Earthquake Weather (24 page)

“It’s not—” Cochran swayed in the smoky air. “I think I’m gonna puke again.”

“Oh hell,” Mavranos said, glancing for reassurance at the unconscious Plumtree. “Down the hall to the right. If I see you turn left, toward the kitchen, I’ll shoot you, okay?”

“Okay.”

Cochran stepped carefully over the telephone cords to the doorway, and glanced at the ivy-leaf mark on the back of his right hand to make sure he didn’t turn the wrong way by mistake.

He followed his hand sliding along the wallpaper to the hallway corner. As he had done at the airport, he was forcing himself not to think about the consequences of this course of action; all his concentration was on the immediate tasks: step quietly down the side hall, unchain the street door, and then hurry away into the night, away from the dead body in the kitchen and
everybody
here, never looking back.

But when he had shambled around the hallway corner he froze.

Instead of the remembered narrow hall through which he and Plumtree had entered the building, with its threadbare carpeting and low, flocked ceiling—

—he was in a broad, dark entry hall, at the foot of a spiral staircase that curled away upward for at least two floors; rain was drumming on a skylight far overhead, and drops were free-falling all the long way down the stairwell to splash on the parquet floor at his feet. In the taut, twanging moment of astonished vertigo he rocked his head forward to look at the floor, and saw in the wood a stain that he was viscerally certain was old blood.

Then he had no choice but to look behind him.

A gilt-framed mirror hung on the paneled wall, and in the mirror, behind the reflection of his own wide-eyed face, stood the man he had met in the streets of Paris five days ago, who had called himself Mondard.

Cochran whirled to face the man, but there was no one there; he was still alone in the empty baroque hall; and so he had to look back into the mirror.

The man in the reflection had the same curly dark beard he’d had when Cochran had first spoken to him in the courtyard of the Hotel L’Abbaye, around the corner from the Church of St. Sulpice, but now it reminded Cochran of the bearded dead king who lay somewhere behind him; and these liquid brown eyes had shone with this same perilous joy even when they had stared at Cochran from a living bull’s head on the man’s shoulders, later that same morning in the narrow medieval Rue de la Harpe; and when Cochran had fled, stumbling over ancient cobblestones past the Lebanese and Persian restaurants with whole lambs turning on spits in the windows, the thing that had pursued him and finally tripped him up on the Quai Saint Michel pavement by the river had been a man-shaped bundle of straw, with dried ivy for hair and split and leaking grapes for eyes.

In the hotel courtyard the man had introduced himself as Monsieur Mondard, having to lean close to be heard over the glad baying of the dog in the lobby, and he had frightened Cochran by speaking of the dead Nina and offering him an insane and unthinkable “surcease from sorrow”—and as Cochran stared again now into the reflection of those horizontally pupiled eyes, he knew from their unchanged hot ardor that Mondard was still holding out the same offer.

“Donnes moi le revenant de la femme morte,”
Mondard had said,
“buvez mon vin de pardon, et débarrassez-vous d’elle.” Give the dead woman’s ghost over to me, drink my wine of forgiveness, and be free of her.

In that old Paris courtyard, under the marbled winter sky, Cochran had believed that the man could do what he offered: that he could actually relieve him of the grief of Nina’s death by taking away Cochran’s memories of her, his useless love for her.

And he believed it again now. The figure in the mirror was holding a bottle of red wine, and in the reflection the letters on the label were something like I BITE DOG AP but Cochran couldn’t read it because of the sudden swell of tears in his eyes. Why
not
take a drink of the sacramental wine, and by doing it give over to this creature his intolerable memories of Nina—give to this thing that called itself Mondard his now cripplingly vestigial love for his killed wife?

When he looked up into Mondard’s face, the goat-pupilled eyes were looking past him, over Cochran’s shoulder; a moment later they were warmly returning his gaze, and he knew that Mondard was promising to provide the same solace, the same generously ennobling gift, when Cochran’s grief would be for the death of Plumtree.

And Cochran wondered exactly
how
Nina had come to run out into the lanes of the 280 Freeway at dawn, ten days ago; had she been chased? … Lured?

Nina was dead, and Cochran was suddenly determined not to betray his love for her by disowning it; and Janis was alive, and he was not going to sanction her death, abandon her to this thing, even implicitly.

The bottle of wine, “Biting Dog” or whatever it was called, gleamed in the long-nailed hand in the mirror’s reflection, and on the back of the hand was a mark that might have corresponded to the mark on Cochran’s hand—but Cochran shook his head sharply, and turned away and blundered back the way he had come.

“You know that you are recalled to life?”

“They tell me so.”

“I hope you care to live?”

“I can’t say.”

“Shall I show her to you? Will you come and see her?”

—Charles Dickens,

A Tale of Two Cities

P
LUMTREE WAS STILL HUDDLED
under the sink when Cochran stepped carefully back into the stark yellow light of the laundry room, but she was blinking and looking around now and Angelica was crouched beside her, talking to her.

Pete was hunched over the telephone, tapping the hang-up button; the paper speaker cone on the shelf was silent in the instants when the phone was hung up, but always came back again with the same noise, which was distant mumbling and laughter and vitreous clinking, as if the phone at the other end had been left unattended in a crowded bar somewhere. Perched up on the washing machine, Kootie was frowning in the mint-and-tequila smoke from the kitchen, and holding his bleeding side.

As Cochran stepped over the telephone and electric cords to get back to his place beside the sink, he found that he was straining to hear, among the slurred babble crackling out of the speaker, the rattle-and-bang of someone playing bar dice.

“Oh, Scant!” said Plumtree when he sat down beside her. “I was afraid you ran out on me.”

Cochran managed to smile at her. “Decided not to,” he said shortly.

Angelica glanced at him, and then stared at him. He wondered what his expression looked like. “Good,” she said. “Did you get …
lost,
at all, looking for the bathroom?”

Cochran realized that he’d been holding his breath, and he let it out. “Yes,” he said. “Never did—find it.” Now that he had resumed breathing, he was panting, as if he had run a long distance back here.

“Big Victorian halls?” Angelica asked him in a neutral tone. “Rich-looking?”

Cochran caught his breath with a hiccup, both relieved and frightened to learn that she knew about the hall he had found himself in, that he had not been hallucinating. “Yes,” he admitted. “Grand once—decrepit now.”

Angelica was nodding. “For the last week and a half,” she said slowly, “we’ve been getting print-through, here, overlay, overlaps, of two other houses, old Victorians. One’s dark and mildewy, and the other’s clean and got electric lights. This building was put up in 1923, partly constructed of lumber salvaged from the Winchester House in San Jose. The top couple of floors of that house collapsed in the big earthquake in 1906—”

“When
he
came for the black lady’s ghost, out of the sea,” said Janis in a helpful tone, “and knocked down all the buildings. Valorie told me that part.”

“Oh, do be quiet, girl,” whispered Angelica, closing her eyes for a moment. “The Winchester House is still standing, of course,” she went on to Cochran, “big haunted-house tourist attraction on the 280 south of San Fran … but lately when it’s raining in San Jose, the roof leaks here.”

“It was—leaking there, too,” panted Cochran. “Through a skylight.” He didn’t feel able to tell her about the man he’d seen in the mirror.

“Talk to Kootie about it, he’s seen—”

A clunking sounded from the speaker, then breathing; clearly someone at the unimaginable other end had picked up the telephone.

“
Whooo
wawnts it?” came a man’s drawling voice from the speaker. “Your daddy’s home, baby! That bad old doctor wanna play
strip poker,
I’ll see he gets his ashes hauled for real.” A high, razory whine had started up in the background.

Cochran’s face went cold, for he was certain that this was the voice that had come out of Plumtree’s mouth at Strubie the Clown’s house.

Plumtree had sat up and stiffened. “That
is
my daddy!” she said hoarsely, her voice seeming to echo faintly out of the speaker. “Daddy, can you hear me? I’m so
sorry
I let you die, I tried to catch you—”

“Course I can hear—”

The whine grew abruptly louder and shriller, as if Dopplered by the source of the carrier-wave signal accelerating toward them at nearly the speed of light; a blue glow was shining now in the dark office beyond the laundry-room doorway, and the drumming of water into the pots out there was a barrage; then the speaker abruptly went silent and the blue glow was extinguished. Cochran couldn’t hear the roof dripping in the other room at all now.

In the silence, Pete pushed back his chair and shuffled carefully to the doorway and looked into the office.

“The carborundum bulb
exploded
,” he said, turning back into the brightly lit little room. He gave Plumtree an empty, haggard stare. “Your dad’s ghost is one muscular son of a bitch.”

“He’s not a ghost,” said Angelica in a shaky tone as she lithely straightened her legs and stood up. “And it wasn’t Spider Joe’s dead wife that whited out the TV. Let’s go in the other room and get the
Vete de Aquí
oil splashed around.”

Cochran knew enough Spanish to understand that the phrase meant, roughly,
Go Away;
and in spite of his recent resolve to stay with these strange people, he forlornly wished he could rub some of that oil onto the soles of his shoes.

“I’ve got to make a couple of ordinary phone calls before we settle down again,” said Angelica when everybody had filed back into the office and turned the lights back on and Johanna and Kootie had begun shaking yellow oil from tiny glass bottles onto the doorframes and the windowsills. Angelica hurried into the kitchen, and Cochran heard a pan clank in a sink, and then running water and the sudden hiss of steam. Pete had unplugged the electrical cords and was twisting the clamps off the terminals of the car battery that was sitting on the desk.

“I’ll bet he’s an angel,” Plumtree was saying, “if he’s not a ghost. I’ll bet he’s my guardian angel.”

Cochran drained the last third of his can of beer in several deep swallows. Has she not even
considered,
he wondered, the likelihood that her father’s personality is the famous Flibbertigibbet?—who battered the would-be rapist to death in 1989 on October the unforgettable seventeenth? An angel, maybe, Cochran thought, but one with a harpoon rather than a harp.

The thought of a harpoon reminded him of the sawn-off spear in the neck of the dead king in the kitchen; he darted a nervous glance in that direction, and then peered up at Kootie, who had climbed back up onto the desk and was sitting cross-legged among the wires and radio parts.

Kootie was looking at him. “Call me Fishmeal,” the boy said, softly and not happily.

Cochran blinked at him. “Uh … sorry, you said what?”

“Never mind,” sighed Kootie.

Angelica came striding back into the office from the kitchen, her dark hair swinging around her pale, narrow face. “Your Bugsy Siegel eye worked,” she told Mavranos. “The two L.A.-area
santeros
I just called were aware of some powerful ghost agitations a few minutes ago, but Alvarez in Venice registered it as northeast of him, and Mendoza in Alhambra clocked it as just about exactly west.”

“The Hollywood Cemetery …?” ventured Pete.

“Unmistakably,” said Angelica. “So we’re no more vulnerable than we were before. At least.”

She threw herself down on the couch and stared hard at Plumtree, who was sitting on the floor beside Cochran. Impulsively Cochran put his arm around Plumtree’s shoulder; and she leaned back against him, which led him to believe that she was currently Janis.

“And I’m pretty sure I’ve got you diagnosed, girl,” Angelica said to her, “though I’d love it if you could have brought your admission notes with you from the madhouse.” She looked around at the other people in the long, smoky room—just Cochran and Kootie and Mavranos and Diana—and she said, “I’m afraid I’m going to be violating doctor-patient confidentiality in what I say here. But everybody here is concerned in this—and anyway, you never paid me forty-nine cents.”

Angelica shook her head and smiled then, though she was frowning. “You know, when I was a practicing psychiatrist, I learned real quick that the regular doctors, the surgeons and all, were cowards when it came to giving their patients bad news. They’d call one of us shrinks over to their wing of the hospital to ‘consult’ on a case, and it always just meant … ‘Would you explain to my patient that his cancer is fatal? Would you tell his family?’ So a lot of times I had to be the one to tell some stranger that his leg had to be amputated, or tell some girl her father had died. I always felt bad to be the one breaking the news.” She coughed out two syllables of uncomfortable laughter. “I’m rambling, aren’t I? What I mean is, I don’t want to say what I’ve got to say now—though in a way I’ve got the opposite sort of news.” Plumtree must have opened her mouth to speak, for Angelica held up her hand. “Let me talk, Miss Plumtree. You are, genuinely, a multiple personality,” Angelica said, “but that’s not all that’s … peculiar about you. How do I start? For one thing, I’m just about sure that you were present when your father … well, let’s call it
died
.”