outside.

  “The knocking, and the bell, those are to confuse ghosts,” said Plumtree.

  Angelica was shaking the jar harder, as if trying to drive the image off the TV screen, and she seemed irritated that the pennies weren’t doing it, were instead just jangling in rhythmic counterpoint to the bell.

  “It’s San Francisco, all right,” said Pete. “That’s a cable-car bell in the background.”

  “This film clip is seventy years old,” panted Angelica. “Everyplace probabl
y had streetcars then.”

  “It isn’t the old clip anymore,” objected Pete. “This here has got sound.”

  “Pete,” said Kootie loudly as he clanked his empty bowl down beside the television set, “dig out the Edison telephone and get it hooked up again. We’re in a new game now, with this restoration-to-life talk, and even an idiot shell of Scott Crane might have something to say worth hearing. And I reckon Janis Plumtree should be enough of a link for us to reach him, her being his own personal murderer.”

  “And his wife,” said the bald Diana from the kitchen doorway. “You’ve got his wife here, too.”

  “Right,” said Kootie hastily. “Sorry, Diana—I was thinking in terms of the new arrivals. I meant murderer now too.”

  Angelica finally leaned forward and set the jar of 1943 pennies down on the carpet. “I’m not dealing with the I Ching old lady here,” she said, wiping her hands on her jeans as she leaned back against the couch cushions. “And it’s not being run by just your synchronicity either, Pete. It’s … I sense some other old woman.”

  Cochran saw Mavranos glance at Spider Joe. Clearly he was wondering if the crazy old blind man’s dead wife might be taking over the show here. Cochran wondered if Booger had been a black woman.

  “If you say so, Kootie,” said Pete. “Scat, Ollie—you guys can help me carry some boxes in from the garage.”

  After Diana’s two boys had followed Pete out the back door, Angelica Anthem Elizalde Sullivan stared resentfully at the Plumtree woman sitting in front of the desk with her drunk Connecticut pansy boyfriend. MPD, thought Angelica scornfully. I didn’t even think that was a hip diagnosis anymore, I thought everybody was busy uncovering suppressed memories of childhood sexual abuse these days.

  “Kootie,” Angelica called, “toss me my Lotería cards.”

  Her adopted son twisted around on the desk and dug through a pile of utility bills and check stubs, then tossed over the heads of Cochran and Plumtree a little deck of cards held together with a rubber band.

  Angelica caught the bundle and pulled the rubber band off the cards. “Miss Plumtree,” she said, having forgotten the woman’s first name, “come sit by me on the couch here and chat.”