We don’t go in through the main gate. We go in through a little gate in the side wall. The moment we step inside the place, I get how weird things are. Above the Mission is a patch of wu luz that filters the sunlight just enough to give everything in the place this kind of angel glow. It’s like being in the eye of a storm. I didn’t know fog had eyes.
Faces peer out at us from winnebago windows. The guys I’m with seem real edgy, too, eyes going every-which-way. It’s clear there’s no work going on in here.
We’re almost to John Makepeace’s personal winnebago when a silky banner of mist drifts across our path and the guy next to me slices through it with his laser pistol and a wild shriek.
Weird.
John Makepeace himself slams open the door of his winnebago, reaches down with both hands and hauls me up the stairs by my collar. He flings me so hard across the little room, I flip over the table and into the bench seat on the other side. It’s not a smooth landing, ‘cause my hands are tied behind my back.
Next thing I know, I’m right-side up again and looking hard into John M’s face, which at this moment is almost as red as his beard.
“All right, you conniving little bastard. Call off your dogs or, I swear, we’ll drop every one of them.”
“My dogs?” I repeat, wondering if John and I are on the same planet.
“You heard me. Tell them to cut the crap or — “
“I don’t get it, John. I don’t have any dogs. “
“You know what I’m talking about, you little cheese ball.” John’s face is getting redder by the second. “The spooks, the haunts. You remember them: first you pretended not to know about them, then you decided they were the Minions of Darkness. Well, I think it’s pretty clear whose minions they are. And I’ve never heard of ghosts that tinkered with machinery. Now, I’m going to take you out there — “ He nods toward the door. “ — and I want you to tell your buddies two things: one, they stop this harassment of my crews right now, or they’re going to end up with their sheets full of holes, and two, they give back the components they took out of the satellite dish.”
I blink and try to look muy innocent. “You mean, it’s broken?”
“You’re damn right it’s broken.”
“Then, you can’t phone home and call in reinforcements.”
I give him a certain look, hoping he will see that his situation is deteriorating.
He does. And he reacts to this observation by rapping my skull against the window behind me and snarling, “Look, weirdo, my crews are cut off from home, sitting on a fault line, and surrounded by fog, legends, and a pack of schizophrenic indigents who have exploited their every nightmare. I’ve offered them extra pay and bonuses and paid time off — you name it — but right now, every other man’s ready to quit. Ty’s threatening to take his crew and bug out right now and — ”
He fumes for a moment, then finishes, “ — and I just lost contact with the group in Golden Gate Park. Either they’ve been put out of business, or they’ve broken camp. Now, I’m telling you, Taco Shell, you are going to show these boneheads that these spooks are bogus before somebody really gets hurt.”
He hauls me to my feet and aims me at the door.
“So, no one’s been hurt yet?” I ask.
He shoves me out the door before answering. After he has picked my sorry ass up off the flagstones, he says, “Actually, a few of my guys have managed to break some bones and singe each other. Naturally, they blame it on the spooks and not on their own careless stupidity.”
He commences to dragging me toward the sanctuary. Shabu dong pulls apart before us like gauzy curtains and glides back behind.
“So you...you haven’t shot any of the haunts?”
“Not yet. But if they don’t stop their haunting, we will.”
“I don’t get it, John,” I say, ‘cause I don’t. “Coming in, you didn’t have any queasies about wiping out a couple city blocks of Potrero-Taraval, Potreros and all. I know. I buried some of them. Burying the kids was the hardest.”
I check out his face. He looks pretty grim.
“You’re lying,” he informs me. “We didn’t target any kids. Only people who were attacking us.”
“No, John. I’m not lying, and I think you know I’m not lying. And it doesn’t matter that you didn’t target them. They still ended up dead. Collateral damage, I think they used to call it in wars. So, I gotta wonder what you’re waiting for here. I kind of think if you could shoot these haunts, you would. So, why don’t you?”
He doesn’t answer, just drags me up to the top of the sanctuary steps, turns me around and addresses the shabu dong thusly, “Listen up, all you ghosties and ghoulies. I’ve got your feckless leader here. Make no mistake, this is a threat. You pack up your bed sheets and get the hell out of here or people are going to get hurt — starting with El Loco, here.”
The shabu dong has been minding its own business up to now, eddying here and there, sniffing at our heels a bit. At the end of John M’s pronouncement, there is a sudden stoppage of dong. The courtyard is so quiet, I can hear water dripping from the church roof and pigeons mumbling under the eaves.
Then, weird stuff happens — stuff I seen before real recently, only not in a real place as I recall. The shabu gets muy, muy dong and begins to coil into columns and spirals that I suspect are going to look very human before too long.
Huh, I marvel, not Hoot and Lou after all.
A couple of laser bolts zing across the courtyard. One hits a tree, another zaps the corner eave of the church and sends plaster flying away in scorched chunks.
“Hell,” mutters John Makepeace, then bellows, “Hold your fire!”
He gives me a hard shove, then yanks me back by the rope around my hands, obviously forgetting that arms don’t bend that way.
“Tell them,” he snarls. “Tell them to get lost.”
“Sorry, John,” I say, “I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
I feel the muzzle of his laser pistol glide, cold, alongside my neck.
Yow.
“I mean, yeah,” I say quickly, “I can tell them to get lost. I can tell them anything you want, but I don’t s’pect it’d do any good. They’re not my guys. I can’t control them.”
I can’t control my face, either. It just starts grinning bigtime. Master Ho was right, the city does have a soul and the Ohlone are part of it and probably always will be. They’re the spirits of this place, after all.
Whoa. I have understood monk-speak. Anything can happen.
I laugh — an untimely and ill-advised move.
“What are you laughing at, you nit-wit?” roars John Makepeace and clobbers me upside the head, then grabs a fistful of my hair to keep me on my feet. “What do you mean, they’re not your guys? You mean they belong to that moron, Lord E?”
“No, I mean they don’t belong to anybody. They’re spirits.”
“Aw, jeez,” John M says, then adds a few more colorful comments, taking the names of several Prophets in vain. "Are we back to that crap about the Minions of Darkness? Are you going to pull out that old Chinese wizard our of your hat again?”
“I don’t own a hat. And the old Chinese wizard is out of the picture,” I explain, my eyes on what’s shaping up in the courtyard.
I wonder which funnel-o-fog is Pedro? I wonder if his son, Delmar, and Paguin the Shaman are here, too.
“And this isn’t the Minions of Darkness, either. This is the Dolores.”
“The who?”
“The spirits of this place. The soul of the Gam Saan.”
“That’s bullshit! There are no spirits. You’ve got some sort of technology you’ve been hiding from us. You — ” He breaks of and glances sideways at me. “Damn. What the hell am I saying? You’re such a backward bunch of — If they’re not your people, why would they defend you?”
“Maybe ‘cause we’re like them and you’re not. Or maybe they just don’t wanna see history repeat on itself.”
He gives me this long look, then pokes his pistol into my neck again. “Talk to them.”
I shrug and turn my attention to the courtyard, which is beginning to be a very scary place for people who don’t believe in ghosts. The fog is moving, changing, clumping up around the winnebagoes and other places I suspect aliens are hiding.
“Ohlone!” I say loudly. “John Makepeace wants you to cease and desist as you are interfering with his plans to turn the Gam Saan into a tourist trap and make oodles-o-bucks. Now, I figure since you are the landlords of this chunk-o-real estate and it’s up to you who you’d rather rent to — ”
John Makepeace stops me with another jab of his ray gun.
“Cut it out,” he says. “Just tell them to leave.”
“John Makepeace wants you to leave,” I say. “Now. What d’you say?”
The Mission holds its breath for just a moment, then things go from weird to worse. The foggy shapes are suddenly legitimate wraiths — totally Lost-Arkian. They are as fully-formed as they were in the Lodge; I can make out faces and arms and legs. They move, too, not on the ground but above it. Not swiftly, ni dong, but in that slow, inexorable way that ghouls do in those old movies (which makes you wonder how they ever catch anybody).
These wraiths go right for the hiders. Winnebago doors crash open, laser bolts fly and human forms dart among the ex-human ones.
As for John and me, we are forced to go to ground, and all the shouting he does about holding fire does squiddle.
It doesn’t take long before the aliens lose track of each other in the swirl of fog and spirit. There are screams of pain as their lightning starts striking random targets.
“Shit!” says John Makepeace. “They’re going to massacre each other! Shit!”
And he moves, dragging me backward through the doors of the sanctuary. The pistol goes to my head and I hear it click and whine.
“Give me one reason I shouldn’t blast a neat little hole through your head.”
“Because I don’t think you really want history to repeat on itself, either,” I say. “’Cause that’d make for really bad karma. And maybe ‘cause you know we didn’t do anything to you. You chose to come here. We just tried to hang on to our lives and our home. And now our home is trying to hang on to us. That’s the core of it, John — even if you kill me, the Gam Saan will still fight back.”
Outside, a winnebago engine roars to life. Then another and another. John Makepeace freezes.
This seems like an auspicious moment to give him some travel information.
“By the way,” I tell him, "you can’t get back across the Bay Bridge. The Islanders blew it up again. You might want to go south.”
“Shit,” he says again. Funny how fear reduces the vocabulary.
He gives me a hard look in the face, then pulls off his belt and knots it around my feet, which he yanks out from under me.
When I manage to struggle into a half-sitting position, John Makepeace has disappeared out into the Dolores fog, leaving me on the hard, cold floor and the doors swinging open on their freshly oiled hinges.
The shooting is dwindling now, and out in the courtyard is a regular winnebago chorus. There is a vast rumbling as they pull out. There are some crashes, too, but eventually, the rampage of metal elephants stops, their bellows fade and the place goes quiet.
I peer from the doors and see the shabu dong has stilled and begun to clear — except for this one, lone swirl of fog and sun-motes that’s doing a dance right in front of me. It thickens, slows and becomes Pedro, sitting cross-legged across from a fire pit that is and isn’t there.
I have the weird sensation of being in the Ohlone Lodge and the Californio sanctuary at the same time. I can almost feel the warmth of the spirit fire on my face.
Pedro smiles at me. At least, I think he’s smiling.
“The first aliens met the shaman when they climbed the mountain,” he says. “They have met him again. They will tell their people you are their Devil.”
“So, history repeated on itself after all,” I say.
“The first aliens didn’t go home,” he says.
He stands up, or maybe rises is a better word, and turns to the open church doorway. I can see right through him; the graveyard’s ragged, leaning headstones, the rocky grotto, the devil/saint. There are no more ghosts.
“When I told the Indian agent I was the last one,” Pedro says, “I was more wrong than I knew. Now I see that the spirit of my people has never left this place — will never leave it.”
“So that’s why?” I ask. “That’s why you came back to help us?”
He begins to fade; I can see sunlight washing the graveyard.
“And because you are right in what you said to John Makepeace.”
“That we’re like you? Or that you didn’t want history to repeat?”
But he’s gone and I’m still tied up like a fat duck in the Gee Gah. In the videos, they untie you. Sometimes life isn’t a whole lot like the videos.
I settle back and watch sunlight play across the grey and white and weathered brown of the graveyard. Eventually, Firescape will come for me. She always does. And I’m sure she’ll know right where to find me.
And now I’m thinking about our son who will soon be in this world, and I’m thinking that his name will be Pedro. Pedro Delmar Flannigan. Well, Pedro Delmar Flannigan whatever-his-mother-eats-or-sees-or-hears-at-the-moment-of-his-birth. That’s tradition. And, I think, it’s something the spirits of this place will understand.
