Earthquake Weather (69 page)

“The left one’s the
Troilus and Cressida
quote,” said Angelica softly, “though ‘tables’ isn’t supposed to be plural. And the right one is from
Richard II,
when the king is alone in prison, and conjuring up company for himself out of his own head.” She shook her head. “Why the hell would Winchester have put
them
up here? The
Troilus and Cressida
one is from a speech where Ulysses is saying what a promiscuous ghost-slut Cressida is!”

Plumtree’s cold left hand clasped Cochran’s, and was shaking.

“It’d get a raised eyebrow from any Shakespeare-savvy guest,” agreed Pete.

“Is that a
clue,
is she in
here
?” snapped Cochran, looking from the windows to the ghost in the white suit.

“Probably not in a room with a fireplace,” said Pete. “Fireplaces would be the … portals for ghosts to get broken up in and sent to the god, like the ashtrays you see with palindromes lettered around the rims.”

“She was talking to
me,
” said Plumtree flatly. “Those windows were put there as a message for … for the person who looks like is turning out to be me, all these years later. This little
head.
Shit, she must have been, voluntarily or involuntarily, a multiple-personality herself.”

“So what’s the message?” asked Angelica.

“She—she didn’t want to go smoking away up one of the chimneys,” said Plumtree.

“Sail on,” said Scott Crane’s ghost, with a chopping wave toward the rest of the house.

They found a broader hall and tiptoed along it, instinctively crowding against one paneled wall after another, and darting quickly across the wide, gleaming patches of hardwood floor between. The electric lights were far apart, but the open rectangular spaces were all grayly lit by the dozens of interior windows and arches and skylights. In fact the layout of the rooms was so open and expansive that the sprawling scope of the house was evident at every turn, from every obtuse perspective; at no point could one fail to get the visceral impression that the house was infinite in every dimension, like a house in an Escher print—that one could walk forever down these broad, carpeted halls, up and down these dark-railed stairs from floor to ever-unfamiliar floor, without once re-crossing one’s path. And Cochran remembered Mammy Pleasant saying that the place had been built to attract, and trap, and dispatch to the after-world, wandering ghosts reluctant to go on to the god.

“It looks open,” whispered Angelica at one point, “but she’s made the geometry in here as complicated as the mazes in the Mandelbrot set; there are patches of empty air in here that might as well be steel bulkheads. You’d never know because you could never quite manage to
get
to ’em.”

Cochran found a stairway, but it ran uselessly right up against the ceiling, with not even a trap-door to justify it; then he led his party up another set of stairs that switchbacked seven times but only took them up one floor, for each step was only two inches tall; and he led them through galleries with railed-off squares to keep one from stepping into windows that were set in the floor, and through a broad hall or series of open-walled rooms in which four ornate fireplaces stood nearly side by side; and they shuffled past mercifully locked windowed doors that opened onto sheer drops into kitchens and corridors below.

“More a house for birds,” said Cody at one point, “or monkeys, than for people.”

“Aerial manlike entities,” agreed Angelica with a glance at the dead king.

“Smoking away up the chimneys,” said the bearded figure, drawing a frown from Plumtree.

At last they found themselves in a room with an open railed balcony on the fourth floor, unable to climb higher. The room was unfinished, with bare lath along one wall; an exposed brick chimney, with no fireplace, rose from the floor to the ceiling in the left corner.

Pete stepped toward the balcony, crouching to peer out over the green lawns and red rooftop peaks without being seen from below.

“It’s infinite,” he said, hopelessly. “I can’t even see an end to the house, from here. You’d think I could see the freeway, or a gas-station sign, or something.”

“This place is still a supernatural maze,” said Angelica. “It’s got to be drawing ghosts like a candle draws moths, still. I swear, down in those endless galleries and halls I could feel all their half-wit attentions on us. Old lady Winchester ‘wide unclasped the table of her thoughts’—her patterns of thoughts, her accommodating masks—to every footloose ghost in the West, she was no virgin, psychically; and ‘these same thoughts people this little world.’ Except it doesn’t look so little, from inside.” She shook her head violently and then startled Cochran by spitting on the floor. “They’re all around us right now, like spiderwebs. These fireplaces should be running full-blast, twenty-four hours a day.”

“She probably assumed they’d be used, in the winter at least,” said Cody. “After her death.”

Cochran looked away from Angelica, toward the corner of the room.

“This chimney is like the first stairway we tried,” he said, “look. There’s no hole in the ceiling for it.”

Pete Sullivan walked over and reached up with both hands to hook his fingertips over the uneven row of bricks at the top edge of the chimney, which did end several inches short of the solid ceiling planks. “My hands are twitchy,” Pete said, “like they want to …
participate
with it. Did Houdini ever do an escape from a chimney?”

The white-clad ghost strode over and, taller than Pete, was able to slide its whole hand into the drafty space between the bricks and the ceiling planks.

“Clean, uncarboned brick,” the ghost said solemnly; “and gold. I can smell gold on the draft.”

“Gold?” echoed Cochran, disappointed that they had apparently found some old treasure instead of the old woman’s ghost.

“Well now, gold would damp out her wavelengths,” said Pete, lowering his hands and brushing brick dust off on his jeans. “Ghosts are an electromagnetic agitation, so she’d have to be locked up in something shielding, to be hidden. People used to make coffins out of lead, to keep the ghost in, contained and undetectable. Gold’s not quite as dense as lead, but it’d certainly do.”

“And,” said Cochran, nodding, “if chimneys generally destroy ghosts, if that’s common knowledge, then you certainly wouldn’t ever
look
for a ghost to be
hiding
in one.”

“Not unless you knew it was a dummy chimney,” agreed Angelica. “And with a hundred
real
fireplaces and chimneys around the place, who’d notice that
one
was a fake?”

The ghost’s white sleeve disappeared behind the top row of bricks … and Cochran noticed that the figure was leaning braced against the chimney with one knee, for the other leg appeared now to be just a hanging, empty trouser leg, its cuff flapping over an empty white shoe.

“The chimney is like the hole Alice fell down,” said the ghost softly. “Tiny shelves all the way down, with papers and locks of hair and rings and stones and dry leaves.” After another moment, the ghost said, “Ah.”

Then the trouser leg filled out and the cuff lowered to cover the shoe, which shifted as weight visibly settled into it again.

A clunking, scraping noise at the top of the chimney made Cochran look up—and the ghost was trying to rock something out of the chimney, apparently struggling to angle it out through the narrow gap between the bricks and the ceiling planks.

The hard object was not coming out. “Break away a brick or two,” suggested Cochran, looking nervously toward the stairs. He could hear voices now, and the knocking of footsteps. “I think a tour’s coming.”

Pete reached his own hand in next to the ghost’s, and then shook his head. “It’s not that it won’t fit out,” he said through clenched teeth, “it’s just
stopping,
in mid-air, like the thin air turns rubbery, like we’re trying to push two big magnets together at their positive ends.”

Cochran could definitely hear voices mounting from below now. “What
is
it?” he asked anxiously. “If it’s just an old magnet or something, drop it and let’s go!”

“It’s rectangular,” gasped Pete, “heavy.”

Plumtree stood by the chimney and jumped up, peering into the gap. “You’ve got a gold box,” she said when her sneaker soles had hit the floor again.

“Dead woman’s gold,” said Angelica, “she’s probably got the geometry of the chimney-boundary magicked to not let it pass.”

“Let’s see if the chimney can tell the difference between that and a dead
man’s
gold,” said Plumtree. She dug the gold Dunhill lighter out of her pocket and tossed it up in a glittering arc toward the gap.

The lighter knocked against the wooden ceiling and disappeared behind the bricks, down inside the chimney, and then Pete jackknifed backward and sat down hard on the wooden floor, holding in his lap a metal box that gleamed gold under a veil of cobwebs.

Scott Crane’s ghost had leaped back, or
flickered
back like an image in a jolted mirror; and when Cochran heard a scuffling flutter behind him he spun around to see a white-painted canvas banner settling onto the floor. The word
GARLIC
was painted on it in cursive blue letters, and the king’s ghost was gone.

Cochran looked back at Angelica and Plumtree, who were staring wide-eyed at the empty canvas. Cochran shrugged at Plumtree. “You tossed his lighter,” he said.

“Good,” she said with a visible shiver.

“Is there somebody up there?” came a voice from the stairs at the back of the room.

Plumtree grabbed the dusty, cobwebby box from Pete and took a long step toward a doorway that led away from the stairs. She jerked her head for the others to follow.

Cochran helped Pete to his feet and followed Angelica and Plumtree down this unexplored hallway. Let the tour-guide explain the garlic banner, he thought:
Damn ghosts!
—
leaving their goofy shit around everywhere.

They hurried on through a hastily glimpsed kaleidoscope of architecture, with skylights below them and stairways curling around them and interior balconies and windows receding away at every height in the patches of electric lamp-glow and lancing columns of gray daylight.

At the top of one white-painted stairway Cochran’s right hand was suddenly tugged diagonally out and down. He crouched and made a
ch-ch!
sound, and then started hopping down the stairs before his hand could pull him off balance and send him tumbling down them. He could hear the others following behind him, but he didn’t dare lift his eyes from the crowding-up stair-edges to look back.

The stairway continued down past the next floor, but was beveled dark wood now, and the walls and doors and ceilings were framed in carved mahogany. Cochran’s hand was pulled out horizontally away from the landing and down a hall, and he almost thought he could feel a warm, callused hand clasping his palm and knuckles, and a deeply jarring pulse like seismic temblors.

Helplessly Cochran led his companions through a wide doorway, and his first impression was that they had come to another unfinished section—but a closer look at the walls showed him that the wide patches of exposed lath were edged with broken plaster and torn wall fabric.

“This must be the earthquake-damaged section,” Cochran whispered to Plumtree, who was holding the gold box in both hands.

She stepped carefully over the uneven floor to the windows, which were panes of clear glass inset at the centers of stained-glass borders.

“We’re in the, what was it, the Daisy bedroom,” Plumtree said breathlessly, peering out at the grounds, “or near it. You can see the sign we reconnoitered at, down there to the left. This here would be where she was sleeping on that night in 1906, when Dionysus knocked down the tower onto her.”

Cochran flexed his hand, then waved it experimentally in the still air; and it seemed to be free of any supernatural tether now.

“It must be here,” he said, “whatever we’re supposed to find.”

Two big, framed black-and-white photographs were hung on one raggedly half-plastered wall. Still hesitantly holding his hand out to the side, Cochran walked over to the pictures, and saw that they were views of the house as it had stood in the days before the top three stories had fallen; and the additional crenellations and pillars and balconies, and the peak-roofed tower above it all, ashen and fortress-like and stern in the old gray photographs, made the structure’s present-day height and red-and-beige exterior seem modest by comparison.

“The House of Babel,” said Plumtree, who had walked up beside him with her hands in the pockets of the leather jacket. “I guess that’s how the god looked at it.”

“There was a fireplace over here,” called Pete softly from the other side of the room, “at one time.”

He was standing beside a chest-high square gap in the wall, through which the exposed floor joists of another room were visible on the far side. Pete crouched and looked up at the underside of the gap. “You can see the chimney going on upward.”

A piece of white-painted plywood had been neatly fitted in to cover the spot where the hearth would have been, and Cochran crossed to it and then knelt down on the floor beside Pete’s knees to take hold of the edge of the board. Pete stepped back.

“I’m certain this must be bolted down,” Cochran said softly.

“Think of young King Arthur,” said Angelica behind him, “with the sword in the stone. You’re the—the guy with the Dionysus mark on his hand.”

Cochran yanked upward on the board, and nearly fell over backward as it sprang up in his hands. He shuffled his feet to regain his balance, and leaned against the board and pushed it forward onto the floor joists of the next room; then for several seconds he just peered down into the rectangular brick-lined black hole he had exposed. He dug a penny out of his pocket and held it over the hole for a moment, then dropped it; and he waited, but no sound came back up.

At last he stood up and quickly stepped away from the hole. Instead of stepping over to look for themselves, Angelica and Pete and Plumtree stared at him.

“Well,” Cochran said, “there’s—it’s very fucking dark down there, excuse me. But there’s
rungs,
starting a yard or so down.”