And if Armentrout could succeed in getting the new Fisher King maintained flatline, brain-dead, on artificial life-support in his clinic, Dionysus’s clock would be stopped—at the one special point in the cycle that would permit Armentrout to consume ghosts with impunity—with no fear of consequences, no need for masks.
The two-mannikin framework shifted and clanked in the back seat now as Armentrout drove fast through the Seventeenth Street intersection, the car’s tires hissing on the wet pavement. Market Street was curving to the right as it started up into the dark hills, toward the twin peaks that the Spanish settlers had called Los Pechos de la Chola, the breasts of the Indian maiden.
“There was still time” Long John Beach said, in his own voice.
“For what?” asked Armentrout absently as he watched the red brake lights and turn-signal indicators reflecting on the wet asphalt ahead of them. “You wanted to get something to eat? There’s roast beef and bread at the house—though I should feed you in the driveway, the way you toss it around.” He passed a slow-moving Volkswagen and sped up, eager to put more distance between himself and that shifting maternal ghost on Lapu Lapu Street. “I should feed you Alpo.”
“I mean there was still time, even though I couldn’t see it. It doesn’t stor> because you have something blocking the light. If we coulda seen in infrared,” he went on, pronouncing the last word so that it rhymed with impaired, “the shadow woulda been there, I bet you anything.” The BMW was abruptly slowing, because Armentrout’s foot had lifted from the gas pedal, but the old man went on, “Infrared is how they keep patty melts hot, in diners, when the waitress is too busy to bring ’em to you right when they’re ready.”
“Stay,” said Armentrout in a voice muted to a conversational tone by the sudden weight of fear; he took a deep breath and made himself finish the sentence, “out… of…my…mind. God damn you.” But his thoughts were as loud and rapid as his heartbeat: You can’t read my mind! You can’t start channelling me! I’m not dead!
Long John Beach shrugged, unperturbed. “Well, you go around leaving the door open…”
From the backseat came a squeak that could only have been one of the Styrofoam heads shifting against the other as the car rocked with resumed acceleration—but to Armentrout it sounded like a hiccup of suppressed laughter.
TALL CYPRESSES hid from any neighboring houses the back patio of the neurologist’s, villa on Aquavista Way, and the green slope of the northernmost Twin Peak mounted up right behind the pyrocantha bushes at the far edge of the lawn. After Armentrout had parked the car in the garage and made Long John Beach carry the two-mannikin appliance out to the patio, he fixed a couple of sandwiches for the one-armed old man and then carefully began scouting up paraphernalia for a seance and exorcism in the back yard.
The neurologist’s house didn’t afford much for it—Armentrout found some decisive candles in glass chimney shades, and a dusty copper chafing dish no doubt untouched since about 1962, and a bottle of Hennessy XO, which was almost too good to use for plain fuel this way. Popov vodka would be more appropriate to his other’s—
He hastily drank several mouthfuls of the cognac right from the bottle as he Jrhade himself walk around the cement deck of the roofed patio, shakily lighting the candles and setting them down in a six-foot-wide circle. Then he picked up a hibachi land walked around the circle shaking clumped old ash in a line around the perimeter; after he tossed the hibachi out onto the lawn, where it broke like glass, he walked around the circle again, stomping and scuffing the ash so that the line was continuous and unbroken. The chafing dish he set on a wooden chair inside the circle, and, needing both hands to steady the bottle, he poured an inch of brandy into it.
Then for several minutes he just stood and stared at the shallow copper pan while the morning hilltop breeze sighed in the high cypress branches and chilled his damp face. I can face her, he told himself firmly; if it’s for the last time, and if she’s concealed behind the idiot shell-masks of Long John Beach’s broken mind, and if I’m armed with the Sun card from the monstrous Lombardy Zeroth deck—and there’s brandy to lure her, and then burn her up.
A hitch that might have been a sob or a giggle quivered in his throat.
Will this mean I’ll have committed matricide twice?
He shivered in the cold wind, and took another big gulp of the brandy to drive away the image of the old face under the surface of the water, the lipsticked mouth opening and shutting, and the remembered cramps in his seventeen-year-old arms.
He looked up at the gray sky, and swallowed still another mouthful and mentally recited the alphabet forward and backward several times.
At last he felt steady enough to go back inside and fetch out from under the bed the two purple velvet boxes.
“Finish your sandwich and get out here,” he told Long John Beach as he carried the boxes through the kitchen to the open back door. “We’ve got a…a call to make.”
When Long John Beach came shambling out of the house, absently rubbing mustard out of his hair and licking his fingers, Armentrout had to tell him several times to go over and stand inside the circle, before he finally got the old man’s attention. “And step over the ash line,” he added.
At last the old man was standing inside the circle, blinking and grinning foolishly. Armentrout forced himself to speak in a level tone: “Okay, John, we’re going to do our old trick of having you listen in on a call, right? Only this time, you’re going to be the telephone as well as the eavesdropper. ‘Kay?”
Long John Beach nodded. “Ring ring,” he said abruptly, in a loud falsetto.
Armentrout blinked at him uncertainly. Could this be an incoming call? But this couldn’t start yet, he hadn’t lit the brandy yet! “Uh, who is this, please?” he asked trying to sound stern so that the old man wouldn’t laugh at him if he’d just been clowning around and this wasn’t a real call.
“Dwayne,” said Long John Beach.
Armentrout tried to remember any patient who had ever had that name “Dwayne?” he said. “I’m sorry—Dwayne who?”
“Dwayne the tub, I’m dwowning!”
Armentrout reeled back, gasping. It wasn’t his mother’s voice, but it had to be a sort of relayed thought from her ghost.
“J-John,” he said too loudly, fumbling in his pockets for a match or a lighter, “I want you to light the brandy—light the stuff in that pan there.”
He found a matchbook and tossed it into the circle, then fell to his knees on the wet grass beside one of the purple velvet boxes. I can’t shoot him, he thought, it wouldn’t stop her, she’s just passing through Long John’s train-station head.
He flipped open the other box and spilled the oversized cards out onto the grass, squinting as he pawed through them until he found the Sun card.
When he looked up, Long John Beach had lifted the copper chafing-dish pan in his one hand and was sniffing it. And now it was Armentrout’s mother’s voice that spoke from the old man’s mouth: “Oh, how I wish I could shut up like a telescope!”