by Tim Powers
He thought about folding the dead man’s legs in under the steering wheel. And then he thought about retrieving his cane from under the body.
At last he just leaned in over the man’s broad back, resolutely looking at the holster and not at the blood, hooked out the revolver, and turned away to limp, unaided, across the highway and into the perilous chapel in the wasteland.
CHAPTER 32
Get In Close
Like the floor of the ruined Colosseum, the surface across which Crane and Susan walked was hatched with trenches, as if corridors in some vast cellar had collapsed long ago. Walking in the trenches kept the wind-blown sand out of their eyes, though it did nothing to protect them from the weight of the sun.
Every time the two of them climbed a sand slope back up to floor level, Crane could see that the far wall had drawn a little closer.
The wound in his thigh, which had been healing, had begun to bleed again, making a black, shiny spot on his jeans.
At last he climbed up and saw only flat sand between himself and the wall, and he could see an ancient architectural gap in it, blocked now by a tumbleweed.
Crane turned to look back and see if he could gauge how far they’d come, but a thing hanging on one of the nearest cacti made him jump and swear.
It was a dried human body, hung upside down. One ankle was tied to the top of the cactus, and the other leg, though obviously as stiff as driftwood now, had once bent at the knee under gravity and was now bent that way forever. Desiccation had given the face an expression of composure.
And then the eyes opened, their whites glaring against the brown leather of the face, and Crane screamed and scrambled back away from the autistic malice that shone in the bright black pupils.
From behind, Susan touched Crane’s arm. “You remember him. Come on and meet the others.”
Numbly Crane let her turn him toward the doorway.
The tumbleweed that blocked it was as big as a stove, and even as he focused his eye on it, the round dry bush exploded into twigs; a flat, hollow boom shook the super-heated air, and Crane realized that somebody had fired a shotgun at the tumbleweed.
He stopped walking and stared at the blown-open bush.
When he heard the two harsh, metallic lisps of the shotgun being re-chambered, he turned around.
A few yards behind him the fat man was stepping carefully over the uneven ground, wearing a business suit and carrying a shotgun slung under his arm, pointed at the ground. Crane was vaguely glad that the fat man wasn’t appearing as the warty sphere today. A few steps further back was another man, on whom Crane couldn’t get his false eye to focus. Apparently they had been pacing Crane and Susan in one of the parallel trenches.
Susan’s bony fingers were still on Crane’s arm. “Come on,” she said. “Meet me.”
Crane let her push him through the broken stone doorway. He took a few steps out across the floor of the next wide, roofless expanse of sand, and then he turned and looked back at her.
His head was suddenly singing with shock, but he just stepped back.
Susan had apparently taken off all her clothes since the last time he had focused his eye on her. If he had noticed it, he would have warned her about what would happen, what had in fact happened—she had dried out completely, and her nakedness was horrible now.
She was a skeleton covered tight with thin, sun-shrunken leather; her breasts were empty flaps, and her groin was a hole torn open in a sawdust-stuffed doll; her eyes and mouth were pulled so wide open that she couldn’t shut them, and steam was wafting out of the holes as her tongue and eyeballs withered away.
But she was smiling, and with a bony brown foot she kicked a big puffball loose from its mooring in the sand, and then she strode long-legged to another and kicked it loose, too.
There were a lot of the ball things poking up out of the sand, he noticed now, and when he made his eye focus on them, he saw that they were the blinking, grimacing heads of people buried up to their necks in the desert. There were arms sticking up, too, holding fanned-out playing cards.
Susan was bounding lightly from place to place, waving her long, thin brown arms over her head like a monkey, pausing before each next leap only long enough to kick another head loose from the stem of its neck.
The senile chorus of the wind in the broken stones was louder here, and Crane was suddenly desperate for a drink.
The bottle he was carrying only had an inch of warming wine sloshing in it, and he tipped it up to his lips—then choked and lowered his head and filled the bottle with vomited blood. He threw it away, and the blood that sprayed from the neck dried to dust in mid-air.
And Susan had gone prancing away across the desert with the other two bottles. Perhaps she would slow down for him.
Through the rheumy eyes of Richard Leroy, Georges Leon watched Crane go stumbling away after the capering figure of Death, and Leroy’s mouth smiled with Leon’s satisfaction.
There was no problem here. He had accompanied Trumbill on this particular initiation only because there had been something about Scott Crane that had murkily upset him when he had been in the Betsy Reculver body.
He sighed to think of Reculver, whose body Trumbill had buried—intact, as Leon had insisted—in the backyard of the house on Renaissance Drive.
Betsy Reculver had been nineteen when he first saw her—at the first game on the lake, in 1949. She had had a long-legged, coltish grace then, with her brown bangs falling over her eyes as she squinted at her cards, grinning mischievously every time she raised; and when he had cut the deck for the Assumption and won her body, he had been sourly aware of his scarred and featureless crotch, and had wished for a moment that he could have made her his literal Queen rather than one of his honorary children.
And it had been right here, twenty years later in 1969, in this magically conjured ruined chapel, that he had last seen the person who she had been.
Of course, by that time drink and bad dreams had long since pounded the elfin charm out of her, but at thirty-nine she had still been a strikingly good-looking woman. And she had held her chin up as she had followed Dionysus-and-Death, which Leon recalled had taken for her the form of her father, out into the broken chapel of the barren land.
It was generally the image of a family member that they projected onto the destroying face of Dionysus. With Crane, for a while lately, it had seemed to be a wizened fragment of a little boy, but now, at the end, here, it had again been the image of his dead wife—until it had cast off all images and stood naked and undeniable before him.
But, true to form, he was still chasing it.
Leon looked back the way they’d come, at the jagged walls that hid the highway. He couldn’t sense any human personalities out there, not even the security guard. Perhaps the man was asleep and not dreaming.
He wondered if his original body, ninety-one years old now, was going to follow them out here. Leon knew he should keep better track of the damned old thing, which, if nothing else, was the reservoir of Leon’s original DNA. If the cloning of human bodies should one day become a reality, that old, senile jug of blood could be used to make another copy of his real body, complete with genitalia, and Leon could assume it in a game and be back where he’d been before that disastrous shotgun blast in 1948.
Leon spat into the sand at his feet and watched the spit sizzle. But Doctor Leaky was such a humiliating caricature. And Leon had made sure that samples of the blood were preserved in any number of blood banks throughout the world.
Let the old son of a bitch walk out in front of a bus some day, Leon thought. I won’t be responsible; in no sense will I have killed anything that could be called me.
Leon looked at Trumbill, sweating beside him and chewing up another celery stick. The fat man was digging snacks out of his pockets more quickly now that the figure of Death was undisguised.
“I’ll follow along with him through one more of the Major Arcana,” Leon said.
Trumbill nodded, his mouth fu
ll and working, and the two of them started forward again.
Ozzie had been hunching along slowly outside the broken wall, panting and blinking sweat out of his eyes and grinding his teeth with the shoulder ache of constantly holding fives playing cards up in front of him—face out, so that every time he glanced up, he was staring at five images of the naked woman’s smiling face on the backs of the cards. He kept being reminded of Macduff’s soldiers in Macbeth, sneaking up on Dunsinane Castle and holding up clusters of branches as disguise.
Every hundred feet or so he had paused and walked windshield, in a tight counterclockwise circle, as he flexed his cramping fingers and then fumbled through the cards and selected another five for fresh cover. Always he had selected five that were full of contradictions, like impotence and promiscuity, or infancy and senility, or hysteria and cunning; such combinations constituted null sets that indicated no human mind behind them, and at the same time were somehow portraits of this place, and so served as a kind of psychic camouflage.
The massive gray stones of the wall were rippled and eroded as if by centuries of harsh weather, but he could sometimes see figures that had at one time or another been etched so deeply that they were still visible in the harsh sunlight as faint scratches. He saw angular suns and moons, and writing that looked like bus route maps, all long lines with cross-hatchings at different angles, and at one place a crude picture of fish attacking the underbelly of a stag.
And some of the stones were cold when he braced himself against them, and some were dark as if in shadow though the cobalt sky was cloudless, and two were wet with water that tasted like salty brine on Ozzie’s fingertip. This ruined cathedral, or whatever it was, was clearly not entirely in this place—perhaps not even entirely in any one time.
He’d been careful never to shuffle the cards; God knew what forceful old portraits the deck would assume, or what attention it would bring.
Whenever the wall was broken down low enough to see over, he peeked carefully. Crane and the woman he was walking with had taken so long climbing into and out of the long, interrupted trench that he had been able to keep up with them even at this halting pace, and of course the fat man and his white-haired companion were only pacing Crane.
The four figures inside had hesitated in front of the second doorway, and Ozzie had been able to crouch and watch them over a belt-high section of the wall. The fat man had fired his shotgun, and Ozzie had been standing up straight in an instant, sighting down the gleaming stainless steel barrel of the guard’s .38 at the center of the fat man’s back, before he realized that the shot had been aimed at a tumbleweed.
He had lowered the hammer shakily. It would have been too long a shot, and the white-haired man would have dived for cover and begun firing back at him, and it was only the white-haired man that Ozzie really wanted, anyway.
That would be the body that Crane’s real father, who had probably arranged Diana’s death, was currently occupying. There was even a chance, just a chance, that it was the only body that the old psychic cannibal had left.
It’s time, Ozzie thought, to quit all this tiptoeing around and get in close.
But can I shoot another person from behind, with no warning?
Shooting the security guard in the back of the head had been, and still was, too enormous and appalling a thing for him to encompass, like staring straight into the noon sun.
Find out when you get there, he told himself.
He tucked the revolver into his belt and, awkwardly and painfully, climbed over the cold, wet wall in the hot sun.
Crane had stumbled only a dozen yards after his terrible bride when his wounded thigh seized up on him, and he thudded heavily to the hot sand. Ants like curled copper shavings crawled busily over the backs of his hands.
Footsteps crunched behind him, and he looked back. The fat man and his indistinct companion stood now on the sand just a few steps this side of the last doorway. Seen through Crane’s false eye, the face of the companion was a bright, flickering blur, as if in some sense he were whirling very fast.
And now there was a third old man, standing in the half shadow of the broken doorway behind the other two, and after a moment Crane recognized him—it was his foster father, Ozzie. Ozzie was carrying a net bag with three gold cups in it, and he was holding out a fourth cup in his right hand.
Crane was only impatient, certain that his old foster-father couldn’t have anything important to say or do here, but he closed his right eye and reached up to pry open his swollen-shut left eye.
Now he saw that Ozzie was holding a big steel revolver, pointing it steadily at the backs of the two other old men. He seemed to be hesitating; then,
“Freeze,” Ozzie said loudly.
The two men spun toward the sudden voice, and even as they began to scramble and the fat man grabbed the barrel of the shotgun to raise it, Ozzie’s gun boomed twice.
Blood sprayed across Crane as the fat man’s indistinct-faced companion nodded violently and then rebounded over backward and hit the sand with his shoulders and the blown-out back of his head—and the fat man staggered.
But he managed to raise the shotgun and fire it.
Ozzie’s white shirt exploded in a red spray as the buckshot punched him off his feet.
All of Crane’s dry maturity was blown away in the hard explosion of that shot, and his mouth was open in a wordless scream of denial as he started forward.
The fat man spun awkwardly, wincing as he pulled the shotgun’s slide back and shoved it forward again, the gun’s machinery silent in the shocked, ringing air.
The barrel was pointed at Crane’s knee, and he skidded to a halt.
The fat man’s face was pale as milk, and bright blood was spilling over his right eyebrow and down his neck from the gash Ozzie’s bullet had torn across his temple over his ear. He was slowly saying something, but Crane’s ears weren’t working. Then the fat man stared at the corpse of his companion.
Crane felt hollowed and stricken, as if the blast of shot had hit him in the chest; he couldn’t look at Ozzie, so for a moment he just followed the fat man’s gaze.
The blurringly fast changes in the holed face were slowing down, and Crane could see the face from moment to moment as that of an old man with a crown, and of a vital, tanned, dark-haired man, and of a little boy. The dark-haired man was of course the Ricky Leroy who had hosted the Assumption game on the lake in ’69…but it was when he recognized the little-boy face that Crane fell to his knees with shock.
It was the face of his nearly forgotten older brother, Richard, who had been the infant Scott’s playmate in the days before the older brother lost all personality and took up his position as lookout on the roof of the Bridger Avenue bungalow.
The shifting faces were replacing each other more and more slowly, and finally it was the old man who lay on the stony ground, the crown no longer visible.
Crane braced himself in the sand with one hand and hesitantly touched the blood-spattered white hair with the other, but this had been a corpse for a long time, since at least 1949.
At last Crane lifted his head and began crawling on his hands and knees to where Ozzie lay sprawled and bloody and motionless on the gravelly dirt.
Peripherally he was aware that the fat man had bent to pick up the revolver and was now plodding slowly away, back through the doorway toward where the highway and the parked Jaguar waited; and then Crane noticed the figure that was now crouched over Ozzie’s body.
It was the dried-out Susan, her starvation smile turned on Crane like a bright light through a poisoned fish tank. Her mad leaping had shredded the leathery skin from her, and now she was a sexless skeleton draped only with the most tenuous shreds of organic stuff.
Crane realized that this was no longer drink, Dionysus. This was indifferent Death. This was nobody’s ally.
And it had taken Ozzie. Crane couldn’t look at the old man’s devastated chest; he stared instead at the old, wrinkled hands that had held and discarded and d
rawn so many cards and now held nothing at all.
Death slowly reached out and touched Ozzie’s forehead with a skeletal finger—and Ozzie’s body collapsed into gray dust, leaving only the crumpled, pitiful old-man’s-suit, and an instant later a hot gust of wind blinded Crane with sand and whirled the clothing and the dust away, over the ruined walls and across the desert’s miles-wide face.
The sudden wind had rolled Crane over onto his back, and after it had gone scouring away toward the mountains, he sat up and blinked sand out of his eyes. The animated skeleton was gone, and except for the corpse of Richard Leroy, Crane was alone in the desolate ruins.
The sun was hot on his head; his ludicrous cap had been blown away. He got laboriously to his feet and looked around at the broken walls.
You think your old man’s nuts, don’t you? he remembered Ozzie saying, on that night in 1960 when they had driven out here to find Diana; and he remembered Ozzie scuffling desperately after him down the stairwell of the Mint Hotel, crying and pleading, when Crane had left to play on the lake in 1969; and he remembered how fragile and dapper the old man had looked on Sunday morning—only four days ago!—when he and Arky had met him on Balboa Island.
Go back to your Louis L’Amour novels and your Kaywoodie pipes, Crane had told him yesterday. But the old man had not, after all, been willing to go gentle into that good night, to roll with the dying of the light.
Was Crane willing to, now?
He looked at some dark spots spattered on the stone wall. They were probably Ozzie’s blood.
No, not now. He started limping back toward the highway.
CHAPTER 33
I’ve Got a Present for Scott, Too
Diana strode along the railed second-floor cement walkway in the gold light of early evening, looking at the numbers on the apartment doors she passed. There was a pool in the courtyard below, and the air smelled of chlorine.