Medusa's Web (23 page)

“You didn't tell him about me?” Madeline asked.

“He said to tell you that Natacha was grateful for your company, on that taxi ride to the hospital.” Ariel was shaking her head in bewilderment, but Scott held up his hand and went on, “Mainly I told him I wanted to exorcise the spiders and all their works, to free you from Aunt Amity.”

“But,” said Madeline, “that would . . .
free me
from any chance of finding
him
! Oh, Scott—you love me, but I'm glad the house is gone.”

“Why did you sit down in Aunt Amity's chair, at dinner?” he asked.

“I . . . don't remember doing that,” she admitted.

Ariel leaned forward. “Foil, fillings? Why would Claimayne want to prolong his occupation of me? It wouldn't take more than
a few seconds to have me walk to his room and pick up the gun.”

“I imagine,” Scott said slowly, “that he wanted enough time to climb you up that ladder onto the roof, before he pulled the trigger.”

Ariel gave him a horrified look. “Why?”

Scott shrugged. “Aunt Amity has been pretty active in this house, postmortem, typing a new novel—yeah, we'll tell you about that too—and speaking through Madeline. Maybe Claimayne hoped that your violent death on the same spot where the old lady blew herself up would fragment and dilute her lingering aura, confuse her—”

“Make interference fringes in her waveform,” said Madeline.

“Uh, right,” agreed Scott.

“And I would have been stuck in Claimayne's body while he did it,” said Ariel with a shudder, “probably handcuffed to the bed, and probably—” She suddenly sat back, her face stiff. “If,” she began, but her voice was weak; she coughed and went on, “if you wanted to prevent a, a
lingering aura,
or minimize it at least . . . a grenade, outside the confinement of the house and garden, would probably . . .” She leaned forward and looked across Madeline at Scott. “When Aunt Amity was climbing up onto the roof with the grenade last week—surely in pain from climbing with her bad foot!—Claimayne was locked in his room, yelling and crying. And for four days afterward he was totally bedridden. He missed the funeral.”

“Wow,” whispered Scott after a pause.

Madeline cleared her throat and said, “Could you hear what he was yelling, in his room?”

“No. Why?”

Madeline rocked her head. “I would have liked to know what Aunt Amity's last words were.”

“I don't know. She didn't sound happy.”

“He must have been
covered
with bruises afterward,” said Madeline in an awed tone. “I had a bruise on my leg after Natacha got shot.”

“I guess it was worth it, to him,” said Ariel.

Scott wondered if Claimayne, in Aunt Amity's body, had taken the Clara Bow umbrella with him up to the roof because it had been promised to Madeline instead of him.

“Um,” said Ariel cautiously to Madeline, “what was that about finding Rudolph Valentino?”

Madeline glanced at Scott; after a moment, he shrugged and nodded.

“I guess we
trust
you,” said Madeline. “Well—Scott and I found some spiders in an envelope when we were kids—”

“The ones your parents stole from Aunt Amity,” interrupted Ariel. “Claimayne told me about this. And you gave them back to her, but you had already looked at one called
Ore-Ida Fries
or something.” Scott and Madeline were both looking at her in alarm, and she went on, slowly and almost apologetically, “And he said that's the big spider, the
Medusa,
and somebody's going to look at it again, and that's
crumbling our local chronology
—he made me remember that phrase.” She inhaled, then added, “He wants it, pretty bad.”

“He knows a lot,” said Madeline in an awed tone.

“. . . You were going to say, about Valentino?”

“Oh, right,” said Madeline. “When Scott and I looked at the big spider—it was like a million lives at once, all jerking us every which way—”

“Total nervous-system seizure,” said Ariel.

“Okay. And then in the worst of it—Scott didn't experience this—a young man was there,
outside
of all the exploding scenes, and he came to me and pulled me out too. He led me into a quiet moonlit garden, and he comforted me, told me it wasn't so bad, where he was. And last night Scott and I were looking at a book about Rudolph Valentino, and I recognized him.” She looked with mild defiance from one to the other. “And I won't leave this house till I find my way back to him.”

“I, uh, think that's death,” said Ariel. “Actually.”

“If he's there, it won't be so dreadful.”

“Gently into that raucous night,” muttered Scott. “Some great plan.”

Ariel shifted on her chair. “This is the old movie star you're talking about, right?
That
Rudolph Valentino?”

Madeline and Scott both nodded.

“Okay.”

For several seconds none of them spoke or looked at one another.

Then Ariel slapped her hands on her thighs and smiled. “How would you two like to get cussed at and insulted?”

Madeline grimaced. “I couldn't bear seeing Claimayne again tonight.”

“Not by him,” said Ariel cheerfully, “by me.”

“I thought you liked us again,” said Madeline.

“Oh, I do, sweetie—I
always
liked
you,
really. But this is to balance the books. I'll be back in a minute.” She stood up and hurried to the door, pulled it open, and tapped away down the dark hall.

“I think something's wrong with our whole family,” said Madeline seriously.

Scott exhaled in a long, diminishing whistle. “Hard to argue.” His throat tightened, and he was surprised to find that he was shivering, remembering their mother's tormented voice grating out of Claimayne's mouth. “I hope Claimayne dies like Ariel said.”

Madeline glanced at him in evident surprise. “Why? He let us tell Mom we love her.”

“I didn't want to tell her that. It was just—like putting an injured animal out of its misery.”

“Sometimes you gotta.”

Scott shifted in his chair and glanced behind him at the open door, wondering what Ariel was up to. “That box in the garage?—with our parents' credit cards and driver's licenses in it? Ariel put it there when she was ten. She found the stuff in the compost bin.”

“Oh,” said Madeline, nodding. “Oh.”

Then Ariel came hurrying back up the hall and stepped into the
apiary and pulled the sliding door closed. She was smiling, but it was a tense smile.

In her hand was a folded slip of paper. “You guys know how the before-and-after effect of spiders works, right?” Then she visibly recalled Claimayne's performance at dinner half an hour ago, and went on quickly, “This is a spider I looked at three days ago, on Tuesday night, just as you two arrived. Remember it? You met a
me
then who was cheerful and welcoming, right? Well, that was me from right now—and when I look at this, you're going to get the
reciprocal
me, the me from that night. I'm afraid she's going to be very rude.”

She dragged one of the chairs out of line and spun it to face Scott and Madeline.

“Uh,” said Scott, glancing at his sister, “why do it in front of us?”

“Because right here, with you two, is where I found myself when I looked at this spider on Tuesday night. Just like this—me sitting here, you two sitting there. It must have been right now.”

Which only means, thought Scott, that tonight you decided to do it in front of us. But he said, “That makes sense.”

Ariel nodded. “I apologize in advance, okay? This, what you're about to see, is the old me—three days old.”

She flipped open the paper and stared at it almost hungrily; and her eyes unfocused and for several seconds she just stared blankly at the floor. Scott braced himself to catch her if she fell out of her chair.

But she stiffened, and when she looked up, she was scowling. “
You
two! What fucking day is it?” She glared around the room. “Why are you in
here
? It better not be more than the week—”

“It's Friday night,” Scott told her.

“Three nights in your future,” put in Madeline.

Ariel spat on the floor, and both Scott and Madeline rocked back in surprise. “Four days from, from
this,
” Ariel went on, grimacing as she waved her hand in a circle, “we'll have to fumigate the rooms in the apartments down there, burn the sheets—after a drunk and a
bag lady stayed there—a couple of ghouls—grave-worms! And if you imagine you're going to inherit this place—”

“Really, Ariel,” Scott interrupted loudly, “this is all unnecessary. We understand—”

“We don't hold this against you,” said Madeline, eyeing her seated cousin with something like wonder.

“We're not at odds,” added Scott. He was surprised to find that he was sweating.

“Liar! You pathetic—”

Scott stood up quickly, for Ariel's eyes had half shut and she was swaying, and he caught her before she could topple forward. Holding her under her arms, he considered propping her back up in her chair, then just lowered her to the floor.

“I don't think she'd have done it here,” said Madeline breathlessly, “with us, if she'd remembered how mean she was.”

Scott straightened up. “I wonder.” He was glad that the bag-lady remark didn't seem to have upset his sister, though it had angered him for her sake. The drunk accusation hadn't bothered him—
it
hadn't been a prediction, after all, just a statement of presumed present fact.

Ariel had dropped the slip of paper, and he picked it up, glancing at it peripherally through nearly closed eyes just to be sure there really was an eight-limbed figure on it, and that Ariel hadn't improvised her diatribe on the spot, with a blank piece of paper.

Ariel sat up, blinking; she fumbled at her chest until she gripped her silver gyroscope pendant, and she waved it in front of her face; her eyes didn't follow its motion. “It worked,” she said hoarsely. “I saw you two on Tuesday night, all soaked in the rain. It
was
enchiladas, that first night, wasn't it?”

Madeline nodded, then said, “Yes.”

Ariel let go of the pendant and flexed her hands, and seemed to see them clearly. She peered around, frowning, and saw the paper in Scott's hand. She reached for it and he handed it to her, and she shakily tore it to pieces. “That spider's done, consummated. And I'm
never doing another. Was I very horrible? It's been three days, I don't exactly remember.”

“Yes,” said Scott, a little stiffly.

“Oh, Scott, don't pay any attention to all that! It was me before . . . before I knew what was what.”

But you figured we ought to hear it, he thought.

“That's okay,” said Madeline. “Do you want help getting up?”

“No, I—” Ariel folded her legs with some evident effort, but remained sitting on the floor. “Well, yes.”

Scott reached a hand down to her, and when she grasped his wrist, he pulled her erect; and she gripped his shoulder tightly.

“I'll be all right in a minute,” she said. “I hate to leave you right after that . . . version of me, that old version, but I'm . . . I think I'm going to turn in.”

“I'll help you down the stairs,” said Scott. “And I advise locking your bedroom door.”

Ariel nodded, though it made her wince. “And I'll put a chair against it. And I've got my .32 with only one round used up.” She started to yawn, but that seemed to hurt too. Scott thought of old Genod Speas, all his life treasuring the memory of a yawn shared with Ava Gardner. Ariel went on, “And Claimayne will probably be busy making phone calls and planning for his party tomorrow night.”

“I'm going to retire too,” said Madeline, getting up.

Ariel told her, “I'm sorry I said all that awful stuff.”

“That's okay. I don't think you meant it, even then.”

“Maybe you're right.”

Ariel leaned on Scott all the way down the hall, and her arm around his waist reminded him of their hectic ride on the motorcycle this afternoon. Her hair smelled faintly and not unpleasantly of diesel exhaust. In spite of his misgivings about her performance a few minutes ago, he found that he wanted to tip her face up and kiss her. He sighed deeply and resisted it.

It was a love note, damn it,
she had said at Miceli's. And he had said,
I might have left Louise, if I'd seen it
.

And I would have, he thought now.

At the stairs, she held on to the banister and put both feet on each step before attempting the next. Scott held her arm and Madeline held his, evidently meaning to belay both of them if Ariel should tumble.

Ariel was more steady in the dark second-floor hall, and trudged to her door without support.

“You two should sleep with the lights on,” she whispered. “Or better, don't sleep at all.”

“I'm not afraid,” said Madeline.

Ariel shook her head and stepped into her room. When the door closed, Scott and Madeline could hear a chair being dragged across the floor inside.

“I'm going to put my blankets on your floor,” Scott told his sister as they walked back toward their own rooms, “and sleep there tonight. If you suddenly turn into Aunt Amity, I'll slap you out of it.”

“That's no good,” she said. “Pain makes it last longer. Sing me a lullaby.”

MADELINE WAS BREATHING WITH
reassuring evenness in the darkness, but lying on the floor reminded Scott too much of having come to his senses half naked in the garden last night.

He was wearing his jeans and shirt, and he stood up silently and stole through his own room and out into the dark hall. The house creaked in the night wind that rattled the window at the far end of the hall, and the air seemed to be full of ancient whispered questions.

He walked barefoot to the head of the stairs. Claimayne's elevator had not yet banged up through the walls, and he wondered what the man might be up to, alone down in the dining room or the kitchen or his mother's library.

Briefly he thought of tiptoeing down to spy on him—and he was ruefully surprised to discover that the idea scared him. What if Claimayne were sitting down there in the lightless dining room, staring at the entry hall? Scott imagined Claimayne holding the revolver Ariel had seen on his bedside table, but that actually seemed to make the idea more mundane; it was more disturbing to imagine Claimayne just sitting there with empty hands, staring, his bland face perhaps smiling.

Scott hurriedly turned back toward Madeline's room, brushing
his hand along the row of fixed doors that lined the south wall, and he automatically knocked at the one that had been salvaged from the Garden of Allah.

“Come in,” said a woman's voice.

SCOTT FROZE, HIS HANDS
tingling and his scalp suddenly tight.

“Doody?” said the voice. He heard footsteps on the other side of the door—but there was only plaster and brick on the other side of the door!—and then the knob turned and he stepped back as the door swung open, spreading radiance into the hallway.

He squinted against the new light at a short, trim, gray-haired woman in horn-rimmed glasses who was peering up at him, and then past him, in evident surprise. She was wearing tan slacks, and the fuzz of her green sweater was backlit by sunlight in a window behind her.

Scott's breath was caught in his throat, and for a moment he couldn't think at all, and simply stared.

The woman stepped back too, then whispered, apparently to herself, “Thou art a scholar—speak to it, Adelaida.” She met Scott's wide-eyed gaze and gave him a forced smile, and waved into the room. “Do come in, O Spirit. And close the door behind you—I want to believe my sundeck and the pool are still out there.”

Scott was breathing again, deeply. This is what happened to Madeline two days ago, he told himself; Ariel said something about our local chronology crumbling. This will fade away in a minute or so.

His heart was almost clanking in his chest, and he shifted his weight to his back foot, ready to run down the hall to his own room, no, to Madeline's room—

Madeline, who needs to somehow be saved from Aunt Amity.
When is a door not adore? When it's a way in, Scott.

Scott nodded several times, then made himself take the long step forward across the threshold; into a small living room with a long
violet couch, a black enameled desk by a window on the right, and a potted orchid curling its green leaves and lobed yellow flowers across another window straight ahead. The room glowed with midday sunlight. When he closed the door behind him, he noticed a framed fire evacuation notice screwed to the wood; evidently this was a hotel. He was still squinting and blinking in the bright light.

The woman raised her chin. “This is that old
black geometry,
isn't it?” she said. “We try to avoid having anything to do with that stuff.”

“I, uh, suppose it is, more or less.” Scott was panting. “Sorry.”

She cocked her head, smiling quizzically now. Her eyes were vivid blue behind the glasses, and her gray hair was done in a pageboy cut. “I do believe you're more startled by this . . . impossible intrusion! . . . than I am!” She spoke with an accent, pronouncing “r”s as soft “d”s. Scott caught a whiff of lemon verbena perfume.

“Yes, ma'am,” said Scott. “Very likely, I mean.” He hoped he had zipped his fly and buttoned his shirt correctly, and wished he'd shaved; at random he said, “Doody?”

“My secretary,” said the woman. “She's gone across the street to Schwab's to fill a prescription—do sit down—look at you, not even any shoes!”

With a shaky hand she waved him toward the couch and sat down in an armchair on the other side of a low coffee table, by the near window. On the table was a copy of
Life
magazine with a black-and-white picture of teenaged Shirley Temple on the cover, and the woman reached out to pick nervously at the glued-on address label.

“It's not her real name, of course,” she went on distractedly. “In a movie we saw, a man referred to his wife as his sacred duty, and he pronounced it
doody
—not that—” She clenched her fists and let out what was left of her breath, and then looked straight at him. “Where were you a moment ago?”

Scott slowly sat down on the couch and peered around at the
books and framed black-and-white photographs on several shelves. A mandolin hung on one wall. “Uh, Hollywood,” he said.

“Hmph.” From the coffee table she picked up a flat black box and a matchbook, and when she opened the box, Scott saw a row of black cigarettes with gold filters. She took one out and lit it with a steadier hand, blew smoke toward Scott, and leaned back in her chair.

She waved the cigarette toward her closed front door. “Nighttime?”

“Hm? Oh.” Scott rubbed his forehead. “It was, yes.”

“So you're not a
local,
by at least a few hours. Very well. Why did you knock at my door, since”—she glanced at his bare feet and no doubt disheveled hair—“you clearly didn't expect a response?”

My door.
With a sudden cold hollowness in his chest, Scott belatedly realized that this woman must be Alla Nazimova, and that this place was surely the Garden of Allah, some time before it was torn down in 1959. He looked more closely at the woman sitting across from him, and he was able to recognize the actress who had played Salomé—older, but still almost boyishly slim.

“Your door . . .” Scott began; he hesitated, then went on, “. . . is one of a row of doors salvaged from old demolished hotels, lining a hallway in a house, in 2015.”

Nazimova stood up lithely, strode to the door, and pushed it open on a view of green tree branches in sunlight. A warm breeze ruffled her gray hair, and Scott could smell roses and chlorine.

“Seventy-three years from now,” she said, barely loud enough for him to hear. “Is it a transfigured world?”

“I—guess not.”

“The Allies
do
win the war, I trust?”

“Yes. In 1945.”

“That long.” She shivered. “Do you know who I am?”

“Yes, ma'am. I knew whose door it was. I watched
Salomé
only last night.” He reached for the box of cigarettes, then caught himself. “My aunt used to knock on the door every time she went by it.”

She had turned around and now waved impatiently at the cigarettes. “Please be my guest. Your aunt wasn't—isn't?—Natacha Rambova . . . ?”

“No.”

Nazimova drew on her cigarette and sighed, exhaling smoke. “Good, I hope Natacha keeps her resolve . . . and dies, I hope—happy, I hope!—before the now you come from.
Claim
to come from.”

“My aunt's name was Amity Madden.” Nazimova shrugged and started to say something, but Scott remembered the conclusion he and Madeline had come to, and added, “Or Charlene Cooper.”

Nazimova straightened up, and her face tightened. “Was?”

“She died. A week ago. Killed herself.”

“In
2015
? That little
vampire
!” Nazimova seemed poised by the open door, as if considering running out. “You didn't . . . work for her?”

“No, ma'am. I haven't seen her in thirteen years. Hadn't.” Except in a mirror in a vision, he thought.
Welcome home, Scott.

Nazimova was watching him closely. “How old are you?”

“Thirty-six.”

She cocked her head. “That seems right. If anything, you look a bit older than that. You don't have the characteristic puffy smoothness of the predators.” She scrutinized him for several more seconds, staring into his eyes, then nodded with apparent reluctance. “I believe what you say. How well did you know her?”

Scott smiled bitterly. “Not very well at all, it seems. She raised my sister and me, after—” He shook his head and went on, “After, perhaps, killing our parents.” He waved away any interruption, though Nazimova had not moved. “We thought she was born in 1944, but in the last couple of days we've found evidence that she was actually born in 1899. She, uh, never looked her age.”

“I imagine not.” Nazimova closed the door and resumed her seat by the window. She crushed out her cigarette in a glass ashtray on the table. “Are you
sure
she's dead?
Really
gone, in every respect?”

Scott met her gaze and said, “No. She's trying to take possession of my sister.”

“Your sister? Why? What has your sister got?”

“She—and I—both looked at—do you know what spiders are?—the patterns on paper?”

“Yes. Go on.”

“We both looked at one, when we were children. ‘The big one,' I'm told. The Medusa. It belonged to my aunt.”

“That would have to be the Ince version of it, or
another
once-removed one, since it didn't kill you.” Scott nodded, and she went on, “But if Charlene had that, why does she need your sister's experience of it now?” She pursed her lips. “In
2015,
I mean?”

“We tore it up, after we looked at it. And I drew a squiggly asterisk and put it in the envelope the real one was in. I was thirteen years old. She never found out.”

“Oh, she found out, or she wouldn't be trying to mine your sister's experience.
Seventy-three years
from now! Wait a moment.” She stood up and hurried into the little adjoining kitchen; Scott heard her open a drawer and rattle around in its contents, and then she had hurried back into the living room and dropped a handful of rubber bands onto the table.

“Stretch a tight one around your wrist,” she said. “Both wrists. And your head, like a circlet. Uncomfortably tight.” When he hesitated, she reached down and pinched his cheek, hard. “Hurry!”

Scott had flinched, but now he quickly pulled a rubber band around each wrist, and another around his head over his eyebrows.

“Every few seconds,” said Nazimova, “you must pull one out and let it snap back. It must hurt, or you're liable to disappear from here.”

“I get it.” Better than chewing on foil, Scott thought, or poking a thumbtack into my toe.

He pulled the rubber band a couple of inches away from his forehead and let it snap back; it stung enough to make his eyes water.

The doorknob rattled then, and Scott looked over in alarm as it swung open, but it was still sunlight and blue sky that shone out there, behind a short flaxen-haired woman who stood now at the threshold staring at him in surprise. She was holding a white paper bag.

“Doody,” said Nazimova, standing up, “this is—well, actually I don't know his name.” She turned to Scott with raised eyebrows.

Scott belatedly stood up too. “Scott Madden, ma'am.” He snapped his forehead rubber band as if tipping a hat.

“He's leaving, I assume,” said the woman in the doorway. She looked to be in her thirties, wearing high-waisted tan slacks and a long-sleeved white blouse.

“Mr. Madden,” said Nazimova, “this is Glesca Marshall, my secretary.” To Glesca, she added, “No, let's hope he's not leaving.”

Scott nodded. “Pleased to meet you, Ms. Marshall.”

“Miss,” she corrected, “not Mrs.” She was frowning. “I'm not married.”

Scott didn't try to explain
Ms.
“I'm sorry,” he said. “My hearing isn't great.”

Glesca turned to Nazimova. “He looks like a hobo!”

“It wasn't a planned visit,” said Nazimova. “He wants help saving his sister from the—webs?—of Charlene Cooper; and making Charlene stay dead.”

“Well, that's good.” Glesca took two steps inside and closed the door, keeping a wary eye on Scott. “He lives here at the Garden?”

“No, child, I'm afraid this is black geometry. I'm sorry. He lives in the year 2015, seventy-three years in the future, by which time the Garden has apparently been torn down.” She glanced at Scott, who shrugged and nodded apologetically. “Charlene died only a week before,” Nazimova went on, waving toward Scott, “the evening he came from.” She shrugged. “You know this is possible—I believe it's all true.”

Glesca glanced at the rubber band stretched across Scott's fore
head and didn't seem at all incredulous. “That serpent lives till 2015?” she exclaimed, tossing the paper bag onto the table. “Shouldn't she . . . die much sooner?”

“Spider rejuvenations,” said Nazimova, “dilutions with young blood and bone, you know the story. Snap!” she added to Scott.

He hastily snapped his forehead rubber band and then the ones on his wrists. “I shouldn't stay away long, though,” he said. “My sister is alone back there.”

“Why do you imagine clocks here would have a connection with clocks there?” said Nazimova, sitting down again. “This isn't an
exchange,
such as you get with a spider. You came in here through a crack in time, and you'll go back through that crack.”

Glesca stepped wide around the couch where Scott sat and leaned against the wall on the far side of the window. She was still staring mistrustfully at him—evidently this talk of stepping from one century into another didn't strike her as unprecedented, but he was surprised that she didn't seem curious about the future. Maybe she just didn't want to know any of it.