Janis’s bright eyes in Valorie’s dead face turned on Cochran as the face became transparent. “And so farewell,” said the figure that was now just one more ghost, “and fair be all thy hopes, and prosperous be thy life!”
The ghost spun in a casual pirouette, and gathered into its insubstantiaI self all the other Plumtree ghosts; and Cody was left standing solidly on the -sand beside Cochran. He seized her hand, both to be sure she was a living human being and to prevent her from following the ghost, which was now gliding down the marble stairs and across the cobblestone dock toward the boat; and for a moment now the faint music seemed to be the strains of ‘ill Take You Home Again, Kathleen.”
“But I’ll be alone!” wailed Cody, in a voice that shook with absolute loss.
“No, you won’t,” said Cochran strongly. He gripped her shoulders and said again looking into her face, “No—you won’t.”
“No,” she agreed brokenly, “I won’t.” She fell forward against him, and he hugged her tightly.
Omar Salvoy’s words were echoing in his head: A death is still owed in this math. But that was it, Cochran thought shrilly; poor Janis just died, along with Omar Salvoy at last, and Tiffany and the rest of them. Wasn’t that death enough for the god?
And the rest of what Salvoy had said …
Then Plumtree stiffened in his arms, and he felt her ribs clench as she screamed. A moment later Pete and Angelica yelled in alarm, and the dog was barking.
Cochran wheeled around, crouching and dizzied.
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 mannikin 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 swivelled 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 nonspatial 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 unfea-tured 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 focussed 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.