Earthquake Weather (43 page)

Cochran just nodded. I can see his point, he insisted to himself. I’d do the same, in his place.

Angelica came tromping back upstairs lugging a green canvas knapsack, and Cochran had to move his NADA sign and papers as she began unpacking its contents onto the bedspread.

She lifted out some springy shrub branches that smelled vaguely of eucalyptus, held together by a rubber band. “Myrtle,” she said. “Sacred to Dionysus, the books say. And a bottle of wine for us all to drink from, to show him respect.”

With shaky fingers Cochran took from her the bottle she had dug out of the knapsack. It was, he saw, a Kenwood Vineyards 1975 Cabernet Sauvignon, and the stylized picture at the top of the label was of a skeleton reclining on a grassy hillside.

Cochran’s ears seemed to be ringing with a wail that he was afraid he might actually give voice to, and for the moment he had forgotten the dead king and his confiscated gun. “This—was never released,” he said, making himself speak slowly. “This label, I mean, with this picture on it. I remember hearing about it. David Goines originally did one of a nude woman on the hill, and the BATF rejected it because they said it was indecent, so he did this one of the same woman as a skeleton; and they rejected
it
because of fetal alcohol syndrome or something. Finally Goines did one of just the hillside, and that got okayed, and Kenwood printed it.” He looked up into Angelica’s concerned gaze, and let himself relax a little. “But this was never released, this label was never even printed!—except, I guess, for this one. Where the hell did you find it? And why did you get
it
? I mean, it’s a twenty-year-old Cab! There must have been cheaper ones.”

Angelica opened her mouth, then closed it. “I,” she said finally, “don’t remember what it cost. But I got change back from a twenty, and we got ice and some canned green beans in the same purchase, I remember. This was the only fancy wine they had, at this little place called Liquor Heaven in the Soma neighborhood—Arky, you drove us there and waited in the truck, remember?—the only other wine was one of those bum’s-rush specials, Hair-of-the-Dog or some name like that.”

Mavranos had been watching Plumtree and Cochran, but now he slowly turned to Angelica. “… Bitin Dog?” he asked.

Cochran sat down on the bed, heedlessly crushing Angelica’s myrtle branches, and he was remembering the Mondard figure in the mirror in the vision he’d had last week in Solville. “That’s how it looks in a reflection,” he said dizzily. “You must have been in Looking-Glass Land. The right-way name is something like
pagodetibi.
”

“Get your butt off the boughs of holly,” Plumtree told him.

“No,” said Mavranos, “stay where you are, Dionysus probably likes it a bit crushed, like cats do catnip. Miss Plumtree, you sit beside him. You got your
máquina,
Angelica?”

Angelica touched the untucked tail of her blouse. “Yes, Arky,” she sighed.

“Stand over here and keep your hand on it, and watch those two. Pete and I gotta go to the truck, drag up some of our
scientific apparatus,
more of our
high-tech defensive hardware.
”

Kootie sniffed the air after Arky and his foster-dad had shuffled outside and pulled the door closed behind them. He sensed at least a couple of fragmentary personalities buzzing clumsily around the room.

“The king’s body is drawing ghosts,” he told his foster-mom. “A couple got in when Arky opened the door just now.” He sniffed again. “Just little broken-off bits, probably shells thrown off of somebody who didn’t even die of it.”

Kootie knew that people, especially very neurotic people whose personalities spun in wide and perturbed orbits, often threw ghost-shells in moments of stressfully strong emotion. Kootie could feel the insistent one-note resonance of these, and his hands were shaky and he wasn’t able to take a deep breath.

He found himself staring at Janis Plumtree’s loose blouse and tight jeans, and he snorted and shook his head to dispel the induced lust. Easy to guess what the unknown source-person was up to, he thought, when he shed
these …
psychic snakeskins! And the man must have been left bewildered and abruptly out-of-the-mood after they’d broken away.

The vibrations of the ghost fragments did have a strongly male cast; Kootie wondered what his own response would have been if the source-person had been a woman—would he have found himself looking at … at
Cochran
?—or would he have been so out-of-phase with them that he wouldn’t have sensed their presence at all?

“I’m okay,” he told Angelica, who had taken her eyes off Cochran and Plumtree long enough to give Kootie a raised eyebrow. “I hope Arky’s bringing up the St. Michael and High John the Conqueror sprays.”

“I packed ’em,” she said.

In spite of himself, Kootie was staring at Plumtree again. She was clearly nervously excited—she had pulled a little order pad out of her pocket and was flipping through the pages, nodding and mumbling to herself.

She looked up and caught his gaze, and her sudden smile made his heart thump. “Tomorrow,” she said through her teeth, “no matter what it may cost me, I
won’t
be a murderer anymore!”

Her companion seemed less happy about the idea—Cochran was frowning as he shook a cigarette out of a pack and flipped open a book of matches. Probably he’s worried that this attempt tomorrow will work the way she thinks it will, Kootie thought, and his girlfriend’s body will suddenly have a fifty-two-year-old
man
in it.

Talk about out-of-phase!

Kootie wasn’t aware of the ghost fragments now—probably his lustful response had blunted his latent Fisher King ability to sense them. As if I took a long sniff of a rare hamburger that was cooked in an iron pan, he thought ruefully, or spent the day at the top of a modern high-rise building, far up away from the ground, or gargled with whiskey on a Friday in Lent.

Cochran struck a match—and the matchbook flared in a gout of flame, and Cochran had dropped it and was stamping it out on the carpet.

Cochran and Plumtree both exclaimed “Son of a bitch!” and Plumtree went on to add, “You clumsy stupid shit!”

But Kootie had caught a whiff of cooked bacon on the stale, humid air, and he said, “I think you burned up the ghosts, Mr. Cochran. Toss me the matches, would you?”

Cochran bent over, pried the matchbook from the carpet, and tossed it to Kootie, who juggled the hot thing around in the palm of his hand to look at it.

The moment of flame had not obliterated the letters inked onto each match. Kootie read the words carefully, then looked up at Cochran. “The match you lit has
‘tenebis’
written on it, doesn’t it?”

Cochran bent down again and brushed his hand over the carpet until he had found the match he had struck; then he straightened and stared at it.

“ 
‘Tenebis,’ ”
Cochran read. He looked at Kootie. “You’ve seen this inscription before? It’s Latin, right?”

“I suppose it’s Latin,” Kootie said. “I’ve never seen it before, but I can tell what the missing word must be—’cause it’s a palindrome. See?” He tossed the matchbook back to Cochran. “The letters read the same backward as forward.”

“On a matchbook,” said Angelica with a wry smile. “That’s like the people who letter
L.A. Cigar
—
Too Tragical
around chimneys and frying pans—or gun muzzles,” she added, touching the grip of the automatic in her belt. “Ghosts are drawn to palindromes, and these tricks burn ’em up—dispel ’em into the open air, unlike in the coal of a cigarette, which sends their broken-up constituent pieces straight into your lungs, for a nasty predatory high. The palindrome torchers send them safely on past India.”

This seemed to jar Cochran. “What exactly the hell do you people mean by ‘India’?” he asked.

A measured thumping sounded at the motel-room door, and Kootie could hear Arky Mavranos impatiently call something from outside.

“Peek out before you unlock it,” Angelica said as Kootie stepped toward the door.

“Right, Ma.” Kootie peered out through the lens, then said, “It’s just them,” as he snapped back the bolt and pulled the door open.

Mavranos came shuffling in carrying one of his spare truck batteries in both hands; Pete Sullivan followed, carrying a stack of boxes balanced on top of the ice chest. An electric plug dangled from one of the boxes.

“On the table by the window,” said Mavranos to Pete. “Hook up the charger to the battery, a quick charge on the ten-amp setting—if it’s not too dead you might have time to drag one of the others up here and charge it too.”

“What’s India?” insisted Cochran.

“Uh—ghosthood,” said Angelica, frowning at the boxes Pete was putting down. Then she glanced at Cochran and apparently noted the man’s anxious squint. “In Shakespeare’s time,” she went on patiently, “
India
was sorcerously hip slang for a sort of overlap place, a halfway house between Earth and Heaven-or-Hell. It’s the antechamber to Dionysus’s domain—the god was supposed to have come to Thebes by way of Phrygia from northern India, around Pakistan.”

“Paki Japer came no more,”
sang Plumtree, to a bit of the tune of “Puff the Magic Dragon.”

Mavranos barked out two syllables of a laugh at that, wiping black dust off his hands. “I’m gonna—” he began.

“So what would it mean,” Cochran interrupted shakily, “to say … ‘Her bed is India, there she lies, a pearl’?”

Angelica was frowning at him with, Kootie thought, puzzled sympathy. “That’s a line from
Troilus and Cressida,
” Angelica said. “It would mean ‘she’ is in that India space—a ghost associating with a living person, or vice versa. The overlap, see? And the ‘pearl’ reference would probably mean she’s accreting stuff from the other category—physical solidity, if she was a ghost to start with, or ghosts, if she was a living person. The Elizabethan slang for ghosts was ‘ghostings’—by way of folk etymology from ‘coastings,’ meaning coastlines, outlines, silhouettes; traced replicas—and later in the play—”

“I’m gonna go trace the coastline here,” said Mavranos, “the north coast, from Fort Point by the bridge to where those three old ships are moored at the Hyde Street Pier: the area where the wild mint used to grow, that gave the city its original name of Yerba Buena. I’ve got
a piedra iman,
and a—”

“A
magnet
?” said Angelica, turning toward Mavranos. “But that’s only good for drawing
ghosts,
Arky, you don’t want Crane’s
ghost
—”

“Why aren’t you gonna check west of the bridge?” demanded Plumtree. “The Sutro Baths ruins is where we saw his naked ghost, last week, and that’s west of the bridge. I think you should—”

“But you don’t
want
his ghost—” Angelica went on; and Kootie was interrupting too: “We should see what the old black lady has to say about it—”

Arky had lifted one of Angelica’s weather-beaten stuffed toy pigs out of the box Pete had carried in, and now he shoved a C battery into the compartment in its rear end; and the pig’s sudden, harsh mechanical burping silenced the two women and Kootie.

After three noisy seconds Mavranos pulled the battery out, and the croaking stopped. “I’m not gonna look for his ghost,” he said clearly, “nor where we saw his ghost. What I want to do first is search around the area where your old black lady’s banker friend drowned, back in 1875; that’s near the Hyde Pier. And I’m gonna use the magnet
along with a magnetic compass
—I figure that when the compass needle ignores both the magnet and the real magnetic north pole, I’ll have found the spot where we can yank Scott back here from the far side of India. Wherever the spot is, it’s got to be a regular
black hole
for plain-old ghosts, and they’ve got to add up to a pre-emptive magnetic charge—especially now, on the eve of Dionysus’s day.” He bared his teeth in a smile.
“Okay?”

“Just asking,” said Angelica.

“I have no idea how long this’ll take,” Mavranos went on. “I’m gonna walk it, and leave you people the truck. If I get no readings at all, I’ll just come back here, well before dawn, and we can do the restoration-to-life right at the spot where the banker jumped in.” He swiveled an unreadable stare from Kootie to Angelica to Plumtree. “You all are gonna want to figure out your tactics. Don’t go out—order a pizza delivered, and if you need beers or something, send Pete. Angelica,” he added, with a nod toward where Cochran and Plumtree sat on the bed, “if they try anything at all, don’t you hesitate to—”

“I know,” said Angelica. “Shoot our hosts.”

“Right,” agreed Mavranos. He slapped the pocket of his denim jacket and nodded at the solid angularity of his revolver. Then he was out the door, and the clump-clop of his boots was receding down the stairs.

“What happens,” asked Plumtree bleakly, “if you untie that bandage from around Crane’s leg?”

“He bleeds,” said Angelica. “He’s got no pulse, but fresh blood leaks out of him.”

“Not forever,” Plumtree said. “Where we stabbed him … his throat stopped bleeding after a while, right? I mean, I doubt they tied a tourniquet around his neck, then.” She sighed hitchingly, and ran her fingers through her disordered hair. Her lips were turned down sharply at the corners. “Tilt a few good slugs of his blood into that empty Wild Turkey bottle. Tomorrow I’ll—probably have to—” Her eyes widened in evident surprise and her face went pale. “Scant! Why am I—”

Plumtree stood up and wobbled to the bathroom then, barely managing to slam the door behind her before Kootie heard her being rackingly sick in there.

“Who’s in the mood for a pizza?” he asked brightly.

“Hush,” said Angelica quietly. She opened her mouth as if to say more, then just repeated, “Hush.”

At sunset the entirely discorporate spirit of Scott Crane stood on a cliff over a sea, and it was no longer possible for him to overlook his sin of omission. The call of the one neglected tarot archetype could no longer be drowned out in the busy distractions of life. It had been beckoning during three winters—whispering from six feet under in the agitation of the lice that blighted the vineyards, wheezing in the fevered lungs of Crane’s young children in the winter months, and roaring like a bull in the cloven earth under Northridge a year ago tomorrow. And on New Year’s Day of this year it had come to his house.