Tim Powers - Last Call (14 page)

He carefully put the artificial eye into the mug and then used the bulb to suck up some of the saline solution and begin squirting it into the cavity of his empty eye socket.

He hadn't done it this morning, so he squirted it out thoroughly. Irrigating the cavity, his doctor always called it.

Finally he couldn't pretend any longer that he hadn't finished. What had he come in here for?

Oh, he thought. Right. Rubbing alcohol and a sterile pad and a roll of sterile gauze bandage. He replaced his artificial eye, yawned again, then began groping through the darkness. He didn't seem able to take a deep breath.

I bet they cut it,
he thought now, crawling across the living-room floor and blinking the excess solution out of his eye.
I bet they did.
He was dragging along the bandages and the bottle of rubbing alcohol, wrapped in a shirt from the laundry hamper.

He lifted the telephone down from the table and picked up the receiver and then took a deep breath and let it out slowly when he heard the dial tone. They had not cut the phone line. Well, he thought. He replaced the receiver carefully.

He ran trembling fingers through his hair and glanced around. All his telephone books, he saw, were gone—not only the ragged spiral-bound notebook with inked entries, but the big Pacific Bell white pages and yellow pages, too. I guess people write numbers in those as well, he thought, in the margins and back pages, and maybe draw asterisks by some of the printed ones, like to distinguish one particular Jones from among a column of them. I wonder what sort of calls all my old friends are going to get.

He peeled a couple of yards off the roll of sterile gauze and tucked the long strip under his leg.

He leaned back, and for nearly a minute he looked up through the window glass at the dark, shaggy head of the palm tree out front swaying in the night breeze. He didn't dare raise his head high enough to be seen from outside, but he could crouch here and watch the palm tree. It's outside the hole I'm in, he thought. All it has to do is suck up nutrients and get ready for tomorrow's photosynthesis session, like every other day.

At last he sighed and pulled Arky's Schrade lock-back knife out of his pocket and opened it. Smoke marks mottled the broad four-inch blade, from Arky's having held it over a lit burner on his stove, but Arky had said to use rubbing alcohol, too, if possible.

Crane twisted the cap off the plastic bottle and poured alcohol over both sides of the blade. The stuff reeked sharply, and it chilled his thigh when he shook a couple of liberal splashes of it onto the left leg of his jeans. He was shivering, and his heart was thudding coldly in his hollow chest.

He had to keep reminding himself that he had thought this out a hundred times during these last eighteen hours, and had not been able to see any other way out.

With his right hand he held the knife upright on his left thigh, the point pricking him an inch or two to the outside of where he figured the femur was; his left hand, open, hovered over his head as he gathered his courage.

He was panting, and after a few seconds his nose caught a new depth and mellowness in the alcohol reek. He glanced away from the knife—

—and then stared at the opened bottle of Laphroaig scotch that was standing on the carpet, with a half-full Old Fashioned glass beside it. They had certainly not been there when he had crawled across the floor three or four minutes ago.

"
Scott
," came Susan's voice softly from the shadows beyond the bottle. He looked up, and he thought he could see her. The diffuse, spotty light made camouflage of the patterns on her clothing, and her face was turned away, but he was sure he could see the fall of her black hair and the contour of one shoulder and leg.

"
Don't, Scott
," she said. "
Why
hurt
yourself to get
her
when you can have a
drink
and get
me?"

Crane's face was dewed with chilly sweat. "Is that what you are?" he asked tightly. "Drink? Delirium tremens? Did
I
bring that bottle out? Am I talking to myself here?"

"
Scott, she's not worth this, have a drink and let me
—"

No, he thought, this can't be a hallucination. Arky saw it twice yesterday, this figure, this creature.

"
Come into the bedroom. Bring the bottle
."

He could hear a chitinous rustling as the vague figure in the corner stood up. Would it go into the bedroom, or would it come toward him?

It's not Susan, he reminded himself nervously. Susan's dead. This thing has nothing to do with Susan, or nearly nothing. At most it's a psychic fossil of her, in her shape and with some of her memories but made of something else.

It was coming toward him. The light climbed the approaching figure—slim legs, hips, breasts. In a moment he would see its face, the face of his dead wife.

As if he were slamming a door against something dreadful, he slammed his hand down with all his strength onto the butt end of the upright knife.

Breath whistled in through his clenched teeth, and the room seemed to ring with a shrill, tinny whine. The pain in his stabbed leg was a scalding blackness, but he was cold, freezing, and the blood had come so fast that the knife hilt standing up from his thigh was slick with it, and his scrabbling hands slipped off the hot, wet wood of the grip. At last he got a good hold on it and pulled, but the muscles inside his leg seemed to be gripping the blade; it took all his strength to tug the thing up and out of himself, and he gagged as he felt, deep in his leg, the edge cutting more flesh as it was dragged free.

He squinted around at the dim room. The thing that had seemed to be Susan was gone.

His hands were heavy and clumsy as he laid the bandage on the cut in his sopping jeans—
Should have took the pants off first,
he thought dizzily—and then dragged up the length of gauze and tied it off around his leg, as tightly as he could, over the bandage.

His heart, which had been racing before he stabbed himself, seemed to have slowed and taken on a metallic clanking, sounding like a weary old man pitching horseshoes. He thought he could smell the kicked-up dry dust.

Shock, he told himself. Lean back, put your feet up on the couch, elevate the wound above the heart. Try to relax your rib-cage so you can breathe deep and slow.

Go ahead and hold the leg as tight as you like.

The refrigerator's compressor-motor turned on, then after a minute clicked off again. A siren howled by down Main Street, and he listened to it, vaguely hoping that it might stop somewhere nearby. It didn't.

Come on,
he thought;
call.

Blood was seeping out from under the bandage and running up his thigh and soaking the seat of his pants. The rug will be ruined, he thought; Susan will—

Stop it.

He looked at the glass of scotch. He could smell the smoky, welcoming warmth of it, of her—Stop it.

The ringing of the telephone jolted him awake. How long had it been ringing? He fumbled at it and managed to knock the receiver off.

"Wait!" he croaked, scrabbling at it with blood-sticky hands. "Don't hang up, wait!"

At last he got the fingers of one hand around it and pulled it across the wet rug and lifted its weight to his ear.

"Hello?"

He heard a woman's voice. "Scott! What happened? Are you all right? What happened? I'm calling paramedics if you don't say something!"

"Diana," he said. He took a deep breath and made himself think. "Are you at home?"

"No, Ozzie made me promise—it doesn't matter, what—"

"Good," he said, talking over her. "Listen to me, and don't hang up. I don't need paramedics. God—give me a minute and don't hang up."

"You sound terrible! I can't give you a minute—
just tell me what happened to your leg
."

"I stabbed myself, I—"

"How badly? Quick!"

"Not too bad, I think, I did it with a sterilized knife and made sure to hit the side away from that big artery—"

"You did it on
purpose
!" She sounded relieved and very angry. "I was at work, and I fell right over! The manager had to use my sign-off number on the register and make one of the box boys drive me home! Now I'm clocked out, and I don't get sick pay till I've been there a year! What was it, a game of Amputation Poker?"

He sighed deeply. "I needed to get in touch with you quickly."

She seemed to be coughing softly. Then; "You
what!
You must be crazy, I can't—"

"
Goddamm it, listen to me
!" he said harshly. "I may pass out here, and I probably won't be able to get to this phone again. You and Ozzie—and me—somebody wants to kill us all, and they've got the resources to find you and him the way they've found me. Is Ozzie still alive?"

She was quiet for a moment. "Yes," she said.

"I need to talk to him. This has to do with that game I played in on Lake Mead in '69. There was something Ozzie knew—"

"Jesus, it's been more than a minute. I'm out of here—stay by the phone—I'm crazy, but I'll call you from another booth."

He managed to juggle the receiver back onto the phone. Then he just lay on the floor and concentrated on breathing. Luckily the room was warm. A deep, throbbing ache was building in his leg behind the steady heat of the pain.

The phone rang, and he grabbed the receiver. "You?" he said.

"Right. Ozzie made me promise not to talk to you on a traceable phone, especially now, twenty years later. Talk."

"The people that killed your mother want to kill you. And me, and Ozzie. Don't know why. Ozzie knows why, or he wouldn't have ditched me. To save us all, I need to talk to him."

She inhaled. "You're doomed, Scott," she said, and there seemed to be tears in her voice. "If you are still Scott. What did I give you for your birthday in '68?"

"A crayon portrait of me."

"Shit!" she sobbed. "I wish you were already gone! No, I don't. Scotty, I love you. Good-bye."

There was a click in his ear, silence, the dial tone. He gently hung it up, then sat there for a while and stared at the telephone.

He was bleakly sure that he could stab himself again, in the other leg, or in the belly, and she wouldn't call again.

Tears of self-pity mingled with the sweat and saline solution on his face.

Forty-seven-year-old one-eyed gimp, he thought. He laughed through his tears. What made you imagine you could
help
anybody? She's smart to kiss you off. Any person would do the same. Any real person.

His leg seemed to have stopped actively bleeding, though it throbbed with pain, and the section of rug he was lying on was spongy and slick with cooling blood.

Eventually he reached out and picked up the glass of scotch.

For several minutes he just lay there and inhaled its heady fumes. If he was going to drink it, he was going to drink it, so there was no hurry. Anything that might be waiting in the bedroom could continue to wait. He'd probably have to get fairly drunk, anyway, to be fooled. To get the—the suspension of disbelief.

" 'And human love needs human meriting,' " he whispered, quoting Thompson's "The Hound of Heaven," which had been one of Susan's favorite poems. " 'How hast thou merited—Of all man's clotted clay the dingiest clot?' " He laughed again, chokingly, and took a deep sniff of the smoky fumes. " 'Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble thee, Save Me, save only Me?' " The speaker in the poem had been God, but he supposed gods were relative.

He stared into the glass.

The telephone rang, and he didn't move. It rang again, and then he shook his head sharply and poured the liquor over his bandage. He hissed at the new pain as he grabbed the receiver. "
Ahhh—
you?"

"Right." Diana sniffed. "The only reason I'm doing this is that I think
he
would, if you'd got
him
. Do you remember where he used to take us for—for
bodonuts
, a lot of Sunday mornings?"

"Sure, sure." This is urgent, he told himself; you're back in the fight, pay attention.

"I'll call him and tell him you want to meet him there tomorrow at noon. I've met him there once or twice; it's the only place he'll agree to talk. Okay? He probably won't come at all. And listen, if"—she was crying, and he could hear fright in her voice when she spoke again—"if he does, and you've got bad friends, tell them he doesn't know where I am or how to reach me, will you? Make them believe it, I swear on my children it's the truth."

"Okay, I'll be there." He rubbed his face. "Diana, you have kids? Are you married? How long—"

"
Scott, this isn't a social call
!"

"Diana, I love you, too. I swear I'll kill myself before I let anybody use me to get at you." He laughed hoarsely. "I'm good at stabbing myself, I discover. God, kid, this is your brother, Scott, please tell me, where are you?"

He could hear her sniffling. "Where I am is, I'm flying in the grass."

The phrase meant nothing to Crane.

Again there was the click of a broken connection.

He rolled over gingerly and then got up on his hands and knees, sweating and cursing and wincing as he involuntarily flexed the torn muscles in his leg.

I can't leave by the front door, he thought. Even the back door is probably being viewed through the cross-hairs of a riflescope, according to Arky.

It's got to be the bedroom window.

And I've got to crawl, at least as far as the hallway, so as not to be seen from outside.

He knew there was no one else in the house … no other human. What the hell was the Susan thing? It was real enough for Arky to have seen it—and even spoken to it!—and substantial enough to have carried a bottle and glass into the living room.

The chair in front of him—Susan, the real Susan, had re-upholstered it a couple of summers ago. And she had moved the leaning bookcase against the wall corner so that it stood up straight, and she had painted the floors. Yesterday he had wondered if her imprint was so distinct on the place that it could project a tangible image of her.