Bride of the Rat God (34 page)

“Witness, hell,” said Christine, and adjusted the black and white scarf around her neck.

“Come to think of it,” Norah said, “the first attempt on Christine involved a stuntman, too. What I think happened,” she went on with slow emphasis, “is that Mr. Sandringham fled because he saw that the killer was someone he knew, someone who would be after him, and because he was drunk, he knew he couldn’t hope to be believed. Then he phoned you and begged you to come up with a cover story while he remained in hiding.”

The head of the studio had begun to nod slowly, rubbing his hand across his chin, which was, for once, not covered with stubble. He’d evidently shaved for yesterday’s harrowing by the press. “You think the papers’ll buy that Blake got some kind of crazy fixation against
stuntmen
?”

“I don’t know what the papers will buy,” said Norah. “I’m only saying that the police will find the three incidents
extremely
similar. A star and a stuntman together, Mr. Fallon attacks the stuntman, then attacks the star. Or, in the second attempt, tried to kill both together. In Christine’s case, we were barely able to save her. Mr. Sandringham was so terrified after the attack, he went into hiding, and believe me, after being pursued by Mr. Fallon Friday night, I don’t blame him.”

“And I’ll tell you what the papers will buy,” Christine put in suddenly. “They’ll buy a film with a curse on it, a film with a story behind it. No matter how good or bad that picture is, people will see it because they’ll want to see Blake, and me, and Charlie. They’ll want to see that chariot stunt because they know there was a bomb in the sandpit. They’ll want to see Blake to see if
they
can tell that he was going insane while it was filming. And I’ll bet it’ll kick up receipts for that silly sword fight picture of Charlie’s, too!”

The producer regarded them both for a time, turning the pencil over and over against the surface of his desk like a single piston while his mind shuffled, sorted, wrote, and rewrote scenarios almost visibly behind the glass-pale eyes. At length he put down the pencil, picked up a cigar, and said, “All right. We’ve got to finish shooting by the fifteenth of January if we’re going to get the cutting done. That means we shoot through Christmas and New Year’s. We’ll keep Charlie under wraps and the set closed until we’ve squared the police, but tell Charlie to be here tomorrow morning. You know,” he added as they stood to leave, “when they found Blake’s body, he’d been burned, and his head was bashed in with a crowbar or something. That’s what they think killed him.”

“If it was the crowbar he was chasing us with,” replied Alec, meeting the producer’s gaze squarely, “I’m only glad somebody managed to take it away from him before he could use it on them. Where was he found?”

Brown rose to his feet. “They wouldn’t say.” He stepped across to Christine and, rather unexpectedly, took her hand and brought it to his lips. Then he raised his voice to a bellow. “FISHY!”

Conrad Fishbein popped like a pale, stuffed Pantaloon doll through the study’s outer door.

“Fishy, get in here. We’ve found Charlie.”

Sign of small sacrifice...

Either advancing or retreating,

the soldier must be steadfast,

and all is well...

In hiding, he employs wizards and diviners,

and all is well...

“P
OOR
B
LAKE.”
C
HRISTINE
turned her face from the daffodil lights visible through the dark trees and the occasional mosquelike turrets, medieval towers, and ornate Chinese rooflines against the clear, darkening lapis of the sky as they wound their way back down from Beverly Hills.

Sunset in Oz,
thought Norah.

“He never really meant any harm, you know,” she went on.

“No,” Norah agreed. Neither, she supposed, had Lawrence Pendergast the night he’d come in drunk from a party and tried to rape her in her attic room. She still remembered his voice muttering thickly in her ear:
Be a sport.
She hadn’t dared tell his mother; she had had nowhere else to go. In some ways Fallon reminded her a good deal of Lawrence Pendergast.

Above them the lights of Beverly Hills twinkled like stars through the oak and pepper trees. Beyond the edge of those scattered shoals of spangles the sinister towers of the oil fields lifted under a pall of smoke from one still-burning rig. Norah glimpsed it as they passed the clump of trees that marked the tar pits where the bones of strange and fabulous monsters had been found.

Norah smiled a little, recalling Christine’s reaction to the skeletons on display in Finlay’s Museum on Lick Pier the night they’d gone roller-coaster riding with Alec. “I don’t believe a word of it, darling,” she’d announced, fitting cigarette to holder as she regarded the enormous brown-stained skeletons of dire wolves, impossibly huge sloths, and saber-tooths arranged on their platforms, with jungly “artist’s reconstructions” posted before them to show what those creatures had looked like in life. “I mean, I’ve been past those tar pits, and they stink to
heaven
! If you’re a megatherium or an anaconda or whatever those things were and you saw a lot of other megatheriums or whatever sticking in all this tar sinking out of sight, would
you
go wading right in?”

“Perhaps that’s why they’ve become extinct,” Norah had said.

In spite of the chill, the Shining Crane sat in the dense darkness of the cottage porch with Buttercreme in his lap, sheltered from the cold by a blanket wrapped around them both. He seemed to be expecting them as they picked their way down the path that curved around from the kitchen’s rear door. Perhaps, Norah thought, he had heard their feet on the gravel. As he opened the door, the candles within—dozens of them, stuck on the corners of the table or protruding from the necks of Coke bottles—ignited into sudden, welcoming flame.

After the events of two nights ago, Norah didn’t even blink.

Shang Ko’s narrow mattress had been dragged over to one side of the room. The small table was heaped high with the same confusion of scrolls and books she had seen in the brick chamber deep below Chinatown, volumes in Latin and German as well as Chinese, plus blank paper, a brush and an inkstone, a tortoiseshell, chalk and slate, the brass web of an armillary sphere, an astrolabe, the intricate set of concentric black disks Shang referred to as a
luopan,
the ancient bird-shaped fire vessel, and the green porcelain bowl of water. The rear half of the room was occupied by a complex diagram chalked on the stained plank floor.

Shang Ko studied without a word the newspaper account of Blake Fallon’s death.

“I take it that only means he’s gone on to some other poor sap,” Alec surmised, perching on a corner of the table. “If all he needs is a brain blown out on jake or dope, God knows skid row’s full of candidates.”

Very dimly, where the upper corner of the cottage shared a wall with the lower part of the kitchen, Dominga could be heard bustling about as she made supper. Chang Ming and Black Jasmine, their leashes removed, sniffed at everything in the front part of the cottage, though they avoided the diagram as if a wall stretched across the room. They stood up against Shang Ko’s shins to receive their due of attention, then dashed up the path to the kitchen to get their dinners, Buttercreme trotting in their wake like an imperious dust mop.

“It may be,” Shang Ko said softly, folding up the paper with his crooked hands. “But such a person would have trouble coming close to Miss Christine. He will take whom he can, use whom he can.” The white brows flinched together, and Shang Ko passed a hand across his eyes, recalling, perhaps, others the Rat-God had used.

Then he straightened a little and handed the newspaper back to Norah. “I have taken readings of the sky, of the stars, of the moon and the wind.” He gestured to the equipment on the table, the stone he used in his fire readings, and beside it, a neat stack of three bronze coins. “I have made calculations of... of
rightness of direction
all throughout these hills and as far as the sea.

“The season of the Rat-God’s strength lasts from the full moon of the ninth month until the coming of the new year, six weeks from now. Many years ago, when first I challenged his strength, I did so under the duress of time, going against him as quickly as I could, in the time of the moon’s waxing. The moon is waning now. Moreover the green star, the wizard’s star, is coming into the constellation you call the Bull, a configuration from which I am able to draw some power.”

His twisted fingers stroked the bronze circles of the armillary sphere, where strange beasts took the place of the more familiar stars.

“It will be difficult,” he said. “If you are still willing to do this thing, Miss Christine—if you are willing to trust me and my grandson and the strength of whatever power we can summon from the stars and the sea and the influences of the sky—it must be done in two weeks, when the moon is at its smallest. There is a magic which can be made from the new moon as well as the full. Not as strong, but effective. My old friend and partner Ni Kuei Nu, the Mud Tortoise—” His voice hesitated just fractionally on the name. “—was good at such magics.” He was silent a moment, white brows drawn down over eyes that gazed away into shadows of another time.

Then he shook his head. “Da Shu Ken’s greatest strength was at the solstice of the winter, when the moon was at its full. Now that is past. In two weeks it will be less yet. I have renewed the marks upon this house, so the dreams which visited you last night, Miss Norah, Alexander, should not return again.”

Norah shivered. The dark bulk of the house blocked any sight of the eucalyptus at the head of the drive. She found herself wishing that the trees could be cut down, rooted up, every spearhead leaf and scrap of curling bark burned.

“In the meantime,” said the old man, seating himself carefully in the hard kitchen chair, “I must have the date and year and hour, if possible, of your births—all three of you—that signs of strength may be drawn even from them. I will gather the power of the moon’s dark, the influences of the sea and the green star, and imbue them into the iron and silver of the inkstone I must make. With that ink I will mark the signs of imprisonment and time, the seals of the door gods and the August Personage of Jade himself, upon the silk where my grandson will paint. And there will be many sessions of dreaming, remembering, of calling back images into the silver mirror, before Hsu Kwan can begin to paint the Rat-God itself.”

He spoke haltingly, and Norah remembered the shattered mirror above Charles Sandringham’s bar.
Its eyes... I saw its eyes reflected...

Impulsively, she said, “Would it help—would it go more quickly—if you could speak to someone the Rat-God inhabited? Whose body it had taken over to kill Keith Pelletier? Would you—or Hsu Kwan—be able to take the image of the thing from his mind?”

“He is alive?”

Norah and Alec traded a glance, then Alec said, “The alcohol probably cushioned his mind.”

“He doesn’t remember what happened,” Norah explained. “But if he were hypnotized, or... or if you have some means of reading his dreams... You said the painting had to be not only of the Rat-God’s appearance but of its soul.”

“As such things have souls, yes,” Shang agreed, leaning forward eagerly. “They are not souls as humans know them. Yes, Hsu Kwan would be able to read down through the blurring of alcohol and horror to see what lies beneath, even as he would read past the clouding of shock and pain that has made it difficult, through all these years of nightmares, for me to see the Rat-God clearly. The shamans used certain drugs to open their minds to the Rat-God’s use, and I think these also protected them from awareness, though there are tales of those who suffered death or madness through shock.”

“I know the
hougans
in the voodoo cults are supposed to do the same thing through dancing,” Alec agreed, scratching at a corner of his beard. “I always figured their possession by their gods was some kind of psychological splitting of the personality, but now I’m not so sure. And anyway, I never saw it done. But I have to go down to Venice anyway to tell Charlie to report for work in the morning. I’ll see what he says about coming back with me tonight.”

Shang Hsu Kwan arrived before Alec returned with Charlie, bearing a drawing pad and pencils. He and the Shining Crane sat in the warm kitchen of the main house, drinking tea and talking with the girls while the younger wizard warmed up by making sketches of the dogs. Once Dominga left, Buttercreme emerged from her seclusion beneath the stairs and flirted with both wizards; Norah had noticed before that the little moonlight Peke was definitely a “man’s dog.” She would shy away from women and in fact had never approved of Dominga, but if a man was in the room, she frequently pattered out of hiding and approached almost, but not quite, within patting range, tongue protruding pinkly, then scurried away again, as if performing a coy little fan dance with her tail.

Charlie looked profoundly nervous when he arrived, but Norah took him gently by the arm and said, “It’s going to be all right. These are Shang Ko and Shang Hsu Kwan. They’re going to hypnotize you and get a description of Mr. Pelletier’s actual killer to help the police.”

Sandringham started to speak, then simply nodded. He squeezed Norah’s hand, but not quickly enough to keep her from realizing that his hands were shaking. “Wonderful what they can do with hypnosis these days, isn’t it, my dear?” As she walked with him behind the two Chinese down the half dozen wooden steps and through the tangle of shrubs around to the cottage by the garage, she saw his eyes dart to every shadow and felt the muscles of his arm beneath her hand rigid, like an animal’s in a trap.

“I’ll sit right here with you,” she said as they entered the candlelit cottage. Hsu Kwan fetched wooden kitchen chairs for Norah and Sandringham, placing them beside the small table. “It really will be all right.”

The Shining Crane drew another diagram—one smaller than that which filled three-quarters of the rear of the cottage—in chalk and wax and silver around the table, the chair, and Sandringham himself. Incense burned at the four corners of the diagram in the usual assortment of hand-smoothed bronze holders from the Han Dynasty and old Coke and perfume bottles; Norah realized Shang Ko must have lighted them, though not by striking a match. The table itself had been cleared of scrolls and implements. All that remained now were two candlesticks, Hsu Kwan’s big sketch pad and pencils, and a mirror wrought of polished silver and another one, very ancient and turned facedown, of brass.