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 head-liner, 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 death-day, 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 and 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 seance, and an exorcism, today.
LONG JOHN Beach had hunched forward over the dashboard now, sniffing in fast snorts 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 Fools 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.
Armentrout thought he knew now why the death of the Fisher King had eliminated all the ghosts in the Southern California area. Murdered in the dead of winter, the slain Fisher King had become compellingly identical to the vegetation-god Dionysus, whose winter mysteries celebrated the god’s murder and devourment at the hands of the Titans and his subsequent return from the kingdom of the dead. Being a seasonal deity of death and the underworld—and incarnate this winter in this killed king—the god had taken all the local ghosts away with him, as a possibly unintended entourage, just as the death of summer takes away the vitality of plants, leaving the dried husks behind. In the case of the ghosts, it was their memories and strengths that had lingered behind, while their lethal, vengeful sentiences were conveniently gone.
If you like dead leaves, Armentrout thought as he drove, it’s good news to have a dead Fisher King; and I like dead leaves. I sustain myself spiritually on those dear dead leaves.
But eventually, he thought, if nature follows her cyclical course, Dionysus begins his trek back from the underworld, and a Fisher King again becomes evident; and the plants start to regain their life, and the ghosts—quickly, it seems!—are again resistant, dangerous presences. The god wants to rake up the dead leaves, he wants to gather to himself not only the ghosts but all the memories and powers and loves that had accrued to them…which scraps I don’t want to let him have. He wants us to figuratively or literally drink his pagadebiti Zinfandel, and let go of every particle of the cherished dead, give them entirely to him…which I don’t want to do.
When Armentrout and Long John Beach had finally got off the 280 Freeway last Thursday, the crazy old man had suddenly and loudly insisted that they take a right turn off of Junipero Serra Boulevard and drive five blocks to a quiet old suburban street that proved to be called Urbano; and in a grassy traffic circle off Urbano stood a gigantic white-painted wooden sundial on a broad flat wheel with Rom numerals from I to XII around the rim of it. After demanding that Armentrout stop the car, Long John Beach had got out and plodded across the street and walked back and forth on the face of the sundial, frowning and peering down around his feet a though trying to read the time on it—but of course the towering gnomon-wedge had been throwing no shadow at all on that overcast day. The passage of time, as far as this inexplicable sundial was concerned, was suspended.