Earthquake Weather

by Tim Powers

  Cody was hurting Cochran’s gashed thumb, and even her bandaged right hand was pulling on the door handle so hard that Cochran thought the handle must be about to break off. Her feet were braced against the slippery wet floorboards. “But have I, have any of us?” she whispered. “Janis is deaf now, and her dreams were fading to black-and-white even on Friday night! Tiffany, Janis, Audrey, Cody, Luanne … are we all going to slide into the, the booming black-and-white hole that’s Valorie?”

  The king’s ghost spoke now, clearly addressing Cody: “In the midsummer of this year,” said the deep voice, gently but forcefully, “you and I will be standing in happy sunlight on the hill in the lake.”

  Cochran looked back at him—and didn’t jump in surprise, only experienced a dizzying emptiness in his chest, to see that the ghost was draped in a white woolen robe now, apparently dry, conceivably the same robe Crane’s body had worn when it had been lying in state in Solville. The full, King Solomon beard was lustrous and dry.

  The truck rocked as Pete steered it into a parking space and tromped on the brake. “The grail castle,” he said. “The green chapel.” A tall hedge blocked the view of the estate from here, but they could see a closed gate, and signs directing tourists toward the low, modern-looking buildings to the right.

  Pete Sullivan led the way across the parking lot, but he took his four bedraggled companions toward the locked gate instead of in the direction of the little peak-roofed booth and the Winchester Products Museum beyond it.

  He had pulled his comb out of his pocket, and he appeared to be trying to break the end of it off. “I suppose they count the guests, on the guided tours,” he said to Cochran over the hiss of the rain.

  “Yes,” Cochran told him. “Even one couldn’t sneak away, let alone five. And I bet they wouldn’t let a barefoot guy go anyway.”

  “I don’t expect anybody’s looking this way,” Pete said, “but the rest of you block the view of me; act like you’re taking pictures of the house.”

  Cochran took Plumtree’s elbow and stood to Pete’s left, pointing through the gate and nodding animatedly. “I’m pretending to be a tourist,” he told her when she frowned at him. “Play along.”

  Pete’s comb was metal, apparently stainless steel, and he had broken two teeth off one end of it and bent kinks into them. Now he had tipped up the padlock on the gate and was carefully fitting the teeth into the keyhole.

  Cochran stared between the bars of the gate at the house. Past a low row of pink flowering bushes he could see the closest corner of the vast Victorian structure, a circular porch with a cone-roofed tower turret over it. Through the veils of rain beyond it he could see other railed balconies and steeply sloped shingle roofs, and dozens of windows. Lights were on behind many of the windows, and he hoped Pete’s hands could work quickly.

  “When I say three,” said Pete as he twiddled with the comb teeth in the lock mechanism, “we’ll all go through the gate and then walk fast to the corner of that box hedge by the porch. I can see a sign on a post, I think tourists are allowed to be there.”

  “Yeah,” said Cochran, “it’s part of the garden tour—that’s self-guided. But they may not have the gardens open, on a rainy day like this.”

  “Great. Well, if anybody comes up to us,” Pete said grimly, “smile at ’em and talk in a foreign language, like you wandered out here through the wrong door. And then—” He looked down at his busy, pacifist hands. “Sid, you’ll have to cold-cock ’em.”

  Cochran thought of Kootie and Mavranos back at his house, ready to risk their lives, and of the Sullivans, who had reluctantly committed themselves to this, and of Plumtree, hoping to undo the murder of the ghost that was standing right behind them. He looked back at the bearded figure, and noticed without surprise that the king’s ghost was now wearing a sort of tropical white business suit, though still barefoot. The ghost, as apparently solid as any of them, looked like a visiting emperor.

  “I can see the necessity of that,” Cochran said to Pete. “Let’s hope nobody notices us.”

  Pete nodded, and Cochran heard the snap of the lock. “One, two, three.” Pete was lifting the gate as he swung it open, and the wet hinges didn’t squeal; then Cochran took hold of the elbow of Plumtree’s leather jacket again and they were hurrying across the cobblestone driveway to the sign. Behind him Cochran heard the gate clink closed again, and Pete’s footsteps slapping up to where the rest of them now stood.

  They halted there, rocking, and Cochran stared fixedly at the lettering on the waist-high sign while he tensed himself for any evidence of challenge; but the only sound was the timpani drumroll of the rain on the cobblestones and the smack of bigger drops falling from the high palm branches that waved overhead, and his peripheral vision showed him no movement on the shadowed porches or the walkways or hedged lawns.

  Plumtree had actually read the sign. “That iron cap in the ground is to the coal chute,” she told him. “And those windows up on the second floor there to the left are where the old lady’s bedroom was. ‘The Daisy Bedroom’—huh!”

  “We’re supposed to,” panted Pete, “find the Winchester woman’s ghost—and, I guess, a—container?—of the pagadebiti wine.” He turned to the ghost. “You can do those things?”

  The tall, bearded ghost was looking at Cochran when it echoed Pete’s last sentence: “You can do those things,” it said hollowly.

  “I guess that’ll do,” sighed Pete. “Up onto the porch there, everybody, and I’ll unlock us a door.”

  They found a modern-looking glass door with an empty carpeted hall visible inside. A decal on the glass read PLEASE NO ADMITTANCE EMPLOYEES ONLY, but Pete was able to pop back the bolt with a contemptuous fiddle-and-twist of his kinked comb-teeth.

  “We should hear a tour-party, if one’s nearby,” whispered Cochran as he stepped inside. Angelica was leading the king’s ghost by the hand, and Plumtree had sidled in ahead of them and was now carefully standing on the other side of Cochran from the ghost. “We’ll hear the guide talking, and the footsteps. Move the other way if we do, right?”

  They hurried down the corridor toward the interior of the great house, and soon the corridor turned left and they were in a broad, empty Victorian entry hall lit by electric lights that mimicked gas lamps. Polished carved mahogany framed the windows and doors and the corners of the ceiling, and paneled the walls from the wainscot down; and the floors were a sort of interlocking-plaid pattern of inlaid maple and walnut. The panes in the two front doors were hundreds of carved quartz crystals arranged in fanciful flower and fleur-de-lis patterns, set in webs of silver and lead and bronze.

  “How many rooms did the old lady build here?” asked Angelica in a whisper.

  “I don’t know,” said Cochran. “Two hundred.”

  “Can we—call her ghost, somehow? We can’t search every damn room!”

  “The goose of Winchester can’t hear to hiss,” said the king’s ghost. “A bolt-hole, a hidey-hole, is where she is—hidden, escaped from Dionysus like a possum hidden in its own pouch.” He touched the glossy, deeply imprinted white wallpaper.

  “Swell,” said Cody. “Let’s move on.”

  They hurried down the hall, and found themselves in a vast, dark ballroom. Even in the shadowy dimness Cochran could see that the floor, and the framed and paneled and shelved walls, and the very ceiling way up above the silver chandelier, were of glossy inlaid wood. Far out across the floor on one side was a pipe organ like a cathedral altar, and in the long adjoining wall a fireplace was inset between the two tall, narrow windows that let in the ballroom’s only light.

  Cochran could faintly hear the muffled creak and knock of footsteps on the floor above, and he looked around helplessly at the huge, high-ceilinged room. He was aware of nearly inaudible creaks and rustles from the far, dark corners of the room, and realized that he’d been hearing these soft flexings ever since they had entered the house; and he had steadily felt attention being paid to him and his companions, but it felt chi
ldish and frightful, nothing like a tour-guide or a security guard. Could the ghost of Mrs. Winchester be looking at them now from some remote shelf or alcove, flitting along after them from room to room? He flexed his right hand—but got no sense of help from the god.

  “Let’s just goddamn keep going,” he whispered.

  “Sid—!” gasped Plumtree. “Look at the stained-glass windows!”

  Cochran focused his eyes on the panes of leaded glass that glowed with the gray daylight outside, and he noticed that they each portrayed a long banner curling around ivy-vine patterns. And there was stylized lettering, capitals, on each banner—WIDE UNCLASP THE TABLES OF THEIR THOUGHTS, read the one in the left-hand window, and on the banner in the right was spelled out THESE SAME THOUGHTS PEOPLE THIS LITTLE WORLD.

  “The left one’s the Troilus and Cressida quote,” said Angelica softly, “though ‘tables’ isn’t supposed to be plural. And the right one is from Richard II, when the king is alone in prison, and conjuring up company for himself out of his own head.” She shook her head. “Why the hell would Winchester have put them up here? The Troilus and Cressida one is from a speech where Ulysses is saying what a promiscuous ghost-slut Cressida is!”

  Plumtree’s cold left hand clasped Cochran’s, and was shaking.

  “It’d get a raised eyebrow from any Shakespeare-savvy guest,” agreed Pete.

  “Is that a clue, is she in here?” snapped Cochran, looking from the windows to the ghost in the white suit.

  “Probably not in a room with a fireplace,” said Pete. “Fireplaces would be the … portals for ghosts to get broken up in and sent to the god, like the ashtrays you see with palindromes lettered around the rims.”

  “She was talking to me,” said Plumtree flatly. “Those windows were put there as a message for … for the person who looks like is turning out to be me, all these years later. This little head. Shit, she must have been, voluntarily or involuntarily, a multiple-personality herself.”

  “So what’s the message?” asked Angelica.

  “She—she didn’t want to go smoking away up one of the chimneys,” said Plumtree.

  “Sail on,” said Scott Crane’s ghost, with a chopping wave toward the rest of the house.

  They found a broader hall and tiptoed along it, instinctively crowding against one paneled wall after another, and darting quickly across the wide, gleaming patches of hardwood floor between. The electric lights were far apart, but the open rectangular spaces were all grayly lit by the dozens of interior windows and arches and skylights. In fact the layout of the rooms was so open and expansive that the sprawling scope of the house was evident at every turn, from every obtuse perspective; at no point could one fail to get the visceral impression that the house was infinite in every dimension, like a house in an Escher print—that one could walk forever down these broad, carpeted halls, up and down these dark-railed stairs from floor to ever-unfamiliar floor, without once re-crossing one’s path. And Cochran remembered Mammy Pleasant saying that the place had been built to attract, and trap, and dispatch to the after-world, wandering ghosts reluctant to go on to the god.

  “It looks open,” whispered Angelica at one point, “but she’s made the geometry in here as complicated as the mazes in the Mandelbrot set; there are patches of empty air in here that might as well be steel bulkheads. You’d never know because you could never quite manage to get to ’em.”

  Cochran found a stairway, but it ran uselessly right up against the ceiling, with not even a trap-door to justify it; then he led his party up another set of stairs that switchbacked seven times but only took them up one floor, for each step was only two inches tall; and he led them through galleries with railed-off squares to keep one from stepping into windows that were set in the floor, and through a broad hall or series of open-walled rooms in which four ornate fireplaces stood nearly side by side; and they shuffled past mercifully locked windowed doors that opened onto sheer drops into kitchens and corridors below.

  “More a house for birds,” said Cody at one point, “or monkeys, than for people.”

  “Aerial manlike entities,” agreed Angelica with a glance at the dead king.

  “Smoking away up the chimneys,” said the bearded figure, drawing a frown from Plumtree.

  At last they found themselves in a room with an open railed balcony on the fourth floor, unable to climb higher. The room was unfinished, with bare lath along one wall; an exposed brick chimney, with no fireplace, rose from the floor to the ceiling in the left corner.

  Pete stepped toward the balcony, crouching to peer out over the green lawns and red rooftop peaks without being seen from below.

  “It’s infinite,” he said, hopelessly. “I can’t even see an end to the house, from here. You’d think I could see the freeway, or a gas-station sign, or something.”

  “This place is still a supernatural maze,” said Angelica. “It’s got to be drawing ghosts like a candle draws moths, still. I swear, down in those endless galleries and halls I could feel all their half-wit attentions on us. Old lady Winchester ‘wide unclasped the table of her thoughts’—her patterns of thoughts, her accommodating masks—to every footloose ghost in the West, she was no virgin, psychically; and ‘these same thoughts people this little world.’ Except it doesn’t look so little, from inside.” She shook her head violently and then startled Cochran by spitting on the floor. “They’re all around us right now, like spiderwebs. These fireplaces should be running full-blast, twenty-four hours a day.”

  “She probably assumed they’d be used, in the winter at least,” said Cody. “After her death.”

  Cochran looked away from Angelica, toward the corner of the room.

  “This chimney is like the first stairway we tried,” he said, “look. There’s no hole in the ceiling for it.”

  Pete Sullivan walked over and reached up with both hands to hook his fingertips over the uneven row of bricks at the top edge of the chimney, which did end several inches short of the solid ceiling planks. “My hands are twitchy,” Pete said, “like they want to … participate with it. Did Houdini ever do an escape from a chimney?”

  The white-clad ghost strode over and, taller than Pete, was able to slide its whole hand into the drafty space between the bricks and the ceiling planks.

  “Clean, uncarboned brick,” the ghost said solemnly; “and gold. I can smell gold on the draft.”

  “Gold?” echoed Cochran, disappointed that they had apparently found some old treasure instead of the old woman’s ghost.

  “Well now, gold would damp out her wavelengths,” said Pete, lowering his hands and brushing brick dust off on his jeans. “Ghosts are an electromagnetic agitation, so she’d have to be locked up in something shielding, to be hidden. People used to make coffins out of lead, to keep the ghost in, contained and undetectable. Gold’s not quite as dense as lead, but it’d certainly do.”

  “And,” said Cochran, nodding, “if chimneys generally destroy ghosts, if that’s common knowledge, then you certainly wouldn’t ever look for a ghost to be hiding in one.”

  “Not unless you knew it was a dummy chimney,” agreed Angelica. “And with a hundred real fireplaces and chimneys around the place, who’d notice that one was a fake?”

  The ghost’s white sleeve disappeared behind the top row of bricks … and Cochran noticed that the figure was leaning braced against the chimney with one knee, for the other leg appeared now to be just a hanging, empty trouser leg, its cuff flapping over an empty white shoe.

  “The chimney is like the hole Alice fell down,” said the ghost softly. “Tiny shelves all the way down, with papers and locks of hair and rings and stones and dry leaves.” After another moment, the ghost said, “Ah.”

  Then the trouser leg filled out and the cuff lowered to cover the shoe, which shifted as weight visibly settled into it again.

  A clunking, scraping noise at the top of the chimney made Cochran look up—and the ghost was trying to rock something out of the chimney, apparently struggli
ng to angle it out through the narrow gap between the bricks and the ceiling planks.

  The hard object was not coming out. “Break away a brick or two,” suggested Cochran, looking nervously toward the stairs. He could hear voices now, and the knocking of footsteps. “I think a tour’s coming.”

  Pete reached his own hand in next to the ghost’s, and then shook his head. “It’s not that it won’t fit out,” he said through clenched teeth, “it’s just stopping, in mid-air, like the thin air turns rubbery, like we’re trying to push two big magnets together at their positive ends.”

  Cochran could definitely hear voices mounting from below now. “What is it?” he asked anxiously. “If it’s just an old magnet or something, drop it and let’s go!”

  “It’s rectangular,” gasped Pete, “heavy.”

  Plumtree stood by the chimney and jumped up, peering into the gap. “You’ve got a gold box,” she said when her sneaker soles had hit the floor again.

  “Dead woman’s gold,” said Angelica, “she’s probably got the geometry of the chimney-boundary magicked to not let it pass.”

  “Let’s see if the chimney can tell the difference between that and a dead man’s gold,” said Plumtree. She dug the gold Dunhill lighter out of her pocket and tossed it up in a glittering arc toward the gap.

  The lighter knocked against the wooden ceiling and disappeared behind the bricks, down inside the chimney, and then Pete jackknifed backward and sat down hard on the wooden floor, holding in his lap a metal box that gleamed gold under a veil of cobwebs.

  Scott Crane’s ghost had leaped back, or flickered back like an image in a jolted mirror; and when Cochran heard a scuffling flutter behind him he spun around to see a white-painted canvas banner settling onto the floor. The word GARLIC was painted on it in cursive blue letters, and the king’s ghost was gone.