Earthquake Weather

The likeness passed away, say, like a breath along the surface of the gaunt pier-glass behind her, on the frame of which, a hospital procession of negro cupids, several headless and all cripples, were offering black baskets of Dead Sea fruit to black divinities of the feminine gender…

—Charles Dickens,

A Tale of Two Cities

TROILUS: Fear me not, my lord; I will not be myself, nor have cognition Of what I feel.

—William Shakespeare,

Twilus and Crcssida

CHAPTER THREE

“In short” said Sydney, “this is a desperate time, when desperate games are played for desperate stakes. Let the Doctor play the winning game; I will play the losing one…”

—Charles Dickens,

A Tale of Two Cities

WHERE Janis Cordelia Plumtree finally wound up was in a chair in the TV lounge.

She had visited people in hospitals where the lines on the linoleum floors led you somewhere—“Follow the yellow line to OB” or something—but the black lines in the gray floors of Rosecrans Medical Center just led around in a big dented loop, with frustrating gaps where hallways crossed. Maybe the point was that you were free to pick your own destination…the TV lounge, or the meds station, or your “room” with two unmade beds in it and no bath or shower and a door that couldn’t lock.

There were wire-reinforced windows in the halls and the lounge, but the views were only of fenced-in courtyards, shadowy in the late-afternoon sunlight and empty except for picnic tables and dome-topped swing-door trash cans; and you generally couldn’t get out there anyway.

The pictures on the walls—vapid reproductions of watercolor flowers—had rectangles of Plexiglas over them in the frames, rather than real breakable glass. She couldn’t remember how she knew this, she didn’t recall having touched one in the… nine days she’d been living here.

“I think he’s like you,” Dr. Armentrout went on. The rotund white-haired psychiatrist had dragged up a chair next to the one she’d collapsed into after finally stepping off the floor-line circuit and wobbling into the TV lounge. He had been talking to her for a minute or two now, but she was looking past him.

On the TV, hung behind a clear Plexiglas shield up above head-height on the wall beyond Armentrout, Humphrey Bogart was showing his teeth, talking mean and ruthless as he told the fat man, “We’ve got to have a fall guy.” There were no colors—all the figures, the Fat Man and Bogart and Joel Cairo and “the gunsel,” were in black-and-white, like a memory for someone else.

Plumtree shifted on the vinyl chair and tucked her denim skirt more tightly around her knees but didn’t take her eyes off the screen. Murder had been done, apparently, and a scapegoat would have to be…turned over.

“What a flop,” she said; then added, absently, “Who’s like me?”

“This man Cochran, who’s being transferred here from Metro in Norwalk,” said Armentrout. “His wife was killed Sunday before last, New Year’s Day, at dawn—dressed herself up in a bedsheet and tied ivy vines in her hair and ran out into traffic on the 280, up in San Mateo County.” Plumtree didn’t look at the doctor or speak, and after a few seconds he went on, “She was pregnant, and the fetus died too, do you suppose that’s important? Last week he flew her ashes back to her family estate, in France. He appears to have had a delusional episode there, and another when he got off the plane at LAX, in Los Angeles.”

“Rah rah rah,” said Plumtree.

“What happened on that Sunday morning?” he asked, as casually as if he hadn’t been asking her that question every day.

“This guy’s wife was run over by a bus,” Plumtree said impatiently, “according to you. Cockface.”

The doctor’s voice was tight: “What did you call me, Janis?”

“Him, not you. Wasn’t that what you said his name was?”

“Cochran.”

The vinyl seat of Armentrout’s chair croaked as he shifted, and Plumtree grinned, still watching the movie.

“Cochran,” Armentrout repeated loudly “‘Why do you say it was a bus? I didn’t even say she was hit by a vehicle. Why should it have been a bus?”

THE TV screen went dark, and then flared back on again.

IT WAS a Humphrey Bogart movie; apparently The Maltese Falcon, since Plumtree saw that Elisha Cook and Mary Astor and Sidney Greenstreet were in it too. She was surprised to see that it was in color, but quickly reminded herself that they were colorizing all those old movies now. She couldn’t remember how long she might have been sitting here watching it, and was startled when she glanced to the side and saw. Dr. Armentrout sitting in a chair right next to her. She unfolded her legs and stretched them out, with the heels of her sneakers on the floor and the toes pointed upward.

“So what do you say, Doctor?” Plumtree said brightly. Partly to delay further talk, she dug a little plastic bottle of Listerine out of her shirt pocket, twisted off the cap, and took a sip of it.

On the screen on the wail, Bogart had agreed to Peter Lorre’s proposal that the Mary Astor character be turned over to the police. “After all,” Bogart said, “she is the one who killed him.” He mumbled something about miles, and an archer. Had the murdered person been killed from a distance, with an arrow? Hadn’t it been up close with a spear?

But Plumtree had seen this movie before, and this was not how this scene went; they were supposed to pick the Elisha Cook character to “take the fall.” Perhaps this was an alternate version, a director’s cut or something.

Plumtree looked around for something to spit in, then reluctantly swallowed the mouthwash. “I’m sorry if I haven’t been paying attention,” she said to Armentrout. She glanced again up at the screen, and added, “I love Bogart movies, don’t you?”

Armentrout was frowning in apparent puzzlement “Why should it have been a bus?” he said.

“Why ask why?” said Plumtree merrily, quoting last year’s Budweiser ad slogan.

All the characters in the movie were startled now by a knock at the door. Plumtree recalled that the story took place, in San Francisco—a knock at the door could be anything. She held up one finger for quiet, and watched the screen.

The colorized Bogart got up and opened the door—and it was Mary Astor standing in the hallway, apparently playing a twin of herself. Clearly this was some peculiar alternate version of the movie. Perhaps it was well known, perhaps there were alternate versions of all sorts of movies. The Mary Astor twin in the open doorway was wearing a captain’s cap and a peacoat spotted with dried blood, and her face was stiff and white—she was obviously supposed to be dead; but she opened her mouth and spoke, in a sexless monotone: “Forgive me. Madame has forgotten that we agreed to play in partnership this evening.”

Bogart stood frozen for only a moment, then turned and lifted up in both hands the newspaper-wrapped bundle that had lain on the altar-like table; Greenstreet and Lorre didn’t say anything as Bogart handed it to the dead Mary Astor—they certainly didn’t want it, the severed head of a murdered king. The live Mary Astor was just sitting on the couch, staring wide-eyed at her dead double in the doorway.

Plumtree’s new wristwatch beeped three times. She didn’t even glance at it.

Armentrout chuckled. “Are you being paged, Janis?”

Plumtree turned to him with a smile. “That’s my zeitgeber,” she said. “Dr. Muir gave it to me. Zeitgeber means ‘time-giver’ in German. Dr. Muir suspects that—”

“He’s not a doctor, he’s just an intern. And he’s not your primary, I am.” Dr. Armentrout leaned forward abruptly, staring at Plumtree’s legs. “Is Muir also the one who strapped a mirror to your knee, Janis?” His good cheer was gone. “Is that so he can look up your skirt?”

Plumtree paused, and the TV picture flickered; but a moment later she gave him a reproachful smile. “Of course not, silly!” She reached down to unbuckle the plastic band that held the two-inch metal disk to her bare knee. “I had a dozen of these on this morning, I must have forgotten to take this one off. It’s for the—” She paused, and then recited proudly, “the Infrared Motion Analysis System. Dr. Muir has me sit at a computer and take a test, and while I’m doing that the computer measures how much I…move around. I move fifty millimeters a second sometimes! Doct—Mr. Muir suspects that my circadian rhythms are out of whack. The zeitgeber watch is set to beep every fifteen minutes; it’s to keep me aware of the…the time. When’s now.”

Armentrout leaned back in his chair. “When’s now,” he repeated. After a moment he waved at the television. “You’re missing your Bogart movie, talking.”

“That was the end,” she said.

He opened his mouth, then apparently changed his mind about what he was going to say. “But you’ve had these zeitgebers all along, Janis. I’ve noticed that you bring the front page of the newspaper to bed with you, so you’ll know in the morning what day it is; and you hardly answer a ‘howdy do’ without looking around for a clock, or sneaking a look at that waitress pad you keep in your purse.”

Her watch beeped again, and the television set went dark.

PLUMTREE SAT stiffly; somehow her watch was…making a noise; she could feel the vibration on her wrist. She didn’t touch the watch, or look at it. Maybe it was supposed to be making a noise. She would watch for cues.

Dr. Armentrout was sitting beside her, looking at her speculatively. “So,” he said, “do you feel that you’ve been making progress, now that you’ve been a patient here for two years?”

Her stomach went cold, but a deep breath and a fast blink kept tears from flooding her eyes. It’s okay, she told herself. It’s like Aunt Kate’s funeral again, that’s all. “I reckon I have,” she said stolidly.

“I was lying, Janis,” Armentrout said then. “You’ve been here only nine days. You believed me, though, didn’t you?”

“I thought you said… ‘with your fears,’” she whispered. Her watch was still beeping. The doctor wasn’t remarking on it. Maybe all the patients had been given these stupid noisy watches today, as part of some bird-brain new therapy. What a flop!

At last Armentrout was looking away from her, past her, over her shoulder. “Here’s our Mr. Cochran now,” he said, getting laboriously to his feet and smoothing the skirt of his long white coat. “Just in time for the self-esteem group. Maybe he’ll have some funny stories about his visit to France.” Without looking down, he said, “Have you ever been to France, Janis?”

She shrugged. “I wouldn’t be surprised.”

She shifted around in her chair and squinted at the man standing with Dr. Muir by the nursing station. The new patient looked a bit like Bogart, it seemed to her; a hassled Bogart, tall but stooped, and gangly and worried-looking, with his dark hair combed carelessly back so that it stood up in spikes where it was parted.

She smiled, and the television came back on, and she wondered who the stranger by the nursing station was. Were they expecting a new patient? Would he be staying here?

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” she said, dimly aware that she was echoing a statement someone had made here very recently.

“SCANT?” SAID Dr. Armentrout.

Cochran sat up in his chair and blinked at the doctor, who was seated at the desk and leafing through the file of Cochran’s transfer notes from Norwalk Metro.

At first Cochran had followed him to what the doctor had described as the conference room, which had proved to be just a back office cluttered with stacked plastic chairs and a blackboard and a bulky obsolescent microwave oven; but the patient sitting at the table in there, a bald, round-faced old fellow with only one arm, had just grinned and begun quoting dialogue from the tea-party scene in Alice in Wonderland when Armentrout had asked him to leave, so the doctor had given up on it and led Cochran down a hall to this locked office instead.

Now Armentrout raised his bushy eyebrows and tapped the stack of transfer notes. “Why does it say ‘Scant’ here?”

“Oh—it’s a nickname,” said Cochran. “From when I broke my leg as a kid.”

“So is that leg…shorter than the other?”

“No, Doctor.” Armentrout was staring at him, so Cochran went on, helplessly, “Uh, I limp a little in bad weather.”

“You limp a little in bad weather.” Armentrout flipped a page in the file. “You don’t seem to have been limping on Vignes Street Sunday. After you broke the liquor store window, you took off like an Olympic runner, until the police managed to tackle you.” He looked up at Cochran and smiled. “I guess it wasn’t bad weather.”

Cochran managed to return a frail grin. “Mentally it was. I thought I saw a man in that liquor store—”

“You probably did.”

“I mean this man—a man I met in Paris. A couple of days earlier. Mondard, his name was…unless I hallucinated that whole thing, meeting him and all. And he changed into a bull—that is, he had a bull’s head, like the minotaur. I imagine it’s all in those notes, I told the doctor at Metro the whole story. And I thought that policewoman was—” He laughed unhappily. “—was going to kill me, that is tear me to pieces, and take my head back to him.” He took a deep breath and let it out. “How is she?”

“You knocked out two of her teeth. Hence the Ativan and Haldol…which I’ll leave you off of, if you behave yourself.”

“I’ll tell you the truth, Doctor, I don’t know if I’ll behave myself. I didn’t mean to go crazy on Vignes Street, Sunday.”

“Well, you left the airport during your layover. You were supposed to catch a connecting flight back up to San Francisco, right? And you ditched all your ID.”

“It…seemed urgent, at the time. I guess I thought he might find me…he did find me, at that liquor store.”

Armentrout nodded. “And you had seen this man before.”

“In France, right. In Paris. On Friday.”

“No, I mean…where is it.” The doctor flipped back a couple of pages. “Four years ago last April, in 1990. Also on Vignes Street—hmm?—right after you had a ‘breakdown’ on your honeymoon.”

Cochran’s heart was pounding, and he wanted to grip the arms of his chair but his hands had no strength. “That was him too?” he whispered. “He had a wooden mask on then, that time. But—yeah, I guess that was him, that time. Big.” He shook his head. “Wow,” he said shakily. “You guys are good. And I didn’t remember that it was on the same L.A. street. I guess the police report’s in there from that time too, right?”

“What happened on your honeymoon?”

“I…went crazy. We got married on the sixth of April in ‘90, at a place on the Strip, and—”

“The Strip? You mean on Sunset?”

“No, the Las Vegas Strip, Las Vegas Boulevard. We—”

“Really? Well well well! And here I’d been assuming you were married in Los Angeles!”

“No. Las Vegas. And—”

“At the Flamingo?”

“No.” Cochran blinked at the doctor. “No, a little place called the Troy and Cress Wedding Chapel—”

“Oh, better still!” exclaimed Armentrout happily. The fat doctor looked as though he wanted to clap his hands. “But I should shut up. Do go on.”

“I’m not making that up. It’s probably in your file.”

“I’m sure you’re not making it up. Please.”

Psychiatrists! thought Cochran, trying to put a tone of brave derision into the thought. “And—at dawn the next day, it was a Saturday, I guess a car honked its horn right outside our motel-room door, a loud car horn; the chapel was a motel too, see, with rooms out in the back. They told me later that it was just a car horn. But I was hungover, or still drunk, and in my dream it was the man in the mask, very big, roaring like a lion, and blowing up a building he’d been locked up in, just by the force of his will. A loud noise. And he was loose, and he might do, anything.”

Armentrout nodded and raised his eyebrows.

“So…we left Vegas. I was in a panic.” He looked at the psychiatrist. “Having a panic attack,” he ventured, hoping that conveyed it more forcefully. “I made Nina drive back, across the Mojave Desert.” He held up his right hand. “I was afraid that if I drove, we’d go…God knows where. And then when I did go ahead and drive, after we’d got all the way back to California, we wound up in L.A.—on, I guess, Vignes Street.”

“Where you saw him.”

“Right. On the other side of the street. Right. He was wearing a wooden mask, and…beckoning, like Gregory Peck on Moby Dick’s back.” Cochran looked up, and saw that the psychiatrist was staring at him. “In the movie,” he added.

“And you punched a store window that time too, and cut your wrist on the broken glass. Intentionally, the police thought, hence your 51-50. Standard with suicide attempts.”

“I wasn’t trying to kill myself,” said Cochran defensively. “This was nearly five years ago, and I don’t really remember, but I think I was trying to cut off my right hand.”

“Oh, is that all.”

Armentrout put down his file and got up and crossed to a filing cabinet against the far wall. He pulled open the top drawer and came back to the desk carrying a spiral notebook and two fancy purple velvet boxes. He sat down again and put the boxes down by his telephone, well out of Cochran’s reach, and then flipped open the notebook.

“You were married on the sixth of April,” he said.

“Ri-ight,” said Cochran, mystified.

“That’s very interesting! A week later a lot of people went crazy there. Well, at Hoover Dam, which is nearby. Most of them recovered their senses by the next day, though two gentlemen fell to their deaths off the after-bay face of the dam.” He sat back and smiled at Cochran. “We’ve got a woman on the ward here who also had a nervous breakdown in Las Vegas in April of 1990—on the fifteenth, Easter Sunday.”

“Uh…did she also go crazy in L.A.?”

“Yes! Or nearly. In Leucadia, which is…well, it’s almost to San Diego. But she called the police nine days ago and told them that she’d killed a man. She said he was a king, and that she killed him with a speargun spear. Do you believe in ghosts?”

“Shit, no,” snapped Cochran impatiently. He shook his head. “Sorry—I thought you’d be showing me Rorschach ink-blots here, or having me interpret proverbs, like they did at Metropolitan in Norwalk. No, I don’t believe in ghosts.”

“Have you ever seen anything that seemed to be supernatural?”

“Well, I saw a man turn into a bull, on Vignes Street, day before yesterday.”

Armentrout stared at him for several seconds with no expression. “You’re getting hostile.”

“No, I’m sorry, I—”

“You were being cooperative a few moments ago. You may be too labile right now to participate usefully in group.”

“Too what?” Cochran wondered if he meant lippy.

“The charge nurse showed you your room? Where the cafeteria is, where you shower?”

“Yes.”

‘That was your roommate, the one-armed man I couldn’t roust out of the conference room. John Beach—we all call him Long John. It’s almost certainly not his real name; I think he chose it just because he was found in Long Beach, get it? He’s been with us since November of ‘92.”

Cochran felt empty, and hoped the one-armed old man didn’t recite from Alice in Wonderland all the time, at all hours.

“He’ll be in group. So will Janis Plumtree—she’s the one who had the breakdown in Vegas in ‘90, and who believes she killed a king nine days ago. You may as well participate. I’ll ask you to leave if you start acting out or getting too gamy:”

Gamy? thought Cochran, involuntarily picturing tusked and antlered animal heads on the stone floor of an old smokehouse.

ARMENTROUT LED him back up the hallway to the TV lounge, but Cochran hung back in the entry when the doctor strode out across the shiny waxed floor and lowered himself into one of the upholstered chairs around the conference table near the window. Four men and two women were already seated around the table, visible only in silhouette from the hall entry—Cochran thought it must almost be time for the lights to come on, or curtains to be pulled, for the evening sun was throwing horizontal poles of orange light into the room through the shrubbery that waved outside the reinforced glass.

“My civil rights are being violated,” a young woman at the table was saying harshly. “I haven’t signed anything, and I’m being held here against my will. What’s nine days’ impound fees on a car in the San Diego County municipal lot? I bet it’s more than my car’s worth, it’s just an ’85 Toyota Celery, but I need it for my job, and I’m holding you people, you soy dissant doctors, responsible.”

“It was a Toyota Cressida, Janis,” said Armentrout, and the backlit blob of his head turned either toward Cochran or toward the window. “Unless you’re thinking of some other vehicle. Perhaps a bus?”

“Fuck you, Doctor,” the woman went on, “you’re not scaring me away. It was legally parked, and—”

“Janis!” interrupted another man sharply. “Personal attacks are not permitted, that’s non-negotiable. If you want to stay, be good.” He raised his head. “Are you here for the self-esteem group?”

Cochran understood that he was being addressed, and he shuffled forward uncertainly.

“Come in and sit down, Sid,” said Armentrout. To the group he said, “This is a new patient, Sid Cochran.”

Cochran broadened his stride, squinting as he walked through the brassy sunbeams to the nearest empty chair, which was at the end of the table, next to the angry young woman, with the windows to his right and slightly behind him.

“Hi, Sid,” said the man who had rebuked the angry woman; he was wearing a white coat like Armentrout’s, and seemed to be another doctor. “How are you?”

Cochran stared into the man’s youthful, smiling face. “I’m fine,” he said levelly.

“Ho ho!” put in Armentrout.

“Well, my name is Phil Muir,” the younger man went on, “and we’re here this evening to address problems of self-esteem. I was just saying that you have to love yourself before you can love someone else—”

The young woman interrupted: ‘And I was just saying, Tuck you, Doctor.’” She pointed at Armentrout. “To him. Ho…ho.’ You big fat fag.”

Cochran looked at her in alarm—then found himself suppressing a grin. Under the disordered thatch of blond hair her sunburned face had a character he could only think of as gamin, with a pointed chin and wide mouth and high cheekbones, and the humor lines under her eyes and down her cheek made her outburst seem childishly valiant, just tomboy bravura.

Hoping to prevent her from being ejected from the group, he laughed indulgently, as if at an off-color joke.

But when she whipped her head around toward him, he quailed. Her pupils were tiny black pinpricks and too much white was showing around her irises, and the skin was tight and mottled on her cheeks—

Abruptly an old man who a moment ago had seemed to be asleep hunched forward and hammered a frail fist onto the table. “The…rapist!” he roared as the pieces of a forgotten dominoes game spun across the tabletop. “That’s what it spells! Don’t pronounce it therapist! You’ve raped me with your needles!” He twisted in his chair and suddenly smacked both of his palms around Muir’s throat.

Muir was able to struggle to his feet with the old man’s weight on him, but he wasn’t succeeding in prying the hands free of his throat, and tendons were standing up like taut cables under his straining chin.

“Staff!” roared Armentrout, shoving back his chair and thrashing to his feet. “Code Green! Help, get a chemical here!”

The nursing-station door banged open and two nurses came sprinting out, and with the help of a couple of the patients who had leaped up from the table they pulled the old man off Muir and wrestled him face down to the floor.

“I’ll be snap-crackling pork chops with Jesus!” the old man panted, his cheek against the linoleum tiles. “You sons of bitches! Bunch of Heckle and Jeckles!”

Armentrout was standing beside the table. “Thorazine,” he told the charge nurse, “two hundred milligrams I.M., stat. Put him in four points in the QR till I tell you different.” Two uniformed security guards hurried in from the outer hallway; after taking in the scene, they slung their nightsticks and knelt on the old man so that the patients could return to their seats. The overhead fluorescent lights had come on at some point during the commotion, and as the doctors and patients sat down again the group seemed to be only now convening.

Cochran felt a touch on his shirt cuff, and he jumped when he realized that it was the woman Janis; but when he looked at her, she was smiling. She couldn’t, he thought, be as much as thirty years old.

“With his hands and feet tied down,” she said, “at the four points of a mattress, in the Quiet Room, he’ll be back to himself in no time.”

Cochran smiled back at her, touched that she had worded her remark so that he would understand the psychiatrist’s jargon without having to admit ignorance; though in fact he himself had spent time in four points in a QR back in 1990.

“Ah,” he said noncommittally. “I hope so.”

Two mental-health workers had rolled a red gurney into the room, and the old man was lifted onto it and strapped down. Cochran saw a nurse walking away with an emptied hypodermic needle.

Muir was kneading his throat. “And I think Janis—” He looked across the table at her and stopped. “Janis,” he said again; “maybe you’ll be good now.”

“I do apologize to everybody,” she said. She watched the gurney being wheeled out of the room. “I hope Mr. Regushi is going to be ail right…?”

“He just flipped out,” said Armentrout shortly, settling into his chair. “Very uncharacteristic.”

“We feel vulnerable, threatened,” said Muir hoarsely, “and we get defensive and lash out—when we don’t feel good about ourselves. We feel like bugs on a sidewalk, like somebody’s going to step on us.” He gave the patients a wincing smile. “Janis, I think your recurrent dream of the sun falling on you from out of the sky is indicative of this kind of thinking. How do you feel about that?”

Cochran braced himself, but the woman was just nodding seriously.

“I think that’s a valuable point,” she said. “I’ve always been frightened, of everything—jobs, bills, people. I’ve wasted my whole life being afraid. My only constellation is that I’m finally getting good, caring, state-of-the-art help now.”

“Well,” said Muir uncertainly. “That’s good, Janis.” He looked at Cochran. “I’ve, uh, looked at your file, Sid, and I think you’re afraid of being hurt. I noticed that when poor Mr. Regushi attacked me, you didn’t get up to help. I suspect that this is characteristic of you—that you’re afraid to reach out your hand to people.”

Cochran shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “Reach out your hand, you get it cut off, sometimes.”

Belatedly he noticed old Long John Beach at the other end of the table. The one-armed man bared his teeth, and a domino on the table in front of him quietly flipped over…as if, it seemed to Cochran, he had flipped it with a phantom hand at the end of his missing arm.

No one else had noticed the trick, and Cochran quickly looked back at Muir. Long John probably tied a hair to it, Cochran thought, and yanked on the hair with his real hand. He’s probably got a dozen such tricks. And he’s my roommate! And now I’ve probably offended him with my get-it-cut-off remark. Swell.

Muir had apparently followed Cochran’s brief glance. “Long John can’t remember how he lost his hand,” he said. “His whole arm, that is. But he’s okay with that, aren’t you, John?”

“In some gardens,” said Long John Beach in a thoughtful tone, as if commenting on what had been said before, “the beds are so hard that the flowers can’t even put down roots—they just run around—right out into the street.”

“The dwarves in Snow White” put in Janis, “came home every night—because their little house was fixed up so nicely. Snow White made them keep it just so.”

Cochran thought of his own little 1920s bungalow house in South Daly City, just a few miles down the…the 280 …from Pace Vineyards on the San Bruno Mountain slope; and he reflected with bitter amusement that these doctors would probably consider it “valuable” for him to “share” about it here, ideally with hitching breath and tears. Then all at once he felt his face turn cold with a sudden dew of sweat, as if he were about to get sick, for he realized that he wanted to talk about it, wanted to tell somebody, even these crazy strangers, about the tiny room Nina had fixed up in preparation for the arrival of the baby, about the teddy bear wallpaper, and the intercom walkie-talkie set they had bought so as to be able to heat the baby crying at night. Their whole lives had seemed to stretch brightly ahead of them; and in fact he and Nina had even bought adjoining plots at the nearby Woodlawn Cemetery, just on the other side of the highway—but now Nina’s ashes were in France, and Cochran would one day lie there alone.

Janis touched his hand then, and he impulsively took hold of her hand and squeezed it—but his vision was blurring with imminent tears, and Armentrout was probably staring at him, and the mark on his knuckles was itching intolerably; he released her hand and pushed his chair back and stood up.

“I’m very tired,” he managed to pronounce clearly. He walked out of the room with a careful, measured stride—not breathing, for he knew his next breath would come audibly, as a sob.

He blundered down the hall to his room and flung himself face-down onto the closer of the two beds, shaking with bewildered weeping, his hands and feet at the corners of the mattress as if he were in four points again himself.

“SHE’S DID,” said Muir to Armentrout. He was sipping coffee and still absently massaging his throat. The two of them were standing by the supervision-and-privilege blackboard in the nursing station, and Muir waved his coffee cup toward Janis Plumtree’s name, beside which was just the chalked notation SSF—supervised sharps and flames—which indicated that she, like most of the patients, was not to be entrusted with a lighter or scissors.

“Degenerate Incontinent…Dipsomaniac,” hazarded Armentrout. He wished the pay telephone in the lounge would stop ringing.

“No” said Muir with exaggerated patience. “Haven’t you read the new edition of the diagnostic manual? ‘Dissociative identity disorder.’ What we used to call MPD.”

Armentrout stared at the intern. Muir had been resentful and rebellious ever since they’d heard the news about the overweight bipolar girl Armentrout had treated and released last week; the obese teenager had apparently hanged herself the day after she had gone home.

“Plumtree doesn’t have multiple personality disorder,” said Armentrout. “Or your DID, either. And I don’t appreciate you running tests on her circadian rhythms, and giving her…zeitgebersl That silly watch that beeps all the time? You’re not her primary, I am. I’m on top of her—”

“The watch is a grounding technique,” interrupted Muir. “It’s to forcibly remind her that she’s here, and now, and safe, when flashbacks of the traumas that fragmented her personality forcibly intrude—”

“She’s not—”

“You can practically see the personalities shift in her! I think the patients have even caught on—did you hear Regushi mention Heckle and Jeckles? I think he was trying to say Jekyll and Hyde…though I can’t figure out why he seemed to resent her.”

“She’s not a multiple, damn it. She’s depressed and delusional, with obsessive-compulsive features—her constant demands to use the shower, the days-of-the-week underwear, the way she gargles mouthwash all the time—”

“Then why haven’t you got her on anything? Haloperidol, clomipramine?” Muir put down his coffee cup and crossed to the charge nurse’s desk.

To Armentrout’s alarm, the man picked up the binder of treatment plans and began flipping through it. “You don’t know enough to be second-guessing me, Philip,” Armentrout said sharply, stepping forward. “There are confidential details of her case—”

“A shot of atropine, after midnight tonight?” interrupted Muir, reading from Plumtree’s chart. He looked up, and hastily closed the binder. “What for, to dilate her pupils? Her pinpoint pupils are obviously just a conversion disorder, like hysterical blindness or paralysis! So is the erythema, her weird ‘sunburn,’ if you’ve noticed that. My God, atropine won’t get her pupils to normal, it’ll have ’em as wide as garbage disposals!”

Armentrout stared at him until Muir looked away. “I’m going to have to order you, Mister Muir, in my capacity as Chief of Psychiatry here, to cease this insubordination. You’re an intern—a student, in effect!—and you’re overstepping your place.” The pay telephone in the patients’ lounge was still ringing; in a louder voice he went on, “I’ve been practicing psychiatry for nineteen years, and I don’t need a partial recitation of the effects ofatropine, helpful though you no doubt meant to be. Shall I…dilate!…upon this matter?”

“No, sir,” said Muir, still looking away.

“How pleasant for both of us. Were you going home?”

“…Yes, sir.”

“Then I’ll see you—you’re not working here tomorrow, are you?”

“I’m at UCI in Orange all day tomorrow.”

“That’s what I thought. You’re going to miss our ice-cream social! Well, I’ll see you Thursday then. Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, right?”

Muir walked out of the nurses’ station without answering.

Armentrout looked after him for a moment, then made his way around the cluttered desks to the window and looked out into the TV lounge at the patients, who couldn’t be bothered to answer the telephone. Plumtree and Long John Beach had stayed at the” conference table after the foolish self-esteem group had broken up—Armentrout favored the quick “buying the pharm” attitude toward mental illness over the long, tormenting, dangerous routines of psychotherapy—and he saw that Sid Cochran had got over his sulk and rejoined them. They appeared to be playing cards.

You’ve got a busy day tomorrow, he told himself; coordinating the paperwork on the nurse anesthetist and the attending nurses, and then dealing with Plumtree after she recovers from the procedure. A busy day, and you’ll be lucky to get a few hours of sleep tonight. But tomorrow you may very well find out what happened on New Year’s Day, and learn how to make it happen again.

Atropine, Philip—you fool—is used for more than just dilating eye pupils; it also dries up saliva and nasal secretions, which is desirable in the administration of…of what the patients sometimes call “Edison Medicine.”

AT FIRST they had tried to play for cigarettes, but after Long John Beach had twice eaten the pot, snatching the Marlboros and shoving them into his mouth and chewing them up, filters and all, Cochran and Plumtree decided to play for imaginary money.

They were playing five-card stud, listlessly. To make up for the tendency of any sort of showing pair to automatically win in this short-handed game, they had declared all queens wild; and then Long John Beach had proposed that the suicide king be taken out of the deck.

“I second that emotion,” Janis had said.

“What’s the suicide king?” Cochran had asked.

The one-armed old man had pawed through the deck, and then flipped toward Cochran the King of Hearts; and Cochran saw that the stylized king was brandishing a sword blade that was certainly meant to be extending behind his head, but, with the token perspective of the stylized line drawing, could plausibly be viewed as being stuck right into his head.

“Sure,” Cochran had said nervously “Who needs him?”

Janis had just won a “multi-thousand-dollar” pot with two queens and a king, which according to the rules of this game gave her three kings; Cochran had folded when she was dealt a face-up queen, but Long John Beach idiotically stayed to the end with a pair of fives.

“Hadda keep her honest,” the old man mumbled.

“I almost dropped out when you raised on third street, John,” Janis told him. “I was afraid you’d caught a set of dukes.” Cochran realized that her doubletalk was a charitable pretense of having seen shrewdness in the old man’s haphazard play.

Of course Beach couldn’t shuffle, and Cochran had dealt that hand, so Janis gathered in the cards and shuffled them—expertly, five fast riffles low to the table so as not to flash any cards—and then spun out the three hole cards.

“Have you had your PCH scheduled yet?” she asked Cochran. “That’s probable cause hearing,” she added, “to authorize the hospital to keep you for longer than two weeks.”

“Longer than two weeks?” said Cochran. “Hell no, not even.” He had an eight down and an eight showing, and decided to keep raising unless a queen showed up. “No, I’m just in on a 51-50, seventy-two hours observation, and that’s up late tomorrow night, which I suppose means they’ll let me go Thursday morning. I don’t know why anybody bothered to have me transferred here from Norwalk. I’ve got a job to get back to, and Armentrout hasn’t even got me on any medications.”

“I bet a thousand smokes,” said Long John Beach, who was showing an ace. The tiny black eyes in his round face didn’t seem to have any sockets to sit in, and they were blinking rapidly.

“We’re playing for imaginary dollars now, John,” Janis told him, “you ate all the cigarettes, remember?” To Cochran she said, “Has he talked to you yet? Dr. Armentrout?”

“For a few minutes, in his office,” said Cochran. “She calls,” he told Long John Beach, “and I raise you a thousand.”

“She calls,” echoed the old man, still blinking.

“He’ll want to talk to you more,” Plumtree said thoughtfully. “And he’ll probably give you some kind of meds first. Do cooperate, tell him everything you know about—your problems, so you’ll be of no further use to him. He—he can keep anybody he wants, for as long as he wants.”

“I been here two and a half years,” said the old man. “My collapsed lung’s been okay for so long now it’s ready to collapse again.”

Collapsed brain, you mean, Cochran thought. But he stared out the window, and shivered at the way the spotlights on the picnic tables in the fenced-in courtyard only emphasized the total darkness of the parking lot beyond, and he thought about the wire mesh laminate that would prevent him from breaking that glass, if he were to try, and about the many heavy steel, doubly locked doors between himself and the real world of jobs and bars and highways and normal people.

The telephone was still impossibly ringing, but Cochran was again remembering the intercom he and Nina had bought to be able to hear their expected baby crying, and remembering too Long John Beach’s hollow echo of She calls, and he wasn’t tempted to answer it.

“Have you,” he asked Plumtree, “hadyour…PCH, yet?”

“Yes.” A rueful smile dimpled her cheeks. “A week ago, right in the conference room over yonder. You’re allowed to have two family or friends from outside, and my mom wouldn’t have come, so my roommate Cody came. Cody hasn’t got any respect for anybody.”

“Oh.” The one-armed old man had not called Cochran’s raise, but Cochran didn’t want to say anything more to him. “What did Cody do?”

Plumtree sighed. “I don’t know. She apparently hit the patient advocate—the man had a bloody lip, I recall that. I think Dr. Armentrout was teasing her. But!—the upshot!—of it all was that I’m now 53-53 with option to 53-58—the hospital was given a T-con on me, a temporary conservatorship, and I might be here for a year…or,” she said with a nod toward the distracted Long John Beach, “longer. I’m sure my waitress job, and my car, are history already.”

“That’s…I’m sorry to hear that, Janis,” Cochran said. “When I get out, I’ll see if there’s anything I can do—” He could feel his face turning red; the words sounded lame, but at this moment he really did intend to get her out of this hospital, away from the malignant doctor. He reached across the table and held her hand. “I’ll get you out of here, I swear.”

Plumtree shrugged and blinked away a glitter of tears, but her smile was steady as she looked into Cochran’s eyes “All places that the eye of heaven visits,’” she recited, “Are to a wise man ports and happy havens.’”

Cochran’s arms tingled, as if with returning circulation, and he laced his fingers through Plumtree’s. Those lines were from Richard II, from a speech his wife Nina had often quoted when she’d been feeling down, and he knew it well. The lines immediately following referred to being exiled by a king, and Cochran recalled that Plumtree had been committed for having claimed to have killed a king; so he skipped ahead to the end of the speech: “‘Suppose the singing birds musicians,”‘ he said unsteadily, “The grass whereon thou tread’st the presence strewed, the flowers fair ladies, and thy steps no more than a delightful measure or a dance—”

Long John Beach opened his mouth then, and his harsh exhalation was a phlegmy cacophony like the noise of a distant riot; and then, in a woman’s bitterly mocking voice, he finished the speech: “For gnarling sorrow hath less power to bite the man that mocks at it and sets it light.’”

—And then Cochran was standing on the linoleum floor several feet back from the table, staking violently, his chair skidding away behind him and colliding with the wall—the woman’s voice had been dead Nina’s voice, and when Cochran had whipped his head around he had seen sitting beside him a massive figure wearing a wooden mask, and the golden eyes that stared at him out of the carved eyeholes had had horizontal pupils, like a goat’s—and Cochran had instantly lashed out in an irrational terror-reflex and driven his right fist with all his strength into the center of the mask.

But it was Long John Beach who now rolled across the floor off of his overturned chair, blood spraying from his flattened nose and spattering and pooling on the gleaming linoleum.

Plumtree was out of her own chair, and she ran around the table to kneel by the old man—but not to help him; she drew her fist up by her ear and then punched it down hard onto a puddle of the blood on the floor. The crack of the impact momentarily tightened Cochran’s scalp with sympathetic shock.

“Jesus!” came a hoarse shout from the nurses’ station. “Staff! Code fucking Green, need a takedown!”

Plumtree had time only to meet Cochran’s frightened gaze and smile before the hallway doors banged open and an upright mattress was rushed into the room, carried by two of the security guards; then the guards had used it to knock Plumtree over backward on the floor, and had jumped onto it to hold her down.

“She,” choked Cochran, “she didn’t hit him, I did!”

Armentrout was hurrying in, and he glanced angrily at Cochran. “Look at her,” he snapped.

Plumtree’s bloody fist was thrashing tree ot the mattress for a moment, then one of the guards had grabbed her wrist and pressed her hand to the floor.

“And what hand did you hit him with?” Armentrout asked sarcastically.

Cochran held out the back of his right hand and saw, with a sudden chill in his belly but no conscious awareness of surprise, that the skin of his knuckles was smooth and unbroken, the old ivy-leaf discoloration not distended by any swelling at all.

“No chemicals for her” called Armentrout sharply to the charge nurse, who had sprinted into the room with a hypodermic needle. “Not tonight, she’s, uh, due for a dose of atropine in a couple of hours. Don’t argue with me! Put her in four points in the QR for tonight, with five-minute checks.”

One of the security guards looked up at him desperately. “You’re not gonna sedate her?” he asked, rocking on the mattress as he held down Plumtree’s spasming body.

“I’mthe one who hit the old man!” shouted Cochran. “She didn’t do it, I did!”

“You’ve bought yourself a meds program,” Armentrout told him, speaking in a conversational tone but very fast, “with this…display of childish gallantry. No,” he called to the guard. “PCP tactics. You’re going to have to just wrestle her in there.”

Terrific,” the man muttered. “Get hold of her other arm, Stan, and I’ll get this busted hand in a hard come-along.”

“Watch she don’t bite,” cautioned his partner, who was groping under the mattress. “I got her hair too, but she’s in a mood to tear it right out of her scalp.”

The guards dragged Plumtree to her feet. Her teeth were bared and her eyes were squinting slits, but the come-along hold on her wounded hand was effective—when the guard who held it rotated her wrist even slightly, her knees sagged and her mouth went slack. The three of them shuffled carefully out of the room. The charge nurse had got Long John Beach into a chair, where he sat with his face hanging between his knees and dripping blood rapidly onto the floor, while she talked into a telephone on the counter.

“Do you remember the way to your room?” Armentrout asked Cochran. “Good,” he said when Cochran nodded, “go there and go to sleep. Your roommate is apparently going to be a bit late coming in.”

Cochran hesitated, not looking the doctor in the eye—his first impulse had been to tell Armentrout that he had just had a recurrence of the hallucination that had landed him in the state’s custody, but now he was glad that Armentrout hadn’t let him speak. Any shakiness he exhibited now would be considered just a response to this noisy crisis.

For his self-respect, though, he did permit himself to say, just before turning obediently away toward the hall, “I swear, on the ashes of my wife and unborn child, I’m the one that hit him.”

“I will heal you, Sid,” he heard the doctor say tightly behind him. “That’s a promise.”

THE DOOR to the Quiet Room was open, and Cochran waited until the yawning psych tech had glanced in and then walked away down the hall before he stepped out of his own room and tiptoed to the open door. It would be five minutes before the man would be back to look in on Plumtree again.

She was lying face-up on a mattress in the otherwise empty room; and she rolled her head over to look at him when he appeared in the doorway.

“Mr. Cochran,” she said wearily, “of the dead wife. Rah rah fucking rah. You did hit him, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” said Cochran. “I had to sneak in here and thank you for taking the blame, but I—I can’t let you do it. I tried to tell Armentrout tonight what really happened; I’ll make him…get it, tomorrow. Even though it’ll probably mean I get a—” What did she call it, he thought nervously, the highway through Laguna and Newport, “—a PCH. My God, Janis, your poor hand! You shouldn’t have done that, not that I don’t—not that I’m not grateful—I do.” I’m not making sense, he thought. But how can they leave her tied down on the floor like this? “But I meant what I said, earlier—even if they keep me for two weeks, I’ll get you out of here one way or another. I promise.”

“I punched the floor, didn’t I? For you. Shit. You’d better get me out, I hope you can pull strings and you’re not just a, like a burger-flipper somewhere. And see you do tell ‘em what really happened—first thing tomorrow, hear? I’ve got troubles enough, in the name of the Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost. They’re gonna give me some kind of shot here in a couple of hours, Christ knows what for.” Her mouth was working, and he wondered if she was about to start crying. “This is just like twit Janis, to fall for some dorky tuna in the nut hatch.” She opened her mouth and licked her lower lip, and flexed her arms uselessly against the restraints. “You want to have been of some use on Earth? Scratch my chin for me, it’s itching like to drive me…sane.”

Cochran stepped into the room and knelt by her head, and the lights dimmed for a moment. He reached out, with his trembling left hand, and gently drew his fingernails over the side of her chin she had apparently been trying to reach with her tongue.

She surprised him by lifting up her head and kissing his palm. “I was sorry to hear about your wife’s death,” she whispered. “How long were you married?”

“…Nearly five years,” Cochran said. He had stopped scratching her chin, though his fingertips were still on her cheek.

“How did you meet her?”

“She…fell down some steps, and I caught her.” He pulled his hand back selfconsciously. “I’m a cellarman at a vineyard up in San Mateo County, by Daly City, Pace Vineyards, and she was visiting from France, touring all the Bay Area vineyards. Her family’s in the wine business in the Bas Médoc—the Leon family, they’ve been there since the Middle Ages. And she was looking at the casks of Zinfandel, in fact she was just in the act of tasting the young vintage with a tâte-vin, thing like a ladle, and at that moment the big earthquake of ’89 hit—5:04 in the afternoon—and she fell down the steps.”

“And you caught her,” Plumtree said softly. “I remember that earthquake. Poor Sid.”

“He,” exhaled Cochran, finally nerving himself up to broach the point of this midnight visit, “the old one-armed man, he—I thought he talked with her voice, there, when we were quoting the Shakespeare. My dead wife’s voice. And then he looked like a, a man who chased me in Paris. That’s why I hit him, it was just a shocked reflex. But it was her voice, it was her—unless I’m a whole lot crazier than I even thought.”

“I’m sure it was her. He can channel dead people like a vacuum cleaner, and you were sitting right by him.” She glanced at the open doorway, and then back at Cochran. “You’d better go. I’m not supposed to have visitors here.”

He managed to nod and stand up, though he was even more disoriented now than he’d been when he’d walked in. As he turned toward the door, she said quietly behind him, “I love you, Sid.”

He hesitated, shocked to realize that he wanted to say that he loved her too. It wasn’t possible, after all: he had met this woman only a few hours ago, and she did seem to be some genuine variety of crazy—though that only seemed to be something the two of them shared in common, actually—and in any case Nina had been dead for only ten days. And her…ghost might be…

He forced that thought away, for now.

“My friends call me Scant,” he said, without turning around; then, though he was aching to say something more, he made do with muttering, “I’m as crazy as you are,” and hurried out of the room.

CHAPTER FOUR

All sorts of people who are not in the least degree worthy of the pet, are always turning up” said Miss Pross. “When you began it—”

“I began it, Miss Pross?”

“Didn’t you? Who brought her father to life?”

—Charles Dickens,

A Tale of Two Cities

AT dawn they awoke Plumtree by sticking another hypodermic needle into the vein on the inside of her elbow—this shot contained a potent mix of Versed and Valium, and she had only ten bewildered seconds to curse and swear at the two nurses and Armentrout, and strain uselessly against the damp canvas straps of the four-point restraints, before she collapsed into unconsciousness. After the nurses unstrapped the rubber tourniquet from around her biceps and unbuckled the restraints, Armentrout crouched beside her and held her swollen hand in both of his, rolling the bones under his thumbs and prodding between the knuckles with his fingertips; then gently, almost tenderly, he lifted the young woman’s limp body onto the gurney.

The ECT clinic was at the other end of the building, and Armentrout was pleased to see that the hallway lights didn’t dim as Plumtree was wheeled along under them. One of the nurses striding alongside was holding a black rubber Ambu face mask over Plumtree’s nose and mouth and rhythmically squeezing the attached black bag to assist the comatose woman’s weakened breathing.

The nurse anesthetist who was waiting for them in the fluorescent-lit treatment room was a bearded young man Armentrout had worked with many times before, and the man leaned back against a counter and frankly stared as the nurses unzipped Plumtree’s jeans and pulled them down past her hips and then unbuttoned her blouse and lifted her up into a sitting position to tug her limp arms back and pull the blouse free; Armentrout allowed himself only a glimpse—for now—of Plumtree’s pale breasts when the nurses removed her bra. When they had laid her back down, positioning her head carefully on the perforated plastic cushion, the anesthetist stepped forward.

“What happened to her hand?” the man asked as he looped a Velcro blood-pressure cuff around her left upper arm and then inserted an Intercath needle into the back of her bruised right hand and taped it down. The blush of red blood that backed up in the IV tube cleared instantly when he opened the valve to full flow.

“She punched a guy,” said Armentrout shortly. “Just soft-tissue damage to her hand, no crepitation.”

“I hope he’s not pissed off—very shortly now she won’t remember doing it.” He taped onto Plumtree’s right forefinger the pulse oxymeter that would shine a white light through her fingertip and monitor her oxygen level by changes in the ruby red color of her flesh.

“This guy can’t remember his own name,” absently remarked the nurse who was peeling the backs off of the wire-tethered plastic disks that were the heart-monitor EKG electrodes. She began pressing the disks sticky-side-down onto Plumtree’s skin at each shoulder and hip and then in a cascade pattern around Plumtree’s left breast.

“Get her on the ventilator,” snapped Armentrout.

The anesthetist obediently pried open Plumtree’s mouth and pushed in past her teeth the steel shaft of a laryngoscope that was guiding a balloon-tipped plastic tube into her throat; and when he had got the tube far down her trachea and inflated the cuff to get an occlusive seal, the ventilator began chugging and sighing as it forced oxygen in and out of her lungs.

“And inflate the blood-pressure cuff,” Armentrout said; “it’s time to get the succinylcholine running.” Armentrout was hunched over Plumtree’s head now, ruffling the thatch of her blond hair and at measured intervals poking down into her scalp the tiny needles of the EEG electrodes that would measure her brain-wave activity.

Plumtree’s semi-nude body shivered under the monitor wires as the succinylcholine hit, then relaxed totally—Armentrout knew that the motor end plates of all of her voluntary muscle fibers had now subsided in depolarization, and only the insistence of the ventilator was even keeping her lungs flexing.

A nurse now leaned over the unconscious woman to fit a bifurcated foam-rubber bite block around the endotrachial tube and between the teeth of Plumtree’s upper and lower jaws.

Finally Armentrout smeared conducting jelly on the steel disks that would deliver the voltage, and he carefully stuck one onto each of Plumtree’s temples—this would be a full bilateral square wave procedure, not one of the wishy-washy unilateral with one of the disks stuck onto the forehead. Armentrout knew it wouldn’t damage her—he had undergone a series of full bilateral-wave ECTs himself, when he had been just seventeen years old, after his mother’s death.

“Low voltage tracing,” said the nurse who was watching the EEG monitor; “huh!—with some intermittent sleep spindles at about fourteen hertz.”

“That’s to be expected,” said Armentrout, not looking at the anesthetist. “You’ll see some biphasics, too, if we make a loud noise.” He looked at his watch—it had been two full minutes since the muscle-disabling succinylcholine had gone coursing down the IV tube. “Clear!” he called, and everybody stepped back from Plumtree’s electrode-studded body. For a moment Armentrout let his eyes play over her breasts, the exposed nipples erect in the chilly air of the treatment room, and the wisp of blond pubic hair curling above the elastic waistband of her TUESDAY-stitched panties, and then he twisted the dial on the plastic monitor box to two hundred and fifty joules, took a deep breath, and flipped the toggle switch.

Instantly Plumtree’s left hand twitched and clenched in a fist, for the tight constriction of the blood-pressure cuff had effectively prevented the neuromuscular blocking drug from getting into her forearm.

“Total chaos,” calmly said the nurse who was watching the EEG monitor. Plumtree’s brain waves on the screen were a forest of tight, wildly disordered peaks. “A ten on the Richter scale.”

Then, slowly, the middle finger of Plumtree’s tight-clenched left hand unfolded and extended out straight.

The anesthetist noticed it and laughed. “She’s flipping you off, Richard,” he told Armentrout. “I’ve never seen that happen before.”

Armentrout kept his face impassive, but his belly had gone cold and his heart was knocking in his chest. I can’t believe that’s not involuntary, he thought—but—who the hell are you, girl?

“Me either,” he said levelly.

COCHRAN PUT on yesterday’s clothes when he got out of bed—Long John Beach was in the other bed now, black-eyed and snoring like a horse behind a metal brace taped to his nose, and Cochran was careful not to wake him—but when he had sneaked out of the room he got one of the psych techs to let him rummage for fresh clothes in “the boutique,” a closet full of donated clothing; and twenty minutes after he had got a nurse to unlock the shower room and give him a disposable Bic razor, he shambled into the windowless cafeteria, freshly bathed and shaved and with his wet hair combed down flat for the first time in twenty-four hours, wearing oversized brown-corduroy bell-bottom trousers and a T-shirt with A CONNECTICUT PANSY IN KING ARTHUR’S SHORTS lettered on it. All the other shirts had been too narrow for his shoulders or were women’s blouses that buttoned right-over-left. He didn’t think the crazy people, or even the staff, would read the lettering, and he nervously hoped Janis Plumtree might be able to find it funny.

But when he took a tray and got into the line for oatmeal and little square milk cartons and individual-size boxes of cereal, he looked around the tables and saw that Plumtree wasn’t in the cafeteria.

He carried his tray to an unoccupied table and sat down, and began eating his cornflakes right out of the box, like Crackerjacks, ignoring the little carton of milk. He was breathing shallowly, and dropping as many cornflakes onto his lap as he got into his mouth.

He was wondering just how bad an infraction it was to break the nose of another patient; and he was giddily alarmed at his determination, even stronger this morning than it had been last night, to keep his promise to Janis Plumtree and get the true story across. Eventually Armentrout would be on the ward, and Long John Beach would be up to corroborate the facts. Cochran might very well even have to admit to having had another hallucination, and he supposed that would surely guarantee him a “PCH,” an unfavorable one—which would mean not being able to see the real PCH, Pacific Coast Highway, for at least two weeks—but Cochran would be able, finally, to…take the blame.

And she loves me, he thought as he licked his trembling finger to get the last crumbs out of the corn flakes box; or she did last night; or she said she did last night. I will take her out of this place.

But neither Plumtree nor Armentrout appeared in the cafeteria, and just as Cochran was reluctantly getting up to investigate the TV lounge, and brushing cornflake fragments off the crotch of his ludicrous corduroy pants, a young woman in a white lab coat came striding up to his table.

“Sid Cochran?” she said brightly. “Hi, I’m Tammy Eddy, the occupational therapist, and if you’re free I’d like to get your dexterity tests out of the way. Kindergarten stuff, really—the patients are always asking me if I majored in basket-weaving!”

Cochran managed to return her smile, though her cheer seemed as perfunctory to him this morning as the HAVE A NICE DAY admonition printed on the “moist tow-elette” package on his tray, and she didn’t notice his shirt.

He opened his mouth to tell her that he had something important to say to Dr. Armentrout first—but instead relaxed and said, “Okay.”

“Let’s go to the conference room, shall we?”

Maybe we’ll meet him on the way, Cochran told himself defensively.

BUT THERE was no one in the sunny TV lounge as the young occupational therapist led him through it—Cochran noticed that the blood had been cleaned up, and the floor was a glassy plane again—and she had to fetch out her keys and unlock the conference room, for no one had been in it yet today.

“Sit down, Sid,” the woman said, waving at a chair by the table. “Can you find a patch of clear space there? Good, yeah, that’ll do. Today you’re going to get a lesson in—” she had been moving things on a shelf over the microwave oven, and now turned around and laid on the table in front of him two five-inch square pieces of blue vinyl with holes around the edges, and a blunt white plastic yarn needle and a length of orange yarn. “Can you guess?”

“Knitting,” said Cochran carefully, abruptly reminded of the book he’d read on the flight home from Paris three days ago.

“That’s close. Stitching. This is called the Allen Cognitive Levels test, and it’s just me showing you different ways to sew these two vinyl squares together. Here, the needle’s already threaded—you go ahead and sew them together any way you like.”

Cochran patiently laced the things together as if they were the front and back covers of a spiral-bound book, and when he was done she beamed and told him that he’d just figured out the “whipstitch” all on his own. She took back the squares and unlaced them and began showing him a different stitch that involved skipping holes and then coming back around to them, but though his fingers followed her directions, his mind was on the book he’d read on the plane.

The disquieting thing was that he had read Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities before; and though that had been a long time ago, he had eventually become aware that this book he was reading in the airplane seat by the glow of the tiny overhead spotlight—a Penguin Classics paperback, wedged between his cigarettes and the several little airline bottles of Wild Turkey bourbon—was a different text.

The variances hadn’t been obvious at first, for he’d only been able to read the book fitfully, especially the Parisian scenes; he had still been shaky from his encounter the day before—in the ancient narrow streets south of the river Seine, by Notre Dame cathedral, where fragrant lamb koftes turned on spits in the open windows of Lebanese restaurants—with the man who had called himself Mondard…and who had shortly stopped seeming to be a man, to be a human being at all…

Cochran forced himself to concentrate on pushing the foolish plastic needle through the holes in the vinyl—not knitting, stitching—

The woman in the book had been knitting, and stitching, weaving into her fabrics the names of men who were to die on the guillotine. He’d remembered her name as having been something like Madame Laphroaig, but in this text all the French revolutionaries called her Ariachne—a combination of the names Arachne and Ariadne, given to her because she was always knitting and was married to the “bull-necked” man who owned the wineshop. The notes in the back of the book explained that it was a nom de guerre of the revolution, like the name Jacques that was adopted by all the men. Cochran recalled that during the French Revolution they had even renamed all the calendar months; the only one he could remember was Thermidor, and he wondered what the others could have been. Fricassee? Jambalaya? Chowder?

He smiled now at the thought; and he tried to pay attention to the occupational therapist’s cheery explanation of how to do a “single cordovan” stitch, and not to think about the book.

But he realized now that the story he’d read on the airplane must have started to diverge from the remembered text very early on. In the scene in the Old Bailey courthouse in London, for example, in which the Frenchman Charles Darnay was on trial for treason, Cochran seemed to remember having read that the court bar was strewn with herbs and sprinkled with vinegar, an apparently routine precaution against “gaol” air…but in this text the bar was twined in living ivy, and splashed liberally with red wine.

And just because of the rhyme he had remembered “Cly the spy,” whose death had been a hoax and whose coffin had proved to contain only paving stones—but he had remembered Cly as a man, and certainly the name had not been short for Clytemnestra.

His hand shook as he pushed the needle through the holes. In the book he’d read on the plane, Madame Ariachne’s cloth had flexed and shivered as she had forced each new, resisting name into the fabric.

“You’re not, quite getting the hang of that one, are you?” said Tammy Eddy.

Cochran looked up at her. “It’s hard,” he said.

“Hard to remember what I said?”

“Hard to remember anything at all. But I can do it.”

He thought of the scene at the end of the book as he had read it years ago, in which the dissolute Englishman Sidney Carton redeemed himself by sneaking into the Conciergerie prison to switch places with his virtuous double, the Frenchman Charles Darnay who was condemned to die the next morning; and then Cochran made himself remember the scene as he had read it on the airplane three days ago—

In that variant version it had been a woman who furtively unlocked the cell door—the woman Clytemnestra, who was somehow the classical Greek Clytemnestra from Aeschylus’ Oresteia, come to atone for having killed the high king Agamemnon.

And in this crazy version the prisoner was a woman too, though still the visitor’s mirror-image double; and when she demanded to know the reason for this visit, this exchange of places, Clytemnestra had said, “Forgive me. Madame has forgotten that we agreed to play in partnership this evening.”

Tammy Eddy was speaking sharply to him—and he realized that she had been repeating herself for several seconds. He looked up at her, and saw that she had retreated to the door and pulled it open. “Put,” she said, obviously not for the first time, “the needle…down, Sid.”

“Sorry. Sure.” He opened his fingers and the needle dropped to the tabletop. “I wasn’t listening.” He looked at the vinyl squares and saw that he had stitched them together and then with the blunt needle torn a hole in the center of each square. “I guess I wrecked your…your test,” he said lamely. And no doubt failed it, he thought. She’ll probably testify at my PCH.

“They’re not expensive. That’ll be all for today, Sid.” She stepped back a yard into the TV lounge as he pushed his chair back and sidled around the table to the door. “What,” she asked him as he walked past her toward the cafeteria, “were you making, there at the end?”

He stopped for a moment but didn’t look back at her. “Oh, nothing,” he said over his shoulder. ‘T just got bored and…distracted.”

Perhaps she nodded or smiled or frowned—he kept his eyes on the cafeteria door as he strode forward. He might or might not tell Armentrout, but would certainly not tell this woman, that he had been unthinkingly making a frail mask in which to face the mask that the big bull-headed man would be wearing.

Probably because of his having hit Long John Beach the night before, the knuckles of his right hand stung, and he alternately made a fist and stretched his fingers as he walked through the cafeteria and back out into the lounge without having seen Plumtree or Armentrout—Tammy Eddy was nowhere to be seen now either—and then started down the hall, past the Dutch door of the meds room, to the wing of patient rooms.

At every corner and intersection of hall there was a convex mirror attached to the ceiling, so that anyone walking through the unit could see around a corner before actually stepping around it. At L-corners the mirror was a triangular eighth of a globe wedged up in the corner, and at four-way crossings it was a full half-globe set in the middle of the ceiling. Cochran didn’t like the things—they seemed to be whole spheres, only part-way intruded here and there through temporary violations of the architecture, like chrome eyes peering down curiously into the maze of hallways, and he couldn’t shake the irrational dread of rounding a turn and seeing two of them in the wall ahead of him, golden for once instead of silver, with a single horizontal black line across each of them—but he did reluctantly glance at a couple of them to get an advance look around corners on the way to Plumtree’s room.

But when he finally arrived at her room he saw that her door, in violation of the daytime rules, was closed. He shuffled up to it anyway, intending to knock, and then became aware of Plumtree speaking quietly inside; he couldn’t hear what she said, but it was followed by Armentrout’s voice saying, “So which one of you was it that took the shock?”

The question meant nothing to Cochran, and he was hesitant about interrupting a doctor-and-patient therapy session; and after a few moments of indecisive shuffling, and raising his hand and then lowering it, he let his shoulders slump and turned away and plodded back down the hall toward the TV lounge, defeatedly aware of the wide cuffs of his bell-bottom trousers flapping around his bare ankles.

“SOMEBODY WENT flatline ten seconds after the shock,” Armentrout went on when Plumtree didn’t immediately answer. “We dragged the Waterloo cart into the treatment room, but your heart started up again before we had to put the paddles on you.” He was smiling, but he knew that he was still shaky about the incident, for he hadn’t meant to call it a “Waterloo cart” just now. Waterloo was the brand name of the thing, but it was known as a crash cart, or a cardiac defibrillator; the incident would probably have been his Waterloo, though, as soon as the idealistic Philip Muir heard about it, if Plumtree had died undergoing electroconvulsive therapy with forged permissions while just on a temporary conservatorship. Muir was surely going to be angry anyway, for ECT was not a treatment indicated for multiple personality disorder—or dissociative identity disorder, as Muir would trendily say.

And Armentrout couldn’t pretend anymore that he didn’t know she was a multiple—the ECT had separated out the personalities like a hammer, breaking a piece of shale into distinct, individual hard slabs. Armentrout could have wished that it was a little less obvious, in fact; but perhaps the personalities would blend back together a little, before Muir saw her tomorrow.

“Valerie,” said the woman in the bed. “She always takes intolerable situations. It caught Cody by surprise.”

“And who are you?”

“I’m Janis.” She smiled at him, and in the dim lamplight her pupils didn’t seem notably dilated or constricted now.

“How many of you are there?”

“I really don’t know, Doctor. Some aren’t very developed, or exist just for one purpose…like the one called—what does he call himself?—’the foul fiend Flibbertigibbet!’ What a name! He got it…from Shakespeare, according to him. Is there a play called Leah? He claims to have been a Shakespearean actor. I—don’t want to talk about him, he’s who we’ve brought up when we’ve had to fight, to defend our life. He makes our teeth hurt like we’ve got braces on, and he gives us nosebleeds. I don’t want to talk about him.” She shivered, and then smiled wryly. “We’re like the little cottage full of dwarves in Snow White—each of us with a job to do, while the poisoned girl sleeps. I used to sign my high-school papers ‘Snowy Eve White’ sometimes.”

“Snow White, Eve White—you’ve seen the movie The Three Faces of Eve? Or read the book?”

She shook her head. “No, I’ve never heard of it.”

“Hmm. I bet. And one of you is a man?”

She blinked—and Armentrout could feel the hairs standing up on his arms, for the woman’s face changed abruptly, as the muscles under the skin realigned themselves; her mouth seemed wider now, and her eyes narrower.

“Valerie says you had all my clothes off,” she said in a flat voice. “I’d be pissed about that if I didn’t know you’re a total queer. What did you hit me with?”

“Cody,” said Armentrout in cautious greeting, suddenly wishing Plumtree had been put back in restraints. She had recovered from the succinylcholine amazingly fast, and she didn’t seem to be dopy and blurry, as patients recovering from ECT generally were for at least the rest of the day.

“You’re the one,” he went on, “speaking of hitting, who hit Long John Beach last night, aren’t you, Cody?”

“I don’t know. Probably.” Plumtree’s forehead was dewed with sweat, and she was squinting. “Was this while I had my clothes off? He probably asked for it, he’s got a frisky spirit hand to go with the flesh-and-blood one. And I saw that Cockface guy’s hand—I don’t like his birthmark. A lot of tricky hands around here, and this place is a stinking flop.”

She was breathing through her open mouth, and she looked pale. Altogether she was acting like someone with a bad hangover, and it occurred to Armentrout that the Janis personality had been unimpaired because it had been Cody who had taken the shock treatment. Cody was the one who had given him the finger. Ten seconds had gone by before the Valerie personality, the one who took “intolerable situations,” had taken over. He leaned forward to look at Plumtree’s face, and he saw that her pupils were as tiny as pores. She definitely looked dopy and blurry now.

“What we’re going to try to do is achieve isolation, Cody,” he said. “We’ll decide which personality is most socially viable, and then bring that one forward and…cauterize the others off.” This was hardly a description of orthodox therapy, but he wanted to draw a reaction from her. She didn’t seem to be listening, though.

“How many of you are there, Cody?” Armentrout went on. “I’ve met you and Janis, that I know of, and I’ve heard about Valerie.”

“God, I am still in the psych hospital, aren’t I?” she mumbled, rubbing her eyes. “I suppose a cold beer is out of the question. Shit. But no hair of that dog, thank you—that was the goddamn Wolfman.”

“That was ECT,” Armentrout said, leaning back in the chair beside the bed and smiling at her, “electroconvulsive therapy—shock treatment, Edison Medicine.” He smiled reminiscently and said, “Generally a course of treatment is six or twelve shock sessions, three a week.”

All the worldly weariness disappeared trom her lace, and for a moment Armentrout thought the Cody personality had gone away and been replaced by a little girl, possibly the core child; but when she spoke it was in response to what he had just said, so it was probably still Cody, a Cody for once frightened out of her sardonic pose.

She said, “Again? You want to do that to me again?”

A genuine reaction at last! “At this point I’m undecided.” Armentrout’s heart was beating rapidly, and a smile of triumph kept twitching at his lips. “I’ll make up my mind after our conference later today.”

“Don’t you need…my permission, to do that?”

“One of you signed it,” he said with a shrug. She would probably believe that, even if shown the bogus signature. “How many of you are there?”

“Oh, sweet Jesus, there’s a lot of kids on the bus,” she said wearily, leaning back against the pillows and closing her eyes, “all singing ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat,’ and crying, with a smashed-up crazy man holding a gun on the driver.”

Armentrout recognized the image—it was from the end of the Clint Eastwood movie Dirty Harry, when the battered and hotly pursued serial killer hijacked a schoolbus full of children.

“Where is the…the ‘foul fiend Flibbertigibbet’ sitting?”

Plumtree’s eyes were still closed—her eyelids were as wrinkled and pale as paper wrappers bluntly accordioned off drinking straws—but she managed to put derisive impatience into the shake of her head. “He isn’t sitting,” she said.

Then she was snoring through her open mouth. Armentrout reached out and switched off the lamp, then got up and opened the door to the hallway.

His belly felt hollow with anticipation as he pulled the door closed behind him—We’ll surely get some tasty therapy done, he told himself smugly, in our therapy session at three.

AN HOUR after lunch Cochran stood in the fenced-off picnic yard, smoking his third-to-last Marlboro, which the charge nurse had lit for him with her closely guarded Bic lighter when she had let the patients out here for the hourly, smoke break. The afternoon sunlight shone brightly on the expanse of asphalt and the distant palm trees outside the iron-bar fence, and Cochran was squinting between the bars at two men in the parking lot who were using jumper cables to try to start a car, and he was envying them their trivial problems.

Long John Beach was leaning on the fence a couple of yards to Cochran’s right, gingerly scratching the corner of one swollen eye under the silvery nose brace. Cochran remembered the old man eating nine cigarettes last night, and he tried to work up some resentment over it; and then he tried to be grateful that the one-armed lunatic seemed to have no memory of, nor even any interest in, how his nose had been broken; but these were just frail and momentary distractions.

Cochran threw the cigarette down and stepped on it. “Nina,” he said, loud enough for Long John Beach to hear but speaking out toward the parking lot, “can you hear me?”

The old man had jumped, and was now craning his neck around to peer across the sunny lot at the men huddled under the shade of the car hood. “You’ll have to shout,” he said. “Hey, was I snoring real bad last night? I got coughing when I woke up, thought I’d cough my whole spirit out on the floor like a big snake.”

Cochran closed his eyes. “I was talking to my wife,” he told the old man. “She’s dead. Can you…hear her?” After a moment he looked over at him. “Oh—” Long. John Beach shrugged expansively. “Maybe.”

Cochran made himself concentrate on her bitter voice as he had heard it last night.

“Nina,” he answered her now, as awkwardly as a long-lapsed Catholic in the confessional; he was light-headed and sweating, and he had to look out through the fence again in order to speak. “Whatever happened, whatever—I love you, and I miss you terribly. Look, goddammit, I’ve lost my mind over it! And—Jesus, I’m sorry. Of course you were right about the Pace Chardonnays—” He was talking rapidly now, shaking his head. “—they are too loud and insistent, and they do dominate a’meal. Show-off wines, made to win at blind tastings, you’re right. I’m sorry I called your family’s wines flinty and thin. Please tell me that it wasn’t that silly argument, at the New Year’s Eve thing, that—but if I am to blame—”

He paused; then glanced sideways at his attentive companion. Apparently aware that some response was expected of him, Long John Beach shuffled his feet and blinked his blackened eyes. “Well…1 was never much of a wine man,” the old man said apologetically. “I just ate smokes.”

Cochran was clinging to a description of lunatics a friend had once quoted to him—One day nothing new came into their heads—because lately he himself seemed to be able to count on at least several appalling revelations every day.

“Think not the King did banish thee,’” he said unsteadily, quoting the lines he’d skipped last night, “‘but thou the King.”‘

Long John Beach opened his mouth, and the voice that came out was not his own, but neither was it Nina’s; and it was so strained that Cochran couldn’t guess its gender. “The bay trees in our country are all withered, and meteors fright the fixed stars of heaven,’” the voice said, clearly quoting something. “These signs forerun the death or fall of kings.””

“Who are you?” Cochran whispered.

‘I am bastard begot,”’ the eerie voice droned on, perhaps in answer, “‘bastard instructed, bastard in mind, bastard in valor, in everything illegitimate.’”

Cochran was dizzy, and all at once but with no perceptible shift the sunlight seemed brassy amber, and the air was clotted and hard to push through his throat. “Where is my wife?” he rasped.

‘“Her bed is India; there she lies, a pearl.”‘

“Wh—India? Are you—talking to me? Please, what do you mean—” He stopped, for he realized that he was looking up at Long John Beach, and the base of his spine stung. He had abruptly sat down on the pavement beside one of the picnic tables.

There had been a startled shout from out in the parking lot, and the power lines were swinging gently far overhead. When Cochran peered out at the men, he saw that the car hood had fallen onto one of them; the man was rubbing his head now and cussing at his companion, who was laughing.

“Whoa!” said Long John Beach, also laughing. “Did you feel that one? Or are you just making yourself at home?”

Cochran understood that there had been an earthquake; and, looking up at the power lines and the leaves on the banana tree in the courtyard, he gathered that it was over. The sunlight was bright again, and the jacaranda-scented breeze was cold in his sweaty hair.

He got to his feet, rubbing the seat of his corduroy pants. “I suppose you’ve got nothing more to say,” he told Long John Beach angrily.

The one-armed man shrugged. “Like I say, I was never a wine man.”

The charge nurse was standing in the lounge doorway, waving. The smoking break was apparently ended.

Cochran turned to trudge back to the building. “You don’t know what you’ve been missing,” he said.

When the two of them had shuffled up to the door, the nurse said, “Dr. Armentrout wants to see you.”

“Good,” said Cochran stoically. “I want to talk to him.”

“Not you,” the nurse said. “Him.” She nodded toward the one-armed old man.

Long John Beach was nodding. “For the Plumtree girl,” he said. “He wants me on the horn. On the blower.”

“The usual thing,” said the nurse in obvious agreement as she flapped her hands to shoo the two men inside.

ARMENTROUT KNEW it wasn’t Cody that knocked on his office door at three, because when he peeked out through the reinforced glass panel he saw that Plumtree had walked down the hall and was standing comfortably; Cody would have needed the wheelchair he had told the nurses to have ready.

He unlocked the door and pulled it open. “Come in…Janis?”

“Yes.”

“Sit down,” he told her. “Over on the couch there, you want to relax.”

The tape recorder inside the Faraday cage in the desk wag rolling, and the telephone receiver was lying on the desk, with Long John Beach locked into the conference room on the other side of the clinic, listening in on the extension—Armentrout was psychically protected, masked. Beside the receiver on the desk was the box that contained the twenty Lombardy Zeroth tarot cards, along with a pack of Gudang Garam clove-flavored cigarettes and a box of strawberry flavor-straws, so he was ready to snip off and consume at least a couple of Plumtree’s supernumerary personalities—escort some of the girls off the bus, he thought with nervous cheer, kidnap a couple of Snow White’s dwarves. The better to eat you with, my dear. And if Cody chose to step out and get physical, he had the 250,000-volt stun gun in the pocket of his white coat. A different kind of Edison Medicine.

When she had sat down on the couch—sitting upright, with her knees together, for now—he handed her the glass of water in which he had dissolved three milligrams of benzodiazepine powder. . “Drink this,” he said, smiling.

“It’s…what?”

“It’s a mild relaxant. I’ll bet you’ve been experiencing some aches and pains in your joints?”

“In my hand, is all.”

“Well…Cody will appreciate it, trust me.”

Plumtree took the glass from his hand and stared at the water. “Give me a minute to think,” she said. “You’ve jumbled us all up here.”

Armentrout turned toward the desk, reaching for the telephone. “Never mind, I’ll have them give it to you intravenously.”

The bluff worked. She raised her bruised hand in a wait gesture and tilted up the glass with the other, draining it in four gulps; and if the desk lamp had flickered it had only been for an instant.

She now even licked the rim of the glass before leaning forward to set it down on the carpet; and when she straightened up she was sitting forward, looking up at him with her chin almost touching the coat buttons over his belt buckle.

“This is a highly lucrative position,” she said. “But I guess nobody can see us right here, can they?”

“Well,” said Armentrout judiciously, glancing from the couch to the door window as if considering the question for the first time ever, “I suppose not.” The drug couldn’t possibly be hitting her yet.

She reached out with her right hand and winced, then with her left caught his left hand and pressed it to her forehead. “Do you think I have a fever, Doctor?”

She was rubbing his palm back and forth over her brow, and her eyes were closed.

His heart was suddenly pounding in his chest. Go with the flow, he told himself with a jerky mental shrug. Without taking his hand away from her face he sat down on the couch beside her on her left. “There are,” he said breathlessly, “more reliable…areas of the anatomy…upon which to manually judge body temperature. From.”

“Are there?” she said. She pulled his palm down over her nose and lips; and when she had slid it over her chin and onto her throat she breathed, “Tell me when I’m getting warmer, Doctor.”

He had got his fingers on the top button of her blouse when the desk lamp browned out and she abruptly shoved his hand away.

“Shouldn’t there be a nurse present for any physical examination?” she said rapidly.

He exhaled in segments. “Janis.”

“Yes.”

“Who…was that?”

“I believe that was Tiffany.”

“Tiffany.” He nodded several times. “Well, she and I were in the middle of a, a useful dialogue.”

“Valerie has locked Tiffany in her room,”

“In the…dwarves’ cottage, that would be?”

Plumtree smiled at him and tapped the side of her head. “Exactly.” She had begun shifting uncomfortably on the couch, and smacking her lips, and now she said, “Could I go take a shower?”

Of course there was no tone of innuendo at all in the remark. “Your hairs damp right now,” Armentrout told her shortly. “I bet you took a shower since lunch. You can take one after we’re done here.” He slapped his hands onto his knees and stood up, and crossed to the desk. With shaky fingers he fumbled a clove cigarette out of the pack and lit it with one of the ward Bics. He puffed on it, wincing at the syrupy sweet smoke, and then flipped open the purple velvet box.

“Well!” he said, spilling the oversized tarot cards face up onto the desktop, though not looking directly at them. “I did want to ask you about New Year’s Day. You said you killed a man, remember? A king called, somehow, the Flying Nun? A week later Mr. Cochran saw a man who had a bull’s head, in Los Angeles. On Vignes Street, that means ‘grapevines’ in French; there used to be a winery there, where Union Station is now.” Pawing through the cards and squinting at them through his eyelashes and the scented cigarette smoke, he had managed to find the Sun card, a miniature painting of a cherub floating over a jigsaw-edged cliff and holding up a severed, grimacing red head from which golden rays stuck out like solid poles in every direction.

Now he spun away from the desk and thrust the card face-out toward her. “Did your king have a bull’s head?” He sucked hard on the cigarette.

Plumtree had rocked back on the couch and looked away. And Armentrout coughed as much from disgust as from the acrid smoke in his lungs, for there was no animation, no identity, riding the smoke into his head—he had missed catching the Janis personality, the Plumtree gestalt had parried him.

“Hi, Doctor,” Plumtree said. “Is this a come-as-you-are party?” She stared at him for a moment, and appeared to replay in her head what had last been said. ‘Are you talking about the king we killed? Look, I’m being cooperative here. I’ll answer all your questions. But—trust me!—if you hit us with the…Edison Medicine again, none of us will tell you anything, ever.” Her shoulders had slumped as she’d been talking. “No, he didn’t have a bull’s head. He was barefooted, and had long hair down to his shoulders, and a beard, like you’d expect to see on King Solomon or Charlemagne.” She rubbed her hand over her face in an eerie and apparently unwitting re-enactment of what she had done with Armentrout’s hand. “But I recognized him.”

Armentrout knew his shielded tape recorder would be getting all this, but he tried to concentrate on what the woman was saying. You let that Tiffany girl get you all rattled, he told himself; you don’t want to eat the Janis personality, you idiot, she’s the one you want to leave in the body, to show how successful the integration therapy was. You’re lucky you didn’t get her, in the clove smoke. “You…say you recognized him,” he said, nodding like a plaster dog in the back window of a car. “You’d seen him before?”

“In that game on the houseboat on Lake Mead in 1990. Assumption—it’s a kind of poker. He was dressed as a woman for that, and the other players called him the Flying Nun. Our mental bus navigator Flibbertigibbet was trying to win the job Crane was after, the job of being the king, which is why he had us there, playing hands in that terrible game; and he didn’t succeed—and he went flat-out crazy on Holy Saturday when Crane won…it, the crown, the throne.”

“Crane?”

“Scott Crane. I didn’t know his name until we all got talking together today; I thought Flying Nun was, like, his name, it might be a Swedish name, right, like Bra Banning? He was a poker player in those days.”

“I remember another man who wanted to be this king,” said Armentrout thoughtfully, “a local man called Neal Obstadt. He died in the same explosion that collapsed Long John Beach’s lung, two and a half years ago. And Obstadt was looking for this Crane fellow back in ’90—had a big reward offered.” He looked at her and smiled. “You know, you may actually have killed somebody, ten days ago!”

“What good news,” she said hollowly.

“Whatever you did could be the cause of everything that’s been different since New Year’s Day—I thought you were just delusionally reacting, the way Mr. Cochran almost certainly is.” He held up one finger as though to count off points of an argument. “Now, you couldn’t have got through all of Crane’s defenses, and abducted his very child, as you say you did, without powerful sorcerous help; you’d need virtually another king, in fact. Who could that be?”

“You got me.”

“I thought you said you’d be honest with me here. We can schedule another ECT tomorrow.”

“I—I’m being honest. I was alone. I don’t know whose idea the whole thing was.”

“One of you might have been acting on someone’s orders, though, right? On someone’s careful instructions” He was sitting on the desk now drumming his finders excitedly on the emptied velvet box. “There was a boy around, a couple of years ago, living in Long Beach somewhere. He was a sort of proto-king, as I recall.” Armentrout wished he had paid more attention to these events at the time—but they had been other people’s wars in the magical landscape, and he had been content to just go on eating pieces of his patients’ souls on the sidelines. “His name was something goofy—Boogie-Woogie Bananas, or something like that. He could probably kill a king, or bring one back to life, even, if he wanted to. If he’s kept to the disciplines. Somebody, your man Crane, probably, brought the gangster Bugsy Siegel back to life, briefly, in 1990. You’ve seen the Warren Beatty movie, Bugsy? Siegel was this particular sort of supernatural king, during the 1940s. Yes, this kid would be fifteen or so now—he could be the one that sent you to kill Crane. Does a name like Boogie-Woogie Bananas ring any bells?”

Plumtree visibly tried to come up with a funny remark, but gave up and just shook her head wearily. “No.”

“His party had a lawyer! Were you approached by the lawyer? He had a pretentious name, something Strube, like J. Submersible Strube the third.”

“I never heard of any of these people.” Plumtree was pale, and perspiration misted her forehead. “But one of us went to a lot of trouble to kill Crane. Obviously.”

Armentrout pursed his lips. “Did you say anything to him, to Crane?”

“Sunday before last? Yeah. I wasn’t going to hurt his kid, this little boy who couldn’t have been five years old yet—God knows how I lured him out of the house, but I had the kid down on his back in this grassy meadow above the beach, with the spear points on his little neck—I suppose Flibbertigibbet would have killed the kid!—and when I found myself standing there after losing some time, I looked at the kid’s father standing there, Crane, and I just said, almost crying to see what a horrible thing I was in the middle of, I said, ‘There’s nothing in this flop for me.’” There were tears in Plumtree’s eyes right now, and from the angry way she cuffed them away Atmentrout was sure that she was Cody at the moment. “And,” she went on hoarsely, “Crane said, Then pass.’ He must have been scared, but he was talking gently, you know?—not like he was mad. ‘Let it pass by us,’ he said.”

“And what did you say?”

“I lost time then. When I could see what was going on again, Crane was lying there dead, with the spear in his throat, sticking up through his Solomon beard like a fishing pole, and the kid was gone.” Plumtree blinked around at the desks and the couch and the foliage-screened window. “Why did Janis leave, just now? You made her peel off, didn’t you?” Her expression became blank, and then she was frowning again. “And she’s crying in her bus seat! What did you do to her?”

Armentrout held up the card. “I just showed her this.”

But Plumtree looked away from it. And when she spoke, it was in such a level voice that Armentrout wondered if she’d shifted again: “Strip poker, we’re playing here?” She looked past the card, focussing into his eyes, and Armentrout saw that one of her pupils was a tiny pinprick, as was usual with her, but the other was dilated in the muted office light. The mismatched eyes, along with the downward-curling androgynous smile she now gave him, made him think of the rock star David Bowie. “I can be the one that wins here, you know,” she said. “I can rake in your investment, or at least toss it out into the crowd. Strip poker. How many…garments have you got?”

Armentrout was annoyed, and a little intrigued, to realize that he was frightened. “Are you still Cody?” he asked.

“Largely.” Plumtree struggled up off of the couch to her feet, though the effort made drops of sweat roll down from her hairline, and she stumbled forward and half fell onto the desk. She was certainly still Cody, who had taken the succinylcholine and the electroconvulsive therapy at dawn this morning. Armentrout hastily slid the delicate old tarot cards away from her.

She shook out a Gudang Garam cigarette and lit it.

“This phone is your mask, right?” she gasped through a mouthful of spicy smoke, grabbing the telephone receiver and holding it up. “Your nest of masks? What’s your name?” Armentrout didn’t answer, but she read it off the name plaque on his desk. “Hello?” she said into the telephone. “Could I speak to Richard Paul Armentrout’s mom, please?”

Armentrout was rocked by the counter-attack—she was trying to get a handle on his own soul! That handle! What personality in her was it that knew how to do this?—but he was confident that Long John Beach was psychotically diffractive enough to deflect this, and many more like it. “I t-took a vial of your blood,” Armentrout said quickly, “when you were first brought in here, because I thought I might put you on lithium carbonate, and we have to do a lot of blood testing to get the dosage right for that. I never did give you lithium, but I’ve still got the vial of your blood.” He was breathing rapidly, almost panting.

“That’s a big ace,” Plumtree allowed, “but you’ve lost one garment now, and I’ve only lost my…oh, call her one silly hat.”

Armentrout looked down at the cards under his hands, and his pelvis went quiveringly cold, followed a moment later by a bubbly tingling in his ribs, for he had no time here to squint cautiously sidelong at the distressing things, and was looking at them squarely. He snatched up the Wheel of Fortune card, the miniature Renaissance-style painting of four men belted to a vertical wheel—Regno, Latin for “I reign,” read the word-ribbon attached to the mouth of the man on top; the ones to either side trailed ribbons that read Regnabo and Regnavi, “I shall reign” and “I reigned”—and he shoved the card into Plumtree’s face as he took a cheek-denting drag on his cigarette.

The bulb in the desk lamp popped, and shards of cellophane-thin broken glass clinked faintly on the desk surface; the room was suddenly dimmer, lit now only by the afternoon sunlight streaking in golden beams through the green schefflera leaves outside the window.

Again Armentrout had got nothing but a lungful of astringent clove smoke. And he wasn’t facing Cody anymore. Plumtree had twitched away the card-concussed, vulnerable personality before he could draw it into the barrel of his flavored cigarette, had swept the stunned Cody back to one of the metaphorical bus seats or dwarf-cottage bunks, and rotated a fresh one onstage.

“Hello?” said Plumtree into the telephone again. “I’m calling on behalf of Richard Paul Armentrout—he says he owes somebody there a tre-men-dous apology.” The coal on her cigarette glowed in the dimness like the bad red light that draws loose souls in the underworld in the Tibetan Bardo Thodol.

Armentrout dropped the card and fumbled in his coat pocket for the stun gun. I think I’ve got to put an end to this, he thought; punch her right out of this fight with 250,000 volts and try again, tomorrow, after another ECT session in which I’ll give her a full 500 joules of intracranial juice. If she really can summon, from across the hundreds of miles of mountain and desert wilderness, my m—or any of my potent old guilt ghosts, and lead them all the way in past Long John Beach’s masks to me, they could attach, and collapse my distended life line, kill me. They’re all still out there, God knows—I’ve never had any desire for the Pagadebiti Zinfandel, confiteor Dionyso.

Nah, he thought savagely, that one-armed old man is a better sort of Kevlar armor than to give way under just two shots—and I will have this woman. The damp skin of his palm could still feel her chin, and the hot slope of her throat. Tell me when I’m getting warmer, Doctor.

He snatched up one of the tarot cards at random with one hand and the lighter with the other, and he spun the flint wheel with the card blocking his view of the upspringing flame; the card’s illuminated face was toward her, while he saw only the backlit rectangle of the frayed edge. Gaggingly, and fruitlessly, he again sucked at the limp cigarette—sparks were falling off of it onto the desk like tiny shooting stars.

“Let me talk to your m-mom,” he wheezed, knowing that multiples generally included, among their menagerie, internalized duplicates of their own abusive parents. Surely Plumtree’s distorted version of her mother wouldn’t be able to maintain this fight!

Plumtree’s body jackknifed forward off the desk and tumbled to the carpet. “Behold now,” she gasped in a reedy voice, “I have daughters which have not known man.” Armentrout recognized the sentence—it was from Genesis, when Lot offered the mob his own daughters rather than surrender the angels who had come to his house. “Name the one you want, Omar,” Plumtree’s strained voice went on, clearly not quoting now, “and I’ll throw her to you! Just don’t take me again!”

Armentrout was confident that he could consume this one, this cowardly, Bible-quoting creature—but this was only Plumtree’s approximation of her mother, not a real personality; so he said, “Give me…Tiffany.”

“Tiffany,” said the woman on the floor.

And when Plumtree got back up on her feet and leaned on the desk with one hand while she pushed her tangled blond hair back from her sweaty forehead with the other, she was smiling at him. “Doctor!” she said. “What bloody hands you have!”

Armentrout glanced down—he had cut his hand on a piece of the broken light bulb in grabbing for the lighter, and blood had run down his wrist and blotted into his white cuff.

“With you, Miss Plumtree,” he panted, managing to smile, “strip poker is something more like flag football.” I can have sex with her now, he thought excitedly. Janis snatched Tiffany away from me before, but Janis is off crying in her dwarf bunk now; and I routed Cody too, and whoever that third one was; and the mother personality has outright given Tiffany to me!

“Strip poker?” she exclaimed. “Ooh—” She began unbuttoning her blouse. “I’ll raise you!”

The clove cigarette was coming to pieces in Armentrout’s mouth, and he pulled it off his lip and tossed it into the ashtray and spat out shreds of bitterly perfumy tobacco. He wouldn’t be able to consume any of her personalities this session, it looked like, but he could at least relieve the aching terror-pressure in his groin.

“Sweeten the pot,” he agreed, fumbling under his chin to unknot his necktie.

The close air of the office smelled of clove smoke and overheated flesh, and the skin of his hands and face tingled like the surface of a fully charged capacitor. This psychic battle had left him swollen with excitement, and he knew that the consummation of their contest wouldn’t last long.

She reached out and tugged his cut hand away from his collar, and again she pulled his palm down across her wet forehead and nose and lips—her eyes were closed, so he couldn’t see whether her pupils were matched in size or not—

And then she sucked his cut finger into her mouth and bit it, and in the same instant with her injured hand she grabbed the bulging crotch of his pants and squeezed.

ARMENTROUT EXHALED sharply, and the heel of one of his shoes knocked three times fast against the side of the desk as his free hand clenched into a fist.

“GOTCHA, DOCTOR,” said a man’s voice flatly from Plumtree’s mouth. “I got the taste of your blood now, and the smell of your jizz. In voodoo terms, that constitutes having your ID package.”

Plumtree had stepped lithely away from the desk, and now stared down at Armentrout with evident amused disgust as she wiped her hands on the flanks of her jeans.

When Armentrout could speak without gasping he said, “I suppose you’re…the foul fiend Flibbertigibbet, is that right?”

Plumtree frowned. “That’s what I’ve told the girls to call me. You were just talking to their mom, weren’t you? Playing ‘Follow the Queen.’“

“Your name’s Omar,” Armentrout said. “What’s your last name?” He was still sitting on the desk, but he straightened his white coat and frowned professionally. “I can compel you to tell me,” he added. “With ECT and scopolamine, just for example.”

“I reckon you could. But I ain’t scared of a little white-haired fag like you anyway. My name’s Omar Salvoy.” Plumtree’s pupils were both wide now. She picked up the telephone receiver, then smiled and held it out toward the doctor.

From the earpiece a faint voice could be heard saying, “Let me up, Richie darling! Pull the plug!”

With a hoarse whimper, Armentrout grabbed the receiver and slammed it into its cradle, and then he opened the second velvet box—but Plumtree had stepped around the desk and crouched by the chair.

“You got a gun in the box there, haven’t you?” said the Salvoy personality jovially while Plumtree’s hand fumbled under the desk. “Think it through, old son. You kill us and you’ve got some fierce ghosts on your ass—we got your number now, no mask is gonna protect you from us. Call your momma back and ask her if I ain’t telling you the truth.”

Armentrout’s heart was hammering in his chest like a jackhammer in an airplane hangar, and he wondered if this was capture, death. No, he thought as he remembered to breathe. No, she can’t have—got a fix on me—in that brief moment, with Long John Beach diffracting my hot signal.

After a moment, Armentrout let go of the derringer and closed the box. Had he been planning to shoot Plumtree, or himself?

“And I’ll bet this button right he-ere,” Plumtree went on, her arm under the desktop, “is the alarm, right?”

An instant later the close air was shaken by a harsh metallic braaang that didn’t stop.

Still too shaken to speak, Armentrout stood up from the desk and fished his keys out of his pocket to unlock the door and swing it open. Security guards were already sprinting down the hall toward the office, and he waved his bleeding hand at them and stood aside.

CHAPTER FIVE

No fight could have been half so terrible as this dance.

—Charles Dickens,

A Tale of Two Cities

HIS little boy may have watched me kill him,” said Janis Plumtree in a quiet, strained voice.

A waterproof Gumby-and-Pokey tablecloth had been spread on the big table in the TV lounge, and she and Cochran were standing in line, each of them holding a glossy little cardboard bowl and a napkin that was rubber-banded around a plastic spoon.

“You didn’t kill him,” whispered Cochran earnestly. “Cody did.” He looked nervously at the patients on either side of them, but the old woman ahead of Plumtree and the morose teenager behind Cochran were just staring ahead, anxiously watching the ice cream being doled out.

Plumtree had been escorted to the Quiet Room again, directly after her conference with Dr. Armentrout this afternoon, and confined there for an hour, and when she had found Cochran afterward she had told him about the morning’s costly discovery of her multiple personalities, the “dwarves in Snow White’s cottage.” He had listened with unhappy sympathy, withholding judgment but taking the story as at least a touching apology for her occasional rudenesses, which supposedly had all been the doing of the ill-natured “Cody personality.” Apparently there was no Cody-the-roommate, really.

The appalling thing, the stark fact that still misted his forehead every time he thought of it, was that she had actually undergone shock therapy this morning; he was clinging to her insistence that it had been scheduled for her even before Long John Beach had been hit, and he was happy to be talking about topics that had nothing to do with the hospital, for he had not yet found a chance to tell Armentrout what had really happened last night.

“Well,” Plumtree said now, “Cody didn’t kill him either, directly. But we all knew we were going to that Leucadia estate to do somebody harm. Old Flibbertigibbet kept saying that we were just going to stab somebody in the leg. But we all knew what he could do, what he probably would do, and we all cooperated. We didn’t care.” She sighed shakily. “We do what he wants, ever since we got him to…kill a man in ’89.”

Cochran was inclined to doubt that; and he was fairly sure that she hadn’t killed anybody on this last New Year’s Day, either, for she’d surely be in a prison ward somewhere right now if the police or the doctors had found any reason to take her story seriously.

But she clearly believed these things, and was troubled by them—and Armentrout had given her shock therapy this morning!—so he said, with unfeigned concern, “Poor Janis! How did that happen?”

They had got to the front of the line, and a nurse scooped a ball of vanilla ice cream into Plumtree’s bowl and tucked a wafer cookie alongside it. Plumtree waited until Cochran had been served too, and then they sidled off to the window-side corner, by unspoken agreement choosing the far end of the room from where Long John Beach sat blinking and licking a spoon. At their backs, beyond the reinforced glass, a half-moon shone through the black silhouettes of the palm trees outside the courtyard.

“We were in a bar in Oakland,” she said quietly when the two of them had sat down on the linoleum by the nursing-station-side wall, “and Cody got real drunk. I was twenty-two, and Cody was drinking a lot in those days, though I always stayed sober to drive home. And we lost time—or maybe Cody had an actual alcoholic blackout!—and when I could see what was going on again, I was on my back in a van in the alley parking lot, and the boyfriend I was at the bar with was trying to pull my clothes off. Cody had passed out, and he figured he could do what he wanted with an unconscious woman. This was only…well, it was five-oh-four in the afternoon, wasn’t it? Across the bay, you were just about to catch your wife, wife-to-be, when she fell down the winery stairs. Anyway, this guy gave me a black eye but I was able to fight him off because he hadn’t expected me to…wake up. I scrambled out of the van, with him still grabbing at me and me not able to run, with my clothes all hiked up and down. I probably could have got away from him then with no trouble, ‘cause I was awake and outside and I think he was apologizing as much as anything; but I…got so mad…at him thinking he could do that to me when I was passed out that way, that I called a real serious sic im! in my head. You know? Like you would to a pit bull that was real savage but was yours. I can see now that all of us, even drunk Cody, helped call it. We hadn’t ever been that mad before. We knew it was bad, and that it would cost us, but we called anyway. And we woke up Flibbertigibbet.”

Cochran recalled that this was another of her supposed personalities, a male one. Janis had told him that she didn’t know much of what had happened at the therapy session with Armentrout today—she’d said she had “lost a lot of time” after he had showed her some miniature painting that she couldn’t bear to look at—but that she was pretty sure Flibbertigibbet had been out. Probably Flibbertigibbet had been the one who had reportedly broken the doctor’s desk lamp and bitten his finger, earning Plumtree her most recent stay in the Quiet Room. She had said that she was grateful that Flibbertigibbet hadn’t done anything worse.

“And…Flibbertigibbet—” Cochran was embarrassed to pronounce the foolish name. “—killed the guy?”

She shivered. “He sure did. The big earthquake hit right then, and I suppose the cops thought it was falling bricks that smashed his head that way. It was never in the papers, anything about a guy being murdered there. I ran to my car, and it took me two hours to drive the ten miles home. Nobody at my apartment building, what was left of it, said anything about the blood on me—a lot of people were bloody that day.”

“…I remember.”

The Franciscan shale of San Bruno Mountain hadn’t shifted much in that late-afternoon quake, and only a couple of Pace Vineyards’ oak casks had fallen and burst, spilling a hundred gallons of the raw new Zinfandel like an arterial hemorrhage across the stone floor of the cellar, which Cochran had eventually had to mop up; but when he and a couple of the maintenance men had immediately driven one of the vineyard pickup trucks down to the 280 Highway, they had found cars spun out and stalled across the lanes, and in the little town of Colma hillsides had toppled onto the graves in the ubiquitous cemeteries, and he remembered stunned men and women standing around on the glass-strewn sidewalks, many of them in blood-spattered clothes and holding bloody cloths to their heads. Paramedic vans had been slow and few, and Cochran had driven several people to the local hospital in the back of the pickup truck before eventually returning to the vineyard. The visitor from France, young Mademoiselle Nina Gestin Leon, had been stranded there, and had stayed for the subdued late dinner in the Pace Vineyards dining room. They had all drunk up innumerable bottles of the ’68 late-harvest Zinfandels from Ridge and Mayacamas, he remembered; the night had seemed to call for big wild reds implausibly high in natural alcohol content and so sharp with the tea-leaf taste of tannin that Cochran had thought the winemakers must have left twigs and stems in the fermenting must.

“I had blood and wine on my clothes when I went to bed that night,” he said now.

“Cody’s more of a vodka girl,” said Janis. She leaned back against the TV lounge wall and sang, “You can always tell a vodka girl….”

“That’s the tune of the old Halo Shampoo ads,” Cochran said. “That’s before your time, isn’t it? I barely remember that.”

“Geber me no zeitgebers,” she said shortly. She looked at the nearest of the other patients—poor old Mr. Regushi a dozen yards away, eating his ice cream with his hands—and then she said quietly, “We’ve got to escape out of this place.”

“I think it’d be better to get released out of here,” Cochran said hastily. “And I do think we can do it. I have a lawyer up in San Mateo County—”

“Who couldn’t get us out before tomorrow dawn, could he? Dr. Armentrout is going to give me the electroconvulsive therapy again tomorrow—I can tell, I was told not to eat anything after ten tonight. He says he’s elected me, Janis, to be the dominant personality inside this little head, and he’s going to…cauterize Cody away, like you would a wart.”

Cochran opened his mouth, wondering what he should say; finally he just said, “Do you like her?”

“Cody? No. She’s a, a bitch is the only word for it, sorry. She thinks I’m crazy to be—well, she doesn’t like you. And I think her story about being a security guard somewhere at nights is a lie—I think she does burglaries.”

“Well…I hope not. But if you don’t like her, why not let Armentrout…do that?” He could feel his face reddening. “I mean, he is a doctor, and you certainly don’t need—”

“She’s a real person, Scant, as real as me. I don’t like her, but I can’t just stand by and let her get killed too.” Her lips were pressed together and she was frowning. “’Cause it would be the death penalty for her, and that without an indictment or jury or anything. Do you see what I mean?”

Cochran doubted that Cody was any more real than a child’s imaginary playmate, much less as real as Janis. But, “I follow your logic,” he said cautiously. Then, recklessly, he added, “I’m ashamed of myself for saying just now to let Armentrout do it again. I can’t bear thinking that it happened to you even once.”

“I’m sure he’s got something planned for you, too,” she told him. “You and me and Long John Beach—we’re not specimens he’s going to let go of.”

Cochran still hoped to get some rational planning done here. “This lawyer of mine—”

“This what? This lawyer? You think old Dr. Trousertrout hasn’t got lawyers? He’ll sneak some meds into your food that’ll make you such a five-star skitz you’ll be running around naked thinking you’re Jesus or somebody, or even easier just show you a few tarot cards to do it.” She glanced around then looked back at him and noticed, and stared at, his T-shirt. “A Connecticut Pansy? Unbelievable. Unbelievable! Hell, you he could probably just show the instruction card to.” She flexed her jaw and winced. “My teeth hurt. I hope I’m not gonna have a nosebleed.”

One of the nurses had brought a portable stereo out and set it on the table and was now trying to get all the patients to sing along to “Puff the Magic Dragon.” Plumtree was humming something different in counterpoint, and after a moment Cochran recognized it as “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” “Listen,” she said suddenly, “—what we’ve got to do?—is escape—tonight.”

Cochran was still sure that his lawyer would be able to secure his release, and very possibly Janis’s too, with some routine legal maneuver; and the man might even be able to get some kind of stay-of-shock-therapy for her tonight, if Cochran could get him on the phone. He slapped the pockets of his corduroy bell-bottoms and was reassured to feel the angularity of coins.

“I’m going to call this lawyer—” he said, bracing himself to stand up.

Plumtree grabbed his upper-arm with her good hand. “It won’t work, we’ve got to escape—”

“Janis,” he said irritably, “we can’t. Have you seen the doors, the locks? How quick the security guards show up when there’s trouble? Unless your Mr. Flibbertigibbet can come up with another earthquake—”

Her hand sprang away from his arm, and she was gaping at him. “Has he…called you?”

The group sing-along was already getting out of hand—Long John Beach was improvising lyrics at the top of his lungs, and the other patients were joining in with gibberish of their own, and the nurse had switched the music off and was now trying to quiet everyone—but Cochran was staring at Plumtree in bewilderment.

“Who?” he said, having to speak more loudly because of the singing and his own alarmed incomprehension. “Flibbertigibbet? No, you told me about it, how you were in that Oakland bar on October seventeenth—”

“I never did, not that date, none of us would!” She was shaking. “Why would we?”

“Wh—Jesus, Janis, because I told you I met my wife that day, she fell down some steps when the earthquake hit, and I caught her. What’s the matter—”

“My God, not this way!” She blinked, and Cochran saw tears actually squirt from the inner corners of her eyes. Her pupils were tiny, hardly discernible. “Why did you mention him, you fucking idiot? I can handle locks—in the name of the Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost! Rah rah rah, you Connecticut pansy, I hope you get in his way!”

Cochran wasn’t listening to her—he had scrambled to his feet, and now he reached down and pulled Plumtree up too. “Get ready to run,” he told her. “I think we’re going to have a riot in here.”

Long John Beach and a couple of other patients had grabbed the window side of the table, lifted it, and, still singing raucously, now pushed it right over; the bowls and spoons and ice cream cartons tumbled as the colorful tablecloth flapped and billowed, and then the tabletop hit the floor with an echoing knock.

“Pirate ships would bloom with vines,” the one-armed man was singing, “When He roared out his name!”

“Code Green!” yelled a nurse. “Hit the alarm!”

Cochran could hear a roaring now, a grinding bass note that seemed to rumble up from the floor, from the very soil under the building’s cement slab foundation. He had to take a quick sideways step to keep his balance.

“Aftershock,” he said breathlessly, “from the one this afternoon.” He glanced at Plumtree, and took hold of her forearm, for her face was white and pinched with evident terror, and he was afraid she would just bolt. “Stay with me,” he said to her loudly. The fluorescent lights on the ceiling flickered.

“Code Green, code fucking Green!” shouted the nurse, retreating toward the hallway door.

The building was shaking now, and from the nursing station and the conference room echoed the crashes of cabinets and machinery hitting the floors.

“—the magic flagon,” sang Long John Beach, whirling the tablecloth like a bullfighter’s cape, “lived by the sea, and frolicked in the Attic mists in a land called Icaree!”

And all the lights abruptly went out. Glass was breaking inside the building somewhere, beyond the waving and thrashing shapes dimly visible in the reflected moonlight in the room, but Cochran spun toward the reinforced window, yanking the unseeing Plumtree with him.

The window was glittering like the face of the sea, for silvery cracks were spreading across it like rapid frost and shining with the captured radiance of the moon—and a cloud of plaster dust curled and spun at the far corner.

“Get me Cochran and Plumtree!” came Armentrout’s panicky call through the shouting, lurching bodies jamming the room. “Stun guns and Ativan!”

Cochran looked back toward the hall doorway. The fat, white-haired doctor was standing just inside the room, waving a flashlight in random circles that momentarily silhouetted clawed hands and tossing heads and vertical siftings of plaster dust; two men Cochran had never seen before were standing closely on either side of the doctor, with their arms around his shoulders—and of the whole chaotic, crashing scene, the one element that chilled Cochran’s belly was the sight of those two blank-faced men swivelling their heads back and forth in perfect unison, and flapping their free arms in swings that were awkward and disjointed but as perfectly synchronized as the gestures of a dance team.

Cochran bent down to shout in Plumtree’s ear, “Don’t move, stay right where you are—we’re getting out of here.” And he let go of her arm and lifted one of the upholstered chairs in both hands.

The floor was still flexing and unstable bur he took two running steps toward the far corner of the window, muscling the chair around him in a wide loop, and then he torqued his body hard, at the expense of keeping any balance at all, and slammed the chair with all his strength into the reinforced glass at that end.

The window bent, like splintering plywood, popping out of its frame at that corner.

“One dark night it happened,” the voice of Long John Beach roared on somewhere behind him, “Pakijaper came no more—”

Cochran’s full-tilt follow-through had thrown him headfirst against the buckling sheet of glass, tearing it further out of its frame, and tumbled him to the gritty floor; but he scrambled to his feet and wobbled back to where Plumtree stood dimly visible in the roiling, flashlight-streaked dimness, and he pulled her toward the window. “Both of us hit the glass with our shoulders,” he gasped, “and we’re out of here. Keep your face turned away from it.”

But a hand gripped Cochran’s right hand strongly, and he was jerked around against the solid restraint of the big hard fingers clenched on his knuckles and wrist. He looked back—and whimpered aloud when he saw that there was no one anywhere near him. Then in a flicker of the flashlight beam he saw Long John Beach a dozen feet away, staring at him and hunched forward to extend his amputated stump.

Cochran tugged hard, and the sensation of clutching fingers was gone; Long John Beach recoiled backward into the crowd.

A number of the patients had lifted the table over their heads like a float in a parade, all of them singing now, and Cochran and Plumtree were able to step away from the wall and get a running start toward the bent sheet of glass.

It folded outward with a grating screech when they hit it, and then the two of them had fallen over the sill and were rolling on the cold cement pavement outside. Plumtree had hiked up her legs as she’d hit the glass, and had landed in a controlled tumble, but Cochran’s knees had collided with the sill and he had jackknifed forward to smack the pavement with his outstretched hands and the side of his head, and in the moment when his legs flailed free and he was nearly standing on his head he was sure that his spine was about to snap.

But then he had fallen over and Plumtree had dragged him to his feet, and he was able to limp dizzily forward across the dark courtyard, pulling her after him; the exterior spotlights had gone out too, and Plumtree kept whispering that she couldn’t see at all, but the dim shine of the half-moon was bright enough for Cochran to avoid the wooden picnic tables as he led her to the parking-lot fence, where he and Long John Beach had stood talking six hours ago.

“Grape leaves jell like rain…” came a wail through the broken window behind them.

The winter night air was as harsh as menthol cigarette smoke in Cochran’s nose, but it cleared his head enough so that he could lift one of the picnic-table benches and prop it firmly against the spike-topped iron fence; and though he saw two of the security guards furiously pedalling their bicycles across the lot from the main hospital building, they were clearly heading for the clinic entrance, and no one shouted or shined a light at Cochran as he boosted Plumtree up the steeply slanted boards of the bench seat.

The fingers of her good hand caught the top edge, and with a fast scuffling she was at the top, and leaping; and Cochran was already scrambling up the bench when her sneakers slapped the pavement. Then he had jumped too, and though he almost sat down when he landed, he was ready to run when he straightened up.

But Plumtree caught his shoulder. “Don’t be a person in a hurry,” she said breathlessly. She linked her arm through his, wincing as her swollen knuckles bumped his elbow. “It’s lucky we’re a couple. Just be a guy out for a stroll by the madhouse with his girlfriend, right?”

“Right.” With his free hand he reached back through the bars of the fence and pushed the bench away; the clatter of it hitting the cement pavement in the yard was lost in the crashing cacophony shaking out through the sprung window. “What’s my girlfriend’s name?” he asked as they began walking—a little hurriedly, in spite of her advice—along the tree-shadowed fence toward the lane that led out to Rosecrans Boulevard.

“I’m Janis again. Cody came back just now like somebody fired out of a cannon, so don’t tell me what happened—okay?—or you’ll just have Valerie on your hands. It’s enough to know that you agreed about escaping, and that we’ve done it.” She gave him a frightened smile. “Let’s make like a tree, and leave.”

He nodded, and though his breathing was slowing down, his heart was still knocking in his chest. “Put an egg in your shoe and beat it,” he responded absently. He could see the corner of the fence ahead, and it was all he could do not to walk even faster. “I did agree, in the end.”

He was remembering a pair of shoes Nina had bought for him, actually leather hiking boots. They were only about an eighth of an inch bigger than his ordinary shoes at any point, but he had constantly found himself catching the sides of them against furniture, and tripping on the tread edges when he’d go upstairs, and generally kicking things he hadn’t realized were in his way; and it had occurred to him that in his ordinary old shoes, as he had routinely walked through each day, he must have been only narrowly missing collisions and entanglements with every thoughtless step.

What size shoe am I wearing now? he thought giddily. I’m not walking any differently, but lately I’ve collided with a man who can talk with my dead wife’s voice, and who can reach out and grab you across a room with a hand he hasn’t got; and I’ve run afoul of a doctor who wants to keep me locked up in a crazy ward and give electro-shock treatments to a woman I…am growing very fond of; and she claims to actually be several people, one of whom doesn’t like me and another of whom is reportedly a man, who can—

He took a shuddering breath and clashed her arm tighter, for he was afraid he might fling it away and just run from her.

—who apparently can, he went on, finishing the thought, call up actual earthquakes at will.

Maybe I’m not wearing any shoes at all now, he thought, in that manner of speaking. It’s mostly barefoot people that break their toes.

“You’ve…seen this stuff too, right?” he said softly. “Ghosts? And—” She didn’t want to hear about the earthquake right now. “—supernatural stuff?” He had spoken haltingly, embarrassed to be talking about the very coin of madness; but he needed to know that he really did have a companion in this scary new world.

“Don’t make me lose time here, Scant.”

“Sorry.” Her abrupt reply had brought heat to his face, and he tried to keep any tone of hurt out of his voice. “Never mind.” Don’t be disturbing her, he told himself bitterly, with talk of something distasteful that might be important to you, like your mere sanity.

“I’m sorry, Scant,” she said instantly, hugging his arm and leaning her head on his shoulder, “I was afraid you’d say something more—something specific!—that would drive me away from you here. You and I can’t have misunderstandings between us! Yes—I’ve seen this stuff too, undeniably. Sometimes it’s hard for me to tell, because even normal things…change, if I take my eyes off them. I never cross the street on the green light, because an hour—a week!—might have gone by between the moment I saw the WALK sign flash and the moment I step off the curb; I always cross with people, almost hanging on to their coats. When I was twelve, my mother took me to her sister’s funeral, and halfway through the ceremony I found out that it was her mother’s funeral, and I was fourteen! I think if she hadn’t ever brought me to another funeral at that same cemetery, so I could recognize it, I wouldn’t have found my way back at all, ever, to this day!”

She laughed helplessly. “But I’ve seen ghosts, too, sure. I attract them, they come to me crying, often as not, telling me they’re lost and want help finding their mothers, these transparent little…cellophane bags, like cigarette-pack wrappers! Or they’re… feeling romantic, and whisper nasty things in my ear, as if they could do anything about it. But they can’t grab me, I always just lose time. And Cody and Valerie have different birthdates from me, so each of us that comes up is a fresh picture, and the ghosts slide off, can’t get a grip.” He felt her shudder through his arm. “I think they’d hurt me, I think they’d kill me, if they could get a grip.”

Cochran kissed the top of her head. “Why are they attracted to you?”

“Because I have ‘wide unclasped the table of my thoughts.’ Don’t ask me about that,” she added hastily, “or you’ll be kissing Valerie’s head.” She smacked her lips. “I wish I’d brought my mouthwash.”

They had rounded the fence corner now, and they were walking on a sidewalk under bright streetlights. Cars were driving by, and he could see the traffic signal for Rosecrans Boulevard only a hundred yards ahead of them.

“I think I could call my lawyer now,” he said, “when we find a Denny’s, somewhere we can sit down and they have a pay phone. I’ve got change for the call, and I think I can slant the story a little to make sure he’ll wire us money and then legally, get us out of Armentrout’s control.”

“A Denny’s would be nice,” Plumtree agreed, “I’ve got a twenty in my shoe, and Ra only knows when I last ate. But we don’t need your lawyer—Cody can get us money and a place to stay, and we’ve got…things to do, locally, people to see.”

Cochran could imagine nothing now but getting back to his house in South Daly City up in San Mateo County as quickly as possible. “People?” he said doubtfully. “What, family?”

“No. I’ll tell you when we’ve got drinks in front of us. Don’t most Denny’s serve liquor?”

“I don’t know,” Cochran said, suddenly very happy with the idea of a shot of lukewarm Wild Turkey and an icy Coors for a chaser. “But most bars sell food.”

CHAPTER SIX

“Tell me how long it takes to prepare the earthquake?”

“A long time, I suppose.”

“But when it is ready, it takes place, and grinds to pieces everything before it. In the meantime, it is always preparing, though it is not seen or heard. That is your consolation. Keep it.”

—Charles Dickens,

A Tale of Two Cities

DO you know about ‘making amends’?” Plumtree asked as she led him across a dark parking lot in the direction of the white-glowing facade of a fast-food icecream place called the Frost Giant. Cochran thought she sounded a little uneasy.

“I suppose,” he said, trudging along beside her and wondering when they would get their drinks and talk. The night air was chilly, and he wished he’d been wearing a jacket when they had escaped from the mental hospital, and he wanted to get someone in San Mateo County to wire him some money tonight, or at least use a credit-card number to get him a motel room. That should be feasible somehow. “Restitution,” he said. “Taking the blame, if you deserve it; paying back people you’ve cheated, and admitting you were the villain, and apologizing.” He smiled. “Why, did that guy in the 7-Eleven give you too much change?” They hadn’t bought anything at the convenience store three blocks back, but Plumtree had cajoled the clerk into giving her seventeen one-dollar bills and a double fistful of assorted coins in exchange for the crumpled twenty-dollar-bill that had been in her shoe. When they had got outside, she had made Cochran give her too four quarters from his pants pocket.

“No. The thing is, making amends is…good for your soul, right?”

He shrugged. “Sure.”

“But before you can do it, you’ve got to cheat somebody.”

“I—” He laughed as he exhaled. “I guess. If you want the sacrament of Confession, you do have to have some sins.”

“Whatever.” She gave him a blank, tired look in the white glow. “Don’t speak, here, okay? Do you know any foreign languages, besides plain old Mexican?”

“Qui, mademoiselle je park Français, un peu”

“That’s French, right? Cool, you be a Frenchman. They’d figure you don’t know what your stupid shirt says.”

She pulled open the glass door of the Frost Giant, and a puff of warm, vanilla-scented air ruffled Cochran’s hair.

There was only one customer in the brightly lit restaurant, a woman in a Raiders sweatshirt in a booth by the far window. Plumtree scurried to the counter, and she was laughing with evident embarrassment as she dumped her pile of bills and change onto the white formica.

“Could you do me a big favor?” she asked the teenage boy who was the cashier. “My friend paid me back twenty dollars he owed me, but he doesn’t understand about American money—I can’t fit all this in my pockets! Could you possibly give me one twenty-dollar bill for all this?”

“I—don’t think so, lady.” The young cashier smiled nervously. “Why don’t you get rid of some of it by buying some ice cream?”

A muted crack sounded from the far booth, and the woman in the sweatshirt said, “Shit. You got any spoons that are any damn good?”

Plumtree gave the young man a sympathetic smile as he fetched another white plastic spoon from under the counter and walked around to give it to the woman.

“I understand,” Plumtree said when he was back behind the counter, “and we can come back tomorrow and buy some. But my friend here doesn’t speak any English at all, and he thinks all Americans are stupid—especially me. I told him I could get this money changed into one bill, and if you don’t do it, he’ll call me a, a haricot vert again. That means damn fool. You can tell he’s thinking it already, look at him.” She waved at Cochran. “Momentito Pierre!”

“Ce n’etait pas ma faute,” said Cochran awkwardly “Cet imbecile m’est rentre dedans” It was a bit he remembered from the Berlitz book: It wasn’t my fault, this imbecile crashed into me.

The name badge on the cashier’s shirt read KAREN, and Cochran, perceiving him as a fellow-victim of ludicrous men’s wear, sympathetically wondered when the boy would notice that he had put on the wrong badge. “Well,” said the young man, “I guess it’d be okay. We could use the ones, I guess.”

“Oh, thanks so much,” said Plumtree, helpfully spreading the bills out on the counter for him to count.

The young cashier opened the register drawer and handed her a twenty-dollar bill, his eyes on the ones and the change.

“What are you giving me this for?” asked Plumtree instantly.

The bill in her outstretched hand was a one-dollar bill.

The young man stared at it in evident confusion. “Is that what I just gave you?”

“Yeah. I wanted a twenty. You must have had a one in your twenty drawer.”

“I…don’t think that’s what I just gave you.”

“You’re gonna take all my money and just give me a dollar?” wailed Plumtree in unhappy protest.

The woman in the Raiders sweatshirt broke her spoon again. “Hey, shithead!” she yelled. “You’d think with all the money you make cheatin’ folks, you could afford decent spoons!”

After a tense pause, the young man took back the dollar and pulled a twenty out of the drawer. He stared at it hard for a moment before looking up.

“I really hope,” he said quietly as he handed the twenty to her, “we’re not twenty short at cashout. You seemed nice.”

Cochran’s teeth were clenched, and he could feel his face heating up. This was abominable. He knew he should make Plumtree give back the other twenty-dollar bill, the one she had palmed, but all he could think of was getting out of this place. “Uhh,” he said, feeling a drop of sweat run down his ribs. “Merde”

“I’ll come back tomorrow and make sure,” said Plumtree, pocketing the fresh twenty and hurrying away from the counter. She took Cochran’s elbow and turned him toward the door. “Thanks again!”

Cochran was dully amazed that she could maintain her cheery tone. When they were outside again, he tried to speak, but she shook his arm, and so he just pressed his lips together. His foolish shirt was clammy with sweat now, and he was shivering in the chilly breeze.

At last she spoke, when they had scuffled away out of the radiance of the Frost Giant. “Now we’ve got a clear twenty for food and drink.” Her breathing was labored, and she was sagging against him, as if the conversation in the ice-cream place had exhausted her.

“The kid’s right,” he said tightly. “You did seem nice. He’ll probably lose his job.”

“He might lose his job,” she said flatly, apparently agreeing with him. “I’ll understand—I’ll respect it!—if you decide you don’t want anything to eat, anything that’s bought with this money.” She frowned at him. “Is that what you’re saying?”

“No. Now that it’s done—”

“I could go back.” She straightened and stepped away from Cochran, though she still seemed sick and wobbly on her feet. “Do you want me to give it back to him?”

Cochran shivered; and as he shoved his cold hands into his pants pockets he wondered how energetically the police might be looking for Plumtree and himself, and how easy or difficult it might actually be to get money “wired” to him from the Bay Area at this hour. Where would he go to pick it up? Wouldn’t he need a driver’s license or something? And he was very hungry, and he desperately wanted the warm relaxation and comfortable perspective that a couple of shots of bourbon would bestow. “Well—no. I mean, now that it is done—”

“Right;” she interrupted dryly. “You’re just like Janis.”

“I hear you’re not really a security guard,” he said—absently, for he had noticed a red neon sign ahead of them, on the same side of Rosecrans, that read MOUNT SABU—COCKTAILS. “I hear what you really do is burglaries.”

“She just tells you every damn thing, doesn’t she?”

A MIRROR-STUDDED disco ball was turning under the ceiling over the dance floor in Mount Sabu, but none of the people in the bar were dancing—possibly because the stone dance floor was strewn with sand as if for a soft-shoe exhibition. Even over here on this side of the long room, by the street door, Cochran could feel grit under his shoe soles as he led Plumtree to an empty booth under a lamp in the corner. The warm air smelled of candle wax and mutton.

“Hi, Scant,” Plumtree said when they had sat down. “Are we going to have a drink? What—” She paused, staring at his T-shirt. “Stand up for a minute, will you?”

He slid back out of the booth and stood up, and she started laughing.

“A Connecticut pansy in…King Arthur’s shorts!” she gasped. “I love it! By Marky ‘Choo-Choo’ Twain, I suppose.”

Cochran managed a sour grin as he sat back down, but her obviously spontaneous reaction to the shirt had shaken him. He had to ask: “Do you, uh, happen to feel like dancing?”

“Sure!” she said brightly. “Is that why we came in here?”

“No.” He sighed. “No, and I don’t want to dance, actually. A shot of Wild Turkey, please, and a Coors chaser,” he said to the dark-haired woman who had walked up to the booth with a tray. “And…?” he added, turning to Plumtree.

“A Manhattan, please,” Plumtree said.

“And a couple of menus,” put in Cochran.

The waitress nodded and clunked down a fresh ashtray with some slogan printed around the edge of it before striding back toward the bai, hei long skirl swishing over the sandy floor. Two men in rumpled business suits were playing bar dice for the price of drinks, banging the leather cup on the wet, polished wood.

“What does Cody drink,” asked Cochran, “besides vodka?”

“Budweiser.” She smiled at him. “This is fun! She’s letting me sit and talk to you. Usually I just get to go to the bathroom—over and over again, throwing up there sometimes, while Cody gets to sit and talk to the man, and she never has to get up and leave him at all.”

“Well, she doesn’t like me, you said. And,” he added, still shaken by the realization, “she seemed exhausted, a few moments ago. She wouldn’t have wanted to dance.”

Plumtree nodded. “That treatment this morning hit her hard. She might appreciate a drink or two herself, before we leave here.”

Cochran thought of mentioning how they would be paying for the drinks and eventual food, but decided he didn’t want to break Janis’s cheerful mood.

A frail electronic beeping started up, and he remembered that her watch had made a noise like that when she had been talking the 7-Eleven clerk into giving her all the ones and change for her original twenty-dollar bill. “What do you have that set for?” he asked.

“Oh, this silly thing. You have a watch, don’t you? I think I’ll just leave this one here. One of the doctors gave it to me—it’s supposed to keep me in now, and not in the past…or future, I suppose.” She had unstrapped the watch as she’d been speaking, and now held it up by one end, as if it were a dead mouse. “It’s my last link with that stupid hospital. If I leave it behind, I’ll bet I can leave all of their depressive-obsessive doo-dah with it. They want you to be sick, in hospitals. I bet I won’t even have my old nightmare as much, away from that place.”

In spite of himself, Cochran said, “About the sun falling out of the sky?”

“Right onto me, yeah.” She shook her head sharply. “Filling up the sky and then punching me flat onto the sidewalk. I was in the hospital when I was two, and I guess there was no window in my room, ‘cause I somehow got the idea that the sun had died. My father died right around that time, and I was too young to grasp what exactly had happened.” She frowned at her fingernails. “I still miss him—a lot—even though I was only two when he died.”

The waitress had returned, and she set their drinks down on the tablecloth and then handed Cochran and Plumtree each a leather-bound menu. “Could I borrow a pen?” Cochran asked her. When he raised his hand and made doodling motions in the air the woman smiled and handed him a Bic from her tray. Cochran just nodded his thanks as the woman turned away and strode back toward the bar.

“Prassopita,” said Plumtree, reading from the menu. “Domatosoupa. This is a Greek restaurant.” She took a sip of her drink and audibly swished it around in her mouth before swallowing.

“Oh.” Cochran thought of Long John Beach singing frolicked in the Attic mists…, and then remembered that Janis hadn’t experienced that part of the evening. “I guess that’s all right.” He opened his own menu and stared at the unfamiliar names as he took a sip of the warmly vaporous bourbon. Finally he looked squarely at her. “I believe you, by the way,” he began.

“We’re not talking about the menu now, are we?”

“That’s right, we’re not. I mean I believe you about you being a genuine multiple personality.” He took several long gulps of the cold beer. “Whew! You obviously hadn’t noticed my dumb shirt before a minute ago, and Cody saw it back at the hospital; and she didn’t get that it was a joke about a Mark Twain book title.”

“You should believe it, it’s true. I don’t think Cody’s much of a reader. I am—and I love books about King Arthur, though I’ve never been able to read One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” She rolled her eyes. “You’re taking a whole crowd of girls out to dinner!”

Cochran decided not to ask what she thought One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest had to do with King Arthur. A slip of paper with daily specials on it was clipped to the inside of the menu, and he tugged it free and poised the pen over the blank back side of it. “Who all are you? Just so I’ll…know what names to write on the thank-you card.”

“Oh, Cody’s paying for dinner, eh? I don’t want to hear about it. Well, you know me and her…and there’s Tiffany…” She paused while Cochran wrote it down. “And Valerie…” she added.

He wrote it down the way it was generally spelled, but she leaned over and tapped the paper with her finger. “It’s spelled with an O—Valorie.”

Cochran smiled at the idiosyncrasy. “Like calorie. If you had an overeater in there, you could call her Calorie, and they could be twins.”

Plumtree bared her teeth in a cheerless grin. “Valorie isn’t a twin of anybody.” She stared at the names on the paper. “Then there’s him. Just write ‘him,’ okay? I don’t like his name being out, even on paper.”

As he wrote the three letters, it occurred to Cochran that this Flibbertigibbet character was probably as real as Cody and Janis…and might very well actually have killed a man in Oakland, a little more than five years ago.

And then he wondered about the king that Plumtree claimed to have killed ten days ago.

“That’s a birthmark,” Plumtree said, “not a tattoo—right?”

Cochran put down the pen and flexed his right hand, and the ivy-leaf-shaped dark patch below his knuckles rippled. “Neither one. It’s…like a powder-burn, or a scar. Rust under the skin, I suppose, or even stump-bark dust. I was seven years old, and I got my hand between a big set of pruning shears and a stump-face. I guess I thought it was an actual, live face, and I tried to block this field worker from cutting the old man’s head off.”

Plumtree was frowning over the rim of her glass. “What?” she said when she’d swallowed and nut it down

Cochran smiled. “Sorry—but you obviously didn’t grow up in the wine country. It’s as old as ‘Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home,’ or the Man in the. Moon. Le Visage dans la Vignc, Froissart called it. The Face in the Vine Stump. See, in the winter, when it’s time to prune back the grape vines, sometimes the lumpy budwells in the bowl of an old head-trained vine look like an old man’s face—forehead, cheekbones, nose, chin. People used to be real superstitious about it, like in France in the Middle Ages—they’d uproot the one that looked most like a real face, and take it out on a mountaintop somewhere and burn it. In the middle of winter, so spring would come. The old man had to die.” Throw out the suicide king, he thought.

“As long as you do not die and live again, you are a stranger to the dark earth,’” Plumtree said, obviously quoting something. “Don’t ask me what that’s from, I don’t even know which of us read it. Have you ever thought of having the mark removed? Doctors could do that now, I bet.”

“No,” said Cochran, making a fist of the hand to show the mark more clearly, “I’m kind of proud of it, actually—it’s my winemaker’s merit badge, an honorable battle scar.”

Plumtree smiled and shook her head. “I think I’ll get this Ami Kapama thing, if I can chew it.”

Cochran looked at the menu. “Lamb cooked with sugar and cinnamon? Yuck. I guess I’ll go with the Moskhari Psito. At least that’s beef, according to this. I wish they had plain old cheeseburgers.”

“Well, yeah. We don’t have all night. Are you still set on calling your lawyer? What is it you’d be wanting him to do?”

The waitress came back then, and they placed their orders; Cochran ordered another bourbon and beer chaser, too, and Plumtree ordered another Manhattan.

“I’d want the lawyer,” he said when the woman had gone sweeping away, “to… wire me some money…so that I could get back home. And I”—he looked straight into her tiny-pupilled eyes—“I hope you’d be willing to come with me, Janis. The lawyer would be able to work for you better if you were up there, and you’d be that much farther away from Armentrout.”

Plumtree sang, “I’ll take you home again, Kathleen…” and then sighed. “What’s the hurry? About you getting back home?”

Cochran blinked at her. “Isn’t that song about a girl who’s going to die?”

“I forget. So what is the hurry?”

Cochran spread his hands. “Oh…a paycheck.”

“What’s the work, in January, in a vineyard?”

He barked out two syllables of a laugh, and flexed his right hand again. “Well—pruning. It’s winter. Get our guys to cut each vine back to two canes, with two buds per cane, and save what they call a goat-spur, a water-sprout replacement spur, closer to the stump for fruit a year or two from now—and then drive around to the vineyards we buy off-premises grapes from, and see how they’re pruning their vines. If they’re leaving three or four canes, and a lot of buds for a water-fat cash crop, I’ll make a note not to buy from them come harvest.” He looked at the gray ivy-leaf mark on the back of his otherwise unscarred hand, and he remembered the vivid shock-hallucination that had accompanied the childhood injury, and it occurred to him that he didn’t want to be there for the pruning—not this year. Grape leaves jell like rain…“Why, what’s on your agenda?”

Plumtree eyed her cola-colored drink as the electric light over their heads flickered, and then she waved at the waitress. “Could I get a Budweiser here?” she called. “Two Budweisers, that is?”

Cochran heard no reply, just the continuing thump and rattle of the bar dice.

After a few moments he spoke. “Janis mentioned that you might want a couple of drinks,” he said, levelly enough. He was annoyed to see that his hand trembled as he lifted his beer glass. He made himself look squarely at her, and the skin of his forearms tingled as he realized that he could see the difference, now that he knew to look for it; the mouth was wider now, the eyes narrower.

“My agenda,” said Cody. “I’ve got a lawyer of my own to look up. His name is Strube. He’ll be able to lead me to a boy who’s about fifteen now, a boy-who-would-be-king, apparently, named something like Boogie-Woogie Bananas.”

Cochran raised his eyebrows as he swallowed a mouthful of beer and put his glass down. “Uhh…?”

“This boy apparently knows how to restore a dead king to life. What’s that you’re drinking?”

“Wild Turkey and Coors.”

“Coors. Like screwing in a canoe. Oh well.” She reached across the tablecloth and lifted his glass and drained it in one long swallow. “And two more Coorses too,” she called without looking away from Cochran.

“You can afford it,” he said.

“Fuckyou!” yelled a woman in the booth by the door; and for a second Cochran was so sure that she had been yelling at him that his face went cold. But now a man in the same booth was protesting in shrill, injured tones, and when Cochran looked over his shoulder he saw the blond woman who had shouted shaking her head and crying.

“‘Nuff said,” remarked Plumtree.

If Long John Beach’s crazy lyrics for “Puff the Magic Dragon” had not still been jangling in his head, if Beach had not clasped Cochran’s hand tonight with a hand that he didn’t have, if the bang and rattle of the dice-players at the bar hadn’t been emphasizing the fact that nobody in this bar had seemed to speak above whispers until the woman had shouted, Cochran would never have thought of what he said next; and if he hadn’t downed the bourbon on a nearly empty stomach he would not have spoken it aloud; but,

“You throw it, don’t you?” he said wonderingly to Plumtree. “Anger. Like, it can’t be created or destroyed, but it can be shifted.” Over the aromas of lamb and mint and liquor, the humid air was sharp with the smell of wilted., chopped vegetation, like a macheted clearing in a jungle. “Is that part of your dissociative disorder, that you can stay calm by actually throwing your anger off onto somebody nearby? The lady who kept breaking her spoon in the ice-cream place, and cussing, when the kid wouldn’t give you a twenty…and Mr. Regushi jumping up to strangle Muir yesterday, when Armentrout pissed you off.” He was dizzy, and wished the waitress would hurry up with the beer.

“What gives you the right—“ choked the blond woman by the door.

Cochran exhaled, and gave Plumtree a frail, apologetic smile. “Nothing, I guess,” he said.

“You still got any quarters?” asked Plumtree calmly.

Cochran squeezed his thigh under the table. “At least one.”

“Let’s go make a call.”

They stood up out of the booth and crossed the sandy floor to the pay telephone by the rest rooms in the far corner, and after Plumtree had hoisted the white-pages telephone book up from a shelf under the phone and flipped through the thin leaves of it, she said, “No Strube listed. Not in L.A.”

Cochran was peering over her shoulder at the STR page. “There’s a…‘Strubie the Clown,’” he noted. “He’s listed twice, also as ‘Strubie the Children’s Entertainer.’”

She nodded. “It’s a good enough flop for a call. Gimme your quarter.”

Cochran dug it out for her, and she thumbed it into the slot and punched in the number. After a few seconds of standing with the receiver to her ear, she said, “It’s a recording—listen.”

She leaned her head back and tilted the receiver, and Cochran pressed his chin to her cheek to hear the message with her. His heart was pounding, and he let himself lay his hand on her shoulder as if for balance.

“…and I can’t come to the phone right now,” piped a merry voice from the earpiece. “But leave your name and number, and Strubie will right back to you be!” A beep followed, and Plumtree hung up the phone and shook off Cochran’s arm.

“He’s, uh, not home, I guess,” said Cochran to cover his embarrassment as they scuffed back to the booth. Their dinners had been served—two plates sat on the tablecloth, the meat and vegetables piled on them steaming with smells of garlic and lamb and onion and cinnamon, along with another Manhattan and a fresh shot glass of bourbon and five fresh glasses of beer.

“Where would we be without you to figure these things out?” Plumtree said acidly as she slid into the booth.

Cochran sat down without replying, and as he began hungrily forking up the mess of onions and tomatoes and veal on his plate he looked around at the bar and the other patrons rather than at Plumtree. He hoped she’d be Janis again soon; and he resolved to catch her if she got up to go to the ladies’ room.

The bartender was a woman too, and as Cochran watched she drew a draft beer for one of the men who had been playing bar dice. The man pulled a little cloth bag from his coat pocket and shook from it a pile of yellow-brown powder onto the bar. The bartender scooped the powder up with a miniature dustpan and disposed of it behind the bar.

Gold dust? wondered Cochran with the incurious detachment of being half-drunk. Heroin or cocaine, cut with semolina flour? Either way, it seemed like an awful lot to pay for one beer.

A black dwarf on crutches was laboriously poling his way out of the bar now, and when he had braced the door open to swing his crutches outside, Cochran caught a strong scent of the sea on the gusty cold draft that made the lamps flicker in the moment before the door banged shut behind the little man. And under the resumed knock and rattle of the dice he now heard a deep, slow rolling, as if a millwheel were turning in some adjoining stone building.

He became aware that his food was gone, along with the bourbon and a lot of the beer, and that Plumtree had a cigarette in her mouth and was striking a match. Cochran’s cigarettes were still back at the madhouse.

When she threw the match into the ashtray it flared up in a momentary flame; an instant later there was just a wisp of smoke curling over the ashtray, and a whiff of something like bacon.

“Brandy in the ashtrays?” said Cochran, in a light tone to cover for having jumped in surprise. “What’s the writing on it say? ‘No smoking near this ashtray’?”

Plumtree was startled herself, and she reached out gingerly to tilt the ashtray toward her. “It says—I think it’s Latin—Roma, tibi subito motibus ibit amor. What does that mean?”

“Lemme see.” Cochran tipped the warm ashtray toward himself. “Uh…’How romantic, to be…submitting…in a motor bus, having…a bit!…of love.’”

“You liar!” She actually, seemed frightened by his nonsense. “It doesn’t say that, does it? In a motor bus? You’re such a liar.”

Cochran laughed and touched her arm reassuringly. “No, I don’t know what it says.” He took a sip from one of the beer glasses, and to change the subject he asked, “Why did you say Coors is like screwing in a canoe?”

“Because it’s fuckin’ near water. Ho ho. Let’s get out of here. Strubie the Clown ought to be home by now. I’ll go copy down the address listed for him and call us a cab.” She had got out of the booth and was striding away toward the telephone before he could protest.

“Strubie the goddamn Clown…?” he muttered to himself. “It won’t be the right guy, not this lawyer you want. Tonight?”

He at least managed to finish the beers before she got back and pulled him up onto his feet; but when she had marched him to the door and pulled it open—there was no sea scent on the breeze now—she hurried back inside so that she could speak to the blond woman who had been shouting, and who by this time was very drunk and crying quietly.

When Plumtree rejoined him and pushed him out across the Rosecrans sidewalk, she immediately began looking anxiously up and down the street. “I hope the cab gets here quick,” she muttered.

“Oh hell. Me too,” said Cochran, for he saw that she was now holding a purse.

STRUBIE THE Clown’s house was a little one-story 1920s bungalow off Del Amo and Avalon in the Carson area of south Los Angeles, and after the taxi dropped them off Cochran and Plumtree hurried out of the curbside streetlight’s glare, up the old two-strip concrete driveway to the dark porch.

No lights seemed to be on inside the house, but Plumtree knocked on the door. Several seconds went by without any sound from inside, and Cochran blinked around at the porch.

A wooden swing hung on chains from a beam in the porch roof, and Cochran wobbled across the Astroturf carpeting and slumped into it—and instantly one of the hooks tore free of the overhead beam, and the swing’s streetside corner hit the porch deck with an echoing bang.

“Christ!” hissed Plumtree; she reeled back and bumped a ceramic pot on the porch rail, and it tipped off and broke with a hollow thump and rattle on the grass below. Cochran had rolled off the pivoting and now-diagonal swing, but his arm was tangled in the slack chain, and it took him several seconds to thrash free of it. The fall had jolted him. His face was suddenly cold and damp, and his mouth was full of salty saliva; beside the front door sat a wide plastic tray heaped with sand and cat turds, and he crawled over and began vomiting into it, desperately trying to do so quietly.

“You shithead!” Plumtree gasped. “We’re wrecking his place!”

Cochran was aware of the sound of a car’s engine idling fast out at the curb as it was shifted out of gear, and then the noise stopped and he heard a car door creak open and a moment later clunk shut.

“He’s home,” whispered Plumtree urgently. “Stop it! And get up!”

Cochran was just spitting now, and he got his feet under himself and straightened up, bracing himself on the wall planks. “‘Scuse me,” he said resentfully with his face against the painted wood. “‘Scuse the fuck out o’ me.” He pulled his shirt free of his pants and wiped his mouth on it, then turned around to lean his back against the wall.

“Who’s there?” came a man’s frightened voice from the front yard.

“Oh,” muttered Plumtree, “I got no time for this flop.” A moment later she turned toward the front steps. “Mr. Strube?” she said cheerily. “My friend and I need your help.”

“Who are you?”

Cochran pushed the damp hair back from his face and peered out into the yard. The figure silhouetted against the streetlight glare wore baggy pants and a tiny., tight jacket, and great tufts of hair stood out from the sides of the head. The shoes at the ends of the short legs were as big as basketballs.

“We’re people in trouble, Mr. Strube,” Plumtree said. “We need to find a boy whose name sounds like…well, like Boogie-Woogie Bananas. He’ll be able to help us.”

“I…don’t know anybody whose name sounds…even remotely like that.” The clown walked hesitantly up to the porch steps, and his gaze went from Plumtree to Cochran to the broken swing. “Is he a clown? I know all the local clowns, I think—”

“No,” said Plumtree. “He’s…a king, or a contender for some kind of throne…it’s supernatural, a supernatural thing, actually….”

Strubie’s bulbous rubber nose wobbled as he sniffed. “Did you two get sick here? Are you drunk? What have you done here? I’m going to have to ask you to leave. I’m in the entertainment business, and my schedule…”

Cochran jumped then, for suddenly a man’s voice came grinding out of Plumtree’s mouth, gravelly and hoarsely baritone: “Frank, you got a show-biz friend in the bar here!” the voice drawled amiably. “Nicky Bradshaw, his name is. Shall I tell him where you live?”

Cochran gaped at Plumtree, totally disoriented. There had been a TV star called Nicky Bradshaw—he had starred in some situation comedy in the fifties. Was this voice Flibbertigibbet talking? Cochran was pretty sure that Nicky Bradshaw had died years ago. What bar was Flibbertigibbet talking about?

“Bradshaw doesn’t…blame me,” said the clown quietly, “for his death.”

Again the man’s voice boomed out of Plumtree’s throat: “Then you don’t mind if I tell him where you live, right?”

The clown sighed shakily. “Don’t do anything.” He clumped up the steps to the porch, digging a set of keys out of the pocket of his baggy trousers, and he unlocked the front door. “Come inside, if you’ve got to talk about these things.”

Plumtree followed the clown into the dark house, and after a light came on inside Cochran stepped in too, pulling the door closed behind him.

The green-carpeted living room was bare except for some white plastic chairs and a long mahogany credenza against the far wall; impressionistic sailboat prints and unskilled oil paintings of clowns hung in a cluster over it, as if Strubie had once, briefly and with limited resources, tried to brighten the empty expanses of mottled plaster walls.

Plumtree sat down in one of the plastic chairs and crossed her legs. Her jeans were tight, and it made Cochran dizzy to look at her legs and at the same time remember the voice she had just now been speaking with.

In the glare from the lamp on the credenza, the clown was hideous; the white face-paint was cracked with his anxious frown, and the orange tufts of hair glued onto the bald wig above his ears emphasized the exhausted redness of his eyes.

He didn’t sit down. “Who are you?” he asked, shakily pulling off his white gloves.

“That’s not important,” said the man’s voice from Plumtree’s throat. A sardonic grin made her cheekbones and the line of her jaw seem broader, and Cochran had to remind himself that it was a woman’s face.

Strubie cleared his throat. “Who’s your friend, then?” he asked, nodding toward Cochran, who, daunted by this attention, let himself fold into one of the chairs.

“I’ll tell you the truth, I don’t know.” Plumtree’s face turned toward Cochran, and the wide-pupilled eyes squinted at him. “I gotta say I don’t much like the look of him. However, he may kiss my hand, if he likes.”

Cochran shook his head and licked beads of sweat off his upper lip.

Strubie took a deep breath, and then hugely startled Cochran by reaching both hands behind his ears and peeling the white scalp, with the tufts of orange hair still attached to it, forward and right off of his head. “Who is this bananas person,” the clown asked wearily, “and how can he help you out of whatever trouble it is that you’re in?” He tossed the white bald wig onto the wooden floor. His thinning hair was gray and tangled, and the inch of unpainted forehead below his hairline was the color of oatmeal.

The light dimmed out, then brightened.

And when Plumtree spoke, it was in a woman’s voice: “Don’t tell him,” she said. “You didn’t tell him yet, did you?” Cochran glanced at her quickly, but was unable to guess which personality was up at the moment.

“Tell who,” said the clown, “what?”

“The…the man who was speaking through me,” she said. “Valorie has blocked him, for now. Did you tell him how to find the boy?”

“No,” said Strubie.

“Good. I’ll go away, and you’ll never hear from…that man, again. Or me.” Cochran thought it was Cody speaking. “Tell me how to find the boy, and no harm will cbme to him, I promise.”

Strubie laughed softly, exposing yellow teeth in the white-painted face. “I used to be a divorce lawyer,” he said. “I’ve hurt enough children. Today I try to…give them some moments of joy, if only in a frail, half-assed way. It’s what I can do. How do I know you’re not going to go hurt this boy, or kill him? Other people have wanted to, in the past.”

Plumtree spread her hands. “‘I need to find him because he can restore a dead king to life. I killed…or at least, the man you were just listening to, I helped him kill… a king, and I need to make it right.”

“A king,” echoed Strubie. “And if I tell you nothing…?”

“Then I’ll hang around. I’ll be back tomorrow. The bad man will get it out of you one way or another, and incidentally you’ll have a terrible time. Everybody will.”

“God help everybody,” said Strubie softly.

Strubie reached under the lapel of his midgets jacket and slid out of an inner pocket a flat half-pint bottle Roses whiskey; he unscrewed the deep swig of the brown liquor; his long exhalation afterward was almost a whistle.

“The boy’s name is Koot Hoomie Parganas,” he said hoarsely. “His parents were murdered just before Halloween in ’92, because they were in the way. The Parganas boy had another person inside his head with him—you should be able to empathize!—and a lot of ruthless people wanted that person, wanted to consume it into themselves. For them to do that, incidentally, would have involved killing the boy.”

He sat down on the credenza and lowered his face into his hands. “The last I heard of him,” came his muffled voice, “he was living in an apartment building in Long Beach. I don’t remember the address, but it’s a big old rambling three-story place on the northwest corner of Ocean and Twenty-first Place, run-down, with a dozen mailboxes out front, and he was living there with a man named Peter Sullivan and a woman named Angelica Elizalde.” He raised his head and pried off his bulbous red nose; his real nose was textured and scored with red capillaries. “The building used to belong to Nicholas Bradshaw, the man who played the Spooky character in the old ‘Ghost of a Chance’ TV show—he owned the building under the alias Solomon Shadroe—but it was quit-claimed to his common-law wife, who had some Mexican last name.”

“Valorie’s got all that,” said Plumtree. “Do you owe this Koot Hoomie any money?”

“Owe him—?” said Strubie, frowning. “I don’t think so. No. In fact, I got gypped out of a reward, when I led the bad people there; they were offering a reward to whoever could find Bradshaw, find the Spooky character, and I used to work for Bradshaw when he was a lawyer, after he quit being an actor, so I was able to track him down there. I never got—”

“It sounds like you made Koot Hoomie’s life harder, doing that,” said Plumtree. “Would you like me to take any money to him, from you, as a token of restitution?”

The clown put down his bottle and stared at her out of his red, watery eyes. “I couldn’t,” he said finally, stiffly, “give you more than a hundred dollars. I swear, that’s the absolute—”

“I think that’ll do,” said Plumtree.

The clown stared at her for another few seconds, then wearily got to his feet and shuffled out of the room in his blimp shoes. Cochran could hear him bumping down an uncarpeted hall, and then a door squeaked and clicked shut.

Cochran exhaled through clenched teeth. “This is very damned wrong, Cody,” he whispered. “This poor man can’t afford your…extortion, or protection, or whatever it is. Hell, I’m sure that lady in the bar couldn’t afford to lose her purse! I’m going to—first chance I get, I’m going to pay these people back—”

“Talk the virtuous talk, by all means,” Plumtree interrupted. “Janis can give you tips on it. I’ll make my own restitutions, like always. In the meantime, I don’t need to hear your estimates of how much cash is enough to finance the resurrection of a dead king.” Her lip curled in a smile. “No offense, pansy.”

Cochran shook his head. “Janis is right about you. Did you know she escaped to save your life?”

“Well sure. She needs me a whole lot more than I need her.”

The door down the hall creaked open again, and the clown soon reappeared with a sheaf of crumpled bills in his hand.

“I’m paying not to see you people again,” he said.

“We’ll see you get your money’s worth,” Plumtree told him, standing up and taking the bills. She even counted them—Cochran could see that it wasn’t all twenties, that there were at least a couple of fives in the handful.

Strubie crouched with an effortful grunt, and picked the latex bald wig up off the green carpet; and when he had straightened up again he tugged it back over his hair, and retrieved the rubber nose from where he had set it down on the credenza and planted it firmly on his face again. “You’ve stirred old ghosts tonight,” he said hoarsely. “I’ll sleep in my full mask.”

“Let’s for Christ’s sake go,” said Cochran, struggling back up onto his feet.

Plumtree pushed the bills into the newly acquired purse and strode to the door.

When she and Cochran had stepped out onto the devastated dark porch, and then made their unsteady way down the driveway to the halo of streetlight radiance at the curb, Cochran squinted back at the house: and in spite of everything that had gone before he jumped in surprise to see five—or was it six?—thin little girls in tattered white dresses perched like sickly cockatoos on the street edge of the roof, their skinny arms clasped around their raised knees. They seemed to be staring toward Plumtree and him, but they didn’t nod or wave.

“Look at me!” said Plumtree in an urgent whisper. When Cochran had jerked his head around toward her, she went on, “Don’t look them in the eyes, you idiot. You want to be bringing a bunch of dead kids along with us? And you’re not even masked! You’d just flop down dead, right here. Those are Strubie’s concerns, whoever they might once have been, not ours.”

Cochran’s head was ringing in incredulous protest, but he didn’t look back at the girls on the roof.

Plumtree had started scuffling along the street in the direction of the gas-station and liquor-store lights of Bellflower Boulevard, and he followed, shivering and pushing his hands into the pockets of his corduroy pants.

Cochran forced himself to forget about the ragged little girls and to focus on Plumtree and himself. “We’ve got plenty enough money for a motel,” he said. “To sleep in,” he added.

“Maybe it’s a motel we’ll wind up at tonight,” Plumtree allowed, “but it’ll be in Long Beach, I think. We need to find another cab.”

Cochran sighed, but broadened his stride to keep up with her. Perhaps because of Long John Beach’s upsettingly wrong lyrics to “Puff the Magic Dragon,” misunderstood rock lyrics were now spinning through Cochran’s head, and it was all he could do not to sing out loud,

Had a gold haddock,

Seemed the thing to do,

Let that be a lesson,

Get a cockatoo,

Wooly bully….

Plumtree called for a taxi from a pay phone at an all-night Texaco station on Atlantic, and when the yellow sedan rocked and squeaked into the shadowed area of the lot where the phone was, out by the air and water hoses, Cochran and Plumtree shuffled across the asphalt and climbed into the back seat. The driver had shifted into neutral when he had stopped, but even so the car’s engine was laboring, and it stalled as Plumtree was pulling the door closed; the driver switched off the lights, cranked at the starter until the engine roared into tortured life again, and then snapped the lights back on and clanked it into gear and pulled out onto the boulevard before either of his passengers had even spoken.

“Long Beach,” said Plumtree flatly. “Ocean and Twenty-first Place.” She was gingerly rubbing the corners of her jaw with both hands.

“It’ll be costly,” observed the driver in a cheeful voice. Cochran saw that the man had a full, curly beard. “That’s a lo-o-ong way.”

“She can afford it,” muttered Cochran, feeling quarrelsome. He was breathing deeply; the interior of the car smelled strongly of roses, and he was afraid he might get sick again.

“Oh,” laughed the driver, “I wasn’t doubting your reserves. I was doubting mine.” The man’s voice was oddly hoarse and blurred, and over the reek of roses Cochran caught a whiff of the wet-streets-and-iodine smell of very dry red wine. Their driver was apparently drunk.

“What,” Cochran asked irritably, “are you low on gas?”

“What gas would that be?” the man asked in a rhetorical, philosophical tone. “Hydrogen, methane? Not nitrous oxide, at least. An alternative fuel? But this is an electric car—I’m running on a sort of induction coil, here.”

“Swell,” said Cochran. He looked at Plumtree, who was sitting directly behind the driver, but she was holding a paper napkin to her nose and staring out the window. She’s missing some scope for her sarcasm here, Cochran thought. “You can find Long Beach, though, right?”

“Easy as falling off a log, believe me.”

Plumtree was still sitting up rigidly on the seat and staring out at the dark palm trees and apartment buildings as if desperate to memorize the route, and Cochran slumped back in the seat and closed his eyes. The tires were thumping in an irregular drumming tempo, and he muttered sleepily, “Your tires are low on air.”

The driver laughed. “These are experimental tires, India rubber. Hard with hard vacuum. Has to be a very hard vacuum, or I’d combust.”

The driver’s nonsense reminded Cochran of Long John Beach’s remark this afternoon: Her bed is India; there she lies, a pearl. Cochran frowned without opening his eyes, and didn’t make any further comments. In seconds he had fallen asleep.

CHAPTER SEVEN

“‘My credentials, entries, and memoranda, are all comprehended in the one line, ‘Recalled to Life;’”….

—Charles Dickens,

A Tale of Two Cities

DOGS were howling out in the alleys and dark yards of Long Beach, and unless the ringing air was particularly distorted—which Koot Hoomie reflected that it might very well be—they were howling out on the beach sand too, possibly mistaking the electric glow of the Queen Mary’s million lights across the harbor for the moon, or a close-passing comet.

Kootie stepped out onto the front porch and pulled the door closed behind him. Or, he thought as the night breeze swept the echoes of amplified wailing around from the parking-lot side of the old apartment building, maybe the dogs are tired of our music. The tenants in the neighboring complexes would probably have come to complain about it a week ago if they could locate the source.

For ten days now, all day and all night, there had been some person or other dancing in the Solville parking lot; Elizalde’s clients had spontaneously conceived and taken on the eccentric task, and many of them had missed work to do their individual four-hour shifts, each successive businessman or tattooed cholo or portly matron dutifully hopping and scuffing to the music banging out of the portable stereo that was connected by extension cords to an outlet in the kitchen. On Sunday and Monday of last week it had been a randomly eclectic sequence of sixties rock, mariachi, rap, and Country-Western musics, but by this last weekend they had somehow found and settled on one song—a hoarse, haggardly persevering thing called either “Lay Down” or “Candles in the Wind,” by Melanie, recorded more than a decade before Kootie had been born—and Arky Mavranos had dubbed a cassette of nothing but that song, repeated over and over again, for the dancers to play endlessly.

And his foster dad and Arky Mavranos had located and busted open an old fireplace behind the drywall in the bathroom down the hall from the office, and had climbed up on the roof and knocked the layers of tar paper off the obscured chimney, and so a fire of pine and oak logs had been kept continuously burning. There were enough people in residence to keep the fire tended, but Mavranos had in recent days begun to complain about having to drive all over town for more wood, and Kootie was afraid he would soon insist that they cut down one of the shady old carob trees around the parking lot.

Ten days so far on this deathwatch, and not even a whiff of decomposition yet. Kootie wondered if they would be able to keep on maintaining all these observances even until the weekend.

Kootie sighed, staring out at the dark rooftops.

And whenever the old king did begin to show some sign of decay, and could thus be formally acknowledged as dead, Kootie would apparently…be the next king. His poor naive dead parents had raised him to be some kind of Indian holy man, the new Krishnamurti, the jagadguru, and that discipline had been close enough to what was required here, what with all the well-remembered fasts and the meditations and the sacramental meal of smoked salmon and whitefish at Canter’s Jewish delicatessen on Fairfax, one Friday in 1988—and he was a virgin, physically, and he had the perpetually bleeding wound in his side.

That was why Arky Mavranos and Diana were here—to transfer the mantle, to pronounce Le Roi c’est mort, vive le Roi.

These recent mornings—in the sunny cool-breeze moments between waking and getting out of bed, when he seemed to thrill to the vertiginous flights of crows all over the L.A. basin, and flex with the powerful iron tides roaring along the San Diego and Harbor and Pomona freeways, and be able to just tap his feet in rhythm with the heartbeat of the continent—he found himself very much wanting this job the people in the red track had brought for him; it was only after the sun had gone down over the smokestacks of the Queen Maw a Quarter mile away across the harbor that he seemed to catch the tang of fresh blood and stale beer on the taste buds of the broken asphalt, and cramp with the hopeless hunger and unknown withdrawals in the mazes of cracked plaster and parking garages and electric rainbows in glass on street corners, and shiver with the grinding of fast, shallow panting, or of some subterranean gnawing, that invisibly agitated all the pavements.

Kootie would soon have to either accept it, or refuse it; and he couldn’t get rid of the thought that he would be accruing some debt either way—that a consequence, a price, would be demanded of him at some future time.

Tonight he just wanted to be Kootie, the fourteen-year-old boy who lived in Long Beach and studied astronomy and went in-line skating down the sidewalks of Bluff Park in the afternoons.

He leaned back against the clapboard wall and closed his eyes, and he cautiously let his attention expand just to include the building here. Most strongly he felt the presence of Scott Crane, the still-undecaying dead man in the kitchen, robed in white now and laid out across a dining-room table, with the sawed-short spear segment standing up from his shut-down, pulseless throat; but Kootie was also aware of his foster mom Angelica and the pregnant, bald-headed Diana lady fussing over the big pot of bouillabaisse on the stove near the dead man’s bearded head, and of his foster dad Pete crouching by the television set in the long office room, talking to Diana’s two sons, Scat and Oliver; and of Johanna, who owned the buildings that were Solville, sitting out on the back steps drinking Tecate beer and eating homemade enchiladas with the girlfriend of the teenage boy who was currently keeping the dance going.

Now Pete had straightened up and was looking for Kootie—but it was probably just to ask about the pans full of bean sprouts, and Kootie didn’t bother to open his eyes or step away from the shadowed wall. After Angelica had been convinced that these uninvited houseguests had to stay, and that in some vague but compelling way they needed and merited Kootie’s cooperation, she had done some research into their problem and come up with, among other troublesome measures, her “Gardens of Adonis”—five shallow aluminum pans with half an inch of damp dirt and a handful of beans in each of them; the things had sprouted and quickly died again and had to be re-sown twice already, and Kootie knew that Pete was of the opinion that this third crop had about had it too. Let this lot go one more day, Dad, Kootie wearily thought now.

But Pete had leaned out the back door and spoken to Johanna, and had walked back through the office and was now striding up the hall toward the front door.

Kootie stepped away from the wall and opened the door just as Pete was reaching for the inside knob.

Kootie smiled. “Let ’em go till tomorrow, Dad.”

“You’re talking about those beans, aren’t you?” said Pete Sullivan impatiently. “To hell with the beans. We’ve got a line on the TV.”

“Oh. Okay.” Kootie followed his foster father back into the hall, and made sure to slide the feather-hung security chain into the slot on the inside of the door.

The hallway, and the office when they walked in there and stood beside the television set, smelled strongly of burnt coffee again. The smell had been untraceably hanging around the whole place for the last ten days, generally stronger at night, even with all the windows open and people cooking for a crowd and smoking and often not having bathed; Arky Mavranos had only joined in the general puzzled shrug when people remarked on the odor, but privately he told Kootie that when Scott Crane’s first wife, Susan, had died of a heart attack in 1990, she’d been drinking a cup of coffee, and it was unfinished and still hot after the paramedics had taken her body away—and that Crane, unable to bear the thought of it too eventually cooling off, had put the cup in his oven over the lowest heat setting, and that it had baked dry in there, apparently filling the house with the burned smell. After a while, Arky had said, a crippled and malevolent facet of the wine god Dionysus had come to Crane in the apparition of Susan’s ghost, incongruously heralded by the hot coffee reek. All this had apparently happened before Crane had become…king of the west …on Holy Saturday of 1990.

Tonight the coffee smell had a sharper edge to it, like hot, vapory Kahlua.

Kootie ignored the smell for now, and stared at the television on the desk. For the past ten days the set had been left on, with the brightness control turned down far enough to dim the screen to black. Now, though, a steady horizontal, white streak bisected the black screen.

“Well,” Kootie said slowly, “it’s a ghost, somewhere nearby. According to Sol Shadroe, disembodied personalities are an electromagnetic commotion in the fifty-five-megahertz range—which is roughly the frequency of Channel Two, which this set is tuned to.” He breathed a shallow, hitching sigh and ran his fingers through his hair, then glanced nervously at the bookshelves on the back wall, where the weather-beaten stuffed-toy pig sat on the top shelf. “Has the line got brighter since you first saw it?”

“Yes,” said Diana’s son Scat, who was Kootie’s age, and who liked to sit in front of the TV even though the screen was generally blank. “Uh…twice as bright already, in this minute or so since it first showed up.”

“Then it’s getting closer.”

Diana’s first son, Oliver, was a year older than the other two boys, but the eyes in his tanned face were wet as he looked up at Kootie. “Our dad,” he said, “our stepfather, I mean, he took all the ghosts with him, when somebody…killed him. The ghosts are gone.” He said it proudly, as though Scott Crane had gone down under an onslaught of ghosts, and only after heroically decimating their ranks.

“The local ones, yeah,” Kootie agreed gently, “whatever ‘local’ means, exactly, in this business.” He sighed, and went on, almost to himself, “It’s hard to judge their distance, just from their apparent brightness here, like trying to figure the absolute magnitude of stars. This here ghost could be one that was insulated—clathrated—when the king died, or it could be a visitor from outside the local area. Or of course it could be the ghost of somebody that died in this week-and-a-half since.”

For several moments no one spoke, and the only noise in the room was the steady plink and splash of water from the leaking ceiling falling into the pots and buckets around the couch, though it was not raining outside. Then Kootie heard a clatter and footsteps from the kitchen, and at the same instant a loud, mechanical burping started up behind and above him. He looked toward the kitchen doorway, though he did dart a glance down at Oliver, who was crouched on the floor, and say, “That’s the pig, right?”

“The toy one on the shelf,” said Oliver steadily, “right. Burping.”

“There’s an old man out front,” snapped Angelica, wiping her hands on a kitchen towel. “He’s caught in the pyrocantha bushes.” She glared across the office at the bookshelf. “Of course this would be when the pig decides to put in its two cents’ worth.”

“Two cents’ worth…” echoed Kootie, catching an urgent thought from outside the building’s walls; then it was gone. “Get Arky Mavranos, will you, Oliver?”

“Right.” Oliver straightened up lithely and sprinted out toward the back parking lot.

Diana, the pregnant wife of the dead man in the kitchen, said, “Is this a ghost, out front?”

She was standing beside Angelica; Kootie was getting used to her appearance—all the hair on her scalp had fallen out during the first night the dead king’s company had spent in Solville, the first night after the king’s murder. Probably her sudden baldness was an extreme reaction to grief and loss, but at times Kootie had uneasily wondered if it was instead somehow a consequence of his having asked the wrong question, when their party had driven up in the red truck ten days ago.

Why is your truck the color of blood? he had asked, instead of Who does it serve? Damn all this magical minefield, he thought.

“Probably,” he answered her. “Tangled in the bushes—he sounds like one of what Johanna calls the ‘beasties’—the old ghosts that don’t dissipate, and accumulate substance from bugs and spit and cigarette butts and stuff, and then walk around panhandling money for liquor. Snips and snails and puppydog tails. He doesn’t sound like being…whoever it is we’ve been waiting for.”

“The Three Kings,” said Scat. “With gold and frankincense and myrrh.”

Arky Mavranos had stepped into the office from the back yard, followed by Oliver. “And they’re supposed to show up on Epiphany,” Mavranos said gruffly, “to venerate the new king. They’re five days late already.” He took a sip from the can of Coors beer in his hand, leaving foam on his salt-and-pepper mustache. “You got a line on the TV and a ghost out in the bushes by the driveway, is how I hear it.” He glanced disapprovingly at the stuffed pig on the bookshelf, which was still noisily retching. “Ollie, take the batteries out of that suffering beast, will you? Kootie, let’s you and I go out and talk to his ghost, see if he’s got any news for us.”

“Do you want to bring him anything?” asked Diana, who was still holding the ladle from the pot of bouillabaisse.

“Keep a plate of rocks ready,” said Kootie, “in case he hasn’t had dinner yet.”

Mavranos was laughing at that as he and Kootie walked down the hall to the front door; by unspoken agreement they had avoided the quicker route, through the kitchen and the presence of the dead, bearded king.

The dogs were still howling, and the breeze off the ocean was colder, when Kootie undid the chain and opened the door; and when the two of them had trudged around to the driveway, Kootie jumped back with an involuntary yelp at the sight of the old man who was thrashing in the pyrocantha bushes.

In the fragmentary yellow light from the kitchen window the old man appeared to have a lot of long insect legs or antennae waving in the air around him, as if he were a gigantic daddy-longlegs spider. Then Kootie got a clearer look at the white-bearded figure in the middle of the tangle, and he saw with relief that the waving, flexing filaments were metal, and were attached to the old man’s belt.

“Shit, I know this guy,” said Mavranos, striding forward. “And he’s still wearing his silly damn curb-feelers. Easy, there, Joe,” he said to the old man. “you’re just making it worse. Hold still.” Mavranos pulled the old man out of the bushes and began yanking the metal filaments free of the branches. Twigs and leaves spun across the driveway pavement. “This guy ain’t a ghost. I don’t think—you didn’t, like, die, did you, Joe?”

“Fuck you,” sputtered the old man, thrashing his hands against the bushes as if to help free himself. “No, I’m not dead. Are you dead? If you know me, then I must have found the right place, so there’s a dead guy here somewhere, right?”

“Yeah, but inside, we don’t keep him out here in the shrubbery. Where’s Booger?”

The old man was panting but standing still now, letting Mavranos pull him free. “She died,” he said harshly. “She walked out into the desert, the day after your Easter of 1990. I went after her, calling—but I’m blind, and she was mute. Somebody found her body, after a while.”

“I’m truly sorry to hear that,” Mavranos said. He tugged the last filament free, and now old Joe was swaying on the driveway in the middle of his cluster of bobbing antennae, like, thought Kootie, a sea urchin left here by a high tide, or a big old dandelion seed carried here by the night wind.

From the dark street at Kootie’s back came a shrill whisper: “You ask them”

Kootie spun toward the voice, peripherally aware that Mavranos had quickly turned that way too.

A lanky, dark-haired man in a T-shirt was shuffling up the driveway, visibly shivering in the breeze. “Excuse me,” he said, “but—” His gaze fell on the old man, and he took a quick step backward. Then, after peering more closely, he exhaled hard, took another breath, and went on: “Sorry. Why not? ‘Specially tonight, huh? We re—” He barked a nervous, mirthless laugh and spread his hands. “—looking for a boy named Koot Hoomie Parganas. He lived here, at one time.”

A slim blond woman had sidled up behind the man, and was peering wide-eyed over his shoulder. Now she nodded.

“Kootie’s living in Pittsburgh these days—” began Mavranos, but Kootie interrupted.

“I’m Koot Hoomie Parganas,” he said.

Abruptly Kootie could feel the old man whom Mavranos had called Joe staring at him, and Kootie glanced sideways at him in surprise—and the old man was obviously blind, his eyelids horribly sunken in his dark, furrowed face—but nevertheless the old man was suddenly paying powerful attention to him.

Kootie looked back at the man and woman shivering on the driveway.

Kootie heard footsteps rapping down the steps from the kitchen door, and he sensed that it was Angelica. “Tiena la máquina?” he asked, without looking around: Do you have the machine?

“Como siempre,” came Angelica’s voice coldly in reply. As always.

“No need for your máquinas” said the blond woman, stepping out from behind her companion. Her tight jeans emphasized her long slim legs, and her flimsy white blouse was bunched up around her breasts as she hugged herself against the cold. “Sorry, I can’t have been listening. Did you all say Koot Hoomie Parganas is here, or not?” She laughed, rocking on the soles of her white sneakers. “Have we even asked yet?”

“I’m him,” Kootie said, irritated with himself for being distracted by her figure. “What did you want me for?”

“I—Well, short form, kiddo, I need you to tell me how to find a dead king and restore him to life. Does this make any sense to you? Could we talk about it inside?”

“No,” said Angelica and Mavranos in unison; but a moment later Mavranos muttered, “Restore him to life?”

Kootie gave the woman a quizzical smile. “Why is it your job,” he asked quietly, “to restore this dead king to life?”

She tossed her head to throw her thatch of blond hair back from her face, and she stared at Kootie. “Amends,” she said in a flat voice. She raised her hands, palms out, as if surrendering. “These are the hands that killed him.”

Kootie’s heightened senses caught not only the rustle of Angelica’s hand sliding up under her blouse, but also the tiny snick of the .45’s safety being thumbed off.

Kootie glanced sideways and caught Mavranos’s eye, and nodded.

“You two don’t appear to be armed,” Mavranos said cheerfully, “but we are. I reckon you can all come in, but keep your hands in sight and move slow.”

PLUMTREE DIDN’T pull her injured hand away when Cochran gently took it, and the two of them followed the boy with the funny name across the dark lawn to the apartment building’s open front door. Cochran was walking slowly and keeping his free hand open and away from his body—he had glimpsed the black grip of the automatic under the blouse of the tall, dark-haired woman who had come out of the kitchen, and he was suddenly sober, and taking deep breaths of the cold night air to keep his head clear.

We’ve blundered into some kind of crazy cult, he thought, and Janis—or Cody, probably—has got them mad at us. Watch for a chance to grab her and sneak out, or find a phone and call 911.

His heart was pounding, and he wondered if he might actually have to try to prevent these people from injuring Janis, or even killing her.

“How did you find this place?” called the man with the graying mustache from behind them as they stepped up to the front door and began walking up a carpeted hall. The place smelled like some third-world soup kitchen.

Cochran decided to protect poor Strubie, who had paid them the hundred dollars to keep out of this. “A psychiatrist at Rosecrans Medical Center gave us the address—” he began.

The hall opened into a long room with a couch against the near wall and a desk with a TV set on it against the opposite wall. The TV set’s screen was glowing a brighter white than Cochran would have thought possible, and as the others crowded in behind him one of the two teenage boys on the couch leaped up and snatched the plug out of the wall socket.

“Thanks, Ollie,” said the man who had followed them in. “The ghost that was torquing the TV is apparently the deceased wife of my old pal Spider Joe here, this old gent with the curb feelers on his belt.” He now stepped to the bookshelves behind the couch and reached down a stainless-steel revolver, which he held pointed at Cochran’s feet. “Everybody sit down, hm? Plenty of room on the floor, though the carpet’s wet in spots. And don’t move those pots, they’re catching leaks.”

The old man who was apparently called Spider Joe shambled across the threadbare carpet and slid down into a crouch beside the kitchen doorway, and the antennae standing out from his belt scraped the wall and knocked a calendar off a nail; and as Cochran sat down beside Plumtree in front of the desk he wondered if the ghost of the old man’s wife might be snagged on one of the metal filaments. The woman with the automatic and the boy with the funny name stood beside the couch.

“Let’s get acquainted,” said the man holding the revolver. “My name’s Archimedes Mavranos, and the lady in the kitchen is Diana, the guy beside her is Pete, and this lady with the máquina is Pete’s wife Angelica. The boys on the couch are Scat and Ollie. Kootie you know.” He raised his eyebrows politely.

Cochran had resolved to give false names, but before he could speak, Plumtree said, “I’m Janis Cordelia Plumtree, and this is Sid Cochran.” She pronounced his name so precisely that Cochran knew she had restrained herself from saying Cockface or something. For God’s sake behave yourself, Cody, he thought. The long room was hot and smelled of garlic and fish and Kahlua, and he could feel sweat beading on his forehead.

Water was thumping and splashing into a saucepan by his feet, and he looked up at the mottled, dented, dripping ceiling, wondering how heavy with water the old plaster was, and whether it might fall on them. “It’s, uh, not raining,” he said inanely. “Outside.”

“It’s raining in San Jose,” spoke up a heavy-set woman who had stepped up to an open door at the far side of the room. She spoke shyly, with a Spanish accent.

“Oh,” said Cochran blankly. San Jose was three hundred and fifty miles to the north, up by Daly City and San Francisco. “Okay.”

“And that’s Johanna,” said Mavranos, “our landlady. I wasn’t asking how you got this address,” he went on, “just now, but how you physically got here.”

“In a taxi,” said Plumtree. When Mavranos just stared at her, she added, “We were in Carson. We told the driver the address, and he…drove us here.”

“Dropped us at the corner,” put in Cochran. “He didn’t want to drive up to the building.”

“So much for our protections here,” said the pregnant woman in the kitchen doorway. Cochran focussed past the bobbing antennae of Spider Joe to get a look at her, and was startled to see that she was completely bald.

“No,” said Kootie, “the space is still bent, around this building. The driver must have been somebody.” He stepped forward now, and leaned down to extend his right hand to Cochran. “Welcome to my house, Sid Cochran,” he said.

Cochran shook his hand, and the boy turned to Plumtree. “Welcome to my house, Janis Cordelia Plumtree.”

Plumtree gingerly reached up with her swollen right hand, and the boy clasped it firmly; but Plumtree’s cry was one of surprise rather than pain.

“It doesn’t hurt!” she said. She held up her right hand after the boy released it, and Cochran could see that the swelling was gone. She flexed the fingers and said, “It doesn’t hurt anymore!”

Cochran made himself remember the hard crack of her fist hitting the linoleum floor last night, and how this evening her knuckles had just been dimples in the hot, unnaturally padded flesh of her hand. He looked from Plumtree’s metacarpal bones, now visible again under the thin skin on the back of her hand as she bunched and straightened her fingers, to the face of the boy standing in front of him, and for a moment in the garlic-and-Kahlua reek the boy was taller, and the brown eyes under his curly hair seemed narrowed as if with Asian epicanthic folds, and the unregarded blur of his clothing had the loose drapery of robes. Cochran’s abdomen felt hollow, and he thought, This is a Magician. A real one.

“No,” said Kootie to him softly, once more just a teenage boy in blue jeans and a flannel shirt, “something different than that.”

Cochran closed his own right hand, still warm from the boy’s grip; and he relaxed a little, for he no longer believed that these people meant to harm him or Plumtree.

Kootie looked past him. “Ah, my dinner,” he said. “I hope you all don’t mind if I eat while we talk.” He patted the flannel shirt over his left ribs. “I’m bleeding, and I’ve got to keep up my strength.” He hiked himself up onto the desk and crossed his legs like a yogi. “If any of you are hungry, just holler—we’ve got lots.”

The bald woman was carrying in a steaming, golden bowl cast in the form of a deeply concave sunfish, and the rich smell of garlic and fish broth was intensified; Angelica followed her back into the kitchen, and reappeared with a bottle of Mondavi Chardonnay and a bowl of some sauce for Kootie, while Diana brought steaming ceramic bowls for the two teenage boys who were sitting on the far end of the couch. Kootie was pouring the wine into a gold goblet that was shaped like a wide-mouthed fish standing on its tail.

Had a gold haddock, thought Cochran. “What is it?” he asked.

“Bouillabaisse,” Kootie answered, stirring some orange-colored sauce into his bowl. “According to old stories, a bunch of saints named Mary—Magdalen, Mary Jacob, Mary Salome, maybe the Virgin Mary too—fled the Holy Land after the crucifixion and were shipwrecked on the French Camargue shore, at a place that’s now called Les-Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, and the local fishermen served them pots of this. Ordinarily I just have grilled sole or tuna sandwiches or H. Salt or something, but—” He waved his spoon toward Diana and the two boys on the couch. “—it’s the traditional restorative dinner for fugitive holy families.”

“I heard you can’t make real bouillabaisse in this country,” said Plumtree. “There’s some fishes that it needs that you can only get in the Mediterranean.”

“Rascasse,” Kootie agreed, “and conger eel, and other things, yeah. But there don’t seem to be any kinds of loaves and fishes that can’t show up in the back of Arky’s old red truck after he’s driven it around town.”

“This lady,” Mavranos broke in, waving his revolver in the direction of Plumtree without quite pointing it at her, “says she’s the one who killed Scott Crane.”

In the silence that followed this statement Cochran stared down at the carpet, wishing he had a glass of Kootie’s wine. He could feel the shocked stares of the bald lady and the teenagers on the couch and the Mexican lady in the back doorway, and he knew they were directed at Plumtree and not at him; and he found himself thinking about the twenty dollars Plumtree had swindled from young “Karen” at the ice-cream place, and the purse she had stolen from the lady at the bar, and wishing he weren’t sitting next to Plumtree here.

“Benjamin, our four-year-old,” said bald Diana softly, “did say it was a woman, at first. He says it was a man that did it, but that it was a woman who walked up, and then changed into a man.”

“Benjamin’s my godson,” said Mavranos, “but he’s a…chip off the old block. Half of what he sees is more like stuff that’s going on in some astral plane than stuff going on in any actual zip code. Still, he did say that. And,” he went on, “Miss Plumtree claims that she’s come here now to…restore the king to life.”

“Is that possible?” asked Diana quickly. Cochran suddenly guessed that Diana was this Scott Crane person’s widow, and in vicarious shame he kept his eyes on the carpet. “Well, I want to listen to what she has to say,” said Mavranos, “but I’m pretty sure it’s not, no. Sorry. Scott’s gone on to India, we established that right away—obviously there’s no pulse or respiration, and there are no reflexes, and the pupils are way abnormally dilated and don’t respond at all to light. And he’s cold. And the spear is in his spine. We haven’t been able to do an EEG for brain-wave activity, but the electron brush-discharge in Pete’s carborundum bulb doesn’t flicker when the body is wheeled past it with nobody else in the room, and the Leucadia place isn’t sustained anymore, not even the rose garden—his ashe is completely gone. And he hasn’t risen on the third day or anything.”

Johanna spoke from the back doorway: “Did you try to call up his ghost?” “Any ghost of him wouldn’t be him.” Mavranos said wearily, stepping back and rubbing his eyes with his free hand, “any more than a—goddammit, an old video or tape recording, or a pile of holograph manuscript, or an old pair of his pants, would be him.”

“I was possessed by the ghost of Thomas Alva Edison for a week in ‘92,” said Kootie, looking up from his golden bowl, “and that ghost was as lively as they come; and I have some understanding now of what the king is…what he does, what he monitors. And I’ve got to say that even Edison’s ghost wouldn’t have had the scope for the job.”

“Jesus, lady,” Mavranos burst out, “if you are the one that killed him, how did you get to him? He was castled!”

“A knight’s move,” said Plumtree flatly. “I’m not the same person, necessarily, from moment to moment, so I can’t be psychically tracked if I don’t want to be. And I approached from around below the grounds, from the beach, with the whole half-globe of the Pacific’s untamed water at my back. And I used a spear that was already inside his defenses—I was told that he had injured himself with it, once before—and my own blood was on the spearpoints, so I was in the position of overlapping his aura.” She frowned. “And I—there was something about a phone call—he was in a weakened state. And it was midwinter, the shift of one year to the next—the engine of the seasons had the clutch out, coasting.” She looked up at Mavranos and shrugged. “I—this person talking to you now—I didn’t set it up, or do it. I just…cooperated, went along with somebody else’s plan. And I don’t know who that ‘somebody else’ was.”

“He accidentally shot himself in the ankle with a speargun, in ’75,” said Diana. She visibly shifted her weight from one foot to the other, as if in sympathy. “I remember it.”

“So,” said Mavranos, “did you have any…ideas, about how you’d go about bringing the king back to life?”

“Yes,” Plumtree said. “And then I was told that Koot Hoomie Parganas could probably do it too. I came looking for him—figuring he could at least help me, somehow. See, I don’t know exactly how I’ll go about it.”

“How did you plan to do it?” Mavranos asked with heavy patience. “Approximately.”

“Where is the body?” Plumtree countered.

“Do you need the body, to do your trick?” She shivered. “I hope so. But I suppose not.”

“If you even reach out toward his foot,” Mavranos told her, “I’ll shoot you away from him, please trust me on that.” He gestured toward the kitchen doorway with the revolver, which Cochran estimated was at least .38 caliber, and which appeared to be fully loaded—he could see the holed noses of four hollow-point bullets in the projecting sides of the cylinder.

“Let’s adjourn to the next room,” Mavranos said.

Cochran stood up when Plumtree did, and followed her into the fluorescentlit kitchen.

The white-robed body of a powerfully built, dark-bearded man was lying on a long dining-room table in there. A three-inch metal rod stood up out of his beard above his throat.

“Shit!” exclaimed Cochran. “Is this him, is this guy dead?” His mouth was dry and his heart was suddenly pounding. Forgetting Mavranos’s threat to Plumtree, he stepped forward and touched the figure’s bared forearm—the flesh was impossibly cold, as cold as an ice pack, and he stepped back quickly. “You can’t keep a dead guy in here. Have you called the police? Jesus! Are you all—”

Angelica had walked up to him, and now put her hands on his shoulders and pushed down hard. His knees buckled, and he sat down abruptly on a chair that Diana had slid behind him a moment before.

“He is dead,” Angelica said to him clearly. “The only symptoms he doesn’t show are livor mortis, which is the discoloration caused by blood settling in the lowest areas of the body, and any evidence of decomposition. These may be signs that your girl can do something. Take a deep breath and let it out—would you like a drink?”

“No! I mean—hell yes.”

Cochran heard a clink behind him, and then Diana was pressing a glass of amber liquid into his shaking hand. It proved to be brandy.

“Do something?” he said breathlessly after he’d drunk most of it and helplessly splashed the rest onto the front of his T-shirt. “What you can do is call the—the coroner. All this supernatural talk is just—entertaining as hell, but it’s all crap, you’ve got—”

“This is all supernatural,” said Pete Sullivan loudly, overriding him. “From this undecaying body here all the way down to the TV in the other room. It’s all real, independent of whether you believe it or not.”

Pete smiled tiredly and went on in a quieter voice. “Hell, we had a—a piece of ordinary cotton string, and you could have cut it or burned it in two with a match, or just pulled it apart in your hands—if you could have got around to it! But somehow every time you’d try, something would interrupt—the phone would ring, or you’d cut yourself with the scissors and have to go get a Band-Aid, or the cat would start to throw up on some important papers, or you’d accidentally drop the string down behind the couch. I suppose if you really cornered it and forced it, you’d find that you’d suffered a stroke or a heart attack, or got knocked down by a random bullet through the window—and the piece of string would be on the floor somewhere, still whole.” He shook his head. “None of these things make logical sense, but they’re true anyway. If you insist on the world being logical at every turn, you’ll eventually be forced to retreat all the way into genuine insanity, I promise you.”

“Bring me the goddamn piece of string,” said Cochran loudly. “I’ll break the son-of-a-bitch for you!”

Angelica stood back and crossed her arms. “We lost it.”

After a tense moment Cochran let his shoulders slump; he sighed, and rubbed his face with both hands. “I suppose he’s really a king, too. What’s he king of, what was he king of?”

“The land, for one thing,” said Kootie, who had followed them into the kitchen, “the American West. If he’s well, the land is well—right now he’s dead, and we’re in winter and having earthquakes all over. God knows what the spring will be like, or if there’ll even be one.”

Cochran raised his head and stared at the dead man’s strong, bearded face. It was pale, and the eyes were closed, but Cochran could see humor and sternness in the lines around the eyes and down the cheeks. “How could he have been…in ‘a weakened state?” he asked softly.

Mavranos was frowning, and he passed the revolver from his right hand to his left and back again; Cochran could hear the bullets rattle faintly in the chambers. “We didn’t know how. He and Diana were having healthy babies—though this last couple of years the kids were getting bad fevers in the winter—and the land was yielding several crops a year! But there were signs—the phylloxera—”

“The phylloxera had nothing to do with anything,” snapped Diana angrily from behind Cochran.

“Okay,” Mavranos said. “Then I haven’t got a clue.”

“What the hell’s a phylloxera?” asked Plumtree.

“It’s not important,” Diana said. “Don’t talk about it.”

Cochran said nothing—but he knew what phylloxera was. It was a plant louse that in the 1830s had inadvertently been brought from America to Europe, where it had eventually nearly wiped out all the vineyards—the fabulous old growths in Germany, and Italy, and even France, even Bordeaux. The louse injected a toxin that killed the roots, six feet under, so that the vine and the grapes up on the surface withered away and died; the eventual desperate cure had been to graft the classic old European vitis vinifera grapevines, everything from Pinot Noir and Riesling to Malvasia and the Spanish Pedro Ximenez, onto phylloxera-resistant vitis riparia roots from America. But now, just since about 1990, a new breed of phylloxera had been devastating the California vineyards, which were mostly grown on a modern hybrid rootstock known as AxR#l. Most of Pace Vineyards’ vines were old Zinfandel and Pinot Noir on pre-war riparia rootstocks, so the subterranean plague hadn’t hit them, but Cochran knew personally a number of winemakers in San Mateo and Santa Clara and Alameda Counties who were facing bankruptcy because of the expense of tearing out the infested AxR#l vines and replanting with new vines, which wouldn’t produce a commercial crop for three to five years.

He thought of what Kootie had said—If he’s well, the land is well. And he thought of the billions of minute phylloxera lice, busily working away…six feet under. The land, Cochran thought, has not been truly well for several years.

“And he was always…less powerful, in winter,” Mavranos said, shrugging, “and stronger in summer. One of the tarot cards that represents him is Il Sole, the Sun card.”

“This really is Solville,” said Angelica quietly, “while he’s here.”

Kootie pointed at the withered bean sprouts in Angelica’s Gardens of Adonis pans on the counter by the door. “Solville in eclipse,” he said.

“Not runnin’ a carny peep-show here,” said Mavranos gruffly. “Back into the office, now.”

“Wait a minute,” mumbled old Spider Joe, who had been peering in blindly through the doorway. “I’ve got to…put in my two cents’ worth.” He pushed his way into the kitchen now, his projecting curb-feelers dragging noisily through the doorframe and then twanging free to wave and bob over the dead man’s bare feet. One of the metal filaments whipped across Plumtree’s cheek, and she whispered “Shit, dude!” and batted it away.

The white-bearded old blind man dug two silver-dollar-size coins out of the pocket of his stained khaki windbreaker, and for a moment he held them out on his outstretched palm. They appeared to be dirty gold, and were only crudely round, with bunches of grapes stamped in high relief on their faces, along with the letters TPA.

“Trapezus, on the Black Sea,” exclaimed Kootie, “is where those are from. Those are about two thousand years old!”

Spider Joe closed his hand, and when he opened it again the coins were United States silver dollars. “These are what he paid me with, nearly five years ago, for the tarot-card reading that led him to the throne.”

“I remember,” said Mavranos quietly.

“Well, he’s gonna need them again, now, isn’t he?—to pay for passage across the Styx, and for the drink of surrender from the Lethe River, over on the far side of India.” In spite of being blind, the old man shuffled forward, reached out and accurately laid one of the coins on each of the dead man’s closed eyelids.

Mavranos’s face was stiff. “We okay now? Right, everybody out.”

They all began shuffling and elbowing their way through the doorway back into the office, while Mavranos hung back with the revolver; a couple of Spider Joe’s antennae hooked one of Angelica’s bean pans off the counter and flung it clattering to the floor, spilling dirt and withered bean sprouts across the linoleum.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Mark, silent king, the moral of this sport:

How soon my sorrow hath destroyed my face.

—William Shakespeare,

Richard II

KOOTIE was back up on the desk beside the inert television, sitting cross-legged and finishing his fish stew. When everybody had resumed their places, he refilled his wine cup and said, “Who was this person who gave you my name and address?”

“And when did he give ’em to you?” added Mavranos.

“Dr. Richard Paul Armentrout, at Rosecrans Medical Center in Bellflower,” said Plumtree, who was sitting on the floor beside Cochran in front of the couch now. “This afternoon.” Apparently she too was respecting Strubie the Clown’s hundred-dollar bid to be left out of this picture.

Mavranos frowned, his high cheekbones and narrowed eyes and drooping mustache making him look like some old Tartar chieftain. “He sent you here?”

“No,” Plumtree said. “Sid and I broke out of the hospital, when the earthquake hit, a couple of hours ago. Armentrout didn’t even believe there was a king, much less that I had…helped to kill him, until he talked to me this afternoon. Then he said, ‘Oh, you must have had help, from somebody who was practically a king himself, like this kid from a couple of years ago.’” She looked up past Cochran at Kootie. “Which was you.”

Kootie put the bowl aside and took a sip of the wine. “Why did you escape?”

“Armentrout wants to find out what happened on New Year’s Day,” Plumtree told him, “and he wasn’t going to let us go until he was totally satisfied that he’d found out everything, using every kind of strip-mining therapy that his operating room and pharmacy have available; and even then I don’t think he’d have wanted us to be able to talk, after. He wouldn’t have killed us, necessarily, but he’d have no problem fucking up our minds so bad that between us we couldn’t string together one coherent sentence. This afternoon, just as a warm-up, he tried to break off and…consume a couple of my personalities.”

“Your personalities,” said Angelica.

“I’ve got MPD—that’s multiple—”

“I know what it is,” Angelica interrupted. “I don’t think the condition exists, I think it’s just a romanticizing of post-traumatic stress disorder, best addressed with intensive exploratory psychotherapy, but I do know what it is.”

“My wife was a psychiatrist,” remarked Pete, ‘“before she became a bruja.”

Plumtree gave Angelica a challenging smile. “Would you advise Edison Medicine for the condition?”

“ECT? Hell no,” snapped Angelica, “I’ve never condoned shock therapy for any condition; and I can’t imagine anyone prescribing it for PTSD, or a hypothetical MPD.”

“Edison Medicine,” came Kootie’s wryly amused voice from above Cochran. “It knocked me right out of my own head—and killed my dog.”

One of Spider Joe’s antennae popped up from the carpet with a musical twang, making Plumtree jump against Cochran’s shoulder. He put his arm around her, and in the moment before she shrugged it off he noticed that she was trembling. Well, he was too.

“Whatever,” said Pete, who had sat down on the couch. To Plumtree he went on, “You say he tried to eat some of your personalities. Was he masked, when he did this?” He absently tapped a Marlboro out of a pack and flipped the cigarette into the air; it disappeared, and then he reached behind his ear and pulled out what might have been the same cigarette, lit now, and began puffing smoke from it. “Like, did he have a…a pair of twins present, or a schizophrenic?”

“He had a crazy guy on the extension phone, listening in,” spoke up Cochran. To Plumtree he said, “The old one-armed guy, Long John Beach.”

For a moment no one spoke, and the only sound was the chaotic drumming of water splashing into the pots on the floor. Then, “A one-armed guy,” said Kootie steadily, looking hard at Pete Sullivan, “named after a local city.”

“I—I thought he died,” said Angelica, who was standing beside the desk. “You mean the one who called himself Sherman Oaks, who wanted to kill you so he could eat the Edison ghost out of your head?”

“Right, the smoke-fancier.” Kootie glanced at Plumtree. “Ghosts are known as ‘smokes’ to the addicts who eat them, and he used to eat a lot of them.”

“Shit, he still does,” put in Cochran. “Though he’s down to Marlboros these days.”

“I thought he was dead,” insisted Angelica. “I thought he blew up along with Nicky Bradshaw, when they both fell off the Queen Mary, two years ago.”

“With ‘a local man called Neal Obstadt,’ right?” said Plumtree. “Who was looking for Scott Crane in 1990? Armentrout mentioned this. The explosion killed the Obstadt person, according to him, but just collapsed a lung of this Long John Beach, or Sherman Oaks.” She grinned, breathing rapidly between her teeth. “I wonder what other names he’s used. Wes Covina. Perry Mount.”

Cochran was embarrassed by her incongruous merriment, and nudged her. She nudged him back, hard, in the ribs.

“Or in drag, as Beverly Hills,” Pete agreed absently. Then he stood up abruptly and looked around the room. “Well, he’s been here before—he knows the way here, too. We’d better get ready for him, and for this psychiatrist.”

Angelica visibly shivered, and she touched the gun under her blouse. “We should just run, right now.”

“We need to know where to run, first,” Pete told her. He stepped to the television set and clanked the channel switch a couple of notches clockwise. “Could you plug this thing in again, Oliver? We need some readings, Angie. Pennies, I’d think, for a fine-grain closeup-type picture. What year was Crane born in?”

“Nineteen forty-three,” said Diana.

The tanned teenager hopped up off the couch and plugged the TV set’s cord into the wall while Angelica pulled open a desk drawer and bumped glass jars around in it. “Pennies,” she muttered. “Nineteen…forty…three, there we are.” She lifted one of the little jars out and sat down on the couch. The set’s screen had brightened, and a woman in a commercial was talking about some new Ford car. Cochran and Plumtree hiked themselves forward on the carpet to be able to see the screen.

Angelica shook the jar, and the half-dozen old gray pennies in it rattled and clinked—and the TV picture shifted to a newscaster reading the day’s winning lottery numbers. She shook the jar again, and now they were watching the portly, bearded figure of Orson Welles sitting at a restaurant table, waving a glass of wine and quoting the Paul Masson slogan about selling no wine before its time.

Pete Sullivan caught Cochran’s glance and smiled. “Plain physics so far,” Pete said. “This is an old set, from the days when the remote controls used ultrasound frequencies to change channels and turn the sets on and off. The remote was a tiny xylophone, in effect, too high in frequency for anybody but dogs and TVs to hear. Nowadays the signals need to carry more information, and they use infrared.”

“I get it,” said Cochran, a little defensively. He was still shaking, still enormously aware of the dead man on the table in the kitchen. He nodded. “The TV thinks her jingling pennies are a remote. Who are you, uh, hoping to consult, here?”

Pete shrugged. “Not who—what. Just…the moment; right now, right here. The pennies she’s shaking are a part of now with a link to Crane’s birth year, and the pictures they’ll tune the TV to will be representative bits of now in the same field of reference—just like a piece of a hologram contains the whole picture, or a drop of your blood contains the entire physical portrait of you. It’s what Jung called synchronicity.”

“Synchronicity!” sneered Angelica, who was shaking the jar again and staring at the screen. She stepped back and sat down on the couch, still shaking the pennies.

“Angie thinks there are actual, sentient entities behind this sort of thing,” said Pete. “A querulous old woman, in this case—the same party that’s behind the Chinese I Ching, according to her.”

“A straitlaced and disapproving old party,” said Angelica without looking away from the screen. “Sometimes I can almost smell her lavender sachet. Ah, we’re online.”

Cochran peered at the screen curiously, but it was just showing a grainy black-and-white film of a blond woman brushing her hair.

“It always starts with this,” said Pete, visibly tenser now. “That’s Mary Pickford, the old silent-movie star. A guy name Philo T. Farnsworth was the first guy in the American West to transmit images with a cathode-ray tube, in San Francisco in 1927, and he used this repeating loop of Mary Pickford as a demo.” He sighed shakily. “This isn’t a real-world, 1995 broadcast—we’re into supernatural effects now, sorry.”

“You were getting spook stuff even before” said young Oliver nervously. “Paul Masson hasn’t aired that Orson Welles ad for years.”

“I think he’s right,” murmured Angelica from the couch.

Spider Joe had been sitting silently against the kitchen wall, but now he reared back, and half a dozen of his antennae sprang up from the carpet. “Who just came in?” he barked, the sunken eyelids twitching in his craggy brown face.

Cochran glanced fearfully at the open back door, but there was no one there; and Plumtree and Diana and Angelica were craning their necks down the hall and toward the kitchen, but there was no sign or sound of any intruder.

Kootie had directed an unfocussed stare at the ceiling, and now he lowered his head. “There’s no one new on the whole block.”

Mavranos cleared his throat. “But, uh…your Mary Pickford has changed into a negro.”

“And she got older,” noted the teenager who had been introduced as Scat, and who hadn’t taken his eyes off the screen since they’d all trooped back in from the kitchen.

On the TV screen, the figure was in fact a thin old black woman in a high-necked dark dress now, sitting at a mirrored vanity table and brushing her hair—and though her jawline was strong and unsagging, her kinky hair now looked more white than blond.

As if in response to Angelica’s hard shaking of the penny jar, the grainy black-and-white picture sharpened in focus, and an open window with a row of eucalyptus trees beyond it was visible in the wall behind the old woman; and sounds were audible—a faint, crackling susurration as the old woman drew the brush through her hair, an insistent knocking of the raised window shade bar against the window frame, and a clanging bell from outside.

“The knocking, and the bell, those are to confuse ghosts,” said Plumtree.

Angelica was shaking the jar harder, as if trying to drive the image off the TV screen, and she seemed irritated that the pennies weren’t doing it, were instead just jangling in rhythmic counterpoint to the bell.

“It’s San Francisco, all right,” said Pete. “That’s a cable-car bell in the background.”

“This film clip is seventy years old,” panted Angelica. “Everyplace probably had streetcars then.”

“It isn’t the old clip anymore,” objected Pete. “This here has got sound.”

“Pete,” said Kootie loudly as he clanked his empty bowl down beside the television set, “dig out the Edison telephone and get it hooked up again. We’re in a new game now, with this restoration-to-life talk, and even an idiot shell of Scott Crane might have something to say worth hearing. And I reckon Janis Plumtree should be enough of a link for us to reach him, her being his own personal murderer.”

“And his wife,” said the bald Diana from the kitchen doorway. “You’ve got his wife here, too.”

“Right,” said Kootie hastily. “Sorry, Diana—I was thinking in terms of the new arrivals. I meant murderer now too”

Angelica finally leaned forward and set the jar of 1943 pennies down on the carpet. “I’m not dealing with the I Ching old lady here,” she said, wiping her hands on her jeans as she leaned back against the couch cushions. “And it’s not being run by just your synchronicity either, Pete. It’s…I sense some other old woman.”

Cochran saw Mavranos, glance at Spider Joe. Clearly he was wondering if the crazy old blind man’s dead wife might be taking over the show here. Cochran wondered if Booger had been a black woman.

“If you say so, Kootie,” said Pete. “Scat, Ollie—you guys can help me carry some boxes in from the garage.”

AFTER DIANA’S two boys had followed Pete out the back door, Angelica Anthem Elizalde Sullivan stared resentfully at the Plumtree woman sitting in front of the desk with her drunk Connecticut pansy boyfriend. MPD, thought Angelica scornfully. I didn’t even think that was a hip diagnosis anymore, I thought everybody was busy uncovering suppressed memories of childhood sexual abuse these days.

“Kootie,” Angelica called, “toss me my Loteria cards.”

Her adopted son twisted around on the desk and dug through a pile of utility bills and check stubs, then tossed over the heads of Cochran and Plumtree a little deck of cards held together with a rubber band.

Angelica caught the bundle and pulled the rubber band off the cards. “Miss Plumtree,” she said, having forgotten the woman’s first name, “come sit by me on the couch here and chat.”

Plumtree stared back at her. “Why should I answer your questions, lady?”

Angelica smiled at her as she deftly shuffled the cheap paper cards. “I know about…making amends to people you’ve allowed to die; people you’re linked with by chains of guilt, hm? Real guilt and shame, the kind you’ve got to go back and fix, not just ‘get past’ or ‘put behind you’ or get ‘okay with.’ You think you can do it without help, but that’s like thinking one hand can fix what it took two hands to break. If that dead man in the kitchen can be resurrected, it might be some thing you can tell us that’ll help us all to get the job done.” She looked around the room affectionately. “I wonder if we’ve got even one person here who doesn’t believe, with some validity, that he or she is directly responsible beyond any excuse for the death of someone.”

“Shee-it,” snarled Plumtree; but she struggled wearily to her feet and shambled over to the couch, which thumped the floor with an uneven leg when she dropped onto it beside Angelica. Her boyfriend, Cochran, got to his feet and leaned attentively on the corner of the desk.

Angelica scooted back and spread the cards messily facedown on the couch cushion between them; the blurry black-and-white plaid patterns on the backs of the cards blended together so that it seemed to be one puddle on the cushion. In Mexico these cards were used to play a gambling game similar to bingo, but Angelica had long ago found that the mundane pictures on the fronts of them were useful for eliciting free association from patients. “Pick me three of them,” Angelica said.

Pete and the boys came clomping back in, carrying cardboard boxes, as Plumtree carefully drew three of the cards out of the pile; and Angelica leaned forward to be heard over the clanking of telephone and radio parts being lifted out of the boxes and spread out on the desk. “Now flip one of them face up,” she said.

With a trembling hand Plumtree turned over…card 51, El Pescado, a picture of a red fish upside down in smoky water, holding a tethered hook in its mouth.

“I guess you know what that one indicates,” Angelica said in a carefully confident and dismissive tone.

“‘I’ll bite’ is what it…means” Plumtree said, nodding. “But if this is a reading of me, it’s wrong. I won’t bite. Maybe it’s a warning for me, huh? Don’t let yourself get pulled out into the air, get separated from the school—Off the school bus!—get cooked and eaten and digested by somebody out there. ‘Full fathom five my father lies.’”

Angelica just nodded, but she was surprised—she had expected that this serendipitous picture would evoke some mention of the Fisher King, whom Plumtree claimed to have killed.

Angelica looked up and made a ch-ch! sound; Kootie had climbed down from the desk, but instantly looked around toward her.

“St. Michael the Archangel,” Angelica told him, “with High John the Conqueror ready.”

The boy nodded and pulled open one of the desk drawers; he lifted out two aerosol spray cans and handed the purple one across to his foster mother.

“Your father’s in the other direction, then,” Angelica said to Plumtree, hefting the can, “from whoever’s dangling the line into the water, is that right? Tell me about your father.”

“Well, he’s dead. Is that Scotchgard? I wasn’t going to piss on your couch, lady.” When Angelica didn’t reply or change her expression, Plumtree sighed and went on. “He died when I was two, but I was in the hospital, so they didn’t tell me about it right away, about him being dead. Janis doesn’t remember him any more than I do, but she claims to miss him real bad. All she knows about him is what she’s heard from Valorie.”

“Valorie’s older?”

“Yes” said Plumtree tightly. “Valorie’s been—around from the beginning.”

“She remembers a lot of stuff?”

“She remembers everything. But all her memories,” Plumtree added, glancing at the TV set, “are in black and white, and always with some drumming or banging going on in the background.”

“Can I talk to Valorie?”

Plumtree shifted uncomfortably and shot a nervous glance toward Cochran. “Not unless she wants to talk to you.”

“What were you in the hospital for? When you were two?”

“I don’t remember. Measles? Stress? Some kid thing.”

Pete had unplugged the TV set and was lifting it down off the desk to make room for the Ford coil box and the battered old field frequency modulator. “I hope mice haven’t got into all this stuff in these two years,” he muttered to Kootie.

“It’d be ghosts of mice that’d be attracted to it,” said Kootie, who was still holding the other spray can.

“How did he die?” Angelica asked Plumtree. “Your father.”

“Jesus, lady!” said Plumtree tightly. “You’re just asking to have me lose time here.”

Angelica held up the purple spray can and let Plumtree look at the picture on the label, a crude drawing of a winged, sword-wielding angel kicking a bat-winged devil into a fiery pit. The directions advised, Spray all areas of your surroundings. Make the sign of the Cross. “This is just air-freshener, really,” Angelica said, “but the chlorofluorocarbons in it, and this groovy label, repel ghosts. After I spray it around us, you can talk freely.”

Angelica held the can over Plumtree’s head and pushed the button on the top of it; a mist that smelled like bus-station rest rooms hissed out, drifting over Plumtree and Angelica both.

Plumtree took a deep breath and let it out. “Well!” she said when Angelica had lowered the can. “He fell off a building, is what happened, in San Francisco, one of the old wino buildings south of Market. Soma, they used to call that area, from south of Market, get it? In Soma’s realm are many herbs, and knowledge a hundredfold have they. That’s from the Rig-Veda. I hope you’re right about that spray stuff. He was the chief of a hippie commune, like the Diggers, you know? A group that fed homeless runaways. My father’s commune was called the Lever Blank, they’re mentioned in a couple of the books about the Manson family. I suppose the name meant vote-for-nobody or something. My mom left the commune a couple of years after he died, and she always said that they killed him, because it was the summer solstice and he had failed to become this king of the west at Easter. ‘69 was a competition year for it, just like ‘90 was.”

Pete had sent Ollie back outside to fetch a car battery from one of the Solville vehicles, and was now brushing the dust off the pencil lines and screw holes still in the wood surface of the desk from the time they had set up this telephone in October of 1992.

“Okay,” Angelica said cautiously. She pointed at the two cards that were still face down. “Hit me again.”

Plumtree turned over the second card, and it was the unnumbered El Borracho card, The Drunk—a picture of a man in laborer’s white clothing walking bent-legged and carrying a bottle, with a dog snapping at his heels.

“That was you, tonight,” Plumtree said to Cochran, picking up the card and showing it to him.

Cochran peered at the picture on it, then jerked his head back, frowning. “I may have been drunk,” he said, “but I wasn’t bestial That there is more like who Long John Beach was singing about.” He rubbed his hand clumsily over his face, and Angelica noticed a leaf-shaped birthmark on his knuckles. “And who was it that drank the Manhattans,” he went on, “and all the Budweisers?”

“We’re talking about you, here,” Angelica told Plumtree. “How do you feel about this picture?”

“I hate drunks,” said Plumtree. “I’d never let Janis get involved with one.” Apparently to end discussion of the Borracho card, she reached down and flipped over the third card.

It was number 46, El Sol, a drawing of a bodiless round red face encircled by a jagged gold corona.

Plumtree’s eves slammed shut and she flung herself back hard against the couch cushions, with her fingers clawed into the disordered thatch of her blond hair; her nostrils were tensely white as she whistlingly inhaled a deep breath, but her face was reddening visibly even under her sunburn—and fleetingly Angelica wondered how a patient in a mental hospital could acquire a sunburn. Plumtree was whispering some rapid-cadenced phrase over and over again.

From long practice Angelica resisted the impulse to participate in her patient’s panic. “I think we’d better titrate up our St. Michael dosage,” she said calmly, raising the purple can and spraying two more long bursts of the stuff over their heads.

Pete and Kootie had paused in their phone-assembly work to stare at Plumtree, and Mavranos was frowning and tapping the revolver barrel against his thigh.

Now Angelica could hear what Plumtree was whispering: “—Ghost! In the name of the Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost! In the name of—”

“What is it that this reminded you of?” Angelica asked the woman in a voice just loud enough to override the frantic whispering. “Whatever it is, it’s not here. Only this little drawing is here.”

“Let me,” said Cochran. He stepped forward and knelt beside the stiff, shaking Plumtree. “Jams,” he said to her, “this is 1995, the eleventh of January, Wednesday, probably getting on for midnight. You’re in Long Beach, and you’re twenty-eight years old.” He looked at the Sol card that was still face up on the couch cushion; he turned it face down, and then he glanced up at Angelica. “She has a recurrent nightmare, of the sun falling out of the sky onto her, knocking her flat.”

Plumtree’s eyes opened and she lowered her hands, and she blinked around at everyone staring at her. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Was I yelling?”

Angelica smiled at her. This, she thought, must be one of her other personalities. How I do love the histrionics and theatricalities of dissociatives. “No,” Angelica said patiently. “The gentlemen were wanting help with their telephone.” Plumtree’s mention of herbs a few moments ago actually had reminded her of a crucial part of the telephone; she looked over at Johanna and said, “You remember the mix we cooked on the stove, two years ago? You’d better get a pot of it going—Pete would have forgotten it, being all wrapped up in his hardware. The mint—the yerba buena leaves—you can pick out back by the garage, and there’s tequila in the cupboard, unless Arky’s drunk it all up.”

“It’s your bourbon I drank up,” Mavranos said defensively. “I don’t touch tequila.”

Angelica clasped her hands and turned back to Plumtree. As casually as she could, she asked, “Do you remember much about the hospital you were in, when you were two? Did it have…lawns, playrooms, a cafeteria? Try to picture it.”

“I only remember the room I was in,” Plumtree said. “There were get-well cards on the table by the bed,” she added helpfully.

“Close your eyes again, but this time relax.” When Plumtree complied, Angelica “you’ll find you can remember details very clearly, especially from when you were young, if you clear your mind of every distraction and just relax. And you’re safe here with us, so you can relax, can’t you?”

Without opening her eyes, Plumtree said, “You’re right here, Scant?”

Cochran clasped her shoulder. “Right here.”

“Then I can relax.”

“So…remember the hospital room,” said Angelica. “What did it smell like?”

“…Fresh-peeled adhesive tape,” Plumtree said dreamily, “and laundry baskets, and the woody taste of Fudgsicle sticks once you’ve sucked all the ice cream off, and shampoo.”

“And what did the room look like?”

“There was a window—there was a window!—with metal venetian blinds to my left, but I could only see part of a tree branch through it; the wallpaper was lime green, and there were dots, little holes, in the white tiles on the ceiling—”

Plumtree’s eyes were still closed, and Angelica permitted herself a faint nod and a tiny mild smile of triumph. “Why,” she asked in a voice she forced to sound careless, “couldn’t you see anything more out the window?”

“I didn’t go over to it, to look out.”

“Were you…afraid to?”

“No, it was on the ground floor. I just didn’t get out of bed at all, even to go to the bathroom. I had to use a bedpan, though I was certainly not wearing diapers anymore, by then.”

“Can you see the room? All the details?”

“Sure.”

“Look at yourself, then, at your arms and legs. Why didn’t you get out of bed?”

“I—I couldn’t!—not with a cast on my leg and my arm in a sling—!”

Plumtree’s eyes sprang open, and it was all Angelica could do to maintain her gentle smile—for she was abruptly, viscerally certain that it was an entirely different person now behind the Plumtree woman’s eyes. Angelica made herself go on to note the physical indications—the tightened cast of the woman’s mouth and jaw, the wider eyes, the newly squared shoulders—but the conviction had come, indomitably, first.

Plumtree turned her head to look at Cochran, who flinched slightly but kept his hand on her shoulder.

“How’re you taking all this?” he asked her nervously.

“Upon my back,” Plumtree said in a flat voice, “to defend my belly; upon my wit, to defend my wiles; upon my secrecy, to defend mine honesty; my mask, to defend my beauty; and you, to defend all these. And at all these wards I lie, at a thousand watches.”

“Now who just left?” demanded Spider Joe from the corner.

“Wow,” said Angelica humbly.

Plumtree had lowered her face into her hands, and now she looked up, squinting “Wha’d I miss?” she asked irritably “Do you people have such a thin as a beer around here?”

The woman has shifted again, Angelica thought. I may talk myself out of it eventually, but right now I’m a believer in MPD.

“Yes,” she said, just to get away from this woman who was such an affront to her professional convictions. “Right. A beer. I’ll get one of Arky’s for you.” But she was still too shaken by what she had deduced about Plumtree’s condition to stand up right away; and she was wondering if the telephone call would even be possible with Plumtree here on the premises.

“Coors, that means,” sighed Plumtree.

“This stuff on the desk here is the antenna,” Pete was telling Scat and Oliver, “but we can’t be in the room with it, or the carborundum bulb and the rectifying lens will just pick up on our living auras. Let’s set up the actual telephone receiver in the laundry room. That used to be the kitchen, before one of our remodeling campaigns, and it’s where we did it before.”

And you don’t want to do it in the current kitchen, right in the presence of the dead king, Angelica thought as she finally stood up, dizzily, from the couch. Well, neither do I.

She paused in the kitchen doorway, standing back against the doorframe to avoid getting tangled in Spider Joe’s arching antennae. “How are you planning to scramble the call?” she asked Pete. “Even if Sherman Oaks and this bad psychiatrist already know where we are, there’s no use in lighting a beacon for every other smoke-fancier in the L.A. area, if we can help it.”

Pete held up his hands and made dialling motions with his forefingers. “I’ve still got antique hands.”

“Yeah,” said Angelica uncertainly, “but they’re yours now.”

Pete lowered his hands. “I guess you’re right. I’ve even put a few new scars on ’em in the last two years.”

“You do hand transplants, lady?” Plumtree asked Angelica. “You sound more like Dr. Frankenstein than Dr. Freud.”

“Yeah,” said Mavranos, frowning like someone having health-insurance billing explained to them, “what’s all this Beast-With-Five-Fingers talk?”

“Sorry,” said Pete. “The magician Houdini had a customized mask made in the twenties, see, sort of a decoy with a magical spell on it, to make it look like he was where he wasn’t. It was plaster casts of his hands, and his actual cut-off dried thumb, and if you were carrying the lot when bad magicians focussed on you, you’d suddenly take on the physical appearance of Houdini—short stature, dinner jacket with break-away sleeves, curly hair, the whole outfit. And—”

Plumtree’s boyfriend made a suppressed snorting sound.

“I wish we did still have that magical string from Mexico,” Angelica told him scornfully; “I’d love to see you suddenly notice that your goddamn shoes were on fire, or you suddenly had a live bat in your hair, when you tried to snap it.”

“On Halloween day of ‘92,” Pete went on, “we were dragged out of our apartment here at gunpoint by the people who wanted the Edison ghost that was in Kootie’s head then—you got any problems with that, mister?—and the dried thumb was somewhere else, the bad guys found that; but I grabbed the plaster hands—and they disappeared—and suddenly I had Houdini’s hands.” He held his hands up and wiggled the short, strong fingers. “And I’ve had ’em ever since. They won’t hold a weapon—I guess Houdini didn’t want his decoy hurting anyone—and I’m more comfortable now writing with a fountain pen, and shaving with a straight razor; but at least I can do lots of parlor-magic stunts.” He clenched the hands into fists. “Angie’s right, though—they are mine now. They wouldn’t disguise the source of the call.”

For a moment no one spoke, and the drumming of water falling from the leaky ceiling into the pots and pans was the only sound.

Then, “Arky has the dried eyeball of a dead Fisher King,” said Kootie. “That would be a fine scrambler.”

“Make it two beers,” called Plumtree, “if I gotta sit here and listen to all this creepy shit.” Angelica could hear the tremor of fear under the woman’s bravado.

Angelica decided that she would have a beer herself; and maybe some of the tequila, which she could now smell heating up in the kitchen, if there was any still left in the bottle. She rocked her head back against the doorway frame with a firm knock “I suppose you really do have that,” she said wearily to Mavranos. “And I suppose a one-time Fisher King’s ghost might not have been banished by the current Fisher King’s death, because of standing behind the shotgun, as it were.” She sighed. “An eyeball. So is it activated at all, in any sense? I mean, is there any ashe in it, any vitality? How far away is the rest of this…dead Fisher King? If his body is real far away, or under water, then your…dried eyeball…won’t be a whole lot of use.”

“Oh well,” said Mavranos, shrugging and shaking his head, “as a matter of fact, I think the rest of him is in Lake Mead. And I think he’s used up anyway.”

“Oh, well,” agreed Angelica, and she strode into the kitchen and walked around the dead king’s feet to the refrigerator. Johanna was stirring the aromatic pot of mint leaves and tequila on the stove, and the sharp smell of it reminded Angelica to snag a beer for herself along with the two for Plumtree.

She heard Pete ask Mavranos, “Who was it?”

“Bugsy Siegel,” came Mavranos’s rueful answer. “The eye was shot out of his head when he was killed in ’46, and Scott’s father had it stashed away in a hidey-hole in the basement of the Flamingo Hotel in Vegas. Scott’s father was king, from ’46 until ‘90.”

“No shit? Hey, Angie!” called Pete then. “We’re in business after all.”

CHAPTER NINE

The wine was red wine, and had stained the ground of the narrow street in the suburb of Saint Antoine, in Paris, where it was spilled. It had stained many hands, too, and many faces, and many naked feet, and many wooden shoes. The hands of the man who sawed the wood, left red marks on the billets; and the forehead of the woman who nursed her baby, was stained with the stain of the old rag she wound about her head again. Those who had been greedy with the staves of the cask, had acquired a tigerish smear about the mouth; and one tall joker so besmirched, his head more out of a long squalid bag of a nightcap than in it, scrawled upon a wall with his finger dipped in muddy wine-lees—BLOOD.

—Charles Dickens,

A Tale of Two Cities

AND now they’re all drinking, thought Cochran, and cooking up a pot of some kind of noxious mint-and-tequila punch; and young Boogie-Woogie—Kootie—has refilled his wine cup at least once; and if there’s a crazier brand of bullshit being talked in California tonight, it’s gotta be in a loony bin for far worse cases than any at Rosecrans Medical. But I’m supposedly the one who’s the drunk.

“Bugsy Siegel’s ashes are in the Beth Olaum Mausoleum at the Hollywood Cemetery on Santa Monica, only about twenty miles from here,” the man called Pete was saying now. “His ghost was a pal of my dad’s ghost—Angie, you remember, it was Siegel’s ghost that rapped back knock-knock when I rapped knock, knock, knock-knock, knock, when we were there to pick up my dad’s ghost, day before Halloween in ’92.”

“I do remember that,” allowed the woman who was coming back from the kitchen with three cans of Coors. Two for Cody and none for me, Cochran thought. He thought of going into the kitchen and fetching a couple for himself, but couldn’t face the thought of seeing the dead man again.

And he was still unsettled by the picture on the card that Cody had shown him—with the comment This was you tonight—the fat, bearded, idiot face of the drunken figure in the drawing, the crown of roses that seemed to conceal horns, the animal-skin cloak, the sketchy legs that bent the wrong way like a goat’s and ended in sketchy stumps like hooves!

Kootie had lifted out of one of the cardboard boxes an electric pencil sharpener, and now the boy carefully unsnapped its wood-grain printed plastic cowl. Underneath, instead of the crossed grinders of a pencil sharpener’s works, a thick stick of yellow chalk was attached to the rotor.

“This middle section is pretty deeply grooved from the last time,” Kootie said peering at the chalk. “But we can attach the spring to a different section, closer to the motor, and I remember how Edison set it up.”

“I’m not sure Edison himself knew what he was doing,” said Pete.

“I remember how he set it up,” said Kootie.

“Fine,” said Pete. “Good.” He glanced at Cochran and smiled. “That’s our speaker, our receiver—that pencil sharpener. Most speakers use induced changes in the field of a magnet to wiggle the diaphragm; we can’t do that, because an actual physical magnet would draw ghosts the way a low spot on a pavement collects rainwater. If we did this a lot, I’d hook up a piezoelectric quartz, or an electrostatic setup with perforated condenser plates, but this arrangement actually does work well enough. We’ll soak the chalk with water, and then attach the diaphragm spring to the surface of the chalk, which will be spinning when we turn on the pencil sharpener—wet chalk is toothy and full of friction ordinarily, see, but it gets instantly slick when there’s an electric current going through it. The changes are variable enough and rapid enough to get decent low-quality sound out of the attached diaphragm.”

Cochran understood that the man was sociably trying to let him in on what was going on, so he returned the smile, jerkily, and nodded. “Clever,” he said.

“It was better sound quality than a lot of the headphones out there,” said Kootie.

“I’m not dissing your old orisha, son,” Pete said mildly. In one hand he picked up a rack of glass tubes and in the other a glass cylinder that had a little metal rod rattling in it like a bell clapper. “I’m gonna take the vacuum pump out to the kitchen and hook it to the faucet to evacuate the Langmuir gauge. You might get everybody crowded into the laundry room, Kootie, or out in the back yard. Out of this room, anyway.”

“While you’re in the kitchen,” spoke up Cochran, trying not to speak with passion, “could you get me one of those beers?”

Behind him Plumtree snickered. Pete looked at Kootie, who shrugged and nodded.

“Okay,” Pete said.

Young Oliver was leaning against the couch, and now he hesitantly spoke. “You’re gonna call our father’s ghost, now? Not him, himself, but his ghost?” The boy’s face was stiff, but Cochran could see the redness in his eyes.

“That’s right, Oliver,” said Mavranos. “You’re the man of your family now, you can be there for it, if you like.”

Oliver shook his head. “No,” he whispered. “It’d—”

“It’d just be him dead in that room too,” said his brother Scat solemnly. “Like it is the kitchen.” He looked at Oliver and then said, “We’ll wait in the back yard.” Their mother, Diana, just bit her knuckle and nodded.

COCHRAN FOLLOWED Plumtree and Angelica and Diana into the flower-wallpapered little laundry room, and he sat down beside Plumtree at the foot of a sink in the corner. Kootie had climbed up on top of the washing machine, which was one of the heavy-duty commercial kind that had a push-in slot for quarters; the pencil sharpener sat on a shelf beside his shoulder, attached now to the frame of a disassembled pasta machine with a spring and a paper loudspeaker cone attached to it.

Pete had set up a TV table and a lawn chair in the middle of the linoleum floor, and almost ceremoniously had placed on the table an old black Bakelite rotary-dial telephone that was connected with phone cords trailing one way to the pencil sharpener and strung along the linoleum floor the other way to the assembly on the table out in the office. Johanna had stayed in the present-day kitchen to keep an eye on the pan of mint-and-tequila, though the astringent smoke from it was making Cochran’s eyes water. Probably she just forgot about it, he thought, and went outside to listen to the music some more, and the pan’s on fire. He sipped his freshly opened beer cautiously, not having any idea how long this procedure fight take; crazy old Spider Joe had elected to join the boys outside in the yard, where the music was, and Cochran was wishing he had gone along with the old blind man.

“Can I have the…eye?” Pete asked Mavranos, who was standing by the washer and puffing on a Camel cigarette as if to drive away the burning mint smell. With the hand that wasn’t holding the gun, Mavranos dug a wad of tissue paper out of his shirt pocket and passed it across to him. “And,” Pete said as he carefully unwrapped it, “we’ve got Crane’s…murderer, and his wife, here, which should one way or another work as a homing beacon. Kootie, start up the speaker; and Angie, would you do the honors in the next room?” He looked at Cochran as Angelica sidled past the TV table out into the office. “We’re out past physics again,” he said. “She’s got to light some candles, and pronounce certain Spanish rhymes and splash,Vete de Aqui oil over the door lintel.” He looked at Diana, who was standing beside Mavranos. “I need Crane’s full name, and his birthdate. I realize it seems like bad security, to be dealing in his real psychic locators, but we can’t have any masks at all in the way, for this.”

“Scott Henri Poincaré Leon Crane,” said Diana—who, even in the harsh electric light from the single naked bulb dangling from the ceiling, looked to Cochran’s befuddled gaze like a luminous preliminary Boticelli painting of Venus, before the hair was brushed in. “February 28, 1943.”

The pencil sharpener was spinning the wet chalk cylinder now, and a featureless hiss was rasping out of the paper speaker. Angelica hurried back into the little laundry room, wiping her hands on her blouse and exposing for a moment the grip of the automatic pistol in her waistband.

Pete grimaced as he lifted out of the tissue paper an angular black lump like an oversized raisin; but he sat down in the lawn chair and started to dial.

But even before he had carefully pulled the 7 hole of the dial around to the stop, a buzzing sounded from the speaker; it stopped, then started up again.

“Uh…that’s an incoming call,” Angelica said helplessly. “You may as well answer it.”

Pete picked up the receiver. “Umm…hello?”

The frail voice of an old woman came shaking out of the paper speaker cone: “Pirogi,” it said. “That’s a bayou boat, barely big enough for a body to kneel in. It’s a thing you can cook, too, looks like a boat—stuff an eggplant with seafood once you’ve gouged away the…the core of the vegetable like a dugout canoe. If he hollers, don’t let him go, right? You all need to come here, I can guide your boats. I betrayed the god, I desecrated his temple, but this is my day of atonement. Today is January the eleventh, isn’t it?”

For several seconds nobody spoke, then Kootie said, “Yes, ma’am.” “Ninety-one years ago today,” rasped the old woman’s disembodied voice, “I died. Three Easters and three days later he came for me, out of the sea, and he knocked down all the buildings and took all the other ghosts to himself, burned them up. Yerba buena, burning.”

The telephone speaker hissed blankly for nearly half a minute, and at last Angelica said, “Well, she’s right, the yerba buena does smell like it’s burning. Johanna,” she called through the doorway, “atenda a lo fuego!” Then she looked at Pete. “You’re getting the party-line effect Hang up and try again.”

“You are to come and fetch me,” insisted the old woman’s amplified voice, “and another dead lady, too, who is hiding in a tight little box.”

“I—I think it’s the old black lady,” ventured Kootie. “Who was on the TV.” “I think it is too,” said Angelica. “Will you hang up, Pete? We don’t need help from stray ghosts drawn by the electromagnetic field here, wanting to celebrate their deathdays. Fetch two old women ghosts!—it sounds like a sewing circle. Hang up, and dial Crane’s number.”

“Rightie-o,” said Pete flatly, hanging up the receiver. He leaned forward again with the dark lump—which was apparently someone’s eye!—and used it to rotate the dial. “And I’m enough of a mathematician to know how to spell Poincaré.”

Altogether, for Crane’s name and birth date, Pete dialled thirty-four numbers into the phone. “It’s very long distance,” muttered Kootie, which got a smothered laugh from Plumtree.

Again from the speaker sounded the measured buzz that apparently indicated Ringing, and then a click sounded. Pregnant Diana’s hands clenched into fists against the tight fabric of her jeans.

“Hello,” came a man’s baritone voice from the pencil-sharpener apparatus, you’ve reached Scott Crane, and I’m not able to come to the phone right now. But if you leave your name and number and the time that you called, I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.”

“The woman who killed you,” said Diana loudly, “says she can restore you to life.

Cooperate in this, Scott! And do give us a call, if you can.”

At the first syllables of the man’s voice, Plumtree’s elbow had bumped Cochran’s knee; he glanced at her now and saw that though she was still sitting slumped against the pipes below the sink she had gone limp, her hands open and palms-up on the linoleum floor and her head bowed forward so that her blond hair had fallen over her face. He didn’t bother to try to rouse her.

“Nearly midnight, Scott,” called Mavranos, “on the eleventh of January, ’95; Arky Hand Diana, and some allies; and we’ll have to try you again somehow, or you’ll have to catch us at some pay phone we might be near, okay?—I don’t think we’re gonna be by this phone much longer.”

Now that he had sat down again, Cochran found that he was hardly able to keep his eyes open. The voices of these strangers, and his cramped posture, and his nervous exhaustion, all strongly called to mind the sleepless twelve-hour flight home from Paris four days ago—he could almost hear again the faint brassy big-band music that had seemed to whisper perpetually from some forgotten set of earphones several rows ahead; and his eyes were aching now as they had when he had kept trying to read A Tale of Two Cities, while fatigue had been persistently casting faint, hallucinatory green bands across the bottoms of the pages; and he squinted in the glare of this laundry-room lightbulb and remembered how the horizontal white light of dawn over the north Atlantic had lanced in through the 747’s tiny windows, and been reflected in wobbling flickers onto the white plastic ceiling by the compact-mirrors of ladies fixing up their slept-in makeup.

When the jet had landed at LAX in Los Angeles, he had got off and walked right out of the airport, abandoning his luggage.

Summoning all his strength now, he struggled to his feet and mumbled, “Which way to the head?”

Mavranos, still holding the revolver, pursed his lips and scowled at him. “Hold tight, sonny,” he said. “Your bladder won’t pop.”

“You’re not Speedy Alka-Seltzer,” agreed Pete absently as he hovered over the phone, “you won’t dissolve.”

“It’s not—” Cochran swayed in the smoky air. “I think I’m gonna puke again.”

“Oh hell,” Mavranos said, glancing for reassurance at the unconscious Plumtree “Down the hall to the right. If I see you turn left, toward the kitchen, I’ll shoot you, okay?”

“Okay.”

Cochran stepped carefully over the telephone cords to the doorway, and glanced at the ivy-leaf mark on the back of his right hand to make sure he didn’t turn the wrong way by mistake.

He followed his hand sliding along the wallpaper to the hallway corner. As he had done at the airport, he was forcing himself not to think about the consequences of this course of action; all his concentration was on the immediate tasks: step quietly down the side hall, unchain the street door, and then hurry away into the night, away from the dead body in the kitchen and everybody here, never looking back.

But when he had shambled around the hallway corner he froze.

Instead of the remembered narrow hall through which he and Plumtree had entered the building, with its threadbare carpeting and low, flocked ceiling—

—he was in a broad, dark entry hall, at the foot of a spiral staircase that curled away upward for at least two floors; rain was drumming on a skylight far overhead, and drops were free-falling all the long way down the stairwell to splash on the parquet floor at his feet. In the taut, twanging moment of astonished vertigo he rocked his head forward to look at the floor, and saw in the wood a stain that he was viscerally certain was old blood.

Then he had no choice but to look behind him.

A gilt-framed mirror hung on the panelled wall, and in the mirror, behind the reflection of his own wide-eyed face, stood the man he had met in the streets of Paris rive days ago, who had called himself Mondard.

Cochran whirled to face the man, but there was no one there; he was still alone in the empty baroque hall; and so he had to look back into the mirror.

The man in the reflection had the same curly dark beard he’d had when Cochran had first spoken to him in the courtyard of the Hotel L’Abbaye, around the corner from the Church of St. Sulpice, but now it reminded Cochran of the bearded dead king who lay somewhere behind him; and these liquid brown eyes had shone with this same perilous joy even when they had stared at Cochran from a living bull’s head on the man’s shoulders, later that same morning in the narrow medieval Rue de la Harpe; and when Cochran had fled, stumbling over ancient cobblestones past the Lebanese and Persian restaurants with whole lambs turning on spits in the windows, the thing that had pursued him and finally tripped him up on the Quai Saint Michel pavement by the river had been a man-shaped bundle of straw, with dried ivy for hair and split and leaking grapes for eyes.

In the hotel courtyard the man had introduced himself as Monsieur Mondard having to lean close to be heard over the glad baying of the dog in the lobby, and he had frightened Cochran by speaking of the dead Nina and offering him an insane and unthinkable “surcease from sorrow”—and as Cochran stared again now into the reflection of those horizontally pupiled eyes, he knew from their unchanged hot ardor that Mondard was still holding out the same offer.

“Donnes moi le revenant de la femme morte,” Mondard had said, “buvez mon vin de pardon, et debarrassez-vous d’elle.” Give the dead woman’s ghost over to me, drink my wine of forgiveness, and be free of her.

In that old Paris courtyard, under the marbled winter sky, Cochran had believed that the man could do what he offered: that he could actually relieve him of the grief of Nina’s death by taking away Cochran’s memories of her, his useless love for her.

And he believed it again now. The figure in the mirror was holding a bottle of red wine, and in the reflection the letters on the label were something like I BITE DOG AP but Cochran couldn’t read it because of the sudden swell of tears in his eyes. Why not take a drink of the sacramental wine, and by doing it give over to this creature his intolerable memories of Nina—give to this thing that called itself Mondard his now cripplingly vestigial love for his killed wife?

When he looked up into Mondard’s face, the goat-pupilled eyes were looking past him, over Cochran’s shoulder; a moment later they were warmly returning his gaze, and he knew that Mondard was promising to provide the same solace, the same generously ennobling gift, when Cochran’s grief would be for the death of Plumtree.

And Cochran wondered exactly how Nina had come to run out into the lanes of the 280 Freeway at dawn, ten days ago; had she been chased?…Lured?

Nina was dead, and Cochran was suddenly determined not to betray his love for her by disowning it; and janis was alive, and he was not going to sanction her death, abandon her to this thing, even implicitly.

The bottle of wine, “Biting Dog” or whatever it was called, gleamed in the long-nailed hand in the mirror’s reflection, and on the back of the hand was a mark that might have corresponded to the mark on Cochran’s hand—but Cochran shook his head sharply, and turned away and blundered back the way he had come.

CHAPTER TEN

“You know that you are recalled to life?”

“They tell me so.”

“I hope you care to live?”

“I cant say”

“Shall I show her to you? Will you come and

see her?”

—Charles Dickens,

A Tale of Two Cities

PLUMTREE was still huddled under the sink when Cochran stepped carefully back into the stark yellow light of the laundry room, but she was blinking and looking around now and Angelica was crouched beside her, talking to her.

Pete was hunched over the telephone, tapping the hangup button; the paper speaker cone on the shelf was silent in the instants when the phone was hung up, but always came back again with the same noise, which was distant mumbling and laughter and vitreous clinking, as if the phone at the other end had been left unattended in a crowded bar somewhere. Perched up on the washing machine, Kootie was frowning in the mint-and-tequila smoke from the kitchen, and holding his bleeding side.

As Cochran stepped over the telephone and electric cords to get back to his place beside the sink, he found that he was straining to hear, among the slurred babble crackling out of the speaker, the rattle-and-bang of someone playing bar dice.

“Oh, Scant!” said Plumtree when he sat down beside her. “I was afraid you ran out on me.”

Cochran managed to smile at her. “Decided not to,” he said shortly.

Angelica glanced at him, and then stared at him. He wondered what his expression looked like. “Good,” she said. “Did you get…lost, at all, looking for the bathroom?”

Cochran realized that he’d been holding his breath, and he let it out. “Yes,” he said. “Never did—find it.” Now that he had resumed breathing, he was panting, as if he had run a long distance back here.

“Big Victorian halls?” Angelica asked him in a neutral tone. “Rich-looking?”

Cochran caught his breath with a hiccup, both relieved and frightened to learn that she knew about the hall he had found himself in, that he had not been hallucinating. “Yes,” he admitted. “Grand once—decrepit now.”

Angelica was nodding. “For the last week and a half,” she said slowly, “we’ve been getting print-through, here, overlay, overlaps, of two other houses, old Victorians. One’s dark and mildewy, and the other’s clean and got electric lights. This building was put up in 1923, partly constructed of lumber salvaged from the Winchester House in San Jose. The top couple of floors of that house collapsed in the big earthquake in 1906—”

“When he came for the black lady’s ghost, out of the sea,” said Janis in a helpful tone, “and knocked down all the buildings. Valorie told me that part.”

“Oh, do be quiet, girl,” whispered Angelica, closing her eyes for a moment. “The Winchester House is still standing, of course,” she went on to Cochran, “big haunted-house tourist attraction on the 280 south of San Fran…but lately when it’s raining in San Jose, the roof leaks here.”

“It was—leaking there, too,” panted Cochran. “Through a skylight.” He didn’t feel able to tell her about the man he’d seen in the mirror. “Talk to Kootie about it, he’s seen—”

A clunking sounded from the speaker, then breathing; clearly someone at the unimaginable other end had picked up the telephone.

“Whooo wawnts it?” came a man’s drawling voice from the speaker. “Your daddy’s home, baby! That bad old doctor wanna play strip poker, I’ll see he gets his ashes hauled for real.” A high, razory whine had started up in the background.

Cochran’s face went cold, for he was certain that this was the voice that had come out of Plumtree’s mouth at Strubie the Clown’s house.

Plumtree had sat up and stiffened. “That is my daddy!” she said hoarsely, her voice seeming to echo faintly out of the speaker. “Daddy, can you hear me? I’m so sorry I let you die, I tried to catch you—”

“Course I can hear—”

The whine grew abruptly louder and shriller, as if Dopplered by the source of the carrier-wave signal accelerating toward them at nearly the speed of light; a blue glow was shining now in the dark office beyond the laundry-room doorway, and the drumming of water into the pots out there was a barrage; then the speaker abruptly went silent and the blue glow was extinguished. Cochran couldn’t hear the roof dripping in the other room at all now.

In the silence, Pete pushed back his chair and shuffled carefully to the doorway and looked into the office.

“The carborundum bulb exploded,” he said, turning, back into the brightly lit little room. He gave Plumtree an empty, haggard stare. “Your dad’s ghost is one muscular son of a bitch.”

“He’s not a ghost,” said Angelica in a shaky tone as she lithely straightened her legs and stood up. “And it wasn’t Spider Joe’s dead wife that whited out the TV. Let’s go in the other room and get the Vete de Aqui oil splashed around.”

Cochran knew enough Spanish to understand that the phrase meant, roughly, Go Away; and in spite of his recent resolve to stay with these strange people, he forlornly wished he could rub some of that oil onto the soles of his shoes.

“I’VE GOT to make a couple of ordinary phone calls before we settle down again,” said Angelica when everybody had filed back into the office and turned the lights back on and Johanna and Kootie had begun shaking yellow oil from tiny glass bottles onto the doorframes and the windowsills. Angelica hurried into the kitchen, and Cochran heard a pan clank in a sink, and then running water and the sudden hiss of steam. Pete had unplugged the electrical cords and was twisting the clamps off the terminals of the car battery that was sitting on the desk.

“I’ll bet he’s an angel,” Plumtree was saying, “if he’s not a ghost. I’ll bet he’s my guardian angel.”

Cochran drained the last third of his can of beer in several deep swallows. Has she not even considered, he wondered, the likelihood that her father’s personality is the famous Flibbertigibbet?—who battered the would-be rapist to death in 1989 on October the unforgettable seventeenth? An angel, maybe, Cochran thought, but one with a harpoon rather than a harp.

The thought of a harpoon reminded him of the sawn-off spear in the neck of the dead king in the kitchen; he darted a nervous glance in that direction, and then peered up at Kootie, who had climbed back up onto the desk and was sitting cross legged among the wires and radio parts.

Kootie was looking at him. “Call me Fishmeal,” the boy said, softly and not happily. Cochran blinked at him. “Uh…sorry, you said what?”

“Never mind,” sighed Kootie.

Angelica came striding back into the office from the kitchen, her dark hair swinging around her pale, narrow face. “Your Bugsy Siegel eye worked,” she told Mavranos. “The two L.A.-area santeros I just called were aware of some powerful ghost agitations a few minutes ago, but Alvarez in Venice registered it as northeast of him, and Mendoza in Alhambra clocked it as just about exactly west.”

“The Hollywood Cemetery…?” ventured Pete.

“Unmistakably,” said Angelica. “So we’re no more vulnerable than we were before. At least.”

She threw herself down on the couch and stared hard at Plumtree, who was sitting on the floor beside Cochran. Impulsively Cochran put his arm around Plumtree’s shoulder; and she leaned back against him, which led him to believe that she was currently Janis.

“And I’m pretty sure. I’ve got you diagnosed, girl,” Angelica said to her, “though I’d love it if you could have brought your admission notes with you from the madhouse.” She looked around at the other people in the long, smoky room—just Cochran and Kootie and Mavranos and Diana—and she said, “I’m afraid I’m going to be violating doctor-patient confidentiality in what I say here. But everybody here is concerned in this—and anyway, you never paid me forty-nine cents.”

Angelica shook her head and smiled then, though she was frowning. “You know when I was a practicing psychiatrist, I learned real quick that the regular doctors the surgeons and all, were cowards when it came to giving their patients bad news. They’d call one of us shrinks over to their wing of the hospital to ‘consult’ on a case, and it always just meant…‘Would you explain to my patient that his cancer is fatal? Would you tell his family?’ So a lot of times I had to be the one to tell some stranger that his leg had to be amputated, or tell some girl her father had died. I always felt bad to be the one breaking the news.” She coughed out two syllables of uncomfortable laughter. “I’m rambling, aren’t I? What I mean is, I don’t want to say what I’ve got to say now—though in a way I’ve got the opposite sort of news.” Plumtree must have opened her mouth to speak, for Angelica held up her hand. “Let me talk, Miss Plumtree. You are, genuinely, a multiple personality,” Angelica said, “but that’s not all that’s…peculiar about you. How do I start? For one thing, I’m just about sure that you were present when your father…well, let’s call it died.”

Cochran belatedly noticed that Angelica had brought a glass of something with her from the kitchen, tequila probably, and he watched her take a solid gulp of it now. “I think,” she went on, ‘that you were standing on the pavement below the building he fell from—I think he partly landed on you, which is why you were in the hospital with broken bones. And it was almost certainly a sunny day, because you seem to have identified him with the sun, hence your dream of the sun falling out of the sky onto you, and hence too your no doubt stress-triggered hysterical sunburn and constricted pupils. Conversion disorders, we call that class of physical symptoms.”

Angelica leaned forward—but her head was now over one of the drip-catching pots, and the next drop spattered on her scalp. She leaned back again on the couch. “That much is orthodox—Angelica Anthem Elizalde the doctor talking. Now it’s Bruja Angelica, del ‘Testículos del León’: I think that in the instant before his body died, when you were both lying there on the sidewalk or whatever, he managed to look into your eyes, and then he…jumped across the gap, threw his soul into your two-year-old body.” She was frowning deeply, staring at the liquor in her glass. “So at the tender age of two you lost your psychic virginity, in what must have been a traumatic violation of your self. I doubt that your home life in the hippie cult-commune was real conducive to mental health, but this virtual rape by your own father was undoubtedly the event that triggered your multiplicity.”

“I’m still here,” said Plumtree cautiously. “Valorie hasn’t made me lose time. So this must not be bad news.”

“We-ell,” said Angelica, raising her eyebrows, “the news is that your father is discorporate, but he’s in you; like one of those flanged wedges they use to split logs into several pieces. And he’s alive, he’s not a ghost; he never did die, never did experience the psychic truncation of death. He is, though, almost certainly the person that killed Scott Crane.”

“My father is alive,” said Plumtree, clearly tasting the thought. “I didn’t let him die! I did catch him—save him!”

And he’s Flibbertigibbet, thought Cochran nervously. Don’t lose sight of that, Janis.

A jangling metallic screech at the back door made Cochran jump and almost shout; Spider Joe was coming back inside, and the long, stiff wires that projected from his belt were scraping paint chips from the doorframe. “Goddammit,” the blind old man was muttering. Once through the narrow doorway he plodded across the floor, as Mavranos stepped out of his way and the antennae bunched and snagged the carpet and whipped through the air, and finally he sat down heavily on the floor beside the couch. Perhaps self-consciously, he groped around until he found Angelica’s deck of Loteria cards, and began shuffling the frail cards in his brown-spotted hands.

Angelica turned back to Plumtree. “Do you know what those lines were that you quoted a few minutes ago?” she asked Plumtree sharply. “A list of defenses, all provisional and makeshift-frail—’Upon my back, to defend my belly,’ and so forth?”

“Don’t say any more,” said Plumtree hastily, “please. No, I don’t even recall quoting anything.”

“Well, they happen to be from Troilus and Cressida” Angelica said, “a Shakespeare play that isn’t considered one of his good ones, mainly because it doesn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense. But some spiritualists, mediums brujas y magos—the real ones—are very aware of the play.”

“What’s it about?” asked Cochran—in a strained voice for it had been at the Troy and Cress Wedding Chapel in Las Vegas that he had married Nina Gestin Leon—his beloved dead Nina—and had next morning had his first debilitating hallucination of the big, masked man.

Angelica sighed and finished her drink. “Only a few people know what I’m about to tell you,” she said. “See, Shakespeare didn’t write the play for the general public—its only intended performance was for a small, sorcerously hip audience in London in 1603—and in the published version he had to add four or five lines to the end of the first scene, tacked on after the rhyming couplet triat originally ended it, in order to take away the real point of the play—which is that Troilus didn’t go out and fight, but got his wound at home—fatally, by his own hand. Hardly anybody knows, anymore, that it’s really a play about ghosts.”

She glanced at Plumtree, with what might have been sympathy. “I’ll have to reread it, but it takes place during the Trojan War you know? like in Homer?—and it’s about a Trojan girl, Cressida, who is being prepared to be a vehicle for the ghost of her dead father. The Greeks who are besieging the city have got hold of the ghost, and they want to use it against the Trojans, but they’ve got to get the ghost into a living body that’s both compatible with it and not a virgin, psychically. It’s a dirty-pool move, like using biological warfare, and some of the Greeks such as Ulysses don’t approve of the tactic; the Greek soldiers are suffering disorientation from the powerful ghost’s proximity, and they’re using masking measures—’emulation,’ Ulysses calls it—to insulate themselves. So anyway, a traitor spiritualist in Troy is talking Cressida into having sex with the ghost of her dead boyfriend, Troilus, who near-decapitated himself with his sword before the action starts. In the play it’s never outright stated that Troilus is dead, a suicide ghost, but his very name should have been a clue to the theater-going public, really—in Homer’s Iliad, the Troilus character is dead long before this point in the story, though Homer doesn’t say he killed himself out of unrequited love of Cressida, as Shakespeare secretly has it. Anyway, a trade is set up—the clueless Trojans agree to turn over Cressida in exchange for some VIP prisoner-of-war Trojan, and the spiritualist manages to get Cressida into bed with Troilus’s ghost just barely before she’s got to leave the city. And, of course, the Greek scheme works: Troy falls, the noble prince Hector is killed. Though,” she added, visibly restraining herself from glancing toward the kitchen doorway, “Apollo and Aphrodite preserved Hector’s body from corruption.”

Mavranos was still holding the revolver. He looked across the room at Plumtree and asked, “What was your plan for reviving Scott Crane?”

She shivered under Cochran’s arm and muttered, “In the name of the Father, the Sun, the Holy Ghost.” The lights flickered; then she squinted at Mavranos. “Okay, sorry—what did you say?”

“I asked you how you planned to restore Crane to life.”

A time for hard questions.” She took a deep breath and let it out. “I believed a living king would be able to restore him. A king in a living body. I knew he was a, a magic guy, and I figured he knew how to do shit like that. So I wanted to find the Flying Nun’s—Crane’s—presently disembodied spirit, and let him take my body, so he’ll be occupying a living body—this one—and he’ll be able to do the magical trick, whatever it involves. I know how to…open myself up, ‘wide unclasp the table of my thoughts,’ step aside and let another personality take control of my body—I do it a hundred times a day. And he wouldn’t be compromising himself by violating my spiritual virginity—I’m a regular Grand Central Station for personalities passing through this little head. So far they’ve all been homegrown, as far as I know, but I’m confident that any…psychic hymen!…is long gone.”

Truer than you yet know, Cody, thought Cochran. You should have been here for what Angelica said about your father a minute ago.

Plumtree was still holding Mavranos’s gaze, though Cochran could see the glitter of tears in her eyes. “And,” she went on steadily, “if he can’t manage the trick of getting himself back into his own body—even though it does happen to be so perfectly preserved right here in your kitchen!—then he can simply, God, simply stay in mine, keeep it. Mine’s not perfect, and it’s the wrong sex, but it’s young, and it’s all I have to give him, by way of atonement.” She wiped her eyes impatiently on her shirtsleeve. “That was my plan. Dr. Armentrout said Koot Hoomie Parganas might know a way to do it, maybe another way.” She looked up at the boy on the desk. “Hanging around here tonight, I get the idea you don’t, in fact, know a way to do it. Is that…true?”

Angelica spoke up in answer, angrily. “Of course it’s true! If Kootie could revive the dead king, do you think he wouldn’t have done it?”

After staring at Kootie for another second or two, Plumtree turned a tired smile on Angelica. “No, lady,” she said quietly.

Mavranos swivelled his bleak gaze to Angelica. “Now I know how you feel,” he said hoarsely, “delivering the bad news to people.” He cleared his throat, but when he spoke again his voice was still as gritty as boot soles on sandstone: “I think Miss Plumtree’s plan might work.”

Angelica was visibly tense. “Who is that bad news for?”

“You all, goddammit. You and Pete and Kootie. Shit. What Diana and I meant to do by coming here was to confer the kinghood onto the man with the bleeding wound in his side. That office, the kinghood, would have carried with it a lot of protections—Miss Plumtree can tell you again how much work she had to do to get through the defenses to Crane. But—if Crane can be revived, even though he’s dormant and powerless right now, then Kootie doesn’t become the king after all. There are no protections. And you people are fatally compromised—you’ve invited us in, you’ve voluntarily taken the dead king’s very body in, given it shelter and respect! You’ve eaten bread and drunk wine in his corpse’s presence, you’ve declared allegiance and fealty to his reign, like it or not. The bad guys know your address, this bad psychiatrist and—” He glanced at Plumtree, “—and other villains. And they won’t let you live, you all being sworn-in soldiers in the routed side’s army now, and knowing what you know. These two,” he said, waving at Plumtree and Cochran, “found you tonight—hell, their taxi driver found you. And old Spider Joe had no problem, apparently, and he’s blind. By morning you may have armored assault vehicles pulling up out front. You’ve blown your mask-gaskets by letting us in, and I don’t even think you could run and hide somewhere else, now, and stay effectively hidden for long.”

Angelica had stood up from the couch during this, and paced to the kitchen doorway and back. “Then anoint Kootie,” she said. “Make Kootie the king, as you originally planned. We’ll have the protections of the true living king then.”

Mavranos reached up to the side and laid the revolver on the bookshelf beside the inert stuffed pig, and he wiped the palm of his hand on his jeans. “I deliberately killed a man once, at Hoover Dam, to protect my friends, and it has weighed cruel hard on me ever since. I won’t—I won’t kill a living person to protect a dead man; especially a living person I’ve become indebted to. You can march into the kitchen there and, I don’t know, chop Scott’s head off with a carving knife, if you like. I won’t shoot you, Angelica. Kootie would become king then, even without the blessings of me and Diana, which it would damn sure be without. But Kootie will have become king by being an accessory to the murder of his predecessor…as, in fact, most of the previous kings have done. And his will be—trust me!—a reign poisoned at its root.”

Cochran thought of the phylloxera lice, killing the sunny grapevines from the darkness six feet under.

“I…won’t do that,” said Kootie softly.

“Then I take back our invitation!” shouted Angelica. “I hereby annul it! I never invited you in, and all we did for your damned king was lay him out on the kitchen table! Pete and Kootie will carry him right back out to your abracadabra truck—and you can wipe your fingerprints off the doorknobs and take your kids and your toothbrushes and get out of here—take a broom with you and sweep your footsteps off the walkway as you leave!” She looked at Pete and lifted her open hand, and caught the little bottle of Vete de Aquí oil that he obediently tossed across the room to her.

“Go,” said Plumtree with a giddy wave, “and never darken our towels again.” Mavranos smiled sadly at Angelica. “You took my forty-nine cents, that first day.” “Cheerfully refunded!” Angelica stamped to the desk, pulled open the top drawer, and pawed through a pile of scattered change. Then she turned and threw seven coins at Mavranos.

The coins tumbled to a Wiffle-ball halt in mid-air; and they seemed to pop there, silently, like big grains of puffed rice; and then they fluttered away on dusty white wings toward the dripping ceiling.

Cochran watched them, and cold air on his teeth made him aware that his mouth was hanging open. The coins had turned into live luna moths, and a chilly draft had sprung up in the room.

Angelica was panting audibly as she dug seven more coins out of the drawer, and she flung them too toward Mavranos.

Again the coins dragged to a halt in mid-air, and twitched and puffed out in the moment that they hung suspended, and became live white moths that fluttered away in all directions. The long office room was cold now.

Pete stepped forward then, and he caught Angelica’s wrist as she was scrabbling in the drawer for more coins; and she collapsed against him, sobbing. “Why did you people have to…come here?” she wailed, her hot breath steaming in the chilly air.

Mavranos spread his hands. “Why did Kootie have to be the one with the qualifications, the unhealing cut in his side?”

Blind Spider Joe held up two of Angelica’s Lotería cards; Cochran leaned forward to peer at them, and saw that they were a pair, two copies of a picture of a woman in a narrow canoe, labeled LA CHALUPA.

“Nobody’s brailled these cards for me,” the old man said irritably. “What are these?”

“They’re both the same,” said Kootie. “A lady in a little boat. She’s got, uh, baskets of fruit and flowers by her knees, jammed in the bow.”

“Two boats,” Spider Joe said. “You were in a boat on a boat, a boat aboard a boat, when you got wounded, boy, isn’t that right? And you had a guide who protected you through the ordeal, somebody like Merlin, or Virgil who escorted Dante through the Inferno. That was a rite de passage—he didn’t just save you, he saved you for something. That’s when you swung around to point here, to this.”

“When my side got cut?” said Kootie. “Not boats—I was in a van that some bad guys had driven up inside a truck, on Slauson, by the L.A. trainyards. I was being kidnapped. And the ghost of Thomas Edison saved my life.”

“And you had been prepped,” Spider Joe went on, “like a piece of amber rubbed with a cloth, charged—fasting and observances as a child, that’s obvious, and then you were violently severed from that life, and then you must certainly have renounced your name and your race; and you were a passenger, helpless. And what’s a little charged boat floating aboard a boat?” asked Spider Joe. “It’s a compass. You’ve got to get to the boats now, point north, find a new Merlin or Virgil—or Edison. An intercessor.”

Pete Sullivan was squinting at the old man, and now he looked at Mavranos. “You know this old guy, Arky. Is there value in this?”

Mavranos opened his mouth and closed it, and shrugged. “He seemed to give Crane some good advice, before the big poker game on the houseboat on Lake Mead.”

“It sounds like the old black lady’s boat, her pirogi,” said Diana. She glanced at Angelica. “Do you still think she was just a…random ghost drawn by your telephone?”

“This is the blind leading the blind,” Angelica said.

Cochran stood up, though he had to lean on the desk, and he crossed his arms to hide the foolish writing on his T-shirt. “You tried to get your man Crane an the phone, and he wasn’t there,” he said. “North, says the, the oracular Mr. Spider Joe here; and you said that TV signal originated in San Francisco, and the old black lady’s ghost was talking about San Francisco—obviously she was talking about the 1906 earthquake and fire, and she said ‘Yerba Buena burning,’ and Yerba Buena isn’t just the Spanish term for mint, it was the original name for San Francisco, because of all the wild mint that used to grow on the north-shore dunes there. Your very house leaks because it’s raining in San Jose, which is next door to San Francisco. And she said, ‘You all need to come here, and I’ll guide your boats,’ remember?” And back up in the Bay Area, he thought yearningly, I can get my bearings, get to my house and get some clothes, pick up a paycheck, talk to my lawyer. “For all sorts of reasons, none of us wants Crane to just keep Janis’s body. We all have a stake in him getting his own back.” Or, better, him just going untraceably away, he added to himself. “And Mr. Mavranos points out that we can’t stay here. If we all leave now, we can be at the Cliff House in San Francisco for breakfast.”

“To the boats,” said Plumtree gaily.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

PANDARUS: …Is it not birth, beauty, good shape, discourse, manhood, learning, gentleness, virtue, youth, liberality, and such like, the spice and salt that season a man?

CRESSIDA: Ay, a minced man; and then to be baked with no date in the pie, for then the man’s date is out.

—William Shakespeare,

Troilus and Cressida

AS Johanna was banging around in the reeking steamy kitchen, insistently making snacks to sustain the travellers during the proposed long drive, Archimedes Mavranos was standing in the middle of the office floor and giving orders. He had taken his revolver down from the shelf again, and with his finger outside the trigger guard was now slapping his thigh with the barrel to emphasize his points.

“Diana,” he said, “you take one of the Sullivans’ cars and go back to Leucadia with the boys—Nardie and Wendy will be tired of taking care of all the young’uns by themselves. Mr. King-Arthurs-Shorts and Miss Plumtree can sit up in the front seat of the truck with me, and Kootie and Pete and Angelica can sit in the back seat, with Angelica holding—”

“Kootie certainly won’t go along,” interrupted Angelica, who had sat down on the couch and crossed her arms. “And Pete and I aren’t cowards, but I don’t see why we should go along either.” She blinked around belligerently. “And you can’t take one of our cars. Pete or I can drive Diana and the boys back to Leucadia.”

“I thank you for the offer,” said the woman Cochran had begun to think of as the cue-ball madonna, “but we’ll take a bus. I would be honored to die with you, Angelica, if it were necessary, but I wouldn’t let my boys or my unborn baby go anywhere with someone who was targeted to die.”

Angelica drummed her fingers on the arm of the couch. “Why,” she asked Mavranos, “would you even think of bringing a fourteen-year-old boy?” One of the moths fluttered past her face, and she waved it away impatiently.

“He’s more than that, Angelica,” Mavranos said. “He’s an apprentice king—no, a journeyman king; he can see and sense things we can’t. And if we fail, he’s the king—he should be up to speed for that, be able to land running. And I’ll tell you another bit of bad truth, I’m not at all sure that this restoration-to-life will work, without him.”

“Meaning what?” Angelica demanded.

“I don’t know at all what it means,” said Mavranos, baring his teeth. “But he’s here, he’s empowered, as you shrinks like to say. He’s a uniquely potent soldier in the king’s meager army.” He shrugged. “But, if the boy doesn’t want to go, I certainly won’t try to compel him.”

Cochran couldn’t help sneaking a sidelong glance at Kootie.

The boy was frowning and holding his wounded side. “My mom and dad will die if this doesn’t succeed,” he said carefully.

Angelica leaped lithely to her feet. “Kootie, that’s not—”

“Or hide real damn low,” assented Mavranos. “Moving frequently, not keeping souvenirs. For the rest of their lives.”

“What have we been doing but hiding real damn low?” Pete said to Kootie. “The cops have been looking for us since ‘92, and for your mom since before that. Kootie, we don’t—”

“Well what about him?” Mavranos said, turning to face Pete Sullivan. “Kootie himself? He was brought up to be king, groomed for it—by the plain universe, apparently, if not by any specific person. Weren’t you listening to Spider Joe at all? Even if Kootie never gets to take the crown, the ambitious guys will want him dead, like a valid pretender, and his is a soul they’ll want to eat; they’ll want it bad. You think he can keep his belt and his watchband Möbiused all his life one edge and one side get along forever with half his strength?”

“I will go with them,” said Kootie. He had picked up the bottle of Mondavi Chardonnay from the back corner of the desk, and now refilled his gold fish-cup. He smiled at Angelica. “And I won’t insult you and dad by asking whether or not you’ll come along.”

The bald woman’s lower lip was pulled away from her teeth in what might have been profound relief or pity, or both; and she hurried into the kitchen and came back with a ratty pale-yellow baby blanket. “Kootie,” she said hoarsely, “this belonged to my mother, who was…such a successful avatar of the Moon Goddess that she was killed for it in 1960, at the order of Scott’s natural father, when he was king. Spider Joe could tell you about it. Carry it with you, and she’ll help you do…whatever it might be that you have to do.”

Kootie started to say something, then wordlessly took the little blanket and began slowly folding it.

“Okay,” said Mavranos. “Good. We’ll have Crane’s body in the back of the truck, like under a tarp, and Angelica will be sitting just forward of that, in the back seat, with a gun: Miss Plumtree is our tool for restoring Crane, but at the same time she’s a potential Trojan Horse, she contains the man that killed him—so Angelica has to be ready to shoot her if her father should take over and try to mess things up.”

Plumtree was nodding absently, shaking a cigarette out of a pack from her purse.

“If I shoot her,” noted Angelica shakily, “she won’t be much use in restoring Crane.”

“You might not kill her,” said Mavranos.

“And even if you did,” put in Kootie, who seemed tensely distracted as he tucked the folded-up baby blanket into his hip pocket, “we might find another way.”

Angelica opened her mouth as if to demand an explanation of that, but Cochran overrode her. “She!—came here voluntarily!” he said loudly. His face was hot, and he was trying not to stutter. “At some peril to herself.” He turned to stare into Angelica’s hostile brown eyes. “You’re Spanish,” he said breathlessly. “Okay, that counts. But I’m Irish. If you decide to kill her, or hurt her, you’d be smart to kill me first.”

“Noted,” said Mavranos stolidly. “Joe, do you need a ride anywhere that’s along the 101 north? We won’t want to take a route that strays too far inland—I think proximity to the sea is part of what’s been sustaining Crane’s corpse.” He grinned at Angelica. “Along with Apollo and Afro-Dydee, natch.” He stared toward where Spider Joe sat on the floor beside the couch, then turned to Pete.

“The, uh, ‘beasties,’” Mavranos went on. “Those strange dead guys that you had stacked in your trashed old van last week—we’re gonna have to delay long enough to rip up the turf again over where we planted ’em.”

Pete Sullivan frowned with evident distaste. “What the hell for? I let all the air out of the old Chevy Nova’s tires after we parked it over them; and those were old tires, they might not take air again.”

“All of us together can push it,” said Mavranos softly, “even on a flat or two.” He had been steadily slapping his thigh with the gun barrel, and now he struck himself hard enough with it to make Cochran wince. “Shit,” Mavranos said in an almost conversational tone. “The thing is, Pete, we gotta…well, a Dumpster in back of some gas station wouldn’t be right; we do owe Spider Joe a burial.”

Cochran watched everybody else turn to stare toward the couch before he looked away from Mavranos’s stony face.

Spider Joe’s head was rolled back, and above his slightly opened mouth the sightless eye sockets gaped at the ceiling; and the metal filaments that stood out from his belt were bent double, folded back across his khaki shirt like a dozen crossed fencing foils.

“He did traverse afar,” said Mavranos, “to bring his gifts to the king—to return those two silver dollars.”

“Poor old fucker,” said Plumtree quietly. “You got lots of dead guys around here, huh.”

For a long moment the dripping in the pans was the only sound. Cochran’s teeth ached with the desire to be away from this building.

“Go with my blessings, Spider Joe,” said Kootie softly, “whoever I may be in this.”

After a pause, “His wife was the one who lured my mother to her death,” said Diana. “I wonder if I—” She shook her head. “His last words,” she went on, “were, ‘Get to the boats, point north, find a new Merlin or Virgil or Edison. An intercessor.’” She had been rubbing her eyes as she spoke, and now looked tiredly around at the others in the steamy, smoky room; drops of water fell from the ceiling and plunked in idiot drumming into the various pots, and the moths were bumping against the shade of the lamp on the desk. “An intercessor is for dealing with somebody else—a person more powerful. Who,” she asked, “do you imagine that person would be?”

“Wake up and smell the Kahlua,” said Mavranos. “That person would be nobody else but Dionysus.”

“Ah, God,” said Angelica softly. “I was really hoping it wouldn’t be. I didn’t want this to involve the Bay Area—that country’s all…vineyards.”

The word vineyards caroled in Cochran’s head, echoed by the syllables of Vignes; and insistent memories flooded his mind—of the pre-dawn rolling clatter of the stainless-steel Howard winepress cylinder during the October crush, always run before daylight to elude las moscas, the flies and bees and whatever influences they might carry into the wine; of the fresh, sharp smell of new wine fermenting in a two-hundred-gallon redwood tank when he would pump the awakening juice over the cap of grape skins, the new-born red vintage splashing and spurting out of the hose and flinging up spray; and of the cathedral silence in the eight-foot-wide lanes between the vines, roofless holy aisles carpeted with yellow mustard-weed flowers in the spring, plowed under in the fall and sown with the yeast-rich pomace of spent grape skins to assure continuity of benevolent wild-yeast strains on the skins of the next season’s grapes.

And he lifted his right hand now and started at the gray ivy leaf mark on the back of his knuckles…and reluctantly he called up his impossible childhood memory of what had happened on the day his hand was cut.

“I think he’s right,” Cochran said hollowly. “I think it is Dionysus.” He looked at Plumtree, and had no idea who might be behind her eyes at the moment. “When they were talking about shooting you, just now,” he said to her, “did you…do your stay-calm trick, did you throw your anger over onto me?”

“No,” Plumtree said. “They weren’t insulting me, I wasn’t mad. That was all you—but hey, I gotta say I liked your style.”

“Well, good for me. But a person can throw other things, anybody can. What I mean is, you can throw away grief for dead people you loved, if you’re willing to disown along with it all you have of them, all your memories and all your—all the feelings you had about them…which are arguably of no use to you anymore anyway, they’re just stuff in your head that there’s nothing to be done with anymore, like a collection, a very damn costly collection, of eight-track tapes after all the stereos are gone that ever played ’em.”

“Yeah,” said Plumtree quietly, “they just make you unhappy. All you could do would be dust off the big old cassettes; whistle the tunes from memory and try to remember the instruments, and the vocals.”

Pete closed his eyes for a moment and shook his head. “This is all just—deep and moving as hell, you know, but it’s near midnight and—”

“Let the guy talk,” said Mavranos.

“You can disown the dead person,” Cochran went on, “but not just into a void; I suppose that’d…like, violate the law of conservation of grief, right? The god wants you to give it all to him” He smiled, but didn’t dare look at anyone but the dead body of Spider Joe. “And it’s a gift, that the god takes it—in exchange he gives you ‘surcease from sorrow.’“

“Euripides?” said Mavranos.

“That’s what the tailor says,” put in Plumtree with hectic cheer, “when you bring in a torn pair of pants; and then you say, ‘Eumenides!’“

“That’s mighty funny,” said Mavranos patiently. “But Euripides wrote a play that deals with what Mr. Cochran is talking about.” He glanced at Angelica. “It’s another play with a secret hidden in it, like your Troilus and Cressida”

Cochran sighed, with a shiver at the bottom of his lungs. “This would be Les Bacchants, wouldn’t it,” he said. This soaked ceiling may as well fall in on me, he thought; everything else is.

“I guess so,” said Mavranos. “That’s French? I mean what in English they call The Bacchae, this ancient play about a guy named Pentheus, who was king of Thebes, and his mom, Agave, who cut his head off and brought it to town.”

“Agave is the cactus they make tequila from,” noted Plumtree. “Often enough I’ve felt like it cut my head off.”

“I never read the play,” Cochran told Mavranos. He yawned, creaking his jaw and tipping tears from the comers of his eyes. “But as a matter of fact my in-laws were reading bits of it to me just last week, in France.”

Cochran wished for another cold American beer, to chase away the palate-memory of the flinty claret with which Monsieur Leon had kept topping up his glass—the family’s most prized vin de bouche, the old 1945 vintage, picked from vines that had gone unpruned during the Nazi occupation—while Madame Leon had droningly read page after leisurely, age-yellowed page of the old play; and he remembered how his weary brain had eventually stopped struggling to translate the French sentences, and had begun simply letting the syllables come through as random near-miss English, and how it had all seemed then to be phrases of idiot obscenity, both childish and shocking at the same time. There had been some moral the elderly couple had wanted him to derive from the play, and though he had come to their fifteenth-century farmhouse in Queyrac to turn over to them the urn that contained the ashes of their daughter and unborn grandchild, it had soon become clear that they were trying to get him into bed with their other, younger daughter, the slow-witted Marie-Claire. The thought that had sent him running from the house to his rented car and speeding away down the D-l across the low country of the Bas Medoc toward distant Paris was It’s only January—they want a second try at a grandchild crop out of me in this thirteen-moon year.

“At the start of the play,” said Mavranos, “Dionysus comes to Thebes disguised as a stranger from Phrygia, but he gets all the local women to go dancing off into the hills in his honor, wearing animal skins and waving these staffs that are wrapped in ivy and topped with pinecones—”

“Easy on the vino there, Kootie,” interrupted Angelica.

But the boy didn’t put the bottle down until he had refilled his gold cup; and when he spoke, it was to Mavranos: “Was there blood on these staffs too?”

“After a while, there was,” Mavranos told him. “The old retired king, Cadmus, he puts ivy vines in his hair and goes out to honor Dionysus too; but the present king, Pentheus, disapproves of all this crazy behavior and has the stranger arrested and thrown in jail. But since the stranger is really the god Dionysus, it’s no problem for him to conjure up an earthquake and blow the jail to bits and get out. Pentheus asks him who set him free, and the stranger says, ‘Him who provides mortal man with the grapevine.’ And Pentheus says something argumentative back, which makes the stranger laugh and say, ‘That’s hardly an insult to Dionysus!’”

Dutifully, Cochran asked him, “What did Pentheus say?”

“Well, officially that line has been lost. In all the modern editions the editors have put in something like, ‘The god who makes men and women act like lunatics.’ But Scott Crane’s dad had a real old copy, in Latin, and in this old version the original line’s still there—and it translates to An unjust gift—that lets men forsake their wronged dead.’ Then the stranger talks Pentheus into putting on a dress so he can go spy on the women, disguised as one of them. Pentheus is like somebody with a concussion at this point—he’s seeing double, and he asks the stranger, ‘Were you an animal a minute ago? You’ve got a bull’s head now.’”

Cochran could feel Plumtree’s gaze on him, but he didn’t glance at her; instead he strode into the kitchen and managed to fumble three cans of Coors out of the refrigerator without looking squarely at the dead man on the table. Perceived only in his peripheral vision, the body seemed huge.

“Sorry,” he said when he had stepped back into the office and popped open one of the cans. He took a deep sip of the stinging cold beer and gasped, “Do go on.”

“Well,” Mavranos said, “the women aren’t fooled by Pentheus’s disguise, and they chase him down and just tear him apart. His own mom, Agave, is the worst—she’s, like, delirious, and doesn’t recognize him, she thinks they’ve caught a mountain lion or something, and she cuts off his head and carries it back to town, real pleased with herself. Old Cadmus, who’s her dad, he sees that this is his grandson’s head, and he talks her out of her delirium so that she sees it too; they’re both horrified at what she’s done—and then there’s another missing section, a whole couple of pages. Modern editors have put in made-up speeches from Cadmus and Agave saying what a terrible thing this is and how bad they feel. And then when the old, real text picks up again, Dionysus is condemning Cadmus and his wife to be turned into snakes, and sending Agave off into destitute exile. “

“Is that how it ends?” asked Plumtree. “Downer play, if you ask me.” Angelica closed her eyes and sighed, obviously weary of Plumtree’s remarks but reluctant to snap at her.

“Well, yeah,” Mavranos agreed. “You do wonder why the god treats ‘em so rough, when they were apparently just doing what he wanted ‘em to do. It doesn’t make sense—the way it’s published these days. But in the original version, after Cadmus and Agave realize what she’s done, the god offers them a sacramental wine, called the debt-payer; he tells them that if they drink it, they will lose all memory of Pentheus, and therefore all guilt and unhappiness and grief over his bloody murder. They’ll be turning over Pentheus’s ghost to the god, and in return he’ll give them forgetfulness and peace. And the reason the god is being so harsh to them at the end of the play is that in the last bit of the omitted section they refuse his offer, his gift—they can’t bear to renounce their love of Pentheus, can’t make themselves disown him, even though he’s dead.”

Angelica was frowning, and looked as though she was ready to spit. “Dionysus wants to take grief, and then more of it—and he won’t wait for it to occur accidentally.” She visibly shivered. “We don’t want to deal with him face-to-face, visit him where he lives—if we’ve got to deal with him at all, we want to deal with his borders.”

Pete was half-sitting against the desk, and he looked up at Angelica with raised eyebrows. “He takes in boarders?”

Diana had sat down on the couch and was holding her distended belly. “It doesn’t sound like Dionysus will want to help us, does it?” she asked. “We want to do the opposite of renounce Scott.”

“That’s why we need an intercessor, I reckon,” said Mavranos. He squinted at Cochran. “How did you get that mark on the back of your hand?”

“I was—” Cochran began.

“Jesus!” yelled Pete Sullivan suddenly, leaping away from the desk. “Angle! Get me the can of brake-parts cleaner!”

Angelica had jumped when he shouted, and now she spoke angrily. “No. What is it, a wasp?”

Kootie had scrambled down from the desk, so fast that his forgotten bouillabaisse bowl flew off too and hit the carpeted floor with an echoing clang and a spray of tepid fish broth.

“Yes!” said Pete without looking away from the lamp. “Your goddamn moths are turning into wasps. Get me the goddamn brake-parts cleaner, this wasp’s as big as my head!”

Angelica was just staring at him, and frowning impatiently. “It’s not that big.”

“It is! Will you hurry!”

“Well, it’s not as big as a normal person’s head.”

“If a normal person comes in here we can check. Get me the goddamn brake-parts cleaner!”

“I’ll get it,” said Kootie. Before stepping into the kitchen, the boy grinned nervously up at Cochran. “Best thing for killing bugs, brake-parts cleaner spray is.”

“I bet,” said Cochran to his receding back. Absently he licked fish broth off his shaking fingers.

Plumtree took Cochran’s other hand and led him away from the confusion, past Spider Joe’s corpse to the far end of the couch; then, while Pete and Angelica went on arguing about the wasp, Plumtree stepped quietly into the entry hall, pulling Cochran along after her.

The wasp must have made a break for it, or else another one had manifested itself, for Cochran heard renewed banging and cursing from the office behind them; but Plumtree calmly used the noise as cover while she drew back the chain in the doorframe slot and pulled the heavy door open.

The cold night air was potent with the briny smell of the wild sea as the two of them sprinted down the walk and across the lamplit asphalt to the corner of Ocean Boulevard; and when they had dashed through a gap in the surging headlights across the lanes of Ocean, Plumtree dragged Cochran around a parking lot to a set of iron stairs that led downward toward the beach sand. The majestic old liner Queen Mary was moored permanently as a hotel now at the Port of Long Beach peninsula a quarter-mile away across the dark harbor water, and her yellow lights glittered on the low waves like a windy lane of incandescent flowers.

Plumtree’s blond hair was blowing around her face as she stepped off the last of the iron stairs onto the sand. “Untamed water,” she said, waving at the sea. “They won’t be able to sense us here, even if they’ve got time to look. Which they don’t. They’re crazy even to think of delaying long enough to bury the poor old buggy man.”

Now that they were below the seaside cliffs, Cochran could see a couple of fires down the beach, a hundred yards or so to the south, and he wondered uneasily who might be sustaining them out here in the middle of this night. Faintly on the breeze he could hear drumming.

“Uh,” he said, shivering, “where to?”

“Frisco,” Plumtree said. “Why the Cliff House?”

“It’s—” he said with a shrug, “—a nice place for breakfast. Tourist spot, good cover.” He shoved his hands into his pockets and tried to figure out why the Cliff House had seemed such an obvious place for them all to reconnoiter. “I don’t know, Cody, it just came to me. It’s right by the ruins of the old Sutro Baths, and that’s a good area to talk, down on the plain among the ruins, right by the water, the untamed water, because you can see anybody coming a long way off; nobody could eavesdrop, and the wind and the sea would even fox a shotgun microphone; and—” He laughed self-consciously. “And on the cliffs of Sutro Heights Park, there used to be rows and rows of Grecian statues. They’re all buried in the park somewhere now. I guess I was thinking they’d be a, a protective influence. All the stone people, to distract attention from us.”

He glanced to the side at her shadowed face, wondering if she would make fun of him, but she was just nodding. “Why did they bury ’em?”

“It was during World War Two,” he said. “The government was afraid they’d draw the attention of Japanese submarines.”

“Sure,” she said absently as they trudged through the loose sand north, away from the fires. “Guy at the periscope sees a bunch of naked white guys standing on the cliffs in the middle of the night—‘This mussa be Flisco, Captain-san!’“

Cody’s crude witticism depressed Cochran, and he hoped Janis would be up again soon. “For this,” he said stiffly, “I think we could call my lawyer, and have him wire us some money. We could rent a car then—”

“And leave a paper trail for Armentrout to follow,” she said, nodding again. “Fuck that noise, as the poet said. I’ll get us a car.”

ARMENTROUT HAD never stayed this late on the ward. The patients had all long since been put to bed, and the lights in the common rooms were dimmed; after the final clang of the door closing behind the last of the staff who would not be staying all night, the silence was whole, and tense—the occasional breathless, yiping scream, or raucous laugh, was a welcome collapse-to-one of the standing wave that seemed to fill all the rooms and corridors when the silence was unbroken.

Armentrout was sitting in one of the upholstered chairs at the re-righted table in the TV lounge. The television screen overhead was an opaque dark green, and he knew that the view of the courtyard behind him was blocked by the two board sheets of plywood that had been bolted over the window through which Cochran and Plumtree had escaped.

The views, the extensions to the outside world, were truncated. The pay phone had stopped its incessant ringing, and he was afraid that if he were to get up and cross to it and lift the receiver, he wouldn’t even hear a dial tone.

Every couple of minutes he slapped his pants pockets, and twice in the last couple of hours he had actually had to dig out his keys and look at them to reassure himself that he could leave this locked ward if he wanted to. So far he was resisting the impulse to try the key in the door; what if it should fail to fit the lock, and none of the nurses or staff admitted to knowing who he was? What if they made him take off his white coat and put on clothes from the boutique closet, and forced him to take some subsistence-pharmer dose of meds, and showed him a bed in one of the rooms and told him it was his? What if it was his? He had been a patient in a place like this, in Wichita, at the age of seventeen. …

Atropine again for Richie. …

The charge nurse had given him a bewildered look when he had burst into the demented ice-cream social, hours ago, wearing his awkward two-figure mannikin appliance. He had mumbled something about it being a tool to reintegrate dissociatives—well, he could stick with that. He might try it on a dissociative sometime!

But he had needed the masking effect of the contraption. Long John Beach had been dangerously preempted during that ice-cream-social bedlam, and Armentrout had needed every masking measure he could put on, what with the god apparently right in here, breaking the place up with an earthquake and freeing inmates from their captivity.

Armentrout rocked his head back to look up at the raw cracks in the ceiling. All at once he stood up, shuddering. His fully charged cellular telephone was a weight in his jacket pocket, but suddenly he couldn’t bear being in the TV lounge any longer. He waved at the night charge nurse through the station window as he hurried past.

Plumtree and Cochran, Armentrout thought as he strode down the dark hall toward his closed office door. Why would the god have freed Cochran too?

Armentrout wondered uneasily if he ought to have paid more attention to the deluded widower. How had the man come to have that ivy-leaf mark on the back of his right hand? Cochran hadn’t reported having any delusional episodes—or visitations—while he was here; Armentrout would have been alerted by anything like that; but was the dreary fellow more than just psychically sensitive, could he have some link with the god?

Armentrout’s key unlocked his office door, but he was too distracted to be pleased by the little vindication. I should have had him on hard meds, he thought as he blundered across the linoleum floor and sat down at the desk; hell, I should have given him benzodiazepine and ECT! I lost more than I gained, working them out on Plumtree, even if my—even if no distant ghost got a fix on me.

I got the taste of your blood now, and the smell of your jizz. In voodoo terms, that constitutes having your ID package. True, Armentrout thought now. But I do have a vial of your blood, Mr. Salvoy.

He stared at the two-figure mannikin appliance that was canted against the couch. With shirts, jackets, trousers, and shoes hung and hooked onto the aluminum poles, and the pair of clothing-store mannikin heads stuck on the swivelling neck-posts, the thing did look like two blandly smiling men with their arms around the shoulders of an invisible third man in the middle; and when he strapped the framework onto his own shoulders, Armentrout would become the third man, the man in the middle. A lever in the chest of the left-hand dummy permitted him to work the mechanical outside arms, and one in the right-hand dummy let him swivel the heads this way and that. And he had cored out holes in the backs of the Styrofoam heads, under the Dynel wigs, and stuffed into the holes dozens of paper towels spotted with patients’ blood samples. The thing weighed about twenty pounds and was awkward to wear, and in public it drew far too much derisive attention, but on several occasions it had proven to be an effective multi-level psychic scrambler, a terrifically refractive and deflecting mask. Even some moron with a plain old gun, Armentrout thought, would be likely to hit the wrong head.

The telephone on his desk rang, making him jump in his chair, and in the instant before he realized that the vibration in his ribs was just his cellular phone ringing too, he thought he was having some sort of cardiac arrest.

“Yes?” he said into the receiver when he had fumbled it up to his ear. Not long-distance, he thought fervently, please. Let it just finally be the cop.

And, thankfully, it was the cop.

“Doctor?” came the man’s voice. “Officer Hamilton here. Sorry it’s so late, I called as quick as I could after I got off work. Got a pencil? I’ve got the location of the place where your Appleseed girl said she killed the Flying Nun king.”

Armentrout shakily wrote down an address on Neptune Avenue in Leucadia. “And did you come up with anything about Neal Obstadt’s death two years ago?”

“More or less. Something damn peculiar was going on that week, and the L.A. cops are still trying to figure it out. Obstadt’s body was found in the water off the ocean side of the Queen Mary after some kind of bomb went off in the water there, on October 31 of ‘92, though no traces of any kind of explosive chemicals were found in the water, and no bomb fragments at all were recovered; he was blown to pieces, but they found a small-caliber bullet in his guts too. And the body of a film producer named Loretta deLarava was found up on one of the tourist decks with a .45 slug in her heart. She was filming some kind of TV special there, and we questioned a lot of her employees. Apparently deLarava had brought six people aboard at gunpoint, as handcuffed prisoners. One was that one-armed amnesiac nut you took charge of, who still had a pair of cuffs hanging from his wrist when they found him half-dead on the shore of the lagoon. And I’ve got the names of the other five, if you want ’em.”

“Yes, please.”

“Okay. Nicholas Bradshaw—he was the actor who played Spooky the ghost in that old TV show, ‘Ghost of a Chance,’ which was cancelled in 1960; a lawyer named J. Francis Strube, who spoke to detectives only through a lawyer of his own and basically had nothing useful to say; an itinerant electrical engineer named Peter Sullivan, whose twin sister had killed herself in Delaware five days previous; a lady psychiatrist who’s been wanted on manslaughter charges since November of 1990, named Angelica Anthem Elizalde; and an eleven-year-old kid named Koot Hoomie Parganas, whose parents were torture-murdered the same night Sullivan’s twin sister killed herself. All these people got free of their handcuffs, as if one of ’em had a key or was an escape artist.”

Hamilton sighed over the line. “Bradhshaw and Sullivan and Elizalde and the. Parganas kid haven’t been found since,” he went on, “even though they’re seriously wanted for at least questioning. DeLarava was offering a big reward for the fugitive Parganas boy, and the boy apparently called nine-one-one on the evening of the 27th, but the call was interrupted, and I think he’s probably dead; and the Elizalde woman apparently shot at a woman in the Westlake area on the 28th. And then after Halloween the LAPD was deluged with calls about all this—from psychics! Unhelpful.”

Elizalde! thought Armentrout with a stir of remembered admiration. What a deluded pioneer that woman was! And a dark, long-legged beauty, too—I used to see her a lot when she was on the staff at the County Hospital in Huntington Park in ‘88 and ‘89.

But the mention of one-armed Long John Beach had reminded him that the crazy old man was presently in “three-points” in the Quiet Room, and that if he was going to have to take Beach out of the hospital, it would be far easier with just the night staff to get past.

“So, have there been,” Armentrout asked, knowing that this was his main question, and not at all sure what answer he wished for, “any of the peculiarities I asked about, going on at the Leucadia address, or near it?” Do I get to go home now and catch a few hours of sleep, and visit the Neptune Avenue place at my leisure and alone, he thought—or must I rush off there now, bringing all my cumbrous psychic-defense impedimenta along?

“Well,” said Hamilton, “nobody’s reported any ‘sudden growth of vegetation’ to the cops…nor the opposite…but they wouldn’t hardly, would they?”

“I suppose not,” said Armentrout with a smile, beginning to relax and think of his bed.

“But there’ve been a whole lot of calls about crazy teenagers driving through the neighborhood honking their horns and shooting off firecrackers—guns too, we’ve found ejected shells on the street. And either them or some other crowd of teenagers has been dancing on the beach at all hours, real noisy. You did mention ‘other disturbances.’ And,” Hamilton added, chuckling through a yawn, “you didn’t ask about this, but two separate people have called the Union Tribune to announce that Elvis Presley is going to be coming to town to stay with them for a few weeks. Oh, and you know the way evangelists are always saying the world’s about to end? Well, a nut Bible church on the 101 there, one of the charismatic-hysterical types that rent space in failed laundromats, has announced that the world already ended, on New Year’s Day. We’re all living in some kind of delusional Purgatory right now, they say.”

While the man had been talking, Armentrout had abandoned all thought of going home to bed, and was now wearily planning how he would get Long John Beach and the two-figure appliance out of the clinic past the security guards.

“These…teenagers,” Armentrout said, just to be sure, “are they…dressed nice? Seem to have money?”

“Not in particular. But hey, their cars all look like solid gold! They drive anything at all, Volkswagens, beat old Fords, Hondas, see—but a whole lot of them are painted metallic gold, and they’ve got wreaths of flowers hung over the license plates; even on the back plates, which is a violation. The neighborhood residents say it’d look like a parade if they weren’t tearing through so fast. The kids on the beach, it’s hard to tell—get this, they bring big pots of white clay, and smear themselves up with it for their dancing. Can’t even tell what race they are, I gather.”

Armentrout sighed. “Thank you, Officer Hamilton. I think that will be all.”

“Okay, Doc. Say, how’s your crazy girl working out? Was her name Figleaf? I hope she was worth the money”

Armentrout thought of telling Hamilton that the woman had escaped, then discarded the idea. I don’t really want the cops in on this now, he thought. “Miss Figleaf has been a valuable addition to our team,” he said vaguely.

“Softball league, sounds like. Well, if you use electric scoreboards, nobody’ll know when you lose—right?—with her playing for you.”

Armentrout agreed absently and hung up the phone. “And if the referee’s got a pacemaker, he’d better not declare her out,” he said softly, to no one but the Siamese-twin mannikins leaning against the couch.

Well, she really did kill the king, he thought, our Miss Plumtree, our Miss Figleaf…who certainly held tight to her fig leaf while she was here. And a new king is apparently in readiness. Those people expecting Elvis sense it—the undying King is coming here!—and the gangs of teenagers are clearly, some kind of spontaneous embodiment of the Maruts who are mentioned in the Rig-Veda: noisy, armed youths from a culture so primitive that dance served the purpose of devout prayer, who—helpfully in this instance, while the king is temporarily out of the picture—aggressively embody fertility; and they’re assuming too the role of the Cretan Kouretes, who hid the vulnerable infant Zeus from his murderous father Kronos by performing their Sword Dance around the baby, and masked his crying with the noise of their clashing weapons.

It’s in Leucadia that I’ll get a line on the new king, Armentrout thought, whoever it turns out to be. I wonder if dawn is close enough yet for Venus to be shining like a star in the eastern sky.

The telephone rang again. Armentrout assumed Hamilton had forgotten some detail, and he picked up the receiver. “Hello?”

And then his lungs seemed to freeze—because over the phone he was hearing once again, for the first time in eleven days, the familiar phantom bar sounds, laughter and clinking glass and moronic jabbering. Then a well-remembered voice came on the line—loud, as the very fresh ones always were: “Doctor?” whined the teenaged bipolar girl who had killed herself last week. “I walk all crooked now—where’s the rest of me?”

He hung up the phone without saying anything. There was no use talking to ghosts anyway, and he didn’t want to give the thing the confirmation of having found him.

But she had found him, and no doubt would again. Hers was the first local death for which he’d been responsible since the mysterious and apparently one-shot amnesty that had been granted at dawn on New Year’s Day. How long could it possibly, reasonably be before he would need to send more people—or even just idiot mumbling fragments of people, which would clump together—to that incorporeal bar?

As he stood up and crossed to the file cabinet to fetch out the two purple velvet boxes and the unrefrigerated blood sample from Plumtree, he was mentally rehearsing his imminent departure from the clinic. I can avoid some carrying-hassle by strapping the two-figure appliance right onto Long John Beach, he thought; he’s already established as crazy.

I’ll write him a pass, say we’re going on a field trip…to early-morning mass at some Catholic church. I’ll tell the guards that the old man thinks he’s the Three Wise Men, overdue at Bethlehem.

CHAPTER TWELVE

My father hath a power; inquire of him,

And learn to make a body of a limb.

—William Shakespeare,

RICHARD II

WATCH for a Mobil station,” said Plumtree, leaning back in the driver’s seat and squinting through cigarette smoke at the onrushing dark pavement of Highway 101.

Cochran nodded and peered through a wiped-clean patch of the steamy windshield, though there was nothing at the moment to see but the endless ellipsis of reflective orange lane-marker dots and the perilously close night-time fog hanging on the road shoulder. They were north of Oxnard, out of L.A. County, and had just driven past the exit for something called Lost Hills Road. Why would anyone take that exit? Plumtree had wondered aloud. If hills get lost out there, they’d certainly lose you.

“The Jenkins woman’s not gonna be cancelling her credit cards till ten,” Plumtree went on now, “at the earliest. Hell the way she was knocking back the margaritas, she probably won’t get up before noon.”

Jenkins had proven to be the name of the woman whose purse Plumtree had stolen at the Mount Sabu bar. After searching the Belmont Shore area for an older-model car, and then finding and quickly hot-wiring a ’69 Ford Torino that had been parked off Redondo Avenue, Plumtree had used the Jenkins woman’s Visa card in an all-night Ralph’s market to buy a carton of cigarettes and a dozen cans of soup and a can opener and a fistful of Slim Jim packages and two twelve-packs of Coors and two bottles of Listerine and three 750-milliliter bottles of Popov vodka. A vodka bottle was opened now, wedged between her thighs and occasionally rattled by the bumps on the steering wheel when she changed lanes.

One of the lane changes was a sharp enough swerve to press Cochran against the passenger-side door and make him drop his cigarette, and Plumtree only remembered to click on the turn signal after she was in the left lane and yanking the car back straight. The vodka bottle had rattled like a mariachi band’s percussion gourd. “You want me to drive?” Cochran asked, fumbling on the floor for his cigarette.

“You’re drunk,” said Plumtree. “And don’t… point out to me…that I’m drinking. Alcohol makes me a better driver, keeps me alert. We need an alert driver, for this fog.”

Cochran sat back in the passenger seat and hoped she was right. Certainly he wasn’t sober…and at least they both had their seat belts on. He didn’t want to have to stop and get out of the car, anyway—the car had a heater, and Plumtree had blessedly turned it up to full blast.

Past her silhouetted head he could faintly see the line of the surf glowing gray as it silently rose and fell out past the State Beach, under stars haloed by the incoming fog so that they looked like the stars in Van Gogh’s Starry Night.

“I wonder if the dead king’s crowd has even got started yet,” he said.

“All the dead king’s horses and all the dead king’s men…” Plumtree said softly.

Couldn’t put Scott Crane together again, Cochran mentally finished the rhyme.

“I think—” Plumtree began; then she went on quickly, “this car runs pretty smooth, doesn’t it? I’d like to have done a compression check before we took off on an eight-hour drive, but I don’t hear any bad lifters or rocker arms.”

Cochran bent over to reach into the bag between his feet, and he tore open the top of one of the beer cartons and lifted a can out. “What do you think?” he asked casually as he popped the top and took a leisurely sip.

“You may as well start working on those,” said Plumtree with a nod, “they’ll only warm up, sitting down there by the heater vent.” She hiked up the vodka bottle and took a hearty gulp. “I think I turned those moths into wasps.”

The lights and exit ramps of Ventura had swept past now, but Cochran hadn’t noticed a Mobil sign. Oh well, he thought, Santa Barbara is coming, up fast, and—he peered at the lighted dashboard—we’re only a little under a quarter tank. “Really?” he said, his voice quiet but not skeptical. “Good enough so they could actually sting?”

“Well, I don’t know if they could really sting. And it would be Valorie that did it, not actually this here me. But I think it was because that Mavranos guy asked you about the mark on your hand, and I—we—didn’t want him to find out about it. Is that a birthmark?”

“I—told Janis about it,” Cochran whispered hoarsely after another gulped sip.

“She and I don’t speak to each other much.”

Cochran sighed. “In 1961, when I was seven, I thought I saw a face, a whiskery little old head, in an old Zinfandel stump that was being pruned back for the winter, and, without thinking, I shoved my hand out to stop the shears from cutting the old man’s head off.” The steady green glow of the instrument-panel dials was a cozy contrast to the night and the fog and the rushing lane markers outside, and he took another sip of the cold beer, secure in the knowledge that there were twenty-three more full cans between his ankles. The coal of his cigarette glowed as he inhaled on it, and a moment later exhaled smoke curled against the windshield.

“Actually” he said slowly, then paused; “I think it’s old rust or bark dust, under the skin. Like a powder-burn. Anyway, it’s not a birthmark.”

Plumtree nodded and had another couple, of swallows from the vodka bottle. “Actually what?” she asked.

Her question forced a short, awkward laugh out of Cochran. It made him dizzy to realize that he was teetering on the brink of telling this Plumtree woman—this one!—a secret he had kept for thirty-three years; and to realize too that, in the warm nest-like secrecy of this anonymous car flying along in the middle of cold dark nowhere, he wanted to; so he choked down a big impulsive mouthful of beer and used the sudden dizziness to get himself over the hump.

He spoke rapidly: “Actually—as I remember it, anyway, maybe I’m confusing it with dreams I had later—the shears cut right through my hand, cut it most of the way off. No kidding—there was blood squirting everywhere, and the vineyard worker with the shears was in shock, looking like…like his face was carved out of bone, with a big bullet-hole for a mouth.” He tilted up the can to finish the beer in three deep gulps. “Then, about one full second later, there was an almighty bang—a, a crash like you dropped a Sherman tank from thirty thousand feet onto the roof of the Astrodome—and when I could think again, maybe another second or two later, my hand was fine, whole, not a scratch, and not a drop of blood anywhere—my hand didn’t even have this mark on it yet; that was there when I woke up one morning about exactly a year later—but the old vine was standing there in full, bushy, impossible summertime bloom.” Jerkily he leaned forward again to put the empty can onto the floor mat and tug another can free of the carton.

“Mobil station,” he said briskly when he had straightened up again and looked out through the windshield. “Next exit, it looks like,” he added, nodding and Squinting like a navigator. He popped the can open, but just held it. “And,” he went on gently, shaking his head, “it had ripe grape bunches hanging all over it, but also… pomegranates, and figs, and I don’t know what all else. This was in the dead of winter.” He took a deep breath and let it out, then glanced at Plumtree with a wry smile. “You’d better let me deal with pumping the gas, and paying for it. You’re gonna reek of liquor.”

“That’s Santa Barbara,” Plumtree said, switching on the turn-signal indicator and scuffing her tennis shoe from the gas pedal to the brake. “After this we turn inland at Gaviota. The fog’ll be worse then. Vodka doesn’t have half the smell that beer’s got. You probably stink like an old bar towel. What did the guy with the shears do, the vineyard worker?”

“He got very damn drunk.”

Plumtree nodded as she steered off the highway and rattled across an intersection on a green light. “That shows respect.”

The left-side tires bounced up over the curb when she swung the big old Ford into the white-lit Mobil station, but she managed to park it next to one of the pumps. Cochran had dropped his cigarette again, but he just stomped it out on the floorboards. Before he could remark on the way she’d handled the driveway, she said, “I gotta disconnect the coil to turn this off. That’s good, though—a modern car, with the ignition in the steering column, I’d have had to bust it out, and cops look for that, in parking lots, and then…they wait for whoever to come back to the car. Who’s driving it.”

She enunciated the syllables as carefully as if she were pushing silver dollars out of her mouth one at a time, and Cochran realized that she herself was very drunk; and when he levered open the passenger-side door and stood up and took several deep breaths of the icy air, he was so dizzy that he had to hang on to the door to keep his balance.

He swung his unwieldy gaze over the car’s roof, and watched Plumtree shuffle to the front bumper, frowning and holding on to the vibrating fender with both hands. When she had hoisted up the hood and pulled free the wire that connected the coil to the battery, the engine shook twice and then wheezed to a halt; and in the silence he said, “I think we should…let Janis drive.”

“She’d get lost,” said Plumtree shortly. “I’m gonna go give the man the card, sign for it—you pump the gas when I wave.” She wobbled across the damp asphalt toward the glass door, then halted and looked back at him. “On the Torinos the gasp cap is behind the rear licempse plate.”

Cochran squeaked the license plate down, unscrewed the gas cap, and shoved the nozzle of the premium pump into the filler hole, and then he leaned heavily on the trunk as he held the aluminum trigger squeezed and numbly watched the wheels behind the little gas pump window roll around to, finally, fifteen dollars and sixty cents. The aromatic reek of gasoline on the cold night air did nothing to sober him up He had hung up the nozzle but was still trying to get the cap threaded back on when Plumtree reattached the coil wire and jumped the solenoid again to start the engine. When he heard the hood slam down he just dropped the cap and let the license plate snap up over it, and then hurried to the passenger-side door and got in, glad of the interior warmth even if they were both about to die in a Driving-Under-the-Influence one-car crash in the foggy canyons beyond Gaviota.

She clanked the engine into gear and drove right over the curb onto Milpas Street, swinging wide in a chirruping left turn to get back to the 101.

“Oh, okay,” she said, and the engine missed for a moment, coming back strongly when she fluttered the gas pedal. “Whoops! When do I turn?”

“Take that on-ramp on the right,” said Cochran through clenched teeth, pulling the seat belt across himself. “101 north.”

She glanced at him after she had made the turn. “Scant! What day is it?”

He relaxed a little, and didn’t attach the seat belt. “It’s the morning of the twelfth by now,” he said cautiously, “of January. It’s been a couple of hours since we left Solville.”

“My father is alive,” she said. “I did catch him!”

“That’s…right, I guess. According to that Angelica woman.” He tried to remember when it had been that Janis had last been up.

She leaned back in the seat now, straightening her arms and flexing her fingers at the top of the wheel. “This is disorienting—I don’t have to watch for cues, I can just ask you! How did we get away from there? I don’t think they wanted us to just leave.”

“No—we snuck out. They were talking about—holding a gun on you. We’re still working with them, I guess, but at arm’s length.”

She was gingerly licking her lips and grimacing. “I’m glad to get away from that burnt-liquor stink…Nobody got hurt, I hope?”

“Oh no.” He let the seat belt reel back up into the slot above the door, and finally sat back and let himself exhale. “Well, not hurt—but that old man with the windshield wipers all over him died. But it—was just, like, a heart attack, I guess. Nothing to do with us. And then in the confusion Cody just grabbed my hand and we walked out. And stole us this car.”

“My father spoke to me over the telephone.”

Cochran thought of someone who had to maintain a ‘69 Torino, going out to work on a Thursday morning and finding the car gone; but at least Janis was a sober driver. She hadn’t had anything to drink since…what? A Manhattan or two at dinner, hours and hours ago. Of course it was the same bloodstream, really, but it did seem that Cody had taken the alcohol away with her. “Yes,” he said. “I heard him.”

She was still smacking her lips, and now she said, “Did Cody get mouthwash?” As a matter of fact, she did. A big bottle of Listerine.”

“Could you pass it to me?”

Cochran did, and she unscrewed the cap and took a swig of the mouthwash; she swished it around audibly in her mouth for a few seconds, then rolled down the window to spit it outside.

“We’re going to San Francisco, aren’t we?” she said as she rolled the window back up.

“Yes.” Cochran blinked in the new Listerine fumes, trying to remember whether Janis had still been on when San Francisco had first been proposed. He was sure she had not, that Cody had already been in control then. “How did you know that?” “That’s where he…fell off the building. And I caught him.”

“We’re going there because it’s where they all—you all—hell, we all, can get Scott Crane restored to life.” According to a crazy old dead black lady, at least, he thought.

“They’re bringing his body along, I hope?” It seemed to Cochran that she spoke anxiously.

He thought of the vague plan Cody had described for getting Crane back into his own undecayed body—or, failing that, into hers permanently; and he discarded the idea of asking her about it, for she would probably just lose time if he did ask, and leave the drunk Cody to drive.

“They said they were,” he told her. “We’re probably going to be meeting them at a place called the Cliff House Restaurant, on the northwest shore.”

“I’ll be hungry by then—Cody ate most of my dinner. Did she pick up any snacks?”

“Some Slim Jims,” said Cochran, trying to remember if he had been as unconcerned as this when he had learned that Spider Joe was dead; of course he had actually seen the body, and Janis had not.

“Could I have a pack?”

Cochran leaned down and dug a Slim Jims package out of the bag; and he got out too another beer for himself. He opened the can, and, before he took the first sip, he said, “Here’s to poor old Spider Joe. May he rest in peace.”

Plumtree nodded, staring ahead. “His wife died, though, right? Recently?”

“They did say that,” agreed Cochran. He took another, deeper sip.

AT THE gas-station-and-motel town of Gaviota the 101 curled sharply to the east, inland, and soon they were climbing through the dark canyons of the Santa Ynez Mountains. The fog was a blurry wall close ahead of them, glowing gray with the diffracted radiance of the headlights, and the short patch of pavement that was visible in front of the fog seemed to Cochran’s tired eyes to be stationary, so that the black lines of skid marks were standing waves shimmying in place, and the point-of-impact of a long-ago dropped can of white paint seemed to be the beak of a diving white bird. They passed big semi-trailer trucks that were stopped on the shoulder, visible through the fog only by yellow light seemed to Cochran to trace the rigging of tanker ships more remote in the night than the trucks could possibly really be.

Cones of light, luminous triangular shapes in the darkness, resolved themselves into spotlit billboards, or steep hillside shoulders with headlights approaching from the other side, as he watched them gradually materialize out of the night; and rotating spoke-like fingers of light would turn overhead when an unseen car in the southbound lanes approached behind invisible tree branches. Sometimes Plumtree would change lanes to get around the ghostly red eyes of brake lights ahead of them, and in those transitional moments when the tires were thumping across the lane-divider bumps the turn-signal lights would strobe deeply into the fog on the shoulder, illuminating a bottle or a weed or a shoe for a brief, startled instant.

From time to time Cochran glimpsed moonlit forests off to the side, and the sterile extents of deserts, but it wasn’t until he twice saw a vast castle in the remote distance, with rows of yellow and green-lit windows, and then saw that it was only a reflection of the instrument panel lights in the close window glass, that he realized that nothing he saw beyond a distance of about six feet could be genuine. The realization didn’t stop his weary, smoke-stung eyes from registering new wonders; in fact it seemed to free his optic nerves to present him with wilder things, ships and towering siege engines and dirigibles.

The old Ford’s engine had begun to cough when they were driving past the isolated lights of the Madonna Inn in San Luis Obispo, but began to run smoothly again after that—and Plumtree, who for some miles had been folding her left leg and straightening it again and scooting forward and back in her seat as if trying to stay awake, reached out to the side and squeezed Cochran’s leg just above the knee.

“Do we have any more cigarettes?” she asked.

“A—whole carton,” Cochran said, suddenly very aware of the close flex of her legs in the tight jeans. He gripped his current beer between his thighs and bent forward to grope by his feet for a fresh pack of Marlboros.

But when he straightened up she glanced at it and shook her head. “I meant More, the brand name. I suppose Cody just thought of herself, and got just the Marlboros.” Her fingers were curled around his leg now, palpably brushing against the dashboard-facing side of the beer can, and her thumb was absently rubbing the top of his thigh. “And I don’t suppose she bought any Southern Comfort.”

“No,” said Cochran. “Just beer and vodka.” He stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray and then, as if for a sip of beer, lifted away the impeding can. Her hand slid halfway up his thigh, her fingers kneading the worn secondhand corduroy.

“All alone in the middle of nighttime nowhere,” she said, barely loud enough for him to hear. “Some people would consider this a highly lucrative situation.”

Cochran didn’t see how some people would, but he shifted closer to her and put his arm around her shoulder to stroke her coarsely cut blond hair. She rolled her head back against his forearm and her right hand slid up his leg until her little finger was brushing the tight fabric over his crotch.

“We should,” he said hoarsely, “probably pull over and park on the shoulder for a while. Till the fog clears a bit.” His heart was thudding in his chest, and he wished there was somewhere he could put down the beer he was holding in his right hand. And I should try to get a slug of that mouthwash, he thought.

Her kneading hand was fully on his crotch now, and he simply let go of the beer can; it thudded to the carpeted floorboard as he reached across to cup the unfamiliar hot softness of her left breast through the thin fabric of her blouse.

“Nobody can interrupt us out here,” she whispered, and snapped the turn signal lever up to indicate a lane change. “Nobody knows where we are.” The right tires were rumbling on the shoulder, and Plumtree’s leg flexed as she pressed the brake pedal. “There’s no phone here, so nobody can say we should have taken the time to call anyone.”

“You’re a big girl,” Cochran agreed dizzily. “You don’t have to call your mother and let her know where you are.”

“Ah!” she said, and her voice sounded sad; then she had whipped her right hand up so hard that it struck the head liner and nearly broke his elbow. Her foot slammed onto the gas pedal, and the back tires screeched and burned rubber as she steered the bucking old Ford back out into the slow lane.

“Fog, take it easy!” Cochran yelled, clasping his elbow.

She hit the brake hard enough to throw him forward against the padded black dashboard. He could hear his dropped beer can rolling on the floor.

“I will drive this car straight into a wall if you try to touch me, Omar!” Plumtree said loudly. “In arousing ways! Jesus will not blame me—He will take me into His bosom, and throw you into the fires of Gehenna! You know I will, and you know He will!”

“Fine!” Cochran gasped. “Drive normal! What’s the matter with you, Janis?”

She straightened the wheel, and though the engine was coughing again she quickly accelerated the car to a steady twenty miles an hour, glancing harriedly from the road to the rear-view mirror and back. “I’m sorry, Scant!” she said. “I must have dozed off! God, I might have got us killed! Okay, fog still, okay. Did I hit anything? God, my arms are shaking! Are you all right?”

“Well you nearly broke my arm,” he said, harshly. “Jesus, girl!” He could see that there had been at least one personality shift, and that the erotic moment was long gone. “No, you didn’t hit anything.” He leaned down and yanked a fresh beer out of the box. The floorboard carpeting was marshy under the soles of his tennis shoes, and the hot air was fetid with the smell of the spilled beer. “Who’s Omar?”‘

“That’s my lather’s name! Be careful now, Scant, I don’t want to lose time with you—but—was he here?”

“No,” Cochran said. Thank God, he added mentally. He popped the tab on the beer can. “Another woman—did I…? Do you, uh, recall putting your hand on my leg??

“Oh, God, Tiffany” she said ruefulry “That would be Tiffany. I bet. She made a pass at you, right? And you thought it was me! Poor Scant!”

He had been panting, but now began to relax. “I wouldn’t mind,” he said cautiously, “if it was you.”

“It will be, Scant, I promise you, soon, and not in the back of an old car, either.” She patted at the seat around her legs. “Did she eat my Slim Jim? God, that woke me up, at least—I could feel that I was slipping in and out, back there. I guess Tiffany was slipping out and in.”

Her guileless last couple of lines were echoing in his head, and he tilted up his fresh can of beer for a distancing, objectivity-inducing mouthful.

“If you get sleepy again,” he said, “just pull over. You can catch a nap on the front seat, and I’ll do the same in the trunk.”

“Did Cody get a key to the trunk?”

He sighed. “I was kidding. And no, she didn’t—she hot-wired the car somehow.”

“She is mechanically inclined,” Plumtree allowed, diligently watching the road. Her mouth was working, and she rolled down the window; cold night air blew into the car and twitched Cochran’s sweaty hair. “My mouth’s full of Tiffany’s spit,” Plumtree said, her voice frailer with the open window beyond her. “Could I have the mouthwash?”

Cochran passed it to her, and again she swished a sip of the sharp-smelling stuff and spat it out the window. He was glad when she rolled the window up again, though the sudden scents of diesel exhaust and spicy clay and the dry-white-wine smell of the fog had been a relief from the warm-beer fumes.

“You okay to drive?” he asked.

“Oh, sure. I kind of did catch a nap there, I guess, while she was on. Besides, you’re a little—you’re more than point-oh-eight blood alcohol, I’d guess.”

“Technically, I suppose, yeah,” he said. “We’d better,” Cochran went on steadily, “take the 280, to the city, rather than follow the 101 all the way up. We can stop at my house, and I can pick up some clothes and money.” And think all this over, soberly, he thought. And check the phone messages, and take in the mail. And clip the holstered .357 onto the back of my belt, if I decide we should indeed go on and meet the others.

“Tell me when to turn,” Plumtree said.

“Oh, it won’t be for hours yet.”

“Won’t it…bother you, seeing the place where you lived with your wife?”

Cochran took a long drag on his cigarette. “I suppose so. Sure it will. Gotta be done, though. Faced.”

Plumtree shivered. “It must be scary, not having anyone you can turn the wheel over to, in bad situations.”

Cochran smiled bleakly. “I never—”

Both of them jumped when for an instant a big brown owl swooped into the flickering headlight glow and then disappeared over the roof.

Cochran forced a laugh, embarrassed to have been so startled but pleased that he had not dropped his cigarette. “I wonder what owls think of this highway of light running through the middle of their mountains.”

“They’re hoping for a crash, a fire that’ll drive the mice and rabbits out of hiding.”

After a moment, he said, “A plausible answer, Cody, but I was talking to Janis.”

She exhaled as if trying to whistle. “Listerine! Who else was on?”

“Somebody called Tiffany. And then—”

“You pig.” She rocked on the seat and then brushed the fingers of one hand from the buttons of her blouse to the fly of her jeans. “What did you two do with me?”

“Nothing.” He tried to say it as though he had resisted Tiffany’s advances. This was a disorienting basis for conversation, and it occurred to him that it might be difficult to manage any intimacy even with Janis, without Cody objecting and interfering in humiliating ways. “Anyway, she was interrupted by somebody else, a woman who cussed me out—called me Omar.” He wondered how much Cody might have sobered up in the time she was gone, and he half-hoped something he said might drive her away and let Janis back on.

“Follow the Queen, you were playing,” said Plumtree. “You must have mentioned our…female parent, right? She comes up sometimes when somebody even just mentions her, and always when somebody asks for her. You ever play Follow the Queen?”

“The poker game? Sure—seven-card stud, where the next card dealt face up, after a face up queen, is wild.”

“Wild, right—that is, it’s whatever you declare it to be. And when our parent-of-the-fair-sex is up, the next girl is whoever you ask for. Who did you ask for? Not me, Mom doesn’t do the mouthwash bit.”

“I guess I called for Janis.”

“Not Tiffany? That was noble of you. Of course you didn’t understand the rules yet. Do you swear you two didn’t do anything with me?”

Cochran realized, to his surprise, that he didn’t want to swear to a lie. “I swear there was no kiss,” he said, “and not a button was undone or a zipper unzipped.”

“Oh, you pig. I bet you groped me. I bet you were ready to go all-in on that flop.”

“Flop,” said Cochran, thinking in poker terms now, and remembering that she had used the word several times before this. “That’s what the three communal cards are called, in Hold-’Em: the flop. You hope they make some good hand, combined with your two personal down-cards. Sometimes you just pass even if you’ve got ace-king down, if the flop is all the wrong suit, ‘cause somebody’s surely got two of the flop’s suit, for a flush.”

“When it’s…real life…you can’t pass,” she said grimly, “it’s like you’re the perpetual Big Blind, gotta make the bet whether you want to or not.”

Cochran remembered Janis telling him, just a few moments ago, that he must find it “scary” not to be able to turn a bad situation over to another personality; and he laughed softly with dawning comprehension. “You girls are like a…squad, a relay-team, at the big Poker Table of Life, though, aren’t you? If a flop comes that’s no good to Cody’s hole-cards janis or Tiffany or somebody will be holding two different cards, ones that’ll make a flush or a full boat or something. And so the girl with the playable cards steps in.”

“It still calls for some hard bluffing sometimes. But so far they haven’t dealt us a flop one of us couldn’t play.”

Cochran tilted up his beer to get the last swallow, and sleepily wondered whether to bother opening another. And he thought again about Janis’s remark: Wont it bother you, seeing the place where you lived with your wife?

“Must be convenient, though,” he said now, “nevertheless. ‘Somebody yelling at me? I got a headache? I’ll split, and be back when it’s been taken care of.’”

Plumtree’s vodka bottle was on the seat between them, and he impulsively picked it up and unscrewed the cap. “I—I had to go identify my wife’s run-over pregnant body,” he said, suddenly speaking loudly, “in the morgue. She was pregnant. We bought stuff for the kid-to-be—the stuff’s in that house now, that I’m gonna be breaking a window to get into in a few hours—a crib, goddammit, teddy-bear wallpaper. And Nina and I had adjoining plots, in a cemetery there, we picked out a spot we liked and paid for it—but I had to have her cremated and take her ashes to France, so I’ll be buried there alone.” He gulped a mouthful of the warm, scorching liquor and burningly exhaled through his nose. “I haven’t had the option of going away during any of this. I’ve got to pay for what I take, sometimes as much as all I’ve got. I’ve got to, like most people, I’ve got to take the wounds and then just keep playing, wounded, shoving all my chips out with one hand while I—hold my burst guts in with the other.” The fumes in his nose were making his eyes water. “My hole cards are two dead people, and the, the flop I’m facing is—is those three merciless ladies in Greek mythology who measure out life and fucking cut it off.”

“Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropine,” said Plumtree blandly, watching the road. “Let’s play a game—I’ll name a paper product, and you guess what it is.”

Cochran’s heart was hammering, and his mouth was dry and hot in spite of the vodka, but he didn’t go on shouting. “What?” he said, his voice cracking. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Why don’t you take a nap, then, champ? It might sober you up, and I’ll be ready to be spelled off, come dawn.” She glanced at him and smiled. “Little man, you’ve had a busy day.”

“…Maybe I will.” His anger had evaporated as quickly as it had come, leaving him deflated. Slowly he screwed the cap back on the bottle. “You want some of this?”

“I’m fine for now. Leave it on the seat there, in case of emergencies.”

Cochran stretched his feet out and leaned his head against the cool, damp window glass. “You did that trick just now, didn’t you?” he said emptily, closing his eyes. “What I said made you mad, and you threw the anger over onto me. I—I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings.” Though as I recall, he thought, everything I said was true.

“Go to sleep. You can say anything you want, and yeah; if it pisses me off I’ll just throw it back at you. ‘I’m rubber, you’re glue, whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you.’ All I care about is looking out for Number One.” She laughed softly. “I’m just trying to figure out who that is.”

Cochran’s last thought before he went to sleep or passed out was that her remarks about his interval with Tiffany must not, after all, have represented real anger.

“MAD AS a March herring,” observed Kootie, agreeing with Mavranos’s assessment of Janis Cordelia Plumtree. They were sitting in the front seat of Mavranos’s truck, barrelling along at a steady seventy miles per hour north on the 101 out past Oxnard, with the surf a rippling line far away in the darkness on their left. Mavranos’s view of the right lane was partly blocked by a new Buddha-like stone statue on the dashboard, but he was getting used to that.

“That would be the technical term, yes,” said Angelica Sullivan from the back seat, where she was loading a stack of extended-round .45 ACP magazines—pressing each Eldorado Starfire hollow-point bullet down against the spring pressure with the forefinger of her left hand while she tucked the next into the cleared top of the magazine with the fingers of her right.

Mavranos could see her working in the rear-view mirror. She must have loaded a dozen of those illegal twelve-round magazines by now, he thought. Even with her .45 Marlin carbine, handily built to take the same size magazine, that’s a whole lot of back-up ammo.

She looked up, and in the mirror he could see a glint of highway light reflect from her eye. “You think I’m over-preparing?” she asked.

Mavranos shrugged. “Better than under.”

Pete Sullivan lifted three of the loaded magazines and tucked them into the canvas knapsack at his side. “And these bullets have each got a drop of a rust-based omiero soup in the tip,” he said, “—my pacifist Houdini hands have been capable of that much work, at least—so these’ll stop a ghost as readily as a live human.”

“Good thing,” said Mavranos, watching the traffic ahead and wondering what sort of vehicle Plumtree and Cochran might be driving in. “For the Plumtree woman you’d want both functions. I know, Angelica, you already said her murderer father’s actually not a ghost—but I swear there’s a ghost in that blond head too.” He glanced at the dashboard. “We’re gonna need gas again, next chance—maybe switch in one of the fresh batteries too.”

“We should have taken one of the Solville cars,” said Pete Sullivan; saying it in fact for about the sixth time since they’d buried Spider Joe in the parking lot behind the Solville buildings.

“We need this truck,” said Kootie.

“Why exactly?” asked Pete.

“It’s—” Kootie sighed, and Mavranos caught the boy’s brief, frail grin out of the corner of his eye. “Because when I sensed it coming north to us, Sunday before last, I sensed it as a cup, a chalice. And when Arky takes it to town, it always comes back full of as much food as we’re needing—all this last week and a half, there’s been enough tortillas and bananas and fishes and ground beef and cheese and beer and all, when we unload it, for all the people who’ve been coming over, even though we don’t know in advance how many there’ll be.”

“And it turns red during Holy Week, or any local equivalents,” said Mavranos. “And,” he added ruefully, “so many ghosts are drawn to it and sucked into the air cleaner and burned up in the carburetor that their cast-off charges screw up the electrical system.”

“And it’s used to serve the king,” said Kootie quietly, as if that settled it.

RIGHT NOW, thought Mavranos as he glanced in the rearview mirror at the draped tarpaulin in the back, it’s being used to carry the king.

Mavranos remembered another time Scott Crane had lain stretched out in the back of the truck while Mavranos drove. It had been very nearly a year ago, on January 19th of last year.

Scott had been wearing sweatpants for that painful mid-morning trip up the 405 to Northridge, with not even a bit of twine for a belt, but still his legs had been as weak and racked with cramps as if he’d been wearing a Mobius-twisted belt during a solar eclipse; and he had been as sick—vomiting blood, seeing double, hearing voices—as if he had eaten a rare steak cooked in an iron pan on a Friday in Lent.

He had been that way for two days—ever since 4:31 in the pre-dawn morning of January 17th, when the Northridge earthquake had struck Los Angeles with a force of 6.4 on the Richter scale and 6.7 on the more modern moment-magnitude scale. It had been one of the newly recognized “blind thrust faults,” punching the land upward from a previously unsuspected subterranean fault line.

Mavranos had even noticed several white strands in the coppery bushiness of Scott’s beard.

Scott had been too weak to talk loudly enough for Mavranos to hear him up in the front seat of the rackety truck, and the intercom set they had brought along for the purpose was drowned in the static-fields of thousands of ghosts awakened to idiot panic by the quake, and so they had stopped at a Carl’s Junior hamburger place on the way and put together a string-and-paper-cup “telephone.”

Mavranos had specially “stealth-equipped” the truck for the trip, with sea-water in the windshield-washer reservoir and clumps of anonymous hair from a barbershop floor taped onto the radio antenna supplementing the usual tangle of ultrasonic deer-repnelling whistles pined in conflicted patterns on the roof and hood, and he was sure they couldn’t be traced while they were in the moving vehicle; but he was uneasy about Scott’s determination to struggle out of the truck and walk around among the fractured and concussed buildings.

“It’s the date, Pogo,” Mavranos had finally said, turning his head to speak into the paper cup while keeping the string taut, “that makes me nervous about this. It seems like a…almost a warning.” Mavranos had routinely addressed Scott by the name of the possum character in the Walt Kelly comic strip.

“Today is the 19th,” had come Scott’s faint, buzzing answer through the cup.

“Sure it is,” Mavranos had replied impatiently, “but the earthquake was on the 17th. St. Sulpice and all that.”

Scott hadn’t answered right away, but even through the unvibrating string Mavranos had been able to feel the ill king’s irritation. Mavranos still believed that his point had been relevant, though.

A Vietnamese woman who lived at the Leucadia estate had been given the job of tracing historical events having to do with the secret history of the Fisher Kings and their rivals, and she had discovered a peculiar reactionary vegetation-king cult that had appeared in Paris in 1885, four years after a special congress in Bordeaux had, reluctantly but officially, advised grafting all French grapevines onto imported American rootstocks, which were resistant to the phylloxera louse that looked likely otherwise to obliterate all the vineyards of Europe. The dissenting cult had centered around the seminary and cathedral of St. Sulpice in the St. Germaine district of Paris, and had included among its members the writers Maurice Maeterlinck and Stephane Mallarme, the composer Claude Debussy, and eventually the writer and film-maker Jean Cocteau—but it appeared to have been started by a village priest from a parish in the rural.Languedoc Valley south of Carcassonne. The priest, Berenger Sauniere, had in 1885 uncovered some documents hidden in the foundation stones of his church, which stood on the site of an ancient Visigoth winery dating back at least to the sixth century, and of a Roman mysteries-temple before that; Sauniere’s discoveries had led somehow to his getting substantial payments from the French government and a Hapsburg archduke; and Sauniere had suffered a stroke on January 17th of 1917, and died five days later, after an attending priest had found it impossible to give the dying man the sacraments of confession and Extreme Unction. January 17th was the feast day of St. Sulpice.

The Vietnamese woman, a one-time cabdriver and casino night manager called Bernardette Dinh, had flagged this particular cult because it had shown signs of continuing well into the twentieth century in several splintered branches. In the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris she had traced a network of obscure items published from the late 1950s through the 1970s—pamphlets, and issues of a rare magazine called Circuit, and a privately printed booklet called Le Serpent Rouge, which had been published on January 17th of 1967 and whose three authors were found hanged at separate locations less than two months later. All of these publications mentioned the cathedral of St. Sulpice and contained cryptical essays on the science of multi-generational, almost genealogical, viticulture and vine-grafting. Some researchers had evidently considered that Le Serpent Rouge dealt with a long-preserved bloodline, but Dinh had speculated that it referred to a secretly cultivated varietal, snaking its way in concealment down through the centuries, of red wine.

One branch of the cult survived in the village of Queyrac in the Bas Medoc, and another had taken the name of a fifteenth-century Dionysiac cult called L’Ordre du Levrier Blanc and appeared to have relocated to the American west. In all the branches—and in fact in many other cultures, from the Estonians on the Baltic Sea who sacrificed sheep and oxen on that date, to the Egyptian Copts who observed the day as the anniversary of the death of the tormented visionary St. Anthony—January 17 was a date to be both celebrated and, feared.

“At least,” Scott had said finally, his voice humming in the paper cup linked to where he had lain in the back of the truck on that day, “if I have a stroke, I won’t have any trouble remembering some sins to tell the priest.”

“I can help you out there,” Mavranos had agreed; and the tense moment had passed, but they had still been driving north toward the wounded city.

Traffic on the 405 had slowed to a stop near the intersection with the Ventura Freeway, northwest of Los Angeles, and Mavranos had got off onto the crowded surface streets; plywood covered many shop windows along these sunlit blocks, and hasty curtains of chain-link fencing had been hung across the breezeways of several of the apartment buildings they passed, and finally on a side street off Reseda and Roscoe he had simply let the truck engine’s idle-speed drift them to a parking space at the curb, where he stepped on the brake and, almost as an afterthought, switched off the ignition.

His attention sprang out to the surroundings when the clatter of the engine subsided into silence, and he heard Crane hiking himself up to look out too.

The opposite curb was crowded with empty cars parked bumper-to-bumper, glittering in the bright midwinter sunlight; and the roof of every one of the cars was crushed in, the windshields twisted and white with crazed cracking, the side windows just gone. Beyond the block-long line of Bronco and Jetta and Eldorado hulks, across a lot somehow already brown with dead grass, stood the ruptured apartment complex from whose collapsed carports these cars had been extricated—the outer walls had sheared away, exposing interior rooms and doors, and when Mavranos cranked down the driver’s-side window he could smell the faint strawberry tang of garbage on the breeze.

Mavranos had got out and swung open the back of the truck to help Scott down, uneasily noting the fresh blood blotting Scott’s shirt from the unhealing wound in his side, and though Mavranos had been afraid that they’d be arrested as looters, Scott had insisted on hobbling across the empty street and inspecting the damage.

They had climbed in among the apartments picking their way over the drywall and joist beams and aluminum window frames that had fallen across beds and couches, and shuffled carefully across springy, uneven floors, and stared at the body counts spray-painted by rescue workers on the pictureless walls.

When they had clambered outside again, Scott had sat down on the metal box of a fallen air-conditioning unit. Harsh, shouting rap music echoed from some open window on the other side of the street. “My lands are in disorder,” Crane said. “Broken.”

“From underneath,” said Mavranos stolidly. He had agreed with Dinh that the resurgent phylloxera plague in the north California wine country was a bad sign for Scott’s reign, a message of discontent “from six feet under.”

Scott squinted toward the far side of the empty street. “Sitting on a, an air-conditioning unit, weeping again the king my father’s wreck, this music gibbered by me upon the pavement.” He laid his bare wrist on a torn edge of metal. “So what am not doing? Just five weeks ago the old Flamingo building in Las Vegas was torn down—that was my father’s castle, when he was king, before I killed him—wasn’t that a victory? Las Vegas is turning into a family place, a kid’s place. And Diana and I have had four children, and we…get three crops a year at the Leucadia place ….”

“Why don’t you ever prune back the grapevines, in the winter?”

“They don’t need it. …” He looked up at Mavranos and gave him a wasted grin through his disordered beard. “Well, they don’t, you know. But okay, that’s not the reason. I did prune ’em back, in that first winter after Las Vegas, but later I—I dreamed about it. In the dreams, the branches bled where they were cut; and I dreamed about Ozzie, turned to dust at the touch of Death and blowing away across the desert.”

Mavranos just nodded, and wished he’d brought along one of the beers from the truck Scott and Diana weren’t related, but they had both been informally adopted by the same man, an old-time poker player named Oliver Crane but known in the poker world as Ozzie Smith. He had disappeared in the desert outside Las Vegas during the tumultuous Holy Week of 1990, and Scott had always maintained that the old man had died in saving Scott from a murderous embodiment of Dionysus and Death that had taken the physical form of Scott’s dead wife Susan.

“Maybe you’re s’posed to dream about Death, Pogo,” Mavranos said. “It’s one of the Major Arcana in the tarot deck, and I get the idea that in your dreams you practically go bar-hopping with the rest of that crowd.”

“I humanize them,” Scott said. “A perfect Fisher King wouldn’t just have a wounded side, he’d have no left arm or leg or eye, like the santeria orisha called Osain—his other half was the land itself. I take the archetypes into myself, and they stop being just savage outside influences like rain or fire, and start to be allies—family, blood relations—a little.”

“Poor old Death sounds like the bad witch in Sleeping Beauty,” said Mavranos. “Pissed off because she was the only one not invited to the christening.”

“You haven’t …been there, Arky. Death isn’t a…it doesn’t embody a characteristic that shows up in humans, the way the others do, so you can’t relate to it at all. There’s no common ground. It has no face—and I can’t just arbitrarily assign the face of, say, poor Susan to it, ‘cause that was just my own personal closest death mirrored back at me; anybody else there would have seen some face from their past.” He coughed weakly and shook his head. “In the court of the tarot archectypes, Death’s just a blobby black hole in the floor.”

Mavranos had taken a deep breath then—and he wondered if he could bring himself to say what he thought he had to say here, for Scott Crane was his closest friend, and Mavranos was godfather of Scott and Diana’s first child—but he made himself say it: “Seems to me there is … one face you could put on Death.”

Crane sat there on the air conditioner and stared at the dead grass and didn’t speak, and Mavranos wondered if he had heard him. Then Crane shifted, and coughed again. “You mean the fat man in the desert,” he said softly. “My father’s bodyguard, my father’s emotionless hired assassin. And I killed him, in cold blood—the first shot was in self-defense, to save you as much as me, but he was still alive after that. The last five shots, when he was lying in the gully below the road, were to make sure he didn’t wind up recovering in a hospital.”

Mavranos nodded, though Crane couldn’t see the gesture. The fat man had at some time become a localized embodiment of one of the oldest, possibly pre-human archetypes, a cold figure of almost Newtonian retribution which showed up spontaneously in desert swap-meet legendry and country-western songs and insane-asylum artwork and even, as a repeating obese silhouette, in certain iterative mathematical equations on the complex number plane. Diana’s mother had been an avatar of the Moon Goddess, and the fat man had killed her outside the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas—“shot the moon in the face”—when Diana had been an infant, in 1960. Mavranos had not been sorry when Crane had killed the fat man, but that homicide was surely Crane’s letter of introduction, his indenture, to the kingdom of death.

“No,” said Crane finally. “It can’t be done. It doesn’t need to be done.”

Mavranos had thought of reminding him of the phylloxera, had considered mentioning the many species of tropical fish that had recently stopped being born with any distinct sexes, and the rapid decline in the sperm count of modern male humans—even the slow, progressive collapse of Hollywood Boulevard down into the catacombs being dug for the MTA Metro Rail—but at that point an unkempt middle-aged couple and their two blank-eyed children had come shuffling up through the brown grass to where the bearded king sat, and had hesitantly asked Scott if everything was going to be okay. They were living in their car, they told him, and had hung curtains in the windows, and were wondering if they shouldn’t simply keep living in those cozy quarters forever, even after the houses had been put back up again.

Scott had wearily told them that he would do what he could; and they had showed no surprise, only sympathetic gratitude, when Scott had pushed his own wrist down onto the jagged piece of metal and then held out his hand so that his blood dripped rapidly onto the dry dirt.

Mavranos had muttered a panicky curse and sprinted to the nearby truck for the first-aid kit. And he had noted bleakly, after he had tied a bandage around Scott’s wrist and helped him up for the walk back to the truck, that no flowers had sprung up from where the king’s blood had fallen.

“IT’S WHAT Nardie Dinh calls the Law of Imperative Resemblance,” said Mavranos to Angelica and Pete now.

Fog was beginning to roll in off the ocean, and Mavranos knew that it would be getting worse as the night wore on toward dawn and their route led them inland at Gaviota; maybe he’d get Pete to drive for a while. “There are eternal potent forms out there,” Mavranos went on, “idiosyncratic outlines, and if you take on enough characteristics of one of the forms, if you come to resemble it closely enough, knowingly or not, you find that you’re wearing the whole damned outfit—you’ve become the thing. It arrives upon you.”

“Like critical mass,” said Kootie sleepily, rocking on the passenger seat.

“Well, hijo mio,” said Angelica sternly to the boy as she went on loading her .45 magazines, you’re not going to be taking communion at this Mass.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The bay trees in our country are all withered,

And meteors fright the fixed stars of heaven,

The pale-faced moon looks bloody on the earth,

And lean-looked prophets whisper fearful change;

Rich men look sad, and ruffians dance and leap,

The one in fear to lose what they enjoy,

The other to enjoy by rage and war.

These signs forerun the death or fall of kings.

—William Shakespeare,

Richard II

BERNARDETTE Dinh, known as Nardie to her few close friends, was perched crouched on a dead peach-tree limb, staring down the flagstone steps that led away between rows of dead grapevines to the beach and the dawn-gray sea. Five years ago she had got into the habit of climbing a tree when she was very scared or disoriented, and during these last eleven days she must have spent nearly a full day’s worth of hours up in the branches of this or that dead carob or apple or avocado tree in different corners of the Fisher King’s Leucadia estate, in the periods when she could get Wendy to keep an eye on the kids.

Twenty years ago, when Nardie had arrived at Clark Air Base in Manila on the rainy morning of April 29 in 1975, airport personnel and travellers alike had exclaimed over her and the other passengers that got off the plane with her: Oh, thank God you’re safe! She had then learned that the Saigon airport had been heavily shelled at 5 A.M., just four hours after her plane had taken off; but rockets had been shelling Saigon for two months before her American father had got her a ticket, and for the whole ten years of her life to that point, as she recalled it now, there had always been the background noise of planes and bombings. Her luggage had been mailed ahead, but never did show up anywhere—when she finally arrived at Camp Pendleton in Southern California, all she had had was the clothes she’d been wearing and the cellophane-thin sheets of gold leaf her father had managed to stuff into her pockets.

California had been bewildering, even with the help of other immigrant Vietnamese; Here the poor eat beef every day, she had been told, and the rich people are all vegetarians. And when her new American half-brother had taken her to a modern shopping center in Costa Mesa, the thing that had most struck her had been the pennies and nickels and even quarters scattered in the pool around an indoor fountain; she had struggled with the two ideas of it: that people had tossed the coins in there, and that other people didn’t climb in to get them out.

Nardie was thirty now—but since the first of this month, when Scott’s dead body had been found in the canted meadow down here between the house and the beach, she had been dreaming of those days again. But the fountains in her dreams were dry and bare, and the rockets came plummeting out of the night sky before the airliner she was in could take off.

The last time Nardie had seen Scott Crane alive, he had been trudging away barefoot down these flagstone steps to rescue his four-year-old son, Benjamin; Scott had got some kind of formal threatening challenge over the telephone only ten minutes earlier, and when he had hastily awakened and summoned to the atrium everybody that lived here at the compound—Arky and Wendy and their two teenage daughters, and Diana’s two teenage sons by her first marriage, and Nardie herself, and Diana and the four young children she and Scott had had together—Benjamin had proved to be missing, and the three-year-old girl had said that a black crow had flapped down onto Benjamin’s bedroom windowsill and told the boy that a magical woman in the meadow needed to see him right away.

It was a woman, on the phone just now, Scott had told Nardie and Arky and Diana in the kitchen as he’d pulled off his shoes and tugged his still-dark-brown hair out of the rubber-banded ponytail and let it fall loose onto his shoulders; she claimed to have spoken to the ghost of my first wife, Susan, who was the embodiment of Death in the Las Vegas desert five years ago; and she knows I was called the Flying Nun in the big game on Lake Mead, and she said she was going to “assume the Flamingo, “which must mean that she’s some “jack,” some rival, from the game five years ago, when the Flamingo Hotel was still the kings bunker-castle. I told her that it had been torn down, but I guess she’s got a piece of the physical building—and that would be a potent…charm, talisman. She must have a lot of other things, too, protections and masks and even maybe a tethered ghost or two, to have got in here past our wards without showing up as a consistent, solid intruder. And we have to assume that she’s got Benjamin now. I’ve got to go meet her alone, or it’s too likely that she’ll kill him.

Arky Mavranos had tried to insist that it was his own clear duty to go and rescue the child—I’m Benjamin’s godfather, Scott, he had said forcefully, and I’m not wounded.

Scott Crane had refused to let Arky go, and had then had to flatly forbid the man’s offers of “armed back-up support, at least.”

And so Scott had gone padding down that set of steps alone, to the tilted meadow below the house…and a few minutes later Benjamin had come running back, sobbing about a woman who had knocked him down and held a spear to his throat and who had changed into a man. Daddy stayed to talk to the man, the boy had said. It’s a very bad man.

At that moment the pans had begun rattling in the cupboards, and the overhead light had begun swinging on its chain.

Arky Mavranos and Diana had simply bolted outside then, and skipped and hopped down the shaking steps after Scott…and by the time they had got to the slanting meadow, the earthquake had stopped, leaving only smokelike clouds of raised dust hanging over the cliffs to mark its passage, and they had found Scott’s supine body on the grass, speared through the throat.

They had half-carried and half-dragged the body back across the meadow to the steps before going to get Nardie to help carry, and apparently blood had fallen copiously from Scott’s torn throat, like holy water shaken from a Catholic priest’s aspergillum—

—And, from every point where the blood drops had hit the grass, a spreading network of flowers and vines had violently erupted up out of the soil in a ripping spray of fragmenting dirt clods, as if in some kind of horticultural aftershocks—so that Arky and Diana had in effect been shuffling along at the advancing, untrusting edge of a dense thicket of vibrant grape and ivy and pomegranate. An hour later Nardie had seen a couple of uniformed police officers escorting a blond woman around the edge of the newly overgrown meadow, but they had gone away again without even ringing the bell at the outer gate.

Mavranos had lifted Crane’s body into the back of the—tragically, prematurely!—red truck, in preparation for driving away with Diana to search in the north for another man who would have an unhealing wound in his side: the man whom they would acknowledge and bless as the next Fisher King.

Nardie had given Mavranos a baseball-sized white stone statue of Tan Tai, the Vietnamese god of prosperity, to put on the truck’s dashboard; and only after the truck had gone creaking and rattling away down Neptune Avenue did she recall that her half-brother had given her one very like it, back in the brightly familial days before he had tried to break her spirit and mind to further his own bitter Fisher Kinghood ambitions. Arky Mavranos had had to kill her half-brother eventually, at Hoover Dam during the terrible Holy Week in 1990—Nardie hoped now that her gift had not been an unwitting expression of some lingering subconscious resentment. She had never…blamed poor, staunch Arky for the death of her only blood sibling.

All the magical new plants had wilted and withered during the following week, along with all the other plantings on the whole sprawling estate; and now the grounds were drifted with, dry leaves—among which, if she looked closely, she could discern husks of perished bees and the stiffened, lifeless forms of the million earthworms that had come corkscrewing up out of the ground on that morning—and Nardie could only hope that a new good king would somehow be appointed before the Tet celebration at the end of the month.

Crane had kept a rose garden near the house, and when all the red petals had fallen to the brick pavement last week, they had looked to Nardie like the exploded scraps of firecracker paper that used to litter the Saigon pavements on Tet Nguyen Dan, the festival of the first day of the Vietnamese New Year. She had put a photograph of Scott Crane on her Tet altar, and now she whispered a prayer to the Kitchen God, a humble entreaty for, somehow, prosperity and health for her friends during this disastrous new year.

ALL SHE could see ahead of her, in the notch between the brown grapevines, was a triangle of the distant gray sea…but now she heard the scuffle of someone, possibly several people, climbing the cement stairs that led up the sloping cliff from the beach sand to the slanting meadow. Nardie watched the flagstone steps, but the visitors were probably just more of the white-clay dancers, come to solemnly jump rope with trimmed lengths of kelp for a while in the blighted meadow below the steps—though generally the unspeaking white figures kept that softly drumming vigil at the end of the day, when the red sun was disappearing below the remote western horizon.

At her back she could often hear the cars of the crazy local teenagers racing up the street, and she heard at least one screeching past now, and heard too the pop-pop-pop of automatic weapons fire. In this last week and a half she had sensed a kind of vigilant protection in their constant racket, but an impatience too. Absently, Nardie touched the angular weight in her sweater pocket that was her ten-ounce Beretta .25 automatic.

The dry leaves on the peach-tree branches rattled in the chilly wind from the sea, and Nardie caught the familiar wild strains of the music from the beach. Arky had telephoned the Leucadia estate several times from pay phones, and he had laughed once—dryly—when she had described the music to him, and he had told her the name of the constantly repeated song: “Candles in the Wind,” by somebody called Melanie. Apparently the disattached people near where the killed king was were spontaneously playing the same song as were the disattached people near the king’s broken castle.

Definitely there was more than one person in the meadow—Nardie could hear excited voices.

The white-clay dancers had never spoken.

Silently Nardie swung down from the branch, and her tennis shoes crackled only faintly in the dry grass as she landed and then stole to the top of the steps and looked down.

At the edge of the new wilderness of dead vines in the meadow, by the top of the stairs that led down to the beach, four figures stood silhouetted against the vast gray sea. Three stood together with their arms around each other, though the effect was more as if they were handcuffed that way than comradely; the fourth figure, standing apart, was an old man who had only one arm.

The middle figure of the trio, whose styled hair was white, reached out toward a dead pomegranate bush—and when his two dark-haired companions twisted their heads up toward her and clumsily grabbed their crotches in perfect unison Nardie shivered and bared her teeth, for she understood abruptly that only the middle figure was a real person, and that the outer two were some kind of mobile mannikins.

As if following the gaze of the two artificial heads, the one-armed old man looked up the slope at Nardie.

“Heads up, Doc, all three,” the old man said, loudly enough for Nardie to hear. “The homegrown Persephone yonder don’t want you triflin’ with her seed pods.”

Nardie realized that she had drawn her tiny gun, so she lifted it and pointed it down the steps toward the two living men and the two dummies, though she kept her finger outside the trigger guard.

The one-armed man turned his shoulder stump to her, as if hiding behind the upraised, missing arm; and the trio shifted position, so that one of the dark-haired mannikins was blocking her view of the white-haired man in the middle—who now shakily reached out and plucked the dried gourd of a dead pomegranate from the bush.

Then, in a crackling of trodden dry leaves, all four of the figures in the meadow were lurching away back toward the stairs that led down to the beach, the two mannikins waving their free arms in perfect synchronization, like, Nardie thought giddily, a couple of Gladys Knight’s Pips.

Her teeth stung as she sucked in the cold sea air. Should I shoot at him? she wondered. What, she thought then, for stealing a pomegranate? A dead one? And at this range with this stubby barrel, I’d be doing well to put the bullet in the meadow at all, never mind hitting a head-size target. And she remembered Arky’s assessment of her weapon: A .25’s a good thing to have in a fight, if you can’t get hold of a gun.

The four figures tottered away down the beach stairs, the mannikin arms waving in spastic unison over the two fake heads.

Nardie straightened up when they had descended out of her sight, and she smiled derisively at herself when she noticed that she was standing hunched, and looking around for cover between nervous glances at the sky. The rockets fell a week and a half ago, she told herself; and you’re living in the dry, coinless fountain.

She pocketed her little gun and turned to trudge back uphill toward the house. She’d have to tell Arky about these intruders, whenever he next called from wherever he was.

She really did hope Arky was safe.

Tan Tai be with you, she thought blankly.

THE DOZEN white dancers who appeared to be made out of clay had been high-stepping around in a solemn ring on the flat sand a hundred yards to the south when Dr. Armentrout and Long John Beach had originally walked up the beach to the Crane estate’s stairs, but now they were skipping and hand-clapping back this way. The dawn wind was cold, but Armentrout felt a drop of sweat roll down his ribs under his shirt as he scuffed down from the last cement step onto the sand.

“Keep walking,” Armentrout whispered to Long John Beach as he began plodding away north under the weight of the two-mannikin appliance, “back to the stairway that’ll take us up to the Neptune Avenue parking lot, and don’t look back at those…those white people.”

The one-armed old man immediately turned to gape at the figures following, and his eyes and mouth were so wide that Armentrout turned around to look himself, fearing that the dancers might be silently running at them, perhaps armed with some of the smooth black stones that studded the marbled black-and-gray sand.

But the white figures, though closer, were just walking purposefully after Armentrout and Long John Beach now, and staring at them with eyes that seemed yellow and bloodshot against the crusted white faces. The clay plastered onto their swimsuit-clad bodies made them seem to be naked sexless creatures animated out of the wet cliffs.

Armentrout let go of the lever that controlled the mannikins’ heads, in order to reach into his jacket pocket and grip the butt of the .45 derringer. The Styrofoam heads now nodded and rolled loosely with every jouncing step toward the cement pilings of the wooden municipal stairway that led up to the parking lot, and to the car, and away from this desolate shoreline.

But Long John Beach stopped and pointed back at the advancing mud-people.

“No outrageous thing,” he cried, his voice flat and unechoing in the open air, “from vassal actors can be wiped away; then kings’ misdeeds cannot be hid in clay.”

For a moment Armentrout considered just leaving the crazy old man standing here, as a cast-off distraction to occupy the dancers while he himself trotted away to the car; but he knew now that he needed to find Koot Hoomie Parganas, and he would need every scrap of mask for that.

So Armentrout stopped too, and he turned to face the advancing animated statues; and with deliberate slowness he tugged the fist-sized gun free and let them see it. He gripped the ball-butt tightly, for he remembered that the little derringer tended to rotate in his hand when he pulled the hammer back against the tight spring, and now he cocked it with a crisp, ratcheting click.

“What business,” Armentrout said, “exactly, do you have with us?”

One of the figures, breastless and so probably a young man, stepped forward. “You took something,” came a high voice, “from up the stairs.”

“I did? What did I take?”

The figure’s blue eyes blinked. “You tell me.”

“Answer my question first. I asked you what exactly your business is here.”

The stony figures shuffled uneasily on the wet black-veined sand, and Armentrout suppressed a smile; for these were young people whose random propensities for music and dancing and the beach had happened to constitute a compelling resemblance to an older, mythic role in this season of insistent definition—but they were just San Diego County teenagers of the 1990s, and when they were challenged to explain their presence here, the archaic hum of the inarticulate purpose was lost beneath the grammar of reason.

“No law against dancing,” the figure said defensively.

“There is a law about concealed weapons,” another piped up.

The modern phrases had dispelled the mythic cast—they were now thoroughly just modern kids on a beach, with mud all over them.

“Scram,” said Armentrout.

The white figures began to amble away south with exaggerated nonchalance. Armentrout put the gun away and turned toward the stairs. A blue sign on the railing said,

WARNING

Stay Safe Distance

Away From Bluff Bottom

FREQUENT BLUFF FAILURE

Not today, Armentrout thought with satisfaction as he shooed Long John Beach ahead of him up the stairs.

IN THE parking lot between landscaped modern apartment buildings, Armentrout unstrapped the two-mannikin appliance and stowed it in the back seat of his teal-blue BMW.

Then he opened the passenger-side door and pushed Long John Beach inside. “Belt up,” he said breathlessly to the old man.

“The purest treasure mortal times afford,’” the one-armed old man wailed, the strange and eerily flat voice echoing now between the white stucco walls, “‘is spotless reputation; that away, men are but gilded loam or painted clay.”‘

“I said belt up,” hissed Armentrout between clenched teeth as he hurried around to the driver’s side and got in. “Anyway,” he added in shrill embarrassment as he started the engine, “there’s no hope anymore for our reputations in this town.”

As he drove back down Neptune Avenue, in the southbound lane this time, Armentrout could see a plywood sign attached to a pine tree beside the gates of the field-stone wall on his right. Black plastic letters had been attached to it once, but weather or something had caused most of them to fall away; what remained was accidental Latin:

ET IN

ARC

ADIA

EGO

Et in Arcadia ego.

And I am in Arcadia, he thought, tentatively translating the words; or, I am in Arcadia, too; or, Even in Arcadia, I am.

Armentrout reflected uneasily that the word Arcadia—with its resonances of pastoral Greek poetry and balmy, quiet gardens—probably had applied to this place, before Our Miss Figleaf had come here and killed the king; but who was the Ego that was speaking?

EVEN WHEN he had got back on the 5 Freeway, heading north through the misty morning-lit hills below the Santa Ana Mountains, Armentrout found himself still noticing and being bothered by signs on the shoulder. The frequent GAS-FOOD-LODGING l MI AHEAD signs had stark icons stenciled on them for the benefit of people who couldn’t read, and though the stylized images of a gas pump and a knife-and-plate-and-fork were plain enough, the dot-dash figure of a person on a long-H bed looked to him this morning disturbingly like a dead body laid out in state; and while he was still south of Oceanside he saw several postings of a sign warning illegal Mexican immigrants against trying to sprint across the freeway to bypass the border checkpoint—the diamond-shaped yellow sign showed a silhouetted man and woman and girl-child running hand-in-hand so full-tilt fast that the little girl’s feet were off the ground, and under the figures was the word PROHIBIDO. Armentrout thought it seemed to be a prohibition of all fugitive families.

And when he became aware that his heartbeat was accelerated, he recognized that he was responding with defiance, as if the signs were reproaches aimed at him personally. I didn’t kill any king, he thought; I haven’t uprooted any families. I’m a doctor, I—

Abruptly he remembered the voice of the obese suicide-girl as he had heard it over the telephone a few hours ago: Doctor? I walk all crooked now—where’s the rest of me?

But I certainly didn’t mean that to happen, he thought, her killing herself. I don’t give anyone a treatment I haven’t undergone and benefited from myself; and from my own experience I know that cutting the problem right out of the soul, rather than laboring to assimilate it, really does effect a cure. And even when these misfortunes do result—goddammit—aren’t I allowed some sustenance? I genuinely do a lot of good for people—is it wrong for me to sometimes take something besides money for my payment? Does this make me a, a sicko? He smiled confidently—Not…at…all. The whole notion of intrinsic consequences of “sin” is just infantile solipsism, anyway: imagining that in some sense you are everybody and everybody’s you. Guilt and shame are just the unproductive, negative opposites of self-esteem, and I feel healthily good about everything I do. That’s okay today.

Then he thought of what it was he now planned for his patient Janis Cordelia Plumtree, whenever he might catch up with her, and for Koot Hoomie Parganas, if the boy was still alive—and he heard again the flat howl that had burst from Long John Beach’s throat: gilded loam or painted clay.

It occurred to him, with unwelcome clarity, that the idealistic dancers on the beach had carried the rainbow of living flesh on the inside, and dry, cracked clay on the outside.

His cellular telephone buzzed, and he fumbled it up from between the seats and flipped open the cover. “Yes?” he said furiously after he had switched it on.

“Get your toes aft of the white line, please,” drawled a man’s humorous voice, “and sit your ass down in one of the seats! I’m in control of this bus, and you’re upsetting the children!”

In his first seconds of confusion Armentrout knew he recognized the voice, but he seemed to remember it as disembodied—a ghost?—and this was clearly not a ghost call. The voice and the background breeze-hiss were real, unlike the eternal clattering busy-mess of the group-projected ghost-bar.

“You was comin’ on to my daughter, man,” the voice said now; “You can’t blame me for having got a bit testy, now can you?” Before Armentrout could stammer out anything, the voice went on: “This is Omar Salvoy, and I can’t talk for long. Listen, you and I each got a gun pointed at the other, haven’t we? Mexican standoff. I think we can work together, both eat off the same plate. Here’s the thing—you’d like to get Koot Hoomie Parganas locked up in your clinic, wouldn’t you, in a coma and brain-dead, on perpetual life-support? Or haven’t you thought it through that far?”

It made Armentrout dizzy to hear this voice on the phone speaking his recent, somewhat shameful, thought aloud. “Y-yes,” he said, glancing sideways at Long John Beach and then in the rear-view mirror at the two placid Styrofoam heads. “What you describe is…it could, I guess you’ve figured out that it could, benefit you and me both. But not yet—it would have to be after he had been induced to, uh, officially… take the crown, if you know what I mean. I was just at the Fisher King’s castle, this morning, and it’s very evident from the look of things there that no new king has been consecrated yet. But after that’s occurred, I could set things up so that you and I could both benefit. As you know, I’m uniquely able to set up that scenario, just as you describe it.”

“Ipse dipshit. Now the girls have got some cockamamie idea about restoring the dead king, the old one, to life—I gotta monkeywrench that scheme, that guy is really old, he’s hardened in his thought-paths and likely to be resistant, not like the kid would be.”

“All ROM and no RAM,” agreed Armentrout, though he didn’t see how any of this would matter in a brain-dead body.

“Rom? Ram? Gypsies, sheep? Easy on the mystical, there, Doctor, I want you for science. You do know about how the spirit-transfer thing works, knocking a personality out of somebody’s head?”

“Uh.” Armentrout wiped his forehead and blinked sweat out of his eyes to be able to watch the freeway lanes. “Yes.” I wasn’t being mystical, he thought—doesn’t Salvoy know anything about computers? Oh well, give him the science. “The force that, that holds them in, works the opposite of forces like gravity and electromagnetism and the strong nuclear force, which all get weaker as the, the satellite, say, moves further away from the primary; ghost personalities are more strongly restrained, the further they get out, especially in sane people, but feel no clumping-together force at all if they stay within the mind’s confines. It’s much the same situation as is theorized for the quarks that make up subatomic particles—if they stay close together, they experience what’s called asymptotic—”

“Speaking of which, I’m gonna have to pick up my ass and tote it out of here. I’m at a pay phone—we’ve stopped for gas in King City, and her boyfriend has just ducked off to visit the gents’ and pump the gas. You’d better get up here, right now; and then on to San Fran, apparently—this thing will go a lot smoother if we’ve got a real licensed psychiatrist along, for authority-figuring in case any locals should object to anything. Wave the stethoscope, flourish the prescription pad. I’ll make a point of getting out here again and calling you with more specific directions as we proceed, so Lake your telephone with you, you can do that, can’t you?”

“King City? San Francisco? Certainly, I’ve got the phone with me now. Obviously. But the P—the boy—he’s alive, I gather? Is he in San Francisco? We need—”

“He’s alive, and on his way there. Gotta go—stay by the phone.”

The line was dead, and Armentrout clicked the phone off, closed the cover, and wedged it carefully between the seat and the console. He would have to dig out of the trunk the phone-battery recharger that could be plugged into the cigarette lighter.

His lips were twitching in a brittle, almost frightened grin. There’s no reason why this shouldn’t work, he thought. When the king died eleven days ago, his death opened a temporary drain in the psychic floor locally, so that all my vengeful old California ghosts, at least, were sucked away, leaving me with their abandoned memories and strengths intact and harmless. I was fifty miles away, and my ghosts were banished! That drain has since closed up—but imagine if I could be in the same building with a flatline Fisher King! If we can get the new king on perpetual brain-dead life-support, the drain could be held propped open for…for decades. I’ll be able to outright terminate patients, consume their whole lives, without fear of being hassled by their outraged ghost personalities afterward. And Omar Salvoy will be able to—what? I suppose to evict all the girls from Plumtree’s head, so that he’ll have that youthful body all to himself, to live in.

It’ll be the best of both worlds, Armentrout thought, nodding and smiling twitchily. All the forgiveness that Dionysus’s pagadebiti wine offers, but with the profit from | the sin retained intact too!

He glanced again at Long John Beach and the two heads in the backseat. I may be able to outright ditch the three of you in San Francisco, he thought.

“WHO WERE you calling?” asked Cochran, frowning.

They hadn’t found a Mobil station here in King City, and so they were using I some of the Jenkins woman’s cash at this Shell station, and apparently the Torino’s f tank hadn’t had room for a whole twenty’s worth of gas—Cochran was stuffing a couple of ones into the pocket of his corduroy bell-bottoms. He must have bought the cheapest gas.

Plumtree blinked at him around the aluminum cowl of the pay telephone. There was only a dial tone to be heard from the thoroughly warmed earpiece of the receiver she held in her hand. Cochran looked tired and bed-raggled, she noted, in the cold morning sunlight, and she could see strands of white hair among the disordered brown locks tangled over his forehead.

“It was ringing,” she said, in the old reflexive dismissal of a patch of lost time. | “Nobody on when I picked it up.” She reflected that this might be the literal truth; but she wasn’t happy to find herself reverting to the helpless shuck-and-jive evasions, the poker-table calls that were bluffs because she didn’t know what her hole cards were, so she went on spontaneously, “Let’s get breakfast now, there’s a Denny’s a block back—we can just have coffee with the others at the Cliff House place—and maybe a dessert, if they have some kind of sweetrolls there. And listen, if there’s a Sav-On or someplace open in this town, I’d like to buy some fresh underwear—these panties I’ve got on still say Tuesday on ’em—and Tiffany’s been wearing them.”

“…Okay.”

They got back into the beer-reeking warmth of the car and drove around, but didn’t find any open store at all in the whole town, and so eventually she had to go into the ladies’ room in Denny’s, pull off her jeans, and wash the panties in the sink—with hand soap, wringing them halfway dry in a sheaf of paper towels after she’d rinsed them out—and then shiveringly pull them back on.

Now she was eating scrambled eggs and shifting uncomfortably on the vinyl booth seat, bleakly sure that the dampness must be visibly soaking through the seat of her jeans, and remembering reading On Her Majesty’s Secret Service in another restaurant booth eleven days ago. She had had the aluminum spear taped to her thigh during that breakfast, the points of it cutting her skin.

“I can’t ever sit comfortably in restaurants,” she complained. She remembered that v a telephone had started ringing then, too, on that morning, right in the restaurant; it was Janis’s job to answer telephones, and Cody recalled flipping her lit cigarette into the open paperback book, intending to slam the cover firmly closed and extinguish the coal, since there had been no ashtray on the table and Janis didn’t smoke. But Janis had come on more quickly than usual, apparently, and hadn’t known about the lit Marlboro between the pages.

Cody grinned sourly now. Excu-u-se me!

At least my teeth don’t hurt much right now—not any worse than usual, anyway. And I certainly don’t have a nose-bleed! If Flibbertigibbet was on, it wasn’t for very long.

She looked up. Across the table, Cochran was, smiling at her gently, out of his tired, red eyes. “Who were you calling?” he asked again.

Okay—perhaps the gas-station pay phone had not already been ringing when she had picked it up, and Cochran knew it. Okay. “I call time,” she said, “a lot. That’s UL3-1212 everywhere. In England they call it ‘the speaking clock,’ which always makes me picture Grandfather Clock, from the ‘Captain Kangaroo’ TV show, remember? Wake up, Grandfather! Even when I have a watch on. Those liquid-crystal displays, you can’t ever be—”

He was still smiling tiredly at her.

“I—” She exhaled and threw down her fork with a clatter. “Oh, fuck it. I don’t know, Sid. The receiver was warm, we must have been talking to somebody. My teeth are hurting, but we do call time a lot.”

“Not for extended conversations, though, I bet.” He took a sip from his glass of V-8, into which he’d shaken several splashes of Tabasco. “In this hippie commune you grew up in,” he said; “what was it called?”

“The Lever Blank. My mom and I lived at their farm commune outside of Danville for another couple of years after my lather died.”

“Did they let you watch a lot of TV?”

Plumtree stared at him. “This was mandala yin-yang hippies, Sid! Organic vegetables and goat’s milk. Old mobile homes sitting crooked on dirt, with no electric. My father was the only one that even read newspapers.”

“So how did you ever see ‘Captain Kangaroo’? And Halo Shampoo ads? And I’m not sure, but it seems to me that neither one of those was still being aired in ‘71. I’m an easy ten years older than you, and J hardly remember them.”

Plumtree calmly picked up her fork and shovelled a lump of scrambled egg into her mouth. “That’s a, a terrible point you make, Sid,” she remarked after she had swallowed and taken a sip of coffee. “And I don’t seem to be losing time over it, either, do I? This must be my flop. Do you think I’m an alcoholic? Janis thinks so.”

“Of course not,” he said, with a laugh. “No more than I am.”

“Oh, that’s good, that’s reassuring. Jesus! The reason I ask is, I need a drink to assimilate this thought with. Let’s pay up and get out of here.”

“Fine,” Cochran said, a little stiffly.

Oh, sorree, Plumtree thought, restraining herself from rolling her eyes.

As Cochran took their bill to the cashier, Plumtree walked out of the yellow-lit restaurant to the muddy parking lot. The sky bad lightened to an empty blue-gray vault, but she felt as though there were the close-arching ceiling of a bus overhead, and that the battered madman who had hijacked the bus and cowed the driver had now turned and begun to advance on the hostage children, all the brave little girls.

The chilly dawn wind was throwing all sounds away to the south, and she was able to hum “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” until Cochran had come out of the restaurant and shuffled up to within a yard of her, before she had to stop humming for fear he might hear.

NORTH OF King City they were driving up through the wide Salinas Valley, with green fields of broccoli receding out to the far off Coast Range foothills. Long flat layers of fog, ragged at the top, hung over the ruler-straight dirt roads and solitary farmhouses in the middle distance, and Cochran began to notice signs for the Soledad Correctional Institute. Don’t want to be picking up any hitch-hikers around there, he thought. We’ve got enough of them aboard right now. Neither he nor Plumtree had spoken since getting back into the car in the parking lot of the Denny’s in King City, though she had taken a quick, bracing gulp of the vodka after she had started the engine, and, after a moment of resentful hesitation, he had shrugged and opened one of the warm beers. The sky had still been dark enough then for her to turn on the headlights, but she reached out now and punched the knob to turn them off.

“Smart thinking,” he said, venturing to break the long silence. “We’d only forget to turn them off, once the sun’s well up.”

“And it’s cover,” she said, speaking indistinctly through a yawn. “You can tell which cars have been driving all night, because they’ve still got their lights on. Everybody with their lights out is a local.” She yawned again, and it occurred to Cochran that these were from tension as much as weariness. “But we can’t hide—I can’t, anyway—from my father. Those are his memories, those TV things. Captain Kangaroo, that shampoo. He was born in ‘44.” A third yawn was so wide that it squeezed tears from the corner of her eye. “If we’re compartmentalized, in this little head, then he’s leaking into my compartment. I wonder if he’s leaking into the other girls’ seats too.”

Seats? Cochran thought.

“Like in a bus,” she said. “You could step off, you know, Sid. Like the driver in that movie, Speed, who got shot, remember? The bad guy let him get off the bus, because he was wounded. When we stop at your house. I could drop you off at some nearby corner, in fact, so Flibbertigibbet won’t even know where you live.”

After a long pause, while he finished the can of warm beer and reached down to fetch up another, “No,” Cochran said in an almost wondering tone; “no, I reckon I’m…along for the ride.”

Plumtree laughed happily, and began drunkenly singing the kid’s song, “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” After she had finished the trite lyric and started it up again, frowning now and waving at him, his face heated in embarrassment as he gave up and joined in, singing the lyric in the proper kindergarten counterpoint. And until he put out his hand to stop her, the vodka bottle between her knees was rhythmically rattled as she swung the wheel back and forth, swerving the big old car from one side of the brightening highway lane to the other in time to their frail duet.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

… Mood, like sacrificing Abels, cries

Even from the tongueless caverns of the earth

To me for justice and rough chastisement…

—William Shakespeare,

Richard II

AFTER more distant sort of pop-pop-pop sounded from the cliffs above the plain of ruins, and while echoes of the rapid knocks were still batting away between the old broken walls, Plumtree swung her ponderous gaze to Cochran, and she saw his face change from the robust color of damp cement to an ashier gray. It was certainly an external noise, she reasoned. It must have been gunfire. Cody always springs away at sudden dangerous sounds—telephones, gunfire.

Plumtree skipped lightly ahead down the muddy path, almost tap-dancing in instinctive time to the constant hammering noise in her ears, and she beckoned Cochran forward, downhill, toward the ruins and the wide, still lagoons that were separated by eroded walls from the crashing sea beyond. The lush, steel-colored vegetation on either side of the path shook in the ocean breeze.

“Further down?” she heard him say. His voice was shrill and uncertain. “Toward the baths?”

“A seething bath,” Plumtree pronounced, “which yet may prove against strange maladies a sovereign cure.”

“Valorie,” he said as he hurried after her.

The clatter and thump that rang ceaselessly in her head increased its tempo, and she knew that an emotion was being experienced. “She that loves her selves,” she called, “hath not essentially, but by circumstance, the name of Valorie.” The emotion was something like shame, or cowardice—or fear of those.

On an impulse but resolutely, she halted and pulled from the pocket of her jeans the object she had prepared at Cochran’s house, when they had stopped there earlier this morning; and she held it out to him in a hand that shook with the rhythmic cracking in her head. “This form of prayer can serve my turn” she said: “‘Forgive me my foul murder.’”

Still glancing up at the cliffs and the road, Cochran took the folded cardboard from her hand.

AND COCHRAN paused to stare obediently at the green-and-tan 7-Eleven matchbook Plumtree had handed him, but it was just a matchbook. “Thanks, Valorie,” he said “but could I talk to Janis?” Neither Janis nor Cody, he reflected fretfully, had ever mentioned that Valorie was crazy. “Jan-is,” he repeated.

He shifted impatiently from one foot to the other, grateful, in this chilly mist or sea spray, for the jeans and boots and flannel shirt and London Fog windbreaker he had changed into at his house; and he was nervously reassured by the angular bulk of the holstered .357 Magnum clipped onto his belt in the back.

“Scant!” Plumtree exclaimed; and then she stared around at the fog-veiled amphitheater into which they had by now halfway descended. “Wow, I’m glad I don’t have to pretend with you, Scant! Are we still in California, at all?”

“Yes,” he said, taking her arm and hurrying her forward. “San Francisco—that building up on the promontory behind us is the Cliff House Restaurant, Cody and I were just in there. It’s only been a few hours since you were last up. But let’s get…behind a wall, okay? I swear I heard gunfire up on the highway—not a minute ago.”

She trotted along beside him, and he was tensely glad that the bouncing blond hair and the lithe legs were Janis’s again, and that the deep blue eyes that blinked at him were those of his new girlfriend, in this strange landscape under this rain-threatening gray sky.

He could see why she had doubted that they were still in California. The Sutro Baths had only burned down in 1966 but these low crumbled walls and rectangular lagoons—all that was left of the baths, overgrown now with rank grass and calla lilies—fretted the plain in vast but half-obliterated geometry between the steep eastern slope and the winter sea like some Roman ruin; long gray lines of pavement cross-sections showed in the hillsides in the misty middle distance, and every outcrop of stone invited speculation that it might actually be age-rounded masonry. Fog scrimmed the cliffs to the north and south to craggy silhouettes that seemed more remote than they really were, and made the green of the wet leaves stand out vividly against the liver-colored earth.

“Who was just up?” Plumtree panted. “Were you going to light a cigarette for somebody?”

A low roofless building with ragged square window gaps in its stone walls stood a few hundred feet ahead of them, where the path broadened out to a wide mud-flat, and Cochran was aiming their plodding steps that way. “Valorie,” he said shortly. “No, she gave me these matches.” He flipped the matchbook open, and then he noticed fine-point ink lettering, words, inscribed on the individual matches.

“She’s written something on ’em,” he said; and he felt safe in stopping to squint at the carefully printed words, for the popping from the highway had been distant and hadn’t been repeated. He read the words off each of the matches in order, aloud: ‘“Si bene te tua laus taxat, sua laute tenebis.’ Latin, again.”

“Again?”

“There was some Latin writing on the ashtray last night, in that bar, Mount Sabu—”

“Scant!” she interrupted, seizing his arm and staring at the top of the northern cliff wall. “God, you almost lost me, almost got Valorie back!”

Cochran had spun to look up that way, his right hand brushing the back of his belt; but he could see nothing up on the fog-veiled cliff top.

“What?” he said tensely, stepping sideways to catch his balance on the slippery mud. “Should we run?”

“There was a wild man up there, looking down here!”

“Shit. Let’s—let’s get inside this,” he said, stepping up onto the undercut foundation of the roofless stone structure and crouching to fit through one of the square window gaps. Grass and gravelly sand covered any floor there might have been inside, and when he had glanced around and then helped Plumtree in, they both crouched panting against one of the graffiti-painted walls. Cochran had pulled the revolver free of the holster, and he belatedly swung the cylinder out and sighed with relief to see the brass of six rounds in the chambers.

“What’s a wild man?” he asked, snapping the cylinder closed.

“Bearded and naked! In this weather!”

“A naked guy?” Cochran shook his head. “I don’t know how scared we’ve got to be of a naked guy.”

“I looked away. I didn’t want to look at his face.”

“Didn’t want to look at his face,” Cochran repeated tiredly. He stared up into the gray sky that from where he sat was bisected by low stone crossbeams. “I wonder when the others will show up here. I wonder if they will. I did give the hostess at the restaurant ten bucks to tell them we’d meet ’em down here, in the ruins.”

‘“If? You said they would, Scant!” She glanced up wide-eyed at the ragged top of the wall close above their heads—as if, Cochran thought, she was afraid her wild man might have bounded down from the cliff and be about to clamber right over the wall. “They’re bringing the king’s body, right?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“And it’s still okay? They didn’t drop it on its head or anything?”

Cochran smiled. “It’s still apparently inhabitable, Janis.”

“Good. I did help kill him, and I do owe him his life back, but…I’d just as soon get to keep my own life afterward, not let him just have me…even though that’s what I deserve.” She shivered visibly and, after another fearful glance at the close top of the wall, leaned against Cochran. “Of all things,” she said in a small voice, “I don’t want what I deserve.”

“None of us wants that,” he agreed quietly.

He draped his left arm around her shoulders, and he wondered if she might be mixing up the death of Scott Crane, for which she had been to some extent responsible, with the death of her father. A question for Angelica to wrestle with, he thought; though in fact Angelica, and now janis, don’t believe janis’s father died at all. Somehow.

Her shoulder was pressing into his ribs the tape cassette he’d taken from the telephone answering machine in his house a couple of hours ago, and he shifted his position—not to relieve the jabbing, but to keep the cassette in his pocket from possibly being broken.

WHEN HE had punched in his kitchen-door window with an empty wine bottle that had been standing on his back porch, he had heard his wife’s voice speaking inside the house—“…and we’ll get back to you as quickly as posseebl’…”—and even though his mind had instantly registered the fact that the voice was coming from an electronic speaker, his spine had tingled with shock, and his hands had been clumsy as he had unlatched the chain and pushed the door open.

Whoever had called had not stayed on the line to leave any message.

He had gone to the telephone answering machine and popped the cassette out of it, without letting himself think about why he was taking it; and then he had gone to her sewing room to find a sample of Nina’s handwriting. Cody had followed him, and in a surprisingly humble tone had asked if she might “borrow” some of Nina’s clothes. Cochran had curtly assented, and as Cody had gone through Nina’s closet and dresser, he had pulled out the drawers of her desk. And while Cody carried away underwear and jeans and blouses and a couple of jumpsuits and sweaters, Cochran took from one of the desk drawers an old French-language Catholic missal, on one page of which Nina had written a lot of presumably important dates, including their wedding day; several snapshots, with Nina’s inked notes on the back, were tucked in between the missal’s pages, and he tamped them in firmly before tucking the book into his jacket pocket. And from the bedroom he had retrieved the gun and half a dozen twenty-dollar bills and Nina’s wallet.

Cochran had driven the stolen Torino out into the back yard and parked it between the garage and the greenhouse, and then draped a car cover over it.

He and Plumtree had driven the rest of the way up the 280 to San Francisco in Cochran’s 79 Ford Granada. Getting off the freeway onto Junipero Serra Boulevard, and then driving past the lawns of the San Francisco Golf Club and Larsen Park, had made him think of his many bygone trips to the city in this car with Nina sitting beside him, and he had been glad that the car had no tape player, for he might not have been able to resist the temptation to play Nina’s phone-machine greeting over and over again.

Alio—you ’ave reached Sid and Nina, and we are not able to come to ze phone right now…

FROM FAR away up the amphitheater slope, someone was whistling a slow, sad melody. Cochran recognized it—it was the theme music from the movie A Clockwork Orange. And that had been some old classical piece, a dirge for the death of some monarch….

Cochran straightened up, still holding the black rubber Pachmayr grip of the revolver, and he peeked over the top of the crumbling wall.

Arky Mavranos was plodding down the path from the road above, with Kootie hopping and scrambling along behind him. The two of them looked like a father and son out for a morning stroll, the father whistling meditatively—but Mavranos’s right hand was inside his denim jacket, and even at this distance Cochran could see the man’s eyes scanning back and forth under the bill of the battered blue Greek fisherman’s cap.

“They’re here,” Cochran told Plumtree. He lifted the revolver and clicked the barrel twice against a stone that protruded from the top of the wall.

The sound carried just fine in the foggy stillness; Mavranos’s gaze darted to the structure in which Cochran stood, and he nodded and turned to speak to Kootie.

“We’ll negotiate with them,” Cochran said quietly to Plumtree. “They’d like to have you in captivity, but we’ll make it clear that’s not an option. We can get a motel room, and have him give us a phone number where we can reach them. Go on meeting like this, on neutral ground.”

“My aims don’t conflict with theirs,” she said bleakly. “If you’ll come with me, I don’t mind being in captivity, for the…duration of this. All of us are here, their friend is dead, because of what I did, what I let happen. Mea maxima culpa. I’m just ashamed to meet them.”

It’s not entirely why I’m here, Cochran thought, aware of the angularities of the cassette and the French missal in his pockets. “Well—let me do the talking, okay?”

“What?”

“I said, let me do the talking.”

“Oh, blow me.” She looked, around at the roofless stone walls. “What are we paying for this room?”

Cochran bared his teeth. “We’re in San Francisco, Cody, and Mavranos and the Kootie kid are walking up. I’ve got a gun, and so does Mavranos, but if you don’t do anything stupid here we won’t have to all shoot each other, okay?”

“Was it him that was shooting at us before? I guess I dove for cover.”

“No, that wasn’t him, I don’t know who that was.” Cochran peered again over the wall. Mavranos was close enough now to be eyeing the stone structure for a place to step up. “I don’t think it was him.” To Mavranos, he called, “I’ve got a gun.”

“So does everybody this morning, seems like,” Mavranos said. He used both hands to climb up onto the exposed foundation ledge a few yards to Cochran’s left, and Cochran noted the deepened lines around the man’s eyes and down his gaunt cheeks. “We got shot at, on the road up there, as we were driving up to that restaurant—maybe you heard it. Semi-auto, definitely, because of how fast the shots came; looks like nine-millimeter, from the holes. We drove on past the restaurant, eluded em with some magical shit and some return fire in the numbered streets east of here and parked in an alley off Geary, and Kootie and took a cab back here.” He noticed Plumtree crouched below him on the inner side of the wall, and touched the bill of his cap. “Mornin’, Miss Plumtree.”

“Was the king’s body hurt?” she asked.

“It—yeah, it was shot in the thigh.” He rubbed one brown hand across his face, leaving a streak of mud down his jaw. “Live blood was leaking out, till we bandaged it tight. I mean, it was purple venous blood, but it turned bright red in the air. Got oxygenated, according to Angelica. It’s a good sign, that the blood is still vital. Not so good that he’s got a bullet in his leg now.”

Cochran glanced down at Kootie, who was still standing on the mud-flat. The boy’s face under the tangled black curls was tired and expressionless.

“Who was it that shot at you?” Cochran asked.

“Local jacks,” spoke up Kootie. “Boys who would be king. The world’s been twelve days without a king, and it’s getting impatient. If we wait long enough, the trees will be trying to destroy Crane’s body. The rocks will be.”

“Kootie’s…sensory apparatus works better up here,” said Mavranos. Plumtree had stood up to be able to see over the top of the wall, and he squinted belligerently at her. “You still up for the restoration-to-life stunt, girl?”

Plumtree gave him an empty look.

And down on the around Kootie stenned back, his face suddenly paler, and he glared at Plumtree. “Don’t,” he said, almost spitting, “ever…do that to me again” He took a deep breath and let it out. “Just because neither of us is a virgin, psychically, doesn’t make both of us…sluts.”

Cochran glanced at Plumtree. She was looking down now, and she said, “Well, you just tell your fucking pal—oh, hell, I’m sorry, kid! But Mavranos just now asked me—with a straight face!—if I wasn’t a coward and a liar and a cheat, on top of being a, a murderer. Murderess. Are you still up for it, girlie!’ After I came to you people.”

“And then ran out,” added Mavranos stonily.

Cochran caught on that Cody had thrown her anger to Kootie—who had instantly known where it had come from! “If she was really trying to ‘run out,”‘ Cochran said to Mavranos reasonably, “we wouldn’t have come here to meet you, would we? Let’s not waste time. What do we do next, now that we’re in San Francisco?” How, he thought, does a restoration-to-life work?

Mavranos reached into one of the outer pockets of his denim jacket, and Cochran tightened his grip on his own gun—but what Mavranos pulled out was a can of Coors, which he popped open one-handed. “Okay. Angelica says we gotta call up that black lady that talked to us on the phone, the one who was brushing her hair on the TV. She’s our intercessor, though Angelica doesn’t totally trust her, doesn’t want her taking over. And Angelica brought along a lot of…beacons and landing lights, for Dionysus’s remote attention as well as Crane’s soul: those two silver dollars Spider Joe brought, and a gold Dunhill lighter that some hired assassin gave Crane one time—Angelica says the guy was a representative of Death, so it’s a significant gift—and a bunch of myrtle-bush branches from the back garden. What other stuff we may need we’ll—”

Plumtree interrupted him with a sharp, startled laugh—she was staring over the edge of the wall in the direction of the north cliff—and then she shivered and closed her eyes; Cochran glanced where she’d been looking, and his eyes widened in surprise to see a powerfully built naked man standing on the mud a couple of hundred feet away, facing them, with shoulder-length brown hair and a curly reddish beard that fell over his chest.

And Cochran’s rib-cage went cold, for he recognized the man. “That’s our taxi driver!” he exclaimed. “The guy that drove us to Solville!”

“That’s Scott Crane,” said Mavranos hoarsely. “Or his ghost.”

“Catch him in a bottle,” said Kootie.

Cochran stifled a nervous laugh at the foolishness of the boy’s unconsidered remark—but then the naked man turned away, toward the cliff, and suddenly the distance and perspective were problematic. The man seemed to be smaller, tiny, as if he were some kind of elf standing on the rim of the wall a yard in front of Cochran’s face, and a moment later he seemed to be immensely far away, and huge; and when he moved—away, presumably, for his form appeared to shrink—he shifted without any apparent contact with the ground. For one instant he to jump from side to side like a figure in patchy animation—and Cochran grabbed one of the shoulder-height stone crossbeams, viscerally certain that the figure had been holding still and that it had been the whole world that had jumped.

Cochran’s straining eyes focussed by default on the cliff face, and he noticed that a deep shadow at the base of it was the mouth of a cave; and when the naked figure flickered away out of sight it seemed to disappear into the shadowed opening.

Mavranos was sprinting away around the coping of a sunken mud lagoon, toward the cliff and the cave.

“It’s just his ghost,” yelled Kootie, starting after him.

“It’s the ghost of my friend!” Mavranos shouted back.

Cochran shoved his revolver into his belt, then crouched to climb back out through the crusted-stone window hole. “Come on,” he gasped at Plumtree, “we should go along.”

She wailed softly as she followed him out. Then, “He drove our taxi?” she said as she hopped down after him from the foundation ledge to the mud. “He must have known who I was I held a fucking spear to his baby boy’s throat!” Even though she was Cody, she took his hand as the two of them trotted after Mavranos and Kootie. “If it comes to facing him, I think it’ll have to be Valorie. She’s the one who plays intolerable flops.”

THE CAVE opened into a roughly straight tunnel, high enough for a person to walk upright in. The passage appeared to be natural, floored with wet gravel and bumpy with stone outcroppings on the rounded walls and ceiling, though Cochran could dimly see a metal railing installed along part of the seaward wall, halfway down the shadowed tunnel. By the time Cochran and Plumtree had come scuffing and panting into the broad entrance, Kootie was a dark silhouette far down the length of the tunnel and Mavranos stood in chalky daylight out beyond the far side, perhaps thirty yards distant. Reflected gray sky glittered in agitated puddles that filled low spots of the floor, and the moist breeze from the vitreous corridor was heavy with the old-pier smell of tide pools.

“Come on,” Cochran said, tugging Plumtree’s cold hand as he stepped into the darkness.

“Take Valorie,” she said tightly, “I hate caves.”

Cochran thought about the dead-eyed woman Plumtree had been right after the hollow knocking of the gunshots, and he shuddered at the prospect of walking through this dim, wet tunnel with her. “I’d rather have you along, Cody,” he said, “actually.”

She shrugged irritably and stepped forward, her sneakers crunching in the wet gravel. “I’m here at the moment.”

The mushy rattle of their shoes on the yielding humped floor echoed from the stone walls, but Cochran could hear too the hissing rise and gutter of contained surf—and when he and Plumtree had trudged to where the metal railing stood against the seaward wall, he saw that two jagged holes opened out from floor level to the outer air, where waves could be seen foaming up over rocks that glittered in the gray daylight outside.

A seething bath, he thought, which yet may prove against strange maladies a sovereign cure.

Up ahead, Kootie too was out in the leaden light now, and Mavranos’s voice came reverberating down the tunnel: “Get your girlfriend out here.”

“Come on, girlfriend,” Cochran said.

She yanked her hand free of his, and hurried past him so that he had to splash along after her.

“Wait for moron Tiffany, asshole,” she called back to him.

He touched the lump in his jacket that was the cassette tape from the telephone answering machine. Tiffany, he thought, or someone else.

THERE WAS only a wide ledge under the open sky at the other end of the tunnel, and no way to go farther without climbing over wet, tilted boulders.

Cochran blinked around in the relative glare when he was standing out there beside Kootie and Mavranos and Plumtree, and he pointed at the tan boulder nearest to them, across a narrow gap that had sea water sloshing in it. “That one looks like George Washington,” he said, inanely. It did, though—the broad face turned out to sea in profile, the nose and the jawline and even the edge of the wig, were all rendered in weather-broken stone.

“The father of our country,” said Plumtree brightly.

Kootie was peering down into the water, staring at the foamy scum on the waves. “He’s gone,” he said.

Cochran frowned at Plumtree to stop her from asking if he meant George Washington.

Mavranos was squinting up at the northern cliff face and then out across the huge tumbled stones. “He’s not corporeal,” he said, speaking loudly to be heard over the waves crashing on the rocks farther out. “That’s good, right? He’s not one of the solidified ghosts, like those ‘beastie’ things your dad had in his van.”

“He wasn’t corporeal just now” Kootie said. “And I think it generally takes a fresh ghost a while to firmly gather up enough…spit and bubble gum and bug blood and plaster dust … to form a reliably solid body. Still, he…” Kootie yawned widely. “Excuse me. Did Crane drink a lot?”

“Drink, like alcohol?” Mavranos scowled at the boy. “Well, he used to. He cut back hard after Easter in ’90—since then it’s been a glass or two of wine, with the bread fish he has for breakfast, lunch, and dinner Why?”

In a fruity, affected voice, Plumtree said, “I enjoy a glass of wine with my meals.”

Ignoring her, Kootie said, “I think ghosts of drunks solidify faster. And then they keep drinking, buying cheap wine with money they get panhandling—but they can’t digest the alcohol, and it comes bubbling out of their skin like sweat. It’s like the habit is what animates them.” He turned a cold gaze on Plumtree. “Do you drink a lot?”

“Well,” she said, “one’s not enough and a thousand is too many, as they say. Why do you ask?”

“If he was your taxi driver,” the boy, said, “he must have had some substance for that. Turning the steering wheel, pushing the pedals. You met him then, and you were the first to see him today. Sometimes a ghost clings to the person responsible for his death, especially if the person has a lot of guilt about the death. Al—Thomas Edison—he had a couple of ’em hanging on him, at one time and another.”

“You’re saying what, exactly?” said Plumtree quickly.

“I’m saying your dad may have had help screwing up our TV set. I’m pretty sure you’ve got the ghost of Scott Crane riding in your head like … like a bad case of lice. And you’re only making the ghost develop faster by drinking all the time.”

Cochran couldn’t tell if Plumtree relaxed or tensed up at this statement; then her mouth opened and she droned, “Sometimes she calls the king, and whispers to her pillow, as to him, the secrets of her overcharged soul: and I am sent to tell his majesty that even now she cries aloud for him.”

“Valorie,” Cochran said.

“She that loves her selves,” Plumtree said woodenly, “hath not essentially, but by circumstance, the name of Valorie.”

Cochran shivered in the chilly ocean breeze, and he was glad Mavranos and Kootie would be accompanying him and Valorie back through the tunnel to the ruins and the mud-flats and the long zigzagging path back up to the normal-world San Francisco highway; for this was the same thing Valorie had said half an hour ago, when he had mentioned her name, and it had just now occurred to him that the Valorie personality was to some extent a kind of reflex-arc machine … dead.

Mavranos had been nodding rapidly while Plumtree spoke, and now he said, “Groovy. Scott sure picked a well-ventilated head to occupy.” He turned a pained look on Kootie. “But in fact he doesn’t know anything about it, does he?”

“Right,” said Kootie. “Crane himself is … some where else. Wherever the actual dead people go. Somewhere I guess only Dionysus has the key to. This …’beastie,’ this naked thing we saw today, it’s like a ROM disk. Not useless, if we could talk to it, but hardly more a real person than the Britannica on CD-ROM would be. No, Crane himself wouldn’t know about this thing we followed down here, any more than the real Edison knew about the ghost I had in my head two years ago.”

“No doubt.” Mavranos stared at Cochran. “So are you and Miss … Miss Tears-On-My-Pillow coming with us?”

Cochran touched the butt of his revolver. “No.” His heart was beating fast. “No, we’re gonna get a motel room somewhere. You and Angelica can cook up the restoration procedure, and we’ll join you for that. You go get a place to stay, and meet me tomorrow at…Li Po, it’s a bar on Grant Street. At noon. If you forget the name, just remember where we are right now—the street entrance to the bar is stuccoed up to look like a natural cavern. You can give me, then, the phone number of whatever place you’re staying at; and we can set up a time and place where Janis and I can meet you all.”

Mavranos smiled. “You don’t trust us.”

“Somehow I just don’t,” Cochran agreed, struggling to keep his voice level. “I think it must have something to do with,” he added with a jerky shrug, “you all discussing shooting Janis, last night.”

“That’s noble,” Mavranos said. “But she just did one of her personality changes right now, didn’t she?” He smiled at Plumtree. “You’re Dr. Jeckyll, or Sybil, or the Incredible Hulk now, right?” To Cochran he went on, “Any time you leave her alone—hell, any time at all—she could change into her father, who murdered Scott Crane. Do you think he wouldn’t kill you?”

Cochran quailed inwardly when he remembered the man who had spoken out of Plumtree’s body last night at Strubie the Clown’s house; but aloud he said, “I’ll take my chances.”

“You’ll be taking all of our chances,” said Kootie.

Cochran jumped when Plumtree spoke again, but the flat voice was still that of the Valorie personality: “How chances mock, and changes fill the cup of alteration with diverse liquors!”

And Cochran remembered the bottle of wine that the Mondard figure had generously offered him in the hallucinated mirror last night. Biting Dog, or something, the label had seemed to read, in the reflection. And he thought too about Manhattans, and Budweisers and vodka, and Southern Comfort; and about flinty French Graves wine thoughtlessly disparaged at a New Year’s Eve party.

Mavranos had already shrugged and started slogging back down the tunnel; Kootie followed him, after shaking his head and saying, “Liquor, again.”

Cochran took Plumtree’s elbow and led her after them. And all he was thinking about now was the—admittedly warm—twelve-pack of Coors he had transferred from the stolen Torino to his Granada, parked now just up the hill.