“This was…Harass-thee,” said Kootie.
“Haraszthy,” said Plumtree, subtly correcting the boy’s pronunciation. “Agoston Haraszthy, who took the title of ‘Count’ for the grandeur in it. In 1855 he was made assayer and melter and refiner of gold at the United States Mint at Mission Street south of Market; and the furnaces burned all day and all night, and after he quit, the roofs of the surrounding houses were all deeply stained with misted gold.” The reminiscent smile on Plumtree’s face somehow implied lines and creases that weren’t actually there. “That was a kingly thing, if you like! But, like most of the men who attain the throne, he refused to submit to real death in the winter. And so in the thirteenth year of his reign, 1861, the worst winter floods in the history of California devastated Haraszthy’s precious grapevines; and in 1863, the surviving vines withered in the worst drought in twenty-five years. I was happy to help in undermining this king’s power, and in 1868 I bought the Washington Street property that had housed the original greenhouse-shrine devoted to the Zinfandel in California, and I tore out the sacred old vines and converted the place to a boardinghouse.”
She stared curiously around at the kitchen, as if to fix the details of it in her memory. “After that sacrilege,” she went on, “Haraszthy was getting no spiritual power from the god at all, no psychic subsidy, and so he just abandoned his ordained throne and the American West altogether, and he fled south all the way to Nicaragua—to distill rum, from unsanctified sugarcanes!” She laughed gently and shook her head. “He was hiding from Dionysus, who was without a king now, and therefore not as close to human affairs. I decided to put them both out of my picture—and so on the night of June 24th of the next year, on St. John’s Eve, I celebrated the very first voodoo ceremony to be held in the American West, and in the woods out along the San Jose Road my people danced and drummed and drank rum and worshipped Damballa the Great Serpent, and I conveyed my prayers to him. And twelve days later, down in Nicaragua, the Dionysus who was no longer very human found his faithless king—Haraszthy was eaten by an alligator, which was Sebek-Re, a very crude, early Egyptian personification of the fertility-and-death god.”
Cochran looked away from the ophidian eyes and the somehow distinctly Egyptian-seeming smile, and saw that his companions too were avoiding looking into Plumtree’s face. He thought of the broken skeleton out in the greenhouse in the rain, and he wished someone would close the back door.
“I did not know, at first,” Mammy Pleasant’s voice went on carefully, “that the kinghood had rebounded like a snapped rope when Haraszthy fled this continent in 1868. Dionysus,” she said, with a look that Cochran could feel on the skin of his face, “places great stock in names, in clues and similarities in names; and a weapons manufacturer back East who was known as ‘the rifle king,’ and who, among other fortuitous resemblances, had the middle name ‘Fisher,’ became the unintended and unknowing and unsanctified focus of the kinghood. A…measurable westward deflection!…of my magics, made me aware of the obstruction of him, and in 1880 I held another voodoo ceremony—this time in the basement of my grand house on Octavia Street. Again my people drummed and danced to the Great Serpent, and in the December of that year this poor misplaced king-apparent died. He had a middle-aged son, and in the following March the son died too, of consumption, leaving behind a childless forty-one-year-old widow. They had had one child, a daughter, who had perished of the marasmus back in ’66 at the age of a month-and-a-half.”
“Is she the…other old-woman ghost?” asked Cochran.
Plumtree’s head nodded. “And she’s a rebel, like me, now. She wasn’t always—right after her husband died, she consulted a spiritualist, who told her that she was obligated to the god for the attentions he had so generously paid to her family, and that in return she must use her inherited fortune to build an infinite chapeclass="underline" a gateway for straying ghosts to leave this world through, and go on to the next. And she did, only a couple of years after her precious husband had died. She set about building an enormous house designed to attract ghosts, and then not let them get out; construction of it never stopped for nigh forty years, there was hammering and sawing day and night, and new doors and halls every day—doors and stairways that led nowhere, windows in the floors, faucets way up where no one could reach—and about the only way the ghosts could get out was to be unmade and sent off to the god through one of the fireplaces. She had forty-seven fireplaces there, before she died.”
“I thought hammering repelled ghosts,” said Cochran.
“No,” snapped Angelica, “banging, hammering sounds, the racket disorients ’em. It jolts them out of the groove, resets their controls back to zero—cashes out bets they’d have wanted to let ride.” She looked at Pete. “Of course we know what this crazy house is.”
“And who the old lady was,” Pete Sullivan agreed. “It’s the Winchester House, a few miles down the 280 from here.”
“Winchester,” said Pleasant’s voice out of Plumtree’s mouth. “Yes. And like me she was chosen to be a caretaker and communicant of the god’s pagadebiti wine—the consecrated Zinfandel. But one night in 1899, even while I was being evicted from my own overthrown house and taken into custody by the idiot god-fragment known as Bacus, Winchester found a black handprint on the wall of her chapel, in the wine cellar, and she knew that she was being called upon to give over to the god her own husband’s ghost…and she couldn’t bring herself to obey that, to forget him. And, even while knowing that she’d be punished, she rebelled: she walled up the wine cellar. When the god came to take charge of my wandering ghost three days after Easter in 1906, he struck her too, en passant, with the earthquake of his arrival—the top floors of her house fell onto her bedroom, and she was trapped in there for hours. But she didn’t repent her rebellion—after her servants freed her, she boarded up that whole wing of the house, and spent six months living on water, aboard a houseboat called The Ark, in the south bay here by the Dumbarton Bridge.”
“And the scrap lumber,” said Pete, “from the collapsed upper floors, was used to build a maternity hospital in Long Beach in the 1920s; probably because of the ghost-confusion influences in it.” He looked at Cochran. “That hospital eventual! became our apartment building—Solville.”
“When Winchester returned to her house,” Pleasant went on, “she was masking herself against the god as well as the ghosts now. And when she eventually died she left instructions that her ghost was to be caught, and hidden. And so it was, and now the god wants you to bring her, and me, to him. You’ll need to find a guide.”
Mavranos was rubbing his forehead.
“Omar Salvoy says that someone will have to die, probably more than one person, for our king to come back to life,” said Cochran. “He says there will have to be bloodshed.”
“Of course,” said Pleasant.
Angelica straightened up beside Pleasant’s chair. “And he says that Kootie, the boy here, has to be possessed by Dionysus.”
“Everybody does, eventually,” said Pleasant calmly.
“Well, that’s simply out, I’m afraid,” said Angelica, shaking her head. “I don’t know what’s going to happen, but that’s the thing that’s not going to happen. We’ve got nearly two clear days to run away.”