by Tim Powers
“So does everybody this morning, seems like,” Mavranos said. He used both hands to climb up onto the exposed foundation ledge a few yards to Cochran’s left, and Cochran noted the deepened lines around the man’s eyes and down his gaunt cheeks. “We got shot at, on the road up there, as we were driving up to that restaurant—maybe you heard it. Semi-auto, definitely, because of how fast the shots came; looks like nine-millimeter, from the holes. We drove on past the restaurant, eluded ’em with some magical shit and some return fire in the numbered streets east of here and parked in an alley off Geary, and Kootie and I took a cab back here.” He noticed Plumtree crouched below him on the inner side of the wall, and touched the bill of his cap. “Mornin’, Miss Plumtree.”
“Was the king’s body hurt?” she asked.
“It—yeah, it was shot in the thigh.” He rubbed one brown hand across his face, leaving a streak of mud down his jaw. “Live blood was leaking out, till we bandaged it tight. I mean, it was purple venous blood, but it turned bright red in the air. Got oxygenated, according to Angelica. It’s a good sign, that the blood is still vital. Not so good that he’s got a bullet in his leg now.”
Cochran glanced down at Kootie, who was still standing on the mud-flat. The boy’s face under the tangled black curls was tired and expressionless.
“Who was it that shot at you?” Cochran asked.
“Local jacks,” spoke up Kootie. “Boys who would be king. The world’s been twelve days without a king, and it’s getting impatient. If we wait long enough, the trees will be trying to destroy Crane’s body. The rocks will be.”
“Kootie’s … sensory apparatus works better up here,” said Mavranos. Plumtree had stood up to be able to see over the top of the wall, and he squinted belligerently at her. “You still up for the restoration-to-life stunt, girl?”
Plumtree gave him an empty look.
And down on the ground Kootie stepped back, his face suddenly paler, and he glared at Plumtree. “Don’t,” he said, almost spitting, “ever … do that to me again.” He took a deep breath and let it out. “Just because neither of us is a virgin, psychically, doesn’t make both of us … sluts.”
Cochran glanced at Plumtree. She was looking down now, and she said, “Well, you just tell your fucking pal—oh, hell, I’m sorry, kid! But Mavranos just now asked me—with a straight face!—if I wasn’t a coward and a liar and a cheat, on top of being a, a murderer. Murderess. ‘Are you still up for it, girlie!’ After I came to you people.”
“And then ran out,” added Mavranos stonily.
Cochran caught on that Cody had thrown her anger to Kootie—who had instantly known where it had come from! “If she was really trying to ‘run out,’ ” Cochran said to Mavranos reasonably, “we wouldn’t have come here to meet you, would we? Let’s not waste time. What do we do next, now that we’re in San Francisco?” How, he thought, does a restoration-to-life work?
Mavranos reached into one of the outer pockets of his denim jacket, and Cochran tightened his grip on his own gun—but what Mavranos pulled out was a can of Coors, which he popped open one-handed. “Okay. Angelica says we gotta call up that black lady that talked to us on the phone, the one who was brushing her hair on the TV. She’s our intercessor, though Angelica doesn’t totally trust her, doesn’t want her taking over. And Angelica brought along a lot of … beacons and landing lights, for Dionysus’s remote attention as well as Crane’s soul: those two silver dollars Spider Joe brought, and a gold Dunhill lighter that some hired assassin gave Crane one time—Angelica says the guy was a representative of Death, so it’s a significant gift—and a bunch of myrtle-bush branches from the back garden. What other stuff we may need we’ll—”
Plumtree interrupted him with a sharp, startled laugh—she was staring over the edge of the wall in the direction of the north cliff—and then she shivered and closed her eyes; Cochran glanced where she’d been looking, and his eyes widened in surprise to see a powerfully built naked man standing on the mud a couple of hundred feet away, facing them, with shoulder-length brown hair and a curly reddish beard that fell over his chest.
And Cochran’s rib cage went cold, for he recognized the man. “That’s our taxi driver!” he exclaimed. “The guy that drove us to Solville!”
“That’s Scott Crane,” said Mavranos hoarsely. “Or his ghost.”
“Catch him in a bottle,” said Kootie.
Cochran stifled a nervous laugh at the foolishness of the boy’s unconsidered remark—but then the naked man turned away, toward the cliff, and suddenly the distance and perspective were problematic. The man seemed to be smaller, tiny, as if he were some kind of elf standing on the rim of the wall a yard in front of Cochran’s face, and a moment later he seemed to be immensely far away, and huge; and when he moved—away, presumably, for his form appeared to shrink—he shifted without any apparent contact with the ground. For one instant he seemed to jump from side to side like a figure in patchy animation—and Cochran grabbed one of the shoulder-height stone crossbeams, viscerally certain that the figure had been holding still and that it had been the whole world that had jumped.
Cochran’s straining eyes focused by default on the cliff face, and he noticed that a deep shadow at the base of it was the mouth of a cave; and when the naked figure flickered away out of sight it seemed to disappear into the shadowed opening.
Mavranos was sprinting away around the coping of a sunken mud lagoon, toward the cliff and the cave.
“It’s just his ghost,” yelled Kootie, starting after him.
“It’s the ghost of my friend!” Mavranos shouted back.
Cochran shoved his revolver into his belt, then crouched to climb back out through the crusted-stone window hole. “Come on,” he gasped at Plumtree, “we should go along.”
She wailed softly as she followed him out. Then, “He drove our taxi?” she said as she hopped down after him from the foundation ledge to the mud. “He must have known who I was! I held a fucking spear to his baby boy’s throat!” Even though she was Cody, she took his hand as the two of them trotted after Mavranos and Kootie. “If it comes to facing him, I think it’ll have to be Valorie. She’s the one who plays intolerable flops.”
The cave opened into a roughly straight tunnel, high enough for a person to walk upright in. The passage appeared to be natural, floored with wet gravel and bumpy with stone outcroppings on the rounded walls and ceiling, though Cochran could dimly see a metal railing installed along part of the seaward wall, halfway down the shadowed tunnel. By the time Cochran and Plumtree had come scuffing and panting into the broad entrance, Kootie was a dark silhouette far down the length of the tunnel and Mavranos stood in chalky daylight out beyond the far side, perhaps thirty yards distant. Reflected gray sky glittered in agitated puddles that filled low spots of the floor, and the moist breeze from the vitreous corridor was heavy with the old-pier smell of tide pools.
“Come on,” Cochran said, tugging Plumtree’s cold hand as he stepped into the darkness.
“Take Valorie,” she said tightly, “I hate caves.”
Cochran thought about the dead-eyed woman Plumtree had been right after the hollow knocking of the gunshots, and he shuddered at the prospect of walking through this dim, wet tunnel with her. “I’d rather have you along, Cody,” he said, “actually.”
She shrugged irritably and stepped forward, her sneakers crunching in the wet gravel. “I’m here at the moment.”
The mushy rattle of their shoes on the yielding humped floor echoed from the stone walls, but Cochran could hear too the hissing rise and gutter of contained surf—and when he and Plumtree had trudged to where the metal railing stood against the seaward wall, he saw that two jagged holes opened out from floor level to the outer air, where waves could be seen foaming up over rocks that glittered in the gray daylight outside.
A seething bath, he thought, which yet may prove against strange maladies a sovereign cure.
Up ahead, Kootie too was out in the leaden light now, and Mavran
os’s voice came reverberating down the tunnel: “Get your girlfriend out here.”
“Come on, girlfriend,” Cochran said.
She yanked her hand free of his, and hurried past him so that he had to splash along after her.
“Wait for moron Tiffany, asshole,” she called back to him.
He touched the lump in his jacket that was the cassette tape from the telephone answering machine. Tiffany, he thought, or someone else.
There was only a wide ledge under the open sky at the other end of the tunnel, and no way to go farther without climbing over wet, tilted boulders.
Cochran blinked around in the relative glare when he was standing out there beside Kootie and Mavranos and Plumtree, and he pointed at the tan boulder nearest to them, across a narrow gap that had sea water sloshing in it. “That one looks like George Washington,” he said, inanely. It did, though—the broad face turned out to sea in profile, the nose and the jawline and even the edge of the wig, were all rendered in weather-broken stone.
“The father of our country,” said Plumtree brightly.
Kootie was peering down into the water, staring at the foamy scum on the waves. “He’s gone,” he said.
Cochran frowned at Plumtree to stop her from asking if he meant George Washington.
Mavranos was squinting up at the northern cliff face and then out across the huge tumbled stones. “He’s not corporeal,” he said, speaking loudly to be heard over the waves crashing on the rocks farther out. “That’s good, right? He’s not one of the solidified ghosts, like those ‘beastie’ things your dad had in his van.”
“He wasn’t corporeal just now,” Kootie said. “And I think it generally takes a fresh ghost a while to firmly gather up enough … spit and bubble gum and bug blood and plaster dust … to form a reliably solid body. Still, he …” Kootie yawned widely. “Excuse me. Did Crane drink a lot?”
“Drink, like alcohol?” Mavranos scowled at the boy. “Well, he used to. He cut back hard after Easter in ’90—since then it’s been a glass or two of wine, with the bread and fish he has for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Why?”
In a fruity, affected voice, Plumtree said, “I enjoy a glass of wine with my meals.”
Ignoring her, Kootie said, “I think ghosts of drunks solidify faster. And then they keep drinking, buying cheap wine with money they get panhandling—but they can’t digest the alcohol, and it comes bubbling out of their skin like sweat. It’s like the habit is what animates them.” He turned a cold gaze on Plumtree. “Do you drink a lot?”
“Well,” she said, “one’s not enough and a thousand is too many, as they say. Why do you ask?”
“If he was your taxi driver,” the boy said, “he must have had some substance for that. Turning the steering wheel, pushing the pedals. You met him then, and you were the first to see him today. Sometimes a ghost clings to the person responsible for his death, especially if the person has a lot of guilt about the death. Al—Thomas Edison—he had a couple of ’em hanging on him, at one time and another.”
“You’re saying what, exactly?” said Plumtree quickly.
“I’m saying your dad may have had help screwing up our TV set. I’m pretty sure you’ve got the ghost of Scott Crane riding in your head like … like a bad case of lice. And you’re only making the ghost develop faster by drinking all the time.”
Cochran couldn’t tell if Plumtree relaxed or tensed up at this statement; then her mouth opened and she droned, “Sometimes she calls the king, and whispers to her pillow, as to him, the secrets of her overcharged soul: and I am sent to tell his majesty that even now she cries aloud for him.”
“Valorie,” Cochran said.
“She that loves her selves,” Plumtree said woodenly, “hath not essentially, but by circumstance, the name of Valorie.”
Cochran shivered in the chilly ocean breeze, and he was glad Mavranos and Kootie would be accompanying him and Valorie back through the tunnel to the ruins and the mud-flats and the long zigzagging path back up to the normal-world San Francisco highway; for this was the same thing Valorie had said half an hour ago, when he had mentioned her name, and it had just now occurred to him that the Valorie personality was to some extent a kind of reflex-arc machine … dead.
Mavranos had been nodding rapidly while Plumtree spoke, and now he said, “Groovy. Scott sure picked a well-ventilated head to occupy.” He turned a pained look on Kootie. “But in fact he doesn’t know anything about it, does he?”
“Right,” said Kootie. “Crane himself is … somewhere else. Wherever the actual dead people go. Somewhere I guess only Dionysus has the key to. This … ‘beastie,’ this naked thing we saw today, it’s like a ROM disk. Not useless, if we could talk to it, but hardly more a real person than the Britannica on CD-ROM would be. No, Crane himself wouldn’t know about this thing we followed down here, any more than the real Edison knew about the ghost I had in my head two years ago.”
“No doubt.” Mavranos stared at Cochran. “So are you and Miss … Miss Tears-On-My-Pillow coming with us?”
Cochran touched the butt of his revolver. “No.” His heart was beating fast. “No, we’re gonna get a motel room somewhere. You and Angelica can cook up the restoration procedure, and we’ll join you for that. You go get a place to stay, and meet me tomorrow at … Li Po, it’s a bar on Grant Street. At noon. If you forget the name, just remember where we are right now—the street entrance to the bar is stuccoed up to look like a natural cavern. You can give me, then, the phone number of whatever place you’re staying at, and we can set up a time and place where Janis and I can meet you all.”
Mavranos smiled. “You don’t trust us.”
“Somehow I just don’t,” Cochran agreed, struggling to keep his voice level. “I think it must have something to do with,” he added with a jerky shrug, “you all discussing shooting Janis, last night.”
“That’s noble,” Mavranos said. “But she just did one of her personality changes right now, didn’t she?” He smiled at Plumtree. “You’re Dr. Jeckyll, or Sybil, or the Incredible Hulk now, right?” To Cochran he went on, “Any time you leave her alone—hell, any time at all—she could change into her father, who murdered Scott Crane. Do you think he wouldn’t kill you?”
Cochran quailed inwardly when he remembered the man who had spoken out of Plumtree’s body last night at Strubie the Clown’s house; but aloud he said, “I’ll take my chances.”
“You’ll be taking all of our chances,” said Kootie.
Cochran jumped when Plumtree spoke again, but the flat voice was still that of the Valorie personality: “How chances mock, and changes fill the cup of alteration with diverse liquors!”
And Cochran remembered the bottle of wine that the Mondard figure had generously offered him in the hallucinated mirror last night. Biting Dog, or something, the label had seemed to read, in the reflection. And he thought too about Manhattans, and Budweisers and vodka, and Southern Comfort; and about flinty French Graves wine thoughtlessly disparaged at a New Year’s Eve party.
Mavranos had already shrugged and started slogging back down the tunnel; Kootie followed him, after shaking his head and saying, “Liquor, again.”
Cochran took Plumtree’s elbow and led her after them. And all he was thinking about now was the—admittedly warm—twelve-pack of Coors he had transferred from the stolen Torino to his Granada, parked now just up the hill.
BOOK TWO
DIVERSE LIQUORS
O God! that one might read the book of fate,
And see the revolution of the times
Make mountains level, and the continent,—
Weary of solid firmness,—melt itself
Into the sea! and, other times, to see
The beachy girdle of the ocean
Too wide for Neptune’s hips; how chances mock,
And changes fill the cup of alteration
With divers liquors! O! if this were seen,
The happiest youth, viewing his progress through,
W
hat perils past, what crosses to ensue,
Would shut the book, and sit him down and die.
—William Shakespeare,
Henry IV, Part II
CHAPTER 15
It was an inconsistent and ubiquitous fiend too, for, while it was making the whole night behind him dreadful, he darted out into the roadway to avoid dark alleys, fearful of its coming hopping out of them like a dropsical boy’s-Kite without a tail and wings. It hid in doorways too, rubbing its horrible shoulders against doors, and drawing them up to its ears, as if it were laughing.
—Charles Dickens,
A Tale of Two Cities
FOR FIVE DAYS NOW the skirts of the storm clouds had swept across the fretted hills and smoky lowlands of San Francisco. At the northeast corner of the peninsula the intermittent downpours had saturated the precipitous eastern slope of Telegraph Hill, loosening wedges of mud that tumbled down onto the pavement of Sansomme Street, where old wooden cottages still stood from before the 1906 earthquake, having been saved from the subsequent fire by bucket brigades of Italians who had doused the encroaching flames with hundreds of gallons of homemade red wine; and the rain had swelled the waters of Stow Lake in Golden Gate Park, making a marsh of the playground to the south and completely submerging the strange old stones that edged the lake’s normal boundaries; and in the southeast corner of the city the rain had frequently driven customers out of the open-air Farmer’s Market on Alemany Boulevard, and kept the Mexican children from playing in the streets of the Mission District east of Dolores. In the blocks of run-down post-war housing in Hunter’s Point, east of the 101, gunfire from passing cars was more common than usual.
In fact, incidents of random gunfire had increased all over the city in the five days since a burst of semi-automatic weapons fire had startled tourists outside the Cliff House Restaurant on the northwest shore, on the morning of January 12th. Of less general concern, the wild monkeys that lived in the sycamore trees on Russian Hill had begun a fearsome screeching every evening at sunset, and in the sunless dawns vast flocks of crows wheeled silently over the old buildings at the south end of the Embarcadero by the China Basin. The Chronicle ran a brief human-interest article about the spontaneous street-dancing that had started in these South-of-Market streets and alleys around the French restaurant whose name translated as I Am Starving; the rain-soaked dancers were described as neo-Beatnik youths and unreconstructed old hippies, and the dance was supposed to be a revival of the French carmagnole, and the preferred dance music appeared to be the 1970 Melanie song “Candles in the Wind.”