by Tim Powers
When he looked up into Mondard’s face, the goat-pupilled eyes were looking past him, over Cochran’s shoulder; a moment later they were warmly returning his gaze, and he knew that Mondard was promising to provide the same solace, the same generously ennobling gift, when Cochran’s grief would be for the death of Plumtree.
And Cochran wondered exactly how Nina had come to run out into the lanes of the 280 Freeway at dawn, ten days ago; had she been chased? … Lured?
Nina was dead, and Cochran was suddenly determined not to betray his love for her by disowning it; and Janis was alive, and he was not going to sanction her death, abandon her to this thing, even implicitly.
The bottle of wine, “Biting Dog” or whatever it was called, gleamed in the long-nailed hand in the mirror’s reflection, and on the back of the hand was a mark that might have corresponded to the mark on Cochran’s hand—but Cochran shook his head sharply, and turned away and blundered back the way he had come.
CHAPTER 10
“You know that you are recalled to life?”
“They tell me so.”
“I hope you care to live?”
“I can’t say.”
“Shall I show her to you? Will you come and see her?”
—Charles Dickens,
A Tale of Two Cities
PLUMTREE WAS STILL HUDDLED under the sink when Cochran stepped carefully back into the stark yellow light of the laundry room, but she was blinking and looking around now and Angelica was crouched beside her, talking to her.
Pete was hunched over the telephone, tapping the hang-up button; the paper speaker cone on the shelf was silent in the instants when the phone was hung up, but always came back again with the same noise, which was distant mumbling and laughter and vitreous clinking, as if the phone at the other end had been left unattended in a crowded bar somewhere. Perched up on the washing machine, Kootie was frowning in the mint-and-tequila smoke from the kitchen, and holding his bleeding side.
As Cochran stepped over the telephone and electric cords to get back to his place beside the sink, he found that he was straining to hear, among the slurred babble crackling out of the speaker, the rattle-and-bang of someone playing bar dice.
“Oh, Scant!” said Plumtree when he sat down beside her. “I was afraid you ran out on me.”
Cochran managed to smile at her. “Decided not to,” he said shortly.
Angelica glanced at him, and then stared at him. He wondered what his expression looked like. “Good,” she said. “Did you get … lost, at all, looking for the bathroom?”
Cochran realized that he’d been holding his breath, and he let it out. “Yes,” he said. “Never did—find it.” Now that he had resumed breathing, he was panting, as if he had run a long distance back here.
“Big Victorian halls?” Angelica asked him in a neutral tone. “Rich-looking?”
Cochran caught his breath with a hiccup, both relieved and frightened to learn that she knew about the hall he had found himself in, that he had not been hallucinating. “Yes,” he admitted. “Grand once—decrepit now.”
Angelica was nodding. “For the last week and a half,” she said slowly, “we’ve been getting print-through, here, overlay, overlaps, of two other houses, old Victorians. One’s dark and mildewy, and the other’s clean and got electric lights. This building was put up in 1923, partly constructed of lumber salvaged from the Winchester House in San Jose. The top couple of floors of that house collapsed in the big earthquake in 1906—”
“When he came for the black lady’s ghost, out of the sea,” said Janis in a helpful tone, “and knocked down all the buildings. Valorie told me that part.”
“Oh, do be quiet, girl,” whispered Angelica, closing her eyes for a moment. “The Winchester House is still standing, of course,” she went on to Cochran, “big haunted-house tourist attraction on the 280 south of San Fran … but lately when it’s raining in San Jose, the roof leaks here.”
“It was—leaking there, too,” panted Cochran. “Through a skylight.” He didn’t feel able to tell her about the man he’d seen in the mirror.
“Talk to Kootie about it, he’s seen—”
A clunking sounded from the speaker, then breathing; clearly someone at the unimaginable other end had picked up the telephone.
“Whooo wawnts it?” came a man’s drawling voice from the speaker. “Your daddy’s home, baby! That bad old doctor wanna play strip poker, I’ll see he gets his ashes hauled for real.” A high, razory whine had started up in the background.
Cochran’s face went cold, for he was certain that this was the voice that had come out of Plumtree’s mouth at Strubie the Clown’s house.
Plumtree had sat up and stiffened. “That is my daddy!” she said hoarsely, her voice seeming to echo faintly out of the speaker. “Daddy, can you hear me? I’m so sorry I let you die, I tried to catch you—”
“Course I can hear—”
The whine grew abruptly louder and shriller, as if Dopplered by the source of the carrier-wave signal accelerating toward them at nearly the speed of light; a blue glow was shining now in the dark office beyond the laundry-room doorway, and the drumming of water into the pots out there was a barrage; then the speaker abruptly went silent and the blue glow was extinguished. Cochran couldn’t hear the roof dripping in the other room at all now.
In the silence, Pete pushed back his chair and shuffled carefully to the doorway and looked into the office.
“The carborundum bulb exploded,” he said, turning back into the brightly lit little room. He gave Plumtree an empty, haggard stare. “Your dad’s ghost is one muscular son of a bitch.”
“He’s not a ghost,” said Angelica in a shaky tone as she lithely straightened her legs and stood up. “And it wasn’t Spider Joe’s dead wife that whited out the TV. Let’s go in the other room and get the Vete de Aquí oil splashed around.”
Cochran knew enough Spanish to understand that the phrase meant, roughly, Go Away; and in spite of his recent resolve to stay with these strange people, he forlornly wished he could rub some of that oil onto the soles of his shoes.
“I’ve got to make a couple of ordinary phone calls before we settle down again,” said Angelica when everybody had filed back into the office and turned the lights back on and Johanna and Kootie had begun shaking yellow oil from tiny glass bottles onto the doorframes and the windowsills. Angelica hurried into the kitchen, and Cochran heard a pan clank in a sink, and then running water and the sudden hiss of steam. Pete had unplugged the electrical cords and was twisting the clamps off the terminals of the car battery that was sitting on the desk.
“I’ll bet he’s an angel,” Plumtree was saying, “if he’s not a ghost. I’ll bet he’s my guardian angel.”
Cochran drained the last third of his can of beer in several deep swallows. Has she not even considered, he wondered, the likelihood that her father’s personality is the famous Flibbertigibbet?—who battered the would-be rapist to death in 1989 on October the unforgettable seventeenth? An angel, maybe, Cochran thought, but one with a harpoon rather than a harp.
The thought of a harpoon reminded him of the sawn-off spear in the neck of the dead king in the kitchen; he darted a nervous glance in that direction, and then peered up at Kootie, who had climbed back up onto the desk and was sitting cross-legged among the wires and radio parts.
Kootie was looking at him. “Call me Fishmeal,” the boy said, softly and not happily.
Cochran blinked at him. “Uh … sorry, you said what?”
“Never mind,” sighed Kootie.
Angelica came striding back into the office from the kitchen, her dark hair swinging around her pale, narrow face. “Your Bugsy Siegel eye worked,” she told Mavranos. “The two L.A.-area santeros I just called were aware of some powerful ghost agitations a few minutes ago, but Alvarez in Venice registered it as northeast of him, and Mendoza in Alhambra clocked it as just about exactly west.”
“The Hollywood Cemetery …?” ventured Pete.
&
nbsp; “Unmistakably,” said Angelica. “So we’re no more vulnerable than we were before. At least.”
She threw herself down on the couch and stared hard at Plumtree, who was sitting on the floor beside Cochran. Impulsively Cochran put his arm around Plumtree’s shoulder; and she leaned back against him, which led him to believe that she was currently Janis.
“And I’m pretty sure I’ve got you diagnosed, girl,” Angelica said to her, “though I’d love it if you could have brought your admission notes with you from the madhouse.” She looked around at the other people in the long, smoky room—just Cochran and Kootie and Mavranos and Diana—and she said, “I’m afraid I’m going to be violating doctor-patient confidentiality in what I say here. But everybody here is concerned in this—and anyway, you never paid me forty-nine cents.”
Angelica shook her head and smiled then, though she was frowning. “You know, when I was a practicing psychiatrist, I learned real quick that the regular doctors, the surgeons and all, were cowards when it came to giving their patients bad news. They’d call one of us shrinks over to their wing of the hospital to ‘consult’ on a case, and it always just meant … ‘Would you explain to my patient that his cancer is fatal? Would you tell his family?’ So a lot of times I had to be the one to tell some stranger that his leg had to be amputated, or tell some girl her father had died. I always felt bad to be the one breaking the news.” She coughed out two syllables of uncomfortable laughter. “I’m rambling, aren’t I? What I mean is, I don’t want to say what I’ve got to say now—though in a way I’ve got the opposite sort of news.” Plumtree must have opened her mouth to speak, for Angelica held up her hand. “Let me talk, Miss Plumtree. You are, genuinely, a multiple personality,” Angelica said, “but that’s not all that’s … peculiar about you. How do I start? For one thing, I’m just about sure that you were present when your father … well, let’s call it died.”
Cochran belatedly noticed that Angelica had brought a glass of something with her from the kitchen, tequila probably, and he watched her take a solid gulp of it now. “I think,” she went on, “that you were standing on the pavement below the building he fell from—I think he partly landed on you, which is why you were in the hospital with broken bones. And it was almost certainly a sunny day, because you seem to have identified him with the sun, hence your dream of the sun falling out of the sky onto you, and hence too your no doubt stress-triggered hysterical sunburn and constricted pupils. Conversion disorders, we call that class of physical symptoms.”
Angelica leaned forward—but her head was now over one of the drip-catching pots, and the next drop spattered on her scalp. She leaned back again on the couch. “That much is orthodox—Angelica Anthem Elizalde the doctor talking. Now it’s Bruja Angelica, del ‘Testículos del León’: I think that in the instant before his body died, when you were both lying there on the sidewalk or whatever, he managed to look into your eyes, and then he … jumped across the gap, threw his soul into your two-year-old body.” She was frowning deeply, staring at the liquor in her glass. “So at the tender age of two you lost your psychic virginity, in what must have been a traumatic violation of your self. I doubt that your home life in the hippie cult-commune was real conducive to mental health, but this virtual rape by your own father was undoubtedly the event that triggered your multiplicity.”
“I’m still here,” said Plumtree cautiously. “Valorie hasn’t made me lose time. So this must not be bad news.”
“We-ell,” said Angelica, raising her eyebrows, “the news is that your father is discorporate, but he’s in you; like one of those flanged wedges they use to split logs into several pieces. And he’s alive, he’s not a ghost; he never did die, never did experience the psychic truncation of death. He is, though, almost certainly the person that killed Scott Crane.”
“My father is alive,” said Plumtree, clearly tasting the thought. “I didn’t let him die! I did catch him—save him!”
And he’s Flibbertigibbet, thought Cochran nervously. Don’t lose sight of that, Janis.
A jangling metallic screech at the back door made Cochran jump and almost shout; Spider Joe was coming back inside, and the long, stiff wires that projected from his belt were scraping paint chips from the doorframe. “Goddammit,” the blind old man was muttering. Once through the narrow doorway he plodded across the floor, as Mavranos stepped out of his way and the antennae bunched and snagged the carpet and whipped through the air, and finally he sat down heavily on the floor beside the couch. Perhaps self-consciously, he groped around until he found Angelica’s deck of Lotería cards, and began shuffling the frail cards in his brown-spotted hands.
Angelica turned back to Plumtree. “Do you know what those lines were that you quoted a few minutes ago?” she asked Plumtree sharply. “A list of defenses, all provisional and makeshift-frail—‘Upon my back, to defend my belly,’ and so forth?”
“Don’t say any more,” said Plumtree hastily, “please. No, I don’t even recall quoting anything.”
“Well, they happen to be from Troilus and Cressida,” Angelica said, “a Shakespeare play that isn’t considered one of his good ones, mainly because it doesn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense. But some spiritualists, mediums, brujas y magos—the real ones—are very aware of the play.”
“What’s it about?” asked Cochran—in a strained voice, for it had been at the Troy and Cress Wedding Chapel in Las Vegas that he had married Nina Gestin Leon—his beloved dead Nina—and had next morning had his first debilitating hallucination of the big, masked man.
Angelica sighed and finished her drink. “Only a few people know what I’m about to tell you,” she said. “See, Shakespeare didn’t write the play for the general public—its only intended performance was for a small, sorcerously hip audience in London in 1603—and in the published version he had to add four or five lines to the end of the first scene, tacked on after the rhyming couplet that originally ended it, in order to take away the real point of the play—which is that Troilus didn’t go out and fight, but got his wound at home—fatally, by his own hand. Hardly anybody knows, anymore, that it’s really a play about ghosts.”
She glanced at Plumtree, with what might have been sympathy. “I’ll have to re-read it, but it takes place during the Trojan War—you know? like in Homer?—and it’s about a Trojan girl, Cressida, who is being prepared to be a vehicle for the ghost of her dead father. The Greeks who are besieging the city have got hold of the ghost, and they want to use it against the Trojans, but they’ve got to get the ghost into a living body that’s both compatible with it and not a virgin, psychically. It’s a dirty-pool move, like using biological warfare, and some of the Greeks such as Ulysses don’t approve of the tactic; the Greek soldiers are suffering disorientation from the powerful ghost’s proximity, and they’re using masking measures—‘emulation,’ Ulysses calls it—to insulate themselves. So anyway, a traitor spiritualist in Troy is talking Cressida into having sex with the ghost of her dead boyfriend, Troilus, who near-decapitated himself with his sword before the action starts. In the play it’s never outright stated that Troilus is dead, a suicide ghost, but his very name should have been a clue to the theater-going public, really—in Homer’s Iliad, the Troilus character is dead long before this point in the story, though Homer doesn’t say he killed himself out of unrequited love of Cressida, as Shakespeare secretly has it. Anyway, a trade is set up—the clueless Trojans agree to turn over Cressida in exchange for some VIP prisoner-of-war Trojan, and the spiritualist manages to get Cressida into bed with Troilus’s ghost just barely before she’s got to leave the city. And, of course, the Greek scheme works: Troy falls, the noble prince Hector is killed. Though,” she added, visibly restraining herself from glancing toward the kitchen doorway, “Apollo and Aphrodite preserved Hector’s body from corruption.”
Mavranos was still holding the revolver. He looked across the room at Plumtree and asked, “What was your plan for reviving Scott Crane?”
She shivered u
nder Cochran’s arm and muttered, “In the name of the Father, the Sun, the Holy Ghost.” The lights flickered; then she squinted at Mavranos. “Okay, sorry—what did you say?”
“I asked you how you planned to restore Crane to life.”
“A time for hard questions.” She took a deep breath and let it out. “I believed a living king would be able to restore him. A king in a living body. I knew he was a, a magic guy, and I figured he knew how to do shit like that. So I wanted to find the Flying Nun’s—Crane’s—presently disembodied spirit, and let him take my body, so he’ll be occupying a living body—this one—and he’ll be able to do the magical trick, whatever it involves. I know how to … open myself up, ‘wide unclasp the table of my thoughts,’ step aside and let another personality take control of my body—I do it a hundred times a day. And he wouldn’t be compromising himself by violating my spiritual virginity—I’m a regular Grand Central Station for personalities passing through this little head. So far they’ve all been homegrown, as far as I know, but I’m confident that any … psychic hymen! … is long gone.”
Truer than you yet know, Cody, thought Cochran. You should have been here for what Angelica said about your father a minute ago.
Plumtree was still holding Mavranos’s gaze, though Cochran could see the glitter of tears in her eyes. “And,” she went on steadily, “if he can’t manage the trick of getting himself back into his own body—even though it does happen to be so perfectly preserved right here in your kitchen!—then he can simply, God, simply stay in mine, keep it. Mine’s not perfect, and it’s the wrong sex, but it’s young, and it’s all I have to give him, by way of atonement.” She wiped her eyes impatiently on her shirtsleeve. “That was my plan. Dr. Armentrout said Koot Hoomie Parganas might know a way to do it, maybe another way.” She looked up at the boy on the desk. “Hanging around here tonight, I get the idea you don’t, in fact, know a way to do it. Is that … true?”
