And probably the old informant had been right. When Armentrout had burst into the indicated apartment, wearing his clumsy two-figure mannikin 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 mannikins 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 mannikins 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 Frangais” 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 mannikins 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 mannikin, “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 for 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 mannikin 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 verry 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 mannikins, 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-mannikin 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, channelled 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.