Tim Powers - Last Call (47 page)

And Susan had gone prancing away across the desert with the other two bottles. Perhaps she would slow down for him.

Through the rheumy eyes of Richard Leroy, Georges Leon watched Crane go stumbling away after the capering figure of Death, and Leroy's mouth smiled with Leon's satisfaction.

There was no problem here. He had accompanied Trumbill on this particular initiation only because there had been something about Scott Crane that had murkily upset him when he had been in the Betsy Reculver body.

He sighed to think of Reculver, whose body Trumbill had buried—intact, as Leon had insisted—in the backyard of the house on Renaissance Drive.

Betsy Reculver had been nineteen when he first saw her—at the first game on the lake, in 1949. She had had a long-legged, coltish grace then, with her brown bangs falling over her eyes as she squinted at her cards, grinning mischievously every time she raised; and when he had cut the deck for the Assumption and won her body, he had been sourly aware of his scarred and featureless crotch, and had wished for a moment that he could have made her his literal Queen rather than one of his honorary children.

And it had been right here, twenty years later in 1969, in this magically conjured ruined chapel, that he had last seen the person who she had been.

Of course, by that time drink and bad dreams had long since pounded the elfin charm out of her, but at thirty-nine she had still been a strikingly good-looking woman. And she had held her chin up as she had followed Dionysus-and-Death, which Leon recalled had taken for her the form of her father, out into the broken chapel of the barren land.

It was generally the image of a family member that they projected onto the destroying face of Dionysus. With Crane, for a while lately, it had seemed to be a wizened fragment of a little boy, but now, at the end, here, it had again been the image of his dead wife—until it had cast off all images and stood naked and undeniable before him.

But, true to form, he was still chasing it.

Leon looked back the way they'd come, at the jagged walls that hid the highway. He couldn't sense any human personalities out there, not even the security guard. Perhaps the man was asleep and not dreaming.

He wondered if his original body, ninety-one years old now, was going to follow them out here. Leon knew he should keep better track of the damned old thing, which, if nothing else, was the reservoir of Leon's original DNA. If the cloning of human bodies should one day become a reality, that old, senile jug of blood could be used to make another copy of his real body, complete with genitalia, and Leon could assume
it
in a game and be back where he'd been before that disastrous shotgun blast in 1948.

Leon spat into the sand at his feet and watched the spit sizzle. But Doctor Leaky was such a humiliating caricature. And Leon had made sure that samples of the blood were preserved in any number of blood banks throughout the world.

Let the old son of a bitch walk out in front of a bus some day, Leon thought. I won't be responsible; in no sense will I have killed anything that could be called me.

Leon looked at Trumbill, sweating beside him and chewing up another celery stick. The fat man was digging snacks out of his pockets more quickly now that the figure of Death was undisguised.

"I'll follow along with him through one more of the Major Arcana," Leon said.

Trumbill nodded, his mouth full and working, and the two of them started forward again.

Ozzie had been hunching along slowly outside the broken wall, panting and blinking sweat out of his eyes and grinding his teeth with the shoulder ache of constantly holding five playing cards up in front of him—face out, so that every time he glanced up, he was staring at five images of the naked woman's smiling face on the backs of the cards. He kept being reminded of Macduff's soldiers in
Macbeth
, sneaking up on Dunsinane Castle and holding up clusters of branches as disguise.

Every hundred feet or so he had paused and walked windshield, in a tight counterclockwise circle, as he flexed his cramping fingers and then fumbled through the cards and selected another five for fresh cover. Always he had selected five that were full of contradictions, like impotence and promiscuity, or infancy and senility, or hysteria and cunning; such combinations constituted null sets that indicated no human mind behind them, and at the same time were somehow portraits of this place, and so served as a kind of psychic camouflage.

The massive gray stones of the wall were rippled and eroded as if by centuries of harsh weather, but he could sometimes see figures that had at one time been etched so deeply that they were still visible in the harsh sunlight as faint scratches. He saw angular suns and moons, and writing that looked like bus route maps, all long lines with cross-hatchings at different angles, and at one place a crude picture of fish attacking the underbelly of a stag.

And some of the stones were cold when he braced himself against them, and some were dark as if in shadow though the cobalt sky was cloudless, and two were wet with water that tasted like salty brine on Ozzie's fingertip. This ruined cathedral, or whatever it was, was clearly not entirely in
this
place—perhaps not even entirely in any one time.

He'd been careful never to
shuffle
the cards; God knew what forceful old portraits the deck would assume, or what attention it would bring.

Whenever the wall was broken down low enough to see over, he peeked carefully. Crane and the woman he was walking with had taken so long climbing into and out of the long, interrupted trench that he had been able to keep up with them even at this halting pace, and of course the fat man and his white-haired companion were only pacing Crane.

The four figures inside had hesitated in front of the second doorway, and Ozzie had been able to crouch and watch them over a belt-high section of the wall. The fat man had fired his shotgun, and Ozzie had been standing up straight in an instant, sighting down the gleaming stainless steel barrel of the guard's .38 at the center of the fat man's back, before he realized that the shot had been aimed at a tumble weed.

He had lowered the hammer shakily. It would have been too long a shot, and the white-haired man would have dived for cover and begun firing back at him, and it was only the white-haired man that Ozzie really
wanted
, anyway.

That would be the body that Crane's real father, who had probably arranged Diana's death, was currently occupying. There was even a chance, just a chance, that it was the only body that the old psychic cannibal had left.

It's time, Ozzie thought, to quit all this tiptoeing around and get in close.

But
can
I shoot another person from behind, with no warning?

Shooting the security guard in the back of the head had been, and still was, too enormous and appalling a thing for him to encompass, like staring straight into the noon sun.

Find out when you get there, he told himself.

He tucked the revolver into his belt and, awkwardly and painfully, climbed over the cold, wet wall in the hot sun.

Crane had stumbled only a dozen yards after his terrible bride when his wounded thigh seized up on him, and he thudded heavily to the hot sand. Ants like curled copper shavings crawled busily over the backs of his hands.

Footsteps crunched behind him, and he looked back. The fat man and his indistinct companion stood now on the sand just a few steps this side of the last doorway. Seen through Crane's false eye, the face of the companion was a bright, flickering blur, as if in some sense he were whirling very fast.

And now there was a third old man, standing in the half shadow of the broken doorway behind the other two, and after a moment Crane recognized him—it was his foster father, Ozzie. Ozzie was carrying a net bag with three gold cups in it, and he was holding out a fourth cup in his right hand.

Crane was only impatient, certain that his old foster-father couldn't have anything important to say or do here, but he closed his right eye and reached up to pry open his swollen-shut left eye.

Now he saw that Ozzie was holding a big steel revolver, pointing it steadily at the backs of the two other old men. He seemed to be hesitating; then, "Freeze," Ozzie said loudly.

The two men spun toward the sudden voice, and even as they began to scramble and the fat man grabbed the barrel of the shotgun to raise it, Ozzie's gun boomed twice.

Blood sprayed across Crane as the fat man's indistinct-faced companion nodded violently and then rebounded over backward and hit the sand with his shoulders and the blown-out back of his head—and the fat man staggered.

But he managed to raise the shotgun and fire it.

Ozzie's white shirt exploded in a red spray as the buckshot punched him off his feet.

All of Crane's dry maturity was blown away in the hard explosion of that shot, and his mouth was open in a wordless scream of denial as he started forward.

The fat man spun awkwardly, wincing as he pulled the shotgun's slide back and shoved it forward again, the gun's machinery silent in the shocked, ringing air.

The barrel was pointed at Crane's knee, and he skidded to a halt.

The fat man's face was pale as milk, and bright blood was spilling over his right eyebrow and down his neck from the gash Ozzie's bullet had torn across his temple over his ear. He was slowly saying something, but Crane's ears weren't working. Then the fat man stared at the corpse of his companion.

Crane felt hollowed and stricken, as if the blast of shot had hit
him
in the chest; he couldn't look at Ozzie, so for a moment he just followed the fat man's gaze.

The blurringly fast changes in the holed face were slowing down, and Crane could see the face from moment to moment as that of an old man with a crown, and of a vital, tanned, dark-haired man, and of a little boy. The dark-haired man was of course the Ricky Leroy who had hosted the Assumption game on the lake in '69 … but it was when he recognized the little-boy face that Crane fell to his knees with shock.

It was the face of his nearly forgotten older brother, Richard, who had been the infant Scott's playmate in the days before the older brother lost all personality and took up his position as lookout on the roof of the Bridger Avenue bungalow.

The shifting faces were replacing each other more and more slowly, and finally it was the old man who lay on the stony ground, the crown no longer visible.

Crane braced himself in the sand with one hand and hesitantly touched the blood-spattered white hair with the other, but this had been a corpse for a long time, since at least 1949.

At last Crane lifted his head and began crawling on his hands and knees to where Ozzie lay sprawled and bloody and motionless on the gravelly dirt.

Peripherally he was aware that the fat man had bent to pick up the revolver and was now plodding slowly away, back through the doorway toward where the highway and the parked Jaguar waited; and then Crane noticed the figure that was now crouched over Ozzie's body.

It was the dried-out Susan, her starvation smile turned on Crane like a bright light through a poisoned fish tank. Her mad leaping had shredded the leathery skin from her, and now she was a sexless skeleton draped only with the most tenuous shreds of organic stuff.

Crane realized that this was no longer drink, Dionysus. This was indifferent Death. This was nobody's ally.

And it had taken Ozzie. Crane couldn't look at the old man's devastated chest; he stared instead at the old, wrinkled hands that had held and discarded and drawn so many cards and now held nothing at all.

Death slowly reached out and touched Ozzie's forehead with a skeletal finger—and Ozzie's body collapsed into gray dust, leaving only the crumpled, pitiful old-man's-suit, and an instant later a hot gust of wind blinded Crane with sand and whirled the clothing and the dust away, over the ruined walls and across the desert's miles-wide face.

The sudden wind had rolled Crane over onto his back, and after it had gone scouring away toward the mountains, he sat up and blinked sand out of his eyes. The animated skeleton was gone, and except for the corpse of Richard Leroy, Crane was alone in the desolate ruins.

The sun was hot on his head; his ludicrous cap had been blown away. He got laboriously to his feet and looked around at the broken walls.

You think your old man's nuts, don't you?
he remembered Ozzie saying, on that night in 1960 when they had driven out here to find Diana; and he remembered Ozzie scuffling desperately after him down the stairwell of the Mint Hotel, crying and pleading, when Crane had left to play on the lake in 1969; and he remembered how fragile and dapper the old man had looked on Sunday morning—only four days ago!—when he and Arky had met him on Balboa Island.

Go back to your Louis L'Amour novels and your Kaywoodie pipes,
Crane had told him yesterday. But the old man had not, after all, been willing to go gentle into that good night, to roll with the dying of the light.

Was Crane willing to, now?

He looked at some dark spots spattered on the stone wall. They were probably Ozzie's blood.

No, not now. He started limping back toward the highway.

Diana strode along the railed second-floor cement walkway in the gold light of early evening, looking at the numbers on the apartment doors she passed. There was a pool in the courtyard below, and the air smelled of chlorine.

She had alternately dozed and worried for most of the day on a grassy hill at Clark County Community College, using the balled-up old baby blanket as a pillow. Often in the past she had thought it would be nice to get some time away from Scat and Oliver, but now that she had it she could hardly make herself think of anything but them. Had Ozzie got Oliver to Helen Sully's house in Searchlight? Diana had called Helen's number, but there was no answer there. Had Funo or somebody followed Ozzie and killed him and her son? Had some player in this terrible mess gone to the hospital and killed Scat since her last call?