Earthquake Weather

by Tim Powers

  Mavranos’s head rocked back to stare into the overhanging alder branches against the sky. “It’s true,” he said in a harsher voice, “that I killed you. On purpose, knowing what I was doing—because you would have killed my friends, if I hadn’t. But Nardie didn’t want me to do it.”

  He inhaled hitchingly, and when he spoke again it was in the nasal voice: “But she thanked you for doing it. I was aware of that.” And Mavranos’s natural voice said, “It’s true.”

  Angelica’s mouth was open and she was frowning, as if she wanted to convey a message to Mavranos without letting the Pogue ghost hear; and Cochran wondered if Mavranos had ruined Angelica’s plan by awakening now and conversing with the ghost; but Mavranos was speaking again in his own voice:

  “Ray-Joe Pogue, the bars are nearly wide enough apart for you to leave, to jump, and it is water below you, this time. I’ve carried you, in guilt, for five years, nearly—and Nardie has too, I’ve seen it pinch her face when people talk about … family. I bet we’ve both thought of you every day, your death has been a, like a bad smell that I can’t get rid of, that I notice just when I’ve started to forget about it and have a nice time.” Mavranos yawned, or else Ray-Joe Pogue did. “Before you go free,” Mavranos said, “can you forgive us?”

  “Do you want that?” came the other voice from his throat.

  Angelica dipped her hand into the water again.

  Mavranos inhaled to be able to reply. “Yes. We do both want that—very badly.”

  “Mess with the bull, you get the horns,” said the high voice. “It’s enough to know that you do want it.”

  Mavranos sighed deeply, and his head rocked forward—and Angelica whipped her hand across and slapped him in the face with a handful of water.

  “Now, Arky!” she said urgently. “What’s my name? Where were you born? Who’s president of the United States?”

  Mavranos was spitting. “Angelica Sullivan, goddammit. Muscoy, San Bernardino County, California, in 1955, okay? And William Jefferson Airplane Clinton.”

  Both boats had stalled in the water.

  “Get these boats moving out of here,” said Angelica sharply, “the ghost is off him, but it’ll be a standing wave here for a while. Everybody lean out and paddle, if you have to.”

  Cochran flipped the toggle switch on his boat off and on again, and the motor resumed its buzzing and his boat surged slowly ahead of Angelica’s until she copied his move and got hers running again too.

  Pete Sullivan exhaled as though he’d been holding his breath. “Good work, Angie.”

  Angelica pushed her hair back from her face, and Cochran saw that she was sweating. “He might have forgiven you, Arky,” she panted, “but I had to swat him off right then—he had let go of your mind for a moment, in something like real serenity, but he might have gripped on again at any moment, and clung. It would have killed you.” She looked around, and spun the steering wheel to avoid tangling the boat in the arching branches of an oak tree that had fallen from the island bank into the water. “Sorry, if I was too hasty.”

  Mavranos cleared his throat and spat mightily out past the bow. “I’ll … get along without it,” he said hoarsely. “Damn, I can still taste his ghost. Motor oil and Brylcreem.”

  Plumtree spoke up from beside Cochran. “You want people to forgive you?”

  Cochran steered the boat ponderously out toward the middle of the water. “Some people want that, Cody.”

  “I’m Janis. I’d rather buy a new tire than drive on one with a patch.”

  The boats were trundling around the east end of the island in the middle of the lake. Seagulls wheeled above a waterfall that poured over tall stone shelves on the island, and closer at hand Cochran saw some kind of Chinese pavilion on the shore, among the green flax stalks that crowded right down into the water. At the top of the island hill he could see the trees around the clearing where he and Nina had made love, so terribly long ago.

  “We’re going to watch you closely, Arky,” said Angelica. “If your pupils start to act funny, or your pulse, or if your speech gets slurred or disconnected—‘waxing and waning mentation’—then you are going into a hospital, and we can do our level best to keep you masked in there. But you’ve—right now you’d be much better off out of such a place.”

  Mavranos nodded grimly, touching the cut in the back of his scalp. His hair was spiky with bourbon as well as blood, for Angelica had sterilized it with a few hasty splashes from a pint bottle Mavranos had kept in his glove compartment, promising to put a proper bandage on it as soon as the wound had been “thoroughly aired out.” Presumably it had been, now.

  “Nardie Dinh gave me that statue I had on the dashboard,” Mavranos said. “She probably did mean something by it, even after all these years, though she loves me like a—like a brother. Damn sure she didn’t mean it to be shot into my head.” He looked at Angelica. “But it was. And I think you mean ghosts would be attracted to me in a hospital … now.”

  “There are a lot of scared, lonely, hungry ghosts hanging around in hospitals,” Angelica said, staring ahead. The boats had rounded the eastern end of the island, and were now buzzing irresolutely in the direction of a double-arched stone bridge.

  Mavranos laughed weakly. “Keep your eyes on the course, by all means,” he said. “Lose control of this torpedo and we’re liable to plow right up onto the bank. What I mean is, I’m particularly vulnerable right now, aren’t I?”

  “Yes,” said Angelica. She gave Plumtree a haggard stare. “What did you mean, Janis, about a new tire?”

  “Oh, I meant like a … relationship that’s been … fractured,” Plumtree said. “I wouldn’t try to patch it up, I’d just move on and meet somebody new, somebody who didn’t yet have any disappointments with me.”

  “Or cobble up a new personality out of some of the unused lumber of your soul,” Cochran said tiredly, “one that hasn’t even met the other person yet. Fresh start all around.”

  Plumtree nodded. “My father hath a power; inquire of him, and learn to make a body of a limb.”

  That had sounded like Shakespeare. “Valorie?” Cochran asked.

  “Janis,” Plumtree said, glancing at him impatiently. “I told you that, Sid.”

  A lot of the tall oaks had fallen into the water on this side of the island, and the interior wood at the split stumps was raw and pale, and the leaves on the water-spanning branches were still green; clearly these trees had been felled in the storms that had battered the whole California coast two weeks ago, at dawn on New Year’s Day … when Scott Crane had been killed.

  “Don’t say anything specific,” Plumtree said hastily, “about why we’re here, or you will have Valorie in the boat with you. But even in what we were trying to do, I—I wanted him to be alive again, but I didn’t want his forgiveness. I didn’t want one bit more of his attention on me than would have been necessary! And even that, Valorie would have taken.” There were tears in her eyes, and she let Cochran put his arm around her.

  “Not your flop,” he said.

  She buried her face in the shoulder of his damp windbreaker, and when his hand slid down to her waist his palm was on her bare, cool skin where Nina’s sweater had hiked up away from her jeans; and he found himself remembering Tiffany’s hand caressing him half an hour earlier—and the steamy sweater smelled of Nina’s rose-scented perfume, blended once again here with the wild odors of pine sap and lake water, and for just a reflexive moment, before instant shame actually pulled his lips back from his teeth, he wondered if the rain had ruined the cassette in his shirt pocket.

  None of them spoke as the boats buzzed quietly under the island-side arch of the old stone bridge. Cochran noticed one, then several, then dozens of black turtles perched motionless on the unnaturally horizontal branches of the felled trees—but as soon as he started to watch for them, all the dark ovals he focused on proved to be pinecones.

  He lifted his left arm from around Plumtree so that he could steer the boat with that h
and; his right hand, with the ivy-leaf mark on the back of it, he stuffed into the pocket of his windbreaker.

  To the left, beside the park road, a particularly big redwood tree had fallen this way across the lakeside footpath, and a segment as broad as the path had been sawed out of the six-foot-thick log so that strollers and bicyclists could pass unimpeded. Perhaps the tree was too heavy to move, and would stay there forever as a randomly placed wall, while its water-arching branches would eventually be overgrown by ivy and form a sort of new, hollow bank. After a while, like the cemetery construction on the yacht-club peninsula, it might look like part of the original plan.

  With that thought Cochran looked ahead—and at last saw the carved stones of the Spanish monastery.

  They were set low into the lakeside mud as an irregular segmented coping between the park grass and the water, each placed so that a broken-stone face was turned upward; only from this vantage point, low and out on the water, could the fretted and fluted carved sides be seen.

  “Nina and I didn’t search from out in a boat,” he said wonderingly. When Angelica gave him a weary, questioning look, he went on, “There’s the stones from the old monastery—from here you can see what they are.”

  Mavranos blinked ahead uncomprehendingly. “What are they?” He had still been unconscious when Cochran had mentioned them before.

  “William Randolph Hearst bought a medieval Spanish monastery,” Cochran said, quoting what Nina had told him, “and he had it dismantled and shipped to America to reassemble over here—but the crates and plans burned up, and nobody knew how to put the building back together again. And after a while the park maintenance guys began using the stones for … odd little landscaping projects, like that.” He pointed ahead, at the half-submerged bits of forgotten pillars and porticoes.

  “And you said there are druid stones on the island,” said Pete Sullivan. “Maybe the monastery stones counter those, balance ’em—net zero.”

  “A monastery building would have been formally blessed,” Mavranos muttered, nodding. “Sanctified.”

  “I’m glad you were along,” Angelica told Cochran. “This lake was a perfectly balanced place to shake off the ghost.”

  “Not the job those stones thought they’d have,” Mavranos went on, “when they were carved up so pretty, I bet—just sitting here in the water, not even looking different from plain old fieldstones to anybody walking by ’em. But there’s this purpose they can serve. Even broken. Because they’re broken.”

  Again Cochran thought of walls made of chance-fallen trees, and stairs and benches and pavements made of scavenged pieces of derelict cemetery marble.

  “There’s the dock,” said Pete, pointing ahead and to the right. “Our tour’s up. Where to now? Back to the Star Motel, see if Kootie’s waiting for us there?”

  “Not yet,” said Angelica. “And not in the truck with Crane’s skeleton in it. We—”

  Plumtree jumped in the seat beside Cochran. “His skeleton’s in the truck? How did he—” She blinked around. “What? What scared Janis?”

  Cochran turned to her, wondering if he was about to summon Tiffany here, and if so, what he’d tell her. “Crane’s skeleton is in the truck, Cody.”

  She blinked at him. Then, “Fuck me!” she said, and in spite of himself Cochran smiled at the idea that he might take the exclamation as evidence of Tiffany’s presence; but in fact he could see that this was still Cody. “I’m still on?” she said angrily. “How come I’m the one that gets to stay with all the horrible flops lately? His skeleton? Goddammit, Valorie’s supposed to take the intolerable stuff!”

  “I guess you can tolerate more than you imagine,” said Cochran gently.

  “They say that God won’t hit you with more than you can handle,” said Mavranos in a faint, shaky voice, possibly to himself. “Like, if He made you so you can just take a hundred pounds per square inch, He won’t give you a hundred and one.”

  “We’re still too hot,” Angelica went on. “Magically, I mean. There’s been a lot of fresh—” Her breath caught in her throat. “—fresh blood spilled, this morning. I think plain compasses will point at us for a while after all this stuff—and we can’t be certain we haven’t been followed, either. On the drive down here, we were all looking ahead at the truck, not back. If Kootie is at the motel, he’ll wait for us, he’s got a key. And I guess he’s … the king, now. He’ll have the protections that come with the office.” She looked around among the trees at the anonymous pastel Hondas and Nissans that had begun to drive slowly past on the park road. “We should drive somewhere, aimless, watching behind, and just sit for an hour or so. Give ourselves time to fall back to our ground states.”

  “I’m a, a citizen of the ground state,” said Plumtree. “And our—community hall—is a bar. I need a drink like a Minnie needs a Mickey.”

  “The truck can go where it likes,” Cochran declared. “The Ford is going to the first bar we find.”

  “I’d be interested in finding something to chase that cabernet with,” ventured Pete.

  “I don’t think,” said Angelica judiciously, “that I can stay sane for very long, right now, without a drink, myself.” She sighed and clasped her elbows. “Arky, I guess you can have one, but you’d better stay sober. Doctor’s orders.”

  Mavranos didn’t seem to have heard any of the discussion. “But can we really imagine,” he went on quietly, “that He’d give you anything less than ninety-nine-point-nine?”

  Angelica frowned at Mavranos’s disjointed rambling, probably thinking about waxing and waning mentation. “If Kootie’s at the motel,” she said again, absently, “he’ll wait for us. And he’ll be safe. He’s the king now.”

  When he had tugged off his shirt and jeans and kicked his soaked sneakers heedlessly away across the gleaming floor, the woman had kissed Kootie, her arms around his neck and her robe open on nothing but bare, hot skin against his cold chest. Her tongue had slid across his teeth like an electric shock.

  They had fallen across the quilt on the huge, canopied bed, and Kootie had been feverishly trying to free his hands to pull the robe off of her and tug his own damp jockey shorts off as she kissed his neck and chest—when he’d heard what she had been whispering.

  “Give me you,” she’d been saying hoarsely, “you’re not a virgin—fill me up—you’re so big—you can spare more than I can take—and not near die.”

  Die? he had thought—and then her teeth had begun gently scoring the skin over the taut muscle at the side of his neck.

  If she had been drawing any blood at all it had been from no more than a scratch, and the sensation had been only pleasurable …

  But he had suddenly been aware that his psychic attention and self was wide open and strainingly extended, and that with all the strength of her own mind she was trying to gnaw off a piece of his soul.

  —In an instant’s flash of intolerable memory he was again duct-taped into a seat in a minivan that had been driven up inside a moving truck in Los Angeles—“a boat in a boat”—while a crazy one-armed man with a hunting knife was stabbing at his ribs, trying to cut out his soul, and consume it—

  Abruptly the room seemed to tilt, and grow suddenly darker and hotter, and he was unreasoningly sure that he was about to fall bodily into her furnace mouth, which in this moment of vertiginous nightmare panic seemed to have become the gaping black fireplace below his feet.

  He felt himself sliding—

  And with all the psychic strength that the events of this terrible morning had bequeathed to him, he lashed out, with such force that he was sure he must have burst a blood vessel in his head.

  He hadn’t moved at all, physically, and only a second had passed, when he realized that her skin was impossibly cold and that her bare breasts were still—she was not breathing.

  He tugged his arms out from under her chilly weight and scrambled off the bed. Sobbing and shaking, he clumsily pulled his jeans and shirt on, and he was thrusting his feet back into his sodden
sneakers, when the hallway door was snatched open.

  An old woman was standing silhouetted in the doorway.

  “Call nine-one-one,” Kootie blubbered, “I think she’s—”

  “She’s dead, child,” the old woman said sternly. “Both the telephones downstairs are still ringing themselves off their hooks with their poor magnets shaking, and the god’s big mirror has got a crack right across it. She’s dead and flung bodily right over the spires of India like a cannonball. What-all did the poor woman want, one little bit of the real you, and you couldn’t spare it? Child, you don’t know your own strength.” She shook her head. “He can’t meet you now, with or without the humble-pie breakfast, the wine and the venison. Later, and probably not affording to be as polite as it would have been now. You’ve clouded yourself beyond his sight here today.”

  Kootie cuffed the tears from his eyes and blinked up at her—and then clenched his teeth against a wail of pure dismay. The figure scowling down at him was the old woman he and his parents had seen so many times on the magically tuned black-and-white television. Now he could see that her eyes were of different colors, one brown and one blue.

  “I’m Mary Ellen Pleasant,” she told him. “You may as well call me Mammy Pleasant, like everybody else. Now, boy, don’t you fret about what you’ve done here, bad though it damn well is—hers won’t be the first dead body I’ve disposed of in secret. Right now you get your clothes in order, and come down and talk to me in the kitchen.”

  She stepped back out into the hall, mercifully leaving the door open. As her footsteps receded away along the wooden floor outside, Kootie stood up. Without looking toward the nearly naked body on the bed, he crossed to the make-up table and picked up the bottle of Bitin Dog wine.

  You’d like some of that, wouldn’t you? he remembered the woman saying. Impunity?

  The humble-pie breakfast …

  Cochran had said, “Couldn’t have asked for a better place,” and swung the Granada across momentarily empty oncoming lanes into the uneven parking lot of a bar-and-restaurant that seemed to be a renovated cannery from the turn of the century, the walls all gray wood and rusty corrugated iron. Over the door nearest where he parked was a sign that read THE LOSER’S BAR, but Plumtree pointed out a sign over the main building: SEAFOOD BOHEMIA.