It had been a long walk. As his vision began to come back into focus, the pain in his exploded hand had grown to a red-hot throbbing, and so he'd forced his mind back down into the blurriness of the fading concussion.
He had felt like a swimmer letting air bubble out of his lungs in order to sink, and he had dimly realized that it was something like his identity, his personality, his will, that he was surrendering, but he had never treasured those things anyway.
And other people had never seemed to him to be really alive, but now they were diminished to angular mobiles jerking in some unimportant wind, all pretense of three dimensions abandoned. He now knew that people had seemed to have physical depth and volume only because they always faced him, and changed the appearance of their surfaces as he moved.
Now that the people weren't a distraction, he was able to see the gods.
Walking down the rainy Strip sidewalk this evening, feeling as though he were swimming and using his clumsily bandaged hand as a flipper, he had seen them, and the irrelevance of apparent size made them seem at one moment to dwarf the tall casinos as they strode past, and at the next to mimic the hood ornaments on passing cars.
In the open entry of the Imperial Palace he had seen the Magician sitting at a green felt table on which were a stack of coins, a cup, and an eyeball; and, on stilt-long legs of which the knees were the thickest part, mummied Death had walked down the center of the street, throwing a faint shudder through the crowds of stick figures; and the Hanged Man had swayed in the darkening sky over the Flamingo, the upside-down face placid as it stared down at Snayheever.
The silhouettes in front of him were growing agitated now, and Snayheever got to his feet. Flames had begun to billow from the top of the volcano.
But suddenly it wasn't the Mirage volcano. It was the Tower, tall and vast and so old that its stones were eroded like a natural outcrop of the earth, and a dazzling bolt of lightning lashed down out of the sky to hammer at the breaking crenellations of its battlements; huge chunks of masonry turned in the air as they fell in slow motion, and a robed figure that could only be the Emperor fell with them.
Snayheever turned and swam away into the relative dimness of the casinos along the Strip.
CHAPTER 25: And You've Saved Yourself for Me
Out over the desert the thunderclouds gathered like vast tall ships, and the hard rain lifted hazes of dust and then filled the stream beds and washes with rushing brown water. The long, curving line of I-15 darkened and soon shone with the headlights that moved along it like slow tracer bullets.
On Fremont Street the wet cars glistened with reflected neon rainbows, and the children who waited for their parents on the carpeted sidewalks huddled in the casino doorways. The hiss of the rain was the dominant sound—it muffled the rattle and rapid-fire clang of the slot machines, and though the strikers in front of Binion's Horseshoe kept on walking back and forth with their signs, the shouting of the young woman picketer was less strident without her electric megaphone.
Inside the casinos there was only the occasional whiff of wet hair to let people know it was raining outside, but at the Blackjack tables face cards were being turned up about half the time, and actively played Roulette tables were hard to find, owing to the number of wheels that had been shut down for testing because they came up with the zero and double zero more often than they should, and a number of elderly slot machine players had to be led out in tears, complaining that the machines were glaring at them.
Traffic was heavy south of Fremont Street—buses and old VW bugs and new Rolls-Royces and a procession of white Chevrolet El Caminos—and there were lines of people in gowns and tuxedoes standing patiently in the white-lit rain outside the wedding chapels. The big casinos to the south, the Sands and Caesars Palace and the Mirage and the Flamingo, were flares of lurid color in the wet night.
On the roof of the towering pink and white edifice that was the Circus Circus, in among cables and conduits, below the forest of antennas and satellite dishes, Diana clutched her robe to herself and shivered as the rain drummed and rattled around her.
The city, spread out below her in all its palaces and incandescent arteries, seemed as far away as the dark clouds overhead; the distant moon, not even visible now, seemed closer.
She had called the hospital an hour ago, and Dr. Bandholtz had told her that Scat's condition was a little worse.
The boy had already been connected to a catheter that was inserted under his collarbone and somehow threaded through a vein and then through the "right heart" and lodged in the pulmonary artery—it was to make sure the blood pressure in the lungs didn't rise, for the lungs would not be able to absorb oxygen if it did—but now he was breathing through an "endotrachial tube" taped into his mouth. If his breathing didn't stabilize soon, they were going to put him on an IMV, which she gathered was some very serious kind of ventilator.
After getting off the phone with the hospital, she had called her own apartment number.
And she had sighed with relief and frustration when Hans had answered. At least he was still alive.
"Hans," she'd told him, "you've got to get out of there; it's not safe."
"Diana," he had said, "I trust the police."
She had waited wearily for him to tell her that if she had let the police handle the kidnapping last night, Scat would not be dying in the hospital. He had told her that when she'd called last night, and she had hung up on him, and she knew she'd do the same if he said it again.
He didn't. "Besides," he said, "your foster-brother shot the guy, right?"
"No, don't you listen? The man who shot Scat is somebody else, and he knows where I live, and he's probably still in town. Get out of that apartment.
"If you're evicting me," Hans said pompously, "I am entitled to at least thirty days' notice."
"These people won't give you thirty seconds' notice, you idiot!" She reflected that Hans was guilty of what Ozzie had used to call felony stupid. "I'll call the cops and tell them about your dope plants, and—"
"Have you visited Scat today?" he interrupted angrily.
Quietly she said, "… No."
"Hmm, somehow I had thought not. Are you going to tonight?"
"I don't know."
"I see. Why don't you consult a Ouija board," he said, his voice quavering with the weight of his sarcasm, "to see if it would be safe?"
"Get out of there!" she yelled. She had hung up on him then.
If it would be safe.
Alfred Funo, she thought now as the rain clattered in the puddles around her bare feet. Someday I hope to be able to deal with Mr. Alfred Funo.
Funo had vacated the motel before the police arrived there last night, but his exit seemed to have been hasty, and they had found a couple of 9-millimeter bullets under the bed. Diana was in no doubt that Funo was the man who had shot her son.
And there were others out there: this Snayheever creature, and the fat man in the Jaguar, and, according to Ozzie, dozens of others.
Bathe in the fresh, wild water of this place, Ozzie had told her.