CHAPTER FOURTEEN
… Mood, like sacrificing Abels, cries
Even from the tongueless caverns of the earth
To me for justice and rough chastisement…
—William Shakespeare,
Richard II
AFTER more distant sort of pop-pop-pop sounded from the cliffs above the plain of ruins, and while echoes of the rapid knocks were still batting away between the old broken walls, Plumtree swung her ponderous gaze to Cochran, and she saw his face change from the robust color of damp cement to an ashier gray. It was certainly an external noise, she reasoned. It must have been gunfire. Cody always springs away at sudden dangerous sounds—telephones, gunfire.
Plumtree skipped lightly ahead down the muddy path, almost tap-dancing in instinctive time to the constant hammering noise in her ears, and she beckoned Cochran forward, downhill, toward the ruins and the wide, still lagoons that were separated by eroded walls from the crashing sea beyond. The lush, steel-colored vegetation on either side of the path shook in the ocean breeze.
“Further down?” she heard him say. His voice was shrill and uncertain. “Toward the baths?”
“A seething bath,” Plumtree pronounced, “which yet may prove against strange maladies a sovereign cure.”
“Valorie,” he said as he hurried after her.
The clatter and thump that rang ceaselessly in her head increased its tempo, and she knew that an emotion was being experienced. “She that loves her selves,” she called, “hath not essentially, but by circumstance, the name of Valorie.” The emotion was something like shame, or cowardice—or fear of those.
On an impulse but resolutely, she halted and pulled from the pocket of her jeans the object she had prepared at Cochran’s house, when they had stopped there earlier this morning; and she held it out to him in a hand that shook with the rhythmic cracking in her head. “This form of prayer can serve my turn” she said: “‘Forgive me my foul murder.’”
Still glancing up at the cliffs and the road, Cochran took the folded cardboard from her hand.
AND COCHRAN paused to stare obediently at the green-and-tan 7-Eleven matchbook Plumtree had handed him, but it was just a matchbook. “Thanks, Valorie,” he said “but could I talk to Janis?” Neither Janis nor Cody, he reflected fretfully, had ever mentioned that Valorie was crazy. “Jan-is,” he repeated.
He shifted impatiently from one foot to the other, grateful, in this chilly mist or sea spray, for the jeans and boots and flannel shirt and London Fog windbreaker he had changed into at his house; and he was nervously reassured by the angular bulk of the holstered .357 Magnum clipped onto his belt in the back.
“Scant!” Plumtree exclaimed; and then she stared around at the fog-veiled amphitheater into which they had by now halfway descended. “Wow, I’m glad I don’t have to pretend with you, Scant! Are we still in California, at all?”
“Yes,” he said, taking her arm and hurrying her forward. “San Francisco—that building up on the promontory behind us is the Cliff House Restaurant, Cody and I were just in there. It’s only been a few hours since you were last up. But let’s get…behind a wall, okay? I swear I heard gunfire up on the highway—not a minute ago.”
She trotted along beside him, and he was tensely glad that the bouncing blond hair and the lithe legs were Janis’s again, and that the deep blue eyes that blinked at him were those of his new girlfriend, in this strange landscape under this rain-threatening gray sky.
He could see why she had doubted that they were still in California. The Sutro Baths had only burned down in 1966 but these low crumbled walls and rectangular lagoons—all that was left of the baths, overgrown now with rank grass and calla lilies—fretted the plain in vast but half-obliterated geometry between the steep eastern slope and the winter sea like some Roman ruin; long gray lines of pavement cross-sections showed in the hillsides in the misty middle distance, and every outcrop of stone invited speculation that it might actually be age-rounded masonry. Fog scrimmed the cliffs to the north and south to craggy silhouettes that seemed more remote than they really were, and made the green of the wet leaves stand out vividly against the liver-colored earth.
“Who was just up?” Plumtree panted. “Were you going to light a cigarette for somebody?”
A low roofless building with ragged square window gaps in its stone walls stood a few hundred feet ahead of them, where the path broadened out to a wide mud-flat, and Cochran was aiming their plodding steps that way. “Valorie,” he said shortly. “No, she gave me these matches.” He flipped the matchbook open, and then he noticed fine-point ink lettering, words, inscribed on the individual matches.
“She’s written something on ’em,” he said; and he felt safe in stopping to squint at the carefully printed words, for the popping from the highway had been distant and hadn’t been repeated. He read the words off each of the matches in order, aloud: ‘“Si bene te tua laus taxat, sua laute tenebis.’ Latin, again.”
“Again?”
“There was some Latin writing on the ashtray last night, in that bar, Mount Sabu—”
“Scant!” she interrupted, seizing his arm and staring at the top of the northern cliff wall. “God, you almost lost me, almost got Valorie back!”
Cochran had spun to look up that way, his right hand brushing the back of his belt; but he could see nothing up on the fog-veiled cliff top.
“What?” he said tensely, stepping sideways to catch his balance on the slippery mud. “Should we run?”
“There was a wild man up there, looking down here!”
“Shit. Let’s—let’s get inside this,” he said, stepping up onto the undercut foundation of the roofless stone structure and crouching to fit through one of the square window gaps. Grass and gravelly sand covered any floor there might have been inside, and when he had glanced around and then helped Plumtree in, they both crouched panting against one of the graffiti-painted walls. Cochran had pulled the revolver free of the holster, and he belatedly swung the cylinder out and sighed with relief to see the brass of six rounds in the chambers.
“What’s a wild man?” he asked, snapping the cylinder closed.
“Bearded and naked! In this weather!”
“A naked guy?” Cochran shook his head. “I don’t know how scared we’ve got to be of a naked guy.”
“I looked away. I didn’t want to look at his face.”
“Didn’t want to look at his face,” Cochran repeated tiredly. He stared up into the gray sky that from where he sat was bisected by low stone crossbeams. “I wonder when the others will show up here. I wonder if they will. I did give the hostess at the restaurant ten bucks to tell them we’d meet ’em down here, in the ruins.”
‘“If? You said they would, Scant!” She glanced up wide-eyed at the ragged top of the wall close above their heads—as if, Cochran thought, she was afraid her wild man might have bounded down from the cliff and be about to clamber right over the wall. “They’re bringing the king’s body, right?” she asked.