Reluctantly he picked up the box, then climbed over the gunwale and waded ashore through the cold water, holding the box high.
In ancient Alexandria, Phoenicians had enacted the annual death of Tammuz by throwing a papyrus head into the sea, and seven days later the summer current invariably left the head at Byblos, where they'd fish it out and celebrate the god's resurrection. It was during the interval when the head was in the sea that the location and identity and even the existence of the fertility god were in doubt.
These next two weeks, from this April Fool's Day until Easter, would be the tricky period this cycle, and Pogue was determined that it would be his own head—symbolically—that would be taken out of the water on Easter Sunday.
Max's poor severed head was wearing Pogue's Ray-Bans and had one of Pogue's ties knotted around the stump of its neck, and of course Max had shared Pogue's and Nardie's dietary restrictions, eating no red meat nor anything that had been cooked in an iron pan and drinking no alcohol. That was why Pogue had not been able to simply behead some random tourist for this. The head had to be the closest possible representation of Pogue's own.
His hands were shaking. He wanted to open the box and reknot the tie. Max had never learned how to tie one, and Pogue could remember a dozen occasions when Max had brought a tie to him, and Pogue had had to tie it around his own neck and then loosen it and pull it off over his head and give it to his friend.
When I knotted the tie for him this morning at dawn beside Boulder Highway, he thought now, that was the last time I'll ever do that chore for him.
He clenched his teeth and took a deep breath.
Christ, he told himself, never mind, get the box in the water and moor the line somewhere where no goddamn drunk tourists will find it during the next two weeks, and get the hell out of here.
He looked around among the rocks and the manzanita bushes for a good spot, and he noticed the flock of swallows out over the lake.
He assumed they were swallows. They had the individual darting flight patterns of those birds, certainly—but something was wrong about their wings. And there were other flocks, he now noticed, lots of them, further away. He shaded his eyes to look at the flying things.
Then his stomach went cold, and sweat sprang out on his forehead.
They were bats.
Bats, he thought dazedly—but bats don't ever come out during the day. What're they, crazy, rabid? Is something going on?
He looked away, to see where they might be headed, and he saw that the sky to the south, too, was peppered with the same jiggling dots.
They're coming here. To this little island, from goddamn everywhere.
He scrambled along the little shoreline to a cluster of rocks, and he tossed the gleaming box out over the water; it splashed in while he was tying the end of the line around a half-submerged rock.
And then shadows were whirling around his feet like spots before his eyes. The bats were circling low overhead, silent except for the clatter of their leather wings, and more were coming in from everywhere. The battering wind of their wings disarranged his hair.
He looked up in horror. The furry, toothy little faces flashing past, the bright round eyes were all staring at him.
Something was splashing furiously in the water now, and in panic he swung his head toward it.
The lake water was boiling where he had thrown the box in, and then, impossibly, the heavy box bobbed to the surface, spinning and glittering on the turbulence.
The lake is rejecting it, he thought dazedly. Is that a bunch of fish doing that, or has the water changed its density to keep from enclosing the head?
The clatter of the bats' wings was louder, closer, and he thought he could smell them, a smell like death.
Just run, he told himself.
They've beaten you here today.
Biting back bewildered sobs, he yanked the box back in to shore with one hand while shielding his face from the bats with the other, and then, with the shiny dripping box dangling from his fist, he blundered back down the beach and splashed out to the boat.
When he had tossed the box onto the seat, climbed in himself and in neutral gear deafeningly gunned the big car engine under the Plexiglas hood behind him, the bats seemed to circle higher; and when he spun the wheel and slammed the shift into gear and goosed the boat out across the water straight away from the island, they didn't follow, but broke away and dispersed across the sky.
He let the engine fall back to idle then, and sat panting and shaking in the suddenly becalmed boat as he watched the creatures scatter away, back to the mountain caves in which, on any sane day, they'd have lingered until sunset.
For the first time since the day in the school library when he had figured out the nature of this mystical western kingship, he wished he could break the regimen and drink—get really, thoroughly drunk.
Eventually he got the boat moving, as slowly as the erratic throttle would allow, back toward the marinas of the Lake Mead Resort. Tears and sweat slicked his classically handsome face.
I killed Max for nothing, he thought dully. The sacrifice was rejected, like Cain's.
How could that have happened? Did I disqualify myself by killing Max? No, worse things were done by the old kings. Should I have waited, or done it sooner? Is there already a king's head in Lake Mead, and there isn't psychic room for another?
By the time he got back to the rental dock he had shaken off the passion of loss and hopelessness.
I can still become the king, he told himself as he pulsed the engine and nudged the boat in toward the crowded dock. But I've got to find my damned half-sister—I've got to find Nardie Dinh.
The westering sun was intensifying the orange color of the motel curtains as Crane shuffled the flimsy little deck and dealt out onto the bed five cards each to himself and Ozzie and Mavranos. It was too early to start searching the supermarkets again, and Ozzie had forbidden fooling around with real cards, so Mavranos had fetched from the Suburban a kids' Crazy Eights deck he'd got at a Carl's Jr. hamburger restaurant.
Every card had a cheery, stylized picture of an animal on it, and as the game progressed and cards were discarded face up, Mavranos was amused by the selection of colorful, grinning birds and beasts tossed out across the motel bedspread.
"You know why nobody could play cards aboard the Ark, don't you?" he asked.
Crane rolled his eyes, but Ozzie looked up suspiciously. "No," the old man said, "why?"
Mavranos took a sip of beer. " 'Cause Noah was sitting on the deck." Dry summer thunder boomed, out over the McCullough Range to the south.
Oh, come on, thought Crane, it wasn't that funny.
CHAPTER 19: A Skinny Man Trying to Get Out
The micrometer looked like a monkey wrench for some insanely fastidious mechanic, and its gleaming precision seemed out of place amid the chip racks and adding machines and cigarette-burned desks of the cluttered casino office. Nardie Dinh dutifully held the tool up in the fluorescent light and read the number on the round metal sleeve.
"This one's right on, too," she told the frowning floorman as she loosened the ratchet knob at the base and freed the second of the pair of dice he had brought to her.
She held the translucent red cube close to her face and looked at the faint, tiny initials she had scratched into the one-dot face of the cube, and then she flipped it over and found the microscopic moon symbol she had delicately etched on the six-dot face. Both marks were, of course, exactly as she had scratched them in at midnight, when her shift as night manager of the Tiara Casino dice pit had begun.