by Tim Powers
“I don’t know that we’ve done very well,” said Kootie.
“You’ve all done very badly,” she agreed, “and amassed huge debts.”
From a shelf stacked with old gray cookbooks and account ledgers she now pulled down a jarringly modern oversized paperback book with garish red and green swirls and the word FRACTALS in big red letters on the slick cover. She flipped it open to an inner page and showed Kootie a color picture of flames or ferns or octopus tentacles boiling away from a warty, globular black shape.
“Have you seen this silhouette before?” she asked gently, pointing to a clearer picture of the five-lobed silhouette, which resembled a fat person with a little round head and stumpy arms and round buttocks.
Kootie could only look away from the picture and nod and close his throat against sudden nausea. It was the silhouette that had appeared on the television screen in the motel this morning after Arky had poured beer into the set, and it was, too, the shape he had momentarily seen overlapping the pretty Chinese woman when he had first glimpsed her today in the Street of Gamblers.
Mammy Pleasant sighed and shook her head. “Oh, it’s death, child, the person of the god’s unholy trinity that’s retributive death, and you can testify yourself that it does love to have people enter into its terrible bargain. It was the person of the god that came for me first, on that cold January eleventh morning, demanding payment for chopping down the vine in Macondray’s grapery—dethroning the vine god, killing the vegetation king, beheading the Green Knight. In olden-days history it was called the Quinotaur, and it gave power to the Frankish king Merovee in the Dark Ages—it came to him in the form of a talking bear, and Merovee cut its head off—and it came back under the name of”—she tapped the page—“Pepin the Fat, to kill Merovee’s greatly-greatly-grandson Dagobert, and that ended the Merovingian line of kings in that long-ago time. And it’s been known as Bertilak of the High Desert, the Green Knight, who met Sir Gawain at the Green Chapel on New Year’s Day, a year after Gawain had cut off Bertilak’s head, to collect on that debt. Other folk, meaning to or not, have let the Quinotaur take over themselves to some degree, and always they come back to demand payment-in-kind for their murders.”
Mammy Pleasant seemed to relax, though she was still frowning. “You should go now, child. The New Year is close at hand. The Quinotaur doesn’t always take the life he’s owed—the Green Knight didn’t behead Gawain, just nicked his neck, because he showed courage. Show courage yourself.”
“Courage,” echoed Kootie, and the word reminded him of the Cowardly Lion of Oz. The memory of watching that innocent movie on television in Solville, in the contented days before the red truck had arrived, before Kootie was a murderer, brought tears to his eyes.
She tugged a bookmark out of the volume’s back pages, and handed it to Kootie. “You people should have come to me for this before. Your king is the suicide king now, you’ve got to keep him in your deck—he’s unconditionally surrendered, you see, and is waiting for his instructions, any orders at all. But the god is merciful sometimes—these commandments haven’t changed.” She handed Kootie the paper—he glanced at it, but it seemed to be poetry in Latin, which he couldn’t read. “You bring your people back here,” the old woman went on, “and take me away with you. The god still looks with favor on your king, and wants you all to succeed in restoring him to life: the god owes a good turn to one of your king’s company. But it will cost each of you much more, now, than it would have once. Child, it can’t any longer be your king who comes under your curly-haired roof—and your king will have to come somewhere else.”
Mammy Pleasant put down the book and then moved some jars away from a breadbox on the counter, scattering dust and tearing cobwebs. Kootie looked around and saw that the kitchen had deteriorated in the last few moments—the windows were blurred with greasy dirt now and blocked by vines clinging to the outside of the glass, and the paint was flaking off of the sagging shelves. The old woman tugged open the lid of the breadbox, breaking old rust deposits—and then she lifted out of it Diana’s yellow baby blanket. She reached across the warped table to hand it to him.
Kootie wordlessly took it and tucked it into the back pocket of his jeans. He knew it must have fallen out of his pocket in the bedroom upstairs, not an hour ago; and he couldn’t even bring himself to wonder how it had wound up here.
Mammy Pleasant blinked around at the iron sinks and the cutting boards and the wire-mesh pantry doors, as if for the last time. “This place won’t stay visibly wedged into your electric new world much longer,” she said. “I’ll show you out.”
She led him out of the kitchen—into a huge shadowy Victorian hall, clearly once elegant but now dark and dusty and empty of furniture. A spiral stairway receded away up toward a dim skylight several floors above, and when Kootie looked down at his feet he saw a dark stain on the parquet floor.
“We’re in my house on Octavia Street now,” Pleasant told him as she led him to a tall, ornate door at the end of the passage, “not as it was in my arrogant days, and anyway it won’t last much longer here either. You all come back here and get me. Look to the trees, you’ll see how.” She twisted the knob and pushed open the door. “Go left,” she said from behind him, “up the street. Don’t look back for a few blocks.”
Kootie blinked in the sudden gray daylight. Splintery old wooden steps led down to a yard choked with brown weeds, and beyond a row of eucalyptus trees he could see a street, with a cable car trundling up the middle of the pavement and ringing its bell.
He remembered this cable-car bell from the first time they had got Pleasant on the television in Solville, and he recalled Thomas Edison’s ghost telling him once that streetcar tracks were a good masking measure—“the tracks make a nice set of mirrors.” For a while, Kootie thought now as he stuffed the piece of paper into his pocket. Not forever.
Obediently he walked down the steps and across the overgrown yard to the sidewalk, where he turned left, kicking his way through the drifts of acorn-like seeds that had fallen from the eucalyptus trees.
He was sweating in the cold morning air, and he wasn’t tempted to look back as he walked away from the house; he didn’t even want to look around, for there were no traffic lights at all visible between the corniced buildings bracketing the narrow intersection ahead of him, and aside from the receding cable car all the vehicles on the street were horse-drawn carriages, and though he was aware of the clopping of the horses’ hooves and the voices of the quaintly dressed people that he passed, he was aware too of breezy silence in the background. The air smelled of grass and the sea and wood smoke and horse manure.
After he had walked two blocks, the noise of the modern world abruptly crashed back in upon him: car engines, and radio music, and the sheer roaring undertone of the modern city. His nostrils dilated at the aggressive odor of diesel fumes.
Oh, this is magic, he thought, for only the second time in that whole morning.
Between the traffic lights swung a metal street sign—he was at the intersection of Octavia and California, and Lombard Street and the Star Motel lay a dozen steep blocks ahead of him.
If my mom and dad are still alive, I’ll meet them there, he thought. If they’re not, if they’ve been killed because I ran away this morning—
Recoiling away from the thought, and from a suspense that could not possibly be resolved either way without grief, he began a loud chanting in his head to drown out all thoughts as he strode north on the Octavia Street sidewalk: The Green Ripper, the Green Giant, the Green Knight. I owe him a beheading. The Green Ripper, the Green Giant, the Green Knight …
CHAPTER 23
Gawain, stand ready to ride, as you bargained;
Seek in the wilderness faithfully for me,
As these knights have heard you to solemnly promise.
Find the Green Chapel, the same blow take bravely
You’ve given today—gladly will it be given
On New Year’s Day.
; —Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,
lines 448–453
ANGELICA GLANCED JERKILY BACK over her shoulder—the bumper of the turquoise BMW was scooping fast across the motel parking lot pavement toward her—no, it would miss her—it was accelerating straight at Kootie.
She tried to run faster toward the boy, and she managed to suck enough air into her lungs to yell to him, “Get out of the way!”
Kootie just stood and stared; but Mavranos was ahead of her now, his arms and knees pumping and his dark hair flying as he lashed himself across the lot. As the low BMW roared past her, painfully clipping her left elbow with the passenger-side mirror and nearly spinning her off her feet, she saw Mavranos bodyblock Kootie right off his feet into a driveway-side planter as the car screeched to a halt where Kootie had been standing. The two heads in the rear seat flopped forward and back as if yanked by one string.
Mavranos had rolled over Kootie and was struggling to his hands and knees on the sidewalk past the planter, and Angelica saw a clenched hand poke out of the BMW’s driver’s-side window. A stubby silver cylinder was squeezed in the fist, and it was pointed toward where Kootie lay thrashing weakly among the flowers.
The icy recognition of It’s a gun shrilled in Angelica’s head, but as she sprang forward again she also thought, imperatively, but he’s!—the king now!—he’s got protections against plain guns!
The fist was punched back out of sight by the recoil, and the pop was loud enough to set her ears ringing and deafen her to the roaring of her panting breath and the hard scuff of her sneaker soles on the pavement.
Long John Beach tried to hold on to the seat-back with his phantom left hand, but when Armentrout stood on the brake the psychic limb snapped like taffy and his head smacked the windshield; still, he was able to peer out the open driver’s-side window as the doctor frantically contorted his own arm to get the little gun extended outside the stopped, rocking car.
Even in the passenger seat on the far side of the console, Long John Beach was only a couple of yards from the boy who was lying on his back among the pink geraniums … and in the instant before the gun flared and cracked back against the doorframe, their eyes met, and Long John Beach and the boy recognized each other.
The rangy man in denim who had shoved the boy out of the car’s path was on his feet, and he lunged at the car and slammed a tanned fist against the windshield hard enough to flash silvery cracks across it. Then he was reaching in through the open window and had grabbed a handful of the doctor’s white hair—
But wailing Armentrout stamped on the gas pedal, and though his head was yanked violently back the car had slewed out into the lanes of Lombard Street; horns were honking but there were no audible collisions, and in a moment Armentrout had wrestled the wheel into line and was steering the car fast down the eastbound left lane.
“That was the boy,” Armentrout was whispering rapidly, “I know that was the boy! He was older, but the face was the same as the one in the picture.”
“That was Koot Hoomie Parganas,” said Long John Beach.
Peripherally he could see Armentrout glance at him, but Long John had seized on an old memory, and had no attention to spare for the doctor. The sight of the boy in the flowers had reminded him of some old event.
He nearly never remembered anything of his life before Halloween of 1992, when he had been found on the shore rocks beside the permanently moored Queen Mary in Long Beach. When the police and paramedics had found him he had had a ruptured spleen and a collapsed lung, with “pulmonary hemorrhages”—as well as a set of handcuffs dangling from his bloody right wrist. He had spent weeks in a hospital, at first with a chest tube inserted between his fifth and sixth ribs. Apparently he had been in the lagoon around the old ship when an underwater explosion had occurred. The doctors had speculated that he must have been exhaling in the instant of the blast, and curled up into a ball, and that that was why he hadn’t been killed; another man in the water had been killed … and must have lost at least his shoe and all the skin off his left foot, for … for somebody had previously handcuffed Long John Beach’s wrist to the man’s ankle!
But Long John Beach had been going by another name, then—another makeshift name based on a city he had found himself in.
Like a whisper the old name came to him: Sherman Oaks.
He had been hunting for Koot Hoomie Parganas in that long-ago season, and so had the man who had died in the underwater explosion … and so had a fat woman who had been some kind of movie producer. Each of them had wanted to get hold of the Parganas boy, and kill him, and inhale the powerful ghost that the boy contained—the ghost of Thomas Alva Edison.
Sherman Oaks had failed, and of course the man who’d died in the explosion had failed. Perhaps the fat lady had succeeded in inhaling Edison.
No—she couldn’t have, because that would have involved killing the boy, and Long John Beach had just seen the boy a minute ago, alive.
The boy’s face, when the haunted brown eyes had locked on to Long John Beach’s gaze just now, had been pale and gaunt, and openmouthed with surprise and apprehension—but the sick wrinkles around the eyes spoke of some imminent punishment feared but expected, even accepted. The expression was one of fearful guilt, Long John Beach thought.
The boy’s face had been younger when Beach had first seen it, but it had worn that same look of pathetically anticipating and deserving punishment.
The Parganas boy had apparently run away from home one night in October of ’92, directly after stealing the Edison ghost from whatever shielded hiding place his parents had kept the thing in. Long John Beach—Sherman Oaks, rather—had tracked the ghost’s intense field to the boy’s Beverly Hills home, and he had duct-taped the boy’s mother and father into chairs and tortured them to find out where the ghost had gone. But they hadn’t known where, and he had wound up killing them in a fury of hungry impatience, finally even gouging out their sightless eyes.
And then later that night the boy had come back home, repentant and sorry, visibly ready to take his punishment for having run away and stolen whatever glass container had held the ghost.
It had been Sherman Oaks, not his parents, who had awaited him; but the boy had eluded Oaks, and had run out of the house … right through the room in which sat his dead mother and father.
And then a few days later Sherman Oaks had succeeded in briefly capturing the boy, in a van in the back of a moving truck—and after terrifying him nearly to madness Oaks had tried to kill him, and had in fact managed to stab him in the side with a hunting knife.
Long John Beach had never, since Halloween of ’92, had much awareness of himself as a distinct person. The Edison ghost had lashed out at him somehow and broken something in his mind, so that he’d been left with nothing but the useless ability to channel stray ghosts, as inertly and promiscuously as a tree harbors birds. But now, in this swerving, speeding car, that tortured boy in the flowers back there was connected to his self. The boy’s evident unhappiness was not—Long John Beach flexed the hoardings of his mind to be sure, and it was true—was not separable from the admittedly dim and decayed entity that was Long John Beach’s own self.
He knew that as Sherman Oaks, and probably as other personalities before that one, he had killed people; and he remembered that in those old days he had been addicted to inhaling ghosts, consuming them rather than just channeling them, strengthening his own soul by eating those poor dissolving “smokes”—but suddenly it was Koot Hoomie Parganas, whom he had not even killed, that was an intolerable weight on his frail mind.
There was no new sound in the humming BMW, and Long John Beach saw nothing but the drab motels of western Lombard Street through the windshield, but he was suddenly aware of a change.
A personality that wasn’t a ghost, and might not even have been human, lifted him like a wave under a foundering ship; cautiously, still clinging to the prickly husk that was his identity, he nevertheless let the new person partway into his mind.
“You and your dog.” Armentrout was blinking rapidly at the traffic ahead, and breathing through his mouth. “It doesn’t matter now,” he whispered. “It’s all cashed out, I killed the boy back there.”
Long John Beach gathered back the shreds of his mind and pushed himself away from the big inhuman personality—and he got a quick impression of a young man in patchwork clothes, with a bundle over his shoulder, dancing at the edge of a cliff. He recognized the image—it was one of the pictures in the doctor’s set of oversized tarot cards, the one the doctor called The Fool.
The doctor was afraid of that one. And Long John Beach was not ready to surrender himself to The Fool. The one-armed old man’s identity was nothing more than a limp threadbare sack, angular at the bottom with the fragments of broken poisonous memories and short, rotted lengths of intelligence, but it was all he had.
In spite of his uneasiness with the memories of the Koot Hoomie Parganas boy, he was not ready to surrender himself to The Fool.
Kootie was sobbing and trying to get up when Angelica tumbled to her hands and knees in the muddy planter beside him; Pete slid to an abrading stop against the cement coping beside her.
Mavranos was kneeling on the other side of the boy, and holding him down with hands that were red with fresh blood. “Let your ma look at you, first,” Mavranos said irritably, and then he squinted up into Angelica’s face. “He was rolling over when the bullet hit him—I don’t think it was a direct hit.”