Tim Powers - Last Call (74 page)

Crane could see that whatever had happened had cost Mavranos. "Okay, Arky." He reached out and squeezed Mavranos's elbow.

Mavranos stepped away from him. "None of your fag tricks."

"Seriously, Arky, thank you."

"Don't …
thank
me." Mavranos unknotted his bandanna and tossed it into a planter they were walking past. "Pogue's magic was a—a randomness thing, disorder, chaos—and when he … died, the dam snapped back into order. It was a phase-change like what would have set Winfree's mosquitoes all doing the chorale from Beethoven's Ninth, with Busby Berkeley dance steps."

Crane blinked at his friend and wondered if he was too tired to be understanding what Mavranos was saying. "You mean you think …?"

Mavranos touched the lump under his ear. "I swear it's smaller already, perceptibly smaller, than it was on the drive down here."

Crane was laughing and blinking rapidly and shaking Mavranos's hand. "That's terrific, man! Goddamn, I can't tell you—"

And then they were hugging in the middle of the sidewalk, and even Mavranos ignored the hoots and catcalls.

With their arms around each other's shoulders they stepped up to the lobby doors of the Lakeview Lodge and shoved through and hurried breathlessly into the dark bar.

Diana and Nardie pushed away from the table at which they'd been waiting, and though they winced and limped like people who have recently had too much exercise, they were laughing when they hobbled over and hugged Crane and Mavranos.

They all sat down, and Mavranos ordered a Coors—and then made that two, one for Nardie. Crane and Diana both ordered soda water.

"You sold it to him," Diana said to Crane when the cocktail waitress had walked off toward the bar.

"Yes, finally." Crane rubbed his hands down his face, not caring what his makeup looked like. His right eye socket stung. "And I think my arachnoid is infected."

"Spider," said Mavranos, translating the word. "Spiderlike. What, something about Spider Joe?"

"It's a part of the brain," said Crane through his hands. "It gets infected when you've got, uh, meningitis. The socket of my missing eye is just … on fire." He lowered his hands and leaned back in the booth. "I've got the saline solution and rubber bulb in my purse. As soon as we trade news, I'll go to the head and rinse out the socket."

Diana has seized his shoulder. "
No
," she said now, urgently, "you're going to a doctor, are you crazy? My God,
meningitis
? I'm going to drive out to Searchlight in a couple of minutes to finally get poor Oliver. I can drop you off at a hospital—"

"Tomorrow," he said, "I'll see a doctor. I've got to be back here at the lake at dawn. My father will want to start assuming bodies as soon as the sun's up, and I've got to see the end. And I want to disarm and ditch the two decks of cards, if I can, if the … poisoned sugar cube gets him." He blinked at her through his good eye. "Tomorrow," he repeated. "Not before."

The drinks arrived then, and Crane took a deep gulp of the cold but comfortless soda water. He inhaled. "So," he said, "did you ladies get your bath?"

Diana let go of Crane's shoulder and sat back, still frowning.

Nardie drank a third of her beer. "Eventually," she said with a shiver.

She described the phantom statues that had tried to stop them and how she and Diana had fought them and then finally dispelled them by actually
eating
the yin-yang Moulin Rouge chip.

Mavranos brushed beer out of his mustache and smiled crookedly at Crane. "Weird sort of sacrament."

Nardie picked up Diana's glass of soda water. "And then when we finally got into the lake," she said softly, "before we got out to where we could duck under, the water was fizzing around Diana's feet, like this!" She swirled Diana's glass, and bubbles whirled up in it, hissing. "And for just a second, before the wind blew it out, there were—you could hardly see it in the sunlight, okay?—
flames
around her ankles!"

"Sounds like
electrolysis
," said Mavranos. He was looking into his beer, and Crane guessed that he had somehow been directly responsible for the death of Nardie's half brother out there at the dam and now didn't want to look her in the eye. "You were busting apart the H
₂
and the O, Diana. I remember ol' Ozzie saying Lake Mead was tamed water; maybe you untamed it."

"I did," Diana said. "With help from all of you. The bubbling kept up nearly the whole time I was in the water, and I could … feel, or hear or see,
ride
the whole wild extent of it. I could feel the houseboat spinning north of me, and I felt the shaking at the dam."

Nardie had drained her beer and waved the empty glass at the bartender. "So," she said to Mavranos in a conversational tone, "did you kill my brother?"

Mavranos let go of his beer glass, and Crane thought it was because he was afraid he might crush it in his fist. Mavranos's eyes were closed, and he nodded. "I did," he said. "I—in effect I pushed him off the downstream wall of the dam. Snayheever, too—I killed both of them."

Crane was looking at Nardie now, and for an instant had seen her eyes widen and her mouth sag. Then she put on a battered smile, and she tapped the back of one of Mavranos's scarred hands.

"Each of us has killed someone," she said, a little huskily, "in this. Why'd you ever think you'd be special?"

Crane realized that was true: himself, Vaughan Trumbill; Nardie, that woman in the whorehouse outside Tonopah; Diana, probably Al Funo. And now Mavranos had broken a part of himself in the same way.

"Doctor, my
eye
," Crane sang softly, pushing his chair back and standing up. "I've got to go irrigate the cavity."

Mavranos got up, too, awkwardly. "I gotta call Wendy," he said. "Home tomorrow?"

"You'll probably be home by lunchtime," said Crane.

Nardie reached out and caught Mavranos's flannel sleeve. "Arky," she said, "I'd have had to do it myself, if you hadn't. And it would have hurt me more than it's hurting you. Thank you."

Mavranos nodded and patted her hand, still not looking at her. "I appreciate that, Nardie," he said gruffly, "but don't
thank
me."

He and Crane walked away toward the rest rooms and the telephones, and Nardie and Diana silently sipped their different drinks.

Mosca:
Are not you he that have to-day in court
Profess'd the disinheriting of your son?
Perjured yourself? Go home, and die, and stink.

—Ben Johnson,
Volpone

But were I joined with her,
Then might we live together as one life,
And reigning with one will in everything
Have power on this dark land to lighten it,
And power on this dead world to make it live.

—Alfred, Lord Tennyson,
Idylls of the King

Dawn would be soon, and had already paled the blue sky behind the mountains ahead of them, but out the back windows of the roaring and rattling truck the sky was still a dark purple.

Nardie was in the front seat next to Mavranos, and Diana and young Oliver were in the back seat, and Crane, once again wearing his beat Adidas and a pair of jeans and a long-sleeve shirt, was half lying down in the truck bed among the scattered books and empty beer cans and crescent-wrench sets. His eye hurt. The truck smelled as though Mavranos used old french-fry grease in the engine.

Oliver sat close to his mother. She had talked to him on the telephone several times since he had seen their house blow up and thought that she was in it, but it seemed he hadn't
really
believed she was alive until she had hugged him in Helen Sully's yard in Searchlight yesterday afternoon, and even now he had to keep checking.

Mavranos made the left turn off Highway 93 onto the narrower Lake Shore Road, past the still-dark Visitor Center building.

He lit a cigarette, and Nardie rolled down her window. The morning air was chilly and fresh. "Maybe he'll have taken the cards and just gone off somewhere," said Mavranos, sounding almost hopeful.

"No," Nardie told him. "To take the bodies, to in effect give multiple birth to himself, he needs a token mother, and the lake's that. He'll still be on the boat."

"I don't think the lake's just a token anymore," Mavranos said.

Crane shuddered, dreading confronting his father. He could feel the bulk of the Lombardy Zeroth deck in the inside pocket of his Levi's jacket.

Diana hiked around on the seat and looked back at him. "How's the eye?" she asked softly.

"Won't be any different an hour from now, when I can be in an emergency room." He didn't tell her that when he had squirted the saline solution into the socket yesterday he had felt the painful bulge of some sort of tumor in there.

He clutched his elbows to stop shaking. Diana looked twenty years old now, and almost inhumanly beautiful with the blond hair blowing around the smooth lines of her jaw and throat. It would be too horrible to win her and then have some doctor give him a death sentence. For the first time he thought he understood what Mavranos must have been feeling during these past months.

"I can see the lake," said Oliver softly, pointing.

Mavranos stopped the truck in the parking lot of an all-night Denny's restaurant by the marina, and everyone climbed out to stretch in the chilly predawn air.

"Nardie and Diana and Oliver can wait inside the restaurant here while Scott and I go to the boat," Mavranos said quietly as he walked around to the back of the truck and unlocked the lift-gate and swung it up; the ratchety
click-click-click
of the struts was loud in the empty parking lot. "If we're not back in—what do you think?"

Crane shrugged, still shivering. "An hour," he said.

"Call it an hour and a half," said Mavranos. "If we're not back by then, just go away. Leave a message for us at the Circus Circus desk." He looked around the nearly empty parking lot. "And if Crane comes back alone …"

"Call the police or something," Crane bleakly finished for him. He touched his still-bleeding side. "My father might have assumed this body after all, and it'd be him, not me."

"And Oliver," Mavranos went on sternly, "no funny phone calls, right?"

Oliver pressed his lips together and shook his head and mumbled something.

Mavranos leaned toward him. "What?"

Nardie shrugged at him. "He, uh, says he isn't going to steal any more of your beers, either."

"Huh. Well—okay." Standing so as to block the view from the yellow-lit restaurant windows, Mavranos passed Crane the .357. Then he wrapped the short-barrel pistol-grip shotgun in a nylon windbreaker and laid it on the asphalt.

He pushed the lift-gate up and let it slam shut, then turned the key in its lock and opened his mouth as if to say something—

—But Crane had gasped involuntarily and pressed the fingers of one hand against his right cheek and forehead. The pain in the eye socket had suddenly become a bright, razoring heat, and he hastily pried out the hemisphere of intrusive plastic and let it fall to the asphalt.

"He's being assumed!" yelled Oliver fearfully, scrambling back away from the truck.

Diana caught Crane by his free elbow, and over the pain in his head he realized she must think he was about to fall.

Embolism,
Crane thought in fright as the expanding, bulging pressure in the socket drove a shrill moan up against his clenched teeth.
A stroke, I'm having a stroke.

"Scott," Diana yelled, catching his other arm, too, and shaking him, "you're in no shape to do this!"

He was hunched over, his chin on his chest and his knees shaking.

Then, abruptly, the pain backed off. Tears, and perhaps blood, were running out of the eye, but he blinked in sudden astonishment down at his knees and his shoes and the pavement.

He was seeing them as three dimensional.

He blinked both his eyes and realized, too numbed with shock even to be glad, that he
had
two eyes.

The new eye stung, and was involuntarily blinking in the unaccustomed light, but the savage pain had evaporated.

"What did you say?" he asked hoarsely.

Diana was still holding his arms tightly. "I said you're in no shape for this!"

He took a deep breath, then straightened up and squinted at her. "Actually … I think I … finally
am
in shape for this."

All four of his companions stared at him in uncomprehending alarm.

"You … put the fake eye back in?" faltered Diana, glancing down at the pavement. "I thought you—shouldn't you—"

"He grew a new one," said Nardie flatly. "You and Scott are both now … what, at your physical peaks, okay?—except for the wound in the side that the King always has."

"Jesus," said Mavranos softly.

Diana was still clutching Crane's elbow, and now she tugged at him. "Come over here, Scott." Crane and Diana walked a dozen steps away and stood by the coping of a dusty redwood planter.

"You grew a new goddamn
eye
?" she said. "Is that
true
!?"

"Yes." Crane was breathing rapidly.
I'm not dying,
he thought tentatively.

"Scott," she said with quiet urgency, "
what's happening here
!"

"I think—I think it's going to happen," he said unsteadily; his throat was quivering with imminent laughter or sobbing. "I think you and I are about to … become the Queen and the King."

Both of them were breathing fast.

"What—
today
! What does it mean? What will we do?"

Crane spread his hands helplessly. "I don't know. Get married, be fertile, have children, work, plant gardens—"

Diana almost seemed angry. "—get special T-shirts, print up some letterhead."

Crane grinned at her, but took a deep breath and went on seriously. "If we're healthy and productive, you and I, so will the land be. The land, and us, are going to be sort of voodoo dolls of each other." He thought of the dull, constant pain in his wounded side. "Warning lights for each other."

His fingers brushed her blond hair. "We may lose this honorary youthfulness in the winters, but I'll bet we'll get at least most of it back each spring. I hope it'll be a good long time before those winters start to get too harsh."