Tim Powers - Last Call (27 page)

Sometimes he watched the gold and red clouds terraced across the still-blue sky at sunset, and he pretended that he might see a horse-drawn chariot, tiny in the immense distance, racing along the cloud ridges. If he were ever to see such a thing, and if the chariot were to sweep down and land in this field, like for a breather before taking off again for the cloud kingdoms, he knew he would race across the grass and jump aboard.

He played Mario Brothers a lot on the Nintendo set on the TV at home, and as he walked across the grass now, he thought of the invisible bricks that hung unsupported in the air of the Mario world. If a player didn't know about one of them, he would have the little Mario man run right on by, but a savvy player would know to have the little guy jump up at just the right spot—and bump his head on what had looked like empty air a moment before but was now a brick with one of the glowing mushrooms on it. Catch the mushroom and suddenly you were big. And if it was a lily instead of a mushroom, and you caught that, you could spit fireballs. He jumped now. Nothing. Empty air.

As he drove around on the Strip in the dusty Morris—even as he walked along the morning sidewalks downtown, under the shadow of the Binion's Horseshoe Casino—Snayheever's cheap feathered Indian headdress had not excited much attention. He had bought it for five dollars at the Bonanza souvenir shop at dawn, and had worn it out of the store and not taken it off since, but it was only now, driving the little old Morris slowly through the streets of North Las Vegas, through these little tract-house-and-apartment-complex suburbs west of Nellis Air Force Base, that adults laughed and pointed and honked their car horns, and children shouted and ran madly after the car.

It couldn't be helped. He had to wear feathers today.

Traffic was light this morning. He looked around, noting palm trees throwing long shadows across quiet sidewalks. The residents he saw seemed to be mostly Air Force personnel, and student types who probably went to the Clark County Community College behind him on Cheyenne.

This was his third pass along this section of Cheyenne, and this time he made himself turn right on Civic Center—though he instantly pulled over and put the car into neutral so that he could check his figuring one more time.

He unfolded the AAA map and with a dirty fingernail traced the pencil outline he'd drawn on it.

Yes, there was no mistake, the outline did still look to him like a stylized, angular bird; he thought it was probably a crow or a raven. Usually he traced out patterns that were implicit in the tracks of roads and rivers and boundaries, but this bird pattern was imposed over all such.

The points of the angles were streets with names like Moonlight and Moonmist and Mare. The high point of the bird's tail was a couple of streets called Starlight and Moonlight alongside the 95 out toward the Indian Springs Air Force Base, and the tip of the beak was three streets called Moonglow, Enchanting, and Stargazer at the east edge of town on Lake Mead Boulevard. The diagonal straight line between those two points would contain the point that was the eye of the bird, and sure enough, he had found an intense cluster of streets at the right point, about two thirds down the line toward the tip of the beak—a whole tract with streets named Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Comet, Sun, and Venus.

That tract was now only a block ahead of him.

Venus was obviously the street his mother would live on.

He tromped the clutch and muscled the car back into gear and started forward again. At Venus he turned left.

Along Venus Avenue he saw a lot of two-story apartments and duplexes. He drove slowly down the center of the right lane, lugging in first gear, squinting in the already hot breeze that was blowing in through the rolled-down windows.

How was he to know which place would be his mother's? Would there be clues in the kind of plants out front, the paint, the—

The street number. One of the duplexes had four weathered wooden numbers bolted to the street-facing white stucco wall. The numbers were 1515, but Snayheever read them as letters:

ISIS.

Isis, the Egyptian goddess of the moon.

He had found her house—but he drove on past, tramping the little steel gas pedal and grinding the stick shift into second, for he couldn't approach her
today
.

If he made contact on this here particular Sunday, it would be like—like a king bringing along his army to visit another king. Snayheever was too powerful today; he'd be perceived as imperious rather than how he wanted to be perceived, which was … as supplicating, as humble. He might, it was true, have to do something a little heavy-handed in order to get her attention, but he wouldn't be so presumptuous as to use …
protocol
. And right now the moon was still half a hair on the new side; she'd still be in the weak half of her cycle. And of course she was always weaker in the daytime and only really herself at night. That was why she slept during the day.

Tomorrow night, Monday, the second of April, the moon would be precisely at its half phase. He had discovered that valuable fact only an hour ago, in a newspaper.

He would approach her then.

Crane sat up in the sleeping bag on the motel room floor and tried to shake dream images out of his head.

A rusty lance head and a gold cup. Where had Crane seen them before? Hanging on wires over a chair, long ago, in a—a place that had been home? The memory made his plastic eye ache, and he wasn't sorry that he couldn't trace it. In this last, disjointed fragment of dream the two objects had been set out, with apparent reverence, on a green felt cloth draped over a wooden crate. The light on them was red and blue and golden, as if filtered through stained glass.

Crane's mouth was dry now, though somehow he thought he could taste … what, a dry white wine. A Chardonnay?

The air conditioner was roaring, and the room was cold. There was white light beyond the curtains, but Crane had no idea what time it might be. This was Las Vegas, after all; it could be midnight, and the light outside could all be artificial.

He sighed and rubbed his face with trembling hands.

Again.

He had dreamed about the game on the lake again.

And he had been so exhausted this time—having gone forty-eight hours without sleep—that he had not been able to recoil awake when one of the two vast faces below him in the night had opened its canyon of a mouth and sucked him downward like a wisp of smoke.

He felt the inside of the sleeping bag now, and was glad to find that he had not lost control of his bladder during that part of the dream.

He had spiraled down helplessly through the moonlit abyss of the mouth and down the throat into darkness, and then he was deep under the water of the lake.

Things moved far below him, vast figures that he couldn't see, and that had no real form anyway—but the vibrations of them shook images loose in his mind, as earthquakes in succession might wring chords out of a piano and thus remotely express themselves:

… he saw his real father, weary and old, dressed in a red ermine robe and a hat like a horizontal figure-8, sitting at a table on the wavy edge of a cliff, and on the table was a round collection of coin stacks, and a knife, and a bloody lump that might have been an eyeball;

… and he saw his real father's '47 Buick, as shiny and new as he remembered it, being pulled along the glistening pavement of a rainy street by two harnessed creatures that had the bodies of horses and the heads of men;

… and he saw his foster-sister, Diana, crowned with a tiara like a crescent moon embracing a sun disk, dressed in papal-looking robes and attended by dogs that howled at the moon;

… and between the leafy arms of an oval wreath he saw himself, naked, frozen in a moment of running with one leg bent, while around the outside of the wreath stood an angel, a bull, a lion, and an eagle; and then the perspective changed and the figure that was himself was upside-down, hanging by the straight leg while gravity folded the other;

… and he saw dozens of other figures: Arky Mavranos, walking away across the desert, carrying a bundle of swords as long as stretcher-poles; old Ozzie standing on a sandy hill and leaning on a single sword; Crane's dead wife, Susan, hanging what seemed to be a basketful of hubcaps on a branch of a dead tree …

… and he saw a bodiless, winged cherub's head, pierced through and through with two metallic-looking batons.

The cherub's one eye was staring straight into Crane's one eye, and he screamed and tried to run, but his muscles wouldn't work; he couldn't turn away or even close his eyes. There was nearly no light, and he couldn't breathe; he and the cherub head were far underwater, hidden from the sun and the moon and the stars and the figure that danced on the far cliffs, and he moaned in fear that the thing would open its mouth and speak, for he knew he would have to do what it said.

The dream had become trivial and stiflingly repetitious after that. He had seemed to be in a wide, airless, natural underground pool, trying to find a well up which he could swim to the surface, and there were a lot of wells, but every time he made his way kicking and paddling and bubbling up to the surface of one of them, he found that he was in someone's house—a cigarette would be trailing smoke from an ashtray, or fresh clothes would be draped over a chair and the shower would be running—and, alarmed at the thought of being caught in someone else's place, he had, over and over again, submerged himself and let the air out of his lungs and kicked back down into the darkness of the common pool that underlay all the individual wells. Eventually the hopeless repetition had left him awake, staring up at the white plastic smoke-alarm on the flocked motel ceiling.

The last dream house had been the one where the lance head and the cup lay in a pool of color-stained sunlight on green felt. Without even needing to touch them, he had known that they weren't really there, didn't belong there, and were there even in this illusory form only because there was not, today, any place where they belonged.

Now Crane looked at the digital clock on the bedside table. 2:38 P.M. And there was a note on the table, held down against the air conditioner breeze by a Coors can.

He and Ozzie and Mavranos had checked into this motel at about six-thirty this morning, he recalled now. It was a little ten-unit place somewhere out past the Gold Coast on the wrong side of I-15, he remembered, and a "credit card imprint" had been necessary to get a room. Crane had two Visas in his wallet, one for Scott Crane and one for Susan Iverson-Crane, and Ozzie had made him use Susan's, to avoid being traced by anyone looking up the name
Crane, Scott
.

Crane and Mavranos had let the old man have the bed, and had dragged in a couple of sleeping bags from the Suburban for themselves.

Crane wriggled out of his sleeping bag now and stood up, wincing at the hot pain in his bandaged leg.

Something was wrong. What?

He tried to remember all the events of the last forty-eight hours. Gardena, he thought, and Baker, with that weird kid who played
Go Fish
, and the beer I sneaked in the car … Whiskey Pete's, and the beer and bourbon I got on the way to the men's room … that pickup truck, the man with the hair and the voice, and his friend Max with the gun … the streets around the downtown area, and a dozen goddamn grocery stores, not one of which employed anyone named Diana …

None of it was particularly reassuring, but neither did any of it seem to call for the degree of dread that was speeding his heartbeat and chilling his face. He felt as though he had overlooked something, failed to think of something, and now someone who had depended on him was … frightened, alone with bad people, being hurt.

Caused by me.

He picked up the note. It was in ball-point ink on a piece of a grocery bag.

Archy and I have gone to check out a casino or two,
it read.
Seemed like you could use more sleep. Be back around four.—Oz.

Crane looked at the telephone, and after a moment he realized that his open hand was hovering over the instrument. What
is
it? he asked himself uneasily. Do you want to call somebody, or are you waiting for a call?

His mouth was dry, and his heart was pounding.

Outside, a white Porsche pulled into the motel parking lot.

Al Funo stepped out of the car and stared around quizzically at the row of windows and doors, each door a different bright color. Poor old Crane, he thought.
This
is where he stays when he's in Vegas?

He tucked his sunglasses up into his styled sandy-colored hair as he walked across the lot toward the office. He knew he was going to have to approach Crane a bit more carefully this time. The bullet through the windshield, or something, had apparently spooked him into some elementary caution, and if Funo hadn't gone to the extra trouble of using a jewelery store's ID number to get the details of Crane's credit file from TRW, he'd never have learned about the Iverson-Crane Visa card.

Bells on strings clanged as he pushed open the office door and stepped into the air-conditioned dimness. The floor was shiny green linoleum, and aside from a standing rack of pamphlets and coupon books for tourists, a green vinyl couch was the only furniture.

Just not any class at all, Funo thought sadly.

When a white-haired woman appeared from the little office in the back, he smiled at her with genuine affection. "Hi, I'd like a room, please—probably just for one night."

As he was filling out the form she handed him, he said, "A friend of mine is supposed to be staying here, too—Crane, Scott Crane? We had to drive out separate; I couldn't get the extra day off work."

"Sure," said the old woman. "Crane. Fortyish guy, with two buddies, one with a mustache and the other real old. They're in six, but they just a little bit ago drove off."

"In his red pickup?"

"No, it was a big blue thing, like a cross between a station wagon and a Jeep." She yawned. "I could put you next to them, in five or seven."