by Tim Powers
The waves of the sea glittered silver as a wash of bright moonlight swept in from the horizon toward the shore with eerie speed, and then the full moon was suddenly above the cliffs, shining down onto the rocks, and Cochran could see a naked, bearded man, seeming to stand as tall as Michelangelo’s David, on the top of the George Washington boulder.
Cochran shivered, flinching in the moonlight. Dionysus and the Moon Goddess, for this, he thought. It must have been Diana’s baby blanket that called her.
The tall figure in the wooden mask shifted ponderously around to face the boulder, and Cochran’s eyes narrowed against the radiant heat.
“No!” shouted Long John Beach into the eddying wind. “Wait, listen to this person!” Still cowering before the mask and the moon, he nevertheless shambled out across the ledge toward the masked god. “Look who thinks he’s nothing,” he said in a whimper; “but the voice from the sky said, ‘Let go of the tree.’ ” More loudly, he called to the expressionless mask, “Now you’re killing the boy! Take—take this body—it’s presumed to do a lot of your proper work, in its time—and it’s … pruned.”
Long John Beach hunched forward across the slanted ledge in the stark moonlight—against evident resistance, as if he were weighed down and struggling uphill; Angelica started to push herself away from the cliff to stop him, but Plumtree and Pete both caught her and pulled her back out of the wind.
Cochran was sure that the wind or magnetic repulsion or tilted gravity was going to topple Long John Beach impotently over backward—
—the one-armed man slid back a yard, away from the god—
“Okay!” howled the one-armed old man to the sky, and the wetness on his haggard face had to be tears, “I do it, I let go, I—I surrender everything!”
All at once the old man was laughing, and just for an instant another figure seemed to be superimposed on him, out of scale and suspended as if in mid-dance-step above the stone ledge—a young man in patchwork clothing, with two arms, and a pack over his shoulder and a dog snapping at his heels—and then he was just lone, haggard old Long John Beach again, but standing now right in front of the Dionysus figure.
The lone arm stretched out, and one of the old man’s fingers reached through the rippling aura and touched the mask.
And then Long John Beach spun around to face the naked figure up on the top of the boulder, and he seemed to Cochran’s aching eyes to have spun a number of times, just too fast to catch. And now he was taller, broader-shouldered, and draped in a flapping silver leopard-skin, and it was his face that was hidden by the mask.
Kootie collapsed off to the side in his floppy raincoat, and Angelica and Plumtree both caught him and fell to their knees to lower him gently to the puddled stone surface; Angelica had dropped the bottle, and it had bounced off her foot and was rolling on the ledge, spurting dark wine onto the wet rocks. For a moment Kootie was struggling weakly in the arms of both women, the raincoat collar half hiding his face, and then Plumtree disengaged herself and snatched up the bottle.
Scott Crane’s ghost was flickering up on top of the boulder, like a figure badly projected on a drive-in movie screen—and now Kootie was shaking violently in Angelica’s arms, in the same rhythm.
Mavranos took a step forward, and his right leg folded under him and he fell to his knees in front of Plumtree. “Oh, it will be Kootie,” he gasped, “if I don’t do it. I hoped one of the killer clay-kids would volunteer to do it, that this cup wouldn’t be for me, but—ahh God.”
He reached up and grabbed the bottle from Plumtree—and then he tilted it to his mouth, and Cochran could see his throat working as he swallowed gulp after gulp of the bloody wine. Cochran winced in sympathy, remembering what Mavranos had said at their first attempt, out on the yacht-harbor peninsula: What your girlfriend is ready to do … I don’t think I could do.
A wail echoed from the mouth of the tunnel behind them, and Thutmose the Utmos’ came skittering and thrashing out onto the ledge in a tangle of aluminum crutch-poles. “For me! The holy blood—I’ve worked harder—”
Mavranos lowered the bottle and scowled, and the dwarf subsided into silence. “I was—dying of cancer!” shouted Mavranos through the rain, staring at his empty left hand, “when I met Scott Crane! And what he did cured me!” He made a fist, and when he went on it was in a voice almost too low for Cochran to hear: “This five years has been gravy. Tell Wendy and the girls that I … paid my debts. Tell them they had a husband and father they could be proud of.”
He stood up, not wincing as he put weight on his right leg, and he walked across to stand balanced on the seaward rim of the ledge, nearly eclipsed by the tall masked god whose outlines roiled beside him. Mavranos squinted the other way, up at the towering naked bearded figure on the rock, and he called out strongly, “Scott! Pogo, do you hear me? Jump this way, old friend, I’ll—catch you!”
And Cochran raised his marked right hand against the wind.
Cochran made himself stare across the ledge into the carved, placid features of the wooden mask that he had seen on Vignes Street in Los Angeles and in the mental hospital in Bellflower; and to it he called, “I’m Scant Cochran—extend to Scott Crane the favor you owe me.”
Dionysus swept down one muscular arm and punched Mavranos off the ledge—Mavranos threw his arms out to the sides as he fell away toward the sea, and then he was gone, the bottle spinning away with him.
Thutmose the Utmos’ sprang howling away from the wall and covered the length of the ledge in three slithering hops, and then he had dived off the rocky rim and disappeared after Mavranos.
A crash of thunder like a basso-profundo shout from the cliffs themselves shook the air, and in the same instant a blast of white buckshot abraded the cliff face and punched Cochran solidly into Plumtree, and his first thought was that the rushing moon had exploded; but when the blast struck again, and then was followed by sheets of battering rain, Cochran looked down at the white pellets rolling on the stone surface by his shoes and saw that the white buckshot had been BB-sized hailstones.
Cochran forced his head around against the whipping onshore wind, and through tearing, narrowed eyes saw that there was no figure up on the George Washington head now; and the corner of the ledge was empty where Long John Beach or Dionysus had stood.
We failed at it again, he thought incredulously. He clung to Plumtree as tears were blown out of the corners of his eyes and his shoulders heaved. All of us have about killed ourselves, and Arky has killed himself, and we’ve failed.
Suddenly Plumtree gripped his upper arms hard.
Over the racket of the storm, someone was roaring, or screaming, out in the ocean; and through the rain the cliffs echoed with the baying of a hound.
And the ledge was shaking.
Cochran crouched and pulled Plumtree down, and then he reached past her and tugged hard at Kootie’s raincoat, trying to help Pete Sullivan to drag both the boy and Angelica toward the tunnel. Boulders were moving out in the curtains of rain, and rocks were toppling from the crests of the cliffs and spinning down through the air to crack and rumble in pieces into the churning sea; and some kind of water main must have broken in the core of Point Lobos, for solid arching streams were shooting out far above the boulders and being torn to spray by the wind.
“Get inside!” Cochran yelled at Angelica. “Rock fall!”
“Wait for him!” she screamed back.
Cochran was panting in pure fright as he clung to the heaving ledge over the boiling sea; his tears were flying away past his ears, and the spray in his open mouth was fresh water. He turned around with his hands splayed flat on the wet shifting stone, and shouted to Plumtree, “Get in the tunnel!”
A falling rock impacted so hard with the ledge rim in the moment of shattering like a bomb that the very concussion of the air stunned him and he thought his wrists were broken just from the jolt through the stone.
Two weeks ago the shooting at the ruins on the yacht-club peninsula had shocked him with
the facts of velocity and human mercilessness; now his mind was seized-up with a cellular comprehension of force and physical mass and Nature’s mercilessness. Hail and gravel and rain lashed like chains at his back, and he tried to block Plumtree from it as he pulled her toward the tunnel. The ledge had shifted under his knees, and he was sure it was within moments of breaking away and falling into the sea.
But Plumtree grabbed his chin in her cold hand and yelled, “Look!”—and she stared past him, toward Pete and Angelica and Kootie.
Feeling as though he were turning himself inside-out, Cochran tore his eyes from the close darkness of the stone tunnel and twisted his head around to look toward the open sea.
A man was climbing up out of the waves onto the shaking ledge, clutching each new, bucking handhold with bunched muscles and straining tendons. He was shirtless, and a thick dark beard, sopping wet, was matted across his broad chest. When he had hauled himself up and got one knee onto the shelf, Cochran saw that he was naked, and that a wound in his right side was bleeding; Kootie pushed himself away from Angelica and began unbuttoning his raincoat.
A big black dog, wet as a seal, was scrambling up the rocks on the side of the ledge closer to the George Washington boulder, and Kootie paused to scream “Fred!” over the howling of the storm.
The dog clawed the stone and got its legs under itself and then bounded to the boy, water flying from its weakly wagging tail.
Cochran met the dark eyes of the bearded man—
And with a sudden hollowness in his chest he recognized Scott Crane, alive in a living body at last.
Blood was streaming away in the rain from the man’s nose and mouth and ears, but he smiled through evident pain; and then he braced himself and straightened his legs and stood up. Blood ran down his right leg from the gash below his ribs.
Cochran was sure the man would just be blown right back off the ledge and broken to pieces on the rocks—but the wind rocked to a halt as if Scott Crane had put his aching shoulders under it, and the cliffs stopped shaking under the weight of his bloody bare feet.
In spite of the glad leaping of the dog, Kootie had managed to shrug out of the raincoat, and he knelt forward to hold it up toward Crane. The bearded man took it and slowly pulled it on and belted the yellow sash, and at once he no longer appeared to Cochran to be some sea god risen from the waves—just a robed king, barefoot and wounded.
The rain was falling vertically out of the sky onto the surfaces of stone now, and the arching streams of water had stopped gushing from the cliff. Scott Crane’s gaze travelled from Pete and Angelica and Kootie and the dog to Cochran and, finally, to Plumtree. Cochran wasn’t touching her, but he could feel her flexed tension, and he thought he heard a high, keening wail.
Crane smiled at her, and nodded in recognition.
Then Crane’s great bearded head turned as he looked around at the surrounding boulders and the tunnel opening. “Where is Arky?” he said, and his low voice cut effortlessly through the hiss and spatter of the rain. “He called me, all the way from Persephone’s shore, beyond India.”
Plumtree was on her hands and knees, but now she cautiously stood up, bracing herself with one hand against the rock wall. “The gunshot wound in your side,” she wailed, “is all that’s left of him. He gave you his body—and you’ve transformed it into your own.” She was shaking against the stone, and Cochran realized that she was sobbing. “He restored you to life.”
The bearded king was visibly shaken by this. “Is this true?” he asked hollowly.
Cochran realized that it must be, and he nodded even as Kootie said, “Yes.”
Crane raised his bearded head and stretched his arms out to the sides—as Mavranos had when he had fallen into the sea—and he roared a wordless yell that echoed back from the cliffs, and fell to his knees.
“How can I take this?” he said loudly. “Is this how Dionysus gives his favors?”
“Yes,” said Cochran, and he was aware that he and Plumtree had spoken the word in unison.
“Yes,” echoed Kootie.
“Medere pede,” said Crane, quietly but clearly; “ede, perede, melos. I heard that and assented to it—I came back, on those terms. And there’s more blood owed on the account, shamefully proxy blood, still. But after this dawn I can make sure it’s only me that pays, every winter.” He exhaled a long, harsh aah. “But what can my kingdom be, without … loyal, old, Archimedes Mavranos?” Still kneeling, Scott Crane looked across the ledge at Kootie. “You’re the … young man who held the crown.”
“Fumbled it,” called Kootie miserably over the rain. He was hugging the big black dog. “I ran away, on the morning of Dionysus’s day. And I … can’t remember what I did then, but …”
“My family,” said Crane. “My son Benjamin, my wife—do you know if they’re all right?”
“They’re fine,” said Plumtree. Cochran believed that she needed to talk to Crane now, in spite of her guilt—that she needed to keep on establishing that the man really had returned to life. “According to a woman called Nardie Dinh,” Plumtree went on, “who’s taking care of your place.”
“Nardie,” said Crane hoarsely. “That’s good.”
Again Crane got to his feet, smoothly but with pain evident in the stiffening and sudden pallor of his face. “Stand up,” he said. “You five constitute my army and my field marshals.” Bloody teeth showed through the soaked curls of his beard as he gave them a clenched but resolute smile. “Have you got a car?”
“A Torino,” said Kootie, glancing at Cochran and Plumtree.
“Which is stolen,” said Plumtree. “We’ve got Arky’s truck.”
Crane winced, either at the evident pains of his transfiguration or at the mention of Mavranos’s old Suburban. “Take me to it, and one of you drive,” he said. He stared into Plumtree’s eyes then, making her flinch. “We’ve got two poor bankrupt old women to see off at the cemetery dock.”
“Im—immediately?” asked Cochran, trying to make his voice neutral. All of them had been soaked with cold rain in cold wind for hours, and he had been passionately looking forward to a car heater and a hot shower and then enough to drink so that he could drive out of his mind the image of a severed head in his hands.
Then he glanced at Crane, naked under the raincoat and drenched in sea water and wounded, too, and he was ashamed of having asked. “Not that I—”
“I reckon it’ll be immediate by the time we get there,” said Crane, “yep. We’ve got to go to the cemetery marble temple, out at the end of the peninsula. I think you’ve been there before.”
And been shot at, thought Cochran. “Yes,” he said.
There appeared to be nothing more to say. Plumtree and Cochran led the way back down the tunnel to the slope that descended to the amphitheater plain. The full moon had disappeared behind the clouds, and the fire in the roofless stone structure had died down to a height hardly above the ragged walltops, and the dancers were moving in rings now, waving their torches in unison to the quieter drumming.
It was just a Bacchanalian revel now, no longer a Dionysian hunt. The gods were no longer present.
CHAPTER 34
Ghosts all! The ghost of beauty, the ghost of stateliness, the ghost of elegance, the ghost of pride, the ghost of frivolity, the ghost of wit, the ghost of youth, the ghost of age, all waiting their dismissal from the desolate shore, all turning on him eyes that were changed by the death they had died in coming here.
—Charles Dickens,
A Tale of Two Cities
“LIKE A BRUISE ALL over,” said Plumtree intently as Scott Crane labored up the steep driveway toward the Sutro Heights parking lot, “isn’t it? Like you’ve been hammered with a meat tenderizer, especially on the insides.”
“It is—like that,” panted Crane. “Who—are you?”
“Cody. Cody Plumtree.”
They were skirting the illuminated patch of asphalt under one of the park light poles, and Cochran looked back at the king. The man had re
fused any help from him or Pete, and he was striding along steadily, but the moisture on his bearded face was clearly as much sweat, and perhaps tears, as cold rain. Kootie and the black dog were running on ahead and then running back, staying in sight.
“Ch-ch-changes,” said Plumtree. “At least you’re not changing your sex.”
“I can imagine,” Crane said, nodding stiffly, “that that would be rough.”
Cochran could see the red truck under the overhanging elms ahead, still parked among the nondescript but gold-painted old sedans and station wagons. “Don’t be bothering him, Cody,” he whispered.
“I’m not bothering him. Am I bothering you?”
“The climb up the rocks,” said Crane, “took a lot out of me. I made hard use of a lot of—rearranged muscles that were still too shocked to register their initial pain yet.”
Pete had fumbled out Mavranos’s key ring with the Swiss Army knife on it, and was trying to find the key. Kootie and the black dog were already standing by the front bumper.
“Could you open the tailgate?” asked Crane. “I’d be more comfortable lying down in the back. I’ve travelled back there before, when the winter was a bad one.”
More recently than you know, thought Cochran, feeling his face stiffen at the idea of the living man riding back there where his corpse, and then his wrecked skeleton, had been carried around for a week.
“Sure,” said Pete.
“Jeez, we should sweep it out,” said Plumtree in an awed voice. “There might still be bits—”
Cochran silenced her with a wide-eyed look behind Crane’s back.
After Crane had sweatingly but without help climbed up into the truck bed and stretched out, Pete closed the tailgate and then got in behind the wheel next to Kootie and Angelica, while Cochran and Plumtree got into the back seat, with the dog sitting up panting on the seat between them. When the doors had all been chunked shut, Pete started the engine and backed the truck around, then drove slowly down to the coast highway with the windshield wipers slapping aside the steady streams of rain, and turned right. Everyone seemed to be on the point of saying something, chin and eyebrows raised, but no one spoke as the truck swayed and grumbled through the landscape of gray woods and rock outcrops, looping around the curves of Point Lobos Avenue to the north and then straightening out onto Geary Boulevard, heading east.
