by Tim Powers
The little restaurants and stucco houses on Geary were all dark behind the rain-veiled streetlights, and Cochran wondered what time it could be. If the impossibly full moon had been moving in real time, it might be nearly dawn now. At least the truck’s heater was on full, blowing out hot air that smelled of tobacco and stale beer and dispelled the dog’s odor of sea water and wet fur.
Plumtree had dozed off against the left side window, and though she whimpered and twitched in her uneasy sleep, Cochran had thought it kinder not to wake her; but as the truck was passing a gold-domed cathedral she abruptly hunched forward and spat. Cochran shifted to peer at her past the wakeful, whining dog.
“Just let me talk,” Plumtree whispered. “A condemned … person should get to make a last statement, especially when there’s gonna be no trial before the execution.”
“Cody!” said Cochran sharply, thinking she was still in the middle of a dream. “We’re in the truck, and the restoration-to-life worked this time, remember?”
Plumtree looked up at Kootie, who was peering back from the front seat; he looked startled, and might have been asleep a moment ago himself. “Then you’re not the king anymore,” she whispered, “but will you give me permission to talk, to be heard?”
“Uh,” said Kootie, clearly mystified, “sure.”
“Okay,” came the whisper; then Omar Salvoy’s voice said, “Plumtree is gonna have to die. A death is still owed in this math, and blood and shattered bone. Your Mavranos just died to provide the body. Somebody’s still gotta pay Dionysus for return of the king’s soul.” Salvoy smiled, and the face wasn’t Cody’s anymore. “ ‘For me, the ransom of my bold attempt shall be this cold corpse on the earth’s cold face,’ as the Valerie one would say. Ask the king if I’m making this up.” Plumtree’s body shifted over against the far window, as if Salvoy didn’t like contact with the dog.
I thought you were deaf, thought Cochran helplessly; then he remembered that Janis had taken on the deafness.
After a moment of silence except for the roaring of the engine and the rippling hiss of the tires on the pavement outside, Scott Crane said, wearily, “He’s right.” Behind them he sat up and shifted around in the bed of the truck. “Even if I—were to kill myself, Dionysus will demand a payment for the fact of this night’s resurrection.” He sighed. “I get the idea you people—didn’t know this?—before you undertook to call me back from Erebus.”
“It’ll be poor gallant Plumtree,” said Salvoy, shaking Plumtree’s head, “if nobody else volunteers.” Plumtree’s eyes darted warily to Angelica, who had opened her mouth. “The boy said I could talk!”
“I’ll volunteer,” Cochran found himself saying.
“Of course,” Salvoy went on, ignoring him, “I wonder if it really shouldn’t be somebody with a cold-blooded murder to atone for, somebody who is already owed a stroke from the Green Knight’s axe. Kootie? What did you do, that morning at Mammy Pleasant’s boardinghouse?”
“I—can’t remember,” said Kootie. “But I do remember saying—something?—about the Green—”
“It’ll be ‘poor gallant Plumtree,’ ” interrupted Angelica loudly, “and you, mister. I like Cody, but all of you in there committed or abetted the murder of—” She waved at the bearded man sitting up in the back of the truck. “—of him, and if somebody’s got to die for it, take the fall for it, it’s the Plumtree crowd.”
“Dionysus will decide,” said Scott Crane. “It’s his show.”
“Scant here volunteered,” said Salvoy, speaking faster. “Let me talk, Kootie’s not a child! You could kill him, Kootie, just assist in his voluntary suicide, and become the king yourself—Crane is old, and doesn’t have his strength back yet—let him go home and tend to his rosebushes—and then you could forget that killing, and all your sins!—with the pagadebiti. The king can always score a bottle of that. Don’t talk, listen! Think of it—you must have experienced a taste of it, while Crane was dead—the sensory-neural awareness of the whole American West: cracking your joints and stretching with the sun-warmed mountains and freeway bridges at dawn, drinking the snow-melt from the granite keeps in the Sierra Nevada through the Oroville dam, inhaling and exhaling all the millions of suffering births and deaths!” Salvoy’s voice was strained. “Work with me, boy!”
Cochran could see Kootie’s lower lip pulled away from the teeth, and could see the glitter of tears in the boy’s eyes; and he was suddenly afraid that Salvoy would abandon this dangerous gambit of dialogue and switch deaf Janis on at any moment.
Cochran silently drew a deep breath, but before he could speak, Kootie looked away from Plumtree to the dog and said, clearly, “Mom!”
The dog licked his face, and Angelica hugged him.
Plumtree’s face had started to kink into Janis’s puzzled frown even as the boy had spoken, and for several moments her face twitched with conflicting personalities; then it was recognizably the mother’s voice that said, triumphantly, “Hah! I am out in the world!” The eyes that seemed closer-set blinked at Cochran. “Are we going to the sea? Are you going to send her past India at last?”
“Oh, Cody,” Cochran groaned.
Plumtree cringed back in the seat, but the Follow-the-Queen trick had worked—it was Cody’s voice that said, “God, it was him, wasn’t it?” She spat again. “Don’t let me sleep any more. Get to the goddamn temple on the peninsula and let’s get this paid off.”
Cochran realized as he put his arm around her stiff shoulders that she had known all along that a death would be owed in payment.
But he was resolved that it would be his own.
The dark clouds were breaking up, and the sky was clear and molten red over the long piers of Fort Mason nearly a mile away to the east when Pete drove the truck slowly down the service road behind the yacht club; when they had passed the end of the asphalt and the tires were grinding in sandy mud, Cochran saw that the chain with the NO ADMITTANCE sign hanging from it had been hung across the path again.
“What’s another dent,” said Angelica hollowly.
“We won’t be getting shot at, this time,” said Pete.
“Ideally,” put in Cochran.
“Sometime,” came Scott Crane’s hoarse voice from the back of the truck, “I will need to hear about all this.” He spoke absently, blinking and squinting as he tried to look at the red sky ahead. “My first dawn,” he said. “It’s very bright.” Tears were rolling down over his prominent cheekbones now, possibly from trying to stare at the dawn.
Pete clanked the engine into low gear, and Cochran heard the groan and snap of the chain breaking, and then the rustle as the broken ends sprang away into the shrubbery.
Cochran had rolled down the window, and in spite of the dawn chill he was taking deep breaths of the sea air. He could smell flowers and fresh-turned loam on it too, and he saw that the roadside anise bushes that had been brown and dry when they had been out here two weeks ago were now brightly green and bursting with tiny white flowers.
Pete brought the truck to a slow, squeaking halt a few yards short of the descending stone stairway, up which Angelica had carried Crane’s skeleton in the rain two weeks ago, when dead birds had been falling out of the sky. And Cochran thought he could see a slowly rocking shimmer beyond the stone walls.
Cochran’s face was wet and his mouth was dry, and he was breathing shallowly; and his thoughts were chasing each other around in his head without becoming complete sentences: We’ll all step down there, but not all of us will—me, rather than her, but I hope—think, will you, there must be some way to—but me rather than her, me rather than her—
He didn’t fumble in levering open the door, and when he stepped down onto the gravelly sand he was steady enough not to be knocked over when the big black dog bounded out and collided with his legs. He reached up and took Plumtree’s hand as she hopped out of the truck, and they could hear the rusty squeal as Pete swung the tailgate down.
Plumtree was staring south across the narrow inlet at
the white house-fronts of the Marina district—the windows were dark, but a few bicyclists were distantly visible on the sidewalks of the Marina Green.
“My male parent probably told you I’ll die here,” Plumtree said quietly, “and that may be true. I think I wouldn’t mind that—I knew that might be part of the price of undoing our murder—if I hadn’t met you, Sid.”
Cochran opened his mouth, but couldn’t think of anything to say. If he did manage to pay for the murder himself, he and Cody would still not be together.
“I—feel the same way” was all he could come up with.
There was faint music on the gentle breeze from over the water, distant bells and strings tracing a melody he knew he had loved long ago: bright and almost sprightly, wafting with forlorn insouciance around a core of nostalgic despair. At each moment he could almost anticipate the next note—could almost have hummed along, if his throat had not been choked with grief—and he knew this was only the bridge, that the melody would soon be returning to the valiantly, uselessly brave tragedy of the main theme.
Scott Crane had walked to the head of the white marble stairs, and stood for a moment looking down toward the cobblestone-paved dock. Then he sat down on a broken Corinthian pillar and lowered his head into his hands. Blood was still running from his ears, and his bare right foot shone red in the strengthening light.
Cochran took Plumtree’s hand and walked across the crunching sand to the head of the stairs. He could hear the others following him, and the pad and panting of the dog.
At the top of the stairs he stopped, staring down at the dock-like pavement below.
At first he thought a stray patch of fog had clung to this corner of the choppy bay water; then his eyes shifted their perspective in some way …
And a crystal boat rocked in the gray water under a glassy mast, and smoky transparent forms sat at the thwarts; they became fleetingly clear when he looked squarely at them, then flickered away in a kaleidoscope tumble of diaphanous faces and hands, and he saw that they were frail shells of people, ghosts, blinking around in the dawn. He recognized old blind Spider Joe, who still wore the daddy-longlegs filaments around his waist, and thought he saw Thutmose the Utmos’, though without crutches now; and then he saw, clearly, Archimedes Mavranos standing up by the bow. Mavranos was looking back at the people on the dirt above the dock stairs, and Cochran thought he was smiling and waving.
The faint distant music paused for a full second, like a dancer on tiptoe; then it swept back, stronger—gracious and smiling and evoking sun-dappled streets and old walled gardens even as it bade farewell to all things and bowed to oblivion.
Plumtree pulled her hand free of his; there was a finality to the gesture that chilled him, and he spun toward her.
And as if she stood in the center of a ring of mirrors, he saw more than a dozen of her, opaque enough so that where several overlapped he couldn’t see the red of the truck through them.
Then he saw that two were still solid—no, it was only one, but it was alternately Cody and then Janis, and Plumtree appeared to shift her position against the distant buildings as she changed from one to the other, as if he were helplessly looking at her first through one eye and then through the other. Her ragged blond hair gleamed or was backlit in the dawn’s glow.
“I’ll take this flop,” said Cochran hastily. “I’ll pay the life.”
“You didn’t kill him, Sid,” said Cody. “I’ll go. I’ve loved you, Sid, and that’s a real magic trick—that was never a part of me—”
She shifted, backlit against the brightening sky, and “No,” came one voice that was both Janis and Valorie speaking; “ ‘madame has forgotten that we agreed to play in partnership this morning.’ ” It was clearly Janis who went on, “That’s James Bond to Tracy di Vicenzo, in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, when he volunteers to cover her gambling losses. You wouldn’t remember it, Cody—you set the book on fire.” The Janis figure clenched her fists, as if against an internal struggle. “I’ll never ditch you, Daddy—where I go, you go, I swear on my life!” Then she sagged, and it was a lifeless face that swung from the boat to the brightening dawn behind the distant piers, and back. “See how the morning opes her golden gates, and takes her farewell of the glorious sun!”
There were two Plumtree bodies now; Cody was clearly standing away from the figure that was Janis and Valorie; and that figure was fading.
Janis’s bright eyes in Valorie’s dead face turned on Cochran as the face became transparent. “And so farewell,” said the figure that was now just one more ghost, “and fair be all thy hopes, and prosperous be thy life!”
The ghost spun in a casual pirouette, and gathered into its insubstantial self all the other Plumtree ghosts; and Cody was left standing solidly on the sand beside Cochran. He seized her hand, both to be sure she was a living human being and to prevent her from following the ghost, which was now gliding down the marble stairs and across the cobblestone dock toward the boat; and for a moment now the faint music seemed to be the strains of “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen.”
“But I’ll be alone!” wailed Cody, in a voice that shook with absolute loss.
“No, you won’t,” said Cochran strongly. He gripped her shoulders and said again, looking into her face, “No—you won’t.”
“No,” she agreed brokenly, “I won’t.” She fell forward against him, and he hugged her tightly.
Omar Salvoy’s words were echoing in his head: A death is still owed in this math. But that was it, Cochran thought shrilly; poor Janis just died, along with Omar Salvoy at last, and Tiffany and the rest of them. Wasn’t that death enough for the god?
And the rest of what Salvoy had said …
Then Plumtree stiffened in his arms, and he felt her ribs clench as she screamed. A moment later Pete and Angelica yelled in alarm, and the dog was barking.
Cochran wheeled around, crouching and dizzied.
If he had not seen Dr. Armentrout running at them last night like a spidery Vedic demon, he would not have recognized the battered monster that had clambered out of the bay to his right and was now rushing at Scott Crane; and even so his chest emptied for a moment in cold horror.
The two figures that were attached to Armentrout’s shoulders were twisted and draped with seaweed, and their grimacing fleshy heads were canted outward like the leaves on a fleur-de-lis; but Armentrout’s right hand held the muddy derringer that had bounced into the lagoon last night, and the bloodshot eyes in Armentrout’s swollen purple face were fixed on Scott Crane.
Cochran leaned into the monster’s path, stretching out his right leg and hand. The manikin heads were yelling suddenly—“Feel good about yourself!” one was cawing, and the other was shrilling, “Pull the plug, let me up!”
The little gun was coming up in the pudgy hand as Armentrout took another running step—Scott Crane had lifted his head and turned on the pillar, but he would not be able to dive out of the way—Pete and Kootie had started forward, and the black dog’s forelegs were raised in a leap—and Angelica had drawn the .45 automatic clear of her belt, but Armentrout would have time to fire the derringer before she would be able to swing the heavy gun into line.
In Cochran’s memory the silvery edges of the pruning shears plunged toward the old king’s face, and Cochran instinctively blocked the thrust with his right hand.
The flat, hollow pop of the .410 shell deafened him, and he lost his footing as his right hand was punched away upward. The marble-and-brick-peppered sand plunged up at him and he twisted his left shoulder around to take the jarring impact as he slammed against the ground. With a ringing crystalline clarity Cochran saw drops of his own blood spattering down onto the wet sand around the truck’s front tires.
Then he rolled his head down to look at his right hand, and his vision narrowed and lost all depth—for above his wrist was just a glistening red wreckage of torn skin and splintered white bone, and blood was jetting out into the air.
The rest of what Salv
oy had said flickered through his stunned consciousness—Blood and shattered bone—
Later Cochran learned that Fred the dog had hit Armentrout and knocked him over backward, so that Armentrout had dropped a broken dry pomegranate that he had been carrying in his left hand—it had rolled uphill to Scott Crane’s foot, onto which it had spilled clinging red seeds like blood drops—and that after trying to shoot the emptied gun at the dog that was tearing at his four arms Armentrout and his two attached figures had gone stumbling back down over the wet tumbled rocks into the sea to get away.
But all Cochran saw when he swiveled his shock-stiffened face away from his ruined hand, toward the yelling that was so loud that he was able to hear it even through the ringing in his ears, was Armentrout standing thigh-deep in the shallow sea and doing something strenuous with two people: one was a heavy-set old woman in a sopping housedress, and the other was a slim young man with protuberant eyes and a blackened ragged wound in his forehead.
The dog kept running back and forth between Cochran and the water, and everyone behind him was shouting too. Somehow it didn’t occur to the stunned Cochran that the three figures out in the water were fighting—Armentrout’s companions appeared instead to be forcibly giving him something like a full-immersion baptism, dunking him under the water and then hauling him up to shout at him, and then doing it again, and the white-haired doctor did seem to be responding with denials and oaths and genuflections. It was violent, certainly, but to Cochran it seemed that all three were trying to get an important job done.
Angelica was kneeling beside him on the wet sand, urgently saying things he couldn’t hear and tightly tying a leather belt around his right wrist. But finally a moment came in which it dawned on Cochran that the woman and the pop-eyed young man had held Armentrout under the waves one last time and would not ever be letting him up at all.
