Medusa's Web (13 page)

Ferdalisi scowled for several seconds as if to show that he was not easily mollified, then said earnestly, “Her involvement with old Los Angeles—she did extensive research—did she have no files?”

Claimayne nodded at the papers on the table. Ariel thought he was almost teasing when he said, “I've printed out her computer files—”

“No no, I mean paper, old paper.” Ferdalisi took a deep breath. “Did she have any . . . notes to herself, drawings, little doodles . . . symbols? I believe I read that she kept a lot of such things, folded up. I asked about a
video
because in that final moment she might have been holding—” He stopped short and looked at the ceiling. “Her suicide happened on the
roof
?”

Ariel involuntarily glanced at Scott, and his eyes met hers for a moment before they both looked away.
Little doodles, symbols . . . folded up,
she thought, and she guessed that Scott was thinking of the same thing.

“To be closer to God,” Claimayne told Ferdalisi. Ariel thought there was a note of satisfaction in his tone now, as if he'd finally got an answer he'd wanted. Still without looking at Ariel, he went on, “I'm the representative of the family in these legal affairs—why don't you and I conduct this discussion in the music room, away from”—he nodded toward Scott—“the poor relations.”

Ariel started to stand up, but Claimayne waved her back. “I can wheel myself,” he said. “You can stay here and play checkers or something with the boy.”

WHEN THEY HEARD THE
music room door down the hall squeak and snap closed, Ariel stared across the table at Scott.

“Your old woman came by here this afternoon,” she said. “I went upstairs to fetch you, but you were asleep on your bed, so I told her you weren't home.”

Scott's face was throbbing, but at the same time felt very cold; he was sure Ariel must mean Louise. He raised one spread hand.

“That Louise character,” Ariel went on. “Do you remember her? I may have said you were passed out drunk.”

Scott was somehow sure Ariel had not said that, but he thought of the bottle in his pocket and cleared his throat. “What did she, uh, want?”

“I didn't ask. She drove away.”

Ellis must have told Louise this morning, Scott thought, that I'm staying at the old family estate this week.

“Did she—” he began, then just shook his head.

“What, leave a number? No. Say she'd try again, or call? No.”

Scott nodded. “Okay.”

“Why did she break off the engagement, however many years ago it was?”

Scott met Ariel's gaze. He was suddenly very tired, and here in the old dining room again it was easy to see her as the smart, cheerful companion she had been in the old days.

He smiled faintly. “She thought my ambitions were unrealistic.” He waved a hand. “Unsustainable.”

“Drawing, painting, all that?”

Scott nodded.

“Well, ultimately she proved to be correct there, didn't she?”

Scott's face was still cold. He took a deep breath. “Shrewd girl,” he agreed, exhaling.

“I bet she heard you're supposed to inherit this place, and that's why she's surfaced again.”

“That's likely.”

Ariel was frowning. “You don't hit back.”

Scott reached down and picked up his helmet, then pushed his chair back and got to his feet. “I've always liked you, Ariel,” he said. “I'm sorry we somehow—”

“Liked me?” she interrupted. “Not
always
. Maybe you—”

A door banged open down the hall, and Scott caught the whir of Claimayne's approaching wheelchair. There were no accompanying footsteps.

“What?” asked Scott quickly. “Why not always, maybe I what?”

She waved it away and stood up.

Claimayne's wheelchair wobbled as he rolled into the dining room, and he gripped a wheel with his left hand to stop.

For a moment he didn't speak. Then, “There's a . . .
dip,
in the floor here,” he said. He looked up at Scott and smiled. “A low spot, a concavity. It's always been there. Do you remember, we all played with Hot Wheels cars here—we'd send them racing past this spot and they'd . . . curve.”

Scott nodded.

“It's deeper now,” said Claimayne.

“. . . Okay.”

“So I'd like you to,” and suddenly Claimayne's face was red and he was roaring, “
crawl down there in the goddamn basement and fix it
!” He fumbled in the pocket of his dressing gown and pulled out a heavy-looking stainless-steel revolver.

Scott gasped and stepped away from Ariel in case Claimayne actually meant to shoot at him. “Claimayne—”

“
If,
” yelled Claimayne, and then he went on in a calmer voice, “you can't find it while you're down there, look for a spot of light.” And he pointed the gun at the floor and pulled the trigger.

The resounding pop of the gunshot set Scott's ears ringing; splinters spun away from the new ragged hole in the hardwood floor.

Ariel stepped forward to take the gun from Claimayne's hand. His pale fingers released it with no struggle.

She looked around at the walls and up at the ceiling. “We're lucky that didn't bring the whole house down,” she said, speaking more loudly than usual. She looked past Claimayne down the hall. “Is Mr. Fricassee using the dubious facilities?”

“Ferdalisi.” Claimayne laughed shortly. “I wish he
would
try to use the toilet on this floor. No, he left by the back.” He coughed in the gunpowder smoke. “It seems we don't have anything
concrete
enough to merit his . . . assistance in various matters.”

“Hence your rage at the floor,” said Ariel. “I didn't like him anyway.”

“Quite right,” said Claimayne, dabbing at his eyes now with a handkerchief. “Shouldn't like people.”

Ariel shook her head and walked around the wheelchair toward the hall.

“Salomé,” called Claimayne, “hand me back my gun, so that I might shoot our houseguest!”

Over her shoulder she said, “Who'd fix your damn floor, Tetrarch?,” as she pulled open the front door.

Scott started after her. “Ariel, wait—”

Standing on the threshold with the breeze tossing her dark hair, she turned to face him. Her fingers held the gun loosely at her side. “Could you just not speak?” she said. “Could you please do me that one favor?” And then she had spun away and was hurrying down the path that led along the front of the house to the driveway.

Scott hesitated, then stepped back inside and closed the door.

“She doesn't like you,” remarked Claimayne from the dining room.

Scott sighed. “Quite right,” he said, then turned to the stairs.

SHORTLY AFTER RETURNING TO
his room, Scott heard Claimayne's elevator knocking and banging in the walls; a minute later Madeline came trudging up the stairs, and Scott turned around when she appeared in the connecting doorway between their rooms. Her hands were shoved so deeply in the pockets of her old Members Only jacket that the thin green fabric was taut and her arms were almost straight.

“Maddy,” Scott said, “did you take a paperback book out of my room?”

“Yes,” she said, “it's on the windowsill by my bed. I was reading it. Listen, I—”

“Thank God.” Scott hurried past her and picked up the Michael Connelly book and flipped through it, but there was no folded slip of paper tucked into the pages now. He looked back at Madeline. “
Tell
me you took a piece of paper out of this.”

“I dog-eared your place. A dog-ear's better than a bookmark; it can't fall out, unless the whole pages does. But—”

“Damn it, where's the, the bookmark?” She stared at him blankly, and he went on, “Maddy, it was a spider of Mom's. She wrote
Before
and
After
on it, and she crossed out
Before
but not
After.
You see? It's still unconsummated. And I had it in this book—”

“It's on the floor. Now will you—”

Scott peered quickly around at the floor of her room. “Where?”

“I don't know, but it must be. Or maybe I threw it out. Did you
want
it? A spider?”

“No, but I don't want somebody finding it.”

“You should have torn it up. But if it's not on the floor, then I threw it out, obviously. And a good thing, too. Will you listen?”

Scott moved around the bed, looking at the old floorboards, and finally got down on his hands and knees to look under the bed. There was no scrap of paper visible.

He got to his feet and strode to the wastepaper basket, but it was empty, without a liner. He hurried into his room, and that wastepaper basket was empty too.

“I took the trash out to the Dumpster when I left,” his sister said. “Save work for Rita.”

“If you're sure you—”

“For crying out loud, Scott! I'm sure!”

“Okay.” He put down the wastepaper basket and walked back into her room. “But I've got to tell you about your girl Natacha, who you saw get shot,
experienced
getting shot.”

Madeline paused by her bed, holding her briefcase; then she shook her head and pulled a sheaf of papers out of the briefcase. “After you see this. I read a lot of Aunt Amity's last-person novel last night—you were asleep by the time I came back up here—and listen, I know what
Oneida Inc
means.”

Scott blinked at her. “What it means?”

He stepped to the door and looked up and down the hall, then shut it and twisted the deadbolt knob. He sat down on her bed as she thumbed through the pages, and he saw that she had printed them on the back sides of blank astrological charts.

“Let's keep our voices down,” he said. “I heard Claimayne's elevator a little while ago.”

“Right. Just a sec, I'll find it. Ah—here.” She handed him one of
the sheets and pointed at an underlined section in the middle of the page. Scott peered at it—she had printed it out single-spaced and in a 10-point font—and she added, “I couldn't find printing paper, and I didn't have a lot of these sheets.”

Scott nodded and began puzzling out the small type.

aboard the oneida kosloff let ince see the damn thing and die of it hearst burned it only the taylor film left now we took it running away in adirondack woods natacha or him firing at us travellers now within that valley through the red-litten windows see paul ahead with the film can and me to catch a bullet in my foot and he took the can and left me in hospital rush out forever laugh but smile no more you must get it back charlene

“I googled
oneida kosloff ince,
” said Madeline, “and I got a Wikipedia article about this guy Thomas Ince—he was a movie director in the silent days, and he went on a cruise on William Randolph Hearst's yacht, the
Oneida,
and Theodore Kosloff was on the yacht too, and during the cruise Ince got some kind of sick and died.”

“Oneida
Ince,
” Scott said softly. He shivered. “He got sick because he looked at Usabo. We saw him do it. We did it
with
him, twenty-three years ago.”

“We didn't die of it,” observed Madeline, looking away. “Neither of us.”

“It was still no fun. Anyway, we were already in a spider vision when we looked at it with him, so we looked at it through his eyes. He caught the worst of it.”

He looked out the window at the late-afternoon sunlight on the tree branches. “I know about the film can,” he said. “Yesterday you saw the Kosloff guy get the big spider folder from Natacha after he shot her. Well, sometime after that she and a friend robbed a guy named Taylor, stole a reel of film with the big spider image—they
called it the Medusa—on a lot of the frames. It was in a film can.”

Madeline was staring at him, so he waved at the page and went on, “And then I guess after that, in the Adirondacks—that's mountains, in New York State—”

“I know.”

“—this Charlene and Paul couple stole the film can from Natacha, and Paul ran off with it when Charlene was in a hospital with a bullet in her foot. The ‘red-litten windows' business, and the ‘laugh but smile no more' are from that same poem in the Poe story.”

“Paul and Charlene are the names of Aunt Amity's parents.”

Scott nodded. “I remember.”

“Natacha stole the film? Where do you get that part of it?”

“In a minute.” He pointed at the pages in her hands. “Is there more?”

“Okay. Yes. But don't forget.” Madeline flipped through the pages and handed him another. “There at the top, underlined.”

retirement check all these years and mister 2by4 stole it his kids found it gave it back i open it on resurrection day its gone kids put a squiggle instead wrote a new will made banners branded in their eyes climb down in her eyes out of the tomb

“Aunt Amity gave Dad that two-by-four,” said Madeline softly, “on that last Christmas, in '91. He's mister two-by-four.”

Scott knew he would have to forcefully call her attention to another passage in that section, but for now he just nodded. “And she says here that Dad stole what she calls a retirement check, and you and I gave it back to her, but when she opened it on Resurrection Day, whatever she meant by that, she found that we had switched it with a squiggle.”

“The Oneida Ince one. And then she had to write the new will, specifying that we live here for a week.”

She waved the typescript. “So how do you know Natacha stole the film from this Taylor guy?”

Scott described to his sister finding the box of spiders behind a drawer in their aunt's office, and the vision he had seen after looking at one of them that afternoon: the intrusion by Natacha and her male companion into Taylor's apartment, what she and Taylor had said to each other, and her shooting him and taking away the can of film.

“Natacha didn't mean to shoot him?” said Madeline.

“No, somebody else had taken control of her body at that point. She was as helpless as I was.”

Scott glanced farther down the page and read,

i loved her cyclone I know charlene and alla loved me too at first then said sick wicked and when she died i bought her bathtub and when is a door not adore

He tapped the paper. “You saw this? I forgot to mention there's a big old iron bathtub in Aunt Amity's office. Not hooked up to any plumbing.”

Madeline shrugged and shook her head. “And she spells
a door
like
worship
there. Spell-check doesn't catch errors if they're actual other words.” She took the papers and slid them back into her briefcase. “You feel all right now?”

Scott stretched. “Yeah, I fell asleep for a while, after the vision wore off—” He thought of Louise's visit, and Ariel not waking him up, but pressed on, “and when I woke up I could still sense where the event happened—”

“I know,” said Madeline with a visible shiver, “you feel like you can point your finger to it.”

“And so I got on my bike and went there—”

Madeline gasped. “You went looking for Usabo?”

“It was decades ago, Maddy! The apartment where the Taylor
guy got shot, the whole building, is gone. It's a Ross Dress for Less parking lot now. But the building across the street was still there, the same as it was in the vision.”

“A film that's an exorcism.” Madeline giggled nervously and looked around the room. More quietly, she went on, “Of what?”

“Of the big spider, I guess. Maybe of all the spiders. But your Natacha just wanted to cut some frames out of it.”

“I wonder if the exorcism would work,” said Madeline, “and if it still exists.”

“I was sort of hoping to find a clue about that,” Scott admitted, “when I rode over there.”

“I might need it, if we stay here,” Madeline said. Scott looked at her sharply, and she added, “
Might.
” She didn't say anything more.

Scott prompted her: “Oh?”

“I don't think she means any harm, but Scott, last night when I finally went to sleep, Aunt Amity was in my dreams! I mean she was alive, intruding, shaking me and making me look in her eyes, and then I think I was dreaming her memories.”

Madeline leaned against the door frame and slid down until she was sitting on the floor with her knees up. “I guess she got into my dreams when I looked at the spider yesterday.”

“Maddy, she has got into your
head
.” He finally pointed at the passage on the page that had most caught his attention. “Look what she wrote—
made banners branded in their eyes climb down in her eyes—
if you give her time, she'll get
further
in, and, I don't know, crowd you out. Don't you think that's looking likely? She's begun
possessing
you, through that spider she left for you.”

Madeline nodded slightly. “Well, I've been
wondering
about that. I thought I was just, you know, channeling her. We psychics do that.”

“You're a psychic? I thought you were an astrologer.”

“Well—they're related fields, aren't they?”

“She means to take you over. Already, just when you're talking,
some of your word choices—it's like somebody else's vocabulary is mixing in with yours. We
have
to leave here.”

“Oh hell.” She hugged her knees. “Maybe. Tomorrow. If it happens again, or if it gets worse, or if it gets
scary
.”

He stared at her incredulously. “This isn't scary? That a dead old woman has got herself inside your head?”

Madeline looked away and shrugged. “But I'm afraid she'll die if I leave.”

“Uh . . .”

“I know, she's dead already. But I think I can help her to, you know, move on.”

“Go toward the white light.”

“Right, that stuff.”

Scott was disconcerted by her evident calmness. “We should leave tonight,” he said firmly. “Now.”

“No.”

“But if she—”

“No, Scott.”

He bared his teeth in frustration. “But we
do
leave tomorrow!”

“If it gets too scary.” Scott started to say something more, but Madeline waved dismissively. “So what news of the household?”

Scott emptied his lungs in a sigh, then spread his hands. “Well—Claimayne's gone crazy. He shot a gun into the floor not ten minutes ago.” Now Madeline was glancing around at the floor, and he added impatiently, “Not here, in the dining room.”

“Oh. I saw him downstairs; he said dinner's in half an hour—probably twenty minutes now. He's got a nosebleed.”

“Do you want to have dinner with those two again?”

“It's free. I spent your ten dollars on gas.”

“There's that. Okay. One last dinner. And remember we—”

A loud explosion from overhead shook the floor and rattled the window.

“Damn!” Scott crossed to the window and saw scraps of yellow
lace spinning away down into the garden. “Do you know what Ariel says that noise is?”

“No. I know what it is, though. It's Aunt Amity blowing herself up again. No, not again—still.”

Scott had turned to face her. “How do you know that?”

Madeline shrugged. “I don't know. What else
could
it be?”

“What else could—? Maddy—” Scott paused, trying to think of some reply or further question, and for several seconds neither of them spoke.

Then Madeline said in a rush, “I dreamed about what she wrote. I was in a long room, a tent, really, with no roof, and the walls were painted like rooms but they kept wiggling because it was windy outside, and in front of me three guys in D'Artagnan clothes were having a swordfight, and off to one side of them was like a saloon, with cowboys, and on the other side a guy and a girl dressed like for a wedding were sitting on a bench in front of some fake bushes and holding hands, not paying any attention to the sword guys or the cowboys. And behind me guys were yelling at them, like ‘Slower, quicker, kiss her hand!'”

“Sounds like they were filming a movie. Several movies. Maddy, what makes you think—”

“Oh!” Madeline's eyes had widened. “Yeah, it does. Silent movies, I guess, what with guys all the time yelling at the actors.” She paused, then nodded. “Yes, it was back when I was an actress.”

“What?”

“I said it was back when she was an actress.”

“What? Who, Aunt Amity?”

Madeline held a faraway stare for a moment, then looked down and shook her head. “Whoever.” She stepped to the door and twisted the deadbolt back.