Medusa's Web (8 page)

Ariel tried to sustain her anger, but her heart was thumping and she couldn't take a deep breath. “And what is
that
? That's the second
time in ten minutes.” She paused, but no further explosions followed, and the floor held steady.

Claimayne sighed and rolled over to sit up against a big embroidered cushion, his gold DNA pendant under his chin now. He yawned and pulled the pendant down onto his chest and reached weakly for a glass on the bedside table. “Dip into the wine thy little red lips, Salomé, that I may drain the cup!”

Ariel leaned across the wheelchair and picked up the glass and put it into his shaking hand. “It's already near empty; finish it yourself.”

He did, though he spilled some drops onto his dressing gown lapel, and then handed the glass back to her.

“That explosion,” he said, “you've heard it before. It's my mother, blowing herself up on the roof.”

Ariel momentarily hoped Scott had climbed down from the roof; but, “What do you mean?” she asked. “Come on, please—that was a week ago.”

“And how long ago do you suppose that ‘Laurel and Hardy car' was parked on the side road? All of this is your fault as well as my own. And my mother's. Though I'm the most guilty, I suppose.” He tried to hike himself farther up, then just slumped back with a gasp of pain. “Damn. We should host a youth camp, you know? They could put up tents in the garden and out by the bungalows.”

“You really are a vicious pig,” said Ariel, setting down his wineglass. “You can't get out and leave spiders you've looked at in playgrounds anymore, so you want to . . . get your filthy rejuvenation
here
? I wouldn't let you.”

Claimayne waved a pale hand dismissively. “It was just a thought. But I might leave a couple around for our guests. They're appreciably younger than I am.”

“I don't think you'd want to soak up any of Scott's vitality. You'd probably get the DTs. But you could probably use a dose of anorexia from Madeline.” Ariel looked nervously at the dim ceiling. “
Do
you
know what that explosion was? It can't have been . . . what you said.”

“You just saw a car from nearly a hundred years ago, and you don't believe you can hear a noise from only a week ago? It was my mother.”

Ariel was horrified to realize that she believed him. “Claimayne,” she whispered shakily, “this has got to
stop
.”

“Actually,” drawled Claimayne, “your first guess may have been right—it may be the fault of our guests most of all.”

“What, that old car I saw is their fault? Or the grenade going off again on the roof?”

“Both, and more. The dishes and windows—and my vinyl records!—that are breaking in spider-pattern cracks.” He opened his eyes wide for a moment. “Do you remember 1992?”

“Some. I was ten years old.” She touched her own silver gyroscope pendant.

“I was eighteen. Arthur and Irina had disappeared on New Year's Eve of '91. My mother had apparently lost a collection of spiders in '91, and I think Arthur and Irina stole them from her; then the summer after those two disappeared, my mother got the collection back again. I think she took them from Scott and Madeline, who must have found their parents' hiding place.”

Ariel was aware of, and instantly suppressed, an eagerness to know what had become of the collection. You don't do that anymore, she told herself—you don't want to lose yourself, your self, anymore—and these would probably have been dirty ones, ones that somebody else had looked at. I only did freshly printed ones that had no possible flash-aheads or flashbacks connected to them . . . after I knew how they worked, anyway.

“I was a sneaky boy,” Claimayne went on with a reminiscent smile. “I snooped and found them . . . but there was one she hid away where even I couldn't find it. They were labeled, and she kept a list—the one I never could find was labeled
Oneida Inc
. In a penciled note she called it her retirement check. I think my mother never looked at
it; I think she was saving it for an extremity, but”—he gave a circular wave that took in the whole troubled house, the whole anachronistic compound—“I think Scott and Madeline may very well have looked at it. I remember that they were both very sick, with characteristic symptoms, on the day my mother got the collection back.”

In a small voice Ariel asked, “So is it . . . special, that one?”

Claimayne's laugh seemed forced. “One spider to rule them all, one spider to bind them,” he said lightly. “And I believe this may be a
detoxified
version of it, of the Medusa, who ordinarily turns her viewers to stone.” He had found a handkerchief among the bedclothes and now dabbed ineffectually at the wine stains on the lapel of his dressing gown. “Not literal stone, you understand—just something like a total nervous-system seizure and death, from helplessly performing a million actions at once.”

Ariel frowned and shook her head. “And all this Medusa spider business makes an old car show up in the driveway?”

“Oh, Ariel. What happens—sometimes!—when you look at a spider on Monday and then somebody else looks at it on Friday?” She rolled her eyes impatiently, but he persisted, “Go on, what happens?”

“You overlap with each other for a minute or so. You're in his body on Friday, and he's in yours on Monday. If you're lucky, you can
act,
do stuff, in his body.”

“Do you know why?” When Ariel shrugged, he went on, “It's because the spider you both looked at, or which you yourself looked at both times, doesn't see those two times as
two
times. Nor as two places. To the spider, it's one event.”

Ariel shuddered, remembering that she had looked at one just yesterday, and in fact had yet to do the “after” by looking at it again two days from now.

“You make it sound as if they're
alive,
” she said.

Claimayne was staring at her. “Amateur!” he said with a smile. “Dilettante! How long were you a steady user? You must have
sometimes
sensed that they're . . . something like alive.”

She shook her head, frowning, and whispered, “I don't know.”

“We're three-dimensional creatures—four, really, since we extend in the fourth dimension, too, which is time. The spiders exist in a different sort of universe. They're two-dimensional, appearing motionless to us but perpetually spinning in their own frame of reference, and probably entirely unaware of us, even when we spike one into our universe by providing it with a reciprocal image of itself, inverted and reversed, on our retinas.”

“And so I see old cars.”

“All right,” he said gently. “All right. Somebody—was it Woody Allen?—said that time is nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once. Well, you and me, and my mother, and Art and Irina, probably, and even their two bungling
curiosi
children, all of us have so often used the spiders to make separate moments combine, in this house—made an hour of one day also be an hour of a later day—that time is breaking down, here, everything
is
beginning to happen at once. And so 1920 or '50 or '70 leaks into 2015 sometimes, even if no spider is being quickened in either time at that moment.”

Ariel nodded dubiously. “Like a cabinet door that's been opened and slammed too many times, and now it swings open all by itself, even when nobody touches the knob.”

“If you like. That old car you saw was visible for a minute or so here—I expect it was brand-new when you saw it—and I imagine some residents of this house in the old days were sometimes startled to see a Honda or a Prius parked out there, or to hear a Beatles song echoing out of the house. We've bored so many holes through the timeline of this house and grounds that it's like a load-bearing wall riddled by termites.” He smiled. “And I think our foster cousins may be the biggest termites of all.”

“Because they looked at that one of your mother's?”

“Exactly. That's the big one, and I think that's the one that's really crumbling our local chronology. That's neat, I must say,” he added, and paused to rummage in the bedside table drawer for a min
ute. “Damn. Do you have a pen? No? Well, remind me of ‘crumbling our local chronology,' will you?”

“It's not iambic.”

“It'll do as anapest. And I think our cousins, or one of them, will look at the big spider
again,
soon, and that is—has been, will be—the stress that's really fragmented everything here. Everywhen.”

“Let's make them leave. I never wanted them here again in the first place. Can't we make them leave?”

“No. Can't violate the terms of my mother's provisional will until it's disallowed. And what would that change? It doesn't have to be one of them that looks at the Medusa spider next time. If it happens in this house, then all this . . . chronological erosion will have been caused no matter who it happens to be that looks at it. And I don't think we'd be
having
these incidents unless
somebody
is going to look at it here.”

Claimayne shrugged, and it occurred to Ariel that her cousin's airy detachment was a pose.

“
You
want it,” she said. “You want to be the one. Why? Why did your mother save it without looking at it? Retirement check? What the hell
is
it?”

Another boom from the roof rattled the window behind the velvet curtains. Ariel stepped sideways to keep her balance.

Claimayne had winced at the sound, and his pale fists clenched on the bedspread. “There she goes again,” he said quietly. “Does it occur to any of you that my mother died last week? And it was only four days ago that we buried her? That was my
mother;
are you sure you're all quite clear on that?”

Ariel bit her lip but made herself go on: “Will it—I'm sorry—will the Medusa spider bring her back?” For a moment she thought of her own parents, bohemian amateur mycologists who had died from eating misidentified
Amanita phalloides
mushrooms in a salad; seven-year-old Ariel and fifteen-year-old Claimayne had been present, but neither one had liked mushrooms.

“Can it,” she said, “do that?”

Claimayne laughed now, but not pleasantly. “Bring her
back
. Yes. Me too, ideally. As opposed to intolerable
forward
.” He slumped against the cushion and closed his eyes. “I don't think I'm destined to outlive her by very long. So—backward it is, as richly as possible.”

“What do you mean? Are you sick?”

He gestured toward his unnaturally smooth face and said, “I'm still full of youth, obviously—ill gotten though it may arguably be. But there have been—chest pains, angina! Shortness of breath, pains in my jaw and arm. Trifles of that nature.” He coughed. “And I don't get overlaps from my future anymore. I look at spiders, intending to look at them again when I'm fifty, sixty, seventy—and I get no after-visions at all, not even hallucinations. I've never had a flashback from myself much older than I am right now. You'd think I'd have got through
once
.”

Ariel nodded, and then was a little surprised to find that she felt no sorrow or alarm at all at the prospect of Claimayne's death. I should, she told herself. I should be at least as nostalgically saddened as I'd be if . . . oh, if the Medusa mosaic wall were to fall down in the next rain. I grew up with these things, after all, ugly though they may be.

Why don't I mind? she asked herself.

She summoned up a frown and a tone of concern. “But the clogging effect—after a while, and you've definitely been at it for a while, you stop being able to really sense the future body—you get hallucinations instead—”

“Not
always
. You're convinced you really did talk to Scott and Madeline on the day after tomorrow.”

“Well, maybe you're going to
quit
soon! I did; no reason you can't. That would explain you not getting any overlaps from yourself in the future.”

“Quit. Oh yes,
quit
. And . . . join a monastery, become a vegan, take up philately?” He waved the idea away. “And Ariel, I—I have
bad dreams about this house—all jumbled up, so there's no door that leads outside anymore, and my mother's explosion on the roof is constant, like a drumbeat, and, in every room I enter, those old rubber space aliens from the east garage are there again, but in the dream they're . . . people I've overlapped with. Emptied.”

“I'm . . . sorry,” was all Ariel could think of to say, and she tried to mean it.

He rolled over on his side, facing the picture-decked wall. “Leave me alone,” he said hoarsely, “can't you?”

Ariel stood for a moment, staring helplessly around at the indistinct Chinatown clutter on the shelves and walls, then turned and hurried across the carpet to the door.

Squinting in the relative brightness of the hall, she hurried to her own room, entered and closed the door behind her, then pulled out the bottom drawer of her dresser, pushing aside a stack of sweaters as she lifted out a rubber-banded bundle of twenty-dollar bills. She tucked it into the left pocket of her jeans and tapped the right pocket to make sure she had her keys.

SCOTT REMEMBERED HAPPY CHILDHOOD
explorations in the darkness among the towers of mismatched bricks and cinder blocks and sections of vertical four-by-four lumber in the basement under the main house, but as his flashlight illuminated them one by one now, he was chilled by the realization that these makeshift supports under the floor joists were all that were keeping the rooms above from falling into the cellar. His flashlight beam picked out the steel cylinders of at least a couple of industrial screw jacks in the receding dark gallery, but even these were footed on crumbling bricks or stacks of wood or, in one case, a truck wheel-rim. Attempting to give their levers even a slight tightening twist might just burst the junk they were standing on.

A new thermocouple for the roof, he thought nervously, and a truckload of heavy-duty screw jacks and sturdy footings. The bathrooms in the northeast corner of the building on each of the three floors were tile over cement and must weigh several tons altogether.

The house creaked steadily over him, like, he thought, a gallows with a big body hung from it swinging in the wind on a moonless night.

He kept the flashlight beam on the dirt floor as he stepped away
from the patch of sunlight by the opened cellar door behind him, for since his time someone had decided to store a lot of boxes of old
National Geographic
magazines down here, and the boxes had split open and the magazines had slid everywhere; and by the walls the light gleamed on long puddles, either from the recent rain or from leaky pipes. The cool draft from ahead was spiced with the reek of mildew and old mud.

He remembered that the dirt floor sloped down after a few yards, and so he was careful not to slip. When it leveled out, the floor was mud, and he hoped the screw jacks—or improvised towers—were footed on something solid.

Scott paused, hopelessly swinging the flashlight beam from side to side as he peered into the remote dark expanse. He recalled areas where one had to crawl through low brick arches, and he didn't see any use in threading his way through them today, just to verify that the joist supports were no good.

Just as he was about to retrace his steps, he heard a scuffling from the darkness ahead, and a scared voice that he recognized as Madeline's cried, “I'm here, I'm here!”

He pointed the flashlight in the direction her voice had seemed to come from and soon picked out her sneakers poking out from behind a brick column.

“Maddy, it's me, Scott.” He shuffled forward through the mud. “How did you get—”

“Scott!” Now he could see her pale, wide-eyed face above the shoes. She moved her head as if to look past him.

Scott made his way to the column she was crouching behind, and when he shined the light around, he recognized this corner of this basement. The crayon drawings of bats and moons that little Madeline had taped to the brick wall here had long since fallen down and moldered away, but the gold-painted four-armed lug wrench still stood upright in a square of lumpy cement near the brick wall. He tried to remember the words someone had incised into the cement.

“Who were you thinking it would be?” he asked. “Ariel? Claimayne?”

Madeline turned her head away from the light and touched the lug wrench. “Oh,” she said, “somebody else—somebody I sort of met in this house once. Anything seems to be possible.” She went on quickly, “But another person was dragging something, this way, and I didn't want to meet whoever
that
was.”

Scott nervously turned around to sweep the darkness with the flashlight beam, but he saw only wet brick and upright four-by-fours and mud. He couldn't hear anything except Madeline's breathing and his own.

He sighed and turned the light back into the alcove. Madeline gave him a blinking, twitchy smile and stood up carefully, bracing herself against the wall. “I'm glad you're here.”

Even though I'm not who you were expecting, thought Scott—the person you sort of met in this house once.

“Maddy,” he said, “who do you mean—”

“It was just a dream I had once, never mind.”

Scott nodded doubtfully. “How did you get down here?” Before he'd been able to open the cellar door, he'd had to brush a lot of dirt and leaves off it.

“I crawled in through a basement window beside the porch. I was afraid the freeway was getting closer. Fast. Can you
bear
it?”

He gathered that she meant,
Can you believe it?
“Actually I wouldn't be surprised, today.” He turned the flashlight's beam onto the lug wrench.

“And I always did feel safe beside the scare-bat,” she added, brushing her trembling fingers across the top socket of the thing. Scott could read the words pressed into the cement at the foot of it
: Hic iacent curiosi.

He turned the flashlight beam onto the floor behind him, and his sister limped forward onto the illuminated patch of mud. He swung the light ahead of her, and she painstakingly made her way along
the path it traced out while he followed. On the ascending dirt slope he supported her with his arm, though when they reached the level floor above she was able to walk more steadily to the daylight below the open cellar door at the east end. She made hard, gasping work of climbing the ladder.

At last they stood up on the grass in the sunlight. Madeline was panting, and her hands and the knees of her jeans were black with mud.

“You don't seem to be in the best shape for scrambling around in cellars,” Scott said.

Madeline frowned at him. “I'm in fine shape,” she said defensively. “I'm just sick. If I didn't stay fit, I wouldn't be able to climb Mount McKinley.”

“You climbed Mount McKinley?”

She shook her head.

“You're planning to?”

“No, but I'm able to.” She waved the topic aside. “Thanks for getting me out of there. I don't think I ever could have got out on my own. Ever.”

“Madeline,” he said, haltingly, “this morning when I was climbing onto the roof—”

She raised a hand. “Don't tell me, yet, okay? And don't ask me about what happened to me today, or why I'm sick. We can talk about it later, when it's less . . . recent.”

“Like after the sun goes down? You're . . . still sure you want to stay here? You know I think it's a mistake.”

“I think I am sure, in spite of everything. Else. So far.” She gave him a haunted smile. “You really
don't
have to stay, on my account.”

“I really
do,
you know,” he said sharply.

She nodded seriously. “I guess big brothers have to do that sort of thing.”

ARIEL PEERED OUT PAST
the half-opened kitchen door, but her black Kia Optima sedan just stood unremarkably in the driveway a dozen feet away, its windshield gleaming in the noon sun. The shadow under it didn't waver, and no anachronistic shapes seemed imminent. Beyond the car the western lawn stretched a hundred yards to the palm trees by the garage road, and above them she could see the white line of a jet trail in the cobalt blue sky. The sounds were just the usual whisper of wind in the palm fronds and the creaking of the house.

It looks like solid 2015, she thought, and she stepped cautiously out of the shadows and pulled a pair of sunglasses out of her purse and put them on.

She walked around to the driver's side, still limping a little, and when she had climbed in and pulled the door closed she threw her purse onto the passenger seat, then tugged an iPad out from under the seat and turned it on. Tapping into a deep-web server, she entered a web address with a dark suffix. The familiar picture came up—a movie poster for the Ingmar Bergman movie
Through a Glass Darkly
—and in two blanks at the top of the screen she entered a password and her zip code, then tapped the sign-on icon.

A map of the Hollywood area came up, with a pulsing red dot on Santa Monica Boulevard just a block or two east of Las Palmas. She had no particular recollection of that neighborhood but started the car and backed down the driveway till it joined the branch driveway that led up the hill to the ridge garages and Gower Street beyond; from long practice she was able to back and fill until the car was aimed downhill, and she coasted between the tall, shaggy palm trees down to Vista Del Mar.

One spider to rule them all? she thought, remembering Claimayne's words. What could that mean—
containing
them all? Like a master key that opens all the doors? The car's windows were rolled up and the confined air was hot and smelled faintly of the anchovy pizza Claimayne had demanded two days ago, but Ariel was shiver
ing. And the rest of Aunt Amity's stash of spiders, she thought—those would probably be very dirty, lots of people would have looked at them already, you'd be linking with all those reciprocating retinas, overlapping all those physical lives, and they'd be merging with you, even sharing your bloodstream—young losers, sick old folks, drunks—it exhausted you last night even to merge with your own healthy three-day-future self!

You don't want it.

She turned right on Franklin and then south on Argyle in the momentary shade under the 101 Freeway overpass, and then she was out in the sun again, driving past the high windowless back wall of the Pantages Theatre and through the wide Hollywood Boulevard intersection. On her left now was a big parking lot and on her right the stark white Stalinist-looking east face of the new W Hotel, all of it throwing needles of noon glare into her eyes even through the polarized lenses of the sunglasses.

Why did he have to come back? Why did Aunt Amity
want
him to? He left us all.

Ariel felt her face redden now as she remembered the note she had written to Scott thirteen years ago, when she had been twenty and he had been twenty-three. After he had moved out, intending to marry that Louise woman, she had found the note in the bag of trash he had left in his room, with
idiot teenager!
scrawled across her signature. I was
twenty,
she thought now, not a teenager!

And I'm thirty-three now and stuck living in declining circumstances at Caveat with my demented wheelchair-bound cousin—what's the way out of that?

What's the way out for Scott? Or even Madeline? Back to their shabby south-of-Sunset lives?

According to Claimayne, Scott and Madeline saw this big spider when they were kids. And look at them now. I wonder if it was worth it.

You can't know whether it was or not. Not yet, anyway.

Argyle ended at Sunset in front of the blue pillars of the Nickelodeon On Sunset studio, and she turned right.

You don't want it, she told herself again.

She peered ahead through the glittering windshield. If she turned right instead of left at Las Palmas, she'd pass Miceli's, the Italian restaurant Scott had several times taken her to, long ago. Seeing the brick wall and the green awning of the place would bring back memories. You don't want that either, she thought. Damn it, you don't.

What she most wanted, she conceded to herself dejectedly, was a clean, fresh-printed spider, and just that infinite moment of separation from everything, especially from consciousness, from her self.

But she turned left on Las Palmas, and then left again at Santa Monica Boulevard, and she rolled down the window and took deep breaths of the hot pavement-scented breeze.

The sidewalks along this stretch of Santa Monica were empty except for a half-dozen men lined up at a white taco truck down the street; the north side appeared to be builders' supply lots and the south side was little anonymous office buildings . . . but she saw a pale green light in the dusty window of a shop on her right, and she swerved in to the curb. The sign above the shop said
BOTANICA,
which was plausible cover; the Hispanic botanicas all dealt in semi-magical herbs and oils and candles, and in any case this one probably hadn't been in business more than a week or so and might not be here tomorrow. The spiderbit shops had to move around a lot. Spiderbits was the slang term for people who had quit or were trying to.

Ariel got out of the car and dropped two quarters into the parking meter, then stepped across the sidewalk and pushed open the shop's door. Bells attached to the frame jingled.

The air was cool inside and smelled of camphor and mint; Ariel took off her sunglasses and blinked around at the plastic bottles and aerosol spray cans and shrink-wrapped coyote skulls that crowded the shelves and tables, and she jumped when a plastic angel by her knee began bobbing and squeaking.

“Proximity,” said a man behind a long counter at the far side of the shop. “You got near it.”

“Magic?” asked Ariel dryly.

“Motion sensor. Rechargeable battery.” He took off a pair of glasses, then relaxed and laid them on the counter. “Oh, hi—haven't seen you in a while.”

She peered at the bald young man and nodded. “You were running a video arcade by the chicken and waffles place on Gower.” She walked forward, careful not to jostle any of the bottles of money-attracting or spell-repelling oils; the man's name, she recalled, was Harry, or at least that's what one called him, and he was always dressed in a gray sweatshirt, possibly always the same one. The droopy mustache was new.

“Car stereo shop next, I think,” he said.

She nodded, sure that whatever his next green-light shop would be, it would not be a car stereo shop. Spiderbit outlets drew nasty sorts of predators, and locations of the green-light shops were always secret and temporary.

“I need some more stuff,” she said.

“I've got it all—distorting veils, stick-on windshield ridges, high-octane tarantella CDs . . . Mundane stuff too, while you're here—plexiglass to replace your glass windows, tapestries in case of wall cracks, Bakelite dishes, plaster for rounding off multi-angle corners—”

“No MP3?”

He shook his head. “Try downloading one of the 18/8-time tarantella numbers and the bad guys track your credit card, no matter how good the site's security encryption is. And it always turns out to be an ordinary three-quarter time tarantella anyway.”