Bride of the Rat God (38 page)

From the terrace she descended to the lawn and crossed it—not without a certain queasiness—to the tennis court where the cars were parked. She stowed her handbag carefully under the seat of the Nash. Having left her coat—actually Christine’s chinchilla—up in the house, she was shivering in earnest by the time she climbed back up to another French door and slipped through. This one led into what was clearly a billiards room. She murmured “Excuse me” but doubted that the couple on the table even heard.

Christine was the center of a little group before the bar, which was situated between more columns and was carved and painted with what appeared to be scenes from the Book of the Dead, a pink gin in hand, laughing loudly over one of Ken Vidal’s jokes. Flindy, her feathers awry and the marabou straps of her gown slipping down over plump white shoulders, sagged frankly in the arms of Roberto Calderone, and Mikos Hraldy was holding forth to a costumed dancer on either elbow. “You see, he awake to discover that overnight he is turn into cockroach...”

“Eeww!”
exclaimed one, and Flindy cracked her gum and said, “Sweetie, I’d hate to tell ya how many times I went to bed with a man and woke up with a cockroach beside me!”

“Let’s go,” Norah said quietly, touching Christine on the arm.

“Go? Darling, it isn’t even eleven o’clock yet!”

“That doesn’t matter. Let’s go.”

Christine pulled her arm away and took a long pull at her gin. Her eyes were bright with drugs. “For heaven’s sake, darling, is a little drinking getting to you? You’d better watch out when midnight comes!”

“They can drink themselves insensible for all I care; we’ve got to get out of here.”

“Oh, don’t be such a stick! Just because Alec isn’t here to play cuddle and coo with, you don’t want
me
to enjoy myself either, that’s it!”

“No, it isn’t.” Norah removed the glass from Christine’s hand. “We can collect our coats and simply walk out through any French door, and I think we’d better do that as soon as possible.”

“But
why
?’

Norah leaned closer, keeping her voice as low as she could. “Because I just found the Rat-God’s necklace in Frank Brown’s desk drawer. Now, let’s go.”

The pillar which held up the house is unsafe...

It is better to leave.

The withered willow produces leaves,

an old man finds a young wife...

“F
RANK.”
C
HRISTINE’S SMALL
fists balled tight in terror and rage. “My God, it’s Frank.”

“I’d give him the benefit of the doubt, myself.” Alec perched on a corner of the worktable that took up most of the living room of the cottage by the canals, turning over in his hands the tangle of smoke-blackened bronze and carbonized pearls that had been the Moon of Rats. The heat of the burning car had shattered all three of the opals. Two of them had discolored completely to a dirty gray, but the third still stared like a demented, malicious eye in the prosaic glare of the overhead lamp. The shadow within had darkened and twisted, seeming to fill the cracked whiteness like a hole in a skull. “Frank isn’t a drinker, and he doesn’t dope. My guess is he’s just playing percentages.”

Norah looked up from stroking Buttercreme’s head. “How so?”

“Well, I don’t think Frank deliberately set out to give Chris the necklace and pledge either her or Keith to the Rat-God in the first place,” said Alec. Outside, fog lay thick on the banana trees and hid the canal beyond. Within, the overhead lamp threw sharp, rather dingy shadows on the ranks of light stands, reflectors, tripods, and boxes of equipment along the wall. Midnight had passed sometime during the drive down from Beverly Hills, but a blaze of light in the western sky showed where every amusement pier from Venice to Santa Monica roared full-blast. Alec, in Levi’s and a USC sweatshirt, had been awake when they phoned, sharing a postparty cup of coffee with Charlie Sandringham. After the actor had departed, he’d made a fresh pot for the girls and, Norah saw through the half-open bedroom door, had put clean sheets on the bed. Not bad, she thought, for a man who’d been at the studio twelve hours a day for the past week.

“I don’t think he knew anything about the Rat-God at all until just a few nights ago, probably right after Precious Peony’s attempt to put Shang out of the way fell through. What I think happened,” Alec went on, “is that Da Shu Ken showed up in one of Frank’s dreams.”

“I didn’t think Frank
had
dreams,” Christine marveled, and lit a cigarette.

“Well, I’m guessing it took the Rat-God a couple of tries. That’s why it was the thirtieth before Frank bribed the boys on the Chinatown beat to come down on Shang. Think about it. Somebody shows up in one of Frank’s dreams—we’ll probably never know what form he took. He says, ‘Get those two Chinks arrested and by next week Aaron Jesperson’s a corpse.’ The first time that happens Frank says, ‘What the hell did I have for dinner?’ Maybe the second time, too. But eventually the Rat-God says, ‘You want proof? Look. Here’s the necklace.’ And Frank wakes up and sees the necklace on the bedspread.”

Alec pulled his feet up so that he was sitting cross-legged on the table amid the spare magazines of film and the remains of the
Los Angeles Times.

“So what does Frank do? He’s just lost one of his major stars and has a half million and more riding on a man he suspects is a murderer and knows is—or was—a drunk. He thinks,
What the hell? Can’t hurt. They’re only Chinamen, anyway.
The Rat-God may not even have mentioned that getting Shang in the pokey would mean Christine dies.”

“And even if he did,” said Norah softly, “even if Mr. Brown guessed what it might mean...
would he care
?”

Christine turned to stare at her, the fear in her eyes turning to something else.

“Mr. Brown has this dream,” said Norah, ticking the chronology off on her fingertips with her thumb. “He bribes the police to arrest Shang and his grandson. Christine dies. Jesperson dies. Mr. Brown takes over Enterprise Pictures.” Her thumb curled around the closed fingers of her fist. “How long is it going to be before Mr. Brown puts two and two together and gives the necklace to Flindy or Emily or some other eager little dancer when he needs another favor from the Rat-God?”

“Screw
Flindy or Emily!” Christine got to her feet, setting Black Jasmine aside, her lips tight and her whole body fairly quivering with fury. “The fucking
nerve
of him, just
sitting
there this evening! What can we do? I mean, how can we get in touch with Mr. Shang? Go back to Chinatown?”

“I suspect,” Norah said, “that Mr. Shang will get in touch with us. He did before.”

“And until then?”

Alec walked over to the door and moved the curtain that covered its little window aside, looking out as far as fog and darkness would let him to the barely seen pewter gleam of the canal. Over his shoulder he said softly, “We wait.”

Toward four Norah woke to the sound of the dogs barking. She sat up, startled and disoriented and wondering why she felt so stiff, and discovered that she had fallen asleep on the couch leaning against Alec’s shoulder. Every light in the little room still burned, showing her the half-familiar shabby furniture, the boxes of phonograph records stacked against the walls and the shelves of dog-eared paperback books, the big phonograph and the smaller portable gramophone, the camera equipment and the black, staring squares of the windows behind their cheap muslin curtains. Christmas cards were tacked to the mantel of the room’s doll-sized fireplace, above the small gas heater. There was, of course, no tree. Chang Ming and Buttercreme pattered nervously around the room as they had on the night of wind, the night of Keith Pelletier’s murder, sniffing and scratching at the door.

Norah felt as if her blood had stopped in her veins.

Alec sat up, ruffled and creased-looking, and fumbled his glasses from the lamp table beside the couch. In the bedroom Black Jasmine’s sharp, staccato quacks could be heard. A moment later there was a scuffle of bare feet, and Christine, wrapped in her gaudy kimono, appeared in the doorway, her face like chalk.

“There’s something outside,” she whispered. “Something outside the window. I heard it scratching.”

“Turn out the lights,” Alec said promptly, and reached into the pile of equipment for a crowbar and a flashlight. “At least we won’t be blinded looking out. Any suggestions about how to deal with demons?” By the glare of the flashlight his eyebrows stood out like black smudges against the sudden pallor of his face. Norah, who had changed earlier out of her filmy silks, felt her heart thud sickeningly under the sensible cotton of her shirtwaist.

“Would fire help?” Christine asked timidly. “It did against tigers in
Strongheart of Africa
.”

“He can call fire,” Norah said, looking around for a weapon. She crossed to the kitchen, where Buttercreme was fairly bouncing with rage, her usual timid, almost whispered barks transformed into a sharp and angry fusillade. But Norah stopped in the doorway, gasping, as something vast and formless scuttled past outside the window high above the sink. She shrank back against the door, cold to her marrow, wondering if in spite of the darkness it could see her. The drawer she sought was to the right of the sink, near that pitch-dark window. Her heart hammering so that it nearly sickened her, Norah backed out of the room again. She caught up the mop from behind the door with shaking hands. Nothing could have gotten her across the floor to the knives.

“It’s outside.” Her hand tightened hard around the futile weapon. “Alec, what are we going to do if it comes into one of our minds as it did to poor Charlie?”

“Charlie was drunk,” Alec said briefly. “So was Blake. If it could have taken over someone sober, it would have gotten that institute girl rather than talking her into it through dreams.” He picked up the telephone from the table beside the couch, cursed in Yiddish, and set it down again. “Dead.”

“Can we run for it?” Christine whispered. The flashlight’s beam wavered dizzily in her trembling grip, making the shadows lurch and sway. “It can’t be thirty feet to the house next door.”

“I wouldn’t want to risk it.”

“Shall we scream?”

“They haven’t been home all night. It’s New Year’s Eve. The pier’s not closing down till dawn.” While he spoke, Alec was disentangling the small generator from the miscellaneous junk pile along the wall. He checked a cable, pulled a jackknife from his pocket, and cut and stripped one end. “Even if he cuts the electricity, he can’t get this,” he said quietly. “I’m going to fire her up. That should give us about a thousand volts on the bare end of this thing. With luck I should be able to zap whatever comes through that door before he can get his thoughts together to blow the donkey engine on the turbine.”

His free hand wrapped itself twice in the end of the starter cable. Around them, the dogs had ceased their barking and ran busily from room to room, fur flouncing, sniffing doorsills and outside walls with their flat little noses, their round eyes reflecting weirdly where they caught the flashlight’s beam. For a long time there was no sound but the tiny clatter of their toenails on the wooden floor. Then, apparently satisfied, they trotted back to the living room and sat in a group at Christine’s feet, ears up, wrinkled faces grave.

Alec glanced at Norah, the starter pull unused in his right hand, the cable end ready in his left.

After a few moments Chang Ming sprang to his feet again and toddled to the door. He did not bark but sat in prick-eared expectation, his extravagant tail curled. Presently it started to switch eagerly back and forth.

Footsteps creaked on the small porch. Black Jasmine’s and Buttercreme’s tails sprang up onto their backs as well, and they hastened to join the bigger dog. A moment later someone knocked. “Miss Flamande? Mrs. Blackstone? It is I, the Shining Crane.”

A great trail of mud and water glistened across the damp grass as though some vast, heavy thing had dragged itself from the canal. All around the house mud splotched the walls behind crushed and slime-dripping banana and castor plants. Alec’s flashlight beam picked out the chewed marks on the foundations. The whole night smelled of rats, thick and foul. Norah shuddered, drawing Christine’s chinchilla close around her, but could seem to find no relief from the cold. Christine said nothing, but Norah could sense her tension, wound to breaking point with the aftermath of liquor and drugs and fear.

“I have been afoot, walking and hiding in the orchards, for many hours,” the Shining Crane said, poking in the broken and violated plants with his staff. “My grandson is in the hands of the police. They say he will be held in prison, perhaps deported. An irregularity, they say.”

“An irregularity in the Chinatown beat,” Alec remarked with a rubbing gesture of his fingertips.

Silently, they filed back into the house.

“I felt the thing’s presence from afar.” Shang Ko ran the deformed links of the necklace through his broken fingers. “It fled from me. Surrounded by water and with the moon on the wane, it had little strength, and I do not know what form it was able to take. But it will be back. It has had its taste of blood, the strength of the one life it has already taken. It feels the coming of the year’s end. It will have its sacrifice.”

He looked down at the deformed ghost trapped within the central gem, and the scarred, bent fingers became entangled in the chain.

“Can Kwan’s sketches be used?” Norah asked after a time. “Could you, or one of us, maybe, use the prepared ink to draw over the sketch? Ink it in as they do magazine illustrations?”

Shang Ko shook his head without looking up. “I do not believe so. Yes, the paper could be treated with spells, and yes, the ink I have prepared could be used. But wizards see things in a way others do not. What my grandson would have drawn is not what he sketched. What you suggest, though it might work, might not hold the demon once it is driven forth from the body it will take to attack us.”

He held up his hand, and Norah saw that only the thumb and two of the scarred fingers were mobile. “It is long since I could do the calligraphy necessary for spells of this kind. Ni Kuei Nu used to do my writing for me... and now my writing grows more and more like the patterns of grass blown by the wind. And to tell the truth,” he added with a twitch of his mouth beneath the long mustaches, “it was never beautiful. Not like my grandson’s or the Mud Tortoise’s. I can see the Rat-God in my mind, but that image I cannot place on the silk. If the image is not perfect in all respects, it will not hold the Rat-God’s soul.”