Earthquake Weather (78 page)

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.

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

M
AVRANOS’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 leveled 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 gravel-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.