Earthquake Weather by Tim Powers

big earthquake of ’89 hit—5:04 in the afternoon—and she fell down the steps.”
    “And you caught her,” Plumtree said softly. “I remember that earthquake. Poor Sid.”
    “He,” exhaled Cochran, finally nerving himself up to broach the point of this midnight visit, “the old one-armed man, he—I thought he talked with her voice, there, when we were quoting the Shakespeare. My dead wife’s voice. And then he looked like a, a man who chased me in Paris. That’s why I hit him, it was just a shocked reflex. But it was her voice, it was her —unless I’m a whole lot crazier than I even thought.”
    “I’m sure it was her. He can channel dead people like a vacuum cleaner, and you were sitting right by him.” She glanced at the open doorway, and then back at Cochran. “You’d better go. I’m not supposed to have visitors here.”
    He managed to nod and stand up, though he was even more disoriented now than he’d been when he’d walked in. As he turned toward the door, she said quietly behind him, “I love you, Sid.”
    He hesitated, shocked to realize that he wanted to say that he loved her too. It wasn’t possible, after all: he had met this woman only a few hours ago, and she did seem to be some genuine variety of crazy—though that only seemed to be something the two of them shared in common, actually—and in any case Nina had been dead for only ten days. And her … ghost might be …
    He forced that thought away, for now.
    “My friends call me Scant,” he said, without turning around; then, though he was aching to say something more, he made do with muttering, “I’m as crazy as you are,” and hurried out of the room.

CHAPTER 4
“All sorts of people who are not in the least degree worthy of the pet, are always turning up,” said Miss Pross. “When you began it—”
    “I began it, Miss Pross?”
    “Didn’t you? Who brought her father to life?”
    —Charles Dickens,
    A Tale of Two Cities
    A T DAWN THEY AWOKE Plumtree by sticking another hypodermic needle into the vein on the inside of her elbow—this shot contained a potent mix of Versed and Valium, and she had only ten bewildered seconds to curse and swear at the two nurses and Armentrout, and strain uselessly against the damp canvas straps of the four-point restraints, before she collapsed into unconsciousness. After the nurses unstrapped the rubber tourniquet from around her biceps and unbuckled the restraints, Armentrout crouched beside her and held her swollen hand in both of his, rolling the bones under his thumbs and prodding between the knuckles with his fingertips; then gently, almost tenderly, he lifted the young woman’s limp body onto the gurney.
    The ECT clinic was at the other end of the building, and Armentrout was pleased to see that the hallway lights didn’t dim as Plumtree was wheeled along under them. One of the nurses striding alongside was holding a black rubber Ambu face mask over Plumtree’s nose and mouth and rhythmically squeezing the attached black bag to assist the comatose woman’s weakened breathing.
    The nurse anesthetist who was waiting for them in the fluorescent-lit treatment room was a bearded young man Armentrout had worked with many times before, and the man leaned back against a counter and frankly stared as the nurses unzipped Plumtree’s jeans and pulled them down past her hips and then unbuttoned her blouse and lifted her up into a sitting position to tug her limp arms back and pull the blouse free; Armentrout allowed himself only a glimpse—for now—of Plumtree’s pale breasts when the nurses removed her bra. When they had laid her back down, positioning her head carefully on the perforated plastic cushion, the anesthetist stepped forward.
    “What happened to her hand?” the man asked as he looped a Velcro blood-pressure cuff around her left upper arm and then inserted an Intercath needle into the back of her bruised right hand and taped it down. The blush of red blood that backed up