Earthquake Weather (81 page)

If he had not seen Dr. Armentrout running at them last night like a spidery Vedic demon, he would not have recognized the battered monster that had clambered out of the bay to his right and was now rushing at Scott Crane; and even so his chest emptied for a moment in cold horror.

The two figures that were attached to Armentrout’s shoulders were twisted and draped with seaweed, and their grimacing fleshy heads were canted outward like the leaves on a fleur-de-lis; but Armentrout’s right hand held the muddy derringer that had bounced into the lagoon last night, and the bloodshot eyes in Armentrout’s swollen purple face were fixed on Scott Crane.

Cochran leaned into the monster’s path, stretching out his right leg and hand. The manikin heads were yelling suddenly—
“Feel good about yourself!”
one was cawing, and the other was shrilling,
“Pull the plug, let me up!”

The little gun was coming up in the pudgy hand as Armentrout took another running step—Scott Crane had lifted his head and turned on the pillar, but he would not be able to dive out of the way—Pete and Kootie had started forward, and the black dog’s forelegs were raised in a leap—and Angelica had drawn the .45 automatic clear of her belt, but Armentrout would have time to fire the derringer before she would be able to swing the heavy gun into line.

In Cochran’s memory the silvery edges of the pruning shears plunged toward the old king’s face, and Cochran instinctively blocked the thrust with his right hand.

The flat, hollow
pop
of the .410 shell deafened him, and he lost his footing as his right hand was punched away upward. The marble-and-brick-peppered sand plunged up at him and he twisted his left shoulder around to take the jarring impact as he slammed against the ground. With a ringing crystalline clarity Cochran saw drops of his own blood spattering down onto the wet sand around the truck’s front tires.

Then he rolled his head down to look at his right hand, and his vision narrowed and lost all depth—for above his wrist was just a glistening red wreckage of torn skin and splintered white bone, and blood was jetting out into the air.

The rest of what Salvoy had said flickered through his stunned consciousness—
Blood and shattered bone
—

Later Cochran learned that Fred the dog had hit Armentrout and knocked him over backward, so that Armentrout had dropped a broken dry pomegranate that he had been carrying in his left hand—it had rolled uphill to Scott Crane’s foot, onto which it had spilled clinging red seeds like blood drops—and that after trying to shoot the emptied gun at the dog that was tearing at his four arms Armentrout and his two attached figures had gone stumbling back down over the wet tumbled rocks into the sea to get away.

But all Cochran saw when he swiveled his shock-stiffened face away from his ruined hand, toward the yelling that was so loud that he was able to hear it even through the ringing in his ears, was Armentrout standing thigh-deep in the shallow sea and doing something strenuous with two people: one was a heavy-set old woman in a sopping housedress, and the other was a slim young man with protuberant eyes and a blackened ragged wound in his forehead.

The dog kept running back and forth between Cochran and the water, and everyone behind him was shouting too. Somehow it didn’t occur to the stunned Cochran that the three figures out in the water were
fighting
—Armentrout’s companions appeared instead to be forcibly giving him something like a full-immersion baptism, dunking him under the water and then hauling him up to shout at him, and then doing it again, and the white-haired doctor did seem to be responding with denials and oaths and genuflections. It was violent, certainly, but to Cochran it seemed that all three were trying to get an important job done.

Angelica was kneeling beside him on the wet sand, urgently saying things he couldn’t hear and tightly tying a leather belt around his right wrist. But finally a moment came in which it dawned on Cochran that the woman and the pop-eyed young man had held Armentrout under the waves one last time and would not ever be letting him up at all.

“They’ve killed him!” Cochran yelled, struggling to get up.

Behind and above him he heard Angelica say, “Is that a bad thing, Sid?”

Out in the water the old woman and the young man with the holed face seemed to merge, and then become a shape
superimposed on
the seascape instead of
in
it: the stylized black silhouette of a fat man with stubby limbs and a warty round head. And as it shrank, or receded in some non-spatial sense so that it didn’t disappear into the water, it flickeringly seemed to be a very fat naked white man with tattoos all over him, and a middle-aged Mexican man, and a pretty Asian woman, and others …

Then it had faded to nothing like a retinal glare-spot, and the sea was an unfeatured expanse of rippled silver all the way across to the Marina.

“No,” Cochran said. A death
was
still owed in the math, he thought. A physical heart had to literally stop. “No,” he said again.

Cochran was lying on his back. He twisted his head to look up at Angelica, and then he focused past her. Two transparent old women stood above and behind her, and their milk-in-water eyes were fixed on the puddle of blood on the dirt below Cochran’s tourniquetted wrist. Their hands were reaching toward the blood, and their fingers were stretching like old cobwebs disturbed by a solid person’s passage.

Up the slope by the stairs, Scott Crane had at some point got to his feet. His beard had dried enough to be lustrous and full, so that seen from below this way he looked like a schoolbook picture of Solomon or Charlemagne; and in a voice so deep and resonant that it cut through the shrilling in Cochran’s impacted eardrums, Crane said, “Hot blood is what you’re leaving behind forever now, ladies. Get aboard the boat now; the tide is about to ebb, and you have to go.”

The ghosts of Mrs. Winchester and Mammy Pleasant swirled away to the steps and down toward the insubstantial boat, and then the first rays of the rising sun touched the iron lamp-post at the end of the peninsula. Cochran thought he could hear distant voices singing.

He was sagging with fatigue, and he wondered that he was able to hold his head up; and then he realized that Cody Plumtree was sitting on the sand behind him and cradling his head in her lap. Kootie was kneeling white-faced behind Plumtree, with his arms around the black dog’s neck. Blood was trickling down Kootie’s own neck from a long, shallow cut below his ear, where a stray shot-pellet had evidently nicked him.

Cochran rolled his eyes to look back out at the water of the bay, but it was still empty—the blobby black figure had certainly gone.

The Green Knight gave the boy just a token cut, Cochran thought; and he settled his head more firmly against Cody’s warm, solid legs. The retribution-aspect of Dionysus was merciful, this morning.

Pete was behind the wheel of the truck, and now started up the rackety old engine; and just because of the new noise Cochran became aware that at some point violin-pure voices had begun singing out of the pipes that stood up from the masonry, a high solemn wordless chorus that now coaxed Cochran’s sluggish pulse to meet the vibrant cadences implicit in the new dawn.

“Get up, Sid,” said Plumtree, and Angelica added, “On this morning you can go to a hospital, with no fear of ghosts.”

Cochran got dizzily to his feet, leaning heavily on the two women as he shambled up the slope toward the shaking truck.

White seagulls, luminous in the new daylight, were circling high overhead against the blue of the clean sky, whistling and piping in the open, unechoing air as if calling out the news of the soon-returning spring.

All, all is yours,

The love I owed my father, who is dead,

The love I might have given to my mother,

And my poor sister, cruelly doomed to die.

All yours now, only yours.

—Aeschylus,

The Libation Bearers

C
UPPED AT THE VERY
top of the steep green hill, above the lake that encircled the island and above the fenced-in reservoir that fed the waterfall, was a little lake surrounded by cherry laurel trees and standing green and orange stones. The lake water was so still that every tree branch against the blue sky was reflected motionless in the water.

Cody Plumtree had run up the steps of half-buried railway ties ahead of the others, and now she carefully lifted the hem of her white linen skirt and stepped up onto the altar-like rock at the east end of the little lake. This rock looked as if it were once a source for a waterfall into this lake, and it also looked as if it had been the site of fires in remote times. She remembered Sid saying that these moss-green stones were druid stones, magically counter-weighted by the monastery stones around the lake below. Sid might not remember that now, but he would know it if she told him about it and then made sure to tell him about it again a few times.

It was a topic that was connected to his memories of his dead wife, and all those memories really had disappeared. He knew these days that he had been married, and he could even recognize photographs of the Nina woman, but he was like an amnesia victim—except that an amnesia victim would probably want to learn about the lost past. Along with the memories, Sid had lost any interest in what they had been of.

Cody didn’t mind, and she would probably not remind him of the history of the stones.

The two of them had been living in Sid’s South Daly City house for five months now, but somehow—like, she thought helplessly, the Solville piece of string that couldn’t ever quite be cut—it had consistently been a celibate relationship. That would change after this ceremony today, she was certain.

Cody had not lost any memories at all, and she still dreamed of the other girls that had occupied her head with her. On some nights she even dreamed of the day the sun fell on her, the day—twenty-six years ago now to the day, perhaps to the hour—when her father was thrown off the building in Soma; it was a harrowing dream, but she was glad to experience it, especially since she saw it in
color
—it indicated that she had absorbed, taken as her own, those earliest memories that had been in the sole custody of dead Valorie.

And last night she had dreamed of driving the bus, speeding up and jumping across the wide empty gap in the freeway to land safe on the other side, and the man standing beside her had been Sid Cochran.

Two miles away to the southeast she could see the tall X-shaped TV tower on Mount Sutro; and when she shifted around, she could see the two distant piers of the Golden Gate Bridge, appearing in foreshortening to be standing next to each other on the horizon.

The other people were scuffing up the steps now—and she saw Scott Crane come striding lightly across the grass first, tall and brown and smiling through his lustrous coppery beard; he was fifty-two years old now, but hardly looked thirty-five, and on this midsummer’s day his wound didn’t make him limp at all. He wasn’t dressed as any kind of priest, though that was the function he would be serving here today; he wore a navy blue suit with a white shirt, and his long hair was tied back in a ponytail secured, she had noticed on the walk over the bridge, with a gold Merovingian bee.

The others from the Leucadia compound were right behind him, led by lithe Nardie Dinh and Diana with her three-inch thatch of radiant blond hair. Arky’s widow, Wendy, was leading their two teenage daughters; Plumtree had been afraid to meet them at first, and then had been surprised by their unaffected friendliness and their eagerness to hear stories about Arky’s last month. Diana’s boys Scat and Oliver appeared next, herding the children up into the clearing. Behind them she could hear a barking dog, which meant that the Solville contingent was coming right up.

With the Valorie-memories which were now her own, Cody called across the hilltop glade to Crane, “Standing in happy sunlight on the hill in the lake!”

Crane laughed quietly, and the sound seemed to shake the green leaves and send ripples across the little lake.

Through the green branches overhead, the sky was a cloudless, deep blue. It was a good day for a wedding.

Sid Cochran was glad now that he hadn’t acceded to the advice of the other sales representatives at Pace and worn some kind of tuxedo. His suit was formal enough, and in these wooded sunlit groves the affected pretension of a tuxedo would have been ludicrous. In the same spirit, he had left his prosthetic hand in the car’s glove compartment, and was just wearing a white sock over the stump of his right wrist.

Behind him Fred was bounding along the cinder path on a leash, for Angelica hadn’t wanted him jumping up on people’s nice clothes, and Kootie was kept as busy as a fishing boat trying to stay over a powerful marlin, with the dog wanting to sniff at the mossy stones along the path and go loping and barking across the grass. Kootie had left his sport coat in the Solville van, and Cochran could see that there was no bandage anymore under the boy’s white shirt. Angelica had told him that Kootie’s two-year-old wound had finally healed up within a week of their return to Long Beach.

“And the cement
Eleggua
figure was back in its cabinet, when we got back home,” said Angelica now, striding along between Cochran and Pete Sullivan.

“With a bunch of snapshots in the cabinet with him,” added Pete. “Pictures of the Eleggua statue in front of Stonehenge, and at the Great Pyramid, and at Notre Dame cathedral …”

Cochran glanced sharply at him, but Pete’s face was resolutely deadpan and Cochran couldn’t quite decide if he was kidding or not.

Cody had kept in touch with Angelica during these five months, and the two of them had cautiously agreed that there appeared to have been, so far, no legal or psychic or underworld repercussions from their arduous January. Cochran and Plumtree had heard nothing from Rosecrans Medical—possibly because, according to the newspapers, Dr. Armentrout had run off with a number of patient files before allegedly murdering intern Philip Muir at the borrowed house of an absent neurologist, and then disappearing for parts unknown—and Cody had anonymously, and grumblingly, sent money to the people whose purse and car she had stolen, as well as twenty dollars to the Frost Giant ice-cream shop and a hundred to Strubie the Clown; and Angelica was still safely doing underground-occult consulting work among the Long Beach poor, though she no longer corralled ghosts for clients, and nobody had come looking for Spider Joe, who would ideally rest in peace forever beneath the Solville back parking lot.