Earthquake Weather (71 page)

“So these others claimed,”
said the black man, rolling his obsidian head around at the bones without looking away from the four intruders.
“Did you think there would be no guard? Nobody takes the god’s blood out of the tabernacle past me.”
When he inhaled, Cochran yawned nervously, expecting his eardrums to pop.

Cochran held up the back of his right hand. “This is the god’s mark, given to me when I put out my hand to save the god’s vine from being cut back!” He made a fist. “The god led me into this room,
by
this hand, half a minute ago!”

“So these others claimed,”
repeated the tall black man, again rocking his head.

Cochran realized that the figure was not listening to what they said; perhaps didn’t even have the capacity to understand objections. It was some kind of idiot
genius loci,
an apparently unalterable part of the god’s math, as implacable and unreasoning as an electrified fence. With his free hand Cochran reached around under the back of his windbreaker and, though hollowly aware that the “antique revolver” had apparently been of no use to one long-ago intruder, nevertheless unsnapped his holster.

Beside him, Plumtree shivered.

“If I—put the wine back—” Cochran began hoarsely.

All at once the supernatural guard stamped far forward into the room, sweeping the sword in a fast horizontal arc—the blade whistled as it split the quivering air—

—Hopping back, Cochran snatched the Pachmayr grip and yanked the gun out of the holster, and despairingly pointed the muzzle into the center of the broad chest—

And in the same instant Plumtree stepped forward so that a backswing from the sword or a shot from the gun would hit her; and Mammy Pleasant’s imperious voice said, “Bacchus!”

The curved sword blade paused behind the black man’s left shoulder like the rising crescent moon behind a mountain, and Cochran tipped the gun barrel upward.

“Don’t you recognize me, Bacchus?” spoke the old woman’s voice from Plumtree’s mouth. “I’m Mary Ellen Pleasant, the poor old woman you took
custody
of, in ’99! You were there when I died, five years later—and you were there too when the god came breaking down Yerba Buena for my ghost, three Easters after that.”

“I—do recognize you,”
said the solid black figure.

“Am I, like you, a totally surrendered servant of the god?”

“You are.”

“I am,” said Pleasant as Plumtree’s blond head nodded. “And I tell you that the god has sent me to fetch out this wine, and bring it to the king.” Without looking away from the creature’s eyes, she held out one hand toward Cochran. He carefully laid the bottle in her palm.

For several long seconds the tall black figure stood motionless. Cochran kept the gun pointed at the ceiling but didn’t take his finger out of the trigger guard.

Then the apparition tossed the sword through the eddying air to its left hand, and the sword again became a vine-wrapped staff with a pinecone on it.

The figure waved it and said,
“Pass.”

Again the ground shook, and this time the bottles on the walls clinked and clicked like castanets and temple bells, and didn’t stop rattling; and Cochran didn’t fall to his knees this time, but just crouched like a surfer to keep his balance on the gyrating floor.

While the floor was still shifting, Plumtree turned and began dancing like a tightrope-walker into the darkness at the far end of the cellar, away from the arch and the supernatural guard. Angelica let the lighter go out as she went hopping and skipping after her, and Pete and Cochran were bounding along at her heels.

And, over the bass drumming of the earth, Cochran thought as he ran that he could hear distant pipes playing, unless that was just some whistling overtone of his panicky panting breath as he followed the sounds of Pete and Angelica through the rocking pitch blackness.

Soon they were able to see slanting gray light ahead of them and hear the crackle of rain, and when they had hurried to the muddy end of the tunnel, and climbed up over tumbled masonry out onto wet grass in a battering showery wind, they could see that they were in some kind of park. Cochran hastily shoved his revolver back into its holster, and pulled the back of his windbreaker down over it.

The rain quickly made runny black mud of the soot that smeared their backs and knees, and by unspoken agreement they didn’t run for the shelter of the corrugated metal roof over some nearby picnic tables, but plodded through the cleansing shower straight across the grass toward the nearest visible road.

When Plumtree glanced at him, Cochran saw that she was Cody again. “I guess I look as shitty as you do,” she said through chattering teeth.

“I guess you do,” he said stolidly.

She touched the angular bulge at the bottom of the zipped leather jacket, right over her belt, and Cochran realized that it must be the gold box from the chimney. “I swear I can feel her kicking in there,” she said.

Hades and Dionysus, for whom they go mad and rage,

are one and the same.

—Heraclitus

T
HE ROAD PROVED TO
be called Tisch Way, and they trudged a quarter of a mile west along its gravel shoulder through the downpour to the intersection of Winchester Boulevard, with the rushing lanes of the 280 visible now just past a chain-link fence on the other side of the road.

When they had wearily got back into the red truck and wedged the bottle of
pagadebiti
securely in the glove compartment, Pete started the engine and drove out of the Winchester Mystery House parking lot, but then just made a left turn onto Olsen Drive and an immediate right into the parking lot of a big new shopping center; he drove up to the empty Winchester Boulevard end of the rain-hazed lot and pulled into a parking space under a towering three-panel movie-theater sign and turned off the engine. The rain drummed on the truck roof, and every five seconds a drop collected on the rusty underside and fell soundlessly onto the soaked thigh of Plumtree’s jeans.

She was sitting in the back seat beside Cochran, and she fumbled the gold box out from under the soaked leather jacket. It was no bigger than a couple of decks of cards stuck together back-to-back, and its lid appeared to be an unhinged plate held in place by six gold screws.

“Find me a screwdriver, Pete,” she said. “A flat-tip one.”

“No,” said Cochran, “don’t open it. We’re supposed to pitch it into the ocean.”

“Not still shut up tight, though, right? Or she might as well have stayed in the chimney—there’d be no difference between the box sitting there or sitting still-sealed at the bottom of the bay. She’s gotta be broke open, like an egg into a frypan.” Plumtree leaned back in her seat and closed her eyes. Her wet hair was plastered to her head and streaked with black. “Is Mammy Pleasant going away voluntarily? Or are you just gonna be shoving her in?”

“Voluntarily,” Cochran said. “She’s going along, anyway. She appears to be resigned to it.” The interior of the truck felt warm and close after the gusty chill outside, and he wrinkled his nose against the remembered childhood smell of doused campfires.

“That’s what I thought.” Plumtree fitted her thumbnail into one of the screw slots and twisted gently, but it didn’t move.

“I don’t know if ghosts really have a whole lot of capacity for voluntary action, actual
volition
,” said Angelica from the front seat; and immediately she frowned, as if ashamed to have had the thought.

“These
are
dead people, Cody,” Pete said.

“Like Valorie,” Plumtree agreed, nodding expressionlessly. “Where’s that screwdriver?”

Pete sighed and bent forward to grope under the front seat.

“If you let her out,” said Angelica, clearly nettled but not quite ready to interfere, “she’ll be gone as quick as a puff of steam.”

Pete had dragged a black metal toolbox onto the seat, and unsnapped the catches and opened it. Wordlessly he passed a screwdriver over the back of the seat.

“I don’t think she will,” said Plumtree. “Obviously I wasn’t busted out of the madhouse and made a part of this company just so you’d be able to question my father … and hell, I’ve already hosted Mammy Pleasant.”

“… Oh,” said Angelica, humbly. “I—I see. Cody, I do think you could get away with not doing it.”

Plumtree had already used the screwdriver to back one of the screws out of the box. “Look at that,” she said, holding the screw up. “
All
gold, not just the head.”

“I don’t imagine she’d scrimp,” said Cochran bitterly, “on what she thought would be her eternal resting place.” He knew he wouldn’t be able to talk Cody out of hosting the old woman’s ghost, if it was still viable in there, and he only hoped Winchester wouldn’t get her into any trouble, or hurt her ribs or her hand. “I wonder when she decided to have this box and these screws made.”

“After 1899, I guess,” said Angelica, “if that’s when her daughter’s handprint showed up. The old lady was apparently a loyal servant of Dionysus before then.”

“Call her
Mrs. Winchester
,” said Plumtree. “I’ve got three of the screws out, she may be able to hear you.” Plumtree was rocking slightly on the truck seat, and Cochran could just hear what she was humming:
Row, row, row your boat …
She peered out the windows at the agitated puddles on the asphalt. “Don’t tell me, if it’s too horrible, but how did we get away from the big black genie-guy?”

“Mammy Pleasant knew him,” said Pete. “I think he was a bit of the god’s remote attention, not able to make many decisions—like a horse’s tail, swatting flies while the horse looks at something else. But he recognized her, and he let us get out with a bottle of the super-Zinfandel.” He stared out the window at the rain that was splashing up in waves of mist across the parking lot. “Poor Johanna,” he said quietly. “The roof in Solville must be leaking like six firehoses.”

Plumtree had unthreaded the last screw and lifted it out of the hole. Now she slid the cover off the gold box, and lifted from a nest of ribbon-tied locks of smoky-fine hair and folded strips of newsprint a corked but apparently empty glass test tube.

“Careful you don’t just
eat
her, the way Sherman Oaks or your Dr. Armentrout would,” said Angelica nervously.

“I didn’t
eat
old Pleasant, did I?” Plumtree lifted the tube and stared through it. “I’ve got plenty of practice at just standing aside and making room for an incoming personality, like when the phone rings.”

She frowned slightly, and Cochran knew she must be thinking of Janis, whose job it always was to answer telephones.

“Wide unclasp,” she said then, perhaps speaking to the glass tube. “I’m the one who got the message in the stained glass. Meet the ones that people
this
little head.” And with one motion she bit out the cork and inhaled strongly over the open tube.

The cork fell out of her lips and she sat back in the seat.

“Oh my Lord,” she said then, exhaling and staring wide-eyed at the three people in the truck with her, “has found me, hasn’t he?” The voice was strong but higher in pitch than Cody’s or Pleasant’s.

“No,” said Cochran, “we’re—well, yes, I suppose so. We’re sort of contract labor for him, I guess.”

Tears gathered in Plumtree’s eyes, and spilled down her sunburned cheeks.

“You don’t have to go,” said Angelica suddenly, “if you don’t want to. We can … I don’t know. Damn it! Is there a way to … hide you again, hide you better?”

Beside her, Pete looked as though he wanted to object, but he just pressed his lips together and rolled his eyes to the rusty ceiling.

Plumtree’s eyebrows went up. “No, there’s not.” She raised Plumtree’s hands and flexed them in front of her face. “I’m … out now! … and bound for the god, bound for the sea; and I’ll take my baby’s ghost with me, at least, dry dust though she is. Lord, I did think we’d have to spend eternity in that box. I ran out of thoughts after only a few hours, I believe, and even my dreams were just of being in the box. The memories of her that I kept, defiantly kept, were just black dust after all. Nothing but soot. I should have known.” The eyebrows went up even further when she looked down at the soaked leather jacket and jeans she was wearing. “I’m … grateful to this person for a little interval time in which to breathe fresh air.”

Hardly very fresh, thought Cochran. He yawned from sheer nervousness, anxious to have Cody back on again.

“What,” asked Mrs. Winchester as Cody’s body seemed to brace itself, “is the date, today?”

“Monday the thirtieth of January,” said Pete, “uh, 1995.”

The news appeared to alarm Mrs. Winchester, and Cochran thought it was learning what day of the month it currently was, rather than that seventy-odd years had passed since her death, that had upset her. “When is the Chinese New Year?” she asked quickly.

“Tomorrow,” Cochran told her. “The Year of the Pig.”

“And today’s already dark? How is it that you’ve dawdled so? We can’t wait around through the passage of another
year,
before we get consumed! We’re far past stale already, my poor shred of a daughter and I. Has the god chosen a king?”

“Yes,” said Pete and Cochran and Angelica simultaneously.

“Go to where he waits, then, and stop wasting time. Go quickly—this
is
some species of
automobile,
isn’t it? Has one of you taken a drink of the wine?”

“No, ma’am,” said Pete in a harried tone, turning around to face the dashboard and twist the key in the ignition.

“Ah, one of you should have!—back in my house, if that’s where you found me, if it’s still standing. You
do have
the wine, don’t you? The god will take some host for himself, for the ceremony, but first one of you must thus … formally
invite
him. You’ve got to awaken him, and bring him.” She peered in bewilderment out the side window at the shopping-center parking lot. “Find a grove, wooded groves are still implicitly sacred to him—or a cemetery, a quiet cemetery with trees.” Softly, perhaps to herself, she added, “I can remain rational through this final event, if it happens soon.” Then she looked around quizzically at the three people in the old truck with her. “I don’t know you people, but I presume you know each other. It should be obvious who is to take the drink.”