“I’m—I’m putting the clock on you, here, no more time—and I won’t give you any psychic locators on me—”
“You’re shaking,” said the living king. “Throw the spear away. Don’t tell me anything, I’ll let you take back your bet.”
“You think I’m afraid of you? Now? It was in a poker game on Lake Mead, almost five years ago. You were disguised as a woman, and the other players called you ‘the Flying Nun.’“
The king was frowning. “And you failed then, didn’t you? You failed to assume the hand, assume the Flamingo, take the throne. You’ll fail this time, too, I swear to you, even if you ruin everyone in trying. You flinched away just now, when I approached you. Let it pass.” He raised one hand toward the road. “Go away now, in peace”
“Lest you dash your foot against a stone. Don’t patronize me, you, you kings.” Plumtree’s hands gripped the spear shaft more tightly. “Doyou call?”
Through clenched teeth, the king said, “No, I do not.”
“Then step closer,” hissed the father in Plumtree. And when the king had walked ur> beside them, her father said, “See you in the funny papers,” and snatched the spear s away from the child and drove it into the king’s throat.
PLUMTREE LET go of the iron railing as if it might collapse, and clung to Cochran’s arm so tightly that he nearly dropped the bottle. Cochran thought it must have been Janis, or even Tiffany, but the sharp profile was clearly Cody, and she was staring down at the fires on the plain.
“What?” he snapped, his knees shaking at the thought of dropping the pagadehiti now.
“Nothing,” she said, shaking her head. “Just remembering why I’m here. Let’s get it over with.”
Angelica seemed to agree. “Let’s get down there before Kootie does,” she said.
They found the gate in the chain-link fence and started down the path that led between high dark hedges and ivy-covered mounds, and after the first few steps Cochran felt as if they had left the highway and all of San Francisco, even the twentieth century, far behind. The night wind in the bending cypresses, the monotonous distant drumming weaving in and out of the boom of the surf, the bonfires and waving torches, and the smells of ocean and wet leaves on the cold wind, all made him think of some pre-Christian Mediterranean island, with mad, half-human gods demanding worship and sacrifice.
He was looking to the left, out across the broad dark slope of the basin, when the whole quarter-mile from the Cliff House to remote Point Lobos was lit in glaring white, halting raindrops as shotgun patterns of dark stippling against the marble undersides of the clouds; and when the instant explosion of thunder threw the raindrops against his face and extinguished the light, he carried on his retinas a vision of the slope as a ruined amphitheater, the collapsed walls and sagging foundations undisguised beneath the froth of wild vegetation.
By the yellow glitter of flame reflected in the lake-like puddles, he could see that the path levelled and broadened out ahead of them, and he could make out the low stone building in which he and Plumtree had first met up with Mavranos and Kootie again after fleeing Solvilie. The uneven windows and the top of the roofless wall were silhouetted by fires on the sand floor within, and he could see apparently naked figures dancing on the wall rim.
Half a dozen torch flames were bobbing toward Cochran and his party now across the mud-flats, and he reached around with his right hand to touch the grip of his revolver as he squinted at the approaching forms.
He was able to see that they were people by the bronze glare of the torches many of them were waving, but their bodies and staring-eyed faces were plastered with wet pale mud, so that they seemed to be figures of animated earth, naked and sexless. There were more of them than there were torches, and many carried fist-sized stones. Two or three even had pistols.
Angelica had raised her seat-cover bundle, and Cochran drew his revolver and held it out away from him, pointed at the ground for now. His ears were ringing and his breath was short with the thought of raising the gun, of firing it at these people.
He opened his mouth to speak, but the mud-figures had halted a dozen feet away; and now the torches dipped as they all got down on their bare knees in the mud.
A hot wave of relief rippled up from Cochran’s abdomen—but when he glanced at his right hand he saw that it wasn’t the gun, or even the bottle of wine in his left hand, that had cowed them.
The night seemed suddenly less dark—variations of grays—in contrast to the ivy-leaf mark on the back of his right hand; it shone with such an intense, absolute blackness that his first, spinal impulse was to somehow instantly cut it off.
Far out in the rainy basin, out among the ruined buildings and crumbled pool copings and the ledge where the tunnel mouth gaped against the firelight, the drumming became louder, and faster.
“We knew you’d come,” called one of the figures hoarsely.
“From Phrygia,” wailed one of them in a woman’s voice, “from Lydia, from India!”
To his horror, Cochran’s right hand twitched and clenched and raised; he was able to push it up still further in the instant before it fired the gun, so that the bullet flew away over the top crags of Point Lobos, but the sound and flash of the shot were lost in another simultaneous blast of white light and ground-jolting thunder, and as the echoes rolled away to shake the trees on the slopes he hastily fumbled the gun back into its holster.
The mud-people might not even have been aware of the gunshot; or they might have expected their god to greet his worshippers by trying to murder one of them out of sheer love; they bowed their heads, and began doing a fast, counterpoint hand-clapping that jangled Cochran’s thoughts the way drumming was supposed to confuse ghosts.
“And here is your king!” shouted one of the sexless clay people, pointing behind Cochran and his companions.
Cochran turned, half expecting to see Scott Crane restored already—-but what he saw through the driving rain was a tall figure and a shorter one reeling down the path from the highway; they were hardly a dozen yards away, and after a moment he recognized Mavranos and Kootie.
The recognition was soon mutuaclass="underline" Kootie’s eyes widened and he hurried forward toward Pete and Angelica, and Mavranos trudged up and called, with forced and haggard panache, “What seeems to be the problem?”
“What’s going on?” yelled Kootie over the noise of the storm. “We drove the car right through the greenhouse in low gear, right over Scott Crane’s skeleton!”
“This is it,” Plumtree told him shrilly. “We picked up Scott Crane’s ghost hitchhiking, and he led us to the devil’s wine!” The boy had stumbled closer across the splashing mud now, and she was able to speak in an almost conversational tone when she added, “And we picked up the other old lady ghost, too.” She tapped the side of her head. “It looks like we’re doing it right this time!”
Kootie and Mavranos were bundled up in raincoats, and Mavranos was wearing his Greek fisherman’s cap while Kootie had on an old felt fedora of Cochran’s.
“But Chinese New Year isn’t until tomorrow!” protested Mavranos, staring at the blackly blazing mark on Cochran’s right hand. “Not until midnight, at the soonest! They cant just change it this way! I haven’t had time to think—”
“Midnight?” said Pete. “Is that standard time or daylight savings?” He waved at the rain-swept dark sky. “This day is over.”
Kootie was blinking at the bottle of wine in Cochran’s left hand. “Yeah,” he said bleakly, “the sun’s’ down. I guess there’s debts you don’t carry into the new year.”