by Tim Powers
The drumbeat had continued as the wind strengthened, and was now thumping a little faster. At least two other drums, at other points across the dark basin, had joined the first one in the same rhythm. White patches showed in the eastern sky, where the moon was breaking through the wind-riven clouds.
But it can’t be the moon, thought Cochran. The moon has been waning for a week, it was full on the first of the month—it should be totally dark tonight.
The ground sloped right down into the water here, any original wall long gone, and Kootie halted with his boots a yard from the water. He dug a fluttering paper out of his raincoat pocket and passed it carefully to Cochran. It was a car-registration slip.
“Arky wrote the palindrome on that,” Kootie told him. “When I give you a nod, read the last line aloud.”
“Right,” Cochran said, in a rusty voice. When I read each of the two previous lines aloud, he thought, Crane’s ghost showed up; first as our taxi driver after I read the Latin on the ashtray at the Mount Sabu bar, and then as a naked flickering image right here, after I read the next line from Valorie’s matchbook.
“When are you going to drink the wine?” asked Angelica with badly concealed urgency. Her wet black hair was blowing in tangles across her lean face.
“When we get back up to the cave,” Kootie told her firmly.
The drumbeat was pounding exactly in time with Cochran’s pulse now, and he intuitively knew that his companions were experiencing the same synchronization.
Quickly, before Angelica or Pete could react, Kootie raised the wine bottle and tipped it up to his lips; and when he lowered it, Mavranos quickly reached out and took it out of his hands.
“Aaah!” Angelica’s wail was snatched away over the sea by the wind, and Cochran knew that she had intended to stop the boy, and that Kootie had known it too.
The boy reeled back across the mud, away from the water, but he didn’t fall; well, thought Cochran, he wasn’t standing next to an open grave.
Kootie reached jerkily into an inside pocket of the raincoat and yanked out the dirty little yellow blanket that he had been given by the Diana woman, Scott Crane’s widow. For a moment Cochran thought he was going to throw it away. Then the boy pulled it around his shoulders, and he was suddenly closer, or taller, and the blanket seemed to be a spotted yellow fur. Cochran was having trouble focusing on him in the light of the gusting fire.
Cochran shoved the wet car registration into his pocket. His right hand was still flexing, and he was trying to focus his eyes clearly on anything—the low stone walls that stretched away in the darkness, Plumtree’s face, his own hands—and he found that he couldn’t make out the exact shape of the black hole in the back of his twitching right hand, no matter how he blinked and narrowed his eyes—
The drumbeats were coming more rapidly—the mud-smeared people had got to their feet and were milling around uneasily, swinging their rifles and pistols—and now fast-thudding footsteps from behind were matching the drum’s strokes.
Cochran turned, and flinched even as his right hand sprang once again toward the holster at the back of his belt.
The fire-lit figure rushing straight at them across the mud looked at first like some hallucinatory three-headed Kali with four waving arms, and Cochran’s abdomen momentarily turned to ice water; then he saw that it was a portly white-haired man, with a pair of life-size gesticulating manikins attached to his shoulders; and as Cochran fumbled the gun out of the holster he recognized the muddied, grimacing face—it was Dr. Armentrout, and one of the doctor’s hands clutched a tiny silver pistol.
But another man was running up behind Armentrout, and now caught the doctor; and he must have punched him between the shoulder blades, for Armentrout’s head rocked back sharply and he plunged forward face-down into the mud. The little pistol flew out of his hand and bounced once off the mud and splashed into the dark water.
Before the doctor’s encumbered form had even stopped sliding, his pursuer had leaped onto his shoulders, and Cochran saw that it was Long John Beach. The one-armed old man was gripping the back of Armentrout’s neck—the two artificial white heads were splayed out to the sides in the mud, their aluminum neck-poles bent, and between them the doctor’s head was jerked violently to the side each time Long John Beach’s shoulder stump flexed over him.
Cochran was pointing his revolver at the pair, into the middle of the spider-cluster of mismatched arms and heads, but the muzzle wavered. He was aware of Plumtree standing beside him, breathing fast.
Without halting his invisible beating of the doctor, Long John Beach raised his round white-whiskered face, and his little eyes seemed to be squinting fearfully up at Kootie. “A three-headed dog—on your altar,” he said, panting as his shoulder spasmed metronomically and blood began to blot through the doctor’s snapping white hair. “Your way,” he gasped, “is—clear.” Then he leaned down over the doctor’s limp, jerking form, and a woman’s voice cawed, “Can you breathe, Richie dear? Say something if you can’t breathe.” The voice must have come from Long John Beach’s throat, but Cochran thought the left-side manikin head had been jerking in time to the words.
A dozen drums were pounding in rapid unison now, and though it was no longer synchronized with even his presently very fast heartbeat, Cochran thought the drums were matching some other rhythm inside him—an ancient, savage brain-frequency that made thought impossible. His open mouth was fluttered by the wind, and his nose was full of the wine and sap smells.
A warm, strong hand gripped Cochran’s shoulder—and he found himself helplessly pointing his revolver at the two jolting figures on the mud in front of him, and then he pulled the trigger—but he must have miscounted his previous shots, for the gun didn’t fire.
He was dizzily ready to crouch beside Armentrout and begin pounding on all three of the twitching heads with the pistol grip; but the hand on his shoulder pulled him back and gave him a shockingly hard shove that spun him around twice before he was able to flailingly catch his balance. In the fire-lit wheeling blur he had glimpsed a wooden mask on broad, fur-caped shoulders, but the urgency was now somewhere else; Cochran was still off-balance, somehow.
The clay-smeared people had all stood up at once from the mud around him, and were walking, then striding, toward the Point Lobos cliff. And in a moment they had opened their mouths in a shrill, ululating chorus, and they were running. Cochran let himself start to fall in the same direction.
And then Cochran and Plumtree were running too, right with them, and Cochran didn’t even know if he was joining in the predatory yelling as his feet thudded in the mud and flames whirled around him and Plumtree. No particular sound in the shaking din told him that the struck bullet in the gun he was carrying had belatedly fired into the ground, just the jolt in his hand and the flare at his thigh; he didn’t even look down, just flipped the gun around in his hand so that it would be a better club.
He did hear shots from up the slope ahead—a rapid-fire stutter that conveyed desperation and panic—and over the close tossing clay dreadlocks Cochran could see muzzle-flashes from the mouth of the cave. None of the sprinting youths appeared to be shooting back—like Cochran they were waving their firearms overhead like clubs, or just tossing them away.
Cochran and Plumtree leaped over wall sections and fallen naked bodies, and then he had lost the gun and they were scrambling up the mud slope toward the cave, imitating the naked earth-people around them in hunching forward to pull themselves up with their hands as well as push themselves along with their feet. All the torches and even the guns had been dropped and left behind, and it seemed to be a pack of four-legged beasts rushing up the path to the cave.
The gunshots were just sporadic punctuation to shrill screams now, and the cave was packed with straining, clawing forms streaked only with reflected moonlight. Cochran was breathing fast through his clenched teeth as he fought to get through the press of bodies to the prey; until a heavy, hairy ball rolled over the shoulders in front of him
and fell into his empty hands.
He stared at it. For one transfigured moment it was the head of a lion, shining gold—then it was a human head in the silver moonlight, bearded and gap-toothed and wide-eyed, leaking slick hot blood onto his hands. The nose and ears were torn and bent and tangled in the bloody hair, and an actual thought appeared in Cochran’s fevered mind: This was twisted off of its body.
He stumbled back and shook the thing free of his hands, and it fell into a tangle of vines at his feet.
Looking up, he saw Plumtree backing away, dragging her right shoulder across the clustered fluttering leaves that covered the cliff face, while her left shoulder was jostled by the muddy, sexless figures. She was biting her knuckles and staring toward where Cochran had dropped the severed head; and her face was bone white in the moonlight, but when she looked up at him she was recognizably still Cody.
Cochran dodged his way over to where she stood, and he started to hold out his hand to her; then he saw that it was gleaming black with blood.
But she clasped it anyway, and he leaned beside her against the leaf-covered unevenness of the cliff.
The clay-smeared youths were dancing away from the cave now, whirling and leaping out of the tunnel and waving over their dreadlocked heads pieces of human bodies as they whirled away back down the slope to the wild beat of the drumming.
And the bounding dancers didn’t pause, but the crowd of them split widely around a figure that was striding up the slope now.
Angelica and Pete, supporting the limping Mavranos, were following it.
It wore no mask, and of course it was Kootie—but the boy was taller, and the skirted raincoat and the blanket around his shoulders flapped like robes in the driving wind, and his stern face was dark and Asian in the moonlight. Cochran remembered that the boy’s last name was something from India.
The clay-smeared youths were dancing and running around the fire in the roofless structure now; but other figures, clothed and wet and limping, were toiling across the mud-flats toward the cliff; one was as short as a child, and poling itself forward on crutches.
The impossibly full moon was a white disk hanging over the waving trees at the top of Sutro Park above the highway, and by its light Cochran could see that the whole Point Lobos cliff behind himself and Plumtree was covered with vines; and bunches of grapes swung heavily in the wine-reeking wind.
Cochran and Plumtree stepped back and lowered their eyes as the tall figure that was at least partly Koot Hoomie Parganas stepped up to the broad ledge; tracks of motorcycle tires, and swirling gouges left by motorcycle footpegs and handlebars, stood out in starkly shadowed relief in the mud, but Kootie’s boots sank deeper, and the holes of his bootprints quickly filled with dark liquid.
The god just walked past you, Cochran told himself; Dionysus, walking the Point Lobos cliffs on this broken night.
But the thought was too big to grasp, and slid off his mind, and he could only look away, down the slope.
CHAPTER 33
Soon wild commotions shook him and made flush
All the immortal fairness of his limbs;
Most like the struggle at the gate of death;
Or liker still to one who should take leave
Of pale immortal death, and with a pang
As hot as death’s is chill, with fierce convulse
Die into life …
—John Keats,
Hyperion
MAVRANOS’S HEAD WAS LOWERED, but he was thrusting himself up the slope strongly with his good left leg; the right leg of his jeans was dark with blood. The faces of Pete and Angelica on either side of him were strained and expressionless with the work of supporting his weight as they climbed the slope. Angelica had apparently lost her carbine, but she was gripping the bottle of pagadebiti in her free hand.
When the path leveled out, Mavranos lifted his head, and his stony gaze swept down across the vine-covered cliff to Cochran. “Are there any of the,” Mavranos said through clenched teeth, “mud-kids still in the tunnel?”
Kootie had already disappeared into the tunnel, and Cochran plodded carefully to the cave mouth, stepping out wide of it and peering. The tunnel was nearly as dark as the mark on his hand, but beyond the tall, slowly receding silhouette that was Kootie he could see moonlit rock surfaces beyond the arch of the far opening, and no other people.
He shambled back to where Pete and Angelica and Mavranos stood swaying before he answered, for he didn’t want to seem to be calling down the tunnel.
“Nobody at all, but Kootie,” he said. “They all ran back to the fires, after they—when they—”
Angelica nodded. “We saw what they were carrying.”
“Then,” said Mavranos in an anguished voice, “who?”
“Sid,” said Angelica, “help Pete carry Arky.”
Cochran stepped up beside Mavranos, and Angelica got out from under Mavranos’s left arm and draped its weight around Cochran’s shoulders. And then Angelica went sprinting to the cave mouth and disappeared inside, still carrying the bottle. Drops of the wine splashed out onto the mud, and fresh leafy vines curled violently up out of the ground where they had struck, like convulsing snakes.
“I’ll watch her,” said Plumtree to Pete, and she hurried into the cave after Angelica. Cochran gritted his teeth, remembering that Cody hated caves.
“Come on,” said Pete, starting forward strongly; Cochran braced his right arm around Mavranos’s ribs and followed, and the two of them were in effect carrying Mavranos into the gravel-floored cave, in spite of occasional help from Mavranos’s one good leg.
Cochran could feel the short hairs standing up at the base of his neck at the sharp metallic smell that filled the tunnel, and when he realized that it was the smell of fresh blood he made sure to breathe only through his mouth.
Their footsteps crunched and sloshed along the puddled gravel floor, and over the hooting whistle of the wind Cochran could hear sea water crashing and guttering on rocks in the holes below the remembered iron railing that was invisible in this darkness.
“Crowd your wall,” he gasped to Pete, for the railing had been on the left.
Then he could see the iron railing below Mavranos’s dangling left hand, silhouetted against the luminous foam of the waves outside, beyond the rock wall. A seething bath, he recalled Valorie saying here, which yet may prove against strange maladies a sovereign cure.
As his shoes deeply furrowed the unseen wet gravel, he twice felt the brief entanglement of strips of cloth, and once he kicked a boot that rolled away too loosely to still have a foot in it—his feet didn’t bump anything that felt like flesh and bone, but he was still breathing through his mouth.
When Kootie had stepped out into the diffuse moonlight on the ledge over the water, and the hurrying silhouettes of Angelica and Plumtree had brightened with detail as they shuffled outside too, Cochran could hear footsteps rattling the gravel some distance behind him; but he couldn’t free his head to look around. Pete must have heard the steps as well, for he joined Cochran in striding along at a quicker pace.
At last the three of them stumbled out into the relative brightness of the moonlit cloudy sky. Kootie was standing at the seaward lip of the ledge, staring out at the dark Pacific Ocean. He was clearly taller than Plumtree now, who was braced against the seaward rock face beside Angelica, and he even seemed through some trick of moonlight and perspective to be bigger than the great stone profile, across the splashing gap to the right, which was itself staring out to sea in the same direction.
Cochran had to look away; an aura played about Kootie’s fur-draped shoulders, and Cochran’s eyes hurt when he tried to focus on the boy. He was aware of heat radiating from that side of the ledge, and he wondered helplessly if apotheosis might cause Kootie to spontaneously combust.
Mavranos pushed himself away from Cochran and Pete and stood swaying by himself, blinking around at the stone head and the other huge boulders and tumbled stones piled against this side of the Point Lobos
cliffs.
Free of the heavy arm on his shoulders, Cochran quickly turned to look back down the tunnel. At least two silhouettes were trudging this way up the wet stone windpipe; and he was sure that the one struggling along on crutches could be no one but Thutmose the Utmos’, the dwarf junkie he had met at the Seafood Bohemia bar, apparently still desperate for a sip of the forgiving wine.
Cochran hurried across to stand beside Plumtree. “We got,” he gasped, “company.”
The figure in the aura at the seaward side of the ledge turned ponderously, rippling the gusty air, and through the optical distortions the inhumanly calm wooden mask nodded at Cochran. There was respectful greeting in the gesture, possibly even a blessedly remote affection, but there was also command.
Pete was braced against the wall beside Angelica, and now appeared to be holding her back from rushing at the god.
Cochran dug his cold-numbed fingers into his pocket and pulled out the soggy car-registration form.
The light was far too dim for him to read any words off the water-darkened paper; and in sudden abysmal panic he realized that he couldn’t remember one word of the Latin.
He lifted his right hand toward his face to rub uselessly at his eyes—and then noticed that the black mark on his knuckles seemed to radiate darkness, so that the letters on the paper shone clearly with the same intense, reflected blackness.
He took a deep breath of the cold wine-and-blood-scented sea air.
“Sole,” he read, calling loudly to be heard over the wind whistling in the tunnel at his back, “medere pede: ede, perede melos.” And now he remembered the translation the woman had given them: O Sun, remedy the louse: give forth from yourself, and give forth from yourself again, your devoured limb.
The masked figure that was no longer recognizable as Kootie was shaking, and Cochran could feel heat on his eyes. He stepped back, raising his hand to throw a cool shadow across his face, and saw Long John Beach shamble out onto the ledge.
Cochran tensed and stepped around in front of the man to grab Plumtree’s arm; but the old man was cowering, and his single arm was shaking as he pointed behind and above Cochran.