Cochran was pointing his revolver at the pair, into the middle of the spider-cluster of mismatched arms and heads, but the muzzle wavered. He was aware of Plumtree standing beside him, breathing fast.
Without halting his invisible beating of the doctor, Long John Beach raised his round white-whiskered face, and his little eyes seemed to be squinting fearfully up at Kootie. “A three-headed dog—on your altar,” he said, panting as his shoulder spasmed metronomically and blood began to blot through the doctor’s snapping white hair “Your way,” he gasped, “is—clear.” Then he leaned down over the doctor’s limp, jerking form, and a woman’s voice cawed, “Can you breathe, Richie dear? Say something if you can’t breathe.” The voice must have come from Long John Beach’s throat, but Cochran thought the left-side mannikin head had been jerking in time to the words.
A dozen drums were pounding in rapid unison now, and though it was no longer synchronized with even his presently very fast heartbeat, Cochran thought the drums were matching some other rhythm inside him—an ancient, savage brain-frequency that made thought impossible. His open mouth was fluttered by the wind, and his nose was full of the wine and sap smells.
A warm, strong hand gripped Cochran’s shoulder—and he found himself helplessly pointing his revolver at the two jolting figures on the mud in front of him, and then he pulled the trigger—but he must have miscounted his previous shots, for the gun didn’t fire.
He was dizzily ready to crouch beside Armentrout and begin pounding on all three of the twitching heads with the pistol grip; but the hand on his shoulder pulled him back and gave him a shockingly hard shove that spun him around twice before he was able to flailingly catch his balance. In the fire-lit wheeling blur he had glimpsed a wooden mask on broad, fur-caped shoulders, but the urgency was now somewhere else; Cochran was still off-balance, somehow.
The clay-smeared people had all stood up at once from the mud around him, and were walking, then striding, toward the Point Lobos cliff. And in a moment they had opened their mouths in a shrill, ululating chorus, and they were running. Cochran let himself start to fall in the same direction.
And then Cochran and Plumtree were running too, right with them, and Cochran didn’t even know if he was joining in the predatory yelling as his feet thudded in the mud and flames whirled around him and Plumtree. No particular sound in the shaking din told him that the struck bullet in the gun he was carrying had belatedly fired into the ground, just the jolt in his hand and the flare at his thigh; he didn’t even look down, just flipped the gun around in his hand so that it would be a better club.
He did hear shots from up the slope ahead—a rapid-fire stutter that conveyed desperation and panic—and over the close tossing clay dreadlocks Cochran could see muzzle-flashes from the mouth of the cave. None of the sprinting youths appeared to be shooting back—like Cochran they were waving their firearms overhead like clubs, or just tossing them away.
Cochran and Plumtree leaped over wall sections and fallen naked bodies, and then he had lost the gun and they were scrambling up the mud slope toward the cave, imitating the naked earth-people around them in hunching forward to pull themselves up with their hands as well as push themselves along with their feet. All the torches and even the guns had been dropped and left behind, and it seemed to be a pack of four-legged beasts rushing up the path to the cave.
The gunshots were just sporadic punctuation to shrill screams now, and the cave was packed with straining, clawing forms streaked only with reflected moonlight. Cochran was breathing fast through his clenched teeth as he fought to get through the press of bodies to the prey; until a heavy, hairy ball rolled over the shoulders in front of him and fell into his empty hands.
He stared at it. For one transfigured moment it was the head of a lion, shining gold—then it was a human head in the silver moonlight, bearded and gap-toothed and wide-eyed, leaking slick hot blood onto his hands. The nose and ears were torn and bent and tangled in the bloody hair, and an actual thought appeared in Cochran’s fevered mind: This was twisted off of its body.
He stumbled back and shook the thing free of his hands, and it fell into a tangle of vines at his feet.
Looking up, he saw Plumtree backing away, dragging her right shoulder across the clustered fluttering leaves that covered the cliff face, while her left shoulder was jostled by the muddy, sexless figures. She was biting her knuckles and staring toward where Cochran had dropped the severed head; and her face was bone white in the moonlight, but when she looked up at him she was recognizably still Cody.
Cochran dodged his way over to where she stood, and he started to hold out his hand to her; then he saw that it was gleaming black with blood.
But she clasped it anyway, and he leaned beside her against the leaf-covered unevenness of the cliff.
The clay-smeared youths were dancing away from the cave now, whirling and leaping out of the tunnel and waving over their dreadlocked heads pieces of human bodies as they whirled away back down the slope to the wild beat of the drumming.
And the bounding dancers didn’t pause, but the crowd of them split widely around a figure that was striding up the slope now.
Angelica and Pete, supporting the limping Mavranos, were following it.
It wore no mask, and of course it was Kootie—but the boy was taller, and the skirted raincoat and the blanket around his shoulders flapped like robes in the driving wind, and his stern face was dark and Asian in the moonlight. Cochran remembered that the boy’s last name was something from India.
The clay-smeared youths were dancing and running around the fire in the roofless structure now; but other figures, clothed and wet and-limping, were toiling across the mud-flats toward the cliff; one was as short as a child, and poling itself forward on crutches.
The impossibly full moon was a white disk hanging over the waving trees at the top of Sutro Park above the highway, and by its light Cochran could see that the whole Point Lobos cliff behind himself and Plumtree was covered with vines; and bunches of grapes swung heavily in the wine-reeking wind.
Cochran and Plumtree stepped back and lowered their eyes as the tall figure that was at least partly Koot Hoomie Parganas stepped up to the broad ledge; tracks of motorcycle tires, and swirling gouges left by motorcycle footpegs and handlebars, stood out in starkly shadowed relief in the mud, but Kootie’s boots sank deeper, and the holes of his bootprints quickly filled with dark liquid.
The god just walked past you, Cochran told himself; Dionysus, walking the Point Lobos cliffs on this broken night.
But the thought was too big to grasp, and slid off his mind, and he could only look away, down the slope.
CHAPTER THIRTY THREE
Soon wild commotions shook him and made flush
All the immortal fairness of his limbs;
Most like the struggle at the gate of death;
Or liker still to one who should take leave
Of pale immortal death, and with a pang
As hot as death’s is chill, with fierce convulse
Die into life …
—John Keats,
Hyperion