Medusa's Web (28 page)

“Curl around west and find a way down to Sunset,” gasped Louise as the car swayed around the curves of the driveway. “Cops will arrive by way of Laurel Canyon.” She reached a shaky hand between the front seats and touched the rough surface of the dartboard on Scott's lap.

Madeline was blinking around as Ariel got to the bottom of the driveway and made a bouncy right turn. “I was Aunt Amity again, wasn't I? He shouldn't have pointed a gun at her foot.”

“It was a lucky break this time,” said Scott. “She tried to poke Ostriker's eyes out and then blew up on the roof.”

“Couldn't beat it as a distraction,” agreed Ariel, her eyes fixed on the road swooping past under the tires.

Madeline was pale and massaging her throat. “It feels like she did a lot of yelling too.”

After Ariel had made a number of tight, random turns, and hurriedly backed out of several narrow cul-de-sacs, with the clear intent of consistently aiming downhill, Scott peered out through the windshield and read a street sign. “This is Sunset Plaza Drive. I'd stay on it.”

Louise had been silent for several minutes, and now said, “What are you going to do with it?”

Scott looked at Ariel. “Do you know where Aunt Amity's old projector is, at Caveat? And the screen?”

“In the apiary,” she said.

He sighed in something like surrender. “We've got to get it set up.” And then by God I
will
do what Valentino and Nazimova wanted me to do, and Madeline will be free. Maybe it won't kill me, maybe my childhood exposure to the big spider—to Usabo, to the Medusa—will give me some degree of immunity.

He felt ready to vomit.

Madeline touched his shoulder. “It has to be me that watches it, Scott.”

“At Caveat?” said Ariel doubtfully. “Won't those guys come there, after it?”

“They're not following us right now,” said Scott, leaning back in the seat and breathing deeply, “and they think we somehow snuck past their watchers on Vista Del Mar—go back by way of the easement, from Gower, and with luck they'll think we're still out driving around the city somewhere. And anyway, it'll be eleven by the time
we get there; the house will be full of Claimayne's cleaners and caterers. Practically a public place.”

“And where else are we going to find a 35-millimeter projector instantly available?” asked Madeline. Scott could only see Louise in the rearview mirror, but he knew that if he could see Madeline, she'd be giving him a defiant look.

ARIEL DROVE SLOWLY UP
Gower past Franklin from Hollywood Boulevard, and when she could see no cars in the uphill or downhill lanes she swerved to the left into the narrow driveway that curved up between stone walls and overhanging greenery to the level area by the garages above the broad slope of the Caveat garden. She coasted down the main driveway, and at the gap where she and Scott had rolled one of the bordering logs aside she turned off the pavement and drove across the grass to the driveway by the kitchen door. A red Ford sedan that Scott didn't recognize was parked beside his motorcycle.

He handed the dartboard across to Ariel as he climbed out. “Let me go in first,” he said.

Louise had got out and was looking around at the landscape uneasily. “I'll wait outside,” she said.

Scott nodded as he crossed the cement and opened the kitchen door. “Fine.”

Foil-covered platters now covered every inch of counter space in the kitchen, and the warm air smelled of lemon and blue cheese; but there was no one in sight, and he pushed open the swinging doors to the long dining room. All the French windows were open to the cold breeze, and this room too was empty. He could hear voices and the clatter of collapsible chairs down the hall in the direction of the music room.

“I'll grab the old 220-volt extension cord,” called Ariel from the kitchen.

“'Kay.”

Madeline stepped into the dining room, and Scott nodded to her and led the way through the room to the hall and the stairs. He was relieved not to have come across Claimayne. As he tapped up the uncarpeted stairs, hearing Madeline's sneakers scuffing behind him, he was trying to remember how his aunt had threaded film through the projector and turned it on—feed roller, film gate, sprocket . . .

He had nearly reached the third-floor landing when he realized that he didn't hear Madeline's feet on the stairs now.

“Maddy?” He paused, then hurried back down the two flights of stairs.

She wasn't in the hall at the bottom of the stairs, nor down the laundry room hall, and his heart was pounding as he rushed through the dining room and pushed open the kitchen doors.

Madeline was crouched by the sink, gripping the counter and straightening up. Blood gleamed bright red on her mouth and chin and had stained the front of her blouse.

She saw Scott and waved toward the kitchen door. “Claimayne and that guy,” she gasped, “grabbed Ariel.”

Scott ran to the door and pulled it open—the red Ford was gone; Claimayne's empty wheelchair stood near Scott's motorcycle. He hurried out across the driveway, but the only vehicles he could see down the slope were cleaning and catering trucks and Louise's white Saturn. He looked across the lawn, but there was no car on the garage road. He didn't see Louise either.

He rushed back inside. Madeline was standing now, leaning over the sink and running water on a dish towel.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

She pinched the bridge of her nose. “Not broken,” she said, “just bloody. Ariel was in the dining room, behind me, and when I was on the stairs, I heard a scuffle and went back. Claimayne was walking! And that Ferdalisi guy was with him. He punched me.”

“Did she have the dartboard?”

“I couldn't see. She didn't have the extension cord.” She pressed the wet dish towel to her nose. In a muffled voice, she added, “Louise was with them. Voluntarily. She must have seen them in the garden, was why she hung back.”

“Terrific.” Scott was snapping his fingers rapidly. “Why would they take
Ariel,
if they had their damn dartboard?” Then he remembered something Ariel had said at Miceli's yesterday:
wheelbugs love to find people like me
. He waved a hand. “Talking to myself. How the hell are we going to find her?”

“Call 911.”

“And tell them she's in a red Ford somewhere. We need to find her
now
.” He strode to the door and looked uselessly out through the shard-edged window frame at the driveway and the lawn. He took a deep breath and let it out through clenched teeth—

—then reached into his pocket past the bulky revolver and pulled out the fourth of the spiders that had been in Claimayne's cloisonné box, the one labeled
Il Dottore.
It was crumpled, but he knew the lines on it would still be clear.

“Oh, don't even bother, Scott,” said Madeline, stepping forward and catching his arm. “It'll just show you where the dartboard was in 1950 or 1960. Not where it is
this minute
.”

“I'm not going to look at it dirty.” He turned around and held the folded slip of paper toward her. “Take a picture of it with your phone, and e-mail it to yourself, to break the dirty continuity. Quick! We can open it and print it out in the library.”

“So it'll be clean—so what?”

“
Eventually
I'll learn where they're taking her, right? So I'll look at it now, but I won't look at it again, I won't do the after, until I know where they've taken her.” Madeline stared at him blankly. “Listen,” he went on quickly, “when Ariel looked at a spider Tuesday night when we first got here, she was suddenly the Ariel from last night, who knew we weren't enemies, right? So she was friendly then, on Tuesday night, till that after wore off.”

Madeline's eyes widened and she nodded. “So when you look at it right now, you'll be the Scott who looks at it later, after you've found out where she is.”

He nodded. “Hurry. But don't look at it yourself.”

“It doesn't make sense. You'll find out where she
is
now because you'll eventually know where she
was
now?”

“Spiders see it all at once, not divvied up into
then
and
now
and
later
. Hurry!”

Madeline found her purse under the table and pulled her phone out of it.

“Focus on the edge of the sink first,” Scott told her, “so you know how high to hold it.”

Madeline nodded and moved the phone up and down over the sink, peering at the screen; then she held it steady. “Okay.”

“Don't move your hand, but close your eyes.” Scott unfolded the piece of paper, looking away, and by touch laid it on the Formica. “Now.”

The phone clicked, and he hastily folded the paper and shoved it into his pocket.

Madeline was stepping toward the door even as she tapped the screen. “There,” she said, pushing through the doors to the dining room, “let's go open up AOL.”

They hurried down the hall, past several impatient strangers in white coats with a caterer's logo stitched on the breast pockets, to their aunt's office, and Scott closed the door behind them while Madeline turned on the computer.

As the Windows screen appeared, Madeline asked, “So where will
you
be, when you look at this?”

“God knows
where
I'll be, but I'll have found out where she was now.”

“But even then, you won't know what happened, where they took her.”

Scott frowned. “That's true. Yeah, I'll have
traded places
with
the Scott who found that out. Just like the Ariel who cussed us out last night—
she
didn't know anything that had happened since the moment she looked at a spider three nights earlier.” He shrugged. “But at that point I won't need to know; it'll already have happened, and presumably I'll have . . .”

“Saved Ariel. Again.”

“Ideally. I hope so. Get into AOL, and don't look at your e-mail.”

Madeline tapped the keys on the white keyboard, then looked away, and a few seconds later the printer started humming. When it stopped, Scott peered sideways through slitted eyes at the piece of paper lying in the tray and saw the lines of a spider. He looked at the ceiling as he lifted the paper out of the tray and folded it twice.

As they hurried back down the hall toward the kitchen, he pulled out of his pocket the old crumpled spider that Madeline had photographed and tore it to pieces in the palm of his hand.

A couple of men in aprons were in the kitchen now, and they watched in mute disapproval as Scott took a clean wineglass from a box and broke it in the sink. He snatched up a solid piece of the stem with a wing of glass still attached, and then he and Madeline pushed past the caterers and out the door. Scott tucked the piece of glass into his pocket, not looking forward to gripping it tightly in his fist.

“Helmet?” said Madeline as he swung onto the motorcycle and bent to fit the key into the ignition. “Goggles?”

“Damn. No time. They might be killing her right now.”

He drove his foot down on the kick-starter and the motor roared.

Madeline was wringing her hands. “I should have cast a chart for you!” she called.

“It'd just tell me what I should have done last month,” he said. He looked at his watch—it was exactly 11:10. He took a deep breath, then unfolded the sheet of freshly printed paper and looked squarely at the spider.

THE HOUSE AND THE
gray sky and his anxious sister were all blotted out as the spider's limbs expanded and split and split again and again and began to spin; or else it and Scott held still while the universe spun around them. And for a precious, measureless period he was nobody at all.

Then he was among the vertical-seeming shapes, and it came to him that
they
were spiders, viewed from the two-dimensional spider perspective, end-on; and that their apparent infinite height was a compensatory illusion provided by his mind, in an attempt to normalize the perception of figures with breadth but no height at all.

They moved aside, and he fell through them.

And his motorcycle was gone, and he sagged to his knees in damp grass, and pain shot up his left arm when he leaned forward and his weight came onto his palms. He rolled jarringly onto his left shoulder and looked at his left hand; fresh blood was smeared across his palm, almost hiding an inch-long gash at the base of the thumb, and his fingers were sticky with it and the black cuff of his jacket was gleaming.

He sat up and found himself facing the south wall of Caveat, just to the right of the front porch, under an overcast sky. He got his legs under himself and managed to stand up.

What day is it?
he thought.

His joints all ached, but that was the familiar spider-lag effect; he didn't seem to have any other wounds, or any broken bones. A moment later he cringed to see a wide patch of fresh blood on the front of his shirt, but when he prodded his chest he felt no cuts—either he had held his cut hand there, or it was someone else's blood.

He shifted stiffly around to look toward the driveway and exhaled in relief to see the roofs of the catering and cleaning vans. It's the same day, he thought; I didn't have to wait days to do the after, didn't have to get a call from the police about Ariel's body found in a culvert somewhere.
But did I save her?

He looked at his watch: 11:29.

Only nineteen minutes since I started the motorcycle in the driveway and looked at the spider and exchanged places with me in this vision right now. What did I learn a few seconds ago—standing right here!—that led me to look at the spider again, do the after? What made me believe I knew where she was?

He peered around at the long grass and the descending overgrown slope down to Vista Del Mar. Whatever the encounter was, he told himself, it must have been close by, for it all to be over in only nineteen minutes. If in fact it is all over. I wonder where my bike is.

The piece of glass that had presumably cut his palm was gone; and when he patted his right jacket pocket, he realized that the revolver was gone too.

If I did rescue her from Claimayne—Claimayne was up and walking?—and Ferdalisi, where is she now? In an ambulance? In Madeline's car, racing out of Los Angeles? Waiting for me in the apiary? And if I didn't succeed in rescuing her . . . is she injured, dead, somewhere? Still with Claimayne and Ferdalisi? Did I run into trouble and then abandon her? What did I do with the damn
gun?

Suddenly the aches in his head and spine doubled, and he realized that he had sat down again, involuntarily. Sweat ran down his
forehead into his eyes, and he was shivering violently in the cold; he took several deep breaths to quell a surge of nausea. My body has taken the shocks of two spider viewings within the space of nineteen minutes, he thought dazedly; I'm lucky I'm not dead.

Unless I failed her, in which case I'm not lucky at all.

It was harder to stand up this time, and he took two lurching steps and held himself up by leaning against the rough stucco wall of the house.

He dragged himself along the wall and then worked his way around the porch, leaning on the outside of the marble rail. The two steps up to the porch were dizzying enough to make him sit down on the bench where he had set his bundle and Madeline's bag in the rain on their first night at Caveat.

When his head had cleared, Scott lifted his wrist and made himself focus on his watch: 11:44 now. He stood up and walked fairly steadily to the front door. He touched the knob, and the vision faded.

HE FELL TO HIS
hands and knees again, and instantly lifted his left hand as it flared with pain.

“God!” he croaked. He could feel that he was on damp grass again, but all he could see was a mottled gray and green surface with red streaks across it. He gingerly stretched the fingers of his left hand and saw the red streaks change their shapes.
It's my hand,
he thought—
see it as three-dimensional
.

He rotated his hand and watched the red patches merge and separate—wishing he had Ariel's gyroscope instead—and after several seconds, he was able to perceive that the gray and green shapes were grass and, several yards away, the marble railing and pavement of the Caveat front porch; the red shapes were clearly his own blood-wet fingers only inches in front of his face.

Scott lowered his hand and scowled across the grass at the Caveat porch and the front door and the doorknob he seemed to
have touched only a minute ago. That vision had ended, and he was back in real time.

He sat down in the grass and focused on his watch. Squinting hard, was able to see that the hands stood at 11:26. And the vision he'd just recovered from had started at 11:29!

Three minutes from now, he thought bewilderedly, I'm due to look at the spider again. In these next three minutes I'll apparently, somehow, satisfy myself that I know where Claimayne and Ferdolisi took Ariel.

He got to his feet once again—though the two times in his immediate memory wouldn't actually occur for several minutes yet—and just stood there panting. Had he been running? He turned and looked behind him, toward the east. Is that the direction I came from, he wondered, after whatever happened happened? Where the hell
is
everybody?

There was something lumpy against his stomach, under the jacket, and it didn't feel like the revolver. Whatever it was, it hadn't been there . . . wouldn't be there, a couple of minutes from now, when he would look at the spider again. He took hold of the zipper tab with his left hand and pulled it down.

At that moment he heard the front door open, and he shifted his feet around on the grass to be able to look toward it.

Louise was standing on the porch, staring at him in horror. She was holding Madeline's purse. The left side of her face and her hair on that side were bright neon orange, and streaks of the same color slanted vividly across her dark blue quilted jacket.

“I'm sorry!” she wailed. “Is Ariel dead?”

“Where are they?” he called hoarsely.

And then she just shook her head and ran away from him, toward the driveway. He started after her but slid to a gasping halt after only a couple of paces.

Louise had left the front door open, and from inside Scott now heard the clanging and booming of Claimayne's elevator starting up.
Where is Claimayne coming from? thought Scott in alarm. Where is he going?

His instinctive impulse was to go inside—find Claimayne, confront him. But he looked again at his watch and saw that it was now 11:28. He couldn't go after Claimayne now, he was due to look at the spider again in less than
one minute
—and experience the moments directly after he had first looked at it, sitting on his idling motorcycle while Madeline said she wished she'd made an astrological chart for him.

But I won't know where to go! And I've only got seconds left!

Impatiently he pulled the lumpy object out of his jacket.

It was a green rubber hand with long pointed rubber fingernails.

I know what that is, he thought; I've seen that before. Where?

The rubber space aliens in the east garage.

Claimayne and Ferdolisi hadn't taken Ariel far at all.

He tossed the rubber hand aside, pulled the spider from his pocket, and unfolded it and stared at it.

FOR THE SECOND TIME
the thing expanded to fill his vision, dividing and fissipating and spinning, and in this impossible-seeming perspective his consciousness had no place in which to exist, and so it did not.

Eventually the view of the spider rotated ninety degrees, and Scott was again able to comprehend the spiders from their own perspective, horizontally, though his mind imposed an arbitrary verticality on their infinite flatness. They parted, and he moved forward between them—

And he was in the reciprocal vision, experiencing his body nineteen minutes earlier. He was astride the idling motorcycle on the driveway outside the kitchen door, and he folded the freshly printed spider paper and shoved it into his pocket, then clicked the bike into first gear.

Madeline was standing in the kitchen doorway, staring at him anxiously. He knew she hoped he would call out and let her know what he believed he had learned, but he didn't want her to participate in whatever it was that had made him lose the gun and perhaps get someone else's blood on his shirt.

And so he just nodded quickly to his sister and then let out the bent clutch lever and twisted the throttle grip, and he gunned the bike out across the grass. Now he could see that there were more tire tracks flattening the grass than just those that had been left by Madeline's Datsun.

To his own surprise he felt optimistic and almost eager, and he realized that it was because his aches and nausea were gone, and his left hand was still strong and undamaged, and he could again feel the weight of Claimayne's revolver in his right jacket pocket. It's temporary well-being, he told himself as he steered the motorcycle through the gap where he and Ariel had rolled the bordering log aside this morning, but use it while you've got it. He inhaled the cold eucalyptus-scented air and raced up the driveway toward the ridge garages.

Scott clicked the gearshift down into neutral when the road leveled out in front of the garages, and when he had sped past them, and past the easement down to Gower, the driveway curved to the right and began to descend toward the old east-end garage.

The red Ford sedan was parked down there on the wider section of pavement. Scott reached under the gas tank and switched the engine off.

As the motorcycle coasted down the curving driveway back toward the east end of the house, it was silent except for the faint whir of the chain; Louise's question—
Is Ariel dead?
—echoed in his head, and he was not even tempted to let his right foot touch the rear brake pedal.

Where the driveway broadened in front of the garage, Scott slanted the bike to the right and gripped the front brake lever; the front end nosed down sharply, and the bike came to a silent halt beside the big
mesquite tree that shaded half the garage roof. He swung the kickstand down and got off the motorcycle, pulling Claimayne's revolver from his jacket pocket. He knew he still had two unfired rounds in it, and he resisted the temptation to swing the cylinder out and check them. He was sweating and trembling, and as he stepped around the corner of the garage he reminded himself to breathe. With his left hand he dug the piece of broken wineglass out of his pocket, and he gritted his teeth and made himself squeeze it—the edge cut into the base of his thumb, and he gasped at the bright heat of the pain.

The doorway of the garage was open, the door he had knocked out of its frame on Wednesday still lying on the asphalt in front of the red Ford. Scott sidled up to the door in time to hear Claimayne say, “Where the hell is your
backup
?”

Ferdalisi's Spanish-accented voice said, “The party isn't to start until two; this preemptive capture was serendipitous. Now, girl, tell me where you put the—dartboard?—or I'll cut out your eyes. A misfortune for a spider addict.”

Scott whispered a brief prayer, then raised the gun and stepped through the doorway, swinging the barrel back and forth in the dimness.

Claimayne was instantly visible, sitting down on the cement floor and massaging his left leg; he blinked in surprise at Scott's sudden appearance. Ariel was sitting on the floor to the right, her head lowered and her arms awkwardly bent behind her, and beside her crouched Ferdalisi, who, Scott was now able to see, was holding a pistol, its barrel pressed against Ariel's temple.

“Drop it,” Ferdalisi said calmly. When Scott hesitated, he went on, “She had only moments to hide the dartboard after she saw us coming, and Louise has gone to look for it. She will almost certainly find it very quickly. I really don't need this woman to tell me where it is.”

“She'd only tell you someplace wrong anyway,” said Claimayne, straightening his leg and wincing. “She's perverse.”

When Scott still didn't let go of the revolver, Ferdalisi shrugged and lifted the grip of his pistol so that the barrel was aimed more directly at Ariel's temple, and Scott hastily opened his right hand. The revolver clanked on the cement floor.

Ferdalisi let his arm relax, but he kept the muzzle pressed against Ariel's hair, and it didn't waver when running footsteps approached from outside. Scott looked to his left and saw Louise step into the doorway, panting and holding the dartboard in both hands.

She gave him an incongruously apologetic grimace as she edged past him into the garage. “It was on top of a cabinet in the dining room,” she told Ferdalisi.

“Step away from her,” Ferdalisi said sharply to Scott. And when Scott shuffled aside, furiously squeezing the broken glass in his left hand, Ferdalisi told Louise, “Open it. There must be a way to open it.”

Louise sat down cross-legged on the cement near Claimayne and pried at the rim. “It shakes like there's something in it,” she said helpfully. After a few more seconds, she said, “Aha.” Scott heard a click, and then she had lifted away the top surface of the dartboard. Inside the shallow round tray lay the film can Scott had last seen in William Desmond Taylor's apartment in 1922.

“The exorcism,” said Ferdalisi with evident satisfaction. “Now it will never be viewed.”