Medusa's Web (12 page)

THE RINGING OF A
telephone was echoing in his parents' empty room, but the telephone itself was gone.

Scott had taken a couple of Madeline's Advils and lain down on his bed, waiting for the postspider aches in his joints and jaw to abate, and he had managed to drift off into a restless sleep and a dream in which he shuffled endlessly through his aunt's canceled checks, but the ringing phone brought him upright and swinging his feet to the floor.

He followed the ringing noise through Madeline's room and into his parents' empty sunlit room, and then he stared blankly at the two wires sticking out of the wall where the telephone had once been connected. The pulsing metallic clangor was coming clear and unmuffled from that corner of the room.

Somewhere there's the actual phone, he thought, and it's silent, but if I could find it and pick up the receiver I could talk to . . . whoever's calling.

His hands flexed uselessly.
Claimayne, where did your mother put our parents' stuff?

At the seventh ring Scott automatically began waiting for an answering machine to pick up, but the ringing kept on. Wherever
the phone is, he thought, the answering machine isn't hooked up to it anymore.

Feeling foolish even though he was alone, but reasoning that sounds here, now, were fragmented in space and time, he knelt by the wires and ventured to say, “Hello?”

The ringing stopped. The following silence seemed to fill the room, crowding him. He wished he had brought the Valentino book with him from his room, so that he could look at his mother's handwriting on the flyleaf.

“Mom?” His forehead was chilly with a sudden dew of sweat. “Is that you?”

But his heartbeat was all he heard, and after a full minute of kneeling on the floor, he wearily got to his feet, feeling the various aches undiminished.

He shambled to the window, but Claimayne and Ariel had apparently finished their lunch and gone inside. The wheelbarrow no longer stood in front of the Medusa wall.

He straightened and turned to face the far corner of the room. The apartment where Natacha had shot Mr. Taylor had been in that direction, southeast, and not far away.

Back in his own room, his scuffed leather jacket was on the floor, and he bent and picked it up, feeling the swinging weight of the bottle in the pocket as he wearily thrust his arms into the sleeves. The three remaining folded spider papers were still scattered on the bedspread, and he gathered them up and shoved them into the same pocket as the bottle.

He looked toward the door—the direction was still clear. He picked up his helmet and opened the door and stepped into the hall.

SCOTT RODE UP THE
ramp from Argyle onto the southbound 101 Freeway, and since he wasn't sure when its course might diverge from the destination he sensed, he stayed in the slow lane, passing pastel-
colored apartment buildings beyond the high freeway walls and the more distant turrets and roof peaks of the Scientology Celebrity Centre to the north. At about Beverly the freeway began to swerve to the left of his psychically insistent course, and he downshifted off the freeway at the Rampart exit and, after a moment of indecision at the traffic light, turned south. When he got down to West Sixth Street he felt that he had passed it, and he made a left turn and sped along past the clustered trees of MacArthur Park.

At Alvarado Street he intuitively swerved north, and he knew that he had passed his goal in the same moment that he recognized the Roxy Apartment building on his left. In full daylight he could see the cornices and decorative friezes above the arched windows of the first floor, and its masonry was visibly tan now; it had appeared gray in the moonlight when he had seen it in the spider vision a little more than an hour ago.

He leaned the bike into a hasty U-turn, and a moment later made a left onto a very narrow street called Maryland, and he swerved past a startled fruit-seller's cart into the parking lot of a Ross Dress for Less clothing store. He braked to a halt, reached down to switch off the engine, then slowly levered down the kickstand with his foot, swung his leg over the gas tank, and stood up on the parking lot asphalt.

He took a few tentative steps as he pulled off his helmet and goggles, and then stopped. The breeze was chilly in his sweaty hair.

He knew he was standing precisely where the woman Natacha had stood when she had shot Taylor. And the apartment it had happened in was long gone. From the moment when he had started his motorcycle, he had felt that he was following a line toward an end point, but in fact the end point was in a time he couldn't get to.

THE DRIVER OF THE
white Chevy Blazer was caught by surprise when Scott looped back, and he had to continue on up to Third Street and then turn right, and then down a long alley of the back
ends of apartment buildings, all graffiti and fire escapes and abandoned mattresses propped against low, bumper-scarred walls; and when he finally rocked across Maryland Street into the Ross parking lot, he drove well past where Scott was standing and braked crookedly in a parking space closer to the store. His 7-Eleven Big Gulp cup had fallen onto the passenger-side floor and spilled open.

His cell phone was already in his hand, and he was talking before the SUV had entirely stopped shifting on its shocks.

“This is Polydectes. That Madden guy on the motorcycle is at the place where Taylor was killed! Right, Alvarado and Maryland—yeah, the Scott one, he came right here from the Madden house on Vista Del Mar . . . no, he's off the bike, and I think he's standing, listen to me, I think he's standing exactly where Taylor's bungalow was, in '22.” He lit a cigarette with trembling fingers as he listened, and then he interrupted, “Sure, sure—but I'd say it's a good bet that he's got a hypertemporal line on the big spider.”

He listened for several seconds, sitting hiked around on the seat to keep an eye on Scott Madden and the motorcycle, then said, “I haven't seen any of the Montreal crowd, but that doesn't mean they're not here. If they are, they probably saw me come in here fast—but it was from a different direction, yeah, they'd figure I just need to buy a pair of pants . . .
pants,
this is Ross, they sell clothes . . . okay, right, action only if there's interference.”

SCOTT WALKED SLOWLY BACK
to his motorcycle, and when he had put on his goggles and helmet again and got the bike's engine started, he rode north on Alvarado, not hurrying—and not aware of the white Blazer behind him, much less of the white Saturn a few car lengths behind it.

As he reflexively worked the throttle and clutch and gearshift and the gathering headwind fluttered his shirt collar, Scott was trying to fit evident facts into a chronological order.

The Natacha woman had told Taylor that a man named Kosloff
had stolen the Medusa spider from her and shot her while doing it, and in fact Madeline had experienced that in a vision yesterday.

Later Natacha and a companion had gone to the apartment of this Taylor, and then somebody—somebody from a more recent time period—had overridden Natacha's control of her own body, and had shot Taylor, probably fatally.

Scott's right hand was gripping the throttle, but he vividly remembered the recoil of the gun in his palm; and then Taylor had taken a step toward the door—reflexively, hopelessly, trying to walk away?—and Scott had seen the little hole punched in the back of the man's jacket. Taylor had fallen over backward to the floor, and Scott remembered the empty look in the blankly staring eyes.

Scott was shivering and afraid he might vomit.

Abruptly his vision changed. The shapes of cars and buildings and pavement in front of him didn't shift or disappear, but his view had lost all depth, and he seemed to be riding straight at a flat surface with projected shapes at the edges moving away from the center.

By sheer sense of balance he kept the motorcycle upright as he squeezed the front brake and trod on the back one, and, guessing that the diagonal tapering line at his right was the curb, he slanted in toward it and brought the bike to a skidding stop. Cars audibly roared past him on his left, presumably corresponding to shapes that appeared and diminished on that side. He swung his right foot off the footrest and sagged in relief when the toe of his shoe bumped the gritty corner of the cement curb.

He clicked the gearshift pedal into neutral and then let the engine idle as he stared down at the shapes that were his hands, moving one in front of the other, and after a few seconds he was able to see that they moved in cubic space, and he could see that the gas tank was below them, and his shoe on the curb was below that. He looked up, along Alvarado Street, and the building and cars clearly receded from near to far.

The view kept on appearing to have depth, so after several deep
breaths, Scott squeezed the clutch, stepped on the gearshift, and carefully angled his way back into the northbound traffic.

Focus, he told himself uneasily as he clicked up through the gears and the headwind chilled his damp face.

And Natacha claimed that Taylor got hold of a photograph of the Medusa spider, he thought, and incorporated multiple copies of the image into a film:
an exorcism film, setting the image in tarantella frequencies to nullify it.

And Natacha had walked out with the film.

An exorcism, to nullify the Medusa spider. And—wasn't tarantella the name of a dance?

Just past Temple Street he leaned the bike to the left onto the oak-lined on-ramp for the northbound 101 Freeway, heading back toward Caveat. A white Chevy Blazer and a white Saturn steered into the on-ramp close behind him.

ARIEL FOUND TO HER
surprise that she was relieved to hear Scott's old Honda roaring up the garage road. She and Claimayne had been talking to Jules Ferdalisi for ten minutes in the dining room, and she still wasn't sure what the man really wanted.

Claimayne now gestured toward the stack of notebooks and papers Ariel had laid on the table. She had set a corkscrew on top of them to keep the pages from blowing to the floor in the breeze through the open windows. “But that's all the . . .
peripheral writing
that she left,” Claimayne said, a note of impatience beginning to flatten his voice. “What sort of thing are you after?” He seemed to have a specific answer in mind, coaxing Ferdalisi to give it. “Do say.”

“I'm envisioning multimedia,” said Ferdalisi. His ear-to-ear beard with no accompanying mustache, and his bald head, made his face appear to Ariel to be upside-down. “Music, and film, and reading. Dance. I want to convey the whole woman.” He frowned and pouted his lips. “I don't mean to be offensively personal.”

Claimayne blinked. “Uh . . . oh?”

“But,” Ferdalisi went on, “her suicide—I know only the fact of it, not the means or place, from the newspaper accounts. But—was the moment captured by some security camera?”

“No,” said Claimayne, clearly surprised at the question.

Ferdalisi frowned and pursed his lips. “Did she—I beg your pardon—herself make a video recording of the event? So many people do think to make such a record of significant . . .
milestones,
these days. The end of a, a noteworthy life—”

Ariel clenched her throat against a reflexive giggle and managed to cough instead.

Claimayne leaned back in his wheelchair and stared at the high ceiling beams, and Ariel thought he looked baffled and disappointed. “No,” he drawled, “but an animated sequence might suffice. The old Warner Brothers cartoons—”

“Or Itchy and Scratchy,” ventured Ariel in a choked voice.

“What do you mean?” Ferdalisi snapped at her, and she was sure he knew what she had referred to and was trying to make her feel frivolous.

“In the TV show
The Simpsons,
” she said slowly, “Bart and Lisa—those are two characters, it's a cartoon—they often watch a cartoon show called
Itchy and Scratchy
.” She smiled at him. “A cartoon within a cartoon, you see? And it's very violent—”

“I think they've even used grenades on each other,” offered Claimayne. “I know someone who knows Matt Groening.”

“That's the writer of the show,” said Ariel. “You might approach him.”

The kitchen door squeaked, and then Scott's shoes were clumping on the linoleum floor in there, and a moment later he pushed through the swinging door and walked into the dining room.

“Oh,” he said, halting when he saw the three sitting at the table. “Excuse me.”

“No, sit down,” said Ariel. “We were talking with this gentleman
about making an animated cartoon of Claimayne's mother blowing herself up on the roof.”

Scott nodded. “You know,” he said, “I used to live in the normal world. I still remember it.”

“I apologize if I—” began Ferdalisi.

Ariel stared at the man curiously. “You came here to produce a
snuff
film?”

“No.” Ferdalisi was blinking rapidly at Ariel. “I came here in good faith—”

“I knew somebody would,” said Claimayne, “if we waited long enough.”

“
You
didn't come in good faith,” said Ariel to Scott. “You and your sister. Will you sit down?”

“My purpose is scholarly!” Ferdalisi burst out. His face was red. “I am in a position,” he went on, and Ariel forced herself not to interrupt with a joke about his position, “for one thing, to pay you a great deal of money.” Ariel had been trying to place his accent, and now that he was speaking angrily it was recognizably Spanish.

Scott pulled out a chair in front of the windows and sat down, setting his helmet on the floor.

Ferdalisi peered at him and then quickly looked back at Claimayne—but Ariel was sure she had seen a twitch of recognition in the man's eyebrows.

Claimayne reached out and patted the cuff of Ferdalisi's tweed jacket. “I do apologize. This
is
my mother we're discussing. It's a touchy subject, right?” He sat back. “Do
please
tell me what sort of material you are thinking of.”