Medusa's Web (31 page)

“Do we have any fire extinguishers?” she asked, looking past him.

“You live here.”

“We don't have any fire extinguishers. Madeline ran to the stairs, but she was gone by the time I—I was right behind her. She disappeared.”

“I know, I saw her. Call 911—about the fire.”

They shuffled down the hall to the stairs, and Scott gripped the banister and Ariel's arm as he got both feet on one step before reaching for the next. Ariel had her phone in her free hand and was describing the situation to the 911 dispatcher.

“I've got to go,” she said finally, evidently interrupting the dispatcher, and she thrust the phone into her pocket. When they reached the second-floor landing, she asked Scott, “Did it work? Is there anything you need from your rooms?”

“It worked,” he gasped, “and no, nothing.” Certainly not the Wild Turkey, he thought.

Halfway down the last flight of stairs they saw a man in a white jacket pause in the entry hall to stare up at them.

“The house is on fire,” said Scott distinctly. “Get everyone out now.”

The man ran away toward the kitchen.

“Valentino said it would kill whoever watched it,” said Ariel, still supporting most of Scott's weight.

Scott took a deep breath and said, “It would have killed me—the Medusa fell out of this reality like . . . a letter through a mail slot—but I managed to separate myself and rotate out of it, away from it, before it went, so I was . . . flat against the mail slot, as it were.” He had run out of breath, but when they reached the floor of the entry hall he inhaled again and added, “Madeline—before the Medusa spider disappeared—escaped into the past with Rudolph Valentino.”

Ariel shook her head and sighed. “Might have guessed.”

Men and women in uniforms and overalls were hurrying up and asking questions, and Ariel shouted, “The house is on fire! Get everyone out!” In a more normal voice she added, “The party's
totally
canceled.”

“I can walk,” said Scott. He hobbled to the front door and pulled it open. Already the breeze was spicy with wood smoke. Ariel held his arm as they made their way down the steps and across the patch of lawn to the top of the leaf-strewn and vine-hung stairs. How many years ago, Scott wondered, did Madeline and Valentino and Bridget hurry away down these stairs?—if it happened in actual linear time at all.

Scott could see a crowd of the cleaners and caterers out on the driveway beyond the kitchen now, and when a couple of young men in the catering uniform hurried out the front door, Scott yelled, “Is everybody out?”

“The last of them,” one of them answered irritably. “Both crews. Are you sure?”

“Get over here.”

The men hurried across the grass, and Scott pointed behind them.

They turned and looked back. Flames danced behind the windows of the gables, and smoke sifted in quickly dispelling streamers from under the roof tiles. As they watched, a gray rectangle spun away into the sky and a jet of flame burst up from the far side of the roof.

“That's the rooftop heater,” said Scott.

“Right.” Both the caterers hurried toward the driveway, away from Scott and Ariel.

Ariel was holding Scott's right hand. “I'm not sure any copies of Claimayne's books of poetry exist outside of the house,” she remarked.

“Firemen might save the library.”

In a low but suddenly fierce voice, Ariel said, “I hope nothing is saved.”

Scott heard trucks start up and move down the driveway toward Vista Del Mar.

The breeze was chilly in Scott's sweaty hair and shirt, and he wished he had paused on the second floor to grab his jacket.

A moment later he was glad he hadn't. A crack appeared between
two windows on the second floor, and the crack leaped up to the roof and down to the foundation and became a widening, roof-splitting fissure, with falling beams dimly visible through it and clay tiles tumbling out in the gray daylight, and then very slowly the entire east side of the house leaned away and separated into uneven segments as it folded and fell in a rushing burst of dust. The noise was like unending close thunder.

Coughing in the dust and sudden heat, Scott and Ariel hurried down the steps as bits of masonry clattered in the leaves overhead.

“All the way to the parking lot,” Scott gasped.

“Screw jacks!” said Ariel, scuffing through drifts of dead leaves ahead of him.

“Lousy handyman,” Scott agreed.

Each of them stumbled on the cement steps at some point and was helped up by the other, but within two minutes they both stood at the street edge of the parking lot, panting.

Scott was bent forward with his hands gingerly gripping his knees, but he looked up in time to see the western half of the house sink unevenly into the dust cloud. This time the rolling rumble of the collapse was matched by thunder from the sky, and drops of rain tapped at his hands.

Flames flickered into sight above the treetops, apparently along the whole length of Caveat.

“Everything,” said Ariel beside him. Then, “The east half of the house fell onto the garage, and it's all burning. They'll find Claimayne and Ferdalisi, and the gun, but I doubt they'll find our blood.”

Scott nodded, occupied with breathing and keeping his balance.

Behind him he heard an idling engine and tires slowly turning on asphalt, and when he looked over his shoulder, he saw the gleaming yellow Chevrolet station wagon halt a few yards away. The door opened and the gray-haired man who this morning had called himself Polydectes got out. He was still wearing the dark windbreaker, and his right hand was in the pocket.

“We put on the spare,” he said to Scott. He looked up the hill then, and after a moment he added, “Your house appears to be burning up.”

“I watched the film,” Scott said.

He peered over the man's shoulder but didn't see anyone else in the car. But there were probably other cars.

The man nodded thoughtfully. “You're alive, though,” he pointed out.

“I rotated myself out of it,” Scott said. “But it did work.” He straightened up, against sharp aches in his back.

The fire up the hill boomed and cracked.

“Maybe you watched it, maybe you stashed it.”

Ariel reached into the pocket of her blouse and pulled out a folded piece of paper. To Scott she said, “I printed two copies, in case . . . I don't know. Doesn't matter now.” She faced Polydectes and held the paper out toward him. “This is a live spider, or it was, before Scott did the exorcism. Go ahead, look at it.”

The man cocked his head at her and smiled. “I doubt you'd have a decoy ready—but
you
look at it.”

Ariel nodded and slowly unfolded the paper, and her expression was unreadable. She took a deep breath and then stared at the printed spider pattern.

And she exhaled and looked away. “Nothing,” she whispered.

She flipped the paper around to show them. Polydectes flinched, then glanced from Scott to Ariel and looked directly at the spider pattern himself.

His shoulders sagged in evident relief. “Nothing,” he agreed. He pulled his hand out of his pocket and wiped his face. “We had volunteers—but it's fitting that a Madden finished poor Taylor's project. Our volunteers might not have been able to . . . rotate? . . . out of it.” He squinted at Scott and Ariel. “Are you two okay?”

Ariel gave him a bright, strained smile. “What does it look like?”

“Right.” To Scott he said, “What you said, at Ostriker's, that
was true—we were on the same side.” He held out his right hand.

Scott stepped back unsteadily and shook his head. “You were going to shoot my sister's leg off.”

The man closed his hand and shrugged. “Did your sister get out all right?”

“She got out.”

After another few seconds, the man returned to the station wagon and backed out of the parking lot. Scott heard him sound the horn twice and then once as he drove slowly away down Vista Del Mar. Two acknowledging honks sounded from up and down the street.

The rain was falling steadily now, and Scott looked at the empty parking lot and thought of the night he and Madeline had arrived here.

She got out.

Tears mingled with the rainwater on his face. When she was eight years old, Valentino had told her,
My dear, my dear, it is not so dreadful here.
And all her life since then, apparently, she had wanted to return to wherever that
here
was, and to him. And today, or at least in Scott's recent memory, Valentino had said,
I will be to her all the things no one else has been.

But—where? thought Scott. When? Madeline, I hope I was sometimes what a brother should be.

When she had told him about briefly stepping into the past on Wednesday, she'd said,
I didn't hurt anymore, and I walked around to the front of the house and—and Hollywood was like a village, beautiful . . . and I started down the steps like I was walking into Narnia . . .

He sank to his knees on the asphalt as the rain came down harder and blurred his view of the hill, though flashes of flame glared through the swaying veils.

In the distance, over the close clatter of the rain, he could hear the rising wail of sirens.

THE BLACK KIA OPTIMA
made a right turn off Sunset onto Fairfax by the Rite Aid drugstore, and the early evening sunlight slanting across the parking lot on the right lit the film of dust on the windshield, obscuring the view.

Ariel slowed the car and switched on the windshield wipers, which didn't help, but in a few moments the car had moved into the shadows of another apartment building, and she could see out again.

“For two thousand dollars they could have run it through a car wash,” she said.

“True,” said Scott. “But it's lucky it was just impounded, for being parked in the middle of the street—if it had been stolen, you probably wouldn't have a windshield at all.” The interior of the car smelled of nothing now but the submarine sandwiches in the bag on Scott's lap.

“I bet they could have got in touch sooner, though. And the escrow company could have told me they were somehow getting all our mail. And God knows where Madeline's Datsun is. We should have reported it stolen.”

“The picture didn't need complicating.”

Ariel turned right onto Fountain, and again the windshield became a nearly opaque glowing screen. She slowed the car to a crawl, peering ahead. “At least we can stop taking buses now.” She glanced sideways at Scott. “Do you miss your motorcycle? We can certainly afford to get you a new one, if you like. Not right away, after that first month's rent and security deposit on Genod's place—but when escrow closes.”

Scott's motorcycle had been found under the rubble by the Caveat east garage, not far from where the bodies of Ferdalisi and Claimayne had eventually been discovered.

Scott shook his head, recalling their ride up the L.A. River embankment. “I think I've used up my luck on bikes. I'll wash the windshield first thing tomorrow.”

“The whole car could use it.”

“The whole car,” he agreed.

Claimayne's gun had been found too, and an autopsy had revealed a .38 caliber bullet in Ferdalisi's abdominal aorta; Scott had been questioned because of the location of his motorcycle, but his explanation that he had parked it by the garage on the previous day in order to work on it over the weekend appeared to have stood up.

“
If
escrow closes,” Ariel went on. “They could have put a better name on the parcel than Caveat.”

Scott nodded—every prospective buyer had seemed to flinch at the implicit
Emptor
after
Caveat
. “The actual full inscription wouldn't have been much more attractive.”

“Scarier, really.”

Scott had told Ariel that the words on the stone lintel above the Caveat front door had originally been
Caveat Progenies,
and she had looked it up and found that the Latin phrase meant
Let future generations beware
.

She steered left on Hayworth, and in the lengthening shadows they could see through the windshield again, and soon she steered
the car up the driveway of the Ravenna Apartments parking lot and braked to a halt in the space marked
Reserved
.

Scott hefted the bag from Greenblatt's Deli as he climbed out. “The sandwiches smell great,” he admitted. He had suggested the Cactus Taqueria on Vine.

“They're the best submarine sandwiches in the world,” Ariel said. “Aunt Amity used to bring them home. Her office was just a couple of blocks west of Greenblatt's.”

Scott waved at Ellis in the lighted office as he led the way to the stairs. “I remember,” he said as they started up. “Right across the street was where I bought my bottle of bourbon.”

Tapping up the steps beside him, she asked, “Do you miss it? Drink?”

“It's been nearly a month since my . . . brief relapse,” he said, “and I hadn't touched any for more than a year before that. No, I still have dreams about it, but I don't miss it.” He looked at her and raised his eyebrows.

Ariel shrugged and shook her head. “I had four years clean before
my
relapse—and
my
vice doesn't even
exist
anymore.”

As he stepped up onto the green-painted cement second-floor walkway, Scott said, “Where do you want to eat?”

“Your place,” she said. “I want to see that obit.”

“If you subscribed, you'd have seen it this morning.”

“Why should I subscribe when my next-door neighbor does?”

Scott walked past her door to the door of his own apartment, digging in his pocket for his keys. He unlocked the door and swung it open for her, and as he walked in after her and closed it and switched on the lights, he said, “To drink?”

He had assured her that it didn't bother him when people around him drank alcohol, and he had even bought a couple of bottles of Ravenswood zinfandel to have on hand for her, but she said, “Coffee will be fine,” as she crossed the carpeted living room to the kitchen and sat down at the little table.

“Coming up.” Scott followed her and got a can of ground coffee out of the refrigerator and began measuring spoonfuls into the coffeemaker on the counter.

He opened the refrigerator again to get a carton of milk, and he set it and a bowl of sugar cubes on the table. Ariel had already picked up the LATEXTRA section of the
Los Angeles Times
.

Scott took it from her, folded it to the obituary page, and handed it back. He tapped one of the names.

“‘
Adrian Ostriker, 83,
'” Ariel read, “‘
passed away in early January at his Laurel Canyon home. Ostriker had been an actor, most recently in
Empire of the Ants
(1977), though he was best known for his role in
Paradise Alley
(1962). He also appeared in many television series, such as
The Legend of Jesse James
and
The Guns of Will Sonnett.
Ostriker was cremated.
'”

Ariel looked up. “Same guy?”

“Laurel Canyon. Unusual name.”

“I remember talking to him when he was between names.” She sat back. “I've got to say he looked real good for eighty-three.”

“God knows how old he really was. He married our aunt in 1921. I think it caught up to him when the spiders stopped working. Like Dorian Gray when his picture got burned up.”

He glanced at the canvas propped on an easel in the living room below a glowing track light, but the coffeemaker started bubbling and hissing, and he turned to open the cabinet and take down the two coffee cups and set them on the table.

Ariel took hold of a lot of the sugar cubes in her fist, then opened her hand and let them fall back into the bowl. She picked up one to drop into her coffee and gave him a wistful smile. “Gotta let go or be trapped.”

Scott nodded, mystified. “I suppose so.”

He poured coffee into the cups and sat down across from her.

“Claimayne's gone now,” she said. “I lived at Caveat with him ever since my parents both died when I was seven, and he was fif
teen.” She stirred her coffee. “I always wondered . . .” she went on hesitantly, then shook her head. “But my parents
were
amateur mycologists, and they
were
careless in a lot of things—and he really
didn't
like mushrooms. Luckily for me I didn't either.”

After a pause, “Good God,” Scott whispered. “You think he—?”

“Maybe not.” She shrugged. “Everybody's dead, we'll never know.”

Scott tried to recall the event, but he had only been ten years old and had never met Ariel's parents. All he remembered of them, and that vaguely, was the funeral. Fifteen-year-old Claimayne had worn a tie, he recalled. Afterward, adults had reminded young Scott not to eat mushrooms he found in the yard.

Now Ariel had turned to look at the canvas, and she got up and crossed the living room to stand in front of it. Scott followed and stood next to her.

It was a painting of Madeline and Valentino descending the stairs at Caveat; Valentino was an anonymous figure looking away, but Madeline's face was turned back toward the viewer, lit by the antique sun that had been shining through the impossible open door to the side. Her expression was wistful, but Scott's brush had also caught the glow of glad anticipation in her eyes.

Like I was walking into Narnia . . .

“You caught her perfectly,” said Ariel after a moment. “She's happy.”

Scott shrugged. “I hope so. I hope they don't find her under the rubble.” Beside the scare-bat, he thought, clinging to the grave marker of her foolish parents.

Ariel gripped his arm. “I was there, in real time. She got out. You know she did.”

He exhaled and gave her a smile. “I do know it.”

If there is a frail spirit buried down there,
he thought,
huddled in mingled love and resentment next to their makeshift grave, may it be the cast-off, always backward-looking ghost of my old self.

Scott stepped past Ariel to the window and pulled back the curtain.

Outside under the sunset glow the lights would be coming on in Beverly Hills and Westwood and way out along the coast in Malibu, and he thought of all the lights in Los Angeles, from the hills of Griffith Park to the docks in San Pedro, from LAX airport east to the 605 Freeway, and he wondered if every single one of those million lights could be reached from now—if there might not be one where Madeline stood looking out over a very different Los Angeles, thinking of him.

But the sky was dimming behind the palm trees, and the coffee was steaming in the cups on the table. He took Ariel's arm and led her back to the kitchen.