Last Call

by Tim Powers

  “They’ve started to…digest us,” panted Diana.

  An idea intruded itself into her mind, and she moaned hopelessly.

  “We’ve got to do more,” she said in a voice that shook with exhaustion.

  “Like what?” panted Nardie.

  “The goddamn chip is what they can’t digest, what repels them,” Diana called. “We’ve got to do more than just cut ourselves with it.” She had to lash out and hit one of the Huck Finn boys from the riverboat facade of the Holiday Casino, and she shouted in pain as the grinning boy’s teeth scored her wrist, but the figure did fall back. “Cutting our hands with the chip was a token, a gesture,” she sobbed, shaking her burned hand. “This isn’t about tokens. Look at the chip now.”

  Nardie feinted furiously, and then, in the bought second of the figures’ retreat, she held up what was left of the Moulin Rouge chip. It was a flimsy white disk now, seeming as thin as paper.

  “Break it,” said Diana, “and we’ll eat it.” The gummy air whistled in her throat as she tried to take a vivifying breath. “Then, when the chip is part of each of us, it’ll be us that they can’t digest.”

  The giant ape, transparent as cellophane, made a rush at them across the sand and Diana and Nardie scrambled several yards back before a swipe of the disk drove the thing back. “It will kill us,” Nardie said.

  Nardie’s words hung in the heat that surrounded them.

  Will it kill us, Mother? thought Diana. Is it your will that your daughter, and her friend that you blessed, die by their own hands rather than at the hands of these things?

  She sensed no answer.

  “Give me half,” she said despairingly.

  “Christ.” After a moment of hesitation Nardie broke the chip and reached over to hand half of it to Diana.

  Again the big voice from across the lake boomed a couple of incomprehensible syllables.

  The towering Vegas Vic cowboy from the roof of the Pioneer Casino, grinning with a mouth made of ghostly neon tubes under his giant phantasmagorical cowboy hat, bent down and swatted Diana with his open palm.

  She tumbled away across the hot sand, but she held on to the half of the chip, and when she rolled to a stop, she put it into her mouth. It had sharp edges and cut her tongue and the roof of her mouth as she made her throat work and swallow it.

  But suddenly she sensed something in her that partook of Scott and Oliver and Scat and Ozzie, and of something in the lake itself, and even of poor Hans, and she was sure that she was not too exhausted to stand up again.

  Mavranos was certain he was going to have a stroke and cheat cancer.

  He was tasting blood as he limped across the street, not knowing if the blood was his own or Pogue’s, and his throat burned from having shouted, Eat me! in helpless tandem with Snayheever’s ground-shaking voice a few moments ago.

  And now, in a fast halo of swirling, fluttering bats, Snayheever had climbed up and was dancing on the coping of the far wall.

  —The wall that fell away at a very steep slope for six hundred feet of empty air to the cement roof of the power plant on the downstream side of the dam.

  Pogue was in the street, blundering among the stopped cars, and at one moment he seemed to be close enough for Mavranos to lunge to him and at the next seemed hundreds of feet away.

  Mavranos was afraid that Pogue would knock Snayheever down into those yawning half-natural and half-engineered canyon depths and then, freed from Snayheever’s induced insanity and blindness, make his way back across the street and dive into the lake, stopping the clock and ruining the water. If Pogue tried to do that, Mavranos probably would have to try shooting at him.

  The air was hard to breathe—it was suddenly cloudy with hot, steamy, sticky mist, but it didn’t seem to be Pogue’s blood anymore; when Mavranos brushed his hand across his mouth, he felt his mustache slicked with something that smelled like algae. He tugged the .38 free of his belt and held it out in front of him as he bumped and stumbled among the cars after Pogue.

  And though he was still half blinded by Snayheever’s demanding pronouncements, he was sure that some of the things that he saw darting in circles around Snayheever’s capering form were fish: bass, and carp, and catfish with sweeping tentacles. Some of the finny shapes seemed to be so tiny as to be circling in front of Mavranos’s face, and others seemed to be huge, and moving around with astronomic speed somewhere as far away as the orbit of the moon.

  The pavement under his boots was shifting, and when he looked down, he saw cracks in the concrete rapidly expanding and narrowing like pulsing arteries—was the dam breaking up?—and then he seemed to be hanging far above the earth, himself way out there in the moon’s orbit, and what had seemed to be cracks or arteries below him were great river deltas changing in the violet-shifted radiation of unnaturally quick-passing centuries.

  He made himself look up, and he saw the bats scatter away from Snayheever in ribby, fluttering clouds, for the crazy man had started roaring again: “King and Queen of Caledon, how many miles to Babylon?”

  Snayheever was prancing along on the precipitous edge of the chest-high coping, kicking up his feet and tossing his arms, the tails of his threadbare coat flying in the wet wind. He seemed to Mavranos to be taller; in fact, it seemed for a moment that he towered over the mountains on either side of the dam, his joyfully upturned idiot face the closest thing to the sky.

  “Threescore miles and ten,” he sang harshly, his voice mirrored in the quaking of the bats and the flying fish. “Can I get there by moonlight? Yes, and back again.”

  The sky was dark, as if with a sudden overcast, but the full moon shone clearly over the mountains. The dam shook with turbulence and disorder in the penstocks and turbines that were its heart.

  “I guess I make it more,” said Crane as he tossed another couple of bills into the pot, trying to put a faint tone of theatrical reluctance in the statement, as would someone who holds a cinch hand and is trying to look weak to get a call.

  Crane had promptly raised the original two-hundred-dollar bet, but the young man, after some thought, had raised it back to Crane.

  He felt as though this hand had been in play for at least an hour.

  The houseboat seemed to be turning in the water, and Crane had to force himself not to grip the edges of the table as several of the other players were doing.

  Now the young man was facing another two-hundred-dollar raise, and he rubbed his stubbly chin dazedly and stared at Crane’s six showing cards: the Six and Eight of Cups, the Knight of Clubs, and the Seven, Eight, and Nine of Swords.

  Crane knew that his opponent held an Ace-high Flush in Coins; the young man was clearly wondering whether or not Crane’s Seven, Eight, and Nine of Swords could possibly be part of a Straight Flush, which would beat him.

  Crane saw the young man’s pupils dilate and knew that his opponent was about to call the raise and end the betting for the showdown.

  Crane was about to lose. And he had one urgent thought: Ozzie, what can I do here?

  Got it.

  “What’s your name, boy?” Crane said abruptly, flashing a wide and no doubt lipstick-stained toothy grin, and he prayed that his opponent had a one-syllable name.

  “Uh,” the young man muttered distractedly, moving his hand toward his stack of bills, “Bob.”

  “He called!” Crane shouted instantly, flipping over his two hole cards, which were the Ten and the King of Swords, but keeping his palm over the name printed at the bottom of the King, so that only the end of a sword could be seen on the card. “And I’ve got a Jack-high Straight Flush!”

  “I didn’t call!” yelled young Bob. “I just said ‘Bob’! You all heard me!”

  Crane instantly flipped the King back over, and then intentionally fumbled in turning over the Ten so that everyone could see it before it was again hidden.

  Crane looked up then, trying to put a look of tight outrage on his made-up face. “I say he said, ‘Call.’”

  “You freak,” s
aid Newt, wiping his sweating old face. “He said, ‘Bob.’”

  The other players all nodded and mumbled assent.

  Leon was staring at Crane. “You’re awfully eager to get one more bet,” he said, frowning in puzzlement. “But the boy said, clearly, ‘Bob.’” Leon turned his unswollen eye on Crane’s young opponent. “Do you want to call?”

  “Against a Straight Flush? No, thank you.” Young Bob turned his cards over and tossed them aside. “The Flying Nun can take a flying leap.”

  Crane shrugged in faked chagrin and reached out to rake in the pile of bills. Thank you, Ozzie, he thought.

  “Ah ah!” said Leon, holding up one smooth brown hand. “I am a parent of that hand, remember.” He turned on Crane a smile that was terrible under the bandage and behind the gray and purple swelling and the inflamed veins. “I’m claiming the Assumption.” He pulled a billfold out of his white jacket and began fanning out hundred-dollar bills. “Newt, count the pot, would you?” Leon smiled at Crane again. “I’ll make the last call—for everything.”

  Crane spread his hands and kept his head down to conceal the fast pulse in his throat. It was dark outside, and Crane was afraid to look out the ports; he thought he’d see solid brown lake water at each one, as if the boat had turned upside down and it were only some kind of centrifugal force that held the players in their chairs.

  “Okay,” Crane whispered, “though you—you know you’ve got a little bit of me anyway.”

  “If your heels be nimble and light,” roared Snayheever, his voice shaking dust down from the mountainous slopes, “you may get there by candlelight!”

  Ray-Joe Pogue was still trying to cross the street; one old woman had seen his hat and begun screaming, and he was blindly trying to grope his way around her. There were only a few other people, apparently injured, still visible along the top of the dam—everyone else seemed to have fled away on foot.

  Mavranos had zig-zagged through the stalled and crashed cars, up over the curb to the sidewalk on the afterbay side of the highway, and he flung his arms over the coping a few yards from where Snayheever danced and for a breath-catching moment stared down past his .38, through the volumes of foggy air at the galleries of the power station far below, with the churning water of the disordered spillway overflow dimly visible below and beyond that—and then he straightened up hastily and stared at the cement coping he was leaning on and ran the callused palm of his free hand along the edge of it.

  It was as wavy and rippled as if a jigsaw had been working on it, as if it were meant to be a theatrical exaggeration of an eroded cliff face, and he remembered the Fool card in the Lombardy Zeroth deck: The Fool had been dancing on a cliff edge that had been scalloped like this.

  And when he looked up again at Snayheever, Mavranos saw that the mad young man’s coat was longer and looser, and belted with a rope, and that he wore a headdress of feathers.

  He was terribly tall.

  Pogue finally stepped up to the curb now, seeming to be only a few yards from Mavranos. The card was still in his hat-band like a lamp on a miner’s helmet, and he blindly raised a little automatic pistol through the wet wind toward Snayheever.

  Still leaning on the coping, Mavranos swung the barrel of his .38 into line, aimed at Pogue’s chest, feeling the brass shells of the plastic-tipped Glaser rounds click back in the cylinder—and with his finger on the grooved metal of the trigger he froze, suddenly certain that he could not kill anyone.

  Pogue’s gun banged, jerking his hand up, but Snayheever’s mad dancing didn’t falter. Pogue’s first shot had flown wide in the shattered, rainy air.

  I’m still a damn good shot, though, thought Mavranos, sighting instead on the shimmering target of Pogue’s outstretched gun hand. Maybe I won’t have to kill him.

  He pulled the trigger through the double-action cycle without the sights wavering at all, and when the hard bang punched his eardrums and the barrel flew up in recoil, he saw Pogue go spinning away.

  But he had seen dust spring away from the wall and the sidewalk, and he wondered if the Glaser round had come apart, like a shot shell, before hitting Pogue’s hand. If so, he might have killed Pogue, in spite of his careful aim.

  Pogue was getting back up on his feet, though, and his hand was a splintered white and red ruin, jetting arterial blood; clearly Mavranos’s shot had gone as aimed. The sight of the ruined hand drove a column of hot vomit up Mavranos’s throat, and he resolutely clenched his jaw and swallowed…but for a moment he wondered if his gun had somehow shot several bullets, or rather several likelihoods of bullets.

  Pogue was howling now in the green seaweed-tasting rain, and he lunged at Snayheever’s ankles.

  Mavranos raised his .38 again, but the two figures were together, and the pavement was shaking over the laboring heart of the dam, and he didn’t dare shoot. Pogue had climbed up on the coping and was sitting straddling it beside Snayheever, and he had clasped his one good arm around Snayheever’s legs. His hat had come off and gone spinning away down the afterbay wall, and his pompadour was broken into wet strands plastered across his forehead.

  Snayheever was just standing there on the coping surface now, but still smiling into the dark sky and waving his arms. “Blind as a bat!” he roared, with Pogue and Mavranos moaning it in synchronization.

  “Is there anyone that can hear me?” Pogue shouted over the hiss of the hot rain. His darkly swollen eyes were screwed shut, and the bandage taped over his nose was blotting with blood.

  Mavranos waved his gun helplessly. “I can hear you, man,” he called.

  “Help me, please,” Pogue sobbed. “I’m turned around, and I’m blind, but I’ve got to sink my head right now. I can’t wait for the blood to behave! Am I on the lake side of the highway? Is it the lake below us here?”

  If I say yes, Mavranos thought, he’ll let go of Snayheever and jump, and I can yank Snayheever down from there.

  But I’ll be killing Pogue, as surely as if I’d shot him through the face.

  If I say no, he’ll throw Snayheever off and then cross the highway unimpeded. I won’t be able to reach him, stop him, with his optical illusion magic going full strength again. He’ll jump off the lake-side edge, and Diana will be doomed.

  And if I say nothing at all…?

  Okay then, he thought despairingly, I’ll go to hell.

  “That’s the lake below you,” he said loudly, feeling the words brand burns into his soul. “You’re on the railing at the north side.”

  Pogue’s lean face split into a white grin under the straggling wet hair and the bandage—

  —And he snapped his head forward, buried his teeth in Snayheever’s calf and swung his highway-side leg up and kicked Snayheever’s knee.

  Then Snayheever had tipped, and Mavranos swore and started forward in horror. He couldn’t tell whether the flailing of Snayheever’s arms was a useless attempt to keep his balance or still part of the crazy dance; Snayheever disappeared over the side, and Pogue, his arm still around his legs and his teeth still in his flesh, rolled off the coping after him.

  Mavranos slammed into the cement wall and peered over the edge.

  For several seconds the locked-together figure that was Snayheever and Pogue spun free in the mist above the dizzying abyss, rapidly diminishing in apparent size. Then they touched the steep slope and bounced and tumbled away apart, arms and legs flailing horribly loose, and they cartwheeled and sprang all the way down to the cement power station roof, where they briefly shook in what must have been prodigious bounces, and were two tiny, still forms.

  Then the resounding air was stilled, like a struck piano wire when the foot pedal is tromped on, and the dam under Mavranos’s feet became again as solid as the mountains, and the flow of water through the mighty penstocks and giant turbines must abruptly have been restored to a full, even flow, for the face of the river below the dam quickly became as smooth as a plate of glass.

  The rain of lake water stopped, and the wind was steady, and the
bats and fish were gone. Clouds blocked the sun intermittently, and the edges of cloud shadow on the pavement were as sharp as if they had been razored out of black cardboard.

  And Mavranos stood away from the gradual geometric curve of the coping, which stretched in an unrippled arc from one mountain to the other. He uncocked his revolver and put it back in his belt and pulled his shirttail over it. He took a deep breath, then swallowed, and swallowed again.

  He tapped his jacket pocket, then fished out the Baggie. It had burst at some point during the last several minutes, but the little goldfish was still flopping in the wet plastic bag.

  He walked quickly out onto the highway, between the cars and across to the lake-facing railing. He held the Baggie out over the abyss and the lake water below, and he shook the fish out, then leaned over and watched it tumble away until he couldn’t see it anymore.

  His exhaustion was gone. He sprinted away over the drying pavement, down the center of the long, curving highway, running with his knees well up, swerving effortlessly around the abandoned cars, toward the parking lot where he had left the truck.

  And twenty-five miles away to the northwest in Las Vegas, every pair of dice on every Craps table had come up snake-eyes in the instant of Snayheever’s death, and every roulette ball rocked to a solid halt in the 00 slot, and every car in town that had its key turned in the ignition at that moment started up instantly.

  The sky over the west shore of the lake was still almost as dark as night, and though the moon should have been three days past its full phase, it hung overhead as perfectly round as the worn white disk Diana and Nardie had shared.

  The two of them were alone on their section of beach; Nardie, empty-handed now, was still in a defensive crouch, and Diana was swaying on her feet and clutching her throat. A hundred yards away to their left, the children and parents were hesitantly but at least loose-jointedly wandering back up the beach toward their towels and umbrellas, clearly puzzled and ill at ease and wondering about imminent rain.