“Earthquake!” someone was yelling in the pitch blackness. Cochran sat up, battered by the mattress that was convulsing beside him like a living thing, and then he scrambled forward on his hands and knees until his forehead cracked against some unseen piece of furniture—the dresser the television had been sitting on, probably The pizza boxes tumbled down onto his head, spilling crumbs and crusts.
“Mom!” yelled Kootie’s voice. “Mom, where are you?”
Two shrill voices answered him: “Here!”
Light flooded the room, just yellow electric lamplight but dazzling after the darkness. Squinting, and blinking at the trickle of blood running down beside his nose, Cochran saw that Angelica was standing beside the door with her hand on the light switch, and that Mavranos was crouched between the beds holding his revolver pointed at the ceiling. Kootie and Pete Sullivan stood beside Angelica, staring at the bed with Plumtree on it.
The bed was still jumping, the bedspread flapping like manta-ray wings, and Plumtree’s body was tossing on it like a Raggedy Ann doll—even though the rest of the room had stopped shaking.
“Omar!” grated a shrill, keening voice from between Plumtree’s clenched teeth. “Damn your soul! Stop it, take one of the girls, Tiffany or Janis, just let me go!” The three empty beer cans that Mavranos had wired to her ankle with a coat hanger were shaking and clattering.
Kootie has provoked the Follow-the-Queen sequence, Cochran thought; he did it when he yelled for his mother. Next card up is wild, whatever you declare it to be. Dizzy and light-headed, Cochran opened his mouth.
“Nina!” he called hoarsely.
“Omar, I will kill any child conceived in this way!” screamed the voice out of plumtree’s mouth. “God will not blame me!”
It hadn’t worked.
Cochran’s bruised forehead was chilly with sweat. “J—” he began; then, “Cody!” he called.
At first he wasn’t sure the card he had declared would be honored, for though Plumtree’s eyes sprang open she was now gasping, “In the name of the father, the sun, the holy ghost!” Then she had rolled off the spasming mattress and scrambled across the carpet to the front door, the beer cans snagging in the carpet and hopping behind her.
“Whoa,” said Mavranos.
The mattress flopped down flat and stopped moving.
Mavranos stared at the bed with raised eyebrows. “I,” he said, as if speaking to the bed, “was talking to Miss Plumtree.”
Cochran half-expected the bed to start jumping again at this explanation, but it just lay sprawled there, the mattress at an angle now to the box springs, the pillows and blankets tumbled in disorder.
“Get back by boyfriend,” Mavranos told Plumtree.
Somewhat to Cochran’s surprise Plumtree had no rude retort, but just obediently stepped back toward the bed; though she did shake her ankle irritably, rattling the attached cans. She was smacking her lips and grimacing. “Jeez, was my female parent on? I hate her old spit. I gotta gargle, excuse me.” She hurried past Cochran into the bathroom, and he could hear her knocking things over on the sink.
The light in the room was flickering, and when Cochran looked around he saw that the television had come on again, possibly because of having been jolted in the earthquake. Again the screen showed a glowing nude man and woman feverishly groping and sucking and colliding.
Mavranos stepped back to see behind the set, and frowned; clearly the cord was still unplugged.
“Could you get me a beer, Angelica?” he said, holding out his left hand and not taking his eyes off the television. He was gripping the revolver in his right hand, and Cochran wondered if he might actually shoot the TV set, and if he’d think of muffling the shot with a pillow.
Angelica leaned over the ice chest and fished up a dripping can; she popped it open and reached over to slap it into his open palm.
“Thanks.” Mavranos tilted the beer can over the ventilation slots on the back slope of the television set, and after a few seconds of beer running down into the sets works the picture on the screen abruptly curdled into a black-and-white pattern like a radar scan, with a blobby figure in one corner that looked to Cochran like a cartoon silhouette of a big-butted fat man with little globe limbs, and warts all over him; and the sound had become a roaring hiss that warped and narrowed to mimic whispered words: et…in…arcadia…ego…
Then it winked out and was dark and inert, a wrecked TV with beer puddling out from the base of it. Mavranos absently drank the rest of the beer and clanked the can down on the dresser.
For several seconds no one spoke, and the distant foghorn moaned out in the night.
Mavranos raised the gun barrel for silence while he stared at the watch on his left wrist.
Cochran began to let the muscles in his shoulders relax, and he gently prodded the bloody bump on his forehead.
The foghorn sounded again, and Mavranos lowered his arms. His face was expressionless. “What time is it?” he asked.
“You were just staring at your watch!” said Angelica.
“Oh yeah.” Mavranos looked at his watch again. “Quarter to five, apparently that’s showtime.” He sighed shakily and rubbed his left hand over his face. “Let’s mobilize. Angelica, get your witchy shit together and have Pete carry it downstairs and into the truck while you cover him with your .45, and don’t forget to bring that Wild Turkey bottle with Scott’s blood in it. Don’t put stuff in the back bed, though—we’ll be carrying Scott down and putting him back there. I’ll drive the truck, and Pete can drive Mr. Cochran’s Granada—”
Plumtree had stepped out of the bathroom, and Cochran could smell the Listerine on her breath from a yard away, though he was ashamed to meet her eye. She dug in the pocket of her jeans and pulled out a bundle of bills.
“Kid,” she said to Kootie. When he looked up, she thrust the bills out toward him. “This is yours. A hundred bucks—long story, don’t ask. I want to give it to you now, in case we get…in case we don’t quite meet again.” Cochran thought there was gruff sympathy in her voice. “No hard feelings.”
Kootie was holding the little yellow blanket that bald-headed Diana had given him back in Solville, but he reached across the bed with his free hand and took the money. “Thank you, Janis Cordelia Plumtree,” he said.
“And Janis Cordelia can ride shotgun in the Granada,” Mavranos went on rapidly “with Angelica behind her ready to shoot. Come on, everybody, up! I want us out of here in five minutes.”
Angelica snatched up her knapsack and grabbed the Wild Turkey bottle. “What’s the hurry, Arky?” she asked irritably. “Sunrise isn’t for another hour or so, and you said the place is walking distance from here.”
Mavranos had peered through the peek hole and now unchained the door and pulled it open. “That foghorn, just now—it’s sounding every fifteen seconds, not twenty, and it’s a different tone. It’s a different foghorn.”
Pete was squeezing the battery charger’s clamps off the terminals of one of Mavranns’s car batteries and then lifting the battery in both hands. “So?” he asked breathlessly. “Maybe the wind’s from a different direction.”
“They don’t vary that way, Pete,” said Mavranos impatiently, “or they wouldn’t be any good as foghorns, would they? We’re—we’re Scott’s army, this king’s army, and in that sense we wont truly exist until the potential of his resurrection becomes an actuality. Our wave-form has to shake out as one rather than as zero. And I think—this wrong foghorn makes me think—that we’re a fragmented waveform right now, that psychically we’re somewhere else too, as well as here in a motel on Lombard Street.”