by Tim Powers
Arky had lifted one of Angelica’s weather-beaten stuffed toy pigs out of the box Pete had carried in, and now he shoved a C battery into the compartment in its rear end; and the pig’s sudden, harsh mechanical burping silenced the two women and Kootie.
After three noisy seconds Mavranos pulled the battery out, and the croaking stopped. “I’m not gonna look for his ghost,” he said clearly, “nor where we saw his ghost. What I want to do first is search around the area where your old black lady’s banker friend drowned, back in 1875; that’s near the Hyde Pier. And I’m gonna use the magnet along with a magnetic compass—I figure that when the compass needle ignores both the magnet and the real magnetic north pole, I’ll have found the spot where we can yank Scott back here from the far side of India. Wherever the spot is, it’s got to be a regular black hole for plain-old ghosts, and they’ve got to add up to a pre-emptive magnetic charge—especially now, on the eve of Dionysus’s day.” He bared his teeth in a smile. “Okay?”
“Just asking,” said Angelica.
“I have no idea how long this’ll take,” Mavranos went on. “I’m gonna walk it, and leave you people the truck. If I get no readings at all, I’ll just come back here, well before dawn, and we can do the restoration-to-life right at the spot where the banker jumped in.” He swiveled an unreadable stare from Kootie to Angelica to Plumtree. “You all are gonna want to figure out your tactics. Don’t go out—order a pizza delivered, and if you need beers or something, send Pete. Angelica,” he added, with a nod toward where Cochran and Plumtree sat on the bed, “if they try anything at all, don’t you hesitate to—”
“I know,” said Angelica. “Shoot our hosts.”
“Right,” agreed Mavranos. He slapped the pocket of his denim jacket and nodded at the solid angularity of his revolver. Then he was out the door, and the clump-clop of his boots was receding down the stairs.
“What happens,” asked Plumtree bleakly, “if you untie that bandage from around Crane’s leg?”
“He bleeds,” said Angelica. “He’s got no pulse, but fresh blood leaks out of him.”
“Not forever,” Plumtree said. “Where we stabbed him … his throat stopped bleeding after a while, right? I mean, I doubt they tied a tourniquet around his neck, then.” She sighed hitchingly, and ran her fingers through her disordered hair. Her lips were turned down sharply at the corners. “Tilt a few good slugs of his blood into that empty Wild Turkey bottle. Tomorrow I’ll—probably have to—” Her eyes widened in evident surprise and her face went pale. “Scant! Why am I—”
Plumtree stood up and wobbled to the bathroom then, barely managing to slam the door behind her before Kootie heard her being rackingly sick in there.
“Who’s in the mood for a pizza?” he asked brightly.
“Hush,” said Angelica quietly. She opened her mouth as if to say more, then just repeated, “Hush.”
At sunset the entirely discorporate spirit of Scott Crane stood on a cliff over a sea, and it was no longer possible for him to overlook his sin of omission. The call of the one neglected tarot archetype could no longer be drowned out in the busy distractions of life. It had been beckoning during three winters—whispering from six feet under in the agitation of the lice that blighted the vineyards, wheezing in the fevered lungs of Crane’s young children in the winter months, and roaring like a bull in the cloven earth under Northridge a year ago tomorrow. And on New Year’s Day of this year it had come to his house.
It had worn many faces—that of Crane’s first wife, and that of his adopted father, and a hundred others; but today it wore the face of the fat man he had shot to death in the desert outside Las Vegas in 1990. A bargain had been made, and his part had not been fully paid.
CHAPTER 18
“Afraid?”
“It’s plain enough, I should think, why he may be. It’s a dreadful remembrance. Besides that, his loss of himself grew out of it. Not knowing how he lost himself, or how he recovered himself, he may never feel certain of not losing himself again. That alone wouldn’t make the subject pleasant, I should think.”
—Charles Dickens,
Tale of Two Cities
THE SKY BEYOND THE curtains had been dark for hours, and the clock on the bedside table read 10:30, when the traditional Solville knock sounded on the door: rap-rap-rap, rap, in the rhythm of the Rolling Stones’ “Under My Thumb.”
Angelica was sitting on the carpet in front of the television, and she put down her jar of pennies. “Peek out anyway,” she told Kootie as she straightened her legs and stood up. It was a relief to be able to look away from the grotesque, distressing images on the screen.
Kootie hurried to the door and peered out through the lens. “It’s him,” he said as he unchained the door, “alone.” He pulled the door open.
Mavranos brought in with him the smells of crushed grass and cold pier pilings, and Angelica thought she could see the stale room air eddy behind him as he strode to the ice chest and crouched to lift out a wet can of Coors.
“I found our place,” Mavranos said shortly, after popping the top and taking a deep sip. “It’s hardly more than walking distance from here. I found it at sunset, but I’ve spent all this time making sure I wasn’t followed back here. There was a lot of local hippies dressed up as druids there—or druids dressed as hippies?—and I kept on seeing them after I left the place.”
He finished the can and crouched again to get another. “I’d see ’em on rooftops, and in passing buses, but each of ’em was looking at me, I swear, with no expressions at all on their faces, under the hoods. I finally lost ’em by buying a—hah!—a Jiminy Cricket latex rubber mask in Chinatown, and then wearing it while I rode the cable cars Washington-to-Mason-to-Jackson-to-Hyde in a windshield circle for about an hour.” He glanced at Angelica. “ ‘Windshield’—the olden-times word was ‘widdershins.’ ” He twirled a finger in the air. “It means moving counterclockwise, to elude magical pursuit.”
“I know what widdershins is,” said Angelica. “Contra las manecillas. So where is this place? Is it where the banker drowned?”
“No, it’s—well, you’ll see it tomorrow at dawn. It’s out at the end of the peninsula at the Small Craft Harbor, on the grounds of some yacht club; I had to step over a ‘No Admittance’ sign on a chain. It looks like an old ruined Greek or Roman temple. I asked about it at the yacht club—apparently the city planners had a whole lot of cemetery marble left over after they cleared out all the graveyards in the Richmond District in the thirties, transplanted the graves south to Colma, and so somebody set up this pile of … steps and seats and pillars and patchwork stone pavements … out at the end of the peninsula. Very windy and cold—and the compass needle had no time for my magnet or the north pole; I swear I could feel that compass twisting in my hand, so the needle could point straight down.”
His eyes moved past Angelica to the body on the bed, and when he gasped and darted a glance toward the Plumtree woman, Angelica knew he had seen the fresh blood smeared on Scott Crane’s jeans.
“She go messin’ with him?” Mavranos demanded. “Did her dad, I mean?”
Angelica took hold of his arm. “No, Arky. We decanted some of Crane’s blood into a bottle. We think she’ll have to—”
“Phlebotomy,” put in Kootie.
“Right,” Angelica agreed nervously; “it looks like she’ll probably have to, to drink some of Crane’s blood, to summon Crane, to draw him into her body tomorrow.”
Mavranos’s nostrils widened in evident distaste at the thought, and Angelica sympathetically remembered how the poor Janis personality had found herself suddenly in a body that was convulsing with nausea, after the Cody personality had first proposed the idea and then fled.
Mavranos glared around the room and ended up staring at the television, which for the last five minutes had been insistently showing some French-language hard-core pornographic movie.
“So you decided to distract yourself with some T-and-A,” he said sourly. “You psychiatri
sts figure this is wholesome entertainment for fourteen-year-old boys, do you?”
“T and …?” echoed Angelica. “Oh, tits and ass, right? Sorry—to me T-and-A has always been tonsillectomy-and-adenoidectomy.” With a shaky hand she brushed a damp strand of hair back from her forehead. “No, damn it, we’ve been trying to get this off the screen—we had the old black lady, for a few seconds—but now shaking the pennies and even pushing the buttons on the set won’t shift us from this channel.” She glanced at Kootie, who was studiously looking away from the screen but who had clearly been upset—even haunted, she thought—when the desperate, contorting figures had first appeared on the screen.
From far away out in the chilly darkness came the metronomic two-second moan of a foghorn.
“I been hearing that all day, seems like,” Mavranos said absently. “It’s the horn on the south pier of the Golden Gate Bridge. Two seconds every twenty seconds.” He sat down on the carpet and put down his beer can so that he could rub his eyes. “Okay,” he said with a windy sigh, “so did the old black lady have anything useful to say? She’s supposed to be our intecessor, and she’s been awful scarce.”
“She,” Angelica began; then, “No,” she said. I’ll tell you later, Arky, she thought. “Cochran and Plumtree have been working his homemade Ouija board, though, and—”
But Kootie spoke. “She said, ‘The debt-payer is always a virgin, and must go to India still a virgin.’ ”
Angelica could feel her face go slack with exhaustion; she was certain that this was a verbatim recollection of the old woman’s words. Then she made herself raise her head and put on a quizzical expression. “Yes,” she said briskly, “that’s what she said.” Oh, it won’t be you, Kootie, she thought. I won’t let it be you, don’t worry. Oh, why the hell are we even—
“Damn this garbage!” she burst out, and she sprang to the wall and yanked the television’s plug right out of the wall socket.
And then she just blinked from the cord in her hand to the television screen, on which the sweaty bodies still luminously strained and gasped. Her chest went suddenly hollow and cold a full second before she was sure she had pulled out the right plug.
Mavranos had got to his feet and stared at the wall behind the dresser the television sat on, and now he even waved his hand across the back of the set as though verifying a magic trick.
“Lord,” he said softly, “how I do hate impossible things. Pete, let’s carry this abomination down to the truck, and—”
But at that moment the screen went mercifully dark at last.
“Bedtime for the satyrs and nymphs,” Mavranos said. “And for us too, I think.” He looked toward Plumtree and Cochran. “What did the Ouija board say?”
Plumtree shifted on the bed. “We asked to talk to anyone who knew about this … situation of ours, and—well, you tell them, Scant.”
Cochran reached behind Plumtree to pick up one of the many sheets of Star Motel stationery. “ ‘Canst thou remember a time before we came unto this cell?’ ” he read. “ ‘I do not think thou canst, for then thou wast not out three years old.’ ”
“I do think that’s your subconscious speaking,” Angelica said to Plumtree. “Or the core-child, the traumatized personality: the poisoned comatose girl in your Snow White scenario, or the battered lady bus driver in Cody’s Dirty Harry version.” Angelica looked at Mavranos and shrugged. “God knows why it’s in that Shakespearean language—Pete’s pretty sure it’s from The Tempest, the exiled king Prospero talking to his daughter Miranda.”
“Valorie always talks that way,” said Cochran. “She’s the oldest personality, and I think she may be—” He hesitated, and then said, “I think she may be the core-child.”
You were going to say dead, weren’t you? thought Angelica. You were right to keep that idea from her, whether or not it’s true.
Quickly, so as not to let Plumtree think about Cochran’s momentary hesitation, Angelica asked him, “Why does Janis call you Scant?”
Cochran glanced at the back of his right hand and laughed uncomfortably. “Oh, it’s a childhood nickname. I grew up in the wine country, doing odd jobs around the vineyards, and when I was ten I was in a cellar when one of the support beams broke under a cask of Zinfandel, and I automatically stepped forward and tried to hold it up. It broke my leg. The support beams are called scantlings, and the cellarmen told me I was trying to be a proxy scantling.”
“Atlas would have been a good name, too,” remarked Kootie.
“Or Nitwit,” said Mavranos, stepping away from the television. “Angelica, you and Miss Plumtree can sleep on the Ouija-board bed by the bathroom after you clear the pizza boxes off it, with her on the bathroom side, away from Crane’s body; and we’ll tie a couple of cans to her ankle so as to hear her if she gets up in the night. Cochran can sleep on the floor on that side, down between the bed and the wall. Kootie can sleep over by the window, and Pete and I will take turns staying awake with a gun; well, I’ll have a gun, and Pete can wake me up fast. At about five we’ll get up and out of here.”
“If that TV comes on again during the night,” said Kootie in a small voice. He sighed and then went on, “Shoot it.”
“I bet my hands would let me do that, actually,” said Pete.
Valorie’s perceptions and memories and dreams were always in black-and-white, with occasional flickers of false red and blue shimmering in fine-grain moiré patterns like heat waves; and always there was a drumming or knocking, which she understood was an amplification of some background noise present in the soundtrack—or, if there was no actual sound to exaggerate, was simply imposed arbitrarily on the scene. Her dreams never had any fantastic or even inaccurate elements in them, aside from the constant intrusive percussion—they were just re-run memories—and her default dream was always the same, and all the Plumtree personalities experienced at least the last seconds of it whenever she did:
Her mother was wearing sandals with tire-tread soles, but in the dream they rang a hard clack-clack from the sidewalk concrete, and Plumtree’s little shoes and shorter steps filled in the almost reggae one-drop beat.
“They’ve painted a big Egyptian Horus eye on the roof,” said her mother, pulling her along by the hand. “Signaling to the sun god, Ra, he says. All the time Ra Ra Ra! But he blew his big play at Lake Mead on Easter, and nobody can pretend anymore that he’s gonna be any kind of king.”
Plumtree couldn’t see the men dancing on the roof of the building ahead of them, but she could see the bobbing papier-mâché heads that topped the tall poles they carried.
The sun burned white like a magnesium tire rim, straight up above them in the sky, at its very highest summer-solstice point.
“You stay by me, Janis,” her mother went on. “He’ll want to do the El Cabong bang-bang, but he won’t try anything with me today, not if his own baby daughter is watching. And—listen, baby!—if I tell you to run along and play, you don’t go, hear? He won’t hit me, not with you there, and he can’t … well, not to talk dirty, let’s just say he can’t—okay?—unless he’s knocked me silly, kayoed me past any ref’s count of ten. As close to dead as possible. I never even met him before he—I didn’t even meet him during, I was in a coma when he—when you stopped being just a glitter in your daddy’s evil eye. Dead would’ve been better, for him, but if you knock ’em dead you can’t knock ’em up, right? Never mind.”
On the sidewalk in front of the steps up to the door her mother stopped. “And what do you say,” her mother demanded, “if he says, ‘Baby, do you want to leave with your mother?’ ”
Plumtree was looking up at her mother’s backlit face, and the view blurred and fragmented—that was because of tears in her eyes. “I say, ‘Yes,’ ” Plumtree said obediently, though the cadence of her voice indicated an emotion.
Plumtree’s eyes focused beyond her mother—above her. Way above her.
This was the part of the dream that the other Plumtree personalities always remembered upon awakening.<
br />
There was a man in the sky, his white robes glowing in the sunlight for a moment; then he was a dark spot between the girl on the pavement and the flaring sun in the gunmetal sky. Plumtree opened her eyes wide and tried to see him against the hard-pressure glare of the sun, but she couldn’t—he seemed to have become the sun. And he was falling.
“Daddeee!”
Plumtree pulled her hand free of her mother’s, and ran to catch him.
The clattering clopping impact drove her right down into the ground.
Cochran was jolted out of sleep and then rocked hard against textured wallpaper in the darkness, and his first waking impression was that a big truck had hit whatever this building was.
Carpet fibers abraded his face, and a mattress was jumping and slamming on box springs only inches from his left ear; he couldn’t see anything, and until he heard shouting from Mavranos and abruptly remembered where he was and who he was with, Cochran was certain he was back in the honeymoon motel room behind the Troy and Cress Wedding Chapel in Las Vegas in 1990, again enduring the tumultuous escape-from-confinement of the big man in the wooden mask.
“Earthquake!” someone was yelling in the pitch blackness. Cochran sat up, battered by the mattress that was convulsing beside him like a living thing, and then he scrambled forward on his hands and knees until his forehead cracked against some unseen piece of furniture—the dresser the television had been sitting on, probably. The pizza boxes tumbled down onto his head, spilling crumbs and crusts.
“Mom!” yelled Kootie’s voice. “Mom, where are you?”
Two shrill voices answered him: “Here!”
Light flooded the room, just yellow electric lamplight but dazzling after the darkness. Squinting, and blinking at the trickle of blood running down beside his nose, Cochran saw that Angelica was standing beside the door with her hand on the light switch, and that Mavranos was crouched between the beds holding his revolver pointed at the ceiling. Kootie and Pete Sullivan stood beside Angelica, staring at the bed with Plumtree on it.
