Earthquake Weather

by Tim Powers

  Armentrout thought he knew now why the death of the Fisher King had eliminated all the ghosts in the Southern California area. Murdered in the dead of winter, the slain Fisher King had become compellingly identical to the vegetation-god Dionysus, whose winter mysteries celebrated the god’s murder and devourment at the hands of the Titans and his subsequent return from the kingdom of the dead. Being a seasonal deity of death and the underworld—and incarnate this winter in this killed king—the god had taken all the local ghosts away with him, as a possibly unintended entourage, just as the death of summer takes away the vitality of plants, leaving the dried husks behind. In the case of the ghosts, it was their memories and strengths that had lingered behind, while their lethal, vengeful sentiences were conveniently gone.

  If you like dead leaves, Armentrout thought as he drove, it’s good news to have a dead Fisher King; and I like dead leaves. I sustain myself spiritually on those dear dead leaves.

  But eventually, he thought, if nature follows her cyclical course, Dionysus begins his trek back from the underworld, and a Fisher King again becomes evident; and the plants start to regain their life, and the ghosts—quickly, it seems!—are again resistant, dangerous presences. The god wants to rake up the dead leaves, he wants to gather to himself not only the ghosts but all the memories and powers and loves that had accrued to them … which scraps I don’t want to let him have. He wants us to figuratively or literally drink his pagadebiti Zinfandel, and let go of every particle of the cherished dead, give them entirely to him … which I don’t want to do.

  When Armentrout and Long John Beach had finally got off the 280 Freeway last Thursday, the crazy old man had suddenly and loudly insisted that they take a right turn off of Junipero Serra Boulevard and drive five blocks to a quiet old suburban street that proved to be called Urbano; and in a grassy traffic circle off Urbano stood a gigantic white-painted wooden sundial on a broad flat wheel with Roman numerals from I to XII around the rim of it. After demanding that Armentrout stop the car, Long John Beach had got out and plodded across the street and walked back and forth on the face of the sundial, frowning and peering down around his feet as though trying to read the time on it—but of course the towering gnomon-wedge had been throwing no shadow at all on that overcast day. The passage of time, as far as this inexplicable sundial was concerned, was suspended.

  And if Armentrout could succeed in getting the new Fisher King maintained flatline, brain-dead, on artificial life-support in his clinic, Dionysus’s clock would be stopped—at the one special point in the cycle that would permit Armentrout to consume ghosts with impunity—with no fear of consequences, no need for masks.

  The two-manikin framework shifted and clanked in the back seat now as Armentrout drove fast through the Seventeenth Street intersection, the car’s tires hissing on the wet pavement. Market Street was curving to the right as it started up into the dark hills, toward the twin peaks that the Spanish settlers had called Los Pechos de la Chola, the breasts of the Indian maiden.

  “There was still time,” Long John Beach said, in his own voice.

  “For what?” asked Armentrout absently as he watched the red brake lights and turn-signal indicators reflecting on the wet asphalt ahead of them. “You wanted to get something to eat? There’s roast beef and bread at the house—though I should feed you in the driveway, the way you toss it around.” He passed a slow-moving Volkswagen and sped up, eager to put more distance between himself and that shifting maternal ghost on Lapu Lapu Street. “I should feed you Alpo.”

  “I mean there was still time, even though I couldn’t see it. It doesn’t stop because you have something blocking the light. If we coulda seen in infrared,” he went on, pronouncing the last word so that it rhymed with impaired, “the shadow woulda been there, I bet you anything.” The BMW was abruptly slowing, because Armentrout’s foot had lifted from the gas pedal, but the old man went on, “Infrared is how they keep patty melts hot, in diners, when the waitress is too busy to bring ’em to you right when they’re ready.”

  “Stay,” said Armentrout in a voice muted to a conversational tone by the sudden weight of fear; he took a deep breath and made himself finish the sentence, “out … of … my … mind. God damn you.” But his thoughts were as loud and rapid as his heartbeat: You can’t read my mind! You can’t start channeling me! I’m not dead!

  Long John Beach shrugged, unperturbed. “Well, you go around leaving the door open …”

  From the backseat came a squeak that could only have been one of the Styrofoam heads shifting against the other as the car rocked with resumed acceleration—but to Armentrout it sounded like a hiccup of suppressed laughter.

  Tall cypresses hid from any neighboring houses the back patio of the neurologist’s villa on Aquavista Way, and the green slope of the northernmost Twin Peak mounted up right behind the pyrocantha bushes at the far edge of the lawn. After Armentrout had parked the car in the garage and made Long John Beach carry the two-manikin appliance out to the patio, he fixed a couple of sandwiches for the one-armed old man and then carefully began scouting up paraphernalia for a séance and exorcism in the back yard.

  The neurologist’s house didn’t afford much for it—Armentrout found some decorative candles in glass chimney shades, and a dusty copper chafing dish no doubt untouched since about 1962, and a bottle of Hennessy XO, which was almost too good to use for plain fuel this way. Popov vodka would be more appropriate to his mother’s—

  He hastily drank several mouthfuls of the cognac right from the bottle as he made himself walk around the cement deck of the roofed patio, shakily lighting the candles and setting them down in a six-foot-wide circle. Then he picked up a hibachi and walked around the circle shaking clumped old ash in a line around the perimeter; after he tossed the hibachi out onto the lawn, where it broke like glass, he walked around the circle again, stomping and scuffing the ash so that the line was continuous and unbroken. The chafing dish he set on a wooden chair inside the circle, and, needing both hands to steady the bottle, he poured an inch of brandy into it.

  Then for several minutes he just stood and stared at the shallow copper pan while the morning hilltop breeze sighed in the high cypress branches and chilled his damp face. I can face her, he told himself firmly; if it’s for the last time, and if she’s concealed behind the idiot shell-masks of Long John Beach’s broken mind, and if I’m armed with the Sun card from the monstrous Lombardy Zeroth deck—and there’s brandy to lure her, and then burn her up.

  A hitch that might have been a sob or a giggle quivered in his throat.

  Will this mean I’ll have committed matricide twice?

  He shivered in the cold wind, and took another big gulp of the brandy to drive away the image of the old face under the surface of the water, the lipsticked mouth opening and shutting, and the remembered cramps in his seventeen-year-old arms.

  He looked up at the gray sky, and swallowed still another mouthful, and mentally recited the alphabet forward and backward several times.

  At last he felt steady enough to go back inside and fetch out from under the bed the two purple velvet boxes.

  “Finish your sandwich and get out here,” he told Long John Beach as he carried the boxes through the kitchen to the open back door. “We’ve got a … a call to make.”

  When Long John Beach came shambling out of the house, absently rubbing mustard out of his hair and licking his fingers, Armentrout had to tell him several times to go over and stand inside the circle, before he finally got the old man’s attention. “And step over the ash line,” he added.

  At last the old man was standing inside the circle, blinking and grinning foolishly. Armentrout forced himself to speak in a level tone: “Okay, John, we’re going to do our old trick of having you listen in on a call, right? Only this time, you’re going to be the telephone as well as the eavesdropper. ’Kay?”

  Long John Beach nodded. “Ring ring,” he said abruptly, in a loud falsetto.

  Armentrout blinked at
him uncertainly. Could this be an incoming call? But this couldn’t start yet, he hadn’t lit the brandy yet! “Uh, who is this, please?” he asked, trying to sound stern so that the old man wouldn’t laugh at him if he’d just been clowning around and this wasn’t a real call.

  “Dwayne,” said Long John Beach.

  Armentrout tried to remember any patient who had ever had that name. “Dwayne?” he said. “I’m sorry—Dwayne who?”

  “Dwayne the tub, I’m dwowning!”

  Armentrout reeled back, gasping. It wasn’t his mother’s voice, but it had to be a sort of relayed thought from her ghost.

  “J-John,” he said too loudly, fumbling in his pockets for a match or a lighter, “I want you to light the brandy—light the stuff in that pan there.”

  He found a matchbook and tossed it into the circle, then fell to his knees on the wet grass beside one of the purple velvet boxes. I can’t shoot him, he thought, it wouldn’t stop her, she’s just passing through Long John’s train-station head.

  He flipped open the other box and spilled the oversized cards out onto the grass, squinting as he pawed through them until he found the Sun card.

  When he looked up, Long John Beach had lifted the copper chafing-dish pan in his one hand and was sniffing it. And now it was Armentrout’s mother’s voice that spoke from the old man’s mouth: “Oh, how I wish I could shut up like a telescope!”

  “Put that down,” Armentrout wailed.

  The pan tipped up toward the old man’s mouth.

  “Mm—” Armentrout choked on the word mom, and had to make do with just shouting, “Don’t drink that! John! Kick out that woman’s ghost for a minute and listen to me!”

  Suddenly, from the gate by the garage, a man’s voice called, “Dr. Armentrout?”

  “Get out of here!” Armentrout yelled back, struggling to his feet. “This is private property!”

  But the gate clanged and swung open, and it was the young intern from Rosecrans Medical Center, Philip Muir, who stepped out onto the backyard grass. He didn’t have his white coat on, but he was wearing a long-sleeved white shirt and a tie. “John!” he exclaimed, noticing the one-armed old man standing in the ash circle on the patio. Long John Beach was noisily drinking the brandy now, and slopping a lot of it into the white whiskers that bristled on his cheeks and neck these days. Muir turned to Armentrout. “He’s supposed to be at Pacifica.”

  “I—have him out on a day pass,” Armentrout panted. “This is none of your—”

  “Richie!” called Armentrout’s mother’s voice from Long John Beach’s throat, bubbling around the last gulp of the brandy. “Can you hear me under water? I’ve got a beard! Did they have to give me … hormones? Pull the plug, darling, and let me breathe! Where’s some more of this whiskey?”

  Muir sniffed sharply. “And you’re giving him whiskey? Doctor, I—”

  “It’s not whiskey,” babbled Armentrout, “it’s brandy, she doesn’t know the difference—”

  Muir was frowning and shaking his head. “ ‘She’? What’s the matter with you? Have you got Plumtree and Cochran up here too? I know Cochran is in the area, he telephoned the vineyard he works at—”

  Armentrout interrupted him to call out, “I’ll get you more liquor in a moment! Just—wait there!”

  But Long John Beach blinked at him and spat. “I was never a liquor man,” he said. “I just ate smokes.”

  Armentrout sighed deeply and sank down cross-legged beside the two velvet boxes. At least his mother was gone, for now. But Muir surely intended to report this, and investigate Beach’s transfer, and end Armentrout’s career. “Come over here, Philip,” he said huskily, lifting the lid of the box that contained the derringer. “I think I can show you something that will explain all of this.”

  “It’s not me you need to be explaining things to. Why on earth did you give Plumtree ECT? What the hell happened during the ice-cream social last Wednesday? Mr. Regushi swallowed his tongue!”

  Armentrout again got wearily to his feet, one hand holding the box and the other gripping the hidden derringer. “Just look at this, Philip, and you’ll understand.”

  Muir angrily stepped forward across the grass. “I can’t imagine what it could be.”

  “I guess it’s whatever you’ve made it.”

  The flat, hollow boom of the .410 shot-shell was muffled by the cypresses and the hillside.

  CHAPTER 17

  TROILUS: What offends you, lady?

  CRESSIDA: Sir, mine own company.

  TROILUS: You cannot shun yourself.

  CRESSIDA: Let me go and try.

  —William Shakespeare,

  Troilus and Cressida

  “COCHRAN SAID HE’S BEEN walking and taking the cable cars to get down here into Chinatown,” said Archimedes Mavranos. “Maybe the cable cars were full today, and he’s gotta hike the whole way.”

  Shadows from a slow ceiling fan far overhead swept rhythmically over the red Formica tabletop.

  “He might have sold us out,” said Kootie. “Maybe bad guys are just about to come busting in here.” He had asked for a straw with his Coke, and now he glanced over his shoulder; the bartender was looking at the television in the corner above the bar, so Kootie stuck his straw into Angelica’s glass of Chardonnay and took a sip of it. “It’s sacramental,” he explained to his foster-mother when she frowned at him. “The king needs a sip at noon, especially if bad guys are due.”

  “I don’t need Coke in my wine,” Angelica said.

  “If bad guys want to open a hand in a no-limit game like this,” said Mavranos with more confidence than he felt, touching the front of his denim jacket and glancing at Angelica’s purse, “they’re liable to see some powerful raises.”

  Pete Sullivan was sitting beside Angelica at the table by the stairs that led down to the rest rooms, and he was deftly, one-handed, cartwheeling a cigarette over the backs of the knuckles of his right hand; it had been unlit, fresh from the pack, when he’d started, but the tip was glowing when he flipped it into the air off his last knuckle and caught it by the filter in his lips.

  “Wow,” said Mavranos.

  “Yeah, wow,” agreed Pete irritably as he puffed smoke from the cigarette. “Magic tricks. But if I try to hold a weapon, my hands are no good at all. Even a pair of scissors I drop, if I think about stabbing somebody.” He wiggled his fingers. “Houdini made sure his mask wouldn’t be capable of hurting anybody.”

  Kootie grinned wanly. “He can’t even play video games,” the boy told Mavranos. “The hands think he’s really trying to shoot down enemy pilots.”

  Mavranos opened his mouth to say something, then focused past Kootie toward the front door of the bar. “Heads up,” he said.

  Sid Cochran had just stumbled in from the street, and Mavranos felt his face tighten in a smile to see the blond Plumtree woman lurching along right behind him.

  Mavranos pushed his chair back and stood up. “I was afraid we weren’t ever going to see you again, ma’am,” he said to Plumtree.

  Plumtree’s hair was wet, and Mavranos thought she looked like someone going through heroin withdrawal as she collapsed into the chair beside Kootie. There were cuts under her chin and at one corner of her mouth, and her face had a puffy, bruised look. “Shove it, man,” she said hoarsely. “I’m an accessory to a murder today. More than anything else in the world, I want not to be. Soon, please God.”

  “A murder today?” asked Kootie.

  Plumtree closed her eyes. “No. I’m still, today, an accessory to Scott Crane’s murder. Is what I meant. But tomorrow I might not be.”

  “Tomorrow you might not be,” Mavranos agreed.

  “She insisted on coming,” said Cochran nervously as he took the chair opposite her, next to Pete Sullivan. “We’re laying our cards on the table here, but we can see yours too. We saw your truck in the Portsmouth Square parking structure, and saw what had to be your, your dead guy under a tarp in the back of it. If we’d wanted to screw this up, we’d hav
e put a bullet through Crane’s head right then.”

  Plumtree was blinking around now at the gold-painted Chinese bas-reliefs high up on the walls, and she squinted at a yard-wide, decorated Chinese paper lantern hanging from a string above the bar. An old Shell No-Pest Strip dangled from the tassel at the bottom of the lantern.

  “Can I get a drink in this opium den?” she asked. “What is all this shit? The entrance to this place looks like a cave.”

  Mavranos could smell bourbon on her breath right across the table. “It’s named after a famous eighth-century Chinese poet,” he told her. “The pictures painted on that lantern are scenes from his life.”

  “What’d he do to earn the No-Pest Strip?” she asked. “Somebody get me a Bud, hey?”

  I guess there’s no need for her to be sober, thought Mavranos; he shrugged and leaned over to pick up his own beer glass, which was empty.

  “I’ll have a Singapore Sling,” Cochran said. He glanced at Plumtree. “They make a good Singapore Sling here.”

  “Said the Connecticut Pansy,” remarked Plumtree absently. “Did flies kill him?” she asked Mavranos. “Your eight-cent poet, I mean—that yellow plastic thing is to kill flies, if you didn’t know.”

  “Las moscas,” said Cochran, and Mavranos realized that he wasn’t totally sober either, “That’s what they call flies at a vineyard. They can get into the crush, if you do it after sunup—the Mexican grape-pickers think flies will carry little ghosts into the fermenting must, make you dizzy and give you funny dreams when you drink the wine, later. I suppose you might die of it, if enough ghosts had got into the wine.”

  “I’m sure each of us has a funny story about flies,” said Mavranos patiently, “but right now we’ve got more important … issues at hand.” He turned away toward the bar, then paused and looked back at Plumtree. “The poet is supposed to have drowned—the story is he fell out of a boat, drunk, in the middle of the night, reaching for the reflection of the moon in the water.”