AT SUNSET the entirely discorporate spirit of Scott Crane stood on a cliff over a sea, and it was no longer possible for him to overlook his sin of omission. The call of the one neglected tarot archetype could no longer be drowned out in the busy distractions of life. It had been beckoning during three winters—whispering from six feet under in the agitation of the lice that blighted the vineyards, wheezing in the fevered lungs of Crane’s young children in the winter months, and roaring like a bull in the cloven earth under Northridge a year ago tomorrow. And on New Year’s Day of this year it had come to his house.
It had worn many faces—that of Crane’s first wife, and that of his adopted father, and a hundred others; but today it wore the face of the fat man he had shot to death in the desert outside Las Vegas in 1990. A bargain had been made, and his part had not been fully paid.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“Afraid?”
“It’s plain enough, I should think, why he may be. It’s a dreadful remembrance. Besides that, his loss of himself grew out of it. Not knowing how he lost himself, or how he recovered himself, he may never feel certain of not losing himself again. That alone wouldn’t make the subject pleasant, I should think.”
—Charles Dickens,
Tale of Two Cities
THE sky beyond the curtains had been dark for hours, and the clock on the bedside table read 10:30, when the traditional Solville knock sounded on the door: rap-rap-rap, rap, in the rhythm of the Rolling Stones’ “Under My Thumb.”
Angelica was sitting on the carpet in front of the television, and she put down her jar of pennies. “Peek out anyway,” she told Kootie as she straightened her legs and stood up. It was a relief to be able to look away from the grotesque, distressing images on the screen.
Kootie hurried to the door and peered out through the lens. “It’s him,” he said as he unchained the door, “alone.” He pulled the door open.
Mavranos brought in with him the smells of crushed grass and cold pier pilings, and Angelica thought she could see the stale room air eddy behind him as he strode to the ice chest and crouched to lift out a wet can of Coors.
“I found our place,” Mavranos said shortly, after popping the top and taking a deep sip. “It’s hardly more than walking distance from here. I found it at sunset, but I’ve spent all this time making sure I wasn’t followed back here. There was a lot of local hippies dressed up as druids there—or druids dressed as hippies?—and I kept on seeing them after I left the place.”
He finished the can and crouched again to get another. “I’d see ’em on rooftops, and in passing buses, but each of ’em was looking at me, I swear, with no expressions at all on their faces, under the hoods. I finally lost ’em by buying a—hah!—a Jiminy Cricket latex rubber mask in Chinatown, and then wearing it while I rode the cable cars Washington-to-Mason-to-Jackson-to-Hyde in a windshield circle for about an hour.” He glanced at Angelica. “‘Windshield’—the olden-times word was ‘widdershins.’” He twirled a finger in the air. “It means moving counterclockwise, to elude magical pursuit.”
“I know what widdershins is,” said Angelica. “Contra las manecillas. So where is this place? Is it where the banker drowned?”
“No, it’s—well, you’ll see it tomorrow at dawn. It’s out at the end of the peninsula at the Small Craft Harbor, on the grounds of some yacht club; I had to step over a ‘No Admittance’ sign on a chain. It looks like an old ruined Greek or Roman temple. I asked about it at the yacht club—apparently the city planners had a whole lot of cemetery marble left over after they cleared out all the graveyards in the Richmond District in the thirties, transplanted the graves south to Colma, and so somebody set up this pile of…steps and seats and pillars and patchwork stone pavements…out at the end of the peninsula. Very windy and cold—and the compass needle had no time for my magnet or the north pole; I swear I could feel that compass twisting in my hand, so the needle could point straight down.”
His eyes moved past Angelica to the body on the bed, and when he gasped and darted a glance toward the Plumtree woman, Angelica knew he had seen the fresh blood smeared on Scott Crane’s jeans.
“She go messin’ with him?” Mavranos demanded. “Did her dad, I mean?”
Angelica took hold of his arm. “No, Arky. We decanted some of Crane’s blood into a bottle. We think she’ll have to—”
“Phlebotomy,” put in Kootie.
“Right,” Angelica agreed nervously; “it looks like she’ll probably have to, to drink some of Crane’s blood, to summon Crane, to draw him into her body tomorrow.”
Mavranos’s nostrils widened in evident distaste at the thought, and Angelica sympathetically remembered how the poor Janis personality had found herself suddenly in a body that was convulsing with nausea, after the Cody personality had first proposed the idea and then fled.
Mavranos glared around the room and ended up staring at the television, which for the last five minutes had been insistently showing some French-language hardcore pornographic movie.
“So you decided to distract yourself with some T-and-A,” he said sourly. “You psychiatrists figure this is wholesome entertainment for fourteen-year-old boys, do you?”
“T and…?” echoed Angelica. “Oh, tits and ass, right? Sorry—to me T-and-A has always been tonsillectomy-and-adenoidectomy.” With a shaky hand she brushed a damp strand of hair back from her forehead. “No, damn it, we’ve been trying to get this off the screen—we had the old black lady, for a few seconds—but now shaking the pennies and even pushing the buttons on the set won’t shift us from this channel.” She glanced at Kootie, who was studiously looking away from the screen but who had clearly been upset—even haunted, she thought—when the desperate, contorting figures had first appeared on the screen.
From far away out in the chilly darkness came the metronomic two-second moan of a foghorn.
“I been hearing that all day, seems like,” Mavranos said absently, “it’s the horn on the south pier of the Golden Gate Bridge. Two seconds every twenty seconds.” He sat down on the carpet and put down his beer can so that he could rub his eyes. “Okay,” he said with a windy sigh, “so did the old black lady have anything useful to say? She’s supposed to be our intecessor, and she’s been awful scarce.”
“She,” Angelica began; then, “No,” she said. I’ll tell you later, Arky, she thought. “Cochran and Plumtree have been working his homemade Ouija board, though, and—”
But Kootie spoke. “She said, ‘The debt-payer is always a virgin, and must go to India still a virgin.’”
Angelica could feel her face go slack with exhaustion; she was certain that this was a verbatim recollection of the old woman’s words. Then she made herself raise her head and put on a quizzical expression. “Yes,” she said briskly, “that’s what she said.” Oh, it won’t be you, Kootie, she thought. I won’t let it be you, don’t worry. Oh, why the hell are we even—
“Damn this garbage!” she burst out, and she sprang to the wall and yanked the television’s plug right out of the wall socket.
And then she just blinked from the cord in her hand to the television screen, on which the sweaty bodies still luminously strained and gasped. Her chest went suddenly hollow and cold a full second before she was sure she had pulled out the right plug.