Earthquake Weather

The vine by nature is apt to fall, and unless supported drops down to the earth; yet in order to keep itself upright it embraces whatever it reaches with its tendrils as though they were hands.

—Marcus Tullius Cicero

CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE

“I am afraid of it,” she answered, shuddering.

“Of it? What?”

“I mean of him. Of my father.”

—Charles Dickens,

A Tale of Two Cities

IN the Salinas and Santa Clara and Livermore valleys, on the jade green slopes that stretched away from the highways up to where the Santa Cruz Mountains in the west and the Diablo Range in the east met the gray sky, the newly head-pruned grapevines stood in rows like gnarled crucifixes, as if a tortured god hung at endlessly reiterated sacrifice in the cold rain.

The work in the vineyard cellars in late January was racking the wines, pumping the new vintages from one cask to another to liberate them from the freshly thrown sediments of dead yeast cells, and fining them with egg whites to precipitate cloudiness out. In the Pace cellars on San Bruno Mountain the suspension cloudiness in the casks was heavy this year, and bentonite clay as well as egg whites was needed to bring the wine to clarity, and the “goût de terroir,” the flavor of earth, was especially pronounced. On the slopes outside, tractors dragged harrows and cultivators through the old-standard eight-foot aisles between the rows, and this year the blades and disks were soon blunted to uselessness by the rocky soil and had to be replaced after having served only half of their expected life spans.

During the long days Sid Cochran oversaw the washing out of the drained casks with soda ash and hot water so that the wines could be racked back into them, and in the evenings he was kept busy in the lab, chilling some samples of the adjusted new wines to test for tartaric acid stability and heating others to provoke any incipient protein hazing. After his twelve days off, which the payroll clerk had listed as compassionate leave following the death of a family member, Cochran had now worked for seven days straight, as much for relief from his five houseguests as for catching up on the uncompromising vineyard chores and getting in some justifiable overtime pay.

Six or seven houseguests, he thought on Saturday afternoon as he steered the Granada up into his driveway and switched off the engine; at least. Though admittedly only five at any particular moment.

Mavranos’s truck was parked at the top of the driveway. The new pair of tan car covers, weighted down with bricks, concealed the truck’s red color, but did nothing to hide its boxy shape.

Cochran got out of the car and walked toward his 1960s ranch-style house across the lawn rather than on the stepping-stones, for Kootie had covered them with chalk detection-evasion patterns he’d apparently learned from Thomas Alva Edison two years ago; and up on the porch Cochran brushed aside Angelica’s wind chimes of chicken bones and old radio parts, avoided stepping in the smears of pork-fat-and-salt that Mammy Pleasant had carefully daubed onto the concrete, then ignored the brass keyhole plate below the doorknob and crouched to fit his housekey into the disguised lock Mavranos had installed at the base of the door.

The warm air in the entry hall smelled of WD-40 spray oil and stewing beef and onions, and Cochran could hear Bob Dylan’s “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” from the Subterranean Homesick Blues album playing on the stereo in the living room. The music told him that Mavranos was in the house, and the pair of treebark-soled Ferragamo pumps by the door indicated that Mammy Pleasant was not currently occupying the Plumtree body.

“Cody?” he called as he shrugged out of his rain-damp windbreaker.

“She’s out working on the Torino,” came Pete Sullivan’s voice from the kitchen. “How goes the bottle?” He was sitting at the kitchen table, leaning over a couple of half-dismantled walkie-talkies with a screwdriver.

“Aging.” Yesterday Cochran had replied, Cobwebby. He stepped into the kitchen and tossed his windbreaker onto the counter and then opened the refrigerator to get one of Mavranos’s beers. Freshly scratched into the white enamel of the refrigerator door were the numbers 1-28-95; during this week of frustrating waiting Plumtree had got into the habit of key-scratching the current day’s date on any surface that would show a gouge—wood tabletops, dry wall, book spines. When he had protested after finding the first few examples, last weekend, she had doggedly told him that she had to do it, that it was like the hospital surgery-ward policy of inking NO on limbs that were not to be “ectomied,” cut off. And she had been using a black laundry-marking pen to letter the name of each day on whatever blouse of Nina’s she was wearing. Probably she was doing the same to her underwear; Cochran was sleeping on the living-room couch these days, and didn’t know.

Cochran carried his beer out through the laundry room to the back door, the window of which was still broken from the morning two weeks ago when he and Plumtree had let themselves in by breaking the glass with a wine bottle. When he unlocked the door and pushed it open against the cold outdoor breeze, the woman standing by the raised hood of the ’69 Torino looked at him, and was clearly Cody.

“You’ve got to talk to Janis,” Cody said.

Cochran walked up to the old car. Cody had taken the carburetor and the distributor cap off of the engine, and had laid out wrenches and a timing-light gun on a towel draped over the fender. “I’ve tried to,” he said.

Several times at their noisy buffet-style breakfasts he had noticed Plumtree eating poached or fried eggs, holding the fork in her right hand, and he had caught her eye—but each time her face had changed, and it had been Cody who had given him a blank, questioning look as she switched the fork to her left hand and reached for the bowl of scrambled eggs; and once Plumtree’s posture, as she had stood on tiptoe to reach a volume of Edna St. Vincent Millay down from a high bookshelf, had clearly been Janis’s shoulders-back stance—but, when he had called to her, Cody had blinked impatiently at the book and paused only long enough to dig her set of car keys out of her pocket and scratch the date into the cover before putting it back. “She’s avoiding me,” Cochran said.

“Well I wonder why.” Plumtree laid down a screwdriver she’d been twisting the idle screw with and held out her black-smeared left hand. “Can I have your beer? I’m too dirty to be touching your doorknobs and refrigerator handles.”

Cochran handed it to her, without even taking a last sip of it. “And I’ll get you another if you want, just to save you the walk,” he said, “but mi casa es su casa, Cody. Mess up anything you want.”

Plumtree took the beer with a grin. After a deep sip, she exhaled and said, “Thanks, but Mammy Pleasant will make me clean up any messes I make. Have you seen those lists of chores she leaves for me? Not just shopping and cleaning—sometimes she tells me to go buy or sell houses! But I called about a couple, they’re all pre-1906 addresses. It’s a good thing she doesn’t know the 1995 prices I’m paying for her groceries, she’d think I was embezzling. And in the notes she’s always calling me Teresa.”

Cochran nodded. Cody and Mammy Pleasant were both strong presences in the household, and managed to get on each other’s nerves in spite of the fact that they could never meet, taking turns as they did at occupying the same body. But Cochran had several times talked directly to the old-woman personality, and she seemed to be as senile as Kootie said most ghosts were. The Teresa person had evidently been a servant she’d had when she’d been alive.

The Mammy Pleasant ghost had first arrived upon Plumtree last Sunday, after Cody had consented to eat bread baked with ground Octavia Street eucalyptus seeds in it and drink wine in which the split seeds had sat soaking overnight. For an hour after taking the dubious sacrament, Plumtree had just sat on the living-room couch, flushing her mouth with vodka to kill the taste of the eucalyptus and watching the news—

And then she had blinked and reared back, staring with clear recognition into the faces of Kootie and Pete and Angelica and Cochran through eyes that momentarily seemed to Cochran to be mismatched in color. After a few seconds she had looked back at the television, and said in a strong, deep voice, “I was talking to you people through that thing, wasn’t I?”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Kootie, looking away from her. “Courage, boy!” she said. “Remember Gawain.” “Yes, ma’am,” said Kootie again.

Angelica had begun asking the old woman questions, but Mammy Pleasant had immediately demanded to know if they had brought any eucalyptus bark from her tree; and, when she’d been assured that they had, that a pair of shoes be soled from the bark for her. And when Pete and Kootie had cut out bark soles and heels and Superglued them onto a pair of Nina’s low-heeled Ferragamo pumps—Pleasant had haughtily dismissed the notion of using a pair of Reeboks after getting a look at them—the old woman had put the shoes on and walked outside in the crackling, fragmenting footwear, straight to the greenhouse.

Scott Crane’s disordered skeleton was laid out in there on a shelf between Nina’s orchids and a crowd of potted fuchsias, and the Plumtree hands were shaky as they touched the broken skull. “He himself will lead you to the god’s wine,” she had said. “And by then you’ll have learned where to go with it, and what to do.”

She hadn’t said very much more about Crane’s restoration to life than that—then or in the six days since. She generally came on within an hour to either side of noon, though the sun was seldom visible through the overcast, and often she seemed absent-minded, or senile, or even drunk—which, Mavranos noted, was only to be expected in a servant of Dionysus. She kept finding jobs around the house for “Teresa” to do, and had to leave notes because she could never find the girl; and Plumtree had begun leaving notes in return, buggesting that the old woman clean the floors and windows herself. When Kootie or Angelica would stop the old woman and try to get information about the procedure they were supposedly going to perform on the day of the Tet Festival, Pleasant’s drunkenness would seem to become more pronounced—and she would just insist that Crane would presently tell them what to do. Adding to the confusion was the fact that she generally slurred the name to Cren, and frequently pronounced it with a stutter, C-cren, so that she seemed to be referring to Cochran. Even her pronunciation of Scott sometimes seemed to slur nasally toward Scant.

Cochran now watched Cody spraying the carburetor with some very flammable-smelling aerosol.

“Janis is avoiding me,” he said again.

“Don’t light a cigarette right now,” Cody said. “I don’t blame her. But I think she should talk to you.” She put down the spray can and squinted up at him, her face shadowed by the raised car hood. “I saw into her dream for a couple of seconds last night. You were in both of our dreams, and the…figure of you, your outline, must have sort of matched up and spun around at the partition between her mind and mine—like one of those secret bookshelf-walls in old movies, that rotate on a pivot when you pull on the right book.” Cody took another gulp of the beer. “Her dream was in color, but barely—it looked fake, like a black-and-white photo touched up with watercolors, and the backgrounds were plain gray. And there was music, the dwarf music from Sleeping Beauty, but I could hardly hear the melody because the drumming was so hard and loud. It sounded like soldiers marching fast on an iron deck.”

Cochran bared his teeth unhappily. He couldn’t forget the image of Janis valiantly punching the linoleum floor at the Rosecrans Medical Center nearly three weeks ago; nor her look of despairing hurt in his bed last Tuesday, when he had last spoken to her. “What does that mean?” he asked Cody.

“Valorie’s memories are in black-and-white, and always have drumming going on. I think Janis is draining away into Valorie.”

But Valorie’s dead! he almost said. “Can…that happen?”

“As far as we’re concerned, Sid, anything can happen. We went to a funeral once when we were twelve, and by the time the minister was done talking it was somebody else’s funeral and we were fourteen; and what we thought was the emotion of rage turns out to be our male parent, who’s alive and crouching inside our head; and I have to look at whatever I last scratched the date on to be sure—” She glanced at fresh scratches in the greasy curve of the manifold valve cover. “—to be sure that the goddamn Edison Medicine that broke us all into separate pieces, all finally aware of each other, happened only seventeen days ago!”

Cochran smiled with half of his face. “I see what you mean. The word ‘impossible’ isn’t what it used to be, for any of us.” Cody was holding out the beer can toward him; he took it to throw away for her, but it was still more than half full, so he gratefully Hired it up for a sip and then handed it back to her. “What can I say to Janis besides that I’m sorry? Besides that I know I was the bad guy and that she deserved better from even a total stranger, never mind from somebody she had got herself into bad trouble to protect?”

Cody laughed. “Besides those things?” Then she sobered. “I honestly don’t know, but it might save her if you told her you love her.” She shook her head. “My…it’s not sister; my other half?…seems to be evaporating, dying.”

“I could tell her that, I suppose, if it would help,” he said cautiously. He glanced back at the kitchen door. “But if it did help, and she came back, even though I’d—I mean, she’d be able to tell—”

Cody raised an eyebrow. “You don’t love her?”

“No.”

“Huh. She seems to me like the ideal woman, everything I’m not. So do you love anybody?” She coughed. “I mean, anybody who’s alive?”

At first Cochran thought he wouldn’t be able to look at her. Then he did meet her eyes, though his voice was incongruously light when he answered, “Yes.”

It was Cody that looked away. “I don’t think that’s very smart.” She coughed again, rackingly. “Well, go ahead and lie to her, and we can worry about the consequences once she’s herself again. Better a car that’s gonna let you down halfway home than one that won’t run at all.”

Cochran considered, then rejected, the idea of drinking a couple of beers first. “I don’t know what I’ll say. But go ahead—call her up.”

“I can’t, she won’t come voluntarily. You’ve got to call her up.”

“How am I supposed to—oh. Follow-the-Queen.”

“Right. Wait right here, I’ll…get my stupid parentess.” Plumtree closed her eyes. “Mother!” she called.

Instantly her eyes sprang open, and she stepped back away from Cochran after grabbing up a screwdriver from the fender. “You tell him,” she said, “that if he comes out of that house I’ll drive this straight into my own heart. He’ll know I mean it.” The skin of her neck was suddenly looser, and her eyes seemed closer together.

“He’s nowhere around here, Mrs….Plumtree,” said Cochran awkwardly. Why was he talking to this personality? According to Angelica it wasn’t her real mother, nor even a real ghost, just an internalized version of her parent patched together from memories and overheard conversations. “I do know who you mean,” Cochran went on. “We’re hiding from him.” He felt as though he had dialed six digits of Janis’s number, and was afraid to dial the last one. “We’re protecting your daughter from him.”

“You can’t hide, you can’t protect anyone, from Omar Salvoy,” said the querulous voice, though her fist relaxed around the screwdriver handle. But Cochran’s stomach was cold, and he wished she had not mentioned Salvoy’s name. “Especially you can’t protect her. He wants to have a child by a dead woman. I was nearly dead when he had intercourse with me, I was—unconscious’—in a coma!—after a head injury!”

Cochran thought of his afternoon with Tiffany, then drove the horrifying parallel out of his mind.

The mother personality almost put Plumtree’s eye out as she reached up to rub her eyes with the hand holding the screwdriver. “Listen to me,” she went on. “He studied the old books of the Order of the Knights Templar, and one of their secret mystery-initiation stories was about a man who dug up a dead woman out of her grave and had intercourse with her cold body; and after he had raped the corpse and buried it again, a voice from the earth told him to return in nine months and he would find a divine son. He came back then, and when he dug her up this time he found a, a blinking, grimacing little black head lying on her thigh-bones. And the voice from the earth told him to guard it well, for it would be the source of all forgiveness. And so he took it away, and guarded it jealously, and he prospered with impunity.” There were tears in her eyes as she glared at Cochran. “My baby died when he fell on her. There’s some kind of…kaleidoscope girl that’s grown up in there, in her head, but my baby died that day in Soma.” She was shaking her head violently and drawing the screwdriver blade across her chest. “But she can still, my dead daughter can still become pregnant, if Omar is in a male body. He can become the father of the god.”

Cochran knew that it was his vision, and not the sky, that had darkened; but with a shaking hand he reached out and then suddenly, firmly, gripped the blade of the screwdriver.

“Don’t kill her,” he whispered. Was this the same god? he wondered; was the horrible little homunculus she’d described the same person as the deity of groves and grapevines that offered the pagadebitil The mondard that had spoken to him in Paris with such fatherly affection, before turning into a bull-headed thing and then into a tumbled straw effigy? The god that had made the Agave woman in Mavranos’s Euripides play cut off her son’s head? What kind of primordial proto-deity could be all these things?

He thought of the endless rows of gnarled crucifixes dripping out on the surrounding hills in the rain.

“Don’t kill her,” he repeated. “I’ll protect her, I’ll save her from him. I love her.” I love the real one, he thought, even if you don’t know which that is.

Plumtree shook her head in evident pity. “She’ll come to the point where she’ll tear you to pieces just for the honor of being able to bring your head to him. Who are you to the god?”

Cochran abruptly pulled the screwdriver out of her hands. Then, slowly, he turned his hand around to show her the mark below his knuckles. “When I was a boy,” he said, “I put out my hand to save him from the pruner’s shears.”

Plumtree had gasped, and now nodded slowly. “Send her away into the sea,” she said. “She belongs in India, not here, not being the mother of the god. The god himself couldn’t want that, to have an incarnate aspect of himself in filial obligation to a monster.” The smile she gave him was one he had not seen before on Plumtree’s face, but it was brave. “I love her too.”

“I’ll do what’s right,” he said, “for her.” Then he took a deep breath and said, gently, “Janis.”

Plumtree’s features pinched in anxiety. “Oh, it’s Scant,” she said; then her voice quickened: “Was he here? I can feel his name still on my tongue! Daddy?” she called, glancing around at the yard and the greenhouse. “I’ll never ditch you, Daddy! I’ll always catch you! Listen to me! Where I go, you go, I swear on my life!”

“Shut up, Janis, please!” Cochran hissed, spinally aware of the vineyards and of the skeleton in the greenhouse. “He wasn’t here. I have to talk to you, Janis. You don’t have to forgive me, but you do have to know that, that I know I was totally in the wrong, and I’m terribly sorry and ashamed of myself.” He smacked his fist against his thigh, angry with himself for saying this badly. “All my excuses were lies, Janis. You were right about me, but I want to make it up to you, to whatever extent I can. Will you come back to us, please? Cody needs you. I need you. I—”

“To be or not to be, that is the question,” said Plumtree.

Cochran faltered. “Valorie?”

“No…no, I’m Janis, still.”

I should have known, Cochran thought, that it wouldn’t be Valorie quoting the only Shakespeare line that everyone in the world knows. “Janis, I—”

“Don’t, Scant mustn’t, I’ll make myself deaf to him—we can do that. Leave me alone, if he wants to do something for me, he can leave me alone!” She hurried away across the concrete patio deck to the kitchen door, yanked it open, and slammed it behind her.

Cochran thought seriously for a moment about pursuing her. Then he sighed picked up Cody’s abandoned beer, and leaned against the car fender. Maybe, he thought, I should tell it all to dead Valorie, and let her explain it to Janis.

What damn good is this person that’s me? he thought, glancing from the kitchen door to the mark on the back of his hand. How in hell am I supposed to play this flop, when I’m gambling with so many people’s bankrolls? And he remembered Kootie telling him, at the Sutro ruins two weeks ago, You’ll be taking all our chances.

OMAR SALVOY found himself in a bedroom with a telephone in it.

He knew he would have to be careful in what he said to Dr. Richard Paul Armentrout, and he crossed his arms under his daughter’s breasts—A divine offspring for you to nurse during this thirteen-moon year, baby, I promise, he thought—and paced up and down the rag rug in front of the bedside table. Bye, baby bunting, Daddy’s gone a-hunting, gone to get a leopard-skin to bury baby bunting in.

In his youth Salvoy had only wanted to find a king to serve. He had been a theater major at Stanford University, specializing in Shakespeare and finding star tling clues in some of the obscurer plays, and living in a shabby little apartment in Menlo Park.

In May of 1964, when he had been nineteen, Salvoy had gone with a friend to the La Honda house of Ken Kesey, put in the redwood forests at the south end of State Highway 84. Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest had been published only two years earlier.

And, in Kesey, Salvoy thought he had found his king. The burly, balding Oregonian had gathered a whole tribe together at his remote hillside ranch in the canyon, and he spoke of the new drug LSD as the almost sacramental key to “worlds that have always existed.” Hi-fi speakers boomed and yowled on the roof of the house, shattering the silence of the ancient redwood forest, and weird wind chimes and crazy paintings were hung on all the trees. Omar Salvoy had begun visiting the place on his own, driving his old Karmann Ghia down the 84 over the Santa Cruz Mountains to the La Honda ranch every weekend.

One day out in the woods someone had found a dozen oversized wooden chessmen, weathered and cracked, and Kesey’s tribe had spontaneously begun improvising a dialogue among the figures—it had had to do with a king threatened with castration, and a girl with “electric eel tits that ionized King Arthur’s sword under swamp water”—and though the impromptu play was just a cheerful stoned rap from a bunch of distracted proto-hippies, Salvoy had believed he had heard mythic, archetypal powers manifesting themselves in the lines. When Kesey had set his people to painting random patterns in Day-Glo paint all over the 1939 International Harvester school bus he had just bought, Salvoy had climbed up to the destination sign over the windshield and painted on it the name ARTHUR.

That night he had managed to catch Kesey for a few minutes away from his followers, and he had told him about the magical kingdom of the American West, and how the current king—a castrated transplanted Frenchman!—could surely be overthrown when that cycle came around again, at Easter in ’69, five years hence. And he had told Kesey about the supernatural power he would have if he took the throne, how he would be able to shackle and control the god of earthquakes and wine as the present king was doing, and raise ghosts to do his errands, and live forever. Omar Salvoy would be King Kesey’s advisor.

But Kesey had just laughed and, as Salvoy recalled, had said something like, ‘And if I jump off a cliff, angels will bear me up lest I dash my foot against a stone, right?”—and he had walked away. Salvoy believed it had been a quote from the New Testament, when Jesus was refusing to be tempted by Satan. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest had been full of Christ-figure imagery. Salvoy had driven home over the mountains in a humiliated rage, and never returned. Later he had seen a photograph of Kesey’s bus in Life magazine—someone had painted FU over his A on the destination sign, so that it now just read, idiotically, FURTHUR.

Salvoy had abandoned college, though he’d kept studying the plays of Shakespeare, and he began to sample the strange cults that were springing up in the Bay Area in the mid-sixties. From a splinter group of the Order of the Knights Templar he learned about the uses of the Eye of Horns symbol, the udjat eye that looked like a profile falcon, in countering the influences of the feminine Moon Goddess; and that it was possible actually to become the human father of a living, absolving fragment of the god who died with the grapevines every winter and was reborn in them every spring, by impregnating a dead woman; and for a few months he traveled up and down the coast on Highway I, from Big Sur to the state beaches between Santa Barbara and Ventura, with the agricultural human-sacrifice cult that was then still calling itself the Camino Hayseeds, not for two decades yet to be internally reorganized and have its name changed to the Amino Acids.

And then toward the end of the year he had found the Danville-area commune known as the Lever Blank, whose secret and very old real name was L’Ordre du Levrier Blanc, which meant The Order of the White Greyhound. The name had apparently been chosen as long ago as the thirteenth century as a repudiation of the dog that appeared on the Fool card in the tarot deck, which was always a mongrel and generally black. The Lever Blank grew vegetables and marijuana on part of its land, and dispensed food to indigent street people, and talked a lot about harmony with nature and celebrations of life; but the Levrier Blanc was concerned with the grapes that grew on the rest of the commune land, and with re-establishing the carefully preserved old pre-phylloxera vines that had borne Dionysus’s sacramental wine before the French Revolution, and with the supernatural kingdom of the American west which Salvoy had already perceived. Salvoy had decided to join them and become the king, the earthly personification of the sun-god, himself. And, based on what he had learned from the Order of the Templars, he had resolved too to father an incarnate piece of the earthbound, annually dying vegetation god. He had failed at all that, then. This year he would do it.

But it would be a risky and probably one-shot procedure. He would have to learn from Armentrout how to exit a body without hurting it—he wanted to leave the Plumtree body alive, healthy, and fertile. The Koot Hoomie boy would have to be comatose, flat-line brain-dead; Salvoy would take the ventilator out of the boy’s throat and then lean over him and jump across the gap in a moment when Koot was, ideally, inhaling. At that point, with no tenant-mind to overcome, Salvoy would simply have Koot Hoomie’s body.

And Salvoy would quickly have to kill Armentrout, whose goal in all this was to have a perpetually flatline brain-dead king. If Armentrout were actually present, Salvoy would have to remember to put a gun or a knife into the boy’s limp hand before throwing himself out of the Plumtree body into Koot Hoomie.

He punched the doctor’s number into the telephone, and when the querulous voice said, hoarsely, “Hello?” Salvoy forgot diplomacy and just said, “You tried to kill Koot Hoomie, you fat freak!” He did remember to keep his voice down.

“But I failed,” said the doctor quickly. “My mother—Muir—my ghosts are still around, they haven’t been banished! The boy must still be alive—healthy, even!—I’ve been searching for him with the shadow of a pomegranate, but there’s been so little sun—”

“Yeah, he’s alive. He’s with us, still. I’m in the same house with him right now! But I ain’t tellin’ you dick if you’re just gonna try and kill him again.” He bared the Plumtree teeth and spat out, “You fucking block, you stone, you worse than goddamn senseless thing!”

“No, I won’t, I was desperate that day—of course I want to, we both want to, get him onto the perpetual life-support arrangement, brain-dead—but, try to understand this, my mother’s ghost had found me! I was desperate—I was only thinking about—if I killed him outright it would at least get rid of her.”

“You fucking dumb—didn’t you think Koot Hoomie’s ghost would come after you?”

“It would have been a reprieve—and he’s the king, and I think the king’s ghost would have bigger concerns than to go after his murderer. Crane didn’t come after your girls, did he? Anyway, I didn’t kill the boy.”

“Well, you’re on my shit-list, ipso fatso. The good news is that they did the restoration-to-life trick all wrong, and this Koot Hoomie boy is the king if anyone is. Anyway, nobody else is. Look, I’ll cut the boy out of the pack here, but before I let you anywhere near him, you’re gonna have to tell me everything you know about transferring a person from one body to another.”

“Why would you need to know that? All you need to know is that a dead Fisher King is a heat-sink.” Armentrout giggled breathlessly. “He takes the heat.”

“Tell you what, why don’t I just go find another doctor? There’s gotta be more than one psychiatrist in this country who’d like to have in his clinic an engine for… for eliminating the spiritual consequences of sin.” Salvoy clunked the receiver against the wall as if about to hang up—and then he heard a knock at the bedroom door.

IT WAS recognizably Cody who pulled open the bedroom door after Cochran’s knock, and she was holding the telephone receiver to her ear against the spring-tension of the stretched-out cord. Her face was spotty, and she touched a finger to her tight bloodless lips as she held the receiver out toward him.

Cochran twisted his head to listen, with her—and he heard Dr. Armentrout’s unmistakable fruity voice coming out of the earpiece: “—can hear you breathing! You need me, Salvoy, don’t kid yourself! What other psychiatrist is going to know that mind-shifting trick you want? Hah? Asymptotic freedom, remember? How to pick up your ass and tote it out of there? I’ll tell you how to do it—I’ll help you do it. I was just curious why you wanted to, that’s all. Arid I’m her physician-of-record!” Armentrout was panting over the phone. “You’re listening, right? So tell me where you are, where he is.”

Cochran ventured to make a gravelly “Hmm,” sound.

“You say they did the restoration-to-life trick all wrong,” said Armentrout, catching his breath. “Are you afraid they might do it again, and do it right this time? I don’t know why you should care about that, but if you want to screw them up, I can certainly help you, you know. You could use the physician-of-record being present. Is that Cochran guy there too?”

Nervous sweat itching under his eyes, Cochran replied with a careful whistling sigh.

“Oh shit,” whispered Armentrout. “Janis?” he said then, strongly. “‘Cody? This is your doctor. Please tell me where you’re staying.”

Cochran saw Plumtree put her top teeth into her lower lip as though preparing to say a word that started with F, but instead she shook her head and stepped back to the phone to rattlingly hang up the receiver.

“Smart not to say anything,” Cochran said when the connection had been broken. “This way he can’t be sure it wasn’t…your father. I’m sorry I spooked him, there, at the end—”

“No,” she said, staring at the telephone as if she thought it might manifest some dire noise or light that would give them only seconds to flee the room, flee the house; “you had to make some response, and that first hmm got a couple of extra sentences out of him.” When she looked up at him her pupils were pinpricks and her jawmuscles were working. “Janis let him on. Damn her, it makes me sick to think of him—” She spread her fingers and then closed her hands into tight fists, “in here, in me.” Her mouth worked, and then she spat on the rug. “I need Listerine. At least he wasn’t on for long enough to give me a nosebleed or hurt my teeth much—and he didn’t tell Armentrout where we are.” She glanced at the black plastic ten-dollar watch she’d bought to replace the hospital zeitgeber watch. “How long ago was it that I called up my mother for you?”

“Oh—five minutes?”

Plumtree tossed her head in exasperation. “Five minutes at the end for some of them,” she said sternly, “but they’ve got to be sautéed too, and added in with the ones that have been cooking all along. You want onions that’re still toothsome, surely, but others should be nearly melting, they’ve been in there so long.”

You saved me from a reproach, Mammy, Cochran thought after his first instant of puzzlement. “Whatever you say, Mrs. Pleasant.” In fact the old-woman personality had unexpectedly proven to be a terrific cook, and during the past week had prepared a couple of black-roux jambalayas that had even drawn enthusiasm from the preoccupied Mavranos. Cochran now remembered smelling onions cooking when he had come into the house. “Are you talking about what you’ve got simmering in there now?”

“Yes, a beef bourguignonne, and eggplant pirogis,” she said. Plumtree’s eyes had a heavy-lidded, almost Asian cast when Mammy Pleasant was on. “You’ve got three pirogis,” she went on. “Do you know how they are to be filled?”

He knew she was no longer talking about dinner—and he was fairly, sure of what she meant. “I think I know how to fill one,” he said bleakly, “temporarily, at least. I hope somebody else suggests it—I hope she thinks of it, herself!—so I won’t have to.”

“Partly you’re here to think of things,” came the old woman’s strong voice out of Plumtree’s mouth; “yes, partly each of you has been chosen for your wits and cleverness. But each of you has a specific task as well. Each of you, like the three wise men, has brought a gift to your helpless king in this January season of Epiphany. Do you know what gift it is you’ve brought him, Scant Cochran? Do you know what it is that you’re to give away?”

Cochran thought about that. Nina’s ghost, his now objectless and always deceived love for her? Well, yes, the god did appear to want that, but that couldn’t be his purpose here. “Something to do,” he said, “with the mark on my hand.”

Plumtree’s blond head nodded. “If all goes well this time, if you all generously do what the god generously asks, King Crane will be alive at midsummer, and you will no longer have in hand the god’s marker.”

Cochran realized that his mouth was open; he closed it, and then said, “That’s why I’m here, involved in this? To give away the—” What had Angelica called it at the broken temple on the end of the yacht-harbor peninsula? “—the Dionysus badge?”

“Boy, it’s the only reason you were allowed to volunteer to get the mark in the first place.”

“Allowed to—?” Cochran could feel his face heating up. In the Mount Sabu bar in Bellflower, when Janis had asked him why he didn’t get the mark removed, he had told her, I’m kind of proud of it…it’s my winemaker’s merit badge, an honorable battle scar. And he remembered Nina’s ghost telling him that when he had put his hand out to injury to save the god, thirty-four years ago, he had been like Androcles daring to pull the thorn from the lion’s paw in the old story; the lion had thereafter owed Androcles a debt of gratitude. And Cochran was surprised now at the hurt of learning that in his own case he had apparently only been meant to hold the golden beast’s favor for someone else, someone more highly esteemed—that it had never been for him. Like my wife’s love, he thought.

“So all along the god meant,” he said, forcing his voice not to hitch ludicrously, “for me to just hold the obligation in trust for Scott Crane? Why didn’t the god let f—let precious Crane earn the obligation himself, get his own hand half cut off?”

“The god, and Scott Crane too, was yoked in the harness of another king then, a bad king. The god had to incur the debt outside the king’s control but still within his own—that is, in a remote vineyard. I think that, as much as anything, you were chosen because of the similarity of your name to that of the favored boy who would one day be king.” She smiled at him, with no evident malice or sympathy. “As if the god needed a sign even to remember you. And later, it was probably just so that you would get a name closer to Scott that he broke your leg under a cask of his wine.” She reached out and gently touched his marked hand. “To be used by him—yes, even to ignominious destruction—is to be loved by him. You should be honored to have been judged worthy of being deceived and cheated in this way.”

Cochran let the hurt run out of himself as his shoulders relaxed. Spider Joe brought the two coins, he thought, and an oracular reading of Angelica’s cards; and died to do it, and ended up buried under an old Chevy Nova in a Long Beach parking lot. “And Cody brought her father,” he said dully.

“Yes. The king had to die, so that he would no longer be a stranger to the dark earth.”

Cochran frowned into the blue eyes that seemed for the moment to be of two slightly different colors. “I meant for what we’ve got to do next: make him tell us what we did wrong, what we should have done differently, last week. I didn’t mean—my God, woman, are you saying that Dionysus not only wants Crane restored to life, but wanted him to die too?”

“He’s no real king, no real representative of the god, if he doesn’t spend the pruning season of each year in the kingdom of darkness. Few kings have been thorough enough in their observations of the office to do that—to actually die, each year but the god does love Scott Crane.”

“To Crane’s misfortune. To the misfortune of all of us.”

“Yes,” she agreed, “the god loves all of us, in spite of our rebellions and failures.” She blinked around the room then. “I’m too alert—I’ll draw attention. Where are my penance shoes?”

“By the front door where you left ’em.”

She nodded and shuffled past him, her shoulders, too, slumped in unsought humility. “I’ll probably forget, once I’ve got them on—but the dinner will be ready to serve at sundown.”

And I’ll have something to serve to poor Cody, Cochran thought as he followed the old woman out of the bedroom. A flop that even Valorie might quail at. It makes me sick to think of him in here, in me.

ANGELICA HAD taken a bus into the city early that morning, and had spent the day consulting magos and santeros in the run-down Mission and Hunter’s Point districts south of Market Street. She came plodding back up the driveway just at sundown, and grabbed a beer from the refrigerator and slumped on the couch in the living room while the others ate Mammy Pleasant’s beef bourguignonne. Angelica had had a late lunch of pork tamales and menudo and Tecate beer, and couldn’t now face a plate of steaming, vinous beef stew and a glass of room-temperature Zinfandel.

When Kootie and Pele had begun clanking the emptied dishes together and carrying them out to the kitchen sink, Angelica walked into the dining room.

She hadn’t looked behind the door when she had come in, to see if the eucalyptus-soled shoes were leaned against the wall, but by now she could recognize Cody Plumtree.

“Our supernatural escrow is about to close,” Angelica said, loudly enough for Pete and Kootie to hear in the kitchen. “Tet is only three days off, and we have no clue about what we’re supposed to do, this time. My people in the barrios and ghettos are getting signs of something big cooking, but for all their painted bells and chicken blood they don’t know what or where. Our crazy old lady keeps saying that Crane or C-cren will direct us when the time comes—but the old lady’s just a ghost.”

“Sid,” said Cody Plumtree, “speak up.”

Sid Cochran pushed his chair back. “C-cren has got a, a horrible proposal,” he said, “which as far as I’m concerned anybody here can veto—especially Cody.”

Angelica glanced at Cody, who was sitting across from Cochran in the corner against the kitchen-side wall and had just lit a cigarette—and she got the feeling that Cody knew what Cochran was going to say, and hated it, but was not going to interrupt now, nor veto later.

“Omar Salvoy,” said Cochran, “that’s Cody and Janis’s dad, who killed Scott Crane, came on today, here—he was talking on the phone to our Dr. Armentrout.”

Armentrout! thought Angelica. That’s the man who shot Kootie! She darted a fearful glance toward the front door as she touched the .45 automatic at her belt and opened her mouth to speak.

But Cochran had held up his hand. “Wait. Salvoy faded off while they were speaking, and Cody and I heard Armentrout going on talking; Salvoy had not told the doctor where we are. But—” Cochran paused and shook his head. “But, from what Armentrout was saying, it was pretty clear that Salvoy knows what we did wrong, when we tried to bring Crane back to life last week.” He glanced at Cody, who just stared straight back at him. “I think,” Cochran went on stolidly, “we’ve got to do the Follow-the-Queen trick to talk to Omar Salvoy.” Angelica whistled a descending note.

“Why should he tell us anything?” interrupted Pete from the kitchen doorway.

“Valorie can make him, I bet,” said Cody. “She could be on with him, if you call her, like a second file showing in split-screen on a computer monitor.” Once again Angelica found herself admiring the woman. “It’s a—goddammit, it’s a good idea. My father probably would know. He knew enough to nearly become the king, twenty-five years ago, and from the day he exited his smashed body he’s had one foot in India.”

“And I think I could effectively threaten him,” said Kootie quietly from behind Pete.

Angelica stared at her adopted son warily. “With what, hijo mio?.

Ever since the seventeenth, when he had run away from the Star Motel before dawn and reappeared in the afternoon, having spent some part of the morning talking with Mammy Pleasant in her boardinghouse kitchen, Angelica thought Kootie seemed somehow far older than his fourteen years. All he had told Pete and herself about that morning was that he had killed someone, but Angelica had known that much when she had simply met his eyes as he’d lain shot and bleeding in the planter outside the Star Motel office—behind the physical shock that had paled his face and constricted his pupils, independent of that injury, dwarfing it, the new horror and guilt had been clearly evident to her.

“In ‘92,” said Kootie, “when Sherman Oaks or Long John Beach tried to eat the Edison ghost out of me, he had to lure it up toward the surface of my mind first. This was when we were in the ‘boat on the boat,’ the van inside the truck. And from what Miss Plumtree has said about her psychic striptease session with that doctor, he was trying to draw a personality to the surface, to bite it off. The one on top is the one that’s vulnerable.” The boy bared his teeth in a humorless smile. “It seems like a personality brought up by this Follow-the-Queen trick is…stuck in the on position for at least a little while. I think I could validly threaten to…bite him off.”

Angelicas ears were ringing. “But,” she said, “no, you cant—it’s like slamming bad heroin, Kootie, you’d have, his memories in you like heavy metal—his poisonous life force—” Much worse than whatever you’re carrying now, she thought helplessly, trust me.

“Besides,” said Pete Sullivan, staring in obvious dismay at his adopted son, “he’s not a ghost. He’s a full-power person. You’d—you’d probably blow up!”

“I said validly threaten” Kootie sat down in the dining-room chair next to Plumtree, where Pete had been sitting. “If I can’t be sure I can’t do it, neither can he And I think I could kill him, depending on how strong he is—swat him off the top of Miss Plumtree’s mind like driving a golf ball off a tee.”

Oh, don’t be flippant and proud of it, Kootie, thought Angelica unhappily; and she would have said it out loud but for the knowledge that they might in fact need him to do it, and if so she didn’t want to hamper him in advance.

“Without killing ‘Miss Plumtree’?” asked Cochran, his voice hoarse and his eyes wide with skepticism.

Kootie raised his eyebrows and squinted across the table at him—then peripherally caught Angelica’s anguished, vicariously mortified gaze; and the boy instantly looked down at the tablecloth, his face reddening. “I don’t know,” he whispered. “I don’t know if he isn’t stronger than me, even. He’s older than me, and meaner, so he might be.” He looked up, clearly abashed. “But—see?—I can believably threaten him with it.”

“Just don’t kill me before he’s said what to do,” said Plumtree with what Angelica recognized as hollow, exhausted bravado. Plumtree held up her hands, and her voice skidded up and down the scale as she said, “Sid, do you have some duct tape?”

Kootie looked nauseous.

We won’t do it tonight,” Angelica said hastily. Plumtree was like a flexed piece of tempered glass, and Angelica was afraid one measured tap might actually shatter her mind into a thousand tiny personalities, no one of them more sentient than an infant. And Kootie wasn’t looking much better himself. “Not if he’s already been out once today,” Angelica went on in her most self-assured doctor-tone. “Tomorrow will be plenty of time.”

Both Kootie and Plumtree sagged in what looked like uncomfortable relief.

“Then for God’s sake right now get me a drink,” said Plumtree in a husky voice. “Sid, you got vodka?”

“Got vodka,” said Cochran, getting up out of his chair like an old man.

“Got a lot of it?”

Cochran just nodded as he shambled into the kitchen.

He paused by the sink before reaching up to the liquor cabinet overhead, and stared at the glittering white mound of tiny soap bubbles that stood motionless above the dish-filled sink. And he experienced a vivid memory-flash of how Nina had looked, so many times, wearing an apron and leaning over this sink; and all at once, silently except for a nearly inaudible hissing, the soap foam diminished away to nothing, leaving the dishes exposed poking out of the surface of the gray water.

Her ghost is gone, he thought giddily as he reached up for the vodka bottle, but my memories of her apparently still have some palpable force.

We’re not… finished, yet.

CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

I’ll hide my silver beard in a gold beaver…

—William Shakespeare,

Troilus and Cressida

COCHRAN woke up in his own bed, alone, roused by the gunning of the Torino engine in the back yard. From the gray light filtering into the bedroom through the lace curtains, he muzzily judged that it must be about seven in the morning. He had sat up drinking with Plumtree until after midnight; and when at last he had got up unsteadily and announced his intention of retiring to the couch, Plumtree had told him to take the bed. I’ll sleep on the couch, she had said, enunciating carefully. I can see it from here, so I know I’ll be able to find it.

As much as anything, they had been discussing immortal animals. Cody had insisted that carp never died naturally, and survived the winter frozen solid in pond ice; and Cochran had told her about toads that had been found alive in bubbles in solid rock. When the animals in question began to be imaginary ones from children’s books and science-fiction movies, like the Pushmi-pullyu and E. T., Cochran had just followed the drift of the conversation, and talked about Reepicheep the mouse in the Narnia books, and the bread-and-butter-flies from Through the Looking-Glass. Plumtree’s voice had changed several times, and she had vacillated sharply between skepticism and credulity—but since Cochran was the only other person in the room she had not had to address him by name, and the nearest electric light that was on had been the one in the kitchen and Cochran couldn’t tell when it might have flickered, and their talk had been abstract and speculative enough to keep him from guessing who he might have been talking to at any particular moment. He hadn’t been aware of any obvious archaisms that would have indicated lines quoted from Shakespeare, though he hadn’t by any means caught everything she had said; and if Tiffany had been on, she had been subdued, and content with vodka.

He got into a fresh shirt now and pulled his jeans back on and opened the bedroom door. The car noise had evidently awakened the Sullivans too—he could hear Kootie and Pete talking quietly behind the closed door of the spare bedroom.

Mavranos was sitting at the dining room table frowning over the Saturday San Francisco Chronicle. In front of him a cup of coffee sat steaming, and on the opposite side of the table stood fourteen mismatched cups and tumblers. Cochran padded over barefoot and peered at them; each had a grainy white sediment puddled in the bottom.

“You better pick up some more Alka-Seltzer when you go out,” said Mavranos quietly; “a big bottle. I guess each of the girls had a hangover, and couldn’t stomach drinking out of another one’s used glass.”

Cochran stared at the cups and glasses on the table. “Fourteen?” he whispered in awe.

“Each one for a different bad flop, I reckon,” Mavranos said with a shrug. “Like chopping up a starfish.” He lifted his coffee cup in both hands to take a sip. “I kind of admire her restraint in having only fourteen, after twenty-seven years. If I had the option, I’d be splitting off all the time.” Softly he sang a line Cochran believed was from a Grateful Dead song: “‘I need a miracle ev-ery day.’”

Cochran began carrying the cups and glasses into the kitchen, gripping three with the fingers of each hand; and when he came back from carrying the first six out of the dining room, Kootie was wordlessly picking up four more.

When they had brought the last of the cups and glasses out to the counter, the Torino hood audibly slammed down outside; and after Cochran had rinsed out two of the cups and filled them with fresh coffee and carried them back to the dining-room table for himself and Kootie, he heard Plumtree come battering in through the kitchen door and run more water in the sink. A moment later she shuffled into the dining room with a steaming McDonald’s mug and slumped down into the chair beside Kootie. She was clearly Cody, and her T-shirt was correctly marked SUNDAY in crude black letters.

“You’re awake,” she observed as she lit a Marlboro.

“Somehow,” agreed Cochran.

“The Torino’s running again, a lot better than before. Let’s get this thing done.” She squinted at Kootie. “Your mom and dad up yet?”

“I think they are,” said Kootie nervously. “I think they’ll be out in a minute.”

“Sid,” said Cody, “if this goes real wrong, leave the Torino parked somewhere it’s sure to be towed, will you? And leave the registration on the front seat. Oh, and the Jenkins purse is in the trunk—first mail that to the Jenkins woman.”

“I—won’t hurt you,” said Kootie.

“It’s not you I’m scared of, kiddo—but thanks.”

Pete and Angelica Sullivan came in then, and Angelica sat down at the table while Pete went into the kitchen.

“This chair is no good,” said Plumtree, wiggling the arms of her dining-room chair. “My snips-and-snails parent could bust it to kindling. Let’s go out back and use one of the iron patio chairs.” She had one more sip of her coffee and then stood up.

“What,” said Angelica, wide-eyed, “right now? Before breakfast?”

“Well I’m just not hungry, somehow,” said Plumtree. “And the sooner we get my job done, the sooner you can have your old lady in the wooden shoes cook you up some fucking gumbo or something, right?”

“Sorry,” said Angelica.

“Shit,” said Plumtree. “If her nose isn’t bleeding too bad for her to cook, by then.”

FIVE MINUTES later Mavranos, Angelica, Pete, Kootie, and Cochran were sitting, uncomfortably like judges, on one side of the long picnic table under the patio roof between the kitchen and the backyard greenhouse, facing the chair in which Plumtree now sat confined by strips of duct tape wrapped tightly around her wrists and waist and ankles. The sky was low and gray behind the pepper trees that overhung the yard; and though the breeze was chilly, Cochran knew that wasn’t why Plumtree was visibly shivering. Inside Mavranos’s open denim jacket Cochran had seen the checkered wooden grip of the revolver tucked under the man’s belt.

For a few moments Plumtree waited blankly, relaxed enough for her teeth to chatter; then she rolled her head back to stare up at the beams of the patio roof, and she whispered, “Valorie, whatever you make at your job, you’re overpaid.” She took a deep breath, and Cochran did too. “Mom!” called Plumtree hoarsely.

Then she lowered her head to stare at the five people sitting across from her at the table, and her shoulder muscles flexed under her T-shirt. At last her gaze fixed on Cochran. “Are we near the sea?” she asked him in the shriller voice of Plumtree’s mother. Are you going to call her up now, and send her to India?”

“No,” Cochran said. “We need to learn some things Omar Salvoy knows. We’re going to call him up, and question him. You can see that he’ll be restrained.”

“I can see a car,” protested Plumtree’s mother, “and I can smell the ocean! Are you too squeamish to kill her body? You said you loved her!”

At the same time Angelica was leaning forward from between Mavranos and Pete to say, quietly, “Sid, this isn’t even a ghost of her mother, this is just a, an ‘internalized perpetrator,’ why are you talking to it—”

“As far as Cody’s concerned,” Cochran interrupted, “it’s her mom.” He looked back at Plumtree taped into the chair. “Trust me,” he said, “I won’t let him have her.”

“We won’t let him have her,” Mavranos agreed.

“Oh, Jesus,” said the mother’s voice. She looked back to Cochran. “I hope you’re a lot smarter than you look, mister.” She sighed shakily. “Go ahead, and God be with you.”

“Omar Salvoy,” said Cochran, and he felt Kootie tense beside him.

Plumtree’s eyes hadn’t left Cochran’s face, but now it was an amused, crafty, almost reptilian gaze. Again the arms flexed, but the tape held, even though the muscles had bulked out more. “Hdll-lo, baby!” said the man’s voice from Plumtree’s mouth. Cochran’s nerves were twanging with the impulse to run, but his muscles felt as loose as wet cement.

“Valorie,” said Cochran then, breathlessly.

One of Plumtree’s pupils visibly tightened down to a pinprick. Split-screen, thought Cochran.

Like a pole-vaulter visually picking out each spot his feet would touch on the run to the bar, Cochran prepared his words; then, carefully, he spoke: “What did we do wrong twelve days ago, when we tried to get Scott Crane restored to life?”

“Oh, eat me.” The childish taunt rode incongruously on the deep, vibrating voice.

“I will, if you don’t tell us,” spoke up Kootie. “I can.”

“AY,” CAME,” a new, flat voice from Plumtree’s lips, speaking to Kootie, “sharp and piercing, to maintain his truth; whiles thy consuming canker eats his falsehood.” The face contorted and gasped for breath, and the man’s voice added, “Dammit, that’s Henry the Sixth, Part One! Valorie, you traitorous bitch! Who do you think you got all your lines from, anyway? Do you remember Love’s Labour’s Lost? We to ourselves prove false, by being once false for ever to be true to those that make us both—fair ladies, you.’”

“Valorie is on our side,” said Kootie, “and she’ll know it if you lie.”

Plumtree’s gaze fixed on Kootie, and her teeth were bared.

Kootie’s shoulder jumped against Cochran’s arm, and then the boy leaned tensely forward—

—The air was suddenly colder, and Cochran thought the pepper trees shook in no breezc—

And in the same instant Plumtree’s head was rocked back as if from a physical blow. “Easy, kid!” gasped the man’s voice. “Unless you want all the fair ladies dead!”

“I bet you can tell I pulled that punch,” said Kootie. His voice was calm and level, though Cochran could feel the boy shivering, “I have used it full strength, before today. And I don’t believe that punching you dead out of that head would hurt any of the Plumtree ladies.”

“You haven’t yet seen any of my strength, boy.” Salvoy’s voice seemed to vibrate in Cochran’s ribs. “That was a love-pat a moment ago. I killed your king, and I did not flinch when I did it. But I don’t want you to be hurt.” The teeth were still bared, and now the lips curled in a smile. “I’m prob’ly the only one here who doesn’t want you to kill yourself.”

Angelica started to say something, but a rumbling, liquid growl from Plumtree’s throat stilled her.

“You’re the one with the wound in your side, boy,” the man’s voice went on, loudly and almost anguished, “it’s always been you that would have to drink the real pagadebiti, even supposing you assholes could ever find a bottle of the stuff. It’s you, Baby Gawain, that would have to be possessed by the actual god, abandon yourself to his…bestial mercies. You sure you’re up for that, Gumby Gunslinger?”

Cochran heard elbows shift on the wooden table somewhere to his right, and guessed it was Angelica.

Plumtree’s gaze swung toward Angelica, and the flat Valorie voice said, “Pardon me, madam: little joy have I to breathe this news; yet what I say is true.”

“Were we at the right place, at least?” asked Mavranos insistently. “Out at those ruins by the yacht club? Mammy Pleasant was talking about a spot out on that shore.” “You were in the right place,” said Omar Salvoy, “but you didn’t have the right wine, and I’m glad to say I don’t even know where you would get—” Abruptly Plumtree choked; and then Valorie’s voice said, “Upon my soul a lie, a wicked lie. Touching this dreadful sight twice seen of us—you may approve our eyes, and speak to it. Looks it not like the king? Thou art a scholar; speak to it.” And immediately Salvoy’s voice shook breathlessly out of the mouth: “Valorie, when I have you alone under me—”

“At those other ruins, she means,” said Kootie, “the ruins of the baths, by that restaurant. That’s where we saw Crane’s ghost. And it was the second time Plumtree had seen it.”

The Plumtree body leaned back in the chair and took a deep breath. “You all were so embarrassed by that, I bet,” said Salvoy, grinning. “Your exalted king, probably babbling nonsense and dressed like a bum, right? Or naked, looking like a crazy man. Brought down in the world, and how. Dizz-gusting! And you sensible folks probably just ran away from him. Think how pleased he must have been with his friends.”

“I,” stammered Mavranos, “ran after him—!”

“The palindrome should have been a clue,” Pete Sullivan interrupted, making a chopping gesture at Mavranos. “The Valorie personality gave Cochran one line of that, at the ruins, and we knew that palindromes were good for nothing but drawing ghosts.”

“Palindrome?” said Salvoy. “What palindrome?”

“Sit on a potato pan, Otis,” Kootie told him.

“And that foghorn was a clue,” said Mavranos. “I bet the foghorn we heard in that motel room at dawn was the one you’d hear out at the Sutro Baths ruins. Shit, I even noticed it.”

Plumtree’s face was red and twitching, but in a mockingly conversational tone Salvoy asked, “Is one of you ready to die? That’s part of it, you know. To get a life back, the god wants one in exchange. Even to repay an old debt-of-honor,” he said, with a scorching glance at Cochran, “he can’t violate his own math. And blood—fresh blood has got to be spilled. Splintered bone, torn flesh, before he’ll consider it consummated. Ask apple-o’-my-eye Valorie if you think I’m lying about this.” Plumtree’s head rocked back, and the Valorie voice said, “That this is true, father, behold his blood. ’Tis very true.” Her head came down and Salvoy’s furious gaze swept across them. “And what body is your king going to take, now? Some bums? That’s another death, in addition to the god’s bargain!” He gave a harshly jovial laugh, and then Plumtree’s eyes squeezed shut. “I’m fading out, thank Ra. Think about what I’ve said Koot Hoomie—and any of the rest of you that care—”

Plumtree’s chin fell forward onto her chest, and for a moment she just panted. Then she looked up, in blank puzzlement; but when her eyes darted to Cochran she looked away again quickly. “Oh, it’s Scant,” she said. “I can’t stay here.” She flexed her arms and legs and then said again, in a voice shrilling with panic, “I can’t stay here! Arky, what’s going on?” She smacked her lips. “Was my father just here?”

“Can I talk to Cody?” said Cochran, standing up from the table. He was aware now that his shirt was clinging to his back with sweat.

“Nobody can talk to anybody, please,” said Plumtree quickly. Her hands were fists. “Arky, get me out of this!”

Mavranos had stood up too, and was opening his lock-back pocket-knife one-handed as he strode around the table to the chair. “Relax, Janis,” he was saying gruffly, “you’re gonna hurt yourself. Here.” He crouched in front of her iron chair to swipe the knife blade through the duct tape on her wrists and ankles, then got up and went around to the back of the chair to cut the strips that bound her waist. “Sorry about this imposition,” he said to her as he helped her struggle to her feet. “Inquistion, even. We can explain it whenever you want to hear about it.”

“I just want to get inside,” she muttered quickly, “away from him.”

Cochran wondered which him she meant as he watched her shakily peel cut flaps of duct tape from her wrists. She was limping past him toward the kitchen door, with one hand on Mavranos’s shoulder and she looked at her wristwatch and then raised her elbow and tilted her head to hold the watch to her ear.

But of course it was a black Casio quartz watch, with a liquid-crystal display. Her gesture reminded Cochran of old black-and-white Timex ads on TV, and in his head he heard the old shampoo-ad song: You can always tell a Halo girl…

When, Cochran wondered, did I last see anybody with a watch that ticked?

Oh, Jesus, she’s still split-screen!

But her mismatched eyes had been watching him, and caught his instant comprehension, and as he opened his mouth now she was snatching the revolver from Mavranos’s belt and lunging, smashing the barrel and butt of the gun like brass knuckles into Cochran’s belly.

Then Plumtree had danced back away as Cochran folded and sat down jarringly hard on the concrete, and she slapped both hands to her face, her left palm covering her eyes and her right hand pointing the gun up at the patio roof.

And she pulled the trigger. The bang was a ringing impact in Cochran’s ears, and Plumtree’s head smacked the stucco wall at her back.

But an instant later the gun barrel was horizontal the muzzle pointed at Mavranos’s chest. Mavranos stepped back, his hands open and out to the sides.

“Mom,” Cochran choked, not able to get air into his lungs. “Janis’s…mom.” Fragments of wood and tar paper spun down from the new hole in the roof.

Angelica understood what he was doing, and called “Janis’s mom! Mother!”—before visibly wilting with the realization that Plumtree was deaf now.

As Mavranos shuffled backward across the patio deck, the gun muzzle swung toward Angelica. To Cochran’s tear-filled eyes it seemed to leave a rippling wake in the air. “Koot Hoomie,” said Salvoy, much too loudly, “pick up the roll of duct tape and come here—or I put a big hole in your mom. Scant-boy—reach slow into your pants pocket and throw me the car keys.” Plumtree wasn’t looking at Kootie directly.

Cochran thought he could feel ruptured organs inside himself ripping further open as he dragged his legs up under his torso and crawled across the concrete to Plumtree; he even had to reach out and brace himself with one hand on Plumtree’s blue-jeaned thigh as he hitchingly got up onto his knees. His lungs were chugging in his rib cage, but he still wasn’t able to draw any breath down his throat, and his vision had narrowed to a tunnel.

Plumtree had her back against the house wall, so she couldn’t retreat; Cochran was looking up at her, and his dizzy focus shifted effort fully outward from the ring of the .38-caliber muzzle to her eyes. Both of her eyes were wide and staring at him, the tiny-pupilled one and the dilated one, and at the bottom of his vision he could still blurrily see down the rifled barrel of the gun.

“Troilus, farewell!” hissed Valorie as Plumtree’s body shook with internal conflict against the stucco wall. The finger lifted out of the trigger-guard ring. “One eye yet looks on thee, but with my heart the other eye doth see.’ Then the Salvoy voice grated, “No,” and the finger wobbled back down onto the trigger, and whitened.

Abruptly a youthful brown right hand sprang into Cochran’s narrow field of vision and closed over the muzzle, and from above him Kootie’s voice said, “You want this to be your right hand one day, don’t you? Will you shoot it off?”

Plumtree couldn’t have heard what the boy had said, but her eyes lifted. And Kootie’s gaze must have caught hers, for she suddenly convulsed sideways across the wall onto the projecting hose faucet as Kootie crouched along with her and violently twisted the gun in her hand.

Cochran threw himself onto her back as she rolled off the faucet and thudded heavily to the concrete, and he too was grabbing for the gun—and when he saw the hammer jump back he got his thumb in under it as it came down.

At last Kootie yanked it away, tearing a gash in the base of Cochran’s thumb. Cochran was breathing at last, in abrading gasps.

With a solid boom Mavranos rebounded off the wall then and fell to his knees on Plumtree’s right arm, and the roll of duct tape shrilled as he tore a long strip free and wrapped it around her wrist; then he had grabbed her other arm and wrapped tape around that wrist too.

Her back was rising and falling as she panted, and after a moment she rolled her head so that she could squint up sideways at Cochran. “How’d it,” she gasped with a bloody rictus of a smile, “go?”

Her nose was bleeding, though Cochran couldn’t guess whether it was from the physical stresses of Salvoy’s visitation or from having collided with the concrete deck. “Can you hear me?” he managed to croak loudly.

Cochran’s heart ached to see how wrinkled her eyelids were as she closed her eyes.

“Yes, Sid, oh, shut up!” She was gasping for breath and her bloody upper lip was twitching away from her teeth. “God, Sid, I hurt! Did I fall off the roof? What the fuck happened?”

“Cut her loose, Arky,” choked Cochran, in horror, as he braced his hands on the concrete deck and carefully climbed off her legs.

“She may still be split-screen,” came Angelica’s voice from behind him.

“Not—Cody.” Cochran reached out his jigging, bleeding hand and gently touched Plumtree’s shoulder. “We can—trust Cody.”

And in fact Mavranos was already knifing the tape off of her wrists.

CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN

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

Between our Ilium and where she resides

Let it be called the wild and wand’ring flood,

Ourself the merchant, and this sailing Pandar

Our doubtful hope, our convoy, and our bark.

—William Shakespeare,

Troilus and Cressida

ANGELICA wanted to look at Plumtree’s bashed ribs and possibly sprained hand, but when Cochran and Mavranos had helped Plumtree to her feet and walked her into the house, she shook them off.

“Leave me be,” she said irritably, leaning over the kitchen sink while blood dripped from her nose. “It’s just a spell of the spasmodics.” She grabbed a dishtowel and pressed it to her face. “Get Teresa to fetch me a cup of Balm Tea,” she said through the rowel, “with some gin in it.” Then she blinked around at the low-ceilinged white kitchen she was standing in, with its blocky white refrigerator and the gleaming black box of the microwave oven. “I mean, a glass of Z-Zinfandel,” she amended querulously. “And my bark-soled penance shoes.”

“No,” said Cochran sharply, “not yet. Sit down, Mrs. Pleasant. Have some coffee. Arky, get her a cup of coffee. Listen, we’ve learned some things about Crane’s resurrection.”

He felt goose bumps tickle against the sleeves of his shirt then, for when the woman looked at him, her forehead and high cheekbones seemed for a moment to be patrician with age, and momentarily her blond hair appeared white in the shine of the overhead fluorescent lights; then it was Plumtree’s face, with both eyes the same shade of blue, though the eyelids were still full and vaguely Asian. She sat down in one of the kitchen chairs stiffly, dabbing at her nose with the bloody towel. Her nose wasn’t bleeding anymore, and the Mammy Pleasant personality didn’t appear to feel any pains in her ribs.

Raindrops began tapping against the window over the sink.

“I tried to tell you people everything,” said Mammy Pleasants cautious voice, “right from the first, well in time for you to have done it correctly on St. Sulpice’s Day. I was supposed to be your intercessor—I told you then that I would have to indwell one of you, but you thought I just wanted a body to take the fresh air in.”

“We’re listening now,” said Angelica. “And you’ve got the body now.”

“I’ll tell you nothing, now,” said Pleasant’s voice. “Your Chinaman holiday isn’t until the day after tomorrow. Ask me about it then, respectfully, and I might tell you what to do, and I might not. At any rate I can have wine for one more day, and my shoes”

Kootie had started toward the hall, but Cochran said, “Don’t get the shoes, Kootie They apparently work as a damper to keep her personality from being conspicuous from being a beacon to this house—maybe she seems to be a tree, to psychic radar when she’s wearing ’em—but I think they’re also a damper on her intelligence I think they’re like dope.”

“Now I will assuredly tell you nothing.”

“But you’ve said that the god’s purpose is your purpose too,” said Angelica in a tone of sympathetic concern. She knelt, beside Plumtree. “And that the god’s purpose is to bring Crane back, as king. We need to know what to do.” Cochran guessed that Angelica was already resolved to ditch this whole enterprise, and every person that resided in the Plumtree head, and simply wanted to find out as much as possible before fleeing; but he had to admit that she projected sincerity. Doctors are trained to do that, he thought.

“The god’s purpose,” said Pleasant, stubbornly shaking Plumtree’s tangled blond hair. “You’re to take two old women to the sea, and throw them in, because the god’s purpose doesn’t include poor frightened old ghosts trying to sleep in some frail shelter out of the rain.” She turned to Angelica, blinking rapidly. “What if we did fight him? Who won?”

Two old women? thought Cochran. She mentioned another old woman right at the first, on the Solville TV—Angelica said it sounded like a sewing circle Who’s the other one? Plumtree’s phantom mother?

“Could I have insisted?” the old woman went on. Plumtree’s eyes were blinking rapidly. “I tried to insist! Through your, your ‘boob tube’! You could have accomplished it then, on St. Sulpice’s Day, if you had listened to me.”

“And if I hadn’t run away,” said Kootie

“We were well down the wrong track already, by that morning,” Mavranos told the boy gruffly. “Going to the wrong shore, with the wrong wine….” To Plumtree’s sunburned face, he said, “You could have told us more. We might not have listened, but…”

“I needed to be in a body! I told you that much! How could I think, without a brain?” Plumtree’s eyes were blinking rapidly.

Mavranos’s nostrils were flared and the corners of his mouth were drawn down. “You wanted a body to take the fresh air in,” he said flatly.

Rain was drumming now against the window over the sink, and Cochran could see the bobbing stems of Nina’s window-box basil outside. The back door was open, and the cold draft smelled of wet clay.

“I wanted some time to rest,” Mammy Pleasant said in a near-whisper, perhaps agreeing with him. “This little time, these little days sitting with the orchids in the greenhouse, and cooking for people again! I don’t see how anybody can describe total oblivion as rest—you couldn’t even call it losing yourself, because for losing to go on there has to be a loser, and there wouldn’t be even that. Oh, believe me, the god’s purpose has only been delayed.”

“And made…costlier,” said Mavranos, very quietly. His brown hands were clenched in fists against his thighs.

“Let me tell you about Omar Salvoy’s purpose,” Cochran said, leaning back against the refrigerator. “According to Plumtree’s mom, he wants to get into the right male body and become this Fisher King, and then get Plumtree pregnant—specifically, get Valorie pregnant. Valorie is evidently the core child inside Plumtree, and she’s apparently dead. I’m sure Cody and Janis don’t know that. Salvoy believes that if he can father a child by a dead woman—well, not a whole child; I gather it would be just a sort of deformed, unconnected head—that partial child will be a living, obligated piece of Dionysus.”

“Jesus!” exclaimed Angelica, looking away from Plumtree to gape up at him.

Kootie was hugging himself, grasping his elbows; and Cochran thought that this revelation had somehow stirred the boy’s memories of whatever devastating thing it was that he had done twelve days ago, after he had run away from the motel on Lombard Street before dawn.

For several seconds no one spoke.

Plumtree’s head was bowed. “Yes,” Mammy Pleasant whispered finally, “if he was the king, he could force that. If he had the body with the wounded side, and if he made a mother of Death, he could stand in loco parentis to the god. Other kings have sometimes achieved degrees of domination over the god, in other ways.”

“Loco parentis is right,” said Mavranos hollowly.

Plumtree’s head snapped back, throwing her blond locks back from her forehead. “The god, in that form,” she said, “and that king, would have uses for a couple of old ghost ladies.” Her face was impassive, but tears spilled down her cheeks. “Thank you, Scant Cochran, for making me understand that the oblivion in the sea is one of the god’s mercies. I do thank him for the offered gift of ceasing to exist. And I’m grateful, too, that it must be the last of his gifts to me.”

Cochran opened his mouth to speak, but Mammy Pleasant rapped Plumtree’s knuckles on the kitchen table. “I will speak, now, and you all will listen,” she said. “When your king’s castrated father was king, he ruled in Las Vegas. And your king ruled and may rule again in the place that rhymes with Arcadia. But there was a king who cultivated the miraculous Zinfandel vine in San Diego until 1852, and who then castled to Sonoma, north of San Francisco, where he grew the vines in the Valley of the Moon, between Sonoma Mountain and Bismark Knob. The god originally intended me to be queen to this king, but I had irretrievably rebelled against the god a dozen years earlier.”

“This was…Harass-thee,” said Kootie.

“Haraszthy,” said Plumtree, subtly correcting the boy’s pronunciation. “Agoston Haraszthy, who took the title of ‘Count’ for the grandeur in it. In 1855 he was made assayer and melter and refiner of gold at the United States Mint at Mission Street south of Market; and the furnaces burned all day and all night, and after he quit, the roofs of the surrounding houses were all deeply stained with misted gold.” The reminiscent smile on Plumtree’s face somehow implied lines and creases that weren’t actually there. “That was a kingly thing, if you like! But, like most of the men who attain the throne, he refused to submit to real death in the winter. And so in the thirteenth year of his reign, 1861, the worst winter floods in the history of California devastated Haraszthy’s precious grapevines; and in 1863, the surviving vines withered in the worst drought in twenty-five years. I was happy to help in undermining this king’s power, and in 1868 I bought the Washington Street property that had housed the original greenhouse-shrine devoted to the Zinfandel in California, and I tore out the sacred old vines and converted the place to a boardinghouse.”

She stared curiously around at the kitchen, as if to fix the details of it in her memory. “After that sacrilege,” she went on, “Haraszthy was getting no spiritual power from the god at all, no psychic subsidy, and so he just abandoned his ordained throne and the American West altogether, and he fled south all the way to Nicaragua—to distill rum, from unsanctified sugarcanes!” She laughed gently and shook her head. “He was hiding from Dionysus, who was without a king now, and therefore not as close to human affairs. I decided to put them both out of my picture—and so on the night of June 24th of the next year, on St. John’s Eve, I celebrated the very first voodoo ceremony to be held in the American West, and in the woods out along the San Jose Road my people danced and drummed and drank rum and worshipped Damballa the Great Serpent, and I conveyed my prayers to him. And twelve days later, down in Nicaragua, the Dionysus who was no longer very human found his faithless king—Haraszthy was eaten by an alligator, which was Sebek-Re, a very crude, early Egyptian personification of the fertility-and-death god.”

Cochran looked away from the ophidian eyes and the somehow distinctly Egyptian-seeming smile, and saw that his companions too were avoiding looking into Plumtree’s face. He thought of the broken skeleton out in the greenhouse in the rain, and he wished someone would close the back door.

“I did not know, at first,” Mammy Pleasant’s voice went on carefully, “that the kinghood had rebounded like a snapped rope when Haraszthy fled this continent in 1868. Dionysus,” she said, with a look that Cochran could feel on the skin of his face, “places great stock in names, in clues and similarities in names; and a weapons manufacturer back East who was known as ‘the rifle king,’ and who, among other fortuitous resemblances, had the middle name ‘Fisher,’ became the unintended and unknowing and unsanctified focus of the kinghood. A…measurable westward deflection!…of my magics, made me aware of the obstruction of him, and in 1880 I held another voodoo ceremony—this time in the basement of my grand house on Octavia Street. Again my people drummed and danced to the Great Serpent, and in the December of that year this poor misplaced king-apparent died. He had a middle-aged son, and in the following March the son died too, of consumption, leaving behind a childless forty-one-year-old widow. They had had one child, a daughter, who had perished of the marasmus back in ’66 at the age of a month-and-a-half.”

“Is she the…other old-woman ghost?” asked Cochran.

Plumtree’s head nodded. “And she’s a rebel, like me, now. She wasn’t always—right after her husband died, she consulted a spiritualist, who told her that she was obligated to the god for the attentions he had so generously paid to her family, and that in return she must use her inherited fortune to build an infinite chapel: a gateway for straying ghosts to leave this world through, and go on to the next. And she did, only a couple of years after her precious husband had died. She set about building an enormous house designed to attract ghosts, and then not let them get out; construction of it never stopped for nigh forty years, there was hammering and sawing day and night, and new doors and halls every day—doors and stairways that led nowhere, windows in the floors, faucets way up where no one could reach—and about the only way the ghosts could get out was to be unmade and sent off to the god through one of the fireplaces. She had forty-seven fireplaces there, before she died.”

“I thought hammering repelled ghosts,” said Cochran.

“No,” snapped Angelica, “banging, hammering sounds, the racket disorients ’em. It jolts them out of the groove, resets their controls back to zero—cashes out bets they’d have wanted to let ride.” She looked at Pete. “Of course we know what this crazy house is.”

“And who the old lady was,” Pete Sullivan agreed. “It’s the Winchester House, a few miles down the 280 from here.”

“Winchester,” said Pleasant’s voice out of Plumtree’s mouth. “Yes. And like me she was chosen to be a caretaker and communicant of the god’s pagadebiti wine—the consecrated Zinfandel. But one night in 1899, even while I was being evicted from my own overthrown house and taken into custody by the idiot god-fragment known as Bacus, Winchester found a black handprint on the wall of her chapel, in the wine cellar, and she knew that she was being called upon to give over to the god her own husband’s ghost…and she couldn’t bring herself to obey that, to forget him. And, even while knowing that she’d be punished, she rebelled: she walled up the wine cellar. When the god came to take charge of my wandering ghost three days after Easter in 1906, he struck her too, en passant, with the earthquake of his arrival—the top floors of her house fell onto her bedroom, and she was trapped in there for hours. But she didn’t repent her rebellion—after her servants freed her, she boarded up that whole wing of the house, and spent six months living on water, aboard a houseboat called The Ark, in the south bay here by the Dumbarton Bridge.”

“And the scrap lumber,” said Pete, “from the collapsed upper floors, was used to build a maternity hospital in Long Beach in the 1920s; probably because of the ghost-confusion influences in it.” He looked at Cochran. “That hospital eventual! became our apartment building—Solville.”

“When Winchester returned to her house,” Pleasant went on, “she was masking herself against the god as well as the ghosts now. And when she eventually died she left instructions that her ghost was to be caught, and hidden. And so it was, and now the god wants you to bring her, and me, to him. You’ll need to find a guide.”

Mavranos was rubbing his forehead.

“Omar Salvoy says that someone will have to die, probably more than one person, for our king to come back to life,” said Cochran. “He says there will have to be bloodshed.”

“Of course,” said Pleasant.

Angelica straightened up beside Pleasant’s chair. “And he says that Kootie, the boy here, has to be possessed by Dionysus.”

“Everybody does, eventually,” said Pleasant calmly.

“Well, that’s simply out, I’m afraid,” said Angelica, shaking her head. “I don’t know what’s going to happen, but that’s the thing that’s not going to happen. We’ve got nearly two clear days to run away.”

Plumtree’s shoulders bobbed with tired laughter. “Don’t try Nicaragua,” said Pleasant’s voice.

“No, Mom,” said Kootie. “What, should I save myself for Omar Salvoy?” He was speaking softly, not looking at any of the others in the kitchen, “if the, the god, is offering me his debt-payer wine, I’m very damn ready to take a drink.” He went on even more quietly, “And I do owe a beheading. He might not take it, but I owe it.”

“We’ll see about that,” said Angelica, bur her voice was too loud, and Cochran thought she looked lost and scared.

“How do we get a guide?” asked Mavranos.

Angelica threw him a surprised, hurt look. “Arky, Kootie is not—”

“On the resurrection day,” said Pleasant, “you are to give a ride to a hitch-hiker. In your motor-car. I have now told you this. And this woman,” she said, touching Plumtree’s forehead, “is to carry with her, at all times, that gold cigarette lighter. I have now told you this.” She nodded virtuously.

And of course you’d have told us two weeks ago, thought Cochran angrily, if we’d simply asked: Should we be picking up hitch-hikers? Should Plumtree hang on to that Dunhill lighter?

“Go ahead and get her goddamn shoes, Kootie,” he said. He crossed to the back door and pushed it closed, not looking out through the broken glass; he was afraid he might see the naked figure of Scott Crane’s ghost out there, sitting in the wet grass and possibly even mournfully looking this way.

CODY CAME back on just as the sun was redly silhouetting the northernmost peaks of the Montara Mountains. Cochran was in the driveway, walking around the shrouded Suburban with a tire-pressure gauge, when through the open living-room window he I heard a cry and a thudding fall.

He let the gauge clatter to the driveway pavement and just sprinted across the grass to the window, punched in the screen, and pulled the curtains up.

Plumtree was lying on her side on the carpet, huffing furiously and struggling up to a sitting position, trying to get traction with the crumbly eucalyptus-bark soles of Pleasant’s penance shoes. Mavranos and Pete scuffed and bumped to a halt in the hall doorway a moment after Cochran leaned in the window.

“This is like the—end of the—fucking Wizard of Oz,” Cody panted, blinking away tears. “Everybody leaning in to see if the—little girl is okay. After her knock on the head.” She was sitting up on the floor now, hugging her side and breathing deeply. “She was—dancing! I came on in the middle of some—kind of goddamn pirouette, off balance. Don’t help me up!” she said in a wheezing voice to Mavranos, who had hurried across the room to her. “My ribs are like broken spaghetti in a cellophane bag. I’ll get up on my own. In a minute.” She looked up at Cochran. “She was dancing around in here, all by herself! How old is she?”

“Hundred and something,” said Mavranos.

“And now I bet I’ve got a broken hip, too,” Plumtree said, “from falling on whatever she put in my pocket.” Bracing herself on an old overstuffed easy chair, she fought her way to her feet, then reached into the hip pocket of her jeans.

“Look at that,” she said, holding out the gold Dunhill lighter. “The old dame was staling the lighter!”

Cochran swung one leg over the windowsill and climbed into the room, thrashing out from under the curtain like, he thought sourly, a rabbit from under a magician’s handkerchief.

“No she wasn’t, Cody,” he said. “That’s supposed to be in your pocket.” “We discover,” added Mavranos.

“Have Angelica earn her keep,” said Plumtree, “and tape up my ribs or something. And for God’s sake get me something to drink.”

Cochran started toward the hall. “You want your mouthwash?” “No,” she said, “ghosts don’t seem to have spit. I want vodka.” She squinted belligerently from Pete and Mavranos and Cochran to the window beyond the flapping curtain. “The day’s over, it looks like. Is it possible for you to tell me what’s been going on?”

“We can try,” said Cochran. He took her arm, and she let him lead her down the ball toward the dining room. “Have something to eat, with your vodka,” he said gently. “The old lady made a fine-looking shrimp remoulade this afternoon, and I was going to make some sandwiches.” He was nodding solemnly. “I think if we all take our time, and Idon’t interrupt each other, we can actually explain what’s gone on today.”

“Well don’t goddamn strain yourselves,” she said, leaning on Cochran.

“Oh, well,” he said, his voice suddenly quivering with an imminent, mirthless giggle, “I don’t know that we can do it without straining ourselves.”

“It really calls for mood music,” said Pete from behind them. His voice too was tense with repressed hysteria. “Wagner, I think, or Spike Jones.”

Mavranos gave a harsh bark of laughter. “And I better make some hand-puppets,” he said.

Even Plumtree was snorting with nervous merriment as they came lurching and cackling into the living room, drawing puzzled stares from Angelica and Kootie.

Cochran made ham and pepper-jack cheese sandwiches, and Plumtree switched from vodka to beer when they ate, then went back to vodka after the dinner dishes were cleared away; and the occasional pauses in the tense and unhappy conversation were punctuated by horns and sirens wailing past on the highway at the bottom of the sloping backyard, the 280.

AND SEVEN miles to the northeast, in the Li Po bar in Chinatown, Richard Paul Armentrout sat at a table under the high, slowly rotating fans and nervously rolled the rattling pomegranate shell around the ashtray and the club-soda glasses. The two Lever Blank men had frisked him in the downstairs men’s room, but after a quick, whispered conference between themselves they had decided to let him keep the pomegranate. Lucky for them that they did, Armentrout thought defiantly. I wouldn’t be talking to them if they’d taken it, and on their own they would never figure out how to find the king with it.

Now they were sitting on the other side of the table from Long John Beach and himself. Armentrout was sure they had guns concealed under their tailored Armani suit coats somewhere. Plumtree had told him about the commune she had grown up in, and he was finding it difficult even to believe that these two gray-haired businessmen had been leaders of a Bay Area hippie cult in the sixties, much less that they were still somehow involved in it.

“We tried,” said the balding one who had introduced himself as Louis, “to stop the resurrection out at the St. Francis Yacht. Club on the seventeenth of this month; some field men of ours did interfere, and in fact the attempted resurrection did fail. We would have acted more decisively if Mr. Salvoy had approached us sooner, and if there had not been unavoidable delays in establishing that the…apparent young woman was Mr. Salvoy; that required summoning entities we don’t usually hold congress with, and procedures, out in the remote hills around Mount Diablo, that the ASPCA wouldn’t approve of.”

The other man, Andre, leaned forward. “Had to kill some goats;” he said. “Needed their heads, for the entities to speak through.”

“Let me tell you a parable,” said Long John Beach.

“Not now, John,” said Armentrout in embarrassment.

Armentrout knew that these two men wanted to intimidate him; and he was intimidated, but not by what they were saying. He forced himself not to focus on the television screen above and behind the men, and he tried not to listen to the two voices buzzing out of the television speaker.

“I gather,” said Louis, “that you don’t precisely represent Mr. Salvoy. You and he are not partners.”

“No,” agreed Armentrout. “Our interests have overlapped, but my main goal right now is to get a drink of the—”

Andre coughed and held up his hand. “No need to say it, we know you’re not talking Thunderbird.”

On the television screen above the bar, Armentrout’s mother said, “I bet I swallowed gallons of that bath water.” She and Philip Muir were sitting in vinyl-looking padded chairs in front of a blue backdrop with big red letters on it that spelled out AFTERHOURS. She was wearing the same housedress she had been wearing when seventeen-year-old Armentrout had held her under the bath water in 1963, and the dress was still soaked, dripping on the studio floor; but she was opaque and casting a shadow, and when she spoke her teeth glinted solidly between the twisting red-painted lips. Muir, never a heavy drinker and only recently dead, was still a bit translucent, and his eyes were still very protuberant and his forehead visibly blackened in pseudosomatic response to the gunshot that had killed him. “Thanks for sharing,” he croaked. Armentrout remembered greeting cards that audibly produced the syllables of happy birthday or merry Christmas when a thumbnail was dragged down an attachsed strip of textured plastic; Muir’s voice reminded him of them. “I can hold my breath for hours now,” Muir went on. “In fact, I can’t breathe.” Armentrout’s dripping mother reached across the low table that separated the chairs and imploded Muir’s shoulder with a sympathetic pat. “Why would you want to breathe when everything smells so bad?” she said.

“Mr. Salvoy did good work for us,” said Louis, “a long time ago—though he was unsuccessful in becoming the king, in 1969, and had to be retired.” Andre winked at Armentrout.

“We would be happy to take Mr. Salvoy on again,” Louis said, “in this new persona, on the basis of his achieving the kinghood this time, and his being willing to comply with the harsher requirements of the office.” He took a sip from his glass of club soda. “But when he spoke to us on the sixteenth he didn’t tell us quite all about the Koot Hoomie boy. He simply indicated that there was a healthy young body he was ready to assume. If we had known that the boy was virtually the king already, we would not have risked harming him; a plain bullet wouldn’t have been able to hurt the true king, but the truck could have rolled into the sea, and the king could drown in sea water. But as it happens the boy wasn’t present, at that attempt at the yachts club. Our only urgency then was preventing the undesirable Scott Crane kinghood from being renewed.”

Andre spread his hands. “We’ll be happy with either one of them, Salvoy or Koot Hoomie, in the boy’s body. We just want a king, an emissary to the god:’

“A cooperative king,” added Louis. “The boy alone might actually be easier to work with. He’d probably be more malleable.”

“Well,” said Armentrout, carefully not looking at the pomegranate and trying to project easy confidence, “I’ve got a sort of psychic dowsing rod that’s leading me to the boy, and Salvoy is committed to keeping me apprised of his own whereabouts by telephone. I can lead you to both of them.”

“A rabbi in a synagogue,” said Long John Beach, “told his congregation, I am… nothing!’ And after the service, a prosperous businessman from the congregation shook the rabbi’s hand and said, with feeling, nodding and agreeing with the rabbi, I am…nothing!’”

“I’ll tell you frankly,” Louis said to Armentrout, “we haven’t been able yet to ferment the real sacramental…beverage you want, though we’ve preserved and cultivated the very oldest strain of vitis sylvestris vine, untouched by the phylloxera louse plague, and we do press a vintage from it every autumn; waiting for the year when the god will see fit to answer our prayers.”

Armentrout didn’t follow all this—he only knew that if he should not be able to kill Koot Hoomie, his sole hope for immunity from the two ghosts who were now on the television screen would be to take a drink of the fabulous pagadebiti wine: disown the ghosts, let Dionysus have all of Armentrout’s memories of them. But he hoped it wouldn’t come to that, for the god might take all of the ghosts, and pieces of ghosts, that he had consumed over the course of his psychiatric career; and Armentrout wasn’t sure he could mentally or even physically survive that loss. But it’s just a backup, last-ditch measure, Armentrout told himself reassuringly; I’ll almost certainly find an opportunity to kill the boy.

“And the custodian came up,” went on Long John Beach, “and he said, real earnestly, ‘I am…nothing!’ And the businessman jerked his thumb at this guy and said to the rabbi, ‘Look who thinks he’s nothing!’”

Armentrout was looking intently into Louis’s eyes, but from the television he heard imbecilic laughter.

“But bottles of it do survive,” said Louis, a little impatiently. “We still have several that were bottled on the Leon estates in the Bas Medoc in the early eighteenth century. And when the Scott Crane contingent tries to do their resurrection ritual again on Tet, they may very well have got hold of a bottle themselves. Bottles of it are around, especially in the Bay Area. We can make sure that you are given a drink of the god’s forgiving blood, one way or the other.”

Andre said cheerfully, “I imagine we’ll have our people retire the whole party, except for the Koot Hoomie boy and, at least for a while, the Plumtree woman.”

“Certainly the one called Archimedes Mavranos,” agreed Louis. “His commitment to restoring Scott Crane appears to be so strong that he would try to impede the coronation of anyone else.”

Armentrout had to force himself to comprehend that these men were talking about killing Cochran, Plumtree, and the Sullivan couple and Mavranos. Not therapeutically, nor as a regrettable necessity for personal sustenance, as he himself had sometimes had to do, but just because these people were inconvenient, in the way; and for a moment he was profoundly sickened at his alliance with them.

How, he wondered forlornly, and when, did I become indistinguishable from the bad guys?

When Louis and Andre had introduced themselves, they had told Armentrout that they were in the children’s products business these days, and owned a controlling interest in the White Greyhound brand of toys. Armentrout had remembered the White Greyhound Solar Heroes action figures and the Saturn’s Rings carnival set; and he had been unhappy to learn, in conversation this evening, that the toys had been designed to initiate children at least a little way into the Dionysian mysteries. Armentrout had learned that the toy figures in the carnival set had been designed to subliminally embody the Major Arcana figures from the tarot deck: with The Magician as the ticket seller, The Lovers on the Ferris Wheel of Fortune, Death as the janitor, and so forth; the White Greyhound people had carefully not included anything to represent The Fool, but they had had to stop production of the set anyway, because by 1975 children all over the country were spontaneously adding a Clown of their own, and suffering bad dreams at night and even banding together during the day to elude the hideously smiling painted figure of random madness that their consensual credulity had nearly brought into real, potent existence.

Louis and Andre had told him with satisfaction that their original five-year-old consumers were now in their late twenties, and as a segment of American society were beginning to show valuable symptoms.

These men are monsters, Armentrout thought. They’ve trekked much farther out into the dark than I ever have, and abandoned items from the original spiritual kit that I could not ever abandon.

And he might have spoken—but now Louis and Andre had hiked their chairs around and were staring at the television over the bar.

On the screen, Muir and Armentrout’s mother had got to their feet and were doing an awkward dance around the studio floor; his dripping mother was making swimming motions, and Muir had pulled up his diaphanous pants cuffs and was walking on his heels. They were both staring right into the hypothetical camera, right out at Armentrout—he avoided looking squarely into their phosphor-dot eyes, even though he doubted that they could get a handle on his soul through the television screen—and they were chanting in unison, “Why so stout, Richie Armentrout? Let ’em all out, Richie Armentrout!”

Louis’s face was pale as he turned back to stare at Armentrout, and his voice was actually shaky: “They’re…talking to you?”

“Leftovers from the old Dale Carnegie days,” Armentrout said hoarsely as he shoved his own chair back and stood up. “We’ve got a deal—let’s get out of here.”

Outside, the Grant Street pavement glittered with reflected neon, and rippled like sketchy animation with the constant rearrangement of the falling raindrops.

CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

Brethren and sisters of the hold-door trade,

Some two months hence my will shall here be made.

It should be now, but that my fear is this,

Some galled goose of Winchester should hiss.

—William Shakespeare,

Troilus and Cressida

THE rain kept up all night, and into the morning.

In spite of Mammy Pleasant’s wish for as much on-time as she might still be able to have, she didn’t appear at all throughout the gloomy morning, and Pete Sullivan wound up making lunch—tacos of fried ground beef and chopped ortega chilis, with the corn tortillas heated in the grease and a hot red salsa splashed liberally over it all. There had been only one Alka-Seltzer cup on the table this morning, and at lunch it was just Cody who sweated and scowled as she ate the restoratively spicy Mexican food and washed it down with a succession of cold beers. She was wearing one of Cochran’s dress white shirts, with MONDAY freshly inked over the pocket.

After Kootie had cleared away the dishes and Angelica had taken the ads from the San Francisco Chronicle out to the living-room couch, Cochran stood at the back door and looked out across the wet yard at the Torino, which for all of Cody’s work still shook as its engine was gunned.

Cody herself had shambled back to bed right after lunch, declaring that she needed to rest the cracked ribs and sprained hand that Angelica had diagnosed and taped up yesterday evening; it was Arky Mavranos who was out revving the car engine in the rain—pointlessly, for the Torino was blocked in by the Granada that was parked behind it.

“He’s near used-up,” said Pete quietly, standing with a freshly opened can of beer beside Cochran and looking too out the window. “I don’t know what his part in this thing tomorrow is supposed to be, but it better not call for liveliness. He doesn’t even drink beer anymore, and he doesn’t eat, either, except for rice and beans and tortillas. That shrapnel-hit to his skull, or else that ghost that was on him…” he said, shaking his head, “broke him down.”

“At least the engine’s in park now,” said Cochran. “A few minutes ago when I ran out there he had it in drive. I told him there’s a mud track that curls down the slope to the 280 at the back of the yard, but that he’d have to drive right through the greenhouse to get to it.” He tossed his cigarette out through the hole in the door window onto the patio. “Now I think of it, I’m glad he didn’t just do that.”

“No chance,” said Pete with a faint, sad smile. “He wouldn’t run over Scott Crane’s skeleton. And he wouldn’t have the heart to move the bones, either.” He finished his beer and visibly thought better of throwing it out the window after Cochran’s cigarette.

“Morituri emere, or something,” he said, stepping into the kitchen. “‘We who are about to die go shopping.’ Angie and I are going to take the Suburban truck out to fill the tank and check the oil in preparation for whatever it is that’s going to befall tomorrow, on resurrection day—and Angie’s made a list of bruja items to shield Kootie with, so we’re going to stop at a grocery store. Oils, candles, chalk, batteries for the stuffed toy pigs. Anything you want? Beer’s already on the list.”

“A Kevlar suit and hat,” said Cochran absently, still staring out at the unhappy man sitting alone in the roaring, smoking car. “A squirt gun full of holy water. A home skitz-testing and lobotomy kit.”

He turned away from the broken door-window and walked into what he still thought of as Nina’s kitchen, littered now with Coors twelve-pack cartons full of empty cans, the shelves crowded with Angelica’s morbid herb bundles and saint-decal candles. “No, if you’ve got beer on the list, I guess I—” He sagged; all at once the whole house was too depressing to bear. “Oh hell, I don’t appear to be going to work today, and I’ll just get in a fight with Mammy Pleasant if I hang around here. I’ll go with you.”

“Oh.” Pete picked up his denim jacket from the pile of damp clothes and scarves on the kitchen table. “Okay. We’ve told Kootie to stay away from Plumtree, and it looks like she’s down for the day anyway. Angie’ll want to leave him her 45, but she’d do that even if you were staying.” He pulled on his jacket and then lifted down one of Angelica’s stuffed pigs from on top of the refrigerator. “Get you fitted for a battery,” he said to it.

Kootie stepped into the kitchen now from the front hall, and Cochran could smell wine on the boy’s breath. “Is Mammy Pleasant planning on making dinner?” Kootie asked. “I’d rather order in a couple of big American pizzas, actually, than have another Creole thing.” He shrugged. “I believe tomorrow I’m gonna be eating in India.”

Cochran and Pete stared at him, and Pete began to stammer a response, waving the stuffed pig.

“I hear they have a New Delhi,” Kootie added hastily.

Pete exhaled. “Here comes your mother. Don’t upset her unless it’s necessary, okay?”

Angelica stepped into the hall, carrying her stainless-steel .45 automatic in one hand and tucking a shopping list into the hip pocket of her jeans with the other. “Good deal on Coors at Albertson’s,” she said. “Are you coming along, Sid?”

“Thought I would, instead of going to work.”

“Here, Kootie,” she said, handing the gun to the boy. “Cocked and locked. Sid, we’ve got the carbine in the truck, but why don’t you bring your .357 too.”

Pete took the truck keys from a hook by the door as Cochran nodded and hurried back into the living room to get his revolver out of the locked strongbox on the bookshelf. “We should be back in an hour,” Pete told Kootie. “If Pleasant shows up, tell her we’re getting pizza. Tell her she might like it.”

Freed of the two car covers, the red truck was in good enough condition to drive. Last week Mavranos had pulled out the holed, starred windshield and sealed a new windshield in place, and scraped the broken glass out of the rear panel windows and replaced them with sawn pieces of plywood. Mavranos himself had not driven the vehicle since parking it in Cochran’s driveway thirteen days ago, possibly because it would agitate the fragments of Scott Crane’s skeleton that were scattered among the cubes of broken window glass in the truck bed.

Angelica got into the back seat, so Cochran climbed into the front and sat in the passenger seat while Pete started the engine and let it warm up. The truck interior smelled of fresh plywood and old beer. Cochran had just settled back in the seat against the hard bulk of the revolver at the back of his belt, and lit a cigarette, when through the rain-blurred new windshield he saw the front door of his house pulled open, and saw Plumtree step out.

She was wearing his old leather jacket now, and sneakers—and when she stared across the driveway at the truck, Cochran’s face chilled in the instant before he consciously recognized the narrower face and higher shoulders.

“I guess Cody wants to come along too,” observed Pete, moving the stuffed pig so that Cochran could scoot over.

Cochran ground his cigarette out in the ashtray. “It’s Janis,” he said.

He stared toward her, and their eyes met with an almost palpable reciprocation through the glass; and Cochran was peripherally aware that a big raindrop rolling down the outside slope of the windshield stopped at the top edge of their linked gaze as if at an invisible barrier, then wobbled off to the side and ran on down to the black rubber gasket without having crossed between their eyes.

Then Janis was hurrying across the wet pavement with her head down and her hands in the pockets of the leather jacket, and she opened the front door and climbed in beside Cochran, who shifted to the middle of the long seat to give her room.

“Janis,” he said, “I’m glad you—”

She touched her ear and shook her head. “I’m deaf. Scant,” she said in a loud, droning voice.

“Oh.” All he could do then was look into her eyes and nod, as Pete clanked the gearshift into reverse and backed the truck around on the wide driveway, then drove down the road to Serramonte Boulevard and made a right turn onto the southbound lanes of the 280.

“Janis’s mom!” said Angelica sharply from the back seat. And when Janis just kept looking ahead at the rainy highway lanes for several seconds, Angelica said “I guess she really is deaf.”

“Don’t…tease her,” said Cochran, “even if she…can’t know you’re doing it.”

Janis had seen him speaking, and looked at him; he looked into her eyes and lifted his right hand, and then held it raised even though after the first few seconds he thought Pete must be expecting him to thumb his nose at the traffic ahead. At last Janis brought up her unbandaged left hand and clasped his, creaking the sleeve of the leather jacket. For several seconds she squeezed his hand hard; then she had released it and looked away, out at the road shoulder rushing past outside.

“I wasn’t teasing her,” said Angelica quietly. “And I’m glad she’s along. I wasn’t thrilled to be leaving her back there with Kootie, and just poor Arky.”

Beyond the window glass the vivid green San Mateo County hills swept past under the low gray sky, with pockets of fog visible in the hollows, and columns of steam standing up like white smoke from behind the middle-distance hills.

Black crows were flapping low across the rainy sky, and for a panicky moment Cochran couldn’t see any buildings or signs, and there appeared to be no other cars on the highway.

Then Janis spoke loudly: “Why would someone be hitch-hiking on a day like this?”

The truck’s engine seemed to roar more loudly after Pete had lifted his foot from the gas pedal. Obscurely reassured by a glimpse of a couple of cars passing the truck on the left, Cochran leaned forward to peer out between the slapping windshield-wiper blades—there was a lone figure in flapping white clothing on the misty highway shoulder a hundred yards ahead, trudging south, the same way they were going, with its highway-side left arm extended.

“Well, it can’t be the hitch-hiker the old lady told us about,” said Angelica matter-of-factly, “today’s not the day. Tomorrow’s Tet.”

Pete was pressing the brake. “I’m not risking any more carelessness.”

“How far are we from Soledad?” protested Angelica. She was leaning forward across the seat, her breath hot on the back of Cochran’s neck. “That’s probably an escaped prisoner!”

“Do they dress them in bedsheets?” asked Pete quietly.

The right-side tires were now hissing and grinding in the muddy shoulder gravel, and the mournful squeal of the brakes made the walking figure stop.

“We’re a hundred miles north of Soledad,” said Cochran.

The hitch-hiker was barefooted and wearing a sort of stiff, blue-patterned white poncho, and when Cochran made out the letters ARLI on the fabric and looked more closely, he realized that the garment was a big painted-canvas banner from one of the roadside garlic stands down in Gilroy. The person was still facing away from them.

“Long dark hair,” said Angelica. “Is it a man or a woman?”

“There’s a beard,” said Pete.

The figure had turned its head in profile to look back at the vehicle, and Cochran recognized the high forehead and chiselled profile. “It’s—” he began.

Beside him, Plumtree jumped violently. “The Flying Nun!” she wailed.

“—Scott Crane,” said Angelica, after giving Plumtree a startled glance. “I remember the face from when he was stretched out, dead, on my kitchen table down in Solville. Well, we’re really in the animal soup now.” She levered open her door, and the sudden chilly breeze inside the truck carried the earthy smells of wet grass and stone. “Uh…hop in,” she called over the increased hissing of the rain, squinting as she leaned out of the still slowly moving truck. Obvious fright made her speak too loudly. “Where you headed?”

With shaking hands, Plumtree cranked down the passenger-side window, and Cochran flinched at the damp wind in his face.

Scott Crane’s ghost turned to face them—it might have been naked under the makeshift poncho, but it was decently covered at the moment. Its beard and long hair were dark and ropy with rain water. “Jack and Jill went up the hill,” the figure called back, “to fetch a chalice of aquamort. To the grail castle, to take away the container of the god’s reconciling blood.” Its voice was baritone but faint, like a voice on a radio with the volume turned down. “I will brook no…trout,” the ghost said.

“Before its time,” agreed Plumtree. The voice was Cody’s, and fairly level, though Cochran could hear the edge of hoarse strain in it. “We can drive you there,” she cried. “But you got to tell us where to turn:’

Can we get there by candlelight? thought Cochran, quoting the old nursery rhyme; aye, and back again.

“And we might need to stop for gas,” said Pete shakily.

Cochran was shifted around with his right elbow down the back of the front seat now, and he saw Angelica visibly consider climbing into the back of the truck or even over the front seat and right onto his lap; but by the time the king’s ghost had limped to the truck’s side door she had simply slid all the way over to the left.

The ghost was as solid as a real person as it climbed in—the truck even dipped on its shocks—and when the dripping bony face turned toward the front, Cochran could feel cold breath on his right hand. “What gas would that be?” the ghost asked. “Not nitrous oxide, at least. I’m running on a sort of induction coil, here.” Its eyes squinted ahead through the rainy windshield. “Straight on south,” the ghost said, pulling the door closed with a slam. The thrashing of the rain on the highway shoulder was shut out, and there was just the drumming on the truck’s roof.

“I know the way,” said Cochran nervously as he shifted back around and clasped his hands in his lap, “and we won’t need to stop for gas, if it’s the Winchester House in San Jose.” He was breathing fast, but he wasn’t panicking; and it occurred to him that Crane’s ghost wasn’t nearly as scary as his dead body had been.

“Find the green chapel,” said the ghost. “Take what you’ve dished out; there’s a New Year’s Eve party coming that’ll square all debts.”

WHEN SCOTT Crane’s ghost directed Pete to take the Winchester Boulevard off-ramp, following the signs meant to lead tourists to the “Winchester Mystery House.” Cochran nodded. “Be ready to take a left onto Olsen,” he told Pete quietly. “The parking lot’s right there.”

Cody pointed at a bleak hamburger-stand marquee sign that read STEAK SAN/PASTRAMI. “I think we’re supposed to go to the San Pastrami Mission,” she whispered to Cochran. He could feel her shivering next to him.

But, “Take a left onto Olsen,” said the ghost in the back seat. Its voice was deeper now, and louder. “The parking lot’s right there.”

Cochran remembered that ghosts tended to be repetitive. And the same thought might have occurred to Cody, for beside him she whispered, “I never need mouthwash, after Mammy Pleasant has been on. Ghosts don’t have spit.” Cochran looked at her in time to see teardrops actually fly out from the inner corners of her eyes.

“Valorie never has spit—I—never have to gargle, after Valorie.”

“I don’t think you need to—” Cochran began.

“Valorie’s dead!” said Cody wonderingly. “Isn’t she?”

Cochran took her hand. “It’s—it’s not,” he stammered, “I mean, you—” The truck interior was steamy since the dead king had got in, and Cochran was sweating under his windbreaker. He wanted to say, If it works, don’t worry about it. “Whatever Valeria’s status is, Cody,” he said finally, “you’re certainly not dead.”

“But she’s the oldest of us!” Cody gripped his hand, hard, as if the truck was tipping over and she might fall out. “All the rest of us are at least two years younger! She’s the one who has our, our birth!”

Angelica leaned forward across the dead king’s ghost to squeeze Plumtree’s shoulder. “Cody,” she said strongly, “lots of people are divided from their births by some kind of fault-line. Most of them aren’t fortunate enough to know how it happened, or even that it happened—they’re just aware of a pressure-failure back there somewhere.” She paused, obviously casting about for something else to say. “Plants often can be safely severed from their original taproots, if they’ve developed newer roots further along the vine.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Swell,” said Cody. “Let’s move on.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“More a house for birds,” said Cody at one point, “or monkeys, than for people.” “Aerial manlike entities,” agreed Angelica with a glance at the dead king. “Smoking away up the chimneys,” said the bearded figure, drawing a frown from Plumtree.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cochran looked back at Angelica and Plumtree, who were staring wide-eyed, at the empty canvas. Cochran shrugged at Plumtree. “You tossed his lighter,” he said.

“Good,” she said with a visible shiver.

“Is there somebody up there?” came a voice from the stairs at the back of the room.

Plumtree grabbed the dusty, cobwebby box from Pete and took a long step toward a doorway that led away from the stairs. She jerked her head for the others to follow.

Cochran helped Pete to his feet and followed Angelica and Plumtree down this unexplored hallway. Let the tour-guide explain the garlic banner, he thought: Damn ghosts!—leaving their goofy shit around everywhere.

They hurried on through a hastily glimpsed kaleidoscope of architecture, with skylights below them and stairways curling around them and interior balconies and windows receding away at every height in the patches of electric lamp-glow and lancing columns of gray daylight.

At the top of one white-painted stairway Cochran’s right hand was suddenly tugged diagonally out and down. He crouched and made a ch-ch! sound, and then started hopping down the stairs before his hand could pull him off balance and send him tumbling down them. He could hear the others following behind him, but he didn’t dare lift his eyes from the crowding-up stair-edges to look back.

The stairway continued down past the next floor, but was bevelled dark wood now, and the walls and doors and ceilings were framed in carved mahogany. Cochran’s hand was pulled out horizontally away from the landing and down a hall, and he almost thought he could feel a warm, callused hand clasping his palm and knuckles, and a deeply jarring pulse like seismic temblors.

Helplessly Cochran led his companions through a wide doorway, and his first impression was that they had come to another unfinished section—but a closer look at the walls showed him that the wide patches of exposed lath were edged with broken plaster and torn wall fabric.

“This must be the earthquake-damaged section,” Cochran whispered to Plumtree, who was holding the gold box in both hands.

She stepped carefully over the uneven floor to the window’s, which were panes of clear glass inset at the centers of stained-glass borders.

“We’re in the, what was it, the Daisy bedroom,” Plumtree said breathlessly, peering out at the grounds, “or near it. You can see the sign we reconnoitered at down there to the left. This here would be where she was sleeping on that night in 1906, when Dionysus knocked down the tower onto her.”

Cochran flexed his hand, then waved it experimentally in the still air; and it seemed to be free of any supernatural tether now.

“It must be here,” he said, “whatever we’re supposed to find.”

Two big, framed black-and-white photographs were hung on one raggedly half-plastered wall. Still hesitantly holding his hand out to the side, Cochran walked over to the pictures, and saw that they were views of the house as it had stood in the days before the top three stories had fallen; and the additional crenellations and pillars and balconies, and the peak-roofed tower above it all, ashen and fortress-like and stern in the old gray photographs, made the structure’s present-day height and red-and-beige exterior seem modest by comparison.

“The House of Babel,” said Plumtree, who had walked up beside him with her hands in the pockets of the leather jacket. “I guess that’s how the god looked at it.”

“There was a fireplace over here,” called Pete softly from the other side of the room, “at one time.”

He was standing beside a chest-high square gap in the wall, through which the exposed floor joists of another room were visible on the far side. Pete crouched and looked up at the underside of the gap. “You can see the chimney going on upward.”

A piece of white-painted plywood had been neatly fitted in to cover the spot where the hearth would have been, and Cochran crossed to it and then knelt down on the floor beside Pete’s knees to take hold of the edge of the board. Pete stepped back.

“I’m certain this must be bolted down,” Cochran said softly.

“Think of young King Arthur,” said Angelica behind him, “with the sword in the stone. You’re, the—the guy with the Dionysus mark on his hand.”

Cochran yanked upward on the board, and nearly fell over backward as it sprang up in his hands. He shuffled his feet to regain his balance, and leaned against the board and pushed it forward onto the floor joists of the next room; then for several seconds he just peered down into the rectangular brick-lined black hole he had exposed. He dug a penny out of his pocket and held it over the hole for a moment, then dropped it; and he waited, but no sound came back up.

At last he stood up and quickly stepped away from the hole. Instead of stepping over to look for themselves, Angelica and Pete and Plumtree stared at him.

“Well,” Cochran said, “there’s—it’s very fucking dark down there, excuse me. But there’s rungs, starting a yard or so down.”

“Rungs.” Angelica quickly crossed to one of the windows and stared out at the shaggy palm trees nodding out in the rain. “Damn it, we were just going to get… gas, and beer, and batteries,” she said harshly. “Kootie’s ordering a pizza. I’m not—hell, I’m not even dressed for climbing down into some goddamn—unlit—spidery catacombs in a haunted house.” She turned around and glared at Plumtree. “If only,” she cried out, “you hadn’t killed Scott Crane!”

Plumtree opened her mouth and blinked, then snarled, “And who did you kill, lady? ‘If only’! Back in your shanty house in Long Beach, you told me that each of you was responsible for the death of somebody, and had guilty amends to make. You told me you can’t get rid of the guilt and shame without help, that that’d be like thinking one hand could fix what it took two to break, remember? I’ve had stinking beer cans wired to my ankles, and I’ve been taped into a chair and then thrown onto a backyard faucet hard enough to crack my ribs, and, and I get the idea that it’s a big honor for me to be allowed to eat with you all.” Her voice was shaking, and her lip was pulled back to expose her lower teeth as she went on, “So tell me, bitch—who did you kill?”

Angelica stared at Plumtree blankly. Then she said, “Fair enough. Okay. I was a psychiatrist in private practice, and I used to perform fake Wednesday-night seances to let my patients make peace with dead friends and relatives; and five Halloweens ago one of the seances, right in the middle of it, stopped being make-believe. A whole lot of real, angry ghosts showed up, and among other things the clinic caught fire. Three patients died, and five more are probably still in mental hospitals to this day.” She took a deep breath and let it out, though her face was still expressionless. “One of the ones that died was in love with me; I wasn’t in love with him, but I—didn’t really discourage him. Frank Rocha. I killed Frank Rocha, through carelessness in the expertise I was trained for, the expertise he had paid me to use. His ghost troubled me for two years, and the police have been looking for me ever since.” She smiled tiredly and held out her right hand. “I do apologize, Cody. Are we friends?”

Plumtree was shaking her head, but apparently more in bewilderment than denial. She took Angelica’s hand and said, “I never had a friend before.”

“It’s a tricky flop,” said Cochran shortly. He could feel a jumpy restlessness in his right hand, and he knew it wanted to point toward the brick chimney hole in the floor. Climb down before it pulls you down, he thought. “Somebody give me a…a Bic lighter or something, since we don’t have the Dunhill anymore.” He sighed and ran his hands through his hair, patted the gun under the windbreaker at the back of his belt, then walked over to the hole and sat down on the floor beside it, swinging his legs into the dark empty space.

Plumtree pulled a red Bic out of the leather jacket pocket. “Here, Sid—and I’m right behind you.”

“So are we, so are we,” sighed Angelica.

Cochran slid himself forward, down into the hole, so that his toes and the seat of his jeans were braced against opposite brick surfaces and most of his weight was on his elbows. The angular bulk of the holstered .357 jabbed him over his right kidney. “Just a bit lower than you’d like,” he said breathlessly through clenched teeth, “there’s a rung you can get a foot onto. Then I guess you just drag your back as you go down until you’ve gone far enough to get your hands onto the rungs.”

He heard several sighs behind and above him, and then Pete’s voice said, “I’ll go last, and pull the plywood cover back over the hole.”

CHAPTER TWENTY NINE

Roma, tibi subito motibus ibit Amor…

—Sotades of Maroneia in Thrace,

c. 276 B.C.

THE shaft was wide for a chimney, but the rough brick sides kept snagging the elbows of Cochran’s windbreaker no matter how carefully he kept them tucked in against his ribs, and after Pete pulled the board over the top of the shaft there was no light at all, and the close amplification of panting breath and the gritty scuff of feet on iron rungs emphasized the constriction; Cochran was terribly aware that even if he unhooked his gun holster and pressed his back flat against the wall behind him he would not have had room to bring his knee up to his chest.

Bits of mud dislodged from Plumtree’s sneakers tapped his head and face and hands in the total blackness, and he thought about pausing to strike the lighter; but the strong clay-scented draft from below would probably have extinguished the flame instantly, and anyway he wasn’t sure he wanted to see how close in front of his face the bricks were, and see the narrow space overhead blocked by the shoe-soles of only one of the three people whose bodies clogged the way back up to air and light and room to move. When his right elbow swung free in a side opening, Cochran’s eyes had been in total darkness long enough for him to detect a faint gray glow from the side tunnel, which slanted downward at roughly a forty-five-degree angle. Faintly he could hear voices coming up through it.

“Side chute to one of the fireplaces,” he whispered upward. “Don’t take it—keep going—straight down.”

He heard Plumtree relaying the message up to Pete and Angelica as he resumed abrading himself down the angular stone esophagus.

After a dozen more rungs he knew he must be well below the level of the ground floor—and when he had hunched a few yards farther down he was sure that he heard far-distant music from the impenetrable darkness below his feet, and that the upwelling draft was elusively scented with hints of cypress and coarse red wine and crushed night-time grass.

He thought of whispering Getting dose how, but told himself that the others would detect it too.

He didn’t realize that he’d been nervously bouncing the heel of each shoe off the back wall between rung-steps until the moment he swung one foot back and it met no wall; and he almost lost his grip in surprise. But then he noticed that the scuff of his feet wasn’t tightly amplified anymore, either, and soon he felt the bottom edge of the scratchy brick surface at his back scrape up across his shoulders and then ruffle the hair at the back of his head. He could stretch out away from the iron ladder in the darkness now, and the sound of his breathing scattered away behind him with no echoes.

And, though it was only the dimmest ashy diffraction, there was light—Cochran could see the backs of his hands as faint whitenesses bravely distinct from the background blackness.

Soon came a moment when his left foot reached down and instead of swinging through empty air struck a gritty, powdery ground, jolting his spine. He got his other foot down onto the ground too, but he whispered for the others to stop, and then spent several seconds pawing around with his shoe soles and flexing his knees before he dared to unclamp his hands from the last rung. He flicked the lighter then, and, looking away from the dazzling flame, saw that he was standing on a patch of soot that covered this corner of a broad dirt floor. Stone walls and a low stone ceiling receded away into shadows, but he could see an arched doorway at the far end of the room. The distantly musical and sylvan breeze was even more remote now, but seemed to be coming to him through the arch.

He cupped his free hand around the lighter flame until his three companions had climbed all the way down out of the chimney shaft and joined him on the sooty patch of dirt, and by that time he was able to look directly into the flame without squinting. When he let it snap off to cool his thumb the darkness seemed absolute again by contrast.

“There’s an arch ahead of us,” he whispered.

“No… presences,” whispered Angelica; “I don’t sense ghosts down here.”

At that moment Cochran jumped and gasped in pure panic, for he had the clear but visually unverifiable impression that a big, warm hand had clasped his right hand, and was gently tugging him forward out across the dirt floor. “Follow me!” he choked urgently to the others as he stumbled forward.

By the echoes of his panting breath he knew when he was passing through the stone arch—and then the dim gray light was strong enough for him to see his empty hand stretched out in front of him. And as soon as he could see that no other hand held his, the sensation of it vanished. He lowered his arm, aware now that his heart was pounding rapidly, and as the sweat cooled on his face he blinked around at the racks and knobs that covered the closest wall.

The racks were wine racks, and the knobs were the foil-sheathed necks of bottles lying horizontally in them. “We’re in the wine cellar!” he whispered. He remembered Mammy Pleasant telling them yesterday that Mrs. Winchester had walled up the wine cellar after seeing the black handprint of her dead husband on the wall.

He flicked the lighter again, and by the sudden yellow glare he walked over and lifted one of the dusty bottles out of the nearest rack, and wiped the label on his windbreaker—and when he had peered at it he shivered and glanced around in suspicious fright, for what he held was a bottle of the fabulous 1887 Inglenook Cabernet Sauvignon, the very same California vintage that Andre Simon had described in 1960 as “every bit as fine as my favorite pre-phylloxera clarets.”

He heard a rattling knock from behind him, and Angelica yelped, “Jesus, a skull! There’s a goddamn skull on the floor here!”

Cochran turned around, still holding the bottle; Angelica was standing stiffly by the arch, her feet well back from what did appear to be a human skull lying on the dirt. Focussing on the dim corners around the room, he now saw pale curls and ribby clusters that might be other bones.

“At least one other skull,” whispered Pete through an audibly tight throat, “over here. And—an antique revolver.”

“They’re old,” Cochran said to Angelica. “They may have been down here a hundred years.”

“I know, I know,” she said, obviously embarrassed at having been frightened. “Sid,” called Plumtree softly from the opposite wall, “bring your lighter over here a second.” She was standing beside a section of plain white plastered wall, pointing at a shadowed spot down by her knee.

Still holding the gas-release lever down, Cochran carefully carried the light over to where she was pointing, and crouched to illuminate the spot.

It was an old mark, in still faintly adhering soot, of a tiny hand.

Angelica had hurried up beside Cochran, and now she bent over to look at the handprint. “Ah!” she exclaimed sharply, stepping back. “The baby! It wasn’t her dead husband’s ghost that the god finally asked Mrs. Winchester to give over to him! Mammy Pleasant had that wrong. It was the ghost of Winchester’s dead baby daughter!” And Cochran saw the bruja of Solville make the Catholic sign of the cross. “She couldn’t bring herself to do that, just as Agave couldn’t disown the ghost of her killed son, in Arky’s Euripides play!”

“And she entombed the wine,” said Pete Sullivan shakily, “but she left a chimney air shaft to link this cellar with her bedroom. I’ll bet she never permitted any fires in any of the fireplaces that connect with that chimney, after she walled up the cellar.”

Cochran let the lighter flame go out, and he handed the hot lighter to Plumtree while he walked back to the rack to reluctantly replace the legendary Inglenook. And after he had put the bottle back, his hand twitched to the side—

—and in his nose was the sagebrush-and-dry-stone smell of the Mojave Desert outside Las Vegas, and the acid perfume of Paris streets after rain, and the hallucinated mildewy staleness of the Victorian hall in which he had seen Mondard in a mirror—

—and his fingers were pressed firmly around another bottle. He lifted it out carefully and carried it over to Plumtree, who struck the lighter.

The label on the bottle was Buena Vista, Count Haraszthy’s old Sonoma vineyard; and below the brand name and a statement of limited bottling was the date, 1860, and the single word PAGADEBITI.

“I’ve got the wine,” he whispered. “Let’s esplitavo.”

“God,” said Angelica, “back up that chimney?”

The dirt floor shook then, and Cochran was so careful not to drop the bottle that he fell to his knees cradling it. Plumtree had let the lighter snap off, and when she flicked it on again there were vertical streaks of dust sifting in the air below the stone ceiling. And through the arch behind them came the echoing rattle of bricks and iron clattering down in the old chimney shaft.

“No,” said a new, deep voice.

Again Plumtree let the lighter go out—and when the flint-wheel had stutteringly lit the flame again, Cochran jumped in surprise to see a tall, broad-shouldered black man standing in the open arch. Even in the frail lighter glow, this newcomer seemed solider than Cochran and his companions—glossier because of reflecting the light more strongly, his feet more of a weight on the dirt floor, the very air seeming to rebound more helplessly from his unyielding surfaces.

The man, if it was a man and not some sort of elemental spirit, was wearing a spotted animal skin like a toga, and leafy vines were tangled in his long braids; in his hand was a staff wrapped with vines and capped with a pinecone.

“I am the guardian of the god’s blood,” the figure said. The voice shook the streaks of dust that hung in the air, and his breath seemed to carry the faint music and the forest smells. “Did you think there would be no guard? Nobody takes the god’s blood out of the tabernade past me. He shifted the staff to his right hand, and it gleamed in the frail light now, for it had become a long, curving sword, and muscles flexed in the strong black arm to hold the weapon’s evident new weight.

“Well I say goddamn!“ burst out Plumtree. The lighter was jiggling wildly in her hand, and Angelica took it from her and re-lit it.

“The,” said Pete Sullivan quickly, “the god wants us to take the wine. He led us here, to get it!”

“So these others claimed” said the black man, rolling his obsidian head around at the bones without looking away from the four intruders. “Did you think there would be no guard? Nobody takes the god’s blood out of the tabernacle past me” When he inhaled, Cochran yawned nervously, expecting his eardrums to pop.

Cochran held up the back of his right hand. “This is the god’s mark, given to me when I put out my hand to save the god’s vine from being cut back!” He made a fist. “The god led me into this room, by this hand, half a minute ago!”

“So these others claimed,” repeated the tall black man, again rocking his head.

Cochran realized that the figure was not listening to what they said; perhaps didn’t even have the capacity to understand objections. It was some kind of idiot genius loci, an apparently unalterable part of the gods math, as implacable and unreasoning as an electrified fence. With his free hand Cochran reached around under the back of his windbreaker and, though hollowly aware that the “antique revolver” had apparently been of no use to one long-ago intruder, nevertheless unsnapped his holster.

Beside him, Plumtree shivered.

“If I—put the wine back—” Cochran began hoarsely.

All at once the supernatural guard stamped far forward into the room, sweeping the sword in a fast horizontal arc—the blade whistled as it split the quivering air—

—Hopping back, Cochran snatched the Pachmayr grip and yanked the gun out of the holster, and despairingly pointed the muzzle into the center of the broad chest—

And in the same instant Plumtree stepped forward so that a backswing from the sword or a shot from the gun would hit her; and Mammy Pleasant’s imperious voice said, “Bacchus!”

The curved sword blade paused behind the black man’s left shoulder like the rising crescent moon behind a mountain, and Cochran tipped the gun barrel upward.

“Don’t you recognize me, Bacchus?” spoke the old woman’s voice from Plumtree’s mouth. ‘I’m Mary Ellen Pleasant, the poor old woman you took custody of, in ’99! You were there when I died, five years later—and you were there too when the god came breaking down Yerba Buena for my ghost, three Easters after that.”

“I—do recognize you,” said the solid black figure.

“Am I, like you, a totally surrendered servant of the god?”

“You are.”

“I am,” said Pleasant as Plumtree’s blond head nodded. “And I tell you that the god has sent me to fetch out this wine, and bring it to the king.” Without looking away from the creature’s eyes, she held out one hand toward Cochran. He carefully laid the bottle in her palm.

For several long seconds the tall black figure stood motionless. Cochran kept the gun pointed at the ceiling but didn’t take his finger out of the trigger guard.

Then the apparition tossed the sword through the eddying air to its left hand, and the sword again became a vine-wrapped staff with a pinecone on it.

The figure waved it and said, “Pass.”

Again the ground shook, and this time the bottles on the walls clinked and clicked like castanets and temple bells, and didn’t stop rattling; and Cochran didn’t fall to his knees this time, but just crouched like a surfer to keep his balance on the gyrating floor.

While the floor was still shifting, Plumtree turned and began dancing like a tightrope-walker into the darkness at the far end of the cellar, away from the arch and the supernatural guard. Angelica let the lighter go out as she went hopping, and skipping after her, and Pete and Cochran were bounding along at her heels.

And, over the bass drumming of the earth, Cochran thought as he ran that he could hear distant pipes playing, unless that was just some whistling overtone of his panicky panting breath as he followed the sounds of Pete and Angelica through the rocking pitch blackness.

SOON THEY were able to see slanting gray light ahead of them and hear the crackle of rain, and when they had hurried to the muddy end of the tunnel, and climbed up over tumbled masonry out onto wet grass in a battering showery wind, they could see that they were in some kind of park. Cochran hastily shoved his revolver back into its holster, and pulled the back of his windbreaker down over it.

The rain quickly made runny black mud of the soot that smeared their backs and knees, and by unspoken agreement they didn’t run for the shelter of the corrugated metal roof over some nearby picnic tables, but plodded through the cleansing shower straight across the grass toward the nearest visible road.

When Plumtree glanced at him, Cochran saw that she was Cody again. “I guess I look as shitty as you do,” she said through chattering teeth.

“I guess you do,” he said stolidly.

She touched the angular bulge at the bottom of the zipped leather jacket, right over her belt, and Cochran realized that it must be the gold box from the chimney. “I swear I can feel her kicking in there,” she said.

CHAPTER THIRTY

Hades and Dionysus, for whom they go mad and rage, are one and the same.

—Heraclitus

THE road proved to be called Tisch Way, and they trudged a quarter of a mile west along its gravel shoulder through the downpour to the intersection of Winchester Boulevard, with the rushing lanes of the 280 visible now just past a chain-link fence on the other side of the road.

When they had wearily got back into the red truck and wedged the bottle of pagadebiti securely in the glove compartment, Pete started the engine and drove out of the Winchester Mystery House parking lot, but then just made a left turn onto Olsen Drive and an immediate right into the parking lot of a big new shopping center; he drove up to the empty Winchester Boulevard end of the rain-hazed lot and pulled into a parking space under a towering three-panel movie-theater sign and turned off the pnennp The rain drummed on the truck roof, and everv five seconds a drop collected on the rusty underside and fell soundlessly onto the soaked thigh of Plumtree’s jeans.

She was sitting in the back seat beside Cochran, and she fumbled the gold box out from under the soaked leather jacket. It was no bigger than a couple of decks of cards stuck together back-to-back, and its lid appeared to be an unhinged plate held in place by six gold screws.

“Find me a screwdriver, Pete,” she said. “A flat-tip one.”

“No,” said Cochran, “don’t open it. We’re supposed to pitch it into the ocean.”

“Not still shut up tight, though, right? Or she might as well have stayed in the chimney—there’d be no difference between the box sitting there or sitting still-sealed at the bottom of the bay. She’s gotta be broke open, like an egg into a fry pan.” Plumtree leaned back in her seat and closed her eyes. Her wet hair was plastered to her head and streaked with black. “Is Mammy Pleasant going away voluntarily? Or are you just gonna be shoving her in?”

“Voluntarily,” Cochran said. “She’s going along, anyway. She appears to be resigned to it.” The interior of the truck felt warm and close after the gusty chill outside, and he wrinkled his nose against the remembered childhood smell of doused campfires.

“That’s what I thought.” Plumtree fitted her thumbnail into one of the screw slots and twisted gently, but it didn’t move.

“I don’t know if ghosts really have a whole lot of capacity for voluntary action actual volition,” said Angelica from the front seat; and immediately she frowned, as if ashamed to have had the thought.

“These are dead people, Cody,” Pete said.

“Like Valorie,” Plumtree agreed, nodding expressionlessly. “Where’s that screwdriver?”

Pete sighed and bent forward to grope under the front seat.

“If you let her out;” said Angelica, clearly nettled but not quite ready to interfere, “she’ll be gone as quick as a puff of steam.”

Pete had dragged a black metal toolbox onto the seat, and unsnapped the catches and opened it. Wordlessly he passed a screwdriver over the back of the seat.

“I don’t think she will,” said Plumtree. “Obviously I wasn’t busted out of the madhouse and made a part of this company just so you’d be able to question my father and hell, I’ve already hosted Mammy Pleasant.”

“…Oh,” said Angelica, humbly. “I—I see. Cody, I do think you could get away with not doing it.”

Plumtree had already used the screwdriver to back one of the screws out of the box. “Look at that,” she said, holding the screw up. “All gold, not just the head.”

“I don’t imagine she’d scrimp,” said Cochran bitterly, “on what she thought would be her eternal resting place.” He knew he wouldn’t be able to talk Cody out of hosting the old woman’s ghost, if it was still viable in there, and he only hoped Winchester wouldn’t set her into any trouble or hurt her ribs or her hand. “I wonder when she decided to have this box and these screws made.”

“After 1899, I guess,” said Angelica, “if that’s when her daughter’s handprint showed up. The old lady was apparently a loyal servant of Dionysus before then.”

“Call her Mrs. Winchester,” said Plumtree. “I’ve got three of the screws out, she may be able to hear you.” Plumtree was rocking slightly on the truck seat, and Cochran could just hear what she was humming: Row, row, row your boat. … She peered out the windows at the agitated puddles on the asphalt. “Don’t tell me, if it’s too horrible, but how did we get away from the big black genie-guy?”

“Mammy Pleasant knew him,” said Pete. “I think he was a bit of the god’s remote attention, not able to make many decisions—like a horse’s tail, swatting flies while the horse looks at something else. But he recognized her, and he let us get out with a bottle of the super-Zinfandel.” He stared out the window at the rain that was splashing up in waves of mist across the parking lot. “Poor Johanna,” he said quietly. “The roof in Solville must be leaking like six firehoses. “

Plumtree had unthreaded the last screw and lifted it out of the hole. Now she slid the cover off the gold box, and lifted from a nest of ribbon-tied locks of smoky-fine hair and folded strips of newsprint a corked but apparently empty glass test tube.

“Careful you don’t just eat her, the way Sherman Oaks or your Dr. Armentrout would,” said Angelica nervously.

“I didn’t eat old Pleasant, did I?” Plumtree lifted the tube and stared through it. “I’ve got plenty of practice at just standing aside and making room for an incoming personality, like when the phone rings.”

She frowned slightly, and Cochran knew she must be thinking of Janis, whose job it always was to answer telephones.

“Wide unclasp,” she said then, perhaps speaking to the glass tube. “I’m the one who got the message in the stained glass. Meet the ones that people this little head.” And with one motion she bit out the cork and inhaled strongly over the open tube.

The cork fell out of her lips and she sat back in the seat.

“Oh my Lord,” she said then, exhaling and staring wide-eyed at the three people in the truck with her, “has found me, hasn’t he?” The voice was strong but higher in pitch than Cody’s or Pleasant’s.

“No,” said Cochran, “we’re—well, yes, I suppose so. We’re sort of contract labor for him, I guess.”

Tears gathered in Plumtree’s eyes, and spilled down her sunburned cheeks.

“You don’t have to go,” said Angelica suddenly, “if you don’t want to. We can…I don’t know. Damn it! Is there a way to…hide you again, hide you better?”

Beside her, Pete looked as though he wanted to object, but he just pressed his lips together and rolled his eyes to the rusty ceiling.

Plumtree’s eyebrows went up. “No, there’s not.” She raised Plumtree’s hands and flexed them in front of her face. “I’m…out now!…and bound for the god, bound for the sea; and I’ll take my baby’s ghost with me, at least, dry dust though she is. Lord, I did think we’d have to spend eternity in that box. I ran out of thoughts after only a few hours, I believe, and even my dreams were just of being in the box. The memories of her that I kept, defiantly kept, were just black dust after all. Nothing but soot. I should have known.” The eyebrows went up even further when she looked down at the soaked leather jacket and jeans she was wearing. “I’m…grateful to this person for a little interval time in which to breathe fresh air.”

Hardly very fresh, thought Cochran. He yawned from sheer nervousness, anxious to have Cody back on again.

“What,” asked Mrs. Winchester as Cody’s body seemed to brace itself, “is the date, today?”

“Monday the thirtieth of January,” said Pete, “uh, 1995.”

The news appeared to alarm Mrs. Winchester, and Cochran thought it was learning what day of the month it currently was, rather than that seventy-odd years had passed since her death, that had upset her. “When is the Chinese New Year?” she asked quickly.

“Tomorrow,” Cochran told her. “The Year of the Pig.”

“And today’s already dark? How is it that you’ve dawdled so? We can’t wait around through the passage of another year, before we get consumed! We’re far past stale already, my poor shred of a daughter and I. Has the god chosen a king?”

“Yes,” said Pete and Cochran and Angelica simultaneously.

“Go to where he waits, then, and stop wasting time. Go quickly—this is some species of automobile, isn’t it? Has one of you taken a drink of the wine?”

“No, ma’am,” said Pete in a harried tone, turning around to face the dashboard and twist the key in the ignition.

“Ah, one of you should have!—back in my house, if that’s where you found me, if it’s still standing. You do have the wine, don’t you? The god will take some host for himself, for the ceremony, but first one of you must thus…formally invite him. You’ve got to awaken him, and bring him.” She peered in bewilderment out the side window at the shopping-center parking lot. “Find a grove, wooded groves are still implicitly sacred to him—or a cemetery, a quiet cemetery with trees.” Softly, perhaps to herself, she added, “I can remain rational through this final event, if it happens soon.” Then she looked around quizzically at the three people in the old truck with her. “I don’t know you people, but I presume you know each other. It should be obvious who is to take the drink.”

“I guess “ Pete said through clenched teeth as he gunned the engine and then clanked it into gear, “we could draw straws—”

“It’s me,” said Cochran, “it’s me.” His heart was pounding, but like Mrs. Winchester he somehow didn’t seem able to find the prospect of cooperating with the god totally repellent. “Dionysus led me by the hand into the wine cellar, so I guess I should be the one to lead him by the hand to the sutro ruins. And I do have to finish giving somebody over to him; I know which cemetery. It’s right on the way, just off the”—the monstrous, he thought, the merciless—“the 280.” I might as well have taken the drink of forgetfulness when Mondard first offered it to me, he thought defeatedly, in the courtyard of the Hotel de l’Abbaye in Paris.

He remembered what Nina’s ghost had told him, in the kitchen of their house two weeks ago, when he had said he wanted to have the mark removed from his hand: I would never have—I would not have your child, if its father were not marked by him. I was married to him, through you.

“It’s me,” he repeated. But he remembered too the vision he’d had in the Solville hallway, of the Mondard in the mirror, and he remembered his apprehension then that the fatally loving god would next ask him to give over his memories of a deceased Plumtree. “But he will take only one woman from me.”

“He’ll welcome into his kingdom whomever you love,” flatly said the old woman out of Plumtree’s lips, “unless he so loves you that he welcomes you first.”

As Pete steered the truck away from the tall theater sign. Cochran noticed the titles of the movies that were showing in the three theaters: Legends of the Fall, Murder in the First, and Little Women.

COCHRAN’S SOUTH Daly City house was just on the other side of the 280 from Colma, but the little town was in the area he always thought of as “north of south and south of north”—when he was travelling to or from Pace Vineyards or San Francisco he used the John Daly Boulevard exit north of the town, and when he had business in Redwood City or San Jose he used the Serramonte Boulevard exit south of it; and so, though he knew the rest of the peninsula cities well, the peculiar little town that he could see across the highway lanes from his back yard was almost totally unfamiliar to him.

The last time he had visited the place had been two years ago, when he and Nina had driven straight across the highway to pick out adjoining plots at the Woodlawn Cemetery. And now Nina and their unborn baby had been cremated, and he had acceded to her parents’ wishes and taken the urn to France, where it would stand forever on the mantle in their house in Queyrac in the Bas Medoc; and the grass grew undisturbed on the plot in Colma.

Colma was the town to which all the graves of San Francisco had been transplanted; until 1938, nearly a third of the Richmond district of San Francisco, from Golden Gate Park north to Geary and from Park Presidio east to Masonic Avenue, was still occupied by cemeteries, as the whole of the district had been before 1900. Colma, six miles to the south, had taken the evicted dead, and on the day Cochran and Nina had gone to buy the plots, Nina had remarked that the town’s dead residents outnumbered the living ones seven hundred to one.

Cochran had Pete steer the truck off the 280 at Serramonte Boulevard, but had him turn east, away from his house, to El Camino Real; and as they drove up the weaving, rain-hazy road, past roadside “monument” shops and misty rolling green hills studded with white grave markers, Cochran tried not to remember the sunny, gaily mock-morbid drive he and Nina had taken along this same road.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SUFFER LITTLE CHILDREN

TO COME UNTO ME

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“He’s killed,” said Angelica.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What are these white Saturns,” said Pete.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The flare was dazzling, but the noise of the gunshot was just a thud against his abused eardrums. He fired again, and then Plumtree had leaned out of the truck and closed her fist in the fabric of his shirt. The truck was moving, slowly. Cochran flailingly pulled the trigger again, and one of the Saturn’s headlights exploded; and then he threw the gun onto the truck floor and lunged inside.

Pete must have floored the accelerator then, for Cochran was tumbled into the seat half across Plumtree’s lap, and the door slammed shut without his help. The interior of the truck was dark in the renewed rainstorm.

“—the fuck were you doing—!” Pete was shouting, and Cochran yelled back, overriding him, “It was Dr. Armentrout In the instant of silence this news caused, Cochran sat up and added, “In that car. He would have followed us. He shot Kootie, remember?”

The roar of the engine rose and fell as Pete swerved from lane to lane to pass slower-moving cars. He had switched on the headlights, and the road ahead was only dimly visible behind a glittering curtain of rain.

“Good,” panted Angelica, “that was good, you were right to shoot him.” She was glancing around wildly, wide-eyed. “What the fuck hit us, Pete? How can the truck be running? We should be—”

“The god hit you,” said Mrs. Winchester from the shadows beside Cochran, in a quavering voice that seemed to carry a trace of satisfaction, “a good deal less hard than he hit my house in 1906.”

“I didn’t shoot him,” said Cochran loudly, “I shot the car, the radiator.”

“We’ve got to cross the 280 and pick up Kootie and Arky,” said Pete.

“No,” said Angelica, “there were other white Saturns driving around back there, and Armentrout’s still fucking alive. We might lead them to Kootie—and this truck’s a beacon, magically and plain-old visually. And turn off your headlights.”

“These are sorcerous bad guys, Angie,” said Pete, nevertheless reaching forward to switch off the lights. “What do you think they were doing down here? Following us? I bet they were tracking the new king, which is Kootie. They might be zeroing in on Cochran’s house right now.”

“Ah, you’re right, you’re right,” said Angelica desperately. “Get on the freeway, get right over in the fast lane to draw any pursuit, and then cut off hard at the first off-ramp, hard enough to send ’em on past it, if they are following us. We’ll call Kootie from a pay phone.”

“It’s getting late, you must let this Kootie person fend for himself,” said Mrs. Winchester’s voice. “I heard that!” added Cody; “they’d surely kill the boy, and anyway we need his help, and Arky’s, to get this thing done.” And then Valorie’s flat voice said, “O, what form of prayer can serve my turn? ‘Forgive me my foul murder.’“

“A pay phone at a gas station,” said Pete, his wet shoe sole squeaking from the gas pedal to the brake and back. “We’re gonna need gas.”

PETE FOLLOWED Angelica’s directions so exactly that Cochran thought they were all going to be killed. From the fast far left-hand lane of the northbound 280, while a scatter of anonymous headlight-pairs bobbed behind them at hard-to-judge distances, Pete cut the wheel sharply to the right, and the truck veered across the shiny black lanes like a banking surfboard, booming over the lane-divider dots in brief staccato bursts, finally half-missing the exit and throwing Cochran onto Plumtree again as the two left wheels slewed on the shoulder.

Then he had straightened the wheel, braked down to about twenty miles per hour without quite making the tires squeal, and pulled sedately into a Chevron gas station, steering the truck around to the back by the rest rooms and pay phones. The headlights were still switched off.

He pushed the gearshift lever over into neutral. “No—” he began, but his voice was squeaky; “nobody’s followed us here,” he said in a deeper tone.

“Guess not,” said Angelica faintly. Then she stirred herself and pushed open the door. “Let’s call …”

She froze with one leg extended out into the rain, and Cochran followed the direction of her gaze to the cone of light around the pay telephone.

At first glance he thought the light was full of moths; then he saw that the fluttering streaks of light were rain-gleams on transparent figures: the streak of a contorted jawline here, the squiggle of a flexed limb there, invisible wet lips working in imbecilic grimaces.

“Something’s got all the ghosts worked up this evening,” Angelica said. “They’re drawn by the magnets in the phone, or they each want to call somebody and haven’t got any quarters.” She gave Pete a stricken look over her shoulder. “I’m not masked enough for this. Breathing, talking on the-phone, in that stew? My voice—and Arky might say, my name! I couldn’t hide my—my psychic locators, my name, my birthday—from all of them. At least a couple of them would be into my head like piranhas in five seconds.”

“These same thoughts people this little world,’” said Mrs. Winchester confidently out of Plumtree’s mouth; to which Cody added, “All us kids on the bus got bogus birth-dates and somebody else’s picture on our IDs,” and the flat voice of Valorie said, “I shall play it in a mask, and you may speak as small as you will.”

“Oh, thank you—!” said Angelica to Plumtree, clearly at a loss as to what name to use. “Give her a quarter, Pete,” she added as Cochran opened the truck’s back door and stepped down into the rain. “Speak this: tell Kootie and Arky to get out of there,” she told Plumtree urgently. “Tell ‘em don’t take the Granada, we were driving that when I shot at the bikers out at the yacht club, they might remember it. Tell ‘em to take the old Torino out back.”

“And bad guys might be out in front of the house, nervous about our guns and waiting for reinforcements,” added Pete. “Tell Arky to drive right out through the greenhouse, like Cochran said this morning—there’s apparently a mud road that leads down the backyard slope right to the 280.”

Cochran could see that Plumtree had to do this, but after she had stepped wearily down out of the truck he grabbed her unbandaged hand and said, “Would it help to have another person beside you? I can concentrate on you, and not pay attention to the ghosts.”

The tired lines in her face lifted in a wan smile. “I’d like that, Sid. Yeah, you’ll be safe enough if you just don’t speak a word, and look nowhere but at me.”

“That’s my plan.” He was nervously pleased to be speaking coherently, after having drunk the pagadebiti; and he was reminded of a time an unidentified snake had bitten him on a hike, and how he had monitored himself for the rest of the day, watching for slurred speech or numbness or any other symptoms of poisoning.

Plumtree took a quarter from Pete, and then she and Cochran walked hand-in-hand across the pavement to the cone of rain-streaked and ghost-curdled light around the telephone.

The ghosts were whispering and giggling in Cochran’s ears, and though he tried not to listen he heard faint, buzzing sexual propositions, pleas for rides to other states, demands for money, offers to wash his car windows for a dollar.

Cochran kept his eyes on Plumtree. Her face was shifting in response to it all, like a fencer parrying in different lines, and once Cochran got a broad wink that he thought must have been from Tiffany. She reached through the contorting forms as if through cobwebs to drop the quarter into the slot, and punched his home number into the keypad as if emphasizing points by poking someone repeatedly in the chest.

After a few moments she tensed and said, “Hi. It’s me, the girl-of-a-thousand-faces. Use the old king’s eye as a scrambler to call me back at this number.” And she read off the number of the pay phone and hung up the receiver.

“Good thinking,” said Cochran through slitted lips.

“Don’t talk!—they could get down your throat. They do but jest, poison in their jest; no offense i’ the world.”

At last the telephone rang, and Plumtree snatched up the receiver. “Hello? Hello?” She took the receiver from her ear and knocked it against the aluminum cowl around the phone. “I’m deaf!” she said loudly. Into the phone she said, “Kootie, Arky, I hope you can hear me. I’m deaf, so just listen!” Her voice softened. “Arky, you’ve got the cutest butt. Out!” Cody yelled, apparently at Tiffany. “Listen, you’ve both got to get out of there, right now—take the—”

She looked at Cochran in panic, and he knew that it had just occurred to her that Janis was listening, and could relay their plans to Omar Salvoy, in her mental Snow White cottage. “The way Sid told Arky this morning, exactly that way, are you following me?”

She flipped the receiver around in her hand and bit the earpiece—and Cochran realized that she was hearing by bone conduction. She fumbled the receiver back to her ear. “Good, don’t say anything more, we’re being overheard here in spite of your scrambler, it’s enough that I know I’m not just talking to somebody who likes calling pay phones. Listen, we’re going, right now, to—to George Washington’s head.”

Cochran nodded. Janis hadn’t been on when they had hiked through the tunnel at the Sutro Bath ruins and seen the boulder that he had said looked like Washington; and Cody wasn’t saying that this was the big event, happening today instead of tomorrow as they had all expected. Janis could relate all of this to her father without his knowing where Kootie and Mavranos would be going.

“Tell me you understand,” Cody said, and again bit the receiver. Then she said into the mouthpiece, “Good. Oh, and Kootie better bring that … that little yellow blanket that the bald lady gave him, if he’s still got it.” She sighed. “Go,” she added, and she hung up the chewed and spitty receiver. Cochran faintly heard one of the ghosts say that the telephone was for calling room service to order food, that one didn’t eat the telephone.

Plumtree took Cochran’s elbow and led him out of the swarm of idiot ghosts, and neither of them inhaled until they had got back to the truck.

“That was Kootie,” Plumtree panted, “and then Arky. They understood, and I didn’t hear either of ’em say anything that would clue anybody. They’ll meet us there.” She looked nervously at Cochran. “I can hear the rain, now, but I don’t know about voices. You say something.”

He smiled at her. “Vous etes tres magnifique,” he said, and he was sure that it had been his own deliberate decision to speak in French.

She laughed tiredly. “Thank you very kindly, sir, now I hear you clearly.”

“Back in the truck” said pete, “everybody don’t want Kootie to get there before we do. Sid, you got a ten for gas?”

CHAPTER THIRTY ONE

Yes. Like the mariner in the old story, the winds and streams had driven him within the influence of the Loadstone Rock, and it was drawing him to itself, and he must go.

—Charles Dickens

A Tale of Two Cities

THE secret switchboards of the city logged dozens of calls in the ordinarily slow witchery-and-wonders categories, as reports of supernatural happenings were phoned in from Daly City south of town up to the Sunset area around Ocean Beach and the Richmond district north of Golden Gate Park—accounts of brake-drums singing in human voices, root beers and colas turning into red wine in the cans, and voices of dead people intruding on radio receptions in unwelcome, clumsy karaoke. In Chinatown, under the street-spanning banners and the red-neon-bordered balconies and the white-underlit pagoda roofs, hundreds of nests of firecrackers were set hopping on the puddled sidewalks, clattering like machine-gun fire and throwing clouds of smoke through the rain, and the lean young men noisily celebrating the new year frequently paused below the murals of dragons and stylized clouds to listen to the storefront radio speakers, out of which echoed an Asian woman’s voice predicting earthquakes and inversions and a sudden high-pressure area locally.

Old Volkswagens and Chevrolets and Fords, painted gold and hung with wreaths at the front and back bumpers, roared with horns honking north through the hospital glare of the Stockton tunnel, to emerge in Chinatown at Sacramento Street still honking, the passengers firing handguns out the windows into the low sky. Police and paramedics’ sirens added to the din, and under the gunpowder banging and the electric howls was the constant hiss of the night rain, and the unending echoing rattle of the cables snaking at their steady nine-miles-an-hour through the street-pavement slots.

On the Bay Bridge, from remote Danville in the hills over on the east side of the bay, three white Saturns passed over the Coast Guard Reservation on Yerba Buena Island on their way in to the China Basin area of the Soma district; and two more were moving west up Ocean Avenue toward the Great Highway and Ocean Beach.

Dr. Armentrout had had to insist, almost tearfully, that the driver of the lead car get off the 280 at Ocean instead of continuing toward Chinatown.

Armentrout was sitting in the back beside Long John Beach and the two-figure mannikin appliance, but the Lever Blank man in the front passenger seat shifted and said, “It’s the pomegranate.” He turned around. “What does it do, point?” When Armentrout just gripped the dry gourd and stared belligerently, the man added, “We won’t take it from you, if you tell us where we can get another one.”

“I picked it from a bush in the meadow where Scott Crane was killed,” Armentrout muttered finally, “at his compound in Leucadia.” He held the thing up and shook it, and dry seeds rattled inside. “In daylight, even such daylight as you get up here, its shadow is perceptibly displaced toward the king, which is the Koot Hoomie boy, I think. I’ve been—shadowing him.” He choked back a frightened giggle, and sniffed; he was still shaking, and his shirt was more clammy from sweat than from rain. “And,” he added, “tonight it … even tugs a little.” He nodded toward the windshield. “That way.”

Armentrout had hysterically demanded that the two-figure mannikin appliance be brought along in this car too, and now it was sitting ludicrously in Long John Beach’s lap beside him. Armentrout wondered if Long John Beach too found the two figures heavier lately than they used to be.

“The royal tree,” said Long John Beach from behind the two Styrofoam heads, in what Armentrout had come to think of as the Valerie-voice, “hath left us royal fruit.”

“It led us to the red truck,” said the driver, “back there in Colma where we had to switch cars. Was the boy in the truck?”

“I don’t know,” said Armentrout. “I don’t think so.” Sid Cochran and janis Plumtree were in the truck, he thought. And Sid Cochran, who I heedlessly let slip through my net back at Rosecrans Medical, shot a gun at me! “I think they were all staying somewhere in the area, and we just ran across the truck before we found the boy. But they must have gone to him after they evaded you people, or else they called him.” He shook the pomegranate, again, and felt its inertial northward pull. “The primary is certainly northwest of us now. I can’t imagine why Salvoy didn’t call me—we could have been waiting for the boy right now, at whatever place they’re going to, instead of just chasing him this way.”

The radio on the dashboard clicked, and then an amplified voice said, “I thought we were going to where the Macondray chapel used to be.”

The driver unhooked a microphone from the console. “The—” He smiled at Armentrout in the rear-view mirror. “—dousing rod is apparently indicating the west coast,” he said. “Tell the brothers coming in from Danville not to waste time circling the Washington and Stockton site. Straight west on Turk to Balboa, tell them, and link up with us probably somewhere below the Cliff House.”

“Aye aye,” said the man in the following car, and clicked off; and Armentrout thought eye-eye, and remembered the tiny pupils of Plumtree’s eyes.

“The woman who pulled … the gunman back into the truck,” Armentrout said, “was Janis Plumtree, the one with your man Salvoy in her head. I’d like to … have her, after Salvoy has moved on.” Moved on to his eternal reward, ideally, he thought.

“Everybody except the king has got to be retired, sorry,” said the man in the front passenger seat. “But we do have to wait until we figure out who the king is, and what body he’s in.” He reached out and unhooked the microphone. “Andre,” he said, “tell the field men not to go shooting anybody until the subjects are out of the vehicles, and even then no women or boys. Got it?”

The driver was shaking his head. “Crisis of faith!” he said quietly.

“Nix” came the voice from the radio. “The field men understand that the true king can’t be hit with a casual bullet.”

“But he might not be in his chosen body yet!” protested the man in the front seat. “You can tell ’em that, can’t you? It’s nothing but the truth.”

“Better we don’t introduce the complication,” insisted the voice from the radio; “and hope for the best.”

The man replaced the microphone and fogged the window with a sigh. “Field men” he said. “Manson-family rejects.”

“Knuckleheads, panheads, and shovelheads,” agreed the driver. “Look, the Koot Hoomie body is the king, and it’ll deflect bullets. All we stand to lose is old Salvoy in the Plumtree, and that might not be altogether a bad thing.”

Armentrout touched the little lump in his jacket pocket that was the derringer. No casual bullet, he thought. But nothing fired from this gun is casual, and I’ve got a couple of very serious .410 shot-shells in it. That’s the way this has got to work out—these Lever Blank boys kill the Plumtree body and everybody in it, and I kill the Parganas boy.

And then stay well clear of the zealot field men.

ON THE long straight stretch of the Great Highway with the black-iron sea to the west, a relayed spot of darkness moved up the coast as each of the sodium-vapor streetlights went out for a moment when the red truck sped past on the pavement below.

Pete Sullivan was driving, and beside him Angelica was irritably drying off the .45 carbine with a handful of paper towels. The knapsack with the spare magazines had been under the seat too, and was also soaked by the rain water that had puddled on the floorboards.

She laid the gun down on the seat, then snapped open the glove compartment; and when she shifted around to look back at Cochran and Plumtree, she was holding the pagadebiti in her hands. “I never brought the … the hardware into your house,” she said to Cochran. “I think the Wild Turkey bottle that had Crane’s blood in it is behind you, in the hub of Arky’s spare tire.”

Cochran winced, for he’d been able to feel Plumtree shivering beside him, even through the soaked leather jacket she was wearing, ever since they’d stopped to call Mavranos and Kootie, and this reminder of the stressful failure two weeks ago wasn’t likely to cheer her up. But he rocked his head back to peer into the truck bed. “Voila” he said. “Still there,” he added shortly.

He had been mentally reciting the multiplication tables to monitor his own alertness, and now he had forgotten his place.

“Here,” said Angelica, handing the wine bottle over the back of the front seat “Pour some of this pagadebiti wine into it, and swish it around and then pour it back.” When he just stared at her, she added, “I say that in my capacity as the king’s ad hoc bruja primera.”

Cochran took it from her. “O-kay.” He hiked one knee up onto the seat to be able to reach back with his free hand to the Wild Turkey bottle. Sitting back down again, he gripped the wine bottle and the pint bourbon bottle between his thighs, and pulled the corks out.

“When I close my eyes,” said Plumtree in a voice that was shaky but recognizably Cody, “I’m in a bus seat, and the crazy smashed-up man is standing at the front and holding a gun on the driver. Row, row, row your boat.”

Cochran carefully lifted the wine bottle and tilted it over the pint bottle and poured a good four ounces of dark wine into it. He re-corked the little bottle and shook it up, then uncorked it and poured its foaming contents back into the bottle of pagadebiti.

“So far,” said Angelica to Plumtree judiciously, “you’re better off keeping your eyes open, then. But, any time now, that vision might be preferable to what’s actually going on outside your eyelids.”

“Oh, that’s helpful,” snapped Cochran as he shoved the corks back into the bottles and reached around to drop the Wild Turkey bottle onto the wet truck-bed floor behind his seat. He wiped his hands on his damp jeans, glad that he had taken his own sip of the wine before this adulteration.

The truck was moving up a grade now, and angling to the left. Cochran peered out through the rain-streaked window and saw concrete barriers on the right shoulder, with yellow earth-moving machines and black cliffs beyond it.

“Cliff House coming up on the left,” said Pete. “I’ll go on past and park in the Sutro Heights lot, up the hill. Rainy walk back down, but I guess we can’t get any wetter than we are.”

“Sorry,” Angelica told Cochran. Then she said brightly to Plumtree, “Of course nothing bad will happen to any of us. As soon as we’re done with this, we could all take Scott Crane to dinner at the Cliff House Restaurant, even.” She snapped her fingers. “Oh, except that we’re drenched in black mud!”

Plumtree gave a hitching laugh. “And Crane’ll p-probably be wearing that garlic banner again,” she said. “And some restaurants,” she added quietly, “don’t like you bringing your own wine.”

PETE TURNED in to the Sutro Heights Park driveway, and drove slowly up the hill with the headlights off and parked the truck against a dark grassy bank with overhanging elms. The nearest parking lot light dimmed but didn’t go out—and Cochran was glad of it as he climbed out of the truck carrying the wine bottle, for the overcast sky was already winter-night-time dark. There were many other cars in the lot, and they all seemed to have wreaths hung on them, but Cochran didn’t see any other people.

The wind sweeping up the cliffs from the sea was cold, and his wet clothing was no protection at all. He was glad that Plumtree at least had the leather jacket.

Angelica had stepped out onto the wet pavement, but now she leaned back in and tore the woven blue seat cover off the front seat, yanking on it to break the strings that tied it to the struts, and when she had dragged it out and shaken dust and cigarette butts out of it she wrapped up her short rifle in it; the stock was folded forward, and the bundle was no more than a yard long, with the ends flapping loose over the pistol grip. She laid it on the truck hood while she shouldered on the sopping knapsack.

“You’ve got what, three rounds left?” she asked Cochran as she picked up the bundled rifle.

Taking the question as a fresh test of his mental acuity, Cochran called up the details of his shooting at the Saturn. “That’s right,” he told her firmly.

“I’ve got seventy rounds of mixed hardball and hollowpoint, but the magazines have been sitting in greasy water for a couple of days. Oh well—I’ve heard .45s will even fire underwater.”

“I hope the omiero hasn’t washed off of the hollow-points,” said Pete as he slammed the door on his side and walked around the back of the truck.

“I imagine the ghosts will all be gone, at least,” said Plumtree, “after what’s-his-name shows up, old Dickweed McStump.”

“What?” said Angelica. “Who?”

“This famous Greek god. What’s his name?”

“Dionysus,” said Cochran with an apprehensive glance at the bottle in his left hand. “This isn’t the night to be dissing him, Cody.”

“Whatever,” said Plumtree. “It sounds like he takes ghosts away with him. The big trick,” she added, “will be seeing to it that he doesn’t wind up taking any of us along in that cnrwd.”

“Well, that’s cleared it up,” said Cochran. “You’ve put your finger on it, all right.”

“I’ll put my finger in your eye, if you don’t shut up,” she told him; but she linked her shivering arm through his as they began trudging down the park driveway Cochran was holding the pagadebiti bottle with both hands.

When they got to Point Lobos Avenue, they had to walk south along the shoulder for a couple of hundred feet, and almost didn’t dare to cross at all, for cars with no headlights on were hurling their dark bulks around the corners from north and south, so fast that the tires yiped, and their passengers were leaning out of the windows and firing guns into the air as they swooped past. But finally there was a quiet gap, and Cochran and his companions sprinted wildly across the lanes and sprang over the far curb onto the sidewalk.

Leaning on the wet iron railing on the seaward side of the highway, they could see through the marching curtains of rain, patches of bright flame on the dark plain below them. Dots of yellow fire that must have been torches bobbed and whirled on the line between the vast rectangular pool of water and the open sea beyond, and Cochran realized that people must be out dancing along that narrow concrete wall. And even way up here on the highway ridge he could hear distant drumming over the roar of the rain.

“Damballa!” said Plumtree huskily; then, “The sounds of hammering and sawing must not cease.”

“It’s good, the drumming’s good,” agreed Angelica nervously.

“Scott Crane is down there somewhere,” whispered Plumtree. ‘Tonight I’ll face him, not his ghost.”

THE STATEMENT seemed to click a switch in her head, and at long last Valorie had no choice but to remember New Year’s Day. After dawn, first:

Trucks and cars on the road behind the gas-station telephone booth had been drumming their tires over a step in the asphalt, and Plumtree had had to hold her free hand over her ear to hear the 911 operator. “You killed him with a speargun?” the voice said.

“No,” said Plumtree in a harsh voice. Cody hod been the one who had taken this flop, this early-morning telephone call, and an emotion had been interfering with her speech. “A spear from one. I stabbed him in the throat. He was stabbed with it before, in 1990?”

“You stabbed him in 1990?”

“No, this morning, an hour ago.”

“He was known as…the Flying Nun?”

“I don’t know. That’s how I was thinking of him.”

Valorie had been aware of Cody’s guess that the 911 operator was just keeping her talking, keeping her on the line …

And a police car had soon come chirruping up behind her, and policemen with drawn guns had shouted at her: “Drop the phone! Let us see your hands!” One had wanted to shoot her; then he’d wanted to mace her. “Take it easy.” another had said, “She’s just a ding.”

They had handcuffed her with her hands in front. “Let’s go. Show us where you killed him.”

But when they had driven her to the slanting meadow above the beach, and got out of the car, the field was silvery bright with fresh vines and grasses and fruit; and since there had been only the cries of wild parrots in the meadow on that morning, Valorie’s memory now had to make the birdcalls loud and harsh and poundingly rhythmic.

The policemen said it was obvious that no one had stepped across the grass in the last day, and so they had marched her back into the car, and driven here to the jail and put her into a cell with mattresses looped over the white-painted steel bars and steady clanging from one of the other cells. Lunch had been hot dogs and sauerkraut, and when they had offered to let her make a call, Cody had declined, but asked if she could have the twenty cents anyway, or a cigarette.

AND THEN, finally, Valorie let herself remember the actual dawn:

In her father’s voice, Plumtree’s body had called to the bearded man who had stepped barefoot into the meadow: “Get over here, Sonny Boy.”

But when the man had walked closer, her father had abruptly receded, and it had been Cody who found herself standing over the little boy who was lying on his back on the dirt. Plumtree was holding the spear with the points at the little boy’s throat.

She looked up at the tall bearded king, and her vision was blurry with tears as she said, “There’s nothing in this flop for me.”

“Then pass,” said the king in a quiet voice. “Let it pass by us.” After a moment he nodded at her, almost smiling, and said. “In the midsummer of this year, you and I will be standing in happy sunlight on the hill in the lake.”

“I don’t think so,” said the reintruded father, breathing in a choked way while the little boy shivered at his feet, “I’ll call—I called you this morning!—and I raise you the kid.” Plumtree’s eyes darted down to the pale child under the spearpoints. “That’s a raise you don’t dare call, right?” Tight laughter shook Plumtree’s throat. “This flop … finally! … gives me a king-high flush in spades. It’s the first day of the new year, and you’ve got to face the Death card––the suicide king.”

The bearded man stepped back. “I’ve—seen you before.” he said. “Where?”

“I’m—I’m putting the clock on you, here, no more time—and I won’t give you any psychic locators on me—”

“You’re shaking,” said the living king. “Throw the spear away. Don’t tell me anything, I’ll let you take back your bet.”

“You think I’m afraid of you? Now? It was in a poker game on Lake Mead, almost five years ago. You were disguised as a woman, and the other players called you ‘the Flying Nun.’“

The king was frowning. “And you failed then, didn’t you? You failed to assume the hand, assume the Flamingo, take the throne. You’ll fail this time, too, I swear to you, even if you ruin everyone in trying. You flinched away just now, when I approached you. Let it pass.” He raised one hand toward the road. “Go away now, in peace”

“Lest you dash your foot against a stone. Don’t patronize me, you, you kings.” Plumtree’s hands gripped the spear shaft more tightly. “Doyou call?”

Through clenched teeth, the king said, “No, I do not.”

“Then step closer,” hissed the father in Plumtree. And when the king had walked ur> beside them, her father said, “See you in the funny papers,” and snatched the spear s away from the child and drove it into the king’s throat.

PLUMTREE LET go of the iron railing as if it might collapse, and clung to Cochran’s arm so tightly that he nearly dropped the bottle. Cochran thought it must have been Janis, or even Tiffany, but the sharp profile was clearly Cody, and she was staring down at the fires on the plain.

“What?” he snapped, his knees shaking at the thought of dropping the pagadehiti now.

“Nothing,” she said, shaking her head. “Just remembering why I’m here. Let’s get it over with.”

Angelica seemed to agree. “Let’s get down there before Kootie does,” she said.

They found the gate in the chain-link fence and started down the path that led between high dark hedges and ivy-covered mounds, and after the first few steps Cochran felt as if they had left the highway and all of San Francisco, even the twentieth century, far behind. The night wind in the bending cypresses, the monotonous distant drumming weaving in and out of the boom of the surf, the bonfires and waving torches, and the smells of ocean and wet leaves on the cold wind, all made him think of some pre-Christian Mediterranean island, with mad, half-human gods demanding worship and sacrifice.

He was looking to the left, out across the broad dark slope of the basin, when the whole quarter-mile from the Cliff House to remote Point Lobos was lit in glaring white, halting raindrops as shotgun patterns of dark stippling against the marble undersides of the clouds; and when the instant explosion of thunder threw the raindrops against his face and extinguished the light, he carried on his retinas a vision of the slope as a ruined amphitheater, the collapsed walls and sagging foundations undisguised beneath the froth of wild vegetation.

By the yellow glitter of flame reflected in the lake-like puddles, he could see that the path levelled and broadened out ahead of them, and he could make out the low stone building in which he and Plumtree had first met up with Mavranos and Kootie again after fleeing Solvilie. The uneven windows and the top of the roofless wall were silhouetted by fires on the sand floor within, and he could see apparently naked figures dancing on the wall rim.

Half a dozen torch flames were bobbing toward Cochran and his party now across the mud-flats, and he reached around with his right hand to touch the grip of his revolver as he squinted at the approaching forms.

He was able to see that they were people by the bronze glare of the torches many of them were waving, but their bodies and staring-eyed faces were plastered with wet pale mud, so that they seemed to be figures of animated earth, naked and sexless. There were more of them than there were torches, and many carried fist-sized stones. Two or three even had pistols.

Angelica had raised her seat-cover bundle, and Cochran drew his revolver and held it out away from him, pointed at the ground for now. His ears were ringing and his breath was short with the thought of raising the gun, of firing it at these people.

He opened his mouth to speak, but the mud-figures had halted a dozen feet away; and now the torches dipped as they all got down on their bare knees in the mud.

A hot wave of relief rippled up from Cochran’s abdomen—but when he glanced at his right hand he saw that it wasn’t the gun, or even the bottle of wine in his left hand, that had cowed them.

The night seemed suddenly less dark—variations of grays—in contrast to the ivy-leaf mark on the back of his right hand; it shone with such an intense, absolute blackness that his first, spinal impulse was to somehow instantly cut it off.

Far out in the rainy basin, out among the ruined buildings and crumbled pool copings and the ledge where the tunnel mouth gaped against the firelight, the drumming became louder, and faster.

“We knew you’d come,” called one of the figures hoarsely.

“From Phrygia,” wailed one of them in a woman’s voice, “from Lydia, from India!”

To his horror, Cochran’s right hand twitched and clenched and raised; he was able to push it up still further in the instant before it fired the gun, so that the bullet flew away over the top crags of Point Lobos, but the sound and flash of the shot were lost in another simultaneous blast of white light and ground-jolting thunder, and as the echoes rolled away to shake the trees on the slopes he hastily fumbled the gun back into its holster.

The mud-people might not even have been aware of the gunshot; or they might have expected their god to greet his worshippers by trying to murder one of them out of sheer love; they bowed their heads, and began doing a fast, counterpoint hand-clapping that jangled Cochran’s thoughts the way drumming was supposed to confuse ghosts.

“And here is your king!” shouted one of the sexless clay people, pointing behind Cochran and his companions.

Cochran turned, half expecting to see Scott Crane restored already—-but what he saw through the driving rain was a tall figure and a shorter one reeling down the path from the highway; they were hardly a dozen yards away, and after a moment he recognized Mavranos and Kootie.

The recognition was soon mutual: Kootie’s eyes widened and he hurried forward toward Pete and Angelica, and Mavranos trudged up and called, with forced and haggard panache, “What seeems to be the problem?”

“What’s going on?” yelled Kootie over the noise of the storm. “We drove the car right through the greenhouse in low gear, right over Scott Crane’s skeleton!”

“This is it,” Plumtree told him shrilly. “We picked up Scott Crane’s ghost hitchhiking, and he led us to the devil’s wine!” The boy had stumbled closer across the splashing mud now, and she was able to speak in an almost conversational tone when she added, “And we picked up the other old lady ghost, too.” She tapped the side of her head. “It looks like we’re doing it right this time!”

Kootie and Mavranos were bundled up in raincoats, and Mavranos was wearing his Greek fisherman’s cap while Kootie had on an old felt fedora of Cochran’s.

“But Chinese New Year isn’t until tomorrow!” protested Mavranos, staring at the blackly blazing mark on Cochran’s right hand. “Not until midnight, at the soonest! They cant just change it this way! I haven’t had time to think—”

“Midnight?” said Pete. “Is that standard time or daylight savings?” He waved at the rain-swept dark sky. “This day is over.”

Kootie was blinking at the bottle of wine in Cochran’s left hand. “Yeah,” he said bleakly, “the sun’s’ down. I guess there’s debts you don’t carry into the new year.”

Mavranos scowled around at the kneeling clay people in the guttering torchlight. “Are you people volunteers?” Mavranos roared at them, and Cochran thought there was a note of desperate hope in the man’s voice. “Do you mean to put yourselves in the way of what’s happening here?”

“We’re here of our own will, which is the god’s will,” called one of the figures.

Mavranos nodded, though he was still frowning and squinting as if against the glare of the vanished lightning. “If this cup may pass away,” he muttered. Then, more loudly, he said, “Let’s get to the cave.”

Plumtree took Cochran’s right hand, and the two of them set off across the marshy plain, with the others following; the mud-people did appear to be allies, but when Cochran glanced back he saw that Angelica with her bundle of soaked fabric, and Mavranos with his hand in the pocket of his raincoat, were hanging back a few paces to watch the roofless building and the landward slopes and the path behind.

Cochran was suddenly, viscerally sure that not all of the king’s company would survive this night; and he was still dizzy from his mouthful of the forgiveness wine, and wondering what memories and loves it had taken from him’and if it might soon take more.

“This is like in a chess game,” he said to Plumtree through clenched teeth, “when all the castles and bishops and knights are focussed on one square, and there’s like a pause, before they all start charging in and knocking each other off the board.” He walked faster, pulling her along the slope up toward the cave mouth, so that several yards of thrashing rain separated them from Pete and Kootie.

“I don’t care what—” he said to her, “well, I do, I care a lot—but whatever you think, whatever your feelings are, I’ve got to tell you—” He shook his head bewil-deredly. “I love you, Cody.”

She would have stopped, but he pulled her on.

“Me?” she said, hurrying along now. “I’m not worth it, Sid! Even if I love you—”

He glanced at her sharply. Do you?” he asked, leaning his head toward hers to be heard, for his heart was thudding in his chest and he couldn’t make himself speak loudly. “Do you love me?”

She laughed, but it was a warm, anxious laugh. “How do I love thee?” she said. With her free hand she pulled her soggy waitress pad out of her jeans pocket. “Let me read the minutes.”

From far away behind them, somewhere on the overgrown terrace paths above this plain but below the highway, came two hard pops that were louder than the drumming; and Cochran was still wondering if they had been gunshots when several more echoing knocks shivered the rain, and then the dark basin behind them was a hammering din of gunfire.

He looked back, crouching and stepping in front of Plumtree. Mavranos had his revolver out as he backed fast across the mud, and Angelica had thrown away the bundle of cloth and was holding the pistol-grip .45 carbine in both hands. Cochran could see winking flashes now on the distant ruined buildings and along the seawall; most of the shooters seemed to be firing into the air, and perhaps this whole barrage was just a live-ammunition variation on the Chinatown firecrackers.

But Cochran drew his own revolver again, hollowly reflecting that he now had only two rounds left in the cylinder.

“I’m still here,” said Cody wonderingly as the two of them scrambled on up the muddy slope. “Gunfire, a lot of it, and I haven’t passed the hand.”

CHAPTER THIRTY TWO

False eyebrows and false moustaches were stuck upon them, and their hideous countenances were all bloody and sweaty, and all awry with howling, and all staring and glaring with beastly excitement and want of sleep.

—Charles Dickens,

A Tale of Two Cities

DR. Armentrout and Long John Beach had jumped off the muddy path to the left after his first reflexively answering shot had provoked so much return fire, and the two of them had tumbled over an old ivy-covered stone wall, with the two-mannikin appliance flailing wildly on Armentrout’s shoulders, and then they tumbled and spun down a mud slope in darkness, away from the torches up on the path. He believed at least one of the Lever Blank men had been shot.

When they had still been in the car the pomegranate had been pulling hard enough to jump away from his hands when he had let go of it, and so he had made sure to grip it tightly as they had climbed out of the Saturn in the parking lot up the hill—he could imagine the thing getting away from him and rolling off into the night to find the king by itself. He had ordered Long John Beach to strap the heavy two-man appliance onto him, and he had held the pomegranate tightly in each hand while sliding the other through the arm loops—even when the left-hand-side Styrofoam head had nuzzled his cheek in an eerie similitude of affection or attack.

With the mannikins flanking him, the leisure-suited aluminum-pole arms around his shoulders, there had seemed to be six people who ran across the drag-strip highway and started down the path toward the Sutro Baths ruins, and they must have been conspicuous; before Armentrout and Long John Beach and the two Lever Blank men had walked ten yards, their way had been blocked by torch-bearing figures of a sort Armentrout had seen before, on the Leucadia beach.

And tonight again he had stared at the human eyes in the clay faces, and again he had used his most authoritative doctor’s voice as he’d said, “What, precisely, is your business here? Get out of our way, please.”

An earthen hand pointed at the pomegranate he held, and a red mouth opened on teeth that glittered in the close orange torchlight: “That’s what you took,” said an adolescent voice, “from up the stairs at the Leucadia Camelot.”

With his free hand Armentrout pulled the little derringer out of his inside jacket pocket. He levered the hammer back, and then confidently raised the gun and pointed it at the center of the breastless, clay-smeared chest. “Get out of our way, please,” he said again.

And then a ringing explosion flared in the ivy to the right, and Armentrout was tugged around in that direction by a punch to his right-side mannikin.

His instant twitch of astonishment clenched his fists—the hollow pomegranate crumpled in his left hand, and his right hand clutched the little gun—

—and then his wrist was hammered by the impact of the wooden ball-grip being slammed into his palm, and the muzzle-flash burned his retinas—but not so dazzlingly that he wasn’t able to see the clay-smeared figure step back and then sit down abruptly in the mud, with a ragged golf-ball-sized hole in its chest.

The shrubbery had seemed to erupt in glaring flashes and deafening bangs then, and Armentrout and Long John Beach had vaulted over the ivy on the downhill side of the path. In the ensuing tumbling slide, Armentrout just tried to let the aluminum bodies and the grunting mannikin heads take the abrasions and knocks, while he kept his hands clamped on the gun and the broken pomegranate.

When they had rolled to a halt in a rainy pool down on the plain, Armentrout sat up in the water and squinted sideways at the Styrofoam head on his right shoulder. A great red flare of afterimage hung in the center of Armentrout’s vision, but he could see that the Styrofoam man had been shot squarely through the forehead—and then he looked away again quickly, because for just an instant the blank white features had been the face of Philip Muir, pop-eyed and gaping as it had been after Armentrout had put a point-blank load of .410 shot between Muir’s eyes.

All he could hear down here, through the ringing in his ears, was a rapid drumming—and then he became aware of a whole siege of popping, spattering gunfire, none of it very close. Peering out through the curtains of cold rain, he saw blinks and flashes of light all along the walls and paths on the plain.

The Maruts, he thought almost in awe; the militant youths described in the Rig-Veda, springing up spontaneously on this western American shore, armed with guns now instead of swords and spears, and wearing earthen rather than golden armor. And they’re embodying the Cretan Kouretes, too, protecting the new king by making a distracting racket with their weapons.

The pomegranate was still pulling in his hand, though it was cracked now and bright little seeds were popping out of it and flying away toward the dark cliffs of Point Lobos on the far side of the lagoons and the low stone buildings. “We have to find the king,” he gasped to Long John Beach as he struggled painfully to his feet and thrust the leaking pomegranate into his pocket. “Come on!”

Long John Beach pushed himself up with his one arm—and then, without falling back, impossibly lifted the arm from the water to push his sopping white hair back out of his face while he was still propped up at an angle out of the pool.

Then he had got his feet under himself and stood up, and the tiny miracle was over. “I do stand engaged to many Greeks,” the old man said in the dead Valerie-voice, “even in the faith of Valerie, to appear this morning to them.” Then he blinked at the three heads on Armentrout’s shoulders as if all of them were alive; and after staring attentively at the one beside Armentrout’s left shoulder, he looked the doctor in the eye and said, “Your mother, in most great affliction of spirit, hath sent me to you.”

In the moment it took Armentrout to remember that he now had only one .410 shell left unfired in the magical gun, he was ready to shoot Long John Beach; then he tried to speak, but all that came out of his mouth was a hoarse stuttering wail like a goat’s. Frightened and angry, and desperate to be once again free of all the demanding dead people, Armentrout just tucked the gun too into his pocket and shoved Long John Beach forward toward the cliffs.

COCHRAN ANDPlumtree had scrambled up to the ledge road, and the cave was only a dozen feet to their left.

Cochran wasn’t aware that he had been hearing idling engines until the headlights came on, up the slope to the right—single headlights, motorcycles—and at the same moment he heard the whirring clatter of Harley-Davidson engines throttling nn_ Cochran clutched the wine bottle to his ribs with his left hand and cocked the hammer of his revolver with his right. Because he had been half thinking in French all evening, he was able to recognize the chorus of yells from the riders: Vive le Roi! Vive le Roi!

The flashes of the first cracking gunshots were aimed toward Pete and Kootie, in the middle of the group; Cochran raised his revolver and saw, in razory tunnel-vision over the gun sights, a bearded and wild-haired rider swinging a pistol left-handed toward Angelica and Mavranos.

And Cochran touched the trigger. Blue flames jetted out in an X from the gap where the cylinder met the barrel, and the hammer-blow of sound rocked him as much as the recoil did, but he glimpsed the rider rolling over backward as a booted leg kicked out and the motorcycle’s wheels came up and the bike went down in a plowing slide.

A second motorcycle rode down into the fallen one and then stood up on end and somersaulted forward, tossing its rider tumbling across the mud to within a yard of Cochran’s feet as the heavy bike clanged away downhill through the curtains of rain; Cochran was aiming now at two more riders who had banked down toward Pete and Kootie.

But Angelica’s carbine and Mavranos’s .38 were a sudden jack-hammer barrage, flaring like a cluster of chain-lightning, and then the motorcycles wobbled past as Kootie dived one way and Angelica leaped in the other direction—one of the machines crashed over sideways, throwing its rag-doll rider to the ground, while the other bounded straight over a low wall into the big rectangular lagoon with an explosive hissing splash.

Cochran spun to the man who had fallen at his feet—and saw Plumtree straightening up from the man’s bloody, sightless face and tossing away a wet rock; raindrops splashed on a stainless-steel automatic that lay in the man’s limp hand. Plumtree’s eyes were bright, and she cried, “It’s still me, Sid!”

And not Salvoy, he thought, remembering the story of the would-be rapist in Oakland in ‘89. Cochran’s right hand was twitching, re-experiencing the hard recoil of the gun, as if his very nerves wished the action could still be cancelled; and he cringed for Cody’s sake, at the thought that she had now been permitted to commit homicide for herself.

A fresh volley of gunfire erupted from down the slope, and stone splinters whistled through the air as bullets hammered into the cliff face to his left and behind him and ricochets twanged through the rain. Then someone had grabbed Cochran’s arm and yelled into his ear, “Back—Arky’s been shot, and there’s bikers in the cave.”

Cochran threw his arm around Plumtree’s shoulders and pulled her away from the dust-spitting cliff face, back down the mud slope toward the fires. He realized that it was Pete who had seized him, and he glimpsed more moving headlights up the slope on the right. The cold rainy air was fouled now with the smells of motor oil and cordite.

“This isn’t aimed at us!” yelled Pete over the banging din.

“Gooood!” wailed Cochran, gritting his teeth and trying to block Plumtree from at least one quarter of the banging, flashing night. The two of them stumbled and slid back down the slope after Pete; squinting against the battering rain, Cochran could see Mavranos being half-carried back toward the roofless stone building by one of the naked-looking clay-people, with Angelica and Kootie hunching along after. The flames that boiled up from within the stone walls were huge now, throwing shadows across the mudflats and clawing the night sky, seeming even to redly light the undersides of the clouds.

“The men on m-motorcycles,” said Pete, speaking loudly to be heard, “think-kuh Kootie is the khing, but they want him to be-be their king. They’ll—kill—everyone else, if they cannn.”

Sound was becoming jerky and segmented again, and Cochran again felt that he was experiencing time in fast but discrete frames—the unceasing rattle and pop of gunfire near and far began to be paced, in a fast, complicated counterpoint tempo like the hand-clapping of the clay people—

—Cochran was stumbling, suddenly feeling very drunk, with the taste of the pagadebiti wine blooming back into his throat and expanding his head—

—Clumsily he pushed the revolver back into the holster at the back of his belt so that he could hold the bottle with the black-stained hand too—

—And then in an instant all the noise stopped, with one last distant rebounding echo to deprive him of the consolation of believing that he had gone deaf; and as if the stunning racket had been a headwind he’d been leaning against, the abrupt cessation of it pitched him forward onto his knees in the mud.

The cork popped out of the bottle’s neck, and Cochran thought he could hear the smack of it hitting the mud a moment later.

Even the rain had stopped—the air was clear and cold, with no slightest breeze, and the fire in the stone building convulsed overhead for another moment and then stood up straight, a towering yards-wide brushstroke of golden glare against the black night.

Cody Plumtree was on her hands and knees beside him, panting. “When the shooting started,” she whispered, “the other girls fell back, and I was on the bus alone, in the driver’s seat, driving away from them.” Her voice was faint, but in the silence Cochran could hear every sound her teeth and lips and breath made. “But the man standing beside me in the vision wasn’t the broken lunatic anymore—it was Scott Crane, all strong and excellent and wise, guiding me; and we sped up and leaped the bus right over the gap in the freeway, and landed whole on the other side. “

From Dirty Harry to Speed, thought Cochran. That’s good, I guess. “Kootie did say,” he whispered cautiously, “when we were here two or three weeks ago, that you’re probably carrying Crane’s ghost on you.”

‘Tonight he gets washed off.”

Cochran remembered the motorcyclist she had killed and the automatic in the man’s limp hand. “Cody,” he said, “you saved my life.”

“Old Chinese proverb,” said Plumtree hoarsely. “‘Whoever saves another person’s life should dig two graves.’“

Kootie came plodding up to where Cochran and Plumtree knelt. And the boy’s splashing footsteps in the mud awoke a wind from over the eastern slopes—the gusty breeze swept down the bowl of the vast amphitheater, bending trees and rippling the ponds, and twitched at Cochran’s wet hair as it stepped over him and his companions and moved out over the dark ocean. The air smelled of dry wine and fresh tree sap.

“Give me the wine,” said Kootie, his raincoat flapping in the breeze. He had lost Cochran’s hat at some point.

Cochran looked past Kootie. The tall flame was curling and snapping again, and by its yellow glow he could see Angelica standing close behind Kootie, and next to her Mavranos with his left arm around Pete’s shoulders and his right hand pressed to his side. Cochran lifted the bottle over his head with both hands and the boy took it.

“Now I think Dionysus … set me up to kill that woman, meant me to do it, in his boarding house,” the boy said quietly. The firelight made deep shadows of his cheeks and his eye sockets. “But I did kill her—I do still have to offer my neck to the Green Knight’s blade.” Angelica would have said something, but Kootie raised his hand “We won’t be able to get into the cave, until I do—and I know the god will kill us all here tonight if I don’t. Remember the end of that play Arky told us about, the one where the people refused to drink the god’s wine.”

“The Bacchae,” said Mavranos through clenched teeth.

A deep, hollow drumbeat rolled down the strengthening breeze; then after a few seconds came another. Like two very slow steps.

“Get up,” Kootie told Cochran and Plumtree. “Let’s go over by the water—”

Cochran struggled to his feet and helped Plumtree up, and with Angelica and Pete and Mavranos they followed the boy down the slope toward the black water beside the stone building. The heat from the flames was a sting on the right side of Cochran’s face.

They passed half a dozen of the mud-smeared youths, all of them kneeling; several of them, and many others on the plain, were facing away, toward the Point Lobos cliff, and holding pistols and even rifles at the ready. Bikers in the cave, Cochran remembered. Four ragged figures were trudging at a labored pace down from the highway-side slope into the light; one was limping, evidently supported by two of his companions.

The drumbeat had continued as the wind strengthened, and was now thumping a little faster. At least two other drums, at other points across the dark basin, had joined the first one in the same rhythm. White patches showed in the eastern sky, where the moon was breaking through the wind-riven clouds.

But it cant be the moon, thought Cochran. The moon has been waning for a week, it was full on the first of the month it should be totally dark tonight.

The ground sloped right down into the water here, any original wall long gone, and Kootie halted with his boots a yard from the water. He dug a fluttering paper out of his raincoat pocket and passed it carefully to Cochran. It was a car-registration slip.

‘Arky wrote the palindrome on that,” Kootie told him. “When I give you a nod, read the last line aloud.”

“Right,” Cochran said, in a rusty voice. When I read each of the two previous lines aloud, he thought, Crane’s ghost showed up; first as our taxi driver after I read the Latin on the ashtray at the Mount Sabu bar, and then as a naked flickering image right here, after I read the next line from Valorie’s matchbook.

“When are you going to drink the wine?” asked Angelica with badly concealed urgency. Her wet black hair was blowing in tangles across her lean lace.

“When we get back up to the cave,” Kootie told her firmly.

The drumbeat was pounding exactly in time with Cochran’s pulse now, and he intuitively knew that his companions were experiencing the same synchronization.

Quickly, before Angelica or Pete could react, Kootie raised the wine bottle and tipped it up to his lips; and when he lowered it, Mavranos quickly reached out and took it out of his hands.

“Aaah!” Angelica’s wail was snatched away over the sea by the wind, and Cochran knew that she had intended to stop the boy, and that Kootie had known it too.

The boy reeled back across the mud, away from the water, but he didn’t fall; well, thought Cochran, he wasn’t standing next to an open grave.

Kootie reached jerkily into an inside pocket of the raincoat and yanked out the dirty little yellow blanket that he had been given by the Diana woman, Scott Crane’s widow. For a moment Cochran thought he was going to throw it away. Then the boy pulled it around his shoulders, and he was suddenly closer, or taller, and the blanket seemed to be a spotted yellow fur. Cochran was having trouble focussing on him in the light of the gusting fire.

Cochran shoved the wet car registration into his pocket. His right hand was still flexing, and he was trying to focus his eyes clearly on anything—the low stone walls that stretched away in the darkness, Plumtree’s face, his own hands—and he found that he couldn’t make out the exact shape of the black hole in the back of his twitching right hand, no matter how he blinked and narrowed his eyes—

The drumbeats were coming more rapidly—the mud-smeared people had got to their feet and were milling around uneasily, swinging their rifles and pistols—and now fast-thudding footsteps from behind were matching the drum’s strokes.

Cochran turned, and flinched even as his right hand sprang once again toward the holster at the back of his belt.

The fire-lit figure rushing straight at them across the mud looked at first like some hallucinatory three-headed Kali with four waving arms, and Cochran’s abdomen momentarily turned to ice water; then he saw that it was a portly white-haired man, with a nair of life-size Gesticulating mannikins attached to his shoulders; and as Cochran fumbled the gun out of the holster he recognized the muddied, grimacing face—it was Dr. Armentrout, and one of the doctor’s hands clutched a tiny silver pistol.

But another man was running up behind Armentrout, and now caught the doctor; and he must have punched him between the shoulder blades, for Armentrout’s head rocked back sharply and he plunged forward face-down into the mud. The little pistol flew out of his hand and bounced once off the mud and splashed into the dark water.

Before the doctor’s encumbered form had even stopped sliding, his pursuer had leaped onto his shoulders, and Cochran saw that it was Long John Beach. The one-armed old man was gripping the back of Armentrout’s neck—the two artificial white heads were splayed out to the sides in the mud, their aluminum neck-poles bent, and between them the doctor’s head was jerked violently to the side each time Long John Beach’s shoulder stump flexed over him.

Cochran was pointing his revolver at the pair, into the middle of the spider-cluster of mismatched arms and heads, but the muzzle wavered. He was aware of Plumtree standing beside him, breathing fast.

Without halting his invisible beating of the doctor, Long John Beach raised his round white-whiskered face, and his little eyes seemed to be squinting fearfully up at Kootie. “A three-headed dog—on your altar,” he said, panting as his shoulder spasmed metronomically and blood began to blot through the doctor’s snapping white hair “Your way,” he gasped, “is—clear.” Then he leaned down over the doctor’s limp, jerking form, and a woman’s voice cawed, “Can you breathe, Richie dear? Say something if you can’t breathe.” The voice must have come from Long John Beach’s throat, but Cochran thought the left-side mannikin head had been jerking in time to the words.

A dozen drums were pounding in rapid unison now, and though it was no longer synchronized with even his presently very fast heartbeat, Cochran thought the drums were matching some other rhythm inside him—an ancient, savage brain-frequency that made thought impossible. His open mouth was fluttered by the wind, and his nose was full of the wine and sap smells.

A warm, strong hand gripped Cochran’s shoulder—and he found himself helplessly pointing his revolver at the two jolting figures on the mud in front of him, and then he pulled the trigger—but he must have miscounted his previous shots, for the gun didn’t fire.

He was dizzily ready to crouch beside Armentrout and begin pounding on all three of the twitching heads with the pistol grip; but the hand on his shoulder pulled him back and gave him a shockingly hard shove that spun him around twice before he was able to flailingly catch his balance. In the fire-lit wheeling blur he had glimpsed a wooden mask on broad, fur-caped shoulders, but the urgency was now somewhere else; Cochran was still off-balance, somehow.

The clay-smeared people had all stood up at once from the mud around him, and were walking, then striding, toward the Point Lobos cliff. And in a moment they had opened their mouths in a shrill, ululating chorus, and they were running. Cochran let himself start to fall in the same direction.

And then Cochran and Plumtree were running too, right with them, and Cochran didn’t even know if he was joining in the predatory yelling as his feet thudded in the mud and flames whirled around him and Plumtree. No particular sound in the shaking din told him that the struck bullet in the gun he was carrying had belatedly fired into the ground, just the jolt in his hand and the flare at his thigh; he didn’t even look down, just flipped the gun around in his hand so that it would be a better club.

He did hear shots from up the slope ahead—a rapid-fire stutter that conveyed desperation and panic—and over the close tossing clay dreadlocks Cochran could see muzzle-flashes from the mouth of the cave. None of the sprinting youths appeared to be shooting back—like Cochran they were waving their firearms overhead like clubs, or just tossing them away.

Cochran and Plumtree leaped over wall sections and fallen naked bodies, and then he had lost the gun and they were scrambling up the mud slope toward the cave, imitating the naked earth-people around them in hunching forward to pull themselves up with their hands as well as push themselves along with their feet. All the torches and even the guns had been dropped and left behind, and it seemed to be a pack of four-legged beasts rushing up the path to the cave.

The gunshots were just sporadic punctuation to shrill screams now, and the cave was packed with straining, clawing forms streaked only with reflected moonlight. Cochran was breathing fast through his clenched teeth as he fought to get through the press of bodies to the prey; until a heavy, hairy ball rolled over the shoulders in front of him and fell into his empty hands.

He stared at it. For one transfigured moment it was the head of a lion, shining gold—then it was a human head in the silver moonlight, bearded and gap-toothed and wide-eyed, leaking slick hot blood onto his hands. The nose and ears were torn and bent and tangled in the bloody hair, and an actual thought appeared in Cochran’s fevered mind: This was twisted off of its body.

He stumbled back and shook the thing free of his hands, and it fell into a tangle of vines at his feet.

Looking up, he saw Plumtree backing away, dragging her right shoulder across the clustered fluttering leaves that covered the cliff face, while her left shoulder was jostled by the muddy, sexless figures. She was biting her knuckles and staring toward where Cochran had dropped the severed head; and her face was bone white in the moonlight, but when she looked up at him she was recognizably still Cody.

Cochran dodged his way over to where she stood, and he started to hold out his hand to her; then he saw that it was gleaming black with blood.

But she clasped it anyway, and he leaned beside her against the leaf-covered unevenness of the cliff.

The clay-smeared youths were dancing away from the cave now, whirling and leaping out of the tunnel and waving over their dreadlocked heads pieces of human bodies as they whirled away back down the slope to the wild beat of the drumming.

And the bounding dancers didn’t pause, but the crowd of them split widely around a figure that was striding up the slope now.

Angelica and Pete, supporting the limping Mavranos, were following it.

It wore no mask, and of course it was Kootie—but the boy was taller, and the skirted raincoat and the blanket around his shoulders flapped like robes in the driving wind, and his stern face was dark and Asian in the moonlight. Cochran remembered that the boy’s last name was something from India.

The clay-smeared youths were dancing and running around the fire in the roofless structure now; but other figures, clothed and wet and-limping, were toiling across the mud-flats toward the cliff; one was as short as a child, and poling itself forward on crutches.

The impossibly full moon was a white disk hanging over the waving trees at the top of Sutro Park above the highway, and by its light Cochran could see that the whole Point Lobos cliff behind himself and Plumtree was covered with vines; and bunches of grapes swung heavily in the wine-reeking wind.

Cochran and Plumtree stepped back and lowered their eyes as the tall figure that was at least partly Koot Hoomie Parganas stepped up to the broad ledge; tracks of motorcycle tires, and swirling gouges left by motorcycle footpegs and handlebars, stood out in starkly shadowed relief in the mud, but Kootie’s boots sank deeper, and the holes of his bootprints quickly filled with dark liquid.

The god just walked past you, Cochran told himself; Dionysus, walking the Point Lobos cliffs on this broken night.

But the thought was too big to grasp, and slid off his mind, and he could only look away, down the slope.

CHAPTER THIRTY THREE

Soon wild commotions shook him and made flush

All the immortal fairness of his limbs;

Most like the struggle at the gate of death;

Or liker still to one who should take leave

Of pale immortal death, and with a pang

As hot as death’s is chill, with fierce convulse

Die into life …

—John Keats,

Hyperion

MAVRANOS’S head was lowered, but he was thrusting himself up the slope strongly with his good left leg; the right leg of his jeans was dark with blood. The faces of Pete and Angelica on either side of him were strained and expressionless with the work of supporting his weight as they climbed the slope. Angelica had apparently lost her carbine, but she was gripping the bottle of pagadebiti in her free hand.

When the path levelled out, Mavranos lifted his head, and his stony gaze swept down across the vine-covered cliff to Cochran. “Are there any of the,” Mavranos said through clenched teeth, “mud-kids still in the tunnel?”

Kootie had already disappeared into the tunnel, and Cochran plodded carefully to the cave mouth, stepping out wide of it and peering. The tunnel was nearly as dark as the mark on his hand, but beyond the tall, slowly receding silhouette that was Kootie he could see moonlit rock surfaces beyond the arch of the far opening, and no other people.

He shambled back to where Pete and Angelica and Mavranos stood swaying before he answered, for he didn’t want to seem to be calling down the tunnel.

“Nobody at all, but Kootie,” he said. “They all ran back to the fires, after they—when they—”

Angelica nodded. “We saw what they were carrying.”

“Then,” said Mavranos in an anguished voice, “who?”

“Sid,” said Angelica, “help Pete carry Arky.”

Cochran stepped up beside Mavranos, and Angelica got out from under Mavranos’s left arm and draped its weight around Cochran’s shoulders. And then Angelica went sprinting to the cave mouth and disappeared inside, still carrying the bottle. Drops of the wine splashed out onto the mud, and fresh leafy vines curled violently up out of the ground where they had struck, like convulsing snakes.

“I’ll watch her,” said Plumtree to Pete, and she hurried into the cave after Angelica. Cochran gritted his teeth, remembering that Cody hated caves.

“Come on,” said Pete, starting forward strongly; Cochran braced his right arm around Mavranos’s ribs and followed, and the two of them were in effect carrying Mavranos into the gavel-floored cave, in spite of occasional help from Mavranos’s one good leg.

Cochran could feel the short hairs standing up at the base of his neck at the sharp metallic smell that filled the tunnel, and when he realized that it was the smell of fresh blood he made sure to breathe only through his mouth.

Their footsteps crunched and sloshed along the puddled gravel floor, and over the hooting whistle of the wind Cochran could hear sea water crashing and guttering on rocks in the holes below the remembered iron railing that was invisible in this darkness.

“Crowd your wall,” he gasped to Pete, for the railing had been on the left.

Then he could see the iron railing below Mavranos’s dangling left hand, silhouetted against the luminous foam of the waves outside, beyond the rock wall. A seething bath, he recalled Valorie saying here, which yet may prove against strange maladies a sovereign cure.

As his shoes deeply furrowed the unseen wet gravel, he twice felt the brief entanglement of strips of cloth, and once he kicked a boot that rolled away too loosely to still have a foot in it—his feet didn’t bump anything that felt like flesh and bone, but he was still breathing through his mouth.

When Kootie had stepped out into the diffuse moonlight on the ledge over the water, and the hurrying silhouettes of Angelica and Plumtree had brightened with detail as they shuffled outside too, Cochran could hear footsteps rattling the gravel some distance behind him; but he couldn’t free his head to look around. Pete must have heard the steps as well, for he joined Cochran in striding along at a quicker pace.

At last the three of them stumbled out into the relative brightness of the moonlit cloudy sky. Kootie was standing at the seaward lip of the ledge, staring out at the dark Pacific Ocean. He was clearly taller than Plumtree now, who was braced against the seaward rock face beside Angelica, and he even seemed through some trick of moonlight and perspective to be bigger than the great stone profile, across the splashing gap to the right, which was itself staring out to sea in the same direction.

Cochran had to look away; an aura played about Kootie’s fur-draped shoulders, and Cochran’s eyes hurt when he tried to focus on the boy. He was aware of heat radiating from that side of the ledge, and he wondered helplessly if apotheosis might cause Kootie to spontaneously combust.

Mavranos pushed himself away from Cochran and Pete and stood swaying by himself, blinking around at the stone head and the other huge boulders and tumbled stones piled against this side of the Point Lobos cliffs.

Free of the heavy arm on his shoulders; Cochran quickly turned to look back down the tunnel. At least two silhouettes were trudging this way up the wet stone windpipe; and he was sure that the one struggling along on crutches could be no one but Thutmose the Utmos’, the dwarf junkie he had met at the Seafood Bohemia bar, apparently still desperate for a sip of the forgiving wine.

Cochran hurried across to stand beside Plumtree. “We got,” he gasped, “company.”

The figure in the aura at the seaward side of the ledge turned ponderously, rippling the gusty air, and through the optical distortions the inhumanly calm wooden mask nodded at Cochran. There was respectful greeting in the gesture, possibly even a blessedly remote affection, but there was also command.

Pete was braced against the wall beside Angelica, and now appeared to be holding her back from rushing at the god.

Cochran dug his cold-numbed fingers into his pocket and pulled out the soggy car-registration form.

The light was far too dim for him to read any words off the water-darkened paper; and in sudden abysmal panic he realized that he couldn’t remember one word of the Latin.

He lifted his right hand toward his face to rub uselessly at his eyes—and then noticed that the black mark on his knuckles seemed to radiate darkness, so that the letters on the paper shone clearly with the same intense, reflected blackness.

He took a deep breath of the cold wine-and-blood-scented sea air.

“Sole,” he read, calling loudly to be heard over the wind whistling in the tunnel at his back, “medere pede: ede, perede melos” And now he remembered the translation the woman had given them: O Sun, remedy the louse: give forth from yourself, and give forth from yourself again, your devoured limb.

The masked figure that was no longer recognizable as Kootie was shaking, and Cochran could feel heat on his eyes. He stepped back, raising his hand to throw a cool shadow across his face, and saw Long John Beach shamble out onto the ledge.

Cochran tensed and stepped around in front of the man to grab Plumtree’s arm; but the old man was cowering, and his single arm was shaking as he pointed behind and above Cochran.

The waves of the sea glittered silver as a wash of bright moonlight swept in from the horizon toward the shore with eerie speed, and then the full moon was suddenly above the cliffs, shining down onto the rocks, and Cochran could see a naked, bearded man, seeming to stand as tall as Michelangelo’s David, on the top of the George Washington boulder.

Cochran shivered, flinching in the moonlight. Dionysus and the Moon Goddess, for this, he thought. It must have been Diana’s baby blanket that called her.

The tall figure in the wooden mask shifted ponderously around to face the boulder, and Cochran’s eyes narrowed against the radiant heat.

“No!” shouted Long John Beach into the eddying wind. “Wait, listen to this person!” Still cowering before the mask and the moon, he nevertheless shambled out across the ledge toward the masked god. “Look who thinks he’s nothing,” he said in a whimper; “but the voice from the sky said, ‘Let go of the tree.’” More loudly, he called to the expressionless mask, “Now you’re killing the boy! Take—take this body—it’s presumed to do a lot of your proper work, in its time—and it’s … pruned.”

Long John Beach hunched forward across the slanted ledge in the stark moonlight—against evident resistance, as if he were weighed down and struggling uphill; Angelica started to push herself away from the cliff to stop him, but Plumtree and Pete both caught her and pulled her back out of the wind.

Cochran was sure that the wind or magnetic repulsion or tilted gravity was going to topple Long John Beach impotently over backward—

—the one-armed man slid back a yard, away from the god—

“Okay!” howled the one-armed old man to the sky, and the wetness on his haggard face had to be tears, “I do it, I let go, I—I surrender everything!”

All at once the old man was laughing, and just for an instant another figure seemed to be superimposed on him, out of scale and suspended as if in mid-dance-step above the stone ledge—a young man in patchwork clothing, with two arms, and a pack over his shoulder and a dog snapping at his heels—and then he was just lone, haggard old Long John Beach again, but standing now right in front of the Dionysus figure.

The lone arm stretched out, and one of the old man’s fingers reached through the rippling aura and touched the mask.

And then Long John Beach spun around to face the naked figure up on the top of the boulder, and he seemed to Cochran’s aching eyes to have spun a number of times, just too fast to catch. And now he was taller, broader-shouldered, and draped in a flapping silver leopard-skin, and it was his face that was hidden by the mask.

Kootie collapsed off to the side in his floppy raincoat, and Angelica and Plumtree both caught him and fell to their knees to lower him gently to the puddled stone surface; Angelica had dropped the bottle, and it had bounced off her foot and was rolling on the ledge, spurting dark wine onto the wet rocks. For a moment Kootie was struggling weakly in the arms of both women, the raincoat collar half hiding his face, and then Plumtree disengaged herself and snatched up the bottle.

Scott Crane’s ghost was flickering up on top of the boulder, like a figure badly projected on a drive-in movie screen—and now Kootie was shaking violently in Angelica’s arms, in the same rhythm.

Mavranos took a step forward, and his right leg folded under him and he fell to his knees in front of Plumtree. “Oh, it will be Kootie,” he gasped, “if I don’t do it. I hoped one of the killer clay-kids would volunteer to do it, that this cup wouldn’t be for me, but—ahh God.”

He reached up and grabbed the bottle from Plumtree—and then he tilted it to his mouth, and Cochran could see his throat working as he swallowed gulp after gulp of the bloody wine. Cochran winced in sympathy, remembering what Mavranos had said at their first attempt, out on the yacht-harbor peninsula: What your girlfriend is ready to do … I don’t think I could do.

A wail echoed from the mouth of the tunnel behind them, and Thutmose the Utmos’ came skittering and thrashing out onto the ledge in a tangle of aluminum crutch-poles. “For me! The holy blood—I’ve worked harder—”

Mavranos lowered the bottle and scowled, and the dwarf subsided into silence. “I was—dying of cancer!” shouted Mavranos through the rain, staring at his empty left hand, “when I met Scott Crane! And what he did cured me!” He made a fist, and when he went on it was in a voice almost too low for Cochran to hear: “This five years has been gravy. Tell Wendy and the girls that I … paid my debts. Tell them they had a husband and father they could be proud of.”

He stood up, not wincing as he put weight on his right leg, and he walked across to stand balanced on the seaward rim of the ledge, nearly eclipsed by the tall masked god whose outlines roiled beside him. Mavranos squinted the other way, up at the towering naked bearded figure on the rock, and he called out strongly, “Scott! Pogo, do you hear me? Jump this way, old friend, I’ll—catch you!”

And Cochran raised his marked right hand against the wind.

Cochran made himself stare across the ledge into the carved, placid features of the wooden mask that he had seen on Vignes Street in Los Angeles and in the mental hospital in Bellflower; and to it he called, “I’m Scant Cochran—extend to Scott Crane the favor you owe me.”

Dionysus swept down one muscular arm and punched Mavranos off the ledge—Mavranos threw his arms out to the sides as he fell away toward the sea, and then he was gone, the bottle spinning away with him.

Thutmose the Utmos’ sprang howling away from the wall and covered the length of the ledge in three slithering hops, and then he had dived off the rocky rim and disappeared after Mavranos.

A crash of thunder like a basso-profundo shout from the cliffs themselves shook the air, and in the same instant a blast of white buckshot abraded the cliff face and punched Cochran solidly into Plumtree, and his first thought was that the rushing moon had exploded; but when the blast struck again, and then was followed by sheets of battering rain, Cochran looked down at the white pellets rolling on the stone surface by his shoes and saw that the white buckshot had been BB-sized hailstones.

Cochran forced his head around against the whipping onshore wind, and through tearing, narrowed eyes saw that there was no figure up on the George Washington head now; and the corner of the ledge was empty where Long John Beach or Dionysus had stood.

We failed at it again, he thought incredulously. He clung to Plumtree as tears were blown out of the corners of his eyes and his shoulders heaved. All of us have about killed ourselves, and Arky has killed himself, and we’ve failed. Suddenly Plumtree gripped his upper arms hard.

Over the racket of the storm, someone was roaring, or screaming, out in the ocean; and through the rain the cliffs echoed with the baying of a hound. And the ledge was shaking.

Cochran crouched and pulled Plumtree down, and then he reached past her and tugged hard at Kootie’s raincoat, trying to help Pete Sullivan to drag both the boy and Angelica toward the tunnel. Boulders were moving out in the curtains of rain, and rocks were toppling from the crests of the cliffs and spinning down through the air to crack and rumble in pieces into the churning sea; and some kind of water main must have broken in the core of Point Lobos, for solid arching streams were shooting out far above the boulders and being torn to spray by the wind. “Get inside!” Cochran yelled at Angelica. “Rock fall!” “Wait for him!” she screamed back.

Cochran was panting in pure fright as he clung to the heaving ledge over the boiling sea; his tears were flying away past his ears, and the spray in his open mouth was fresh water. He turned around with his hands splayed flat on the wet shifting stone, and shouted to Plumtree, “Get in the tunnel!”

A falling rock impacted so hard with the ledge rim in the moment of shattering like a bomb that the very concussion of the air stunned him and he thought his wrists were broken just from the jolt through the stone.

Two weeks ago the shooting at the ruins on the yacht-club peninsula had shocked him with the facts of velocity and human mercilessness; now his mind was seized-up with a cellular comprehension of force and physical mass and Nature’s mercilessness. Hail and gravel and rain lashed like chains at his back, and he tried to block Plumtree from it as he pulled her toward the tunnel. The ledge had shifted under his knees, and he was sure it was within moments of breaking away and falling into the sea.

But Plumtree grabbed his chin in her cold hand and yelled, “Look!”—and she stared past him, toward Pete and Angelica and Kootie.

Feeling as though he were turning himself inside-out, Cochran tore his eyes from the close darkness of the stone tunnel and twisted his head around to look toward the open sea.

A man was climbing up out of the waves onto the shaking ledge, clutching each new, bucking handhold with bunched muscles and straining tendons. He was shirtless, and a thick dark beard, sopping wet, was matted across his broad chest. When he had hauled himself up and got one knee onto the shelf, Cochran saw that he was naked, and that a wound in his right side was bleeding; Kootie pushed himself away from Angelica and began unbuttoning his raincoat.

A big black dog, wet as a seal, was scrambling up the rocks on the side of the ledge closer to the George Washington boulder, and Kootie paused to scream “Fred!” over the howling of the storm.

The dog clawed the stone and got its legs under itself and then bounded to the boy, water flying from its weakly wagging tail.

Cochran met the dark eyes of the bearded man—

And with a sudden hollowness in his chest he recognized Scott Crane, alive in a living body at last.

Blood was streaming away in the rain from the man’s nose and mouth and ears, but he smiled through evident pain; and then he braced himself and straightened his legs and stood up. Blood ran down his right leg from the gash below his ribs.

Cochran was sure the man would just be blown right back off the ledge and broken to pieces on the rocks—but the wind rocked to a halt as if Scott Crane had put his aching shoulders under it, and the cliffs stopped shaking under the weight of his bloody bare feet.

In spite of the glad leaping of the dog, Kootie had managed to shrug out of the raincoat, and he knelt forward to hold it up toward Crane. The bearded man took it and slowly pulled it on and belted the yellow sash, and at once he no longer appeared to Cochran to be some sea god risen from the waves just a robed king, barefoot and wounded.

The rain was falling vertically out of the sky onto the surfaces of stone now, and the arching streams of water had stopped gushing from the cliff. Scott Crane’s gaze travelled from Pete and Angelica and Kootie and the dog to Cochran and, finally, to Plumtree. Cochran wasn’t touching her, but could feel her flexted tension, and he thought he heard a high, keening wail.

Crane smiled at her, and nodded in recognition.

Then Crane’s great bearded head turned as he looked around at the surrounding boulders and the tunnel opening. “Where is Arky?” he said, and his low voice cut effortlessly through the hiss and spatter of the rain. “He called me, all the way from Persephone’s shore, beyond India.”

Plumtree was on her hands and knees, but now she cautiously stood up, bracing herself with one hand against the rock wall. “The gunshot wound in your side,” she wailed, “is all that’s left of him. He gave you his body—and you’ve transformed it into your own.” She was shaking against the stone, and Cochran realized that she was sobbing. “He restored you to life.”

The bearded king was visibly shaken by this. “Is this true?” he asked hollowly.

Cochran realized that it must be, and he nodded even as Kootie said, “Yes.”

Crane raised his bearded head and stretched his arms out to the sides—as Mavranos had when he had fallen into the sea—and he roared a wordless yell that echoed back from the cliffs, and fell to his knees.

“How can I take this?” he said loudly. “Is this how Dionysus gives his favors?”

“Yes,” said Cochran, and he was aware that he and Plumtree had spoken the word in unison.

“Yes,” echoed Kootie.

“Medere pede,” said Crane, quietly but clearly; “ede, perede, melos. I heard that and assented to it—I came back, on those terms. And there’s more blood owed on the account, shamefully proxy blood, still. But after this dawn I can make sure it’s only me that pays, every winter.” He exhaled a long, harsh aah. “But what can my kingdom be, without … loyal, old, Archimedes Mavranos?” Still kneeling, Scott Crane looked across the ledge at Kootie. “You’re the…young man who held the crown.”

“Fumbled it,” called Kootie miserably over the rain. He was hugging the big black dog. “I ran away, on the morning of Dionysus’s day. And I…can’t remember what I did then, but …”

“My family,” said Crane. “My son Benjamin, my wife—do you know if they’re all right?”

“They’re fine,” said Plumtree. Cochran believed that she needed to talk to Crane now, in spite of her guilt—that she needed to keep on establishing that the man really had returned to life. “According to a woman called Nardie Dinh,” Plumtree went on, “who’s taking care of your place.”

“Nardie,” said Crane hoarsely. “That’s good.”

Again Crane got to his feet, smoothly but with pain evident in the stiffening and sudden pallor of his face. “Stand up,” he said. “You five constitute my army and my field marshals.” Bloody teeth showed through the soaked curls of his beard as he gave them a clenched but resolute smile. “Have you got a car?”

“A Torino.” said Koorip planning at Cochran and Plumtree.

“Which is stolen,” said Plumtree. “We’ve got Arky’s truck.”

Crane winced, either at the evident pains of his transfiguration or at the mention of Mavranos’s old Suburban. “Take me to it, and one of you drive,” he said. He stared into Plumtree’s eyes then, making her flinch. “We’ve got two poor bankrupt old women to see off at the cemetery dock.”

“Im—immediately?” asked Cochran, trying to make his voice neutral. All of them had been soaked with cold rain in cold wind for hours, and he had been passionately looking forward to a car heater and a hot shower and then enough to drink so that he could drive out of his mind the image of a severed head in his hands.

Then he glanced at Crane, naked under the raincoat and drenched in sea water and wounded, too, and he was ashamed of having asked. “Not that I—”

“I reckon it’ll be immediate by the time we get there,” said Crane, “yep. We’ve got to go to the cemetery marble temple, out at the end of the peninsula. I think you’ve been there before.”

And been shot at, thought Cochran. “Yes,” he said.

There appeared to be nothing more to say. Plumtree and Cochran led the way-back down the tunnel to the slope that descended to the amphitheater plain. The lull moon had disappeared behind the clouds, and the fire in the roofless stone structure had died down to a height hardly above the ragged walltops, and the dancers were moving in rings now, waving their torches in unison to the quieter drumming.

It was just a Bacchanalian revel now, no longer a Dionysian hunt. The gods were no longer present.

CHAPTER THIRTY FOUR

Ghosts all! The ghost of beauty, the ghost of stateliness, the ghost of elegance, the ghost of pride, the ghost of frivolity, the ghost of wit, the ghost of youth, the ghost of age, all waiting their dismissal from the desolate shore, all turning on him eyes that were changed by the death they had died in coming here.

—Charles Dickens,

A Tale of Two Cities

LIKE a bruise all over,” said Plumtree intently as Scott Crane labored up the steep driveway toward the Sutro Heights parking lot, “isn’t it? Like you’ve been hammered with a meat tenderizer, especially on the insides.”

“It is—like that,” panted Crane. “Who—are you?”

“Cody. Cody Plumtree.”

They were skirting the illuminated patch of asphalt under one of the park light poles, and Cochran looked back at the king. The man had refused any help from him or Pete, and he was striding along steadily, but the moisture on his bearded face was clearly as much sweat, and perhaps tears, as cold rain. Kootie and the black dog were running on ahead and then running back, staying in sight.

“Ch-ch-changes,” said Plumtree. “At least you’re not changing your sex.”

“I can imagine,” Crane said, nodding stiffly, “that that would be rough.”

Cochran could see the red truck under the overhanging elms ahead, still parked among the nondescript but gold-painted old sedans and station wagons. “Don’t be bothering him, Cody,” he whispered.

“I’m not bothering him. Am I bothering you?”

“The climb up the rocks,” said Crane, “took a lot out of me. I made hard use of a lot of—rearranged muscles that were still too shocked to register their initial pain yet.”

Pete had fumbled out Mavranos’s key ring with the Swiss Army knife on it, and was trying to find the key. Kootie and the black dog were already standing by the front bumper.

“Could you open the tailgate?” asked Crane. “I’d be more comfortable lying down in the back. I’ve travelled back there before, when the winter was a bad one.”

More recently than you know, thought Cochran, feeling his face stiffen at the idea of the living man riding back there where his corpse, and then his wrecked skeleton, had been carried around for a week. “Sure,” said Pete.

“Jeez, we should sweep it out,” said Plumtree in an awed voice. “There might still be bits—”

Cochran silenced her with a wide-eyed look behind Crane’s back. After Crane had sveatingly but without help climbed up into the truck bed and stretched out, Pete closed the tailgate and then got in behind the wheel next to Kootie and Angelica, while Cochran and Plumtree got into the back seat, with the dog sitting up panting on the seat between them. When the doors had all been chunked shut, Pete started the engine and backed the track around, then drove slowly down to the coast highway with the windshield wipers slapping aside the steady streams of rain, and turned right. Everyone seemed to be on the point of saying something, chin and eyebrows raised, but no one spoke as the truck swayed and grumbled through the landscape of gray woods and rock outcrops, looping around the curves of Point Lobos Avenue to the north and then straightening out onto Geary Boulevard, heading east.

The little restaurants and stucco houses on Geary were all dark behind the rain-veiled streetlights, and Cochran wondered what time it could be. If the impossibly full moon had been moving in real time, it might be nearly dawn now. At least the truck’s heater was on full, blowing out hot air that smelled of tobacco and stale beer and dispelled the dog’s odor of sea water and wet fur.

Plumtree had dozed off against the left side window, and though she whimpered and twitched in her uneasy sleep, Cochran had thought it kinder not to wake her; but as the truck was passing a gold-domed cathedral she abruptly hunched forward and spat. Cochran shifted to peer at her past the wakeful, whining dog.

“Just let me talk,” Plumtree whispered. “A condemned … person should get to make a last statement, especially when there’s gonna be no trial before the execution.”

“Cody!” said Cochran sharply, thinking she was still in the middle of a dream. “We’re in the truck, and the restoration-to-life worked this time, remember?”

Plumtree looked up at Kootie, who was peering back from the front seat; he looked startled, and might have been asleep a moment ago himself. “Then you’re not the king anymore,” she whispered, “but will you give me permission to talk, to be heard?”

“Uh,” said Kootie, clearly mystified, “sure.”

“Okay,” came the whisper; then Omar Salvoy’s voice said, “Plumtree is gonna have to die. A death is still owed in this math, and blood and shattered bone. Your Mavranos just died to provide the body. Somebody’s still gotta pay Dionysus for return of the king’s soul.” Salvoy smiled, and the face wasn’t Cody’s anymore. “‘For me, the ransom of my bold attempt shall be this cold corpse on the earth’s cold face,’ as the Valorie one would say. Ask the king if I’m making this up.” Plumtree’s body shifted over against the far window, as if Salvoy didn’t like contact with the dog.

I thought you were deaf, thought Cochran helplessly; then he remembered that Janis had taken on the deafness.

After a moment of silence except for the roaring of the engine and the rippling hiss of the tires on the pavement outside, Scott Crane said, wearily, “He’s right.” Behind them he sat up and shifted around in the bed of the truck. “Even if I—were to kill myself, Dionysus will demand a payment for the fact of this night’s resurrection.” He sighed. “I get the idea you people—didn’t know this?—before you undertook to call me back from Erebus.”

“It’ll be poor gallant Plumtree,” said Salvoy, shaking Plumtree’s head, “if nobody else volunteers.” Plumtree’s eyes darted warily to Angelica, who had opened her mouth. “The boy said I could talk!”

“I’ll volunteer,” Cochran found himself saying.

“Of course,” Salvoy went on, ignoring him, “I wonder if it really shouldn’t be somebody with a cold-blooded murder to atone for, somebody who is already owed a stroke from the Green Knight’s axe. Kootie? What did you do, that morning at Mammy Pleasant’s boardinghouse?”

“I—can’t remember,” said Kootie. “But I do remember saying—something?—about the Green—”

“It’ll be ‘poor gallant Plumtree;” interrupted Angelica loudly, “and you, mister. I like Cody, but all of you in there committed or abetted the murder of—” She waved at the bearded man sitting up in the back of the truck. “—of him, and if somebody’s got to die for it, take the fall for it, it’s the Plumtree crowd.”

“Dionysus will decide,” said Scott Crane. “It’s his show.”

“Scant here volunteered,” said Salvoy, speaking faster. “Let me talk, Kootie’s not a child! You could kill him, Kootie, just assist in his voluntary suicide, and become the king yourself—Crane is old, and doesn’t have his strength back yet—let him go home and tend to his rosebushes—and then you could forget that killing, and all your sins!—with the pagadebiti. The king can always score a bottle of that. Don’t talk, listen! Think of it—you must have experienced a taste of it while Crane was dead—the sensory-neural awareness of the whole American West: cracking your joints and stretching with the sun-warmed mountains and freeway bridges at dawn, drinking the snow-melt from the granite keeps in the Sierra Nevada through the Oroville dam, inhaling and exhaling all the millions of suffering births and deaths!” Salvoy’s voice was strained. “Work with me, boy!”

Cochran could see Kootie’s lower lip pulled away from the teeth, and could see the glitter of tears in the boy’s eyes; and he was suddenly afraid that Salvoy would abandon this dangerous gambit of dialogue and switch deaf Janis on at any moment.

Cochran silently drew a deep breath, but before he could speak, Kootie looked away from Plumtree to the dog and said, clearly, “Mom!”

The dog licked his face, and Angelica hugged him.

Plumtree’s face had started to kink into Janis’s puzzled frown even as the boy had spoken, and for several moments her face twitched with conflicting personalities-then it was recognizably the mother’s voice that said, triumphantly, “Hah! I am out in the world!” The eyes that seemed closer-set blinked at Cochran. “Are we going to the sea? Are you going to send her past India at last?”

“Oh, Cody,” Cochran groaned.

Plumtree cringed back in the seat, but the Follow-the-Queen trick had worked

it was Cody’s voice that said, “God, it was him, wasn’t it?” She spat again. “Don’t let me sleep any more. Get to the goddamn temple on the peninsula and let’s get this paid off”

Cochran realized as he put his arm around her stiff shoulders that she had known all along that a death would be owed in payment.

But he was resolved that it would be his own.

THE DARK clouds were breaking up, and the sky was clear and molten red over the long piers of Fort Mason nearly a mile away to the east when Pete drove the truck slowly down the service road behind the yacht club; when they had passed the end of the asphalt and the tires were grinding in sandy mud, Cochran saw that the chain with the NO ADMITTANCE sign hanging from it had been hung across the path again.

“What’s another dent,” said Angelica hollowly.

“We won’t be getting shot at, this time,” said Pete.

“Ideally,” put in Cochran.

“Sometime,” came Scott Crane’s hoarse voice from the back of the truck “I will need to hear about all this.” He spoke absently, blinking and squinting as he tried to look at the red sky ahead. “My first dawn,” he said. “It’s very bright.” Tears were rolling down over his prominent cheekbones now, possibly from trying to stare at the dawn.

Pete clanked the engine into low gear, and Cochran heard the groan and snap of the chain breaking, and then the rustle as the broken ends sprang away into the shrubbery.

Cochran had rolled down the window, and in spite of the dawn chill he was taking deep breaths of the sea air. He could smell flowers and fresh-turned loam on it too, and he saw that the roadside anise bushes that had been brown and dry when they had been out here two weeks ago were now brightly green and bursting with tiny white flowers.

Pete brought the truck to a slow, squeaking halt a few yards short of the descending stone stairway, up which Angelica had carried Crane’s skeleton in the rain two weeks ago, when dead birds had been falling out of the sky. And Cochran thought he could see a slowly rocking shimmer beyond the stone walls.

Cochran’s face was wet and his mouth was dry, and he was breathing shallowly; and his thoughts were chasing each other around in his head without becoming complete sentences: We’ll all step down there, but not all of us will—me, rather than her, hut I hope—think, will you, there must he some way to—but me rather than her, me rather than her—

He didn’t fumble in levering open the door, and when he stepped down onto the gravelly sand he was steady enough not to be knocked over when the big black dog bounded out and collided with his legs. He reached up and took Plumtree’s hand as she hopped out of the truck, and they could hear the rusty squeal as Pete swung the tailgate down.

Plumtree was staring south across the narrow inlet at the white house-fronts of the Marina district—the windows were dark, but a few bicyclists were distantly visible on the sidewalks of the Marina Green.

“My male parent probably told you I’ll die here,” Plumtree said quietly, “and that may be true. I think I wouldn’t mind that—I knew that might be part of the price of undoing our murder—if I hadn’t met you, Sid.”

Cochran opened his mouth, but couldn’t think of anything to say. If he did manage to pay for the murder himself, he and Cody would still not be together.

“I—feel the same way,” was all he could come up with.

There was faint music on the gentle breeze from over the water, distant bells and strings tracing a melody he knew he had loved long ago: bright and almost sprightly, wafting with forlorn insouciance around a core of nostalgic despair. At each moment he could almost anticipate the next note—could almost have hummed along, if his throat had not been choked with grief—and he knew this was only the bridge, that the melody would soon be returning to the valiantly, uselessly brave tragedy of the main theme.

Scott Crane had walked to the head of the white marble stairs, and stood for a moment looking down toward the cobblestone-paved dock. Then he sat down on a broken Corinthian pillar and lowered his head into his hands. Blood was still running from his ears, and his bare right foot shone red in the strengthening light.

Cochran took Plumtree’s hand and walked across the crunching sand to the head of the stairs. He could hear the others following him, and the pad and panting of the dog.

At the top of the stairs he stopped, staring down at the dock-like pavement below.

At first he thought a stray patch of fog had clung to this comer of the choppy bay water; then his eyes shifted their perspective in some way …

And a crystal boat rocked in the gray water under a glassy mast, and smoky transparent forms sat at the thwarts; they became fleetingly clear when he looked squarely at them, then flickered away in a kaleidoscope tumble of diaphanous faces and hands, and he saw that they were frail shells of people, ghosts, blinking around in the dawn. He recognized old blind Spider Joe, who still wore the daddy-longlegs filaments around his waist, and thought he saw Thutmose the Utmos’, though without crutches now; and then he saw, clearly, Archimedes Mavranos standing up by the bow. Mavranos was looking back at the people on the dirt above the dock stairs, and Cochran thought he was smiling and waving.

The faint distant music paused for a full second, like a dancer on tiptoe; then it swept back, stronger—gracious and smiling and evoking sun-dappled streets and old walled gardens even as it bade farewell to all things and bowed to oblivion.

Plumtree pulled her hand free of his; there was a finality to the gesture that chilled him, and he spun toward her.

And as if she stood in the center of a ring of mirrors, he saw more than a dozen of her, opaque enough so that where several overlapped he couldn’t see the red of the truck through them.

Then he saw that two were still solid—no, it was only one, but it was alternately Cody and then Janis, and Plumtree appeared to shift her position against the distant buildings as she changed from one to the other, as if he were helplessly looking at her first through one eye and then through the other. Her ragged blond hair gleamed or was backlit in the dawn’s glow.

“I’ll take this flop,” said Cochran hastily. “I’ll pay the life.”

“You didn’t kill him, Sid;’ said Cody. “I’ll go. I’ve loved you, Sid, and that’s a real magic trick—that was never a part of me—”

She shifted, backlit against the brightening sky, and “No,” came one voice that was both jams and Valorie speaking; ‘“madame has forgotten that we agreed to play in partnership this morning.’” It was clearly Janis who went on, ‘That’s lames Bond to Tracy di Vicenzo, in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, when he volunteers to cover her gambling losses. You wouldn’t remember it, Cody—you set the book on fire.” The Janis figure clenched her fists, as if against an internal struggle. “I’ll never ditch you. Daddy—where I go, you go, I swear on my life!” Then she sagged, and it was a lifeless face that swung from the boat to the brightening dawn behind the distant piers, and back. “See how the morning opes her golden gates, and takes her farewell of the glorious sun!”

There were two Plumtree bodies now; Cody was clearly standing away from the figure that was Janis and Valorie; and that figure was fading.

Janis’s bright eyes in Valorie’s dead face turned on Cochran as the face became transparent. “And so farewell,” said the figure that was now just one more ghost, “and fair be all thy hopes, and prosperous be thy life!”

The ghost spun in a casual pirouette, and gathered into its insubstantiaI self all the other Plumtree ghosts; and Cody was left standing solidly on the -sand beside Cochran. He seized her hand, both to be sure she was a living human being and to prevent her from following the ghost, which was now gliding down the marble stairs and across the cobblestone dock toward the boat; and for a moment now the faint music seemed to be the strains of ‘ill Take You Home Again, Kathleen.”

“But I’ll be alone!” wailed Cody, in a voice that shook with absolute loss.

“No, you won’t,” said Cochran strongly. He gripped her shoulders and said again looking into her face, “No—you won’t.”

“No,” she agreed brokenly, “I won’t.” She fell forward against him, and he hugged her tightly.

Omar Salvoy’s words were echoing in his head: A death is still owed in this math. But that was it, Cochran thought shrilly; poor Janis just died, along with Omar Salvoy at last, and Tiffany and the rest of them. Wasn’t that death enough for the god?

And the rest of what Salvoy had said …

Then Plumtree stiffened in his arms, and he felt her ribs clench as she screamed. A moment later Pete and Angelica yelled in alarm, and the dog was barking.

Cochran wheeled around, crouching and dizzied.

If he had not seen Dr. Armentrout running at them last night like a spidery Vedic demon, he would not have recognized the battered monster that had clambered out of the bay to his right and was now rushing at Scott Crane; and even so his chest emptied for a moment in cold horror.

The two figures that were attached to Armentrout’s shoulders were twisted and draped with seaweed, and their grimacing fleshy heads were canted outward like the leaves on a fleur-de-lis; but Armentrout’s right hand held the muddy derringer that had bounced into the lagoon last night, and the bloodshot eyes in Armentrout’s swollen purple face were fixed on Scott Crane.

Cochran leaned into the monster’s path, stretching out his right leg and hand. The mannikin heads were yelling suddenly—“Feel good about yourself!” one was cawing, and the other was shrilling, “Pull the plug, let me up!”

The little gun was coming up in the pudgy hand as Armentrout took another running step—Scott Crane had lifted his head and turned on the pillar, but he would not be able to dive out of the way—Pete and Kootie had started forward, and the black dog’s forelegs were raised in a leap—and Angelica had drawn the .45 automatic clear of her belt, but Armentrout would have time to fire the derringer before she would be able to swing the heavy gun into line.

In Cochran’s memory the silvery edges of the pruning shears plunged toward the old king’s face, and Cochran instinctively blocked the thrust with his right hand.

The flat, hollow pop of the .410 shell deafened him, and he lost his footing as his right hand was punched away upward. The marble-and-brick-peppered sand plunged up at him and he twisted his left shoulder around to take the jarring impact as he slammed against the ground. With a ringing crystalline clarity Cochran saw drops of his own blood spattering down onto the wet sand around the truck’s front tires.

Then he rolled his head down to look at his right hand, and his vision narrowed and lost all depth—for above his wrist was just a glistening red wreckage of torn skin and splintered white bone, and blood was jetting out into the air.

The rest of what Salvoy had said flickered through his stunned consciousness—Blood and shattered bone—

LATER COCHRAN learned that Fred the dog had hit Armentrout and knocked him over backward, so that Armentrout had dropped a broken dry pomegranate that he had been carrying in his left hand—it had rolled uphill to Scott Crane’s foot, onto which it had spilled clinging red seeds like blood drops—and that after trying to shoot the emptied gun at the dog that was tearing at his four arms Armentrout and his two attached figures had gone stumbling back down over the wet tumbled rocks into the sea to get away.

But all Cochran saw when he swivelled his shock-stiffened face away from his ruined hand, toward the yelling that was so loud that he was able to hear it even through the ringing in his ears, was Armentrout standing thigh-deep in the shallow sea and doing something strenuous with two people: one was a heavy-set old woman in a sopping housedress, and the other was a slim young man with protuberant eyes and a blackened ragged wound in his forehead.

The dog kept running back and forth between Cochran and the water, and everyone behind him was shouting too. Somehow it didn’t occur to the stunned Cochran that the three figures out in the water were fighting—Armentrout’s companions appeared instead to be forcibly giving him something like a full-immersion baptism, dunking him under the water and then hauling him up to shout at him, and then doing it again, and the white-haired doctor did seem to be responding with denials and oaths and genuflections. It was violent, certainly, but to Cochran it seemed that all three were trying to get an important job done.

Angelica was kneeling beside him on the wet sand, urgently saying things he couldn’t hear and tightly tying a leather belt around his right wrist. But finally a moment came in which it dawned on Cochran that the woman and the pop-eyed young man had held Armentrout under the waves one last time and would not ever be letting him up at all.

“They’ve killed him!” Cochran yelled, struggling to get up.

Behind and above him he heard Angelica say, “Is that a bad thing, Sid?”

Out in the water the old woman and the young man with the holed face seemed to merge, and then become a shape superimposed on the seascape instead of in it: the stylized black silhouette of a fat man with stubby limbs and a warty round head. And as it shrank, or receded in some nonspatial sense so that it didn’t disappear into the water, it flickeringly seemed to be a very fat naked white man with tattoos all over him, and a middle-aged Mexican man, and a pretty Asian woman, and others …

Then it had faded to nothing like a retinal glare-spot, and the sea was an unfea-tured expanse of rippled silver all the way across to the Marina.

“No,” Cochran said. A death was still owed in the math, he thought. A physical heart had to literally stop. “No,” he said again.

Cochran was lying on his back. He twisted his head to look up at Angelica, and then he focussed past her. Two transparent old women stood above and behind her and their milk-in-water eyes were fixed on the puddle of blood on the dirt below Cochran’s tourniquetted wrist. Their hands were reaching toward the blood, and their fingers were stretching like old cobwebs disturbed by a solid person’s passage.

Up the slope by the stairs, Scott Crane had at some point got to his feet. His beard had dried enough to be lustrous and full, so that seen from below this way he looked like a schoolbook picture of Solomon or Charlemagne; and in a voice so deep and resonant that it cut through the shrilling in Cochran’s impacted eardrums, Crane said, “Hot blood is what you’re leaving behind forever now, ladies. Get aboard the boat now; the tide is about to ebb, and you have to go.”

The ghosts of Mrs. Winchester and Mammy Pleasant swirled away to the steps and down toward the insubstantial boat, and then the first rays of the rising sun touched the iron lamp-post at the end of the peninsula. Cochran thought he could hear distant voices singing.

He was sagging with fatigue, and he wondered that he was able to hold his head up; and then he realized that Cody Plumtree was sitting on the sand behind him and cradling his head in her lap. Kootie was kneeling white-faced behind Plumtree, with his arms around the black dog’s neck. Blood was trickling down Kootie’s own neck from a long, shallow cut below his ear, where a stray shot-pellet had evidently nicked him.

Cochran rolled his eyes to look back out at the water of the bay, but it was still empty—the blobby black figure had certainly gone.

The Green Knight gave the boy just a token cut, Cochran thought; and he settled his head more firmly against Cody’s warm, solid legs. The retribution-aspect of Dionysus was merciful, this morning.

Pete was behind the wheel of the truck, and now started up the rackety old engine; and just because of the new noise Cochran became aware that at some point violin-pure voices had begun singing out of the pipes that stood up from the masonry, a high solemn wordless chorus that now coaxed Cochran’s sluggish pulse to meet the vibrant cadences implicit in the new dawn.

“Get up, Sid,” said Plumtree, and Angelica added, “On this morning you can go to a hospital, with no fear of ghosts.”

Cochran got dizzily to his feet, leaning heavily on the two women as he shambled up the slope toward the shaking truck.

White seagulls, luminous in the new daylight, were circling high overhead against the blue of the clean sky, whistling and piping in the open, unechoing air as if calling out the news of the soon-returning spring.