“And today’s already dark? How is it that you’ve dawdled so? We can’t wait around through the passage of another year, before we get consumed! We’re far past stale already, my poor shred of a daughter and I. Has the god chosen a king?”
“Yes,” said Pete and Cochran and Angelica simultaneously.
“Go to where he waits, then, and stop wasting time. Go quickly—this is some species of automobile, isn’t it? Has one of you taken a drink of the wine?”
“No, ma’am,” said Pete in a harried tone, turning around to face the dashboard and twist the key in the ignition.
“Ah, one of you should have!—back in my house, if that’s where you found me, if it’s still standing. You do have the wine, don’t you? The god will take some host for himself, for the ceremony, but first one of you must thus…formally invite him. You’ve got to awaken him, and bring him.” She peered in bewilderment out the side window at the shopping-center parking lot. “Find a grove, wooded groves are still implicitly sacred to him—or a cemetery, a quiet cemetery with trees.” Softly, perhaps to herself, she added, “I can remain rational through this final event, if it happens soon.” Then she looked around quizzically at the three people in the old truck with her. “I don’t know you people, but I presume you know each other. It should be obvious who is to take the drink.”
“I guess “ Pete said through clenched teeth as he gunned the engine and then clanked it into gear, “we could draw straws—”
“It’s me,” said Cochran, “it’s me.” His heart was pounding, but like Mrs. Winchester he somehow didn’t seem able to find the prospect of cooperating with the god totally repellent. “Dionysus led me by the hand into the wine cellar, so I guess I should be the one to lead him by the hand to the sutro ruins. And I do have to finish giving somebody over to him; I know which cemetery. It’s right on the way, just off the”—the monstrous, he thought, the merciless—“the 280.” I might as well have taken the drink of forgetfulness when Mondard first offered it to me, he thought defeatedly, in the courtyard of the Hotel de l’Abbaye in Paris.
He remembered what Nina’s ghost had told him, in the kitchen of their house two weeks ago, when he had said he wanted to have the mark removed from his hand: I would never have—I would not have your child, if its father were not marked by him. I was married to him, through you.
“It’s me,” he repeated. But he remembered too the vision he’d had in the Solville hallway, of the Mondard in the mirror, and he remembered his apprehension then that the fatally loving god would next ask him to give over his memories of a deceased Plumtree. “But he will take only one woman from me.”
“He’ll welcome into his kingdom whomever you love,” flatly said the old woman out of Plumtree’s lips, “unless he so loves you that he welcomes you first.”
As Pete steered the truck away from the tall theater sign. Cochran noticed the titles of the movies that were showing in the three theaters: Legends of the Fall, Murder in the First, and Little Women.
COCHRAN’S SOUTH Daly City house was just on the other side of the 280 from Colma, but the little town was in the area he always thought of as “north of south and south of north”—when he was travelling to or from Pace Vineyards or San Francisco he used the John Daly Boulevard exit north of the town, and when he had business in Redwood City or San Jose he used the Serramonte Boulevard exit south of it; and so, though he knew the rest of the peninsula cities well, the peculiar little town that he could see across the highway lanes from his back yard was almost totally unfamiliar to him.
The last time he had visited the place had been two years ago, when he and Nina had driven straight across the highway to pick out adjoining plots at the Woodlawn Cemetery. And now Nina and their unborn baby had been cremated, and he had acceded to her parents’ wishes and taken the urn to France, where it would stand forever on the mantle in their house in Queyrac in the Bas Medoc; and the grass grew undisturbed on the plot in Colma.
Colma was the town to which all the graves of San Francisco had been transplanted; until 1938, nearly a third of the Richmond district of San Francisco, from Golden Gate Park north to Geary and from Park Presidio east to Masonic Avenue, was still occupied by cemeteries, as the whole of the district had been before 1900. Colma, six miles to the south, had taken the evicted dead, and on the day Cochran and Nina had gone to buy the plots, Nina had remarked that the town’s dead residents outnumbered the living ones seven hundred to one.
Cochran had Pete steer the truck off the 280 at Serramonte Boulevard, but had him turn east, away from his house, to El Camino Real; and as they drove up the weaving, rain-hazy road, past roadside “monument” shops and misty rolling green hills studded with white grave markers, Cochran tried not to remember the sunny, gaily mock-morbid drive he and Nina had taken along this same road.
Following Cochran’s directions, Pete turned left up the sloping driveway of Woodlawn and parked at the curb, in front of the grim stone tower that stood between the two stone arches opening onto the grounds. The four dishevelled travellers pushed open the truck doors and climbed out, and walked through the south arch and then trudged uphill along the gravel lane that led to the graves.
Cochran was carrying the bottle of pagadebiti, and in his pocket he now had Mavranos’s bulky key ring with its attached Swiss Army knife. The tall palm trees and twisted cypresses that stood at measured intervals across the green hills gave him no clues as to what spot he and Nina had chosen on that long-ago sunny day, and the gray roads curved around with no evident pattern.
He had kept glancing at Plumtree during the drive up from San Jose, but the woman who had looked apprehensively back at him each time had clearly been Mrs. Winchester, blinking and shivering in the unfamiliar body in the big leather jacket; and so he was glad when Plumtree took his hand now and he looked at the face under the wet blond bangs and recognized Cody.
“I see by our outfits that it’s the same day-o,” she said quietly, glancing back at Pete and Angelica; “but what are we doing in a cemetery?”
“I—” he began; but she had gasped and squeezed his hand.
She was staring at the grassy area to their left, and he followed her gaze.
They were next to what he recalled now was the children’s section of the cemetery, and on a pebble-studded slab of concrete on the grass stood eight painted plaster statues, one of them two feet tall and the others half that. They were the Disney-images of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves; and behind them, on a truncated section of decoratively carved and pierced marble, stood a verdigrised brass plaque on which he could make out the raised letters,
SUFFER LITTLE CHILDREN
TO COME UNTO ME
“‘Suffer, little children,” Plumtree read aloud, in a panicky voice. “Sid, who are we here to bury?”
“My dead wife,” he told her hastily, knowing that she was thinking of Janis. “Or not bury, so much as disown. Give to the god.” He waved the bottle of antique wine, idiotically wondering if he was stirring up sentiment in it. “I’ve got to drink some of the pagadebiti, to summon Dionysus.”
Her hand had relaxed only a little in his. “Oh, Sid, don’t—your wife—I’ll do it, I’ll drink it.”
“You—” he said, then paused. You would probably lose Valorie, he thought; and we might need her “You don’t have to,” he finished. “I can do it—she’s dead, and her ghost is gone, and—actually, my wife was, was more married to the god than to me, even when she was alive.” Only after he’d begun speaking had he decided to tell her that, and he was remotely surprised now at how difficult it had been to say.