Medusa's Web (24 page)

Nazimova leaned forward, her hands clasped, and looked piercingly into Scott's eyes. “Tell me it all; there are no secrets between Doody and I. You want to save your sister? Of course you do. And I would like to help you banish
Charlene
.”

Scott took a deep breath and began speaking, haltingly at first and then, after a few sentences, in a compulsive rush. His wrists and forehead were stinging like burns by the time he had told the women about the Usabo spider and his parents' blackmail attempt, and the exorcism film and the murder of William Desmond Taylor, and his aunt's possible murder of his parents, his peculiar cousins, and Madeline's supposed relationship with Valentino.

He sat back finally, and was surprised to realize that his face was wet with tears; he blotted them on his shirtsleeve.

“It's a painful story to tell, isn't it?” said Nazimova. She waved at his hands and his face. “And not just because of the circumstances.”

Her Russian accent became more pronounced as she went on, “When I was seventeen, a student of Vladimir Namirovich-Danchenko at the Philharmonic School in Moscow, he had a copy of the first version of Henrik Ibsen's
A Doll's House
. Do you know that play?”

Scott shook his head. “Heard of it.”

“Ibsen's agent had made him rewrite the second and third acts, but in the original manuscript the heroine, Nora Helmer, intercepts a letter addressed to her husband from an enemy—it contains a ‘symbol,' and after she has looked at it, she has to dance the tarantella, so fast that it alarms her ignorant husband; and when she has recovered, she leaves her husband and her children because she has no longer any sense of being the person she has been until then. The revised version of the play omits the symbol and her literally broken identity, but Ibsen insisted on retaining the frenzied tarantella dance.

“When I came to Hollywood, I discovered that the symbol Ibsen referred to was real. I never looked at a spider—my own identity, shabby as it is, has always nevertheless been too precious to me—but I knew people who did.” She paused to light another of her black cigarettes.

She sat back in her chair, glancing up and to the side at Glesca. “Charlene Cooper was an extra,” she told Scott, “a girl in a café crowd scene in the film
Eye for Eye,
when I met her in 1918. She was quite a pretty little thing, and I took a fancy to her. I told her I believed I could get her a more visible part in my next picture,
Out of the Fog
. But she was soon involved in the spiders, through the man who married her in 1921, Paul Speas. She wanted the experience of being a famous actress, but not directly—she wanted it through me. She loved me, worshipped me—so much that she wanted to
be
me. She wanted to move past mere adoration and find a way into my actual identity. I had to wear distorting glasses everywhere until I had her banned from the studio.”

“Serpent!” whispered Glesca.

Scott snapped his wrist rubber bands.

Nazimova puffed on her cigarette and went on. “The spiders are apparently two-dimensional creatures who have no conception of time or spatial volume. Sometimes they are summoned into our continuum, and they experience every event here as the same event—and they impose that discontinuous experience on anyone foolish enough to participate in their perspective! I gather,” she said with evident distaste, “it's exciting to occasionally lose one's identity through them. They were like a new drug in Hollywood, thirty years ago; and they were supposed to prolong one's youth, and everyone wanted that. You said you watched
Salomé
last night—Natacha did the set designs for that picture, and, unknown to me, she even inserted an image that spider users would recognize, as a sort of wink to the
cognoscenti
.”

“More like a punch in the nose,” murmured Scott.

Nazimova drew deeply on her black cigarette, frowning. “But,” she went on, exhaling smoke, “predators soon sprang up who enjoyed planting dirty spiders where they'd be seen by someone, and then doing terrible things in that other person's body, even committing suicide, so that they could experience death without quite dying themselves. Your cousin seems to be one of these.”

“Yes,” Scott agreed grimly. “He is.”

“Bill Taylor wanted to find a way to eliminate all the spiders,” Nazimova went on, “because a woman he loved had begun experimenting with them, and it was ruining her health. I suggested to him how he might use the extreme tarantella rhythms to banish the big spider. Spiders spin—” She smiled. “Well, everybody knows that, don't they? But in their own universe they're evidently spinning like tops, and I told Bill that if he could make a film in which the image of the Medusa spider was kept on the screen, interspersed with black frames timed to the period of the spin, it might in effect make the spin appear to—definitively appear to—stop. Like a phonograph record spinning on a turntable in a dark room, illuminated by a light flashing seventy-eight times a minute; the record would appear to
be stationary. And the spider, this is the
master
spider, remember, would effectively lose its spin—become stationary. It would thus find here an impossibility of itself, and be excluded in future from this universe. The patterns on paper would still exist, but they would no longer have a connection to that other universe or anything in it.”

She ground out her cigarette and lit another.

“And so Bill made his banishing film, but before he could use it, Natacha, with poor Rudolph along, unknowingly led some monster to his bungalow down there on Alvarado, and you saw what happened. And then, yes, Charlene and Paul Speas stole Taylor's exorcism film from Natacha, and disappeared. Natacha and Rudolph have been doing penance ever since.”

“Penance?” asked Scott.

“In Purgatory, for Rudolph. Did you know it took two priests to hear his last confession and administer the sacrament of Extreme Unction? Too many lives in one body, too many conflicting sins! And after he died, he was evidently there to pull your sister out of the psychic maelstrom when you were children; because she was a child, and afraid, and helpless in Medusa.” She fixed Scott with something like a glare. “And
before
he died, he told you how to kill the spiders.”

“Yes, but I have to find another way—”

“There is no other way.”

“But damn it, I
tried
to find the film!” Scott protested, reaching up to stretch the rubber band and sting his damp forehead. “Even though
my
identity, shabby though it is, is . . . ! But Paul Speas took it away while my aunt was in a hospital, and I haven't found any trace of him. He's probably dead by now, by 2015. It's an ice-cold trail.”

“Ah, but you have a terrible gift,” said Nazimova, speaking almost gently now, “don't you? You know how to see places where it is in time. If you look at enough places, you might find where it is, in your 2015. And then, I think you know, you must use it—as Taylor intended to use it himself, to save someone he loved.”

“Charlene will destroy your sister,” said Glesca.

Scott recalled what Ariel had said:
It breaks the victim's mind.

Nazimova reached across the table and touched his hand. “What is your sister's name?” she asked, though he had mentioned it in his account.

“Madeline,” he said, and in saying her name again he realized that he had no choice but to do as Nazimova said.

“I think you can take off the rubber bands,” said Nazimova.

Scott pulled them off, no doubt messing up his hair even more. He stood up and turned to the door.

“I should probably step outside,” he said dully. “I don't want to materialize inside the wall, in 2015.” He finally picked up one of Nazimova's black cigarettes and lit it.

He pushed open the door and stepped outside. Beyond a narrow sunlit porch, tiled stairs led down between red-stippled pyracantha bushes to a cement deck and a glittering turquoise pool, and beyond it he could see the tile roof and streaked white walls of a long three-story building. The warm breeze whispered among pepper trees and bird-of-paradise bushes, and Scott could hear Frank Sinatra's unmistakable voice echoing from a nearby apartment.

The door at his back opened and Nazimova joined him, squinting through cigarette smoke at the taller building on the far side of the pool.

“This whole block of Sunset Boulevard was my estate until 1928,” she said. “I lost it through admiration of the wrong person, and now I rent this apartment and only go to the main house over there to pick up my mail.” She smiled up at him and touched his arm. “But I can still admire people.”

The Sinatra song paused in midphrase with a cough, and then the voice started again from the beginning. Nazimova listened for a few seconds, then nodded. “I think he's got it now,” she said, and Scott realized that it was Sinatra himself, in one of the nearby apartments, practicing. How old would he have been, Scott wondered, in 1942?

The landscape flickered.

He heard her say, faintly, “Go with God, Scott Madden,” and then the light vanished and his bare feet were on the wooden floor of the Caveat hallway. The coal of his cigarette was all he could see in the sudden darkness, and he inhaled deeply on it, tasting 1942, as he padded back to Madeline's room.

SCOTT AWOKE TO THE
sound of banging and men's voices below the window. He rolled over stiffly on the floor and was surprised to see Ariel lying beside him, blinking and frowning in the gray morning light.

Madeline had sat up in her bed. “Hullo, Ariel,” she said; then, “What's going on outside?”

“Claimayne's cleaning crew,” said Ariel hoarsely, sitting up and rubbing her eyes. “It sounds like they're throwing out all our pots and pans.” Scott saw her .32 semiautomatic lying on the floor on the other side of her. “You're some guard,” she said to him. “I snuck in here and neither of you woke up.”

Scott could think of nothing to say to that. He watched her warily.

“Neither of
you
woke up,” said Madeline cheerfully, “when I went downstairs at five. I printed—” She visibly caught herself, then finished, “some cat pictures off the Internet.”

You printed some more of Aunt Amity's demented monologue, thought Scott sourly, and with some embarrassment he remembered that
he
had been scared by the mere
thought
of going downstairs last night.

“You shouldn't wander around here by yourself,” he said.

And all at once he remembered his visit with Alla Nazimova, in her apartment at the Garden of Allah. For a moment he tried to imagine that it had been a dream—but he could still taste the cigarette he had lit there.

“Scott's right,” said Ariel, “this house is dangerous for you.” She looked from Madeline to Scott and put her finger to her lips and looked meaningfully around the room.

Madeline rocked her head, clearly indicating,
I remember
.

Scott threw off his blanket and stood up and crossed to the window. Under an overcast sky he could see the Medusa wall out there in the garden, and then he looked down at his bare feet, with no mud on them this morning.

Nazimova is long dead by now, he told himself, carefully tasting the thought. I didn't even promise anything. And, and—there might be a clue to
another way,
in whatever Madeline printed out at dawn. There might be. I should have asked Nazimova what can be done if the Taylor film simply can't be found.

Ariel stood up too; she had at some point changed to flannel pajamas, and she slid her feet into a pair of slippers that lay near her gun.

“I could use some coffee,” Scott said.

“Yes, let's talk in the kitchen,” said Ariel, crouching to pick up her gun.

Madeline rolled over and pulled on a pair of khaki cargo pants and put a sweater on over her T-shirt, and they stepped into the next room.

And then the telephone rang; or, more accurately, a ringing started up near the wall. The telephone was on the other side of the room, on a shelf.

Madeline's eyes were wide, and even Ariel was glancing in obvious bafflement from the sourceless sound in the corner to the inert telephone several feet away.

Scott stared at the thing, wishing it had waited until he had got coffee and was more awake.

“Um,” said Ariel, “answer it, maybe?”

What if it's our mother, thought Scott, from somewhere in the past? But would she call her own phone?

He held his breath and picked up the receiver. “. . . Hello?”

“Dad?” came a young girl's voice out of the earpiece. He recognized it as Madeline's. “I know it's a school night, but is it okay if I go see
Beauty and the Beast
with Darlene and her mom and dad?”

Scott's face was cold. I'm not our dad! he thought. Does my voice
sound
like his?

But he cleared his throat. “Sure, Maddy,” he said; then, remembering that this call didn't actually get through, he added, “I mean, can you call back on the downstairs phone, to confirm it? I'm—distracted right now—I won't remember.”

He heard her sigh. “Okay, Dad. I love you.”

“I love you, Maddy,” he said, hoping their father had said it to her a lot. The line clicked, and then the phone was silent.

Madeline stared at him. “
Me?
”

Scott shakily replaced the receiver. “Yes.” His hand was sweaty, and he wiped it on his jeans. “It sounded like you were about seven. You thought I was Dad, and you were asking if you could go see
Beauty and the Beast
with Darlene.”

Her mouth was open. “I remember he said yes, and when I called back he said no.”

Scott waved at the phone. “It was me who said yes.”

“I wish you'd let me talk to me.”

“Wow,” said Ariel softly. She shook herself, then waved around the room and rolled her eyes.

Right, thought Scott, Claimayne probably heard all that.

“Coffee,” he said; but when Madeline had snatched up a sheaf of papers and she and Ariel had stepped into the hall, he said, “You two go ahead, I—have to put some shoes on.”

When they had descended the stairs, Scott hurried down the hall to the wall of decorative doors, found Nazimova's, and knocked on it.

He waited for several long seconds, but there was no answer. He turned the knob, and when he tugged on it, the door once again swung open.

The room that impossibly lay beyond was empty now, except for a worn tweedy gray couch that had not been there on his earlier visit, and hot sunlight through the uncurtained window on his right that lit streaks of dust on the bare floorboards.

Still barefoot, he stepped hesitantly into the room and closed the door behind him; it echoed in the vacated room, and his gaze darted to the empty spaces once occupied by Nazimova's desk, and the table, and the orchids.

He heard steps ascending the stairs outside, and he realized there was no place to hide, so he just crossed his arms and looked out the window. The cement deck around the pool was crowded with people in shorts and straw hats and sunglasses, and a ladder stood in front of the arches of the main house on the far side.

He heard the door open and looked around with the best imitation of relaxed confidence that he could muster.

A middle-aged man in Bermuda shorts and a polo shirt was holding the door open, and a moment later a blond young woman in a gray pantsuit and a brimless velvet hat walked into the room. The knock of her low shoes echoed in the empty space.

They both gave him a cursory glance, and the man nodded, and then they walked past him to peer in through an open door beside the bare little kitchen.

And as she limped past him, Scott recognized her—more from the author photos on the dust jackets of her novels than from his own later acquaintance with her.

“I want to buy the front door, and the bathtub,” said the woman who by now was probably calling herself Amity Imogene Speas, not Charlene Claimayne Speas anymore.

“The bathtub?” said the man beside her. “Not just the faucets, you mean the whole tub? How do you figure to get it out?”

“You can arrange it, I'm sure,” she said. “Cleveland Wrecking is tearing the whole place down after you've sold all the furniture and fixtures, right? And hauling all the rubble away? So save me the tub. And the door. I can pay you for your trouble.”

Tearing it down? Scott thought. He shivered. Then this must be 1959.

The woman turned and looked down at Scott's bare feet, frowning. “I'm not interested in the couch, if that's what you were after,” she told him. She stepped back then, and he realized he must have been staring at her face, which was jarringly smooth and unlined. He shook his head and looked away from her, toward the window and the wall where Glesca had been leaning, seventeen years earlier.

“No,” he said. “I think I came too late for what I wanted.”

For a moment the urge to say something more to her made the breath quiver in his throat.
Don't write a last-minute will for me and Madeline. Don't leave spiders for us. Please don't kill our parents.
But Amity Speas wouldn't even meet his parents for another decade, and he and Madeline wouldn't be born till years after that—and in any case he was sure that whatever he might say here, now, would have been said in the same 1959 that had inevitably led to his opening the door this morning . . . or, locally, evident afternoon.

Finally all he could think of was to take this disorienting opportunity to say the two syllables of “Good-bye” to the woman who had raised Madeline and him, and he did, a bit huskily.

She gave him an uncertain nod, and when she turned back toward the bathroom, he opened the front door and stepped quietly and directly into the dim Caveat hallway and closed the door behind him.

You have a terrible gift,
Nazimova had told him last night or seventy-three years ago. And,
Go with God, Scott Madden.

He glanced apprehensively down the hall toward his own room, where waited his leather jacket with Claimayne's two remaining spiders in the pocket. Losing his identity, even just for a timeless
moment, was still not an altogether repellent prospect, no matter what calamities might follow.

“Coffee first,” he whispered, and hurried down the stairs.

Before he reached the bottom he heard men's voices in the dining room, and when he stepped through from the hall, he saw that the long table had been turned on its side against the north wall; two young men in overalls were hard at work, one of them washing the windows and the other running a big steel vacuum cleaner over the carpet. Scott nodded as he strode past them.

Only Madeline and Ariel were in the kitchen, though a couple of wheeled yellow plastic buckets and a big clipboard on the counter indicated the recent presence and imminent return of Claimayne's cleaning crew. Ariel handed Scott a steaming cup and said, “I thought you were going to put on some shoes.”

He saw a jar of Taster's Choice coffee beside the microwave oven and knew that she and Madeline had decided on instant coffee under the circumstances. “I forgot,” he said. “Let's take this outside.”

His sister nodded, and he followed her and Ariel out onto the driveway and around the north corner to the sidewalk facing the wilderness of the garden. A couple of strangers at the far end of the house were wheeling more buckets along, but they were moving in the other direction.

Ariel's dark hair was blowing around her face in the chilly breeze. “There's no place to sit,” she said crossly. “And it's cold.”

“We can go back inside when we've said everything we don't want Claimayne to hear,” said Scott. He waved at the papers Madeline was holding in her free hand. “Did Aunt Amity have anything worthwhile to say?”

“Did I sound happy?” asked Madeline. When Scott gave her a blank look, she added, “On the phone, twenty-four years ago?”

Scott shivered in the morning wind, reflecting that every moment he spent with Madeline was making his quest, his surely useless and damaging quest, more impossible to avoid.

“Yes,” he said.

After a pause, Madeline shrugged and then just blew across the top of her coffee cup.

“What would you have said?” Ariel asked her.

“Be patient.”

Scott pointed at the papers. The pavement was cold and damp under his bare feet.

Madeline nodded and crouched to set her coffee cup on the cement, then straightened and held the papers up in front of her. “It repeats, the way she always does, but I thought I ought to bring all the pages along. The gist of it is . . .” She paused and fixed her eyes on the top sheet. “I'm guessing at punctuation . . . ‘
The freeway ends, Cyclone, I've got to take the wheel and swerve to the exit
' . . . uh, I think she meant to put in ‘
and
' or ‘
even though I,
' . . . ‘
risk rolling the glory that blushed and bloomed, a dim-remembered story of the old time entombed—You've got to take that exit before the freeway ends, Charlene, and I think it ends very soon.
'”

Madeline's voice had taken on a singsong cadence, and when she had spoken the last few words, she had not been looking at the paper.

“Make her stop,” said Ariel suddenly, but Scott had already tossed his coffee cup into a rosemary bush and stepped forward to take hold of Madeline's shoulders.

She went on, “‘
I wasn't supposed to be like this—hampered, confused
—'” and then her fingers sprang out straight, and the papers flew away across the weeds; but she stared straight ahead and kept speaking: “‘
Steer Madeline off at the Ince exit, Charlene, and then find Alla in the infinity of surface streets.
'”

“Watch her,” said Ariel quickly, stepping away. “I'll get the papers.”

Madeline's head swiveled to face Scott, and he was sure it was not his sister behind the pinched mouth and narrowed eyes.

“It will destroy her,” he said levelly to his aunt, “and you love her.”

“But you all
meddled,
” came a strained voice from Madeline's throat, “your whole family is terrible nosy parkers, interferers, busybodies! I needed my retirement check, but it was gone, you put a foolish asterisk in the envelope, and my son has obviously killed me, same as he did your
curiosi
parents.” She nodded jerkily. “From the ground, from under the floors, under an iron cross in the darkness, their blood too cries out.”

Scott rocked back on his heels, his face suddenly cold and tight; his hands had fallen away from her shoulders.

The scare-bat in the basement, he thought, the gold-painted lug wrench—their headstone? The writing in the cement,
Hic iacent curiosi—
their epitaph? Does it mean something like
Here lie the interferers?

I always did feel safe beside the scare-bat,
Madeline said when I found her down there three days ago. Was that as close as she could get to her long-lost mother and father?

“You can't keep her,” he managed to say.

“I can. I will. The living image is in her memory, and I'll salvage it and go back—to when Alla loved me. And then I'll do much more than simply adore her from afar. I'll find the way in to
be
her.”