by Tim Powers
“Rah rah rah,” said Plumtree.
When Mavranos got back to the table with the three drinks and sat down, Plumtree greedily took the glass he pushed across to her and drank half of it in one long, wincing sip. “I should have told you to get two,” she said breathlessly when she had clanked the glass back down. “Do you people have a set of handcuffs? My father took over control of my body three days ago, and I just this morning got free of him; and I feel like he spent the whole time body-surfing in avalanches. But he might come back on at any time.” She opened her mouth and clicked her teeth like a monkey.
Mavranos stared at her. We should just ditch these two losers, he thought. Get back to the truck now, and just drive away.
“No, Arky,” said Angelica sharply. She was glaring at him. “She’s the one that’s going to do the … that’s going to let Crane assume her body.”
Plumtree glanced at their faces. “Well, yeah. What, were you—” Her bloodshot eyes widened in sudden comprehension. “My God, you were gonna have the kid do it! Shit, did you people even consider the possib-lil—possibility that Crane might not be able to get back into his old body, afterward?—that he might have to keep the one he takes for this?”
“We did consider that,” said Kootie. “I did consider that. But we’re all gonna get killed if this doesn’t get settled. Our TV burned up today, and—well, you had to be there. And,” he added with a scared glance at Mavranos, “I’m taking Arky’s word that Crane won’t keep my body, if he can help it at all.”
“Well, he won’t get a chance,” Plumtree told him with a haggard but possibly kindly meant smile, “I’m going to do it.”
“Damn right,” said Angelica.
“Kootie’s correct,” said Mavranos, “in saying that we’ve got to settle this situation—we’ve got to collapse this probability wave, let the daylight into Schrödinger’s shitty cat box. As long as there’s no real king working, we’re all exposed—hell, spotlighted—and pretty near totally defenseless. You’re staying at a motel or something?”
“Ye-es,” said Cochran cautiously.
“Well congratulations, you now have four houseguests. I hope the management won’t mind. We’re gonna do this thing tomorrow at dawn, it looks like, this restoration-to-life, so there’s no point in us getting a different room at the same motel. We just this morning got rousted out of our place by some kind of walking department-store dummies, and—”
Cochran choked on his Singapore Sling. “Did they,” he said after he’d wiped his mouth redly on his sleeve, “move in synch, like they were puppets working off the same strings?”
“They did,” said Mavranos stolidly. “And suddenly I don’t like the idea of Scott’s body sitting out there in the truck, you know? Let’s finish up here, and get to your motel. With you and me and Pete, we should be able to get Scott into the motel room. And then we’ve got some preparations to make.”
Kootie nodded, and Angelica scowled at him.
“Finish every drop of your drinks,” said Plumtree with a ghastly, exhausted gaiety, “there’s poor people sober in China.”
Chinese New Year was still two weeks off, but Asian boys on ribbon-decked bicycles tossed strings of lit firecrackers ahead of the six of them, as they walked south on the Grant Street sidewalk under the red-and-gold pagoda-roofed buildings, so that their ears rang with the staccato popping, and their noses burned with the barbecued-chicken smell of gunpowder, and Kootie was treading on fragments of red paper that crumpled and darkened on the wet pavement underfoot like fallen rose petals; and when they trudged across the wet grass of Portsmouth Square, the hoboes and winos hobbled out of their path and seemed to bow, or at least nod, as they passed.
And when they had piled into the two vehicles—Plumtree riding in the front seat of Mavranos’s truck, and Pete riding in the Granada with Cochran, for mutual trust as much as to make sure both parties knew the way to the Star Motel—crows and mockingbirds swooped over them as the old car and truck labored up Van Ness, the darting birds seeming to be fighting in the gray sky.
At Lombard Street at the top of Russian Hill, where a right turn would have led them down the ornamental, brick-paved “crookedest street in the world,” they turned left instead, and drove down the straight lanes between bars and car-repair shops and liquor stores and motels, and after three blocks both vehicles ponderously turned left up the driveway into the Star Motel parking lot.
When they’d parked and all climbed out onto the asphalt, Angelica and Plumtree crowded around the tailgate of Mavranos’s dusty red truck to block the view as Pete and Cochran and Mavranos slid Scott Crane’s body out from beneath the tarpaulin. The body was dressed now in jeans and a white shirt, though with no shoes or socks, and Cochran tried not to look at the bloody bandage knotted around the thigh, over the denim.
The body was limp, not stiff, but they managed to tilt it into an upright posture and march it right past the ice and Coke machines and up the stairs to Cochran’s room; Plumtree had got her key out and scrambled ahead of them, and had got the door open by the time they had carried the dead king to the room.
They flopped Scott Crane down onto the bed that didn’t have Cochran’s homemade Ouija board on it, and Mavranos straightened the body’s arms and legs and unlooped the graying beard from the sawn-off stump of spear that stood up from the throat. The room was still humid from Plumtree’s and Cochran’s showers this morning, and smelled like old salami and unfresh clothing.
“Just like Charlton Heston in El Cid,” said Kootie bravely. “Dead, but leading the army.”
“He is d-damn cold,” panted Cochran as he stood back and flapped his cramping hands. His heart was pounding more than the couple of minutes of effort could justify, and he was shivering with irrational horror at having touched the dead man again. “How can you—think he—” His voice almost broke, and he turned toward the TV set and just breathed deeply.
“Your place—could use some airing,” said Angelica, smoothly calling everyone’s attention away from his momentary loss of control. “Kootie, see if you can’t open the windows, while I go back down to the truck for our witchy supplies.”
“Don’t blame me for this pigpen,” said Plumtree, “I been away.”
“Witchy supplies,” put in Cochran in a carefully neutral tone. He gave Plumtree a resentful glance, very aware of the cassette tape in his shirt pocket and the French-language missal in the bedside table drawer. Kootie had ducked under the curtains and was noisily yanking at the aluminum-framed window.
Mavranos had his hands in the pockets of his denim jacket as he stared at Cochran. “I got to ask you to give me your gun,” he said. “I almost apologize, since we’re all really on the same side here and my crowd is taking over your place this way, for tonight—but Miss Plumtree said herself that her dad came on three days ago and she just this morning came back to herself; and you appear to have a … loyalty to her. I can’t justify—”
“Sure,” said Cochran, speaking levelly to conceal his reflexive anger. Slowly, he reached around to the back of his belt and tugged the holster clip free. Then he tossed the suede-sheathed gun onto the bathroom-side bed.
Mavranos leaned forward to pick it up with his left hand, keeping his right in his jacket pocket. “Thanks,” he said gruffly. “If we run into outside trouble, I’ll give it back to you.”
Cochran just nodded. I can see his point, he insisted to himself. I’d do the same, in his place.
Angelica came tromping back upstairs lugging a green canvas knapsack, and Cochran had to move his NADA sign and papers as she began unpacking its contents onto the bedspread.
She lifted out some springy shrub branches that smelled vaguely of eucalyptus, held together by a rubber band. “Myrtle,” she said. “Sacred to Dionysus, the books say. And a bottle of wine for us all to drink from, to show him respect.”
With shaky fingers Cochran took from her the bottle she had dug out of the knapsack. It was, he saw, a Kenwood Vineyards 1975 Cabernet
Sauvignon, and the stylized picture at the top of the label was of a skeleton reclining on a grassy hillside.
Cochran’s ears seemed to be ringing with a wail that he was afraid he might actually give voice to, and for the moment he had forgotten the dead king and his confiscated gun. “This—was never released,” he said, making himself speak slowly. “This label, I mean, with this picture on it. I remember hearing about it. David Goines originally did one of a nude woman on the hill, and the BATF rejected it because they said it was indecent, so he did this one of the same woman as a skeleton; and they rejected it because of fetal alcohol syndrome or something. Finally Goines did one of just the hillside, and that got okayed, and Kenwood printed it.” He looked up into Angelica’s concerned gaze, and let himself relax a little. “But this was never released, this label was never even printed!—except, I guess, for this one. Where the hell did you find it? And why did you get it? I mean, it’s a twenty-year-old Cab! There must have been cheaper ones.”
Angelica opened her mouth, then closed it. “I,” she said finally, “don’t remember what it cost. But I got change back from a twenty, and we got ice and some canned green beans in the same purchase, I remember. This was the only fancy wine they had, at this little place called Liquor Heaven in the Soma neighborhood—Arky, you drove us there and waited in the truck, remember?—the only other wine was one of those bum’s-rush specials, Hair-of-the-Dog or some name like that.”
Mavranos had been watching Plumtree and Cochran, but now he slowly turned to Angelica. “… Bitin Dog?” he asked.
Cochran sat down on the bed, heedlessly crushing Angelica’s myrtle branches, and he was remembering the Mondard figure in the mirror in the vision he’d had last week in Solville. “That’s how it looks in a reflection,” he said dizzily. “You must have been in Looking-Glass Land. The right-way name is something like pagodetibi.”
“Get your butt off the boughs of holly,” Plumtree told him.
“No,” said Mavranos, “stay where you are, Dionysus probably likes it a bit crushed, like cats do catnip. Miss Plumtree, you sit beside him. You got your máquina, Angelica?”
Angelica touched the untucked tail of her blouse. “Yes, Arky,” she sighed.
“Stand over here and keep your hand on it, and watch those two. Pete and I gotta go to the truck, drag up some of our scientific apparatus, more of our high-tech defensive hardware.”
Kootie sniffed the air after Arky and his foster-dad had shuffled outside and pulled the door closed behind them. He sensed at least a couple of fragmentary personalities buzzing clumsily around the room.
“The king’s body is drawing ghosts,” he told his foster-mom. “A couple got in when Arky opened the door just now.” He sniffed again. “Just little broken-off bits, probably shells thrown off of somebody who didn’t even die of it.”
Kootie knew that people, especially very neurotic people whose personalities spun in wide and perturbed orbits, often threw ghost-shells in moments of stressfully strong emotion. Kootie could feel the insistent one-note resonance of these, and his hands were shaky and he wasn’t able to take a deep breath.
He found himself staring at Janis Plumtree’s loose blouse and tight jeans, and he snorted and shook his head to dispel the induced lust. Easy to guess what the unknown source-person was up to, he thought, when he shed these … psychic snakeskins! And the man must have been left bewildered and abruptly out-of-the-mood after they’d broken away.
The vibrations of the ghost fragments did have a strongly male cast; Kootie wondered what his own response would have been if the source-person had been a woman—would he have found himself looking at … at Cochran?—or would he have been so out-of-phase with them that he wouldn’t have sensed their presence at all?
“I’m okay,” he told Angelica, who had taken her eyes off Cochran and Plumtree long enough to give Kootie a raised eyebrow. “I hope Arky’s bringing up the St. Michael and High John the Conqueror sprays.”
“I packed ’em,” she said.
In spite of himself, Kootie was staring at Plumtree again. She was clearly nervously excited—she had pulled a little order pad out of her pocket and was flipping through the pages, nodding and mumbling to herself.
She looked up and caught his gaze, and her sudden smile made his heart thump. “Tomorrow,” she said through her teeth, “no matter what it may cost me, I won’t be a murderer anymore!”
Her companion seemed less happy about the idea—Cochran was frowning as he shook a cigarette out of a pack and flipped open a book of matches. Probably he’s worried that this attempt tomorrow will work the way she thinks it will, Kootie thought, and his girlfriend’s body will suddenly have a fifty-two-year-old man in it.
Talk about out-of-phase!
Kootie wasn’t aware of the ghost fragments now—probably his lustful response had blunted his latent Fisher King ability to sense them. As if I took a long sniff of a rare hamburger that was cooked in an iron pan, he thought ruefully, or spent the day at the top of a modern high-rise building, far up away from the ground, or gargled with whiskey on a Friday in Lent.
Cochran struck a match—and the matchbook flared in a gout of flame, and Cochran had dropped it and was stamping it out on the carpet.
Cochran and Plumtree both exclaimed “Son of a bitch!” and Plumtree went on to add, “You clumsy stupid shit!”
But Kootie had caught a whiff of cooked bacon on the stale, humid air, and he said, “I think you burned up the ghosts, Mr. Cochran. Toss me the matches, would you?”
Cochran bent over, pried the matchbook from the carpet, and tossed it to Kootie, who juggled the hot thing around in the palm of his hand to look at it.
The moment of flame had not obliterated the letters inked onto each match. Kootie read the words carefully, then looked up at Cochran. “The match you lit has ‘tenebis’ written on it, doesn’t it?”
Cochran bent down again and brushed his hand over the carpet until he had found the match he had struck; then he straightened and stared at it.
“ ‘Tenebis,’ ” Cochran read. He looked at Kootie. “You’ve seen this inscription before? It’s Latin, right?”
“I suppose it’s Latin,” Kootie said. “I’ve never seen it before, but I can tell what the missing word must be—’cause it’s a palindrome. See?” He tossed the matchbook back to Cochran. “The letters read the same backward as forward.”
“On a matchbook,” said Angelica with a wry smile. “That’s like the people who letter L.A. Cigar—Too Tragical around chimneys and frying pans—or gun muzzles,” she added, touching the grip of the automatic in her belt. “Ghosts are drawn to palindromes, and these tricks burn ’em up—dispel ’em into the open air, unlike in the coal of a cigarette, which sends their broken-up constituent pieces straight into your lungs, for a nasty predatory high. The palindrome torchers send them safely on past India.”
This seemed to jar Cochran. “What exactly the hell do you people mean by ‘India’?” he asked.
A measured thumping sounded at the motel-room door, and Kootie could hear Arky Mavranos impatiently call something from outside.
“Peek out before you unlock it,” Angelica said as Kootie stepped toward the door.
“Right, Ma.” Kootie peered out through the lens, then said, “It’s just them,” as he snapped back the bolt and pulled the door open.
Mavranos came shuffling in carrying one of his spare truck batteries in both hands; Pete Sullivan followed, carrying a stack of boxes balanced on top of the ice chest. An electric plug dangled from one of the boxes.
“On the table by the window,” said Mavranos to Pete. “Hook up the charger to the battery, a quick charge on the ten-amp setting—if it’s not too dead you might have time to drag one of the others up here and charge it too.”
“What’s India?” insisted Cochran.
“Uh—ghosthood,” said Angelica, frowning at the boxes Pete was putting down. Then she glanced at Cochran and apparently noted the man’s anxious squint. “
In Shakespeare’s time,” she went on patiently, “India was sorcerously hip slang for a sort of overlap place, a halfway house between Earth and Heaven-or-Hell. It’s the antechamber to Dionysus’s domain—the god was supposed to have come to Thebes by way of Phrygia from northern India, around Pakistan.”
“Paki Japer came no more,” sang Plumtree, to a bit of the tune of “Puff the Magic Dragon.”
Mavranos barked out two syllables of a laugh at that, wiping black dust off his hands. “I’m gonna—” he began.
“So what would it mean,” Cochran interrupted shakily, “to say … ‘Her bed is India, there she lies, a pearl’?”
Angelica was frowning at him with, Kootie thought, puzzled sympathy. “That’s a line from Troilus and Cressida,” Angelica said. “It would mean ‘she’ is in that India space—a ghost associating with a living person, or vice versa. The overlap, see? And the ‘pearl’ reference would probably mean she’s accreting stuff from the other category—physical solidity, if she was a ghost to start with, or ghosts, if she was a living person. The Elizabethan slang for ghosts was ‘ghostings’—by way of folk etymology from ‘coastings,’ meaning coastlines, outlines, silhouettes; traced replicas—and later in the play—”
“I’m gonna go trace the coastline here,” said Mavranos, “the north coast, from Fort Point by the bridge to where those three old ships are moored at the Hyde Street Pier: the area where the wild mint used to grow, that gave the city its original name of Yerba Buena. I’ve got a piedra iman, and a—”
“A magnet?” said Angelica, turning toward Mavranos. “But that’s only good for drawing ghosts, Arky, you don’t want Crane’s ghost—”
“Why aren’t you gonna check west of the bridge?” demanded Plumtree. “The Sutro Baths ruins is where we saw his naked ghost, last week, and that’s west of the bridge. I think you should—”
“But you don’t want his ghost—” Angelica went on; and Kootie was interrupting too: “We should see what the old black lady has to say about it—”
