The motorboat had paused, out on the gray water; but now its engine roared, and its bow kicked up spray as it turned north and began curving away from the peninsula, showing them nothing but wake and a bobbing transom.
Pete and Angelica came sprinting up as Mavranos hopped down out of the truck.
“Let’s get him out,” Angelica gasped, “and down these stairs to that cobblestone lower level there. I should have had hardball rounds first up. You all carry him, I’ll fetch the bruja stuff.”
Cochran stood up, and realized that he had drawn his revolver at some point during the confrontation, and that it was cocked; and after he had carefully lowered the hammer he had to touch the cold barrel to be sure he hadn’t fired it. His right hand was shaking as he reached around behind him and stuffed the gun back into its holster. He brushed a buzzing fly away from his ear, and then, with huge reluctance, stepped toward the truck.
ROBED AND whole and in some sense still barefoot, the spirit of Scott Crane stood beside the lapping gray water. It wasn’t precisely where Mavranos and the Plumtree woman and the two silver coins were—he was just as immediately aware of the capering naked ghost of himself that was flickering like a hummingbird at the ruins by the sea, where the foghorn moan came for two seconds every fifteen seconds—but what confronted him either way was the water, the obligation to cross the cold, unimaginable water.
Obligation but not inevitability. He could with only moderate difficulty blunt and truncate himself enough to animate the ghost, become no more than the ghost but at least be wholly that, and stay here, with real physical mass; free to shamble around in the familiarity of noisy human streets, and bask in the earthly sun, and pour the coarsening common short-dog wine down his shabbily restored throat. He would be a poisoned and diminished quantity, but still a real quantity.
Or he could take the two silver dollars that Spider foe had brought back to him, at such cost, and spend them on the oblivion that the Greeks had represented as Charon’s ferry over the River Styx—and then drink from what the Greeks had called Lethe, the river of forget-fulness and surrender.
No guarantees of anything there, that way, not even of nothing. Total abject and unconditional surrender, to whoever or whatever it might ultimately be behind the busy, clustering gods and archetypes that humanity had tried to hold up to it for size. He could hope for mercy, but there would certainly be justice, a justice older and more implacable than the forces that kept the suns shining and the galaxies wheeling in the nighttime sky.
SITTING IN the steamy BMW idling in’the Star Motel parking lot, Long John Beach turned to the two-mannikin appliance in the back seat. “Let me tell you a parable,” he said.
“Talk to me, goddammit,” said Armentrout hoarsely, gripping the sweat-slick steering wheel. They were here during the Marina 3.2 earthquake last night, one of the motel guests had told him. They were all yelling at each other, and yelling, “Where’s Kootie?” They carried a guy down the stairs to a truck, and drove away, some of ‘em in the truck and some in a beat old brown Ford.
“I’ll tell you all,” Long John said equably. “A man’s car drove over a cliff, and in midair he jumped out, and caught hold of a tree stump halfway down the cliff. Below him is only fog, and he can’t climb up or down. He looks into the sky and says, ‘Is there anybody up there? Tell me what to do!” And a big voice says, ‘Let go of the tree.’ So after a few seconds the guy says, ‘Is there anybody else up there?’“
Armentrout nodded impatiently, and finally turned to Long John. “So? What did he do?”
The one-armed man shrugged. “That’s the end of the story:’
DOWN A set of mismatched brick-and-marble stairs, under the shadow of a scrollwork-roofed marble alcove that looked as if it should shelter the carved effigy of a dead king, a broad cobblestone-paved crescent with a raised stone edge-coping projected out over the sea like an ancient dock.
At the moment the only dead king present was laid out on the pavement below the alcove, his jeans and white shirt blotting up moisture and grime from the puddles between the uneven paving stones; and all that was on the broad table-like slab under the alcove roof was a couple of sheets of corrugated cardboard, bedding for some absent transient.
In the direction of the peninsula point and the iron light pole another set of steps led back up to road level from this stone floor, flanked against the open gray sky by a bench that was a marble slab laid across two broken granite half-moons. Cochran realized that he badly wanted to feel that this shelter was an enduring, solid edifice—but it was too obvious that what distinguished this place from a real, old ruin was the fact that all the stone edges here, even the ones fitted up against each other as part of some wall or seat, were broken and uneven. A line from some poem was tolling in his head: These fragments I have shored against my ruins…
Plumbing pipes projected up out of the muddy ground at every shelf and wall-top, their open-mouthed ends bent horizontal to project the echoing sound of sea water rising and falling in their buried shafts, a deep twanging like slow-fingered ascending and descending slides on slack bass-guitar strings. Cochran’s thudding heartbeat and his shallow panting seemed to provide a counterpoint, and it was only plumtree’s evient, valiant desperation to accomplish the task at hand, and his own queasy shame at having called for Nina’s ghost during the Follow-the-Queen episode, that kept him from wading out into the cold sea on the Marina side and trying to swim to shore.
His face was chilly with sweat, and not just because of having had to help carry the cold dead body a few moments ago. In his mind he was again seeing the carbine jolting in Angelica’s fists and flinging out ejected shell casings, and the brick stairway-top exploding into dust and high-speed fragments, and he was shaking with a new, visceral comprehension of velocity and bullets and human mercilessness. He couldn’t help but be glad that he hadn’t fired his own gun.
Angelica had fetched her canvas knapsack from the truck while Mavranos and Pete and Cochran had been carrying Scott Crane’s body down the steps, and now she was spreading out on the damp stones her paltry-looking tools—there was, along with the assorted garage-sale litter he’d seen last night in the motel room, an empty H. Upmann cigar box, a can of Ronsonol lighter fluid, a pair of pliers, a Star Motel postcard…Cochran shook his head in bewilderment.
Mavranos cussed and slapped at his own neck. “No hippie druids this morning,” he said, “but we got flies up the butt.”
“Here, at this hour,” said Angelica in a strained voice, “those can’t be anything but ghost-flies; las moscas, little essences of dead people, either brought in on us or already here. Ordinarily they’d just be an implicit cloud, but they’re condensed to individuality this morning by the sudden low pressure of having the dead king right here.” She glanced up, frowning. “Try not to breathe them—and if any of you have got any bleeding cuts, cover them.”
She handed Mavranos the bottle of 75 Kenwood Cabernet. “You hold this, Arky,” she told him; “open it when I tell you.”
“Go ahead and do this thing right,” Mavranos said, “but as much on fast-forward as you can, okay? Those guys in the boat will be back, or their friends.”
“Right, Arky,” Angelica said, “but it’s important for this procedure that all the minds present understand what’s going on, assent to it.” Speaking to all of them, she went on rapidly, “See, we’re gonna be doing a kind of ass-backward honoring-of-the-dead here. Usually the procedure is to have a heavily masked guy, a Lucumi ogungun, let himself be taken over by the ghost of the deceased; it’s to let the ghost see the funeral and mourners and flower displays and all, and everybody being sorry, so that the ghost can go away, can dissipate happily and not hang around and cause trouble.”