Tim Powers - Last Call (39 page)

"Have you visited Scat today?" he interrupted angrily.

Quietly she said, "… No."

"Hmm, somehow I had thought not. Are you going to tonight?"

"I don't know."

"I see. Why don't you consult a Ouija board," he said, his voice quavering with the weight of his sarcasm, "to see if it would be
safe
?"

"
Get out of there
!" she yelled. She had hung up on him then.

If it would be safe.

Alfred Funo, she thought now as the rain clattered in the puddles around her bare feet. Someday I hope to be able to deal with Mr. Alfred Funo.

Funo had vacated the motel before the police arrived there last night, but his exit seemed to have been hasty, and they had found a couple of 9-millimeter bullets under the bed. Diana was in no doubt that Funo was the man who had shot her son.

And there were others out there: this Snayheever creature, and the fat man in the Jaguar, and, according to Ozzie, dozens of others.

Bathe in the fresh, wild water of this place, Ozzie had told her.

Her wet skirt, shoes, blouse, and underwear were draped over a taut cable on a big air-conditioning unit, and now she opened her robe and let it fall behind her and stood naked in the thrashing rain.

Mother,
she thought, looking up at the sky.
Mother, hear your daughter. I need your help.

A minute passed, during which all that happened was that the rain abated a little and the air got colder. The puddles around her feet were fizzing and bubbling, as if she were bathing in soda water. She shivered and clenched her teeth to keep them from chattering.

What am I doing? she asked herself suddenly. I'll be arrested out here. None of this is true.

She turned toward where her clothes hung in the darkness, then paused.

Ozzie believes it, she thought. You owe him a lot; can't you make yourself believe it, too, just for a few minutes?

And what other chance have you and your children got?

What
do
I believe, anyway? That I'm able to find a man to share my life with? That Scat is okay, really? That Oliver is actually a normal boy? That I am able to have the one thing I need like flowers need sunlight, a family that's something more than a pathetic caricature of a family? What reason have you ever had for believing any of
that
?

I will try believing
this
, she thought as tears trickled into the cold rainwater on her face. I am the daughter of the moon goddess. I
am
that. And I can call her.

Again she looked up into the cloudy sky. The rain suddenly came down even harder than before and stung her face and shoulders and breasts, but now, even when the gusting wind made her step back to keep her balance, she wasn't cold. Her heart was pounding, and her outstretched fingers tingled, and the twenty-nine-story abyss beyond the roof edge, which had made her nervous when she had first forced the roof door and stepped out here, was exhilarating.

For a moment an old, old reflex made her wish her foster-brother Scott could be out here experiencing this with her, but she forced the thought away.

Mother.
She tried to throw the thought up into the sky like a spear.
They want to kill
me,
now. Help me fight them.

Dimly through the rushing dark clouds above her she glimpsed for a moment a crescent glowing in the sky.

The clouds seemed now to be huge wings, or capes, and under the hiss of the rain she thought she could hear music, a chorus of thousands of voices, faint only because of titanic distance.

Another hard gust of wind made a horizontal spray of the rain, and all at once she was sure that she wasn't alone on the rooftop.

She braced herself against the taut cable, for the gust had made the tar-paper surface of the roof seem to sway like the deck of a ship. And then her nostrils flared to the impossible briny smell of the sea, and the booming thunder sounded like tall waves crashing against cliffs.

Salt spray stung her eyes, and when she was able to blink around again, she saw, numbly and with a violent shiver, that she
was
on a ship—she was leaning on a wooden railing, and the forecastle ladder was a few yards ahead of her across the planks of the deck. Breakers crashed on rocks somewhere out in the darkness.

It happened when I thought of a ship, she told herself frantically. Something really
is
going on here, but it's dressing itself with my imagination.

Again she could see the glowing crescent above her, but now she saw that it wasn't the moon—and it couldn't have been when she'd seen it a few moments ago, for she remembered that the moon was at its half phase tonight. The crescent was on the crown of a tall woman standing up there on the high forecastle deck. The woman was robed, and her face was strong and beautiful but without any trace of humanity in the open eyes.

The chorus was louder now, perhaps on the shore out in the darkness, and the sounds in the sky were clearly the rushing of wings.

When Diana's forehead touched the wet planks of the deck, she realized that she had fallen to her hands and knees.

For she had realized in the deepest, oldest core of her mind that this was the goddess. This was Isis, who in ancient Egypt had restored the murdered and dismembered sun-god Osiris, who was her brother and husband; this was Ishtar, who in Babylonia had rescued Tammuz from the underworld; she was Artemis, twin sister of Apollo, and she was also both Pallas Athena, the goddess of virginity, and Eileithyia, the goddess of childbirth.

To her the Greeks had sacrificed a maiden before sailing to Troy; she had restored life to her son Horus, slain by the bite of a scorpion; and though wild animals were sacred to her, she was the huntress of the gods.

This was Persephone, the maiden of the spring and the lover of Adonis, who had been stolen away to the underworld by the king of the dead.

Then the awe had washed through Diana, or had been broken for her, and again she was aware of herself as a woman named Diana Ryan, resident of a city called Las Vegas.

She stood up, carefully, on the shifting deck.

The woman on the higher deck was looking into her eyes, and Diana realized that the woman loved her, had loved her as an infant and had continued to love her during these thirty years of their separation.

Mother!
Diana thought, and started forward. The deck planks were bumpily slick under her bare soles.

But now there were figures between herself and the ladder, facing her and blocking her way. She squinted through the spray at the nearest one—and, suddenly and completely, she felt the night's cold.

It was Wally Ryan, her ex-husband, who had died in the car crash two years ago. His eyes, under his rain-plastered hair, were placid and blank—but it was clear that he would not let her pass.

Next to him stood Hans, his scanty beard dark with rain. Oh, no, she thought, is he a ghost, too? Did they kill him trying to get me? But I talked to him less than an hour ago!

There were a couple of other figures, too, but she didn't look at their faces.

She looked up at the woman, who seemed to be staring down at her with love and pity.

Diana stepped back. The booming of surf was louder. The half-heard song of the distant chorusing voices had taken on a threatening monotony.

They're not ghosts, she thought. That's not what this is about. Hans isn't dead. These are images of the men who have been my lovers.

The men I've lived with are keeping me from going to my mother.

As she'd been able to do in dreams that had begun to dissolve into wakefulness, Diana tried to will the phantoms away—but they stayed where they were, as apparently solid as the deck and the railing. This was her own imagination, but she wasn't in control.

Why? she thought unhappily. Was I supposed to have stayed a
virgin
all these years?

She squinted up through the rain into the eyes of the goddess, and she tried to believe that the answer was no. For a length of time that might have been no more than a minute, while the figures in front of her didn't move except to sway with the rocking deck, and the rain rattled like chips of clay on the deck all around her, she went on trying to believe that the answer was no.

Eventually she gave up.

Mentally she tried to convey the idea that it wasn't fair, that she was a person living in this world, not some other world.

Then, looking down at her own bare feet on the deck, she tried to remember, for her mother, what each of the circumstances had been.

And she couldn't remember.

Mother,
she thought, looking up again in despair,
is there no way for me to reach you?

And then a concept flashed into her mind, abstract and free of any words or images. As it faded, she tried to hold words up to it to define it for herself—
Token?
she thought;
relic, link, talisman, keepsake?
Something from some time when we were together?

Then it was gone, and all she had left were the remembered words she had tried to fit to it.

Lightning flared out over the lights of the city, and the following boom was thunder, not surf. She was on the roof of the Circus Circus, alone and shivering in the rain.

She stood for several minutes, looking into the sky; then she reluctantly got back into her sopping clothes and shuffled away toward the roof door.

Nardie Dinh had felt it coming, the terribly close approach of the moon, which was not yet her own mother.

Luckily she hadn't had a fare. She had spun the cab's wheel and cut across two wet lanes of the Strip, drawing angry honks from the cars behind her, and stomped the cab to a halt at a red curb by the Hacienda Camperland south of Tropicana Avenue.

Even as she was switching off the engine, she lost consciousness.

And she dreamed. In the dream she was back in the long, high-ceilinged room in the parlor house near Tonopah, and though the twenty-two pictures on the walls seemed to be moving in their frames, she didn't look at them.

The walls boomed and creaked around her, as if all the girls in the little rooms around this one were busy with enormous clients, minotaurs and satyrs instead of mere businessmen and truck drivers. She sat down on the carpeted floor and made herself breathe evenly, quietly; hoping that, even in a dream, her brother's ruling would still apply—that his half-sister was to be a prisoner in the midst of this carnal focus but was not to participate in any way.

The pictures were making sounds now. She could hear faint laughter and screaming and martial music. Their frames were rattling against the plaster walls.

Then there was another rattling, the knob of the door in front of her. With her hands and feet she scuffed herself backward until she was stopped by the wall opposite the door. Above her, she remembered, hung the picture of the Fool.

The door swung open, and her brother stepped into the room.

His black hair was oiled and swept back in a ducktail, but incongruously he wore a floor-length sable robe. In his right hand he carried a tall gold cross with a looped top, the Egyptian ankh.

"Dreaming at last, my sweet little Asian sister," said Ray-Joe Pogue in his affectedly mellifluous voice. His lean face was twisted into a smile, and he walked slowly toward her. The pictures banged violently against the walls as he passed them. "And you've saved yourself for me."

"Not for you," she managed to say, loudly enough to be heard over all the racket.
Wake up,
she told herself urgently.
Push your forehead into the horn ring, open the car door, listen for calls from the dispatcher.

"And right here in town, eh?" he said. "South of me, down by the Marina and the Tropicana. I'm on my way. You and I have got a lot of lost time to make up for. Without the female half of the magic, I've been running into obstacles. I had to kill Max, and then Lake Mead wouldn't take his head. I think the lake might take it from you, or from the two of us once we've coupled. Shall we go see?"

She stood up slowly, dragging her back against the wall, and even when she felt the shaking edge of the Fool's frame against her shoulders, she kept pushing.

The picture came loose from its nail and fell, and for an instant she saw her brother's mouth drop open in dismay—and when the picture hit the floor, the sound it made wasn't that of wood hitting carpet.

It was the sound of a car horn, and when she lifted her head from the steering wheel the blaring honk stopped, and she sat back, gasping in the driver's seat of her parked taxicab, and watched the windshield wipers sweep away the hard spattering of the rain. With a trembling hand she reached out and twisted the key in the ignition.

The engine started right up, and she put it in gear and carefully pulled out into the traffic.

Escaped it that time, she thought shakily, but now he knows I'm in town. I'll get on the 15 north right now, and get off somewhere up around Fremont Street.

Her face was chilly with sweat.

If I knew how to pray, she thought, I'd say a prayer for the soul of poor old Max, who once loved me, may he nevertheless burn in hell forever.

In the back seat of his newly bought '71 Dodge, parked on a dark side street, Al Funo stretched out and tried to get comfortable. The previous owners had apparently had a dog that liked to travel in the car but hated to take baths.

He had sold his Porsche to a car dealer on Charleston in order to buy classy gifts for Diana and Scott. The two long black jewelry boxes—two solid gold rope necklaces that had cost him nearly a thousand dollars each—were wrapped up in his jacket on the front seat.

He had
had
to buy gifts for his friends, to clear up any misunderstandings—but he was still angry at the car dealer, who had called the Porsche 924 "just a glorified Volkswagen," and had given Funo only thirty-five hundred dollars for it. This Dodge had cost him a thousand, leaving him at the end of the day with only about five hundred dollars. And he didn't want to use a credit card if he could help it; the police would almost certainly know who he was by now, and if he used a card, he'd be leaving a trail.