“Could I talk to Janis about all this?”
“No. And what do you mean, ‘she doesn’t have a nosebleed’? It’s her nose too, isn’t it?”
Cochran opened his mouth to point out some inconsistencies in the things she’d said, but found that he was laughing too hard to speak; tears were leaking from the corners of his eyes, and his chest hurt. “I’ll,” he managed to choke, “have the coffee ready when you … get out of the shower.”
Her mouth twitched. “Laugh it up, funny boy,” she said mockingly, then lurched into the bathroom and closed the door with a slam. From the other side of the door he heard her call, “And don’t be peeking in here to see if Tiffany’s on!”
Cochran was still sniffling when he pulled open the bedside table drawer, and he lifted out the cassette and stared at it.
Two full seconds over a lit match would destroy the thing.
But, It’s her nose too, isn’t it?—and, if it comes to that, his, too. Her terrible father’s. A lot of jumping around, re-shuffling and discarding, might happen before we all get out of San Francisco.
He tucked the cassette carefully into his shirt pocket.
CHAPTER 16
Besides that all secret men are men soon terrified, here were surely cards enough of one black suit, to justify the holder in growing rather livid as he turned them over.
—Charles Dickens,
A Tale of Two Cities
DR. ARMENTROUT KNEW HE was lucky to have got out of the smoky apartment building and back down to the street, and his car, and to Long John Beach, before encountering this … very shifty woman.
The day had started propitiously, but this last half hour had been a rout.
Late last Thursday his teal-blue BMW had finally limped off the 280 at Junipero Serra Boulevard and sputtered up Seventh to Parnassus to the UCSF Medical Center, where he had got a couple of colleagues to make some telephone calls for him; the upshot was that he had been allowed to take over house-sitting duties at the nearby Twin Peaks villa of a neurologist who was on sabbatical in Europe.
The first thing he had done at the empty house was to change the phone-answering message. Then, very quickly, he had made a photocopied blank sheet of letterhead from the nearby Pacifica minimum-security psychiatric facility, and he’d altered the phone and fax numbers on it to those of the absent neurologist’s house; he had addressed the sheet to Rosecrans Medical, and typed on it a transfer for Long John Beach, along with a request for Beach’s records—to make it look plausible he had had to ask for everything: nursing progress reports, psychosocial assessment, treatment plan, financial data, the legal section. He hoped the neurologist was in the habit of keeping a lot of paper in his home fax printer. Long John Beach was 53-58, on a full conservatorship, but the old man’s “conservator” had been a fictitious entity from the start, so there’d been no risk in signing the remembered made-up name.
Then Armentrout had telephoned Rosecrans Medical and peremptorily announced his application for immediate administrative leave. He’d explained that he was temporarily working as a consultant at UCSF Medical, and pointed out that he was entitled to six weeks a year of vacation, and had never taken any of it. He had named one of the other doctors, an elderly Freudian, to serve as acting chief of staff in his absence. Nobody had argued with him, as he had known they would not—a chief of psychiatry could pretty well do as he liked in a clinic.
To his surprise, he had felt bad about violating their trust, breaking the rules—and not just because he would lose his career and probably be charged with a felony if he were to be caught. He had pursued a psychiatric career largely out of gratitude for his own long-ago deliverance from guilt and shame, and he regretted the necessity of this dishonesty far more than he had ever regretted the killing of a patient.
While waiting vainly to hear from Plumtree’s Omar Salvoy personality on the cellular telephone, Armentrout had printed up a flyer and posted it in various bars and surf shops and parks around the city; REWARD FOR INFORMATION, the flyer had read, followed by a picture of Koot Hoomie Parganas—an old school photo, the same one that had been on billboards in Los Angeles when the boy had dropped out of sight in ’92—and one of Angelica Anthem Elizalde, also from that year, blown up from a newspaper photo, and unfortunately showing her with her mouth open in surprise and her eyes closed. He had printed the absent neurologist’s phone number at the bottom, and let the answering machine take all calls to it.
There would have been no point in listing the number of his cellular phone—it rang all day long now, with apparently every idiot ghost in the country wanting to threaten him or weep at him or beg him for money or rides to Mexico. He had to answer it every time, though, because it was the line Salvoy would call in on; and at times during this last couple of days, tired of Long John Beach’s insane ramblings, Armentrout had even stayed on the line and had disjointed conversations with the moronic “ghostings,” as the old writers had referred to the things. They certainly were more gerund than noun.
The woman he was facing now, though, seemed to deserve a noun.
This morning a call had come in on the neurologist’s line, and Armentrout had picked it up after hearing a few sentences. It was an old man calling from a pay phone at the Moscone Convention Center, and he was excitedly demanding the reward money. Armentrout had driven over there and paid him fifty dollars, and the man had then told him that the woman and boy on the flyer, and two other men, were living in an upstairs apartment on Lapu Lapu, a block away.
And probably the old informant had been right. When Armentrout had burst into the indicated apartment, wearing his clumsy two-figure manikin appliance, the occupants had apparently just fled out the window. Two smoking television sets sat one atop the other in the middle of the room, chanting crazy admonitions at him like Moses’ own burning bush. He had shambled past them out onto the balcony before fleeing the room, but, though the two manikins he was yoked with had seemed to twitch spontaneously as he had stood out there in the rainy breeze, he had seen no one on the street below.
And so he had shuffled sideways back down the stairs and outside to the car. Fortunately Long John Beach had got tired of waiting in the back seat and had got out to urinate on the bumper—for Armentrout had no sooner opened his mouth to yell at the one-armed old man than he became aware of someone standing only a yard away from Long John Beach and himself.
Armentrout had jumped in huge surprise, the two manikins strapped to his shoulders twitching in synchronized response, for there had been no one standing there a moment earlier. The impossible newcomer was a lean dark-skinned woman in a ragged ash-colored dress, and her first words to him were in French, which he didn’t understand. In the gray daylight her face was shifting like an intercutting projection, from bright-eyed pubescence in one instant to eroded old age in the next. Armentrout knew enough not to meet her eyes.
“No habla Français,” he said hoarsely. This is a ghost, he told himself. A real one, standing beside my car on this San Francisco sidewalk. His shirt was suddenly clammy, and the heads and arms of the manikins yoked on either side of him were jiggling because his hands were shaking on the control levers inside the jackets of their green leisure suits.
“No habla Français,” echoed Long John Beach, stepping forward and shoving his still-swollen nose against the outside ear of the right-hand manikin, “today. No grandma’s cookies, so de little mon say. Madame has forgotten that we agreed to play in partnership this evening.”
The flickering woman goggled at the four heads in front of her—teeth were appearing and disappearing inside her open mouth—and clearly she was uncertain as to which head was which. Armentrout was careful to look away from her eyes, but as her gaze brushed past him he felt his attention bend with the weight of her unmoored sentience, and he shuddered at the realization that he had come very close to dying in that instant—in a group therapy session once he had seen a patient meet the eyes of a ghostly figure that had been loitering out on the lawn f
or several days after an in-house suicide, and the ghost figure had disappeared in the same moment that the patient had toppled dead out of his chair.
Now Long John Beach raised the amputated stump of his left arm, and the two Styrofoam manikin heads began nodding busily. Armentrout wasn’t doing it—he could feel the control lever in his nerveless right hand jiggling independently of him.
“If she hollers, let her go,” Long John Beach chanted as the heads bobbed, “my momma told me to pick this ver-ry one, and out … goes … you.”
He sneezed at the woman, and her face imploded; and with a disembodied wail of “Richeee!” she all at once became nothing more than a cloud of dirty smoke tumbling away down the sidewalk.
“G-good work, John,” stammered Armentrout, spitting helplessly as he spoke. The ghost-woman’s final cry had sounded like Armentrout’s mother’s voice—invoked by Long John Beach saying my momma?—and he was afraid he was about to wet his pants; well, if he did, he could switch trousers with one of the manikins, and people would think the Styrofoam-man had wet his pants. That would work. But then Armentrout would be wearing lime green pants with a gray tweed jacket.
He assured himself that what he feared was impossible. How could his mother’s ghost be here? He had left his loving mother in that bathtub in Wichita thirty-three years ago, drunk, dead drunk; and then intensive narcohypnosis and several series of ECT had effectively severed that guilt-ghost from him, way back in Kansas. “John, what do you suppose—”
“We better motate out o’ here,” interrupted the one-armed old man. “That was several girls in one corset. I sneezed a ghost at ’em to knock ’em down, but they’ll be back soon, with that ghost glued on now too.”
“Right, right. Jesus.” Armentrout was blinking tears out of his eyes. “Unstrap me, will you?”
With the deft fingers of his one hand—or maybe, it occurred to Armentrout now, with help from his phantom hand—Long John Beach unbuckled the two-manikin appliance, and Armentrout shrugged it off and tossed it into the back seat and got in behind the wheel and started the car. After the old man had gone back to the bumper to finish pissing, and had finally got in on the passenger side, Armentrout drove away through the indistinct shadow of the elevated 80 Freeway.
“Let me tell you a parable,” said Long John Beach, rocking in the passenger seat. “A man heard a knock at his door, and when he opened it he saw a snail on the doorstep. He picked up the snail and threw it as far away as he could. Six months later, he heard a knock at his door again, and when he opened it the snail was on the doorstep, and it looked up at him and said, ‘What was that all about?’ ”
Armentrout was breathing deeply and concentrating on traffic. “Don’t you start getting labile and gamy on me, John,” he said curtly.
He was driving north on Third Street, blinking through the metronomic windshield wipers at the lit office windows of the towers beyond Market Street. Beside him Long John Beach was now belching and gagging unattractively.
“Stop it,” Armentrout said finally, as he made a left turn and accelerated down the wet lanes southeast, toward Twin Peaks and the neurologist’s house. “Unroll the window if you’re going to be sick.”
In a flat, sexless voice, Long John Beach said, “I would be blind with weeping, sick with groans, look pale as primrose with blood-drinking sighs, and all to have the noble king alive.”
Armentrout blinked at the man uneasily. Ghosts were harmless in this form, channeled through the crazy old man, but their arrival often made the car’s engine miss—it had stalled almost constantly on the drive up here—and he worried about what the ghosts might overhear and carry back to the idiot bar where they seemed to hang out—“India,” the old writers had called that raucous but unphysical place. And this particular ghost, this sexless one that seemed to quote Shakespeare all the time, had been coming on through Long John Beach frequently lately, ever since their visit at dawn last Thursday to the beach below Scott Crane’s Leucadia estate.
There was something oracular about this ghost’s pronouncements, though, and Armentrout found himself impulsively blurting, “That last cry, from that ghost out on the sidewalk—that might have been my mother.”
“My dangerous cousin,” came the flat voice from Long John Beach’s mouth, “let your mother in: I know she is come to pray for your foul sin.”
“My foul sin?” Armentrout was shaking again, but he forced a derisive laugh. “And I’m no cousin of yours, ghosting. Don’t bother holding a chair for me, in your … moron’s tavern.”
“Most rude melancholy, Valerie gives thee place.”
“Shut up!” snapped Armentrout in a voice he couldn’t keep from sounding petulant and frightened. “John, come back on!” The one-armed figure was silent, though, and just stared at the streaks of headlights and neon on the gleaming pavement ahead; so Armentrout picked up the telephone and switched it on, meaning to punch in some null number and talk to whatever random ghost might pick up at the other end.
But someone was already on the line—apparently Armentrout had activated it in the instant before it would have beeped.
“Got no time for your ma nowadays, hey Doc?” came a choppy whisper from the earpiece. “She’s back here crying in her drink, complaining about you sneezing in her face. Shall I put her on?”
The cellular phone was wet against Armentrout’s cheek. “No, please,” he said, whispering himself. He knew this caller must be Omar Salvoy, Plumtree’s ingrown father, and Armentrout had no decent defenses against the powerful personality. The tape recording he had made last Wednesday had been magnetically erased by Salvoy’s field—even in the Faraday cage inside his desk!—and the vial of Plumtree’s blood had come open in Armentrout’s briefcase, and soaked the waxed-paper wrapper of a sandwich he’d stowed there for lunch; he couldn’t imagine how he could use a dried-out bloody sandwich as a weapon against the Salvoy personality. “You need my clinic,” he ventured weakly. “You need my authority for commitment of the boy, and ECT treatment, and maintenance on life-support.”
“I don’t need this black dog,” came the whisper. “When it barks, the whole India bar shakes out of focus. Is this your dog?”
In the passenger seat beside Armentrout, Long John Beach rocked his gray old head back against the headrest and began jerkily whining up at the headliner, in an eerily convincing imitation of a dog.
“Stop it!” Armentrout shouted at him, accidentally swerving the BMW in the lane and drawing a honk from a driver alongside.
“Take it slow, Daddy-O,” Salvoy said through the telephone. “I only got a minute, boyfriend is in the shower, and anyway I’m not … seated properly here, I’m steering from the back seat and can’t reach the pedals—as it were. Valerie is surely gonna kick me out again any time now. This isn’t the Fool’s dog, is it? Get away! Listen, my girl got away from me hard today, and that’s bad because tomorrow is a Dionysus deathday, it’s their best day to do the restoration-to-life trick with Scott Crane’s body. And my girl Janis tells me that they were talking last week to a ghost black lady in the Bay Area who claimed to have died in like 1903; that can only be this old voodoo-queen ghost known as Mammy Pleasant, who’s been screwing with TV receptions around here ever since there’s been TVs to screw with. If the Parganas crowd is still in touch with Pleasant, they might be getting some real horse’s mouth. Better than half-ass goat head. It’ll be by the water, in any case, at dawn—oh shit, stay by the phone.”
With a click, the line went dead. Then, seeming loud in contrast to Salvoy’s whispering, a girl’s nasal voice from the earpiece said, “Doctor, I’m eating broken glass and cigarette butts! Is this normal? I eat till I jingle, but I can’t fill myself up! Won’t you—”
Armentrout flipped the phone’s cover shut and slammed it back into its cradle. That last speaker had probably been the obese bipolar girl who had killed herself last week—but who was the flat-voiced one who had spoken through Long John, the one who seemed always to quote Shakespeare a
nd who apparently called herself Valerie? Could it be Plumtree’s Valerie personality, astrally at large and spying on him? Good God, he had told her about his mother!
And the voice on the sidewalk had been his mother’s—Salvoy had said she’d been in the bar weeping about someone sneezing in her face.
Armentrout sighed deeply, almost at peace with the realization that he would have to perform a séance, and an exorcism, today.
Long John Beach had hunched forward over the dashboard now, sniffing in fast puffs punctuated by explosive exhalations.
It was so convincing that Armentrout almost thought he could smell wet dog fur. Long John had been doing this sort of thing periodically for the last couple of days, sniffing and whining and gnawing the neurologist’s leather couch—was the crazy man channeling the ghost of a dog?
This isn’t the Fool’s dog, is it?
It occurred to Armentrout that in most tarot-card decks the Fool was a young man in random clothes dancing on a cliff edge, with a dog snapping at his heels; and certainly Long John’s crazy speech, his “word-salad” as psychiatrists referred to skitzy jabbering, did sometimes hint at a vast, contra-rational wisdom.
But surely the crazy old man couldn’t be in touch with one of the primeval tarot archetypes! Especially not that one! The Fool was a profoundly chaotic influence, inimical to the kind of prolonged unnatural stasis that Armentrout needed to establish for the life-support confinement of the Parganas boy.
Could the old man possibly channel someone—or something—that big?
A Dionysus death-day.
Armentrout remembered the catastrophic ice-cream social at Rosecrans Medical Center last week. Long John Beach had seemed to be channeling—had seemed to be possessed by—the spirit of the actual Greek god Dionysus on that night. It was hard for Armentrout to avoid believing that Dionysus had somehow been responsible for the earthquake that had permitted Plumtree and that Cochran fellow to escape.