by Tim Powers
The bed was still jumping, the bedspread flapping like manta-ray wings, and Plumtree’s body was tossing on it like a Raggedy Ann doll—even though the rest of the room had stopped shaking.
“Omar!” grated a shrill, keening voice from between Plumtree’s clenched teeth. “Damn your soul! Stop it, take one of the girls, Tiffany or Janis, just let me go!” The three empty beer cans that Mavranos had wired to her ankle with a coat hanger were shaking and clattering.
Kootie has provoked the Follow-the-Queen sequence, Cochran thought; he did it when he yelled for his mother. Next card up is wild, whatever you declare it to be. Dizzy and light-headed, Cochran opened his mouth.
“Nina!” he called hoarsely.
“Omar, I will kill any child conceived in this way!” screamed the voice out of Plumtree’s mouth. “God will not blame me!”
It hadn’t worked.
Cochran’s bruised forehead was chilly with sweat. “J—” he began; then, “Cody!” he called.
At first he wasn’t sure the card he had declared would be honored, for though Plumtree’s eyes sprang open she was now gasping, “In the name of the father, the sun, the holy ghost!” Then she had rolled off the spasming mattress and scrambled across the carpet to the front door, the beer cans snagging in the carpet and hopping behind her.
“Whoa,” said Mavranos.
The mattress flopped down flat and stopped moving.
Mavranos stared at the bed with raised eyebrows. “I,” he said, as if speaking to the bed, “was talking to Miss Plumtree.”
Cochran half-expected the bed to start jumping again at this explanation, but it just lay sprawled there, the mattress at an angle now to the box springs and the pillows and blankets tumbled in disorder.
“Get back by boyfriend,” Mavranos told Plumtree.
Somewhat to Cochran’s surprise Plumtree had no rude retort, but just obediently stepped back toward the bed; though she did shake her ankle irritably, rattling the attached cans. She was smacking her lips and grimacing. “Jeez, was my female parent on? I hate her old spit. I gotta gargle, excuse me.” She hurried past Cochran into the bathroom, and he could hear her knocking things over on the sink.
The light in the room was flickering, and when Cochran looked around he saw that the television had come on again, possibly because of having been jolted in the earthquake. Again the screen showed a glowing nude man and woman feverishly groping and sucking and colliding.
Mavranos stepped back to see behind the set, and frowned; clearly the cord was still unplugged.
“Could you get me a beer, Angelica?” he said, holding out his left hand and not taking his eyes off the television. He was gripping the revolver in his right hand, and Cochran wondered if he might actually shoot the TV set, and if he’d think of muffling the shot with a pillow.
Angelica leaned over the ice chest and fished up a dripping can; she popped it open and reached over to slap it into his open palm.
“Thanks.” Mavranos tilted the beer can over the ventilation slots on the back slope of the television set, and after a few seconds of beer running down into the set’s works the picture on the screen abruptly curdled into a black-and-white pattern like a radar scan, with a blobby figure in one corner that looked to Cochran like a cartoon silhouette of a big-butted fat man with little globe limbs, and warts all over him; and the sound had become a roaring hiss that warped and narrowed to mimic whispered words: et … in …. arcadia … ego …
Then it winked out and was dark and inert, a wrecked TV with beer puddling out from the base of it. Mavranos absently drank the rest of the beer and clanked the can down on the dresser.
For several seconds no one spoke, and the distant foghorn moaned out in the night.
Mavranos raised the gun barrel for silence while he stared at the watch on his left wrist.
Cochran began to let the muscles in his shoulders relax, and he gently prodded the bloody bump on his forehead.
The foghorn sounded again, and Mavranos lowered his arms. His face was expressionless. “What time is it?” he asked.
“You were just staring at your watch!” said Angelica.
“Oh yeah.” Mavranos looked at his watch again. “Quarter to five, apparently that’s showtime.” He sighed shakily and rubbed his left hand over his face. “Let’s mobilize. Angelica, get your witchy shit together and have Pete carry it downstairs and into the truck while you cover him with your .45, and don’t forget to bring that Wild Turkey bottle with Scott’s blood in it. Don’t put stuff in the back bed, though—we’ll be carrying Scott down and putting him back there. I’ll drive the truck, and Pete can drive Mr. Cochran’s Granada—”
Plumtree had stepped out of the bathroom, and Cochran could smell the Listerine on her breath from a yard away, though he was ashamed to meet her eye. She dug in the pocket of her jeans and pulled out a bundle of bills.
“Kid,” she said to Kootie. When he looked up, she thrust the bills out toward him. “This is yours. A hundred bucks—long story, don’t ask. I want to give it to you now, in case we get … in case we don’t quite meet again.” Cochran thought there was gruff sympathy in her voice. “No hard feelings.”
Kootie was holding the little yellow blanket that bald-headed Diana had given him back in Solville, but he reached across the bed with his free hand and took the money. “Thank you, Janis Cordelia Plumtree,” he said.
“And Janis Cordelia can ride shotgun in the Granada,” Mavranos went on rapidly, “with Angelica behind her ready to shoot. Come on, everybody, up! I want us out of here in five minutes.”
Angelica snatched up her knapsack and grabbed the Wild Turkey bottle. “What’s the hurry, Arky?” she asked irritably. “Sunrise isn’t for another hour or so, and you said the place is walking distance from here.”
Mavranos had peered through the peek hole and now unchained the door and pulled it open. “That foghorn, just now—it’s sounding every fifteen seconds, not twenty, and it’s a different tone. It’s a different foghorn.”
Pete was squeezing the battery charger’s clamps off the terminals of one of Mavranos’s car batteries and then lifting the battery in both hands. “So?” he asked breathlessly. “Maybe the wind’s from a different direction.”
“They don’t vary that way, Pete,” said Mavranos impatiently, “or they wouldn’t be any good as foghorns, would they? We’re—we’re Scott’s army, this king’s army, and in that sense we won’t truly exist until the potential of his resurrection becomes an actuality. Our wave-form has to shake out as one rather than as zero. And I think—this wrong foghorn makes me think—that we’re a fragmented waveform right now, that psychically we’re somewhere else too, as well as here in a motel on Lombard Street.”
“So,” said Angelica, spreading her hands, “what do we do?”
“What are you asking me for?” Mavranos snapped. “All I can think of is for us to go to this crazy cemetery temple on the peninsula, in the wrong gear and without even our TV-star intercessor, and hope we can catch up to ourselves.” He darted a glance around the room. “Where’d Kootie go?”
“He’s right outside,” said Angelica. “He waved his hand in front of his face like he wanted fresh air, and he stepped out.” She hurried to the door, calling, “Kootie?”
She leaned around the doorjamb to look, and then she had lunged outside, and Cochran heard her voice from out on the railed walkway: “A note!” she yelled. “Shit—‘Can’t be with you for this—sorry—’ Pete, he’s run away!”
Kootie had already tiptoed down the stairs and sprinted across the dark parking lot to the Lombard Street sidewalk, and was now hurrying to a cab that had pulled in to the curb after he had, without much confidence, waved to it. He levered open the back door and scrambled in. Better than hiding behind a Dumpster somewhere, he thought nervously, and I can afford this now, thanks to Miss Plumtree. He hiked up on the seat to stuff Diana’s baby blanket into his hip pocket.
The cab driver was an elderly black man who stared at
him dubiously over his shoulder. “You okay, kid?”
“Yes,” panted Kootie. “Drive off, will you?”
“I don’t like hurry.” As if to prove the point, he cocked his head to listen to a dispatch on his radio. “And I don’t like driving people who turn out to not have any money,” he went on finally. “Where did you want to go?”
Kootie bared his teeth in impatience and tried to remember the name of any place in San Francisco. “Chinatown,” he said.
“You better give me ten dollars up front, kid—I’ll give you the change when we get there.”
Hurriedly Kootie dug out of his pocket the money Plumtree had just given him, and he held the bills up to the window to be able to see the denominations by the glow of the nearest streetlight. He peeled off two fives and thrust them over the top of the front seat to the driver.
At last the driver shifted the car into gear and accelerated away from the curb. Kootie pressed his lips together and blinked back frightened tears, but he didn’t look out the back window.
Angelica trudged back up the stairs from the parking lot. Many of the motel rooms had their lights on after the earthquake, and the doorway at which Mavranos stood wasn’t the only one that had been opened.
“No sign of him,” she told Mavranos when she had stepped inside and closed the door. “There was a taxi driving away—he might have been in it, or not, and I couldn’t see what company it was anyway.” She gave Plumtree a look that was too exhausted to be angry. “Thanks for giving him getaway money.”
Plumtree narrowed her eyes, then visibly relaxed and just pursed her lips. “He was going anyway—read the rest of the note!—and if the money did let him take a cab, you should be glad he’s not walking, in this neighborhood at this hour.”
“Gimme the note.”
Pete Sullivan wordlessly passed to Angelica the piece of Star Motel stationery that had been weighted down with a motel glass on the walkway outside the room, and Angelica forced her tired and blurring eyes to focus on the clumsy ballpoint-ink letters:
MOM & DAD & EVERYBODY—I CAN’T BE WITH YOU FOR THIS. I’M SORRY. I KNOW I’D HAVE TO DO THE BLOOD DRIKING—HOPE YOU CAN READ THIS, I DON’T TURN ON THE LIGHT—JESUS I HOPE TV STAYS OFF—I’D HAVE TO DRINK THE BLOD, & I CANT DO IT AGAIN: LET SOMEBODY HAVE ME—& ME BE OUT OF MY HEAD. EDISON IN 92, NEVER AGAIN, ID GO CRAZY. I HAVE/HAVE NOT TAKEN THE TRUCK. I DO NOT HAVE A KEY TO THIS ROOM BUT I’LL BE BACK AFTER. I’VE GOT A LITTLE MONEY, ENUFF. I LOVE YOU DONT BE MAD KOOTIE
Angelica looked up at Mavranos. “I’ve got to stay here.”
Mavranos started to speak, but Pete Sullivan overrode him. “No, Angie,” he said loudly. “We’ve got to go through with this thing, this morning. We’ve got Plumtree, and we’ve got the dead king—and we need a bruja. And Kootie knows where we’ll be, he heard Arky describe the place—if he wants to find us, that’s where he’ll go, not here.”
“Just what I was gonna say myself,” growled Mavranos.
Plumtree had sat down on the bathroom-side bed, and was untwisting the coat-hanger wire from around her ankle. “You don’t mind if I get rid of the house-arrest hardware now, do you? Me, I’m glad the kid’s out of it.”
She tossed the wired pair of beer cans aside and straightened up, then looked around and chuckled softly. “Do you all realize what we’ve done to this room? Burnt the rug and now stomped old pizza crusts into it, blasted the bed, poured beer in the TV—at least Janis made it to the toilet to puke last night. There’s even a lot of shed black dog hair on the beds! I’m glad it’s no credit card of mine this is on.” For a moment her face looked very young and lost, and Angelica thought of the little girl who had been hospitalized because the sun had fallen out of the sky onto her. “Get your Wild Turkey bottle and let’s go,” Plumtree whispered. “And please God I still be here by lunchtime, and Crane be alive again.”
“All of us still alive at lunchtime,” said Mavranos, nodding somberly. “Amen.”
CHAPTER 19
I would be blind with weeping, sick with groans,
Look pale as primrose with blood-drinking sighs,
And all to have the noble duke alive.
—William Shakespeare,
Henry VI, Part II
THE PAVEMENT OF THE yacht club’s empty parking lot was wet with sea spray and pre-dawn fog, and the low overcast looked likely to drop actual rain soon. The clouds were moving across the sky from the direction of the Golden Gate Bridge, but the eastern horizon was still open sky—a glowing pearl-white, making black silhouettes of the long piers at Fort Mason a mile away.
In spite of the dim light, Angelica Sullivan was wearing mirror sunglasses—Standard precaution, she had told Cochran curtly when she and Plumtree had climbed out of Cochran’s Ford Granada; the mirror surface throws ghosts back onto themselves, prevents ’em from being able to fasten on your gaze. Don’t you look squarely at anything.
Cochran remembered the half-dozen little girl ghosts he had glimpsed on the roof of Strubie the Clown’s house in Los Angeles, and how Plumtree had yelled at him for looking at them. Right, he thought. I won’t look at anything.
Driving the Granada with Cochran and Plumtree and Angelica in it, Pete had followed Mavranos’s red truck up Divisadero to Marina and Yacht Road, and the two vehicles were now parked side by side in the otherwise empty lot. Beyond the curb and a short descending slope of tumbled wet boulders, the gray sea of the San Francisco Bay looked as rolling and wild as open ocean.
On a shoulder strap under her tan raincoat Angelica was carrying a compact black Marlin .45 carbine, its folding stock swiveled forward to lie locked against the left side of the trigger guard; and as she stepped away from the Granada she pulled back the rifle’s slide-lever and let it snap back, chambering a live round. The extended base of a twelve-round magazine stuck out from the magazine well, and back in the motel room Cochran had seen her stuff a couple of extra magazines in the pocket of her jeans and a couple more in the raincoat’s left pocket.
You expecting an army? he had asked her.
I want to have plenty of the ghost-killer hollow-points, she had answered in a flat, singsong voice, as if talking to herself, but I want hardball too, full-jacket, ’cause if I shoot off the first magazine’s dozen rounds and need more, I’m likely to be shooting at a distance after that, or through car doors, and hardball’s more reliable for that kind of thing; and adrenaline’s likely to make me shaky, loosen my grip, and hollow-points don’t feed through smoothly sometimes if the gun’s not being braced firmly. Hardball in the raincoat, hollow-point omieros in the jeans.
You’ve given it thought, Cochran thought now as he watched her pull the raincoat around herself and loosely tie the belt in front.
Plumtree was wearing a cranberry-colored cashmere sweater of Nina’s, and she was huddled against the Granada’s front bumper beside Cochran and blowing into her cupped hands. “I don’t see any of Mavranos’s hippie druids,” she said quietly.
“With luck they don’t get up this early,” said Cochran. I hope nobody does, he added to himself. Mavranos said we’ll be trespassing, going on out to the end of this peninsula.
And what about coming back? Is it really conceivable that Scott Crane will be walking back here with us? Limping, I guess, with the bullet in his thigh now. And—
“My God,” he said; then, speaking more loudly, “Angelica? You’re gonnna remember to pull the spear out of his throat, right? It’d be no good if he did come back to life, if—”
He saw two reflections of his own pale face in Angelica’s mirror sunglasses when she smiled at him. “We’ve thought of that, Sid. Thanks, though.” She looked past him. “Arky? How wide is the path to the cemetery temple place? I think you should just back the truck right out to it.”
Mavranos had opened the back of the truck and was kneeling on the tailgate. “Back it out there?” he said, squinting over the Granada’s roof at her. “Well, it would mean we don’t have to carry Scott’s body. …”
; “Nor the rest of the crap,” Angelica agreed. “And I like the truck’s exhaust—with the muffler all fucked up the way it is, it’s kind of a spontaneous bata drumbeat, and it’s the pulse of the king’s vessel.”
“There’s a chain across the path,” Mavranos went on. “Probably padlocked.”
“What’s another dent? What’s some more scratches in your paint?”
“Quicker exit afterward, too,” allowed Mavranos. “That’s worth a lot. Okay.” He hopped down to the pavement and hoisted the lower half of the tailgate shut, though he left the top half raised. “Pete will walk backward ahead of me, waving directions so I don’t go off into the water; Plumtree and Cochran ahead of Pete, so I can keep an eye on ’em over Pete’s shoulder; Angelica behind, watching for pursuit.”
“I should have my gun,” said Cochran.
Mavranos frowned at him. “Actually, I suppose you should. Okay.” He walked around to the open driver’s-side door and leaned in, then walked back to the rear of the truck with Cochran’s holstered revolver. “Just keep it away from Miss Plumtree,” he said as he handed it to Cochran. “And put it away for now.”
Cochran reached behind himself with both hands to clip the holster to the back of his belt.
Mavranos pointed to the northeast corner of the parking lot. “The path starts behind that building, as a paved service road. All of you meet me there.”
He got into the driver’s seat and closed the door, started the engine again, and audibly clanked it into reverse; the truck surged backward out of the parking space and began yawing away across the asphalt in a broad circle.
“After you two,” said Angelica to Cochran and Plumtree, punctuating the request by letting the hidden rifle barrel briefly tent the tan fabric of the raincoat in front of her knee.
They all began trudging after the receding red truck. When Plumtree took his hand, Cochran glanced at her in surprise, for Cody had been on a moment before; but then he saw that it was still Cody—by now he could recognize her stronger jaw and the deeper lines around her flinty eyes.
