Earthquake Weather

by Tim Powers

  Following Cochran’s directions, Pete turned left up the sloping driveway of Woodlawn and parked at the curb, in front of the grim stone tower that stood between the two stone arches opening onto the grounds. The four disheveled travellers pushed open the truck doors and climbed out, and walked through the south arch and then trudged uphill along the gravel lane that led to the graves.

  Cochran was carrying the bottle of pagadebiti, and in his pocket he now had Mavranos’s bulky key ring with its attached Swiss Army knife. The tall palm trees and twisted cypresses that stood at measured intervals across the green hills gave him no clues as to what spot he and Nina had chosen on that long-ago sunny day, and the gray roads curved around with no evident pattern.

  He had kept glancing at Plumtree during the drive up from San Jose, but the woman who had looked apprehensively back at him each time had clearly been Mrs. Winchester, blinking and shivering in the unfamiliar body in the big leather jacket; and so he was profoundly glad when Plumtree took his hand now and he looked at the face under the wet blond bangs and recognized Cody.

  “I see by our outfits that it’s the same day-o,” she said quietly, glancing back at Pete and Angelica; “but what are we doing in a cemetery?”

  “I—” he began; but she had gasped and squeezed his hand.

  She was staring at the grassy area to their left, and he followed her gaze.

  They were next to what he recalled now was the children’s section of the cemetery, and on a pebble-studded slab of concrete on the grass stood eight painted plaster statues, one of them two feet tall and the others half that. They were the Disney-images of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves; and behind them, on a truncated section of decoratively carved and pierced marble, stood a verdigrised brass plaque on which he could make out the raised letters,

  SUFFER LITTLE CHILDREN TO COME UNTO ME

  “ ‘Suffer, little children,’ ” Plumtree read aloud, in a panicky voice. “Sid, who are we here to bury?”

  “My dead wife,” he told her hastily, knowing that she was thinking of Janis. “Or not bury, so much as disown. Give to the god.” He waved the bottle of antique wine, idiotically wondering if he was stirring up sentiment in it. “I’ve got to drink some of the pagadebiti, to summon Dionysus.”

  Her hand had relaxed only a little in his. “Oh, Sid, don’t—your wife—I’ll do it, I’ll drink it.”

  “You—” he said, then paused. You would probably lose Valorie, he thought; and we might need her. “You don’t have to,” he finished. “I can do it—she’s dead, and her ghost is gone, and—actually, my wife was, was more married to the god than to me, even when she was alive.” Only after he’d begun speaking had he decided to tell her that, and he was remotely surprised now at how difficult it had been to say.

  Cody bared her teeth and nodded. “And we might need her.”

  Cochran knew she meant Valorie, and he wondered if she had actually read his mind or simply knew him well enough to guess his thoughts.

  “My wife and I bought a pair of plots,” Cochran said, loudly enough for Pete and Angelica to hear too; “further uphill somewhere, across this road. That would be the place where I should drink it.”

  On the lawn to their left, isolated stone angels and Corinthian pillars stood on pedestals above clustered ranks of upright black marble slabs with gold Chinese ideographs and inset color photo-portraits on their faces, while the lawns stretching away to the right were dotted with rows of flat markers like, thought Cochran, keys on a vast green keyboard. The gray weight of the spilling sky seemed to be held back by the brave yellow and red spots of flower bouquets around many of the headstones; and in the children’s section behind them, silver helium balloons and brightly colored pinwheels had made an agitated confetti glitter against the carpet of wet grass.

  They stepped up to the curb, over cement water-valve covers that looked at first glance like particularly humble little graves, and plodded out across the grass.

  Far up the hill they came upon a scene almost of ruin. To the right, the grass had been stripped away from a broad area, leaving puddles and hillocks of mud around the stranded stone markers; an iron sign on a pole indicated that the grounds were being renovated for installation of a new sprinkler system and would be reseeded, and warned passersby that WOODLAWN WATERS ITS LAWNS WITH NONPOTABLE WELL WATER. And to the left, farther away across the marble-studded grass, a gigantic oak tree had fallen over in the direction away from them, probably during the storms that had ravaged the California coast on New Year’s Day; where the base of the tree had erupted out of the ground, the uplifted knotty face of dirt-caked roots was a monument taller than any of the carved marble ones, an abrupt black section of natural wall whose bent topmost crown-spikes stiffly clawed the sky far higher up than a man could reach. As he and Plumtree walked hand-in-hand around the fallen giant, he saw a thick carpet of fresh green grass still flourishing on the once-horizontal surface far overhead, as if in defiance of the piles of orange sawdust and the vertical saw-cuts visible farther along the trunk, evidences of toiling attempts to dispose of the gigantic thing.

  And sheets of rain-darkened plywood had been laid across the grass to form a wheelbarrow’s road toward an open freshly dug grave; the mound of mud beside the hole was the same orange color as the sawdust. For a moment Cochran thought the grave had been dug in one of the plots he and Nina had bought, and he quailed at the thought of standing on the grass verge and staring down into the hole; then he noted the position of two nearby palm trees relative to the road and realized that his plots were on the far side of the open grave.

  “Over here,” he said, stepping up onto the plywood walk and striding along it. Plumtree was beside him, and he could hear the drumming of Pete’s and Angelica’s footsteps behind.

  Nina’s ghost was gone, exorcised over a coffee cup full of tap water in his kitchen two weeks ago. Today he was going to relinquish whatever might be left of his love for her, of his possession of her.

  I caught you in a wine cellar, he thought bewilderedly as cold water ran down his heated face, and now I’m going to drop you out of my heart, beside an open grave, with a swallow of wine. I really only interrupted your fall, didn’t I—delayed your impact by four-and-something years.

  And, he thought, fathered a companion for you to take with you. Was that death a part of your plan, of the god’s plan? How can I be giving to the god someone I was never allowed to know?

  He didn’t know or care if tears were mingling with the rain water on his face.

  “This will do,” he said harshly, stepping around a winch-equipped trailer with a big rectangular concrete grave-liner sitting on the bed of it. There were of course no markers to indicate which patches of grass were his plots, so he just stood on the grass with the open grave at his back and clasped the bottle under his arm as he pulled Mavranos’s key ring out of his pocket and pried out the corkscrew attachment.

  Rain thumped on his scalp and ran in streams from his bent elbows as he twisted the corkscrew right through the frail old lead foil on the bottle; and when the corkscrew was firmly embedded in the cork, he paused and looked at Plumtree.

  “I don’t want to love her anymore,” he said breathlessly; “and I was never permitted to love the child.”

  Plumtree might not have heard him over the thrash of the rain; at any rate she nodded.

  He tugged at the red plastic knife handle, and with no audible pop the cork came out all in one piece in spite of its age.

  Abruptly the wind sighed to a halt, and the last drops of rain whispered to the grass, and even the drops of water hanging from the cypress branches seemed to cling for an extra moment to the wet leaves so as not to fall and make a sound. In that sudden enormous silence Cochran would have tapped the knife handle against the glass of the bottle to see if his ears could still hear, except that he knew he was not deaf, and except that he didn’t dare violate the holy stasis of the air.

  He tipped the bottle up, and took a mouthful of the paga
debiti.

  At first it seemed to be cool water, so balanced were the tannins and the acids, the fruit so subtle as to be indistinguishable from the smells of grass and fresh-turned earth in his nostrils. Then he swallowed it, and like an organ note rising from total silence, that starts as a subsonic vibration too low even to feel and mounts mercilessly to a brazen chorus in which the very earth seems to take part, bringing tears to the listener’s eyes and standing the hairs up on his arms, the wine filled his head with the surge of the spring bud-break on the burgeoning vines, the bursting slaughter of ripe grapes in the autumn crush, the hot turbulent fermentation in the oaken casks as the soul of the god awoke in the crucible of fructose and malic acid and multiplying yeast. And Cochran was able to see as if from a high promontory the track of the god’s endlessly repeated deaths and resurrections, through the betrayed vineyards of the Gironde and Loire valleys, back to sacred Falernum on the very slopes of slumbering Vesuvius, and the trellised vine gardens at Nebesheh and below the White Wall of Memphis on the Nile, eastward through Arabia, Media, Phrygia and Lydia, and the terraced temple vineyards on the ziggurats of the Babylonians and Sumerians, dimly all the way back to the primeval vitis vinifera sylvestris vines of lost Nysa in the mountains above Nineveh at the source of the Tigris River.

  And then he was looking out through a crudely cut earthen doorway at the gray sky; no, he was lying on his back, and the ringing in his head and the jolt throughout his frame was from having fallen backward into the opened grave. The breath had been knocked out of him, and until his lungs began to heave and snatch at the cold air it seemed that his identity had been knocked out of him too.

  Now three faces appeared around the edges of the grave, peering down at him; Plumtree was standing closest, leaning over, and he could see that she was holding the bottle of pagadebiti, apparently having taken it from him in the first transported moments.

  “He’s killed,” said Angelica.

  “No, he’s not,” said Plumtree angrily. “Sid, get out of there.” The voices of both of them were oddly muffled and ringing, as if the women were embedded in crystal.

  “I’m … not killed,” Cochran said. He rolled over and got to his hands and knees, and then, hitchingly, straightened all the way up to a standing posture, bracing his hands on the back-hoed clay walls; and the color of the exposed dirt darkened from orange clay toward black topsoil as he painfully hiked himself erect. “Pete,” he said, trying to pitch his voice so that it would carry in the changed air, “give me a hand.” He tossed the Swiss Army knife up onto the grass by Plumtree’s feet.

  Pete and Plumtree both leaned over so that he could grasp their wrists, while their free hands extended back to Angelica, who clasped them firmly and braced herself. With a heave from above, Cochran was able to walk up the side of the grave and take two balance-catching steps out across the grass.

  I don’t feel any different, he thought cautiously. I swear I don’t. If the god’s riding on me now, he’s riding lightly.

  Pete had bent to pick up Mavranos’s knife, and now he twisted the cork off the corkscrew and held the cork out to Plumtree, who shoved it into the open mouth of the bottle as if hoping to stifle some shrill sound.

  But in fact it was the silence that Cochran wished would stop. The plywood sheets thumped underfoot as he followed Plumtree and the Sullivans to the gravel road and hurried down it toward the distant front gate, but the sound of their footsteps seemed to agitate the air only very close by. No rain fell, and Cochran couldn’t shake the notion that all the raindrops were hanging suspended under the clouds, like rocks in a Magritte painting.

  As he reeled past the Snow White and the Seven Dwarves statues, Cochran was nervously ransacking his memory. He had forgotten something here today—he had known the wine would make him forget it. But what had it been? Then he remembered saying to Cody, My dead wife; and, my wife was more married to the god than to me. Apparently he had been married, and the wife was dead. He had to concentrate to keep the idea from sliding out of his mind, like thoughts that occur late at night in bed when the light has been turned out. I was, he thought—what? Somebody was more married to the god than to me. When was anybody ever married to me …? Married to the god—to Dionysus? I must have been thinking of the woman in that strange version of A Tale of Two Cities, Ariachne. Something about a Dickens novel …? I can’t remember.

  Finally he was just aware that he had forgotten something; but the awareness carried no anxiety. It didn’t have the mental flavor of importance. If it was important, he thought, I’ll no doubt be reminded of it.

  He remembered vividly the climb down the chimney in the Winchester House, and the supernatural black man in the wine cellar, and Mrs. Winchester’s occupation of Plumtree’s body, and her insistence that they perform the resurrection soon, today, now.

  Twice—once as they passed under the stone gate, and once as Pete pulled open the driver’s-side door of the red truck—Cochran got the impression that Mrs. Winchester had come on; both times Plumtree gasped, and blinked around in a terror that was not Cody’s, and then only a moment later recognizably was Cody, catching her balance and gripping the bottle and counting her companions.

  They had all got into the truck and pulled the doors closed, but Pete was still fumbling with the key ring, when the engine roared to life. Pete stared at the empty ignition keyhole, then stared at Angelica beside him. With a shrug he put the key into the ignition anyway, and turned the switch into the on position.

  Slowly he clanked it into reverse gear, and then tugged at the wheel as he backed out of the parking space; the truck wobbled obediently. “I was afraid it was going to drive itself again,” he muttered, “like it did when Arky got shot.”

  “Don’t speak,” choked Angelica. “Get us—out of here.”

  Pete steered the truck in a back-and-fill star pattern to drive back down to El Camino Real. A car going north squealed to a halt and honked twice as Pete turned south, and the brake lights flared redly at the back of the shiny new white car in front of the truck.

  “What are these white Saturns,” said Pete.

  Cochran was already frightened—the wine he had drunk was making him dizzy, and he had the crazy impression that the action and speech around him were subtly happening at the wrong speed, as if somebody had filmed cars and actors moving and speaking too rapidly, and then projected it at a slowed-down speed to make it all appear normal—but with the gaps between the frames subliminally perceptible now—and Pete’s remark about Saturns seemed to carry huge portent.

  “There’s another,” said Angelica, her finger repeatedly bumping the windshield as she pointed toward the oncoming lane; and though her voice was if anything shriller than normal, Cochran thought he could hear every click and release of her vocal cords.

  “This flop is all face-down,” said Plumtree hoarsely—her voice too was muffled and fragmented, and even though he was sitting right beside her in the back seat Cochran could hardly make out her words—

  Abruptly a harsh animal roaring shattered the stale air inside the truck, and the physical shock of it peeled Cochran’s lips back from his teeth and jerked his right hand to the small of his back, where his revolver was holstered. Squinting against the stunning noise, Angelica fumbled the stuffed toy pig up from the front seat—and Cochran realized that the bestial clamor was coming from the pig. But, he thought in real, angry protest, it hasn’t even got a battery in it!

  In the center of the cavernous roaring, Angelica was frenziedly bashing the toy against the dashboard, to no apparent effect—the toy pig was smoking, and Cochran could see bright dots of tiny burning coals in its pink nylon fur—

  Out one of the windows—in the confusion Cochran somehow couldn’t tell if it was through one of the side windows or through the windshield—Cochran glimpsed a glittering golden vehicle, and in it a carved wooden mask; and an instant later he was deafened by a tremendous metallic crash, and the truck was halted, rocking violently as its passengers rebo
unded from seat-back and dashboard.

  Cochran had wrenched open the door and reeled out onto the pavement, and the smoking pig bounced past him, rolling toward the gutter. The rain was coming down again like a battering avalanche, and the car behind the truck—a white Saturn—had stopped, and a portly white-haired man had opened the passenger-side door and stepped out.

  Cochran waved at him. “Cet ivrogne m’est rentre dedans!” he shouted over the roar of the rain. He stopped speaking, wanting desperately to run to the side of the road and throw himself down on the wet grass; what he had just said was French, meaning, This drunkard crashed into me. “Do you,” he shouted, listening to his own words to be sure he was speaking English, “have a cellular—”

  The man standing by the other car was staring at him, in obvious surprised recognition. Cochran cuffed rain water from his eyes and peered at the man … and with a sudden cold hollowness in his chest recognized Dr. Armentrout.

  Someone was tugging at Cochran’s sleeve, and shouting; he turned and saw that it was Cody, and that she didn’t seem to be injured. “The truck started again!” she was yelling. “It’s not hurt, nobody’s hurt, we didn’t even hit anything—get back in!”

  She hadn’t noticed Armentrout. Cochran nodded at her and put one foot up on the truck floor as she climbed back inside—but he saw Armentrout getting back into the Saturn.

  The truck was shaking as Pete gunned the engine; it did seem to be capable of driving.

  But so was the Saturn. And all Cochran could remember now was Armentrout saying to him three weeks ago, I will heal you, Sid. That’s a promise. Still perceiving all the motions and sounds as discrete fragments, Cochran fumbled under the back of his sopping windbreaker and pulled out his muddy revolver; and he aimed it at the white hood of the Saturn, between and just behind the headlights, and pulled the trigger.