Earthquake Weather

by Tim Powers

  “Is she the … other old-woman ghost?” asked Cochran.

  Plumtree’s head nodded. “And she’s a rebel, like me, now. She wasn’t always—right after her husband died, she consulted a spiritualist, who told her that she was obligated to the god for the attentions he had so generously paid to her family, and that in return she must use her inherited fortune to build an infinite chapel: a gateway for straying ghosts to leave this world through, and go on to the next. And she did, only a couple of years after her precious husband had died. She set about building an enormous house designed to attract ghosts, and then not let them get out; construction of it never stopped for nigh forty years, there was hammering and sawing day and night, and new doors and halls every day—doors and stairways that led nowhere, windows in the floors, faucets way up where no one could reach—and about the only way the ghosts could get out was to be unmade and sent off to the god through one of the fireplaces. She had forty-seven fireplaces there, before she died.”

  “I thought hammering repelled ghosts,” said Cochran.

  “No,” snapped Angelica, “banging, hammering sounds, the racket disorients ’em. It jolts them out of the groove, resets their controls back to zero—cashes out bets they’d have wanted to let ride.” She looked at Pete. “Of course we know what this crazy house is.”

  “And who the old lady was,” Pete Sullivan agreed. “It’s the Winchester House, a few miles down the 280 from here.”

  “Winchester,” said Pleasant’s voice out of Plumtree’s mouth. “Yes. And like me she was chosen to be a caretaker and communicant of the god’s pagadebiti wine—the consecrated Zinfandel. But one night in 1899, even while I was being evicted from my own overthrown house and taken into custody by the idiot god-fragment known as Bacus, Winchester found a black handprint on the wall of her chapel, in the wine cellar, and she knew that she was being called upon to give over to the god her own husband’s ghost … and she couldn’t bring herself to obey that, to forget him. And, even while knowing that she’d be punished, she rebelled: she walled up the wine cellar. When the god came to take charge of my wandering ghost three days after Easter in 1906, he struck her too, en passant, with the earthquake of his arrival—the top floors of her house fell onto her bedroom, and she was trapped in there for hours. But she didn’t repent her rebellion—after her servants freed her, she boarded up that whole wing of the house; and spent six months living on water, aboard a houseboat called The Ark, in the south bay here by the Dumbarton Bridge.”

  “And the scrap lumber,” said Pete, “from the collapsed upper floors, was used to build a maternity hospital in Long Beach in the 1920s; probably because of the ghost-confusion influences in it.” He looked at Cochran. “That hospital eventually became our apartment building—Solville.”

  “When Winchester returned to her house,” Pleasant went on, “she was masking herself against the god as well as the ghosts now. And when she eventually died, she left instructions that her ghost was to be caught, and hidden. And so it was, and now the god wants you to bring her, and me, to him. You’ll need to find a guide.”

  Mavranos was rubbing his forehead.

  “Omar Salvoy says that someone will have to die, probably more than one person, for our king to come back to life,” said Cochran. “He says there will have to be bloodshed.”

  “Of course,” said Pleasant.

  Angelica straightened up beside Pleasant’s chair. “And he says that Kootie, the boy here, has to be possessed by Dionysus.”

  “Everybody does, eventually,” said Pleasant calmly.

  “Well, that’s simply out, I’m afraid,” said Angelica, shaking her head. “I don’t know what’s going to happen, but that’s the thing that’s not going to happen. We’ve got nearly two clear days to run away.”

  Plumtree’s shoulders bobbed with tired laughter. “Don’t try Nicaragua,” said Pleasant’s voice.

  “No, Mom,” said Kootie. “What, should I save myself for Omar Salvoy?” He was speaking softly, not looking at any of the others in the kitchen. “If the, the god, is offering me his debt-payer wine, I’m very damn ready to take a drink.” He went on even more quietly, “And I do owe a beheading. He might not take it, but I owe it.”

  “We’ll see about that,” said Angelica, but her voice was too loud, and Cochran thought she looked lost and scared.

  “How do we get a guide?” asked Mavranos.

  Angelica threw him a surprised, hurt look. “Arky, Kootie is not—”

  “On the resurrection day,” said Pleasant, “you are to give a ride to a hitch-hiker. In your motor-car. I have now told you this. And this woman,” she said, touching Plumtree’s forehead, “is to carry with her, at all times, that gold cigarette lighter. I have now told you this.” She nodded virtuously.

  And of course you’d have told us two weeks ago, thought Cochran angrily, if we’d simply asked: Should we be picking up hitch-hikers? Should Plumtree hang on to that Dunhill lighter?

  “Go ahead and get her goddamn shoes, Kootie,” he said. He crossed to the back door and pushed it closed, not looking out through the broken glass; he was afraid he might see the naked figure of Scott Crane’s ghost out there, sitting in the wet grass and possibly even mournfully looking this way.

  Cody came back on just as the sun was redly silhouetting the northernmost peaks of the Montara Mountains. Cochran was in the driveway, walking around the shrouded Suburban with a tire-pressure gauge, when through the open living-room window he heard a cry and a thudding fall.

  He let the gauge clatter to the driveway pavement and just sprinted across the grass to the window, punched in the screen, and pulled the curtains up.

  Plumtree was lying on her side on the carpet, huffing furiously and struggling up to a sitting position, trying to get traction with the crumbly eucalyptus-bark soles of Pleasant’s penance shoes. Mavranos and Pete scuffed and bumped to a halt in the hall doorway a moment after Cochran leaned in the window.

  “This is like the—end of the—fucking Wizard of Oz,” Cody panted, blinking away tears. “Everybody leaning in to see if the—little girl is okay. After her knock on the head.” She was sitting up on the floor now, hugging her side and breathing deeply. “She was—dancing! I came on in the middle of some—kind of goddamn pirouette, off balance. Don’t help me up!” she said in a wheezing voice to Mavranos, who had hurried across the room to her. “My ribs are like broken spaghetti in a cellophane bag. I’ll get up on my own. In a minute.” She looked up at Cochran. “She was dancing around in here, all by herself! How old is she?”

  “Hundred and something,” said Mavranos.

  “And now I bet I’ve got a broken hip, too,” Plumtree said, “from falling on whatever she put in my pocket.” Bracing herself on an old overstuffed easy chair, she fought her way to her feet, then reached into the hip pocket of her jeans.

  “Look at that,” she said, holding out the gold Dunhill lighter. “The old dame was stealing the lighter!”

  Cochran swung one leg over the windowsill and climbed into the room, thrashing out from under the curtain like, he thought sourly, a rabbit from under a magician’s handkerchief.

  “No she wasn’t, Cody,” he said. “That’s supposed to be in your pocket.”

  “We discover,” added Mavranos.

  “Have Angelica earn her keep,” said Plumtree, “and tape up my ribs or something. And for God’s sake get me something to drink.”

  Cochran started toward the hall. “You want your mouthwash?”

  “No,” she said, “ghosts don’t seem to have spit. I want vodka.” She squinted belligerently from Pete and Mavranos and Cochran to the window beyond the flapping curtain. “The day’s over, it looks like. Is it possible for you to tell me what’s been going on?”

  “We can try,” said Cochran. He took her arm, and she let him lead her down the hall toward the dining room. “Have something to eat, with your vodka,” he said gently. “The old lady made a fine-looking shrimp remoulade this afternoon, and I w
as going to make some sandwiches.” He was nodding solemnly. “I think if we all take our time, and don’t interrupt each other, we can actually explain what’s gone on today.”

  “Well don’t goddamn strain yourselves,” she said, leaning on Cochran.

  “Oh, well,” he said, his voice suddenly quivering with an imminent, mirthless giggle, “I don’t know that we can do it without straining ourselves.”

  “It really calls for mood music,” said Pete from behind them. His voice too was tense with repressed hysteria. “Wagner, I think, or Spike Jones.”

  Mavranos gave a harsh bark of laughter. “And I better make some hand-puppets,” he said.

  Even Plumtree was snorting with nervous merriment as they came lurching and cackling into the living room, drawing puzzled stares from Angelica and Kootie.

  Cochran made ham and pepper-jack cheese sandwiches, and Plumtree switched from vodka to beer when they ate, then went back to vodka after the dinner dishes were cleared away; and the occasional pauses in the tense and unhappy conversation were punctuated by horns and sirens wailing past on the highway at the bottom of the sloping backyard, the 280.

  And seven miles to the northeast, in the Li Po bar in Chinatown, Richard Paul Armentrout sat at a table under the high, slowly rotating fans and nervously rolled the rattling pomegranate shell around the ashtray and the club-soda glasses. The two Lever Blank men had frisked him in the downstairs men’s room, but after a quick, whispered conference between themselves they had decided to let him keep the pomegranate. Lucky for them that they did, Armentrout thought defiantly. I wouldn’t be talking to them if they’d taken it, and on their own they would never figure out how to find the king with it.

  Now they were sitting on the other side of the table from Long John Beach and himself. Armentrout was sure they had guns concealed under their tailored Armani suit coats somewhere. Plumtree had told him about the commune she had grown up in, and he was finding it difficult even to believe that these two gray-haired businessmen had been leaders of a Bay Area hippie cult in the sixties, much less that they were still somehow involved in it.

  “We tried,” said the balding one who had introduced himself as Louis, “to stop the resurrection out at the St. Francis Yacht Club on the seventeenth of this month; some field men of ours did interfere, and in fact the attempted resurrection did fail. We would have acted more decisively if Mr. Salvoy had approached us sooner, and if there had not been unavoidable delays in establishing that the … apparent young woman was Mr. Salvoy; that required summoning entities we don’t usually hold congress with, and procedures, out in the remote hills around Mount Diablo, that the ASPCA wouldn’t approve of.”

  The other man, Andre, leaned forward. “Had to kill some goats,” he said. “Needed their heads, for the entities to speak through.”

  “Let me tell you a parable,” said Long John Beach.

  “Not now, John,” said Armentrout in embarrassment.

  Armentrout knew that these two men wanted to intimidate him; and he was intimidated, but not by what they were saying. He forced himself not to focus on the television screen above and behind the men, and he tried not to listen to the two voices buzzing out of the television speaker.

  “I gather,” said Louis, “that you don’t precisely represent Mr. Salvoy. You and he are not partners.”

  “No,” agreed Armentrout. “Our interests have overlapped, but my main goal right now is to get a drink of the—”

  Andre coughed and held up his hand. “No need to say it, we know you’re not talking Thunderbird.”

  On the television screen above the bar, Armentrout’s mother said, “I bet I swallowed gallons of that bath water.” She and Philip Muir were sitting in vinyl-looking padded chairs in front of a blue backdrop with big red letters on it that spelled out AFTERHOURS. She was wearing the same housedress she had been wearing when seventeen-year-old Armentrout had held her under the bath water in 1963, and the dress was still soaked, dripping on the studio floor; but she was opaque and casting a shadow, and when she spoke her teeth glinted solidly between the twisting red-painted lips. Muir, never a heavy drinker and only recently dead, was still a bit translucent, and his eyes were still very protuberant and his forehead visibly blackened in pseudosomatic response to the gunshot that had killed him. “Thanks for sharing,” he croaked. Armentrout remembered greeting cards that audibly produced the syllables of happy birthday or merry Christmas when a thumbnail was dragged down an attached strip of textured plastic; Muir’s voice reminded him of them. “I can hold my breath for hours now,” Muir went on. “In fact, I can’t breathe.” Armentrout’s dripping mother reached across the low table that separated the chairs and imploded Muir’s shoulder with a sympathetic pat. “Why would you want to breathe when everything smells so bad?” she said.

  “Mr. Salvoy did good work for us,” said Louis, “a long time ago—though he was unsuccessful in becoming the king, in 1969, and had to be retired.”

  Andre winked at Armentrout.

  “We would be happy to take Mr. Salvoy on again,” Louis said, “in this new persona, on the basis of his achieving the kinghood this time, and his being willing to comply with the harsher requirements of the office.” He took a sip from his glass of club soda. “But when he spoke to us on the sixteenth he didn’t tell us quite all about the Koot Hoomie boy. He simply indicated that there was a healthy young body he was ready to assume. If we had known that the boy was virtually the king already, we would not have risked harming him; a plain bullet wouldn’t have been able to hurt the true king, but the truck could have rolled into the sea, and the king could drown in sea water. But as it happens the boy wasn’t present, at that attempt at the yacht club. Our only urgency then was preventing the undesirable Scott Crane kinghood from being renewed.”

  Andre spread his hands. “We’ll be happy with either one of them, Salvoy or Koot Hoomie, in the boy’s body. We just want a king, an emissary to the god.”

  “A cooperative king,” added Louis. “The boy alone might actually be easier to work with. He’d probably be more malleable.”

  “Well,” said Armentrout, carefully not looking at the pomegranate and trying to project easy confidence, “I’ve got a sort of psychic dowsing rod that’s leading me to the boy, and Salvoy is committed to keeping me apprised of his own whereabouts by telephone. I can lead you to both of them.”

  “A rabbi in a synagogue,” said Long John Beach, “told his congregation, ‘I am … nothing!’ And after the service, a prosperous businessman from the congregation shook the rabbi’s hand and said, with feeling, nodding and agreeing with the rabbi, ‘I am … nothing!’ ”

  “I’ll tell you frankly,” Louis said to Armentrout, “we haven’t been able yet to ferment the real sacramental … beverage you want, though we’ve preserved and cultivated the very oldest strain of vitis sylvestris vine, untouched by the phylloxera louse plague, and we do press a vintage from it every autumn; waiting for the year when the god will see fit to answer our prayers.”

  Armentrout didn’t follow all this—he only knew that if he should not be able to kill Koot Hoomie, his sole hope for immunity from the two ghosts who were now on the television screen would be to take a drink of the fabulous pagadebiti wine: disown the ghosts, let Dionysus have all of Armentrout’s memories of them. But he hoped it wouldn’t come to that, for the god might take all of the ghosts, and pieces of ghosts, that he had consumed over the course of his psychiatric career; and Armentrout wasn’t sure he could mentally or even physically survive that loss. But it’s just a back-up, last-ditch measure, Armentrout told himself reassuringly; I’ll almost certainly find an opportunity to kill the boy.

  “And the custodian came up,” went on Long John Beach, “and he said, real earnestly, ‘I am … nothing!’ And the businessman jerked his thumb at this guy and said to the rabbi, ‘Look who thinks he’s nothing!’ ”

  Armentrout was looking intently into Louis’s eyes, but from the television he heard imbecilic laugh
ter.

  “But bottles of it do survive,” said Louis, a little impatiently. “We still have several that were bottled on the Leon estates in the Bas Medoc in the early eighteenth century. And when the Scott Crane contingent tries to do their resurrection ritual again on Tet, they may very well have got hold of a bottle themselves. Bottles of it are around, especially in the Bay Area. We can make sure that you are given a drink of the god’s forgiving blood, one way or the other.”

  Andre said cheerfully, “I imagine we’ll have our people retire the whole party, except for the Koot Hoomie boy and, at least for a while, the Plumtree woman.”

  “Certainly the one called Archimedes Mavranos,” agreed Louis. “His commitment to restoring Scott Crane appears to be so strong that he would try to impede the coronation of anyone else.”

  Armentrout had to force himself to comprehend that these men were talking about killing Cochran, Plumtree, and the Sullivan couple and Mavranos. Not therapeutically, nor as a regrettable necessity for personal sustenance, as he himself had sometimes had to do, but just because these people were inconvenient, in the way; and for a moment he was profoundly sickened at his alliance with them.

  How, he wondered forlornly, and when, did I become indistinguishable from the bad guys?

  When Louis and Andre had introduced themselves, they had told Armentrout that they were in the children’s products business these days, and owned a controlling interest in the White Greyhound brand of toys. Armentrout had remembered the White Greyhound Solar Heroes action figures and the Saturn’s Rings carnival set; and he had been unhappy to learn, in conversation this evening, that the toys had been designed to initiate children at least a little way into the Dionysian mysteries. Armentrout had learned that the toy figures in the carnival set had been designed to subliminally embody the Major Arcana figures from the tarot deck: with The Magician as the ticket seller, The Lovers on the Ferris Wheel of Fortune, Death as the janitor, and so forth; the White Greyhound people had carefully not included anything to represent The Fool, but they had had to stop production of the set anyway, because by 1975 children all over the country were spontaneously adding a Clown of their own, and suffering bad dreams at night and even banding together during the day to elude the hideously smiling painted figure of random madness that their consensual credulity had nearly brought into real, potent existence.