Earthquake Weather

by Tim Powers

  “In ’92,” said Kootie, “when Sherman Oaks or Long John Beach tried to eat the Edison ghost out of me, he had to lure it up toward the surface of my mind first. This was when we were in the ‘boat on the boat,’ the van inside the truck. And from what Miss Plumtree has said about her psychic striptease session with that doctor, he was trying to draw a personality to the surface, to bite it off. The one on top is the one that’s vulnerable.” The boy bared his teeth in a humorless smile. “It seems like a personality brought up by this Follow-the-Queen trick is … stuck in the on position for at least a little while. I think I could validly threaten to … bite him off.”

  Angelica’s ears were ringing. “But,” she said, “no, you can’t—it’s like slamming bad heroin, Kootie, you’d have his memories in you like heavy metal—his poisonous life force—” Much worse than whatever you’re carrying now, she thought helplessly, trust me.

  “Besides,” said Pete Sullivan, staring in obvious dismay at his adopted son, “he’s not a ghost. He’s a full-power person. You’d—you’d probably blow up!”

  “I said validly threaten.” Kootie sat down in the dining-room chair next to Plumtree, where Pete had been sitting. “If I can’t be sure I can’t do it, neither can he. And I think I could kill him, depending on how strong he is—swat him off the top of Miss Plumtree’s mind like driving a golf ball off a tee.”

  Oh, don’t be flippant and proud of it, Kootie, thought Angelica unhappily; and she would have said it out loud but for the knowledge that they might in fact need him to do it, and if so she didn’t want to hamper him in advance.

  “Without killing ‘Miss Plumtree’?” asked Cochran, his voice hoarse and his eyes wide with skepticism.

  Kootie raised his eyebrows and squinted across the table at him—then peripherally caught Angelica’s anguished, vicariously mortified gaze; and the boy instantly looked down at the tablecloth, his face reddening. “I don’t know,” he whispered. “I don’t know if he isn’t stronger than me, even. He’s older than me, and meaner, so he might be.” He looked up, clearly abashed. “But—see?—I can believably threaten him with it.”

  “Just don’t kill me before he’s said what to do,” said Plumtree with what Angelica recognized as hollow, exhausted bravado. Plumtree held up her hands, and her voice skidded up and down the scale as she said, “Sid, do you have some duct tape?”

  Kootie looked nauseous.

  “We won’t do it tonight,” Angelica said hastily. Plumtree was like a flexed piece of tempered glass, and Angelica was afraid one measured tap might actually shatter her mind into a thousand tiny personalities, no one of them more sentient than an infant. And Kootie wasn’t looking much better himself. “Not if he’s already been out once today,” Angelica went on in her most self-assured doctor-tone. “Tomorrow will be plenty of time.”

  Both Kootie and Plumtree sagged in what looked like uncomfortable relief.

  “Then for God’s sake right now get me a drink,” said Plumtree in a husky voice. “Sid, you got vodka?”

  “Got vodka,” said Cochran, getting up out of his chair like an old man.

  “Got a lot of it?”

  Cochran just nodded as he shambled into the kitchen.

  He paused by the sink before reaching up to the liquor cabinet overhead, and stared at the glittering white mound of tiny soap bubbles that stood motionless above the dish-filled sink. And he experienced a vivid memory-flash of how Nina had looked, so many times, wearing an apron and leaning over this sink; and all at once, silently except for a nearly inaudible hissing, the soap foam diminished away to nothing, leaving the dishes exposed poking out of the surface of the gray water.

  Her ghost is gone, he thought giddily as he reached up for the vodka bottle, but my memories of her apparently still have some palpable force.

  We’re not … finished, yet.

  CHAPTER 26

  I’ll hide my silver beard in a gold beaver …

  —William Shakespeare,

  Troilus and Cressida

  COCHRAN WOKE UP IN his own bed, alone, roused by the gunning of the Torino engine in the back yard. From the gray light filtering into the bedroom through the lace curtains, he muzzily judged that it must be about seven in the morning. He had sat up drinking with Plumtree until after midnight; and when at last he had got up unsteadily and announced his intention of retiring to the couch, Plumtree had told him to take the bed. I’ll sleep on the couch, she had said, enunciating carefully. I can see it from here, so I know I’ll be able to find it.

  As much as anything, they had been discussing immortal animals. Cody had insisted that carp never died naturally, and survived the winter frozen solid in pond ice; and Cochran had told her about toads that had been found alive in bubbles in solid rock. When the animals in question began to be imaginary ones from children’s books and science-fiction movies, like the Pushmi-pullyu and E. T., Cochran had just followed the drift of the conversation, and talked about Reepicheep the mouse in the Narnia books, and the bread-and-butter-flies from Through the Looking-Glass. Plumtree’s voice had changed several times, and she had vacillated sharply between skepticism and credulity—but since Cochran was the only other person in the room she had not had to address him by name, and the nearest electric light that was on had been the one in the kitchen and Cochran couldn’t tell when it might have flickered, and their talk had been abstract and speculative enough to keep him from guessing who he might have been talking to at any particular moment. He hadn’t been aware of any obvious archaisms that would have indicated lines quoted from Shakespeare, though he hadn’t by any means caught everything she had said; and if Tiffany had been on, she had been subdued, and content with vodka.

  He got into a fresh shirt now and pulled his jeans back on and opened the bedroom door. The car noise had evidently awakened the Sullivans too—he could hear Kootie and Pete talking quietly behind the closed door of the spare bedroom.

  Mavranos was sitting at the dining room table frowning over the Saturday San Francisco Chronicle. In front of him a cup of coffee sat steaming, and on the opposite side of the table stood fourteen mismatched cups and tumblers. Cochran padded over barefoot and peered at them; each had a grainy white sediment puddled in the bottom.

  “You better pick up some more Alka-Seltzer when you go out,” said Mavranos quietly; “a big bottle. I guess each of the girls had a hangover, and couldn’t stomach drinking out of another one’s used glass.”

  Cochran stared at the cups and glasses on the table. “Fourteen?” he whispered in awe.

  “Each one for a different bad flop, I reckon,” Mavranos said with a shrug. “Like chopping up a starfish.” He lifted his coffee cup in both hands to take a sip. “I kind of admire her restraint in having only fourteen, after twenty-seven years. If I had the option, I’d be splitting off all the time.” Softly he sang a line Cochran believed was from a Grateful Dead song: “ ‘I need a miracle ev-ery day.’ ”

  Cochran began carrying the cups and glasses into the kitchen, gripping three with the fingers of each hand; and when he came back from carrying the first six out of the dining room, Kootie was wordlessly picking up four more.

  When they had brought the last of the cups and glasses out to the counter, the Torino hood audibly slammed down outside; and after Cochran had rinsed out two of the cups and filled them with fresh coffee and carried them back to the dining-room table for himself and Kootie, he heard Plumtree come battering in through the kitchen door and run more water in the sink. A moment later she shuffled into the dining room with a steaming McDonald’s mug and slumped down into the chair beside Kootie. She was clearly Cody, and her T-shirt was correctly marked SUNDAY in crude black letters.

  “You’re awake,” she observed as she lit a Marlboro.

  “Somehow,” agreed Cochran.

  “The Torino’s running again, a lot better than before. Let’s get this thing done.” She squinted at Kootie. “Your mom and dad up yet?”

  “I think they are,” said K
ootie nervously. “I think they’ll be out in a minute.”

  “Sid,” said Cody, “if this goes real wrong, leave the Torino parked somewhere it’s sure to be towed, will you? And leave the registration on the front seat. Oh, and the Jenkins purse is in the trunk—first mail that to the Jenkins woman.”

  “I—won’t hurt you,” said Kootie.

  “It’s not you I’m scared of, kiddo—but thanks.”

  Pete and Angelica Sullivan came in then, and Angelica sat down at the table while Pete went into the kitchen.

  “This chair is no good,” said Plumtree, wiggling the arms of her dining-room chair. “My snips-and-snails parent could bust it to kindling. Let’s go out back and use one of the iron patio chairs.” She had one more sip of her coffee and then stood up.

  “What,” said Angelica, wide-eyed, “right now? Before breakfast?”

  “Well I’m just not hungry, somehow,” said Plumtree. “And the sooner we get my job done, the sooner you can have your old lady in the wooden shoes cook you up some fucking gumbo or something, right?”

  “Sorry,” said Angelica.

  “Shit,” said Plumtree. “If her nose isn’t bleeding too bad for her to cook, by then.”

  Five minutes later Mavranos, Angelica, Pete, Kootie, and Cochran were sitting, uncomfortably like judges, on one side of the long picnic table under the patio roof between the kitchen and the backyard greenhouse, facing the chair in which Plumtree now sat confined by strips of duct tape wrapped tightly around her wrists and waist and ankles. The sky was low and gray behind the pepper trees that overhung the yard; and though the breeze was chilly, Cochran knew that wasn’t why Plumtree was visibly shivering. Inside Mavranos’s open denim jacket Cochran had seen the checkered wooden grip of the revolver tucked under the man’s belt.

  For a few moments Plumtree waited blankly, relaxed enough for her teeth to chatter; then she rolled her head back to stare up at the beams of the patio roof, and she whispered, “Valerie, whatever you make at your job, you’re overpaid.” She took a deep breath, and Cochran did too. “Mom!” called Plumtree hoarsely.

  Then she lowered her head to stare at the five people sitting across from her at the table, and her shoulder muscles flexed under her T-shirt. At last her gaze fixed on Cochran. “Are we near the sea?” she asked him in the shriller voice of Plumtree’s mother. “Are you going to call her up now, and send her to India?”

  “No,” Cochran said. “We need to learn some things Omar Salvoy knows. We’re going to call him up, and question him. You can see that he’ll be restrained.”

  “I can see a car,” protested Plumtree’s mother, “and I can smell the ocean! Are you too squeamish to kill her body? You said you loved her!”

  At the same time Angelica was leaning forward from between Mavranos and Pete to say, quietly, “Sid, this isn’t even a ghost of her mother, this is just a, an ‘internalized perpetrator,’ why are you talking to it—”

  “As far as Cody’s concerned,” Cochran interrupted, “it’s her mom.” He looked back at Plumtree taped into the chair. “Trust me,” he said, “I won’t let him have her.”

  “We won’t let him have her,” Mavranos agreed.

  “Oh, Jesus,” said the mother’s voice. She looked back to Cochran. “I hope you’re a lot smarter than you look, mister.” She sighed shakily. “Go ahead, and God be with you.”

  “Omar Salvoy,” said Cochran, and he felt Kootie tense beside him.

  Plumtree’s eyes hadn’t left Cochran’s face, but now it was an amused, crafty, almost reptilian gaze. Again the arms flexed, but the tape held, even though the muscles had bulked out more. “Hell-lo, baby!” said the man’s voice from Plumtree’s mouth. Cochran’s nerves were twanging with the impulse to run, but his muscles felt as loose as wet cement.

  “Valerie,” said Cochran then, breathlessly.

  One of Plumtree’s pupils visibly tightened down to a pinprick. Split-screen, thought Cochran.

  Like a pole-vaulter visually picking out each spot his feet would touch on the run to the bar, Cochran prepared his words; then, carefully, he spoke: “What did we do wrong twelve days ago, when we tried to get Scott Crane restored to life?”

  “Oh, eat me.” The childish taunt rode incongruously on the deep, vibrating voice.

  “I will, if you don’t tell us,” spoke up Kootie. “I can.”

  “Ay,” came a new, flat voice from Plumtree’s lips, speaking to Kootie, “sharp and piercing, to maintain his truth; whiles thy consuming canker eats his falsehood.” The face contorted and gasped for breath, and the man’s voice added, “Dammit, that’s Henry the Sixth, Part One! Valerie, you traitorous bitch! Who do you think you got all your lines from, anyway? Do you remember Love’s Labour’s Lost! ‘We to ourselves prove false, by being once false for ever to be true to those that make us both—fair ladies, you.’ ”

  “Valerie is on our side,” said Kootie, “and she’ll know it if you lie.”

  Plumtree’s gaze fixed on Kootie, and her teeth were bared.

  Kootie’s shoulder jumped against Cochran’s arm, and then the boy leaned tensely forward—

  —The air was suddenly colder, and Cochran thought the pepper trees shook in no breeze—

  And in the same instant Plumtree’s head was rocked back as if from a physical blow. “Easy, kid!” gasped the man’s voice. “Unless you want all the fair ladies dead!”

  “I bet you can tell I pulled that punch,” said Kootie. His voice was calm and level, though Cochran could feel the boy shivering. “I have used it full strength, before today. And I don’t believe that punching you dead out of that head would hurt any of the Plumtree ladies.”

  “You haven’t yet seen any of my strength, boy.” Salvoy’s voice seemed to vibrate in Cochran’s ribs. “That was a love-pat a moment ago. I killed your king, and I did not flinch when I did it. But I don’t want you to be hurt.” The teeth were still bared, and now the lips curled in a smile. “I’m prob’ly the only one here who doesn’t want you to kill yourself.”

  Angelica started to say something, but a rumbling, liquid growl from Plumtree’s throat stilled her.

  “You’re the one with the wound in your side, boy,” the man’s voice went on, loudly and almost anguished. “It’s always been you that would have to drink the real pagadebiti, even supposing you assholes could ever find a bottle of the stuff. It’s you, Baby Gawain, that would have to be possessed by the actual god, abandon yourself to his … bestial mercies. You sure you’re up for that, Gumby Gunslinger?”

  Cochran heard elbows shift on the wooden table somewhere to his right, and guessed it was Angelica.

  Plumtree’s gaze swung toward Angelica, and the flat Valorie voice said, “Pardon me, madam: little joy have I to breathe this news; yet what I say is true.”

  “Were we at the right place, at least?” asked Mavranos insistently. “Out at those ruins by the yacht club? Mammy Pleasant was talking about a spot out on that shore.”

  “You were in the right place,” said Omar Salvoy, “but you didn’t have the right wine, and I’m glad to say I don’t even know where you would get—” Abruptly Plumtree choked; and then Valorie’s voice said, “Upon my soul a lie, a wicked lie. Touching this dreadful sight twice seen of us—you may approve our eyes, and speak to it. Looks it not like the king? Thou art a scholar; speak to it.” And immediately Salvoy’s voice shook breathlessly out of the mouth: “Valerie, when I have you alone under me—”

  “At those other ruins, she means,” said Kootie, “the ruins of the baths, by that restaurant. That’s where we saw Crane’s ghost. And it was the second time Plumtree had seen it.”

  The Plumtree body leaned back in the chair and took a deep breath. “You all were so embarrassed by that, I bet,” said Salvoy, grinning. “Your exalted king, probably babbling nonsense and dressed like a bum, right? Or naked, looking like a crazy man. Brought down in the world, and how. Dizz-gusting! And you sensible folks probably just ran away from him. Think how pleased he m
ust have been with his friends.”

  “I,” stammered Mavranos, “ran after him—!”

  “The palindrome should have been a clue,” Pete Sullivan interrupted, making a chopping gesture at Mavranos. “The Valorie personality gave Cochran one line of that, at the ruins, and we knew that palindromes were good for nothing but drawing ghosts.”

  “Palindrome?” said Salvoy. “What palindrome?”

  “Sit on a potato pan, Otis,” Kootie told him.

  “And that foghorn was a clue,” said Mavranos. “I bet the foghorn we heard in that motel room at dawn was the one you’d hear out at the Sutro Baths ruins. Shit, I even noticed it.”

  Plumtree’s face was red and twitching, but in a mockingly conversational tone Salvoy asked, “Is one of you ready to die? That’s part of it, you know. To get a life back, the god wants one in exchange. Even to repay an old debt-of-honor,” he said, with a scorching glance at Cochran, “he can’t violate his own math. And blood—fresh blood has got to be spilled. Splintered bone, torn flesh, before he’ll consider it consummated. Ask apple-o’-my-eye Valorie if you think I’m lying about this.” Plumtree’s head rocked back, and the Valorie voice said, “That this is true, father, behold his blood. ’Tis very true.” Her head came down and Salvoy’s furious gaze swept across them. “And what body is your king going to take, now? Some bum’s? That’s another death, in addition to the god’s bargain!” He gave a harshly jovial laugh, and then Plumtree’s eyes squeezed shut. “I’m fading out, thank Ra. Think about what I’ve said, Koot Hoomie—and any of the rest of you that care—”

  Plumtree’s chin fell forward onto her chest, and for a moment she just panted. Then she looked up, in blank puzzlement; but when her eyes darted to Cochran she looked away again quickly. “Oh, it’s Scant,” she said. “I can’t stay here.” She flexed her arms and legs and then said again, in a voice shrilling with panic, “I can’t stay here! Arky, what’s going on?” She smacked her lips. “Was my father just here?”