Mavranos had got to his feet and stared at the wall behind the dresser the television sat on, and now he even waved his hand across the back of the the set as through cerifying a magic trick.
“Lord,” he said softly, “how I do hate impossible things. Pete, let’s carry this abomination down to the truck, and—”
But at that moment the screen went mercifully dark at last.
“Bedtime for the satyrs and nymphs,” Mavranos said. “And for us too, I think.” He looked toward Plumtree and Cochran. “What did the Ouija board say?”
Plumtree shifted on the bed. “We asked to talk to anyone who knew about this…situation of ours, and—well, you tell him, Scant.”
Cochran reached behind Plumtree to pick up one of the many sheets of Star Motel stationery. “‘Canst thou remember a time before we came unto this cell?’” he read. “‘I do not think thou canst, for then thou wast not out three years old:”
“I do think that’s your subconscious speaking,” Angelica said to Plumtree. “Or the core-child, the traumatized personality: the poisoned comatose girl in your Snow White scenario, or the battered lady bus driver in Cody’s Dirty Harry version.” Angelica looked at Mavranos and shrugged. “God knows why it’s in that Shakespearean language Pete’s pretty sure it’s from The Tempest, the exiled king Prospero talking to his daughter Miranda.”
Valorie always talks that way,” said Cochran. “She’s the oldest personality, and I think she may be—” He hesitated, and then said, “I think she may be the core-child.”
You were going to say dead, weren’t you? thought Angelica. You were right to keep that idea from her, whether or not it’s true.
Quickly, so as not to let Plumtree think about Cochran’s momentary hesitation Angelica asked him, “Why does Janis call you Scant?”
Cochran glanced at the back of his right hand and laughed uncomfortably. “Oh, it’s a childhood nickname. I grew up in the wine country, doing odd jobs around the vineyards, and when I was ten I was in a cellar when one of the support beams broke under a cask of Zinfandel, and I automatically stepped forward and tried to hold it up. It broke my leg. The support beams are called scantlings, and the cellarmen told me I was trying to be a proxy scantling.”
“Atlas would have been a good name, too,” remarked Kootie.
“Or Nitwit” said Mavranos, stepping away from the television. “Angelica, you and Miss Plumtree can sleep on the Ouija-board bed by the bathroom after you clear the pizza boxes off it, with her on the bathroom side, away from Crane’s body; and we’ll tie a couple of cans to her ankle so as to hear her if she gets up in the night. Cochran can sleep on the floor on that side, down between the bed and the wall. Kootie can sleep over by the window, and Pete and I will take turns staying awake with a gun; well, I’ll have a gun, and Pete can wake me up fast. At about five we’ll get up and out of here.”
“If that TV comes on again during the night,” said Kootie in a small voice. He sighed and then went on, “Shoot it.”
“I bet my hands would let me do that, actually,” said Pete.
VALORIE’S PERCEPTIONS and memories and dreams were always in black-and-white, with occasional flickers of false red and blue shimmering in fine-grain moire patterns like heat waves; and always there was a drumming or knocking, which she understood was an amplification of some background noise present in the soundtrack—or, if there was no actual sound to exaggerate, was simply imposed arbitrarily on the scene. Her dreams never had any fantastic or even inaccurate elements in them, aside from the constant intrusive percussion—they were just re-run memories—and her default dream was always the same, and all the Plumtree personalities experienced at least the last seconds of it whenever she did:
Her mother was wearing sandals with tire-tread soles, but in the dream they rang a hard clack-clack from the sidewalk concrete, and Plumtree’s little shoes and shorter steps filled in the almost reggae one-drop beat.
“They’ve painted a big Egyptian Horus eye on the roof” said her mother, pulling her along by the hand. “Signaling to the sun god, Ra, he says. All the time Ra Ra Ra! But he blew his bigplay at Lake Mead on Easter, and nobody can pretend anymore that he’s gonna be any kind of king.”
Plumtree couldn’t see the men dancing on the roof of the building ahead of them, but she could see the bobbing papier-mache heads that topped the tall poles they carried.
The sun burned white like a magnesium tire rim, straight up above them in the sky, at its very highest summer-solstice point.
“You stay by me, Janis,” her mother went on. “He’ll want to do the El Cabong bang-bang, but he won’t try anything with me today, not if his own baby daughter is watching. And—listen, baby!—if I tell you to run along and play, you don’t go, hear? He wont hit me, not with you there, and he cant…well, not to talk dirty, let’s just say he can’t—okay?—unless he’s knocked me silly, kayoed me past any ref’s count of ten. As close to dead as possible. I never even met him before he—I didn’t even meet him during, I was in a coma when he—when you stopped being just a glitter in your daddy’s evil eye. Dead would’ve been better, for him, but if you knock ’em dead you can’t knock ’em up, right? Never mind.”
On the sidewalk in front of the steps up to the door her mother stopped. “And what do you say,” her mother demanded, “if he says, ‘Baby, do you want to leave with your mother?”
Plumtree was looking up at her mother’s backlit face, and the view blurred and fragmented—that was because of tears in her eyes. “I say, ‘Yes,’” Plumtree said obediently, though the cadence of her voice indicated an emotion.
Plumtree s eyes focussed beyond her mother—above her. Way above her.
This was the part of the dream that the other Plumtree personalities always remembered upon awakening.
There was a man in the sky, his white robes glowing in the sunlight for a moment; then he was a dark spot between the girl on the pavement and the flaring sun in the gunmetal sky. Plumtree opened her eyes wide and tried to see him against the hard pressure glare of the sun, but she could’t—he seemed to have become the sun. And he was falling.
“Daddeee!”
Plumtree pulled her hand free of her mother’s, and ran to catch him.
The clattering clopping impact drove her right down into the ground.
COCHRAN WAS jolted out of sleep and then rocked hard against textured wallpaper in the darkness, and his first waking impression was that a big truck had hit whatever this building was.
Carpet fibers abraded his face, and a mattress was jumping and slamming on box springs only inches from his left ear; he couldn’t see anything, and until he heard shouting from Mavranos and abruptly remembered where he was and who he was with, Cochran was certain he was back in the honeymoon motel room behind the Troy and Cress Wedding Chapel in Las Vegas in 1990, again enduring the tumultuous escape-from-confinement of the big man in the wooden mask.