Medusa's Web (11 page)

“Were these special, Auntie?” he whispered.

He noticed now that each of them had faint writing in pencil on the bottom edge of the folded flap:
Il Dottore, Innamorati, Scaramuccia,
and
Il Capitano,
which he recognized as the names of characters from the Italian
Commedia dell'arte.

Why had Aunt Amity hidden them behind the drawer?

When Scott noticed that one of his fingers was lightly flipping an edge of the
Il Dottore
paper, he hastily put them all down and got to his feet. A dusty raincoat hung in an alcove next to the bathtub, and he folded it carefully around all the papers and the books and the broken cloisonné box and its contents, tying the belt securely around the bundle so that it wouldn't come open while it was strapped to the sissy bar on his motorcycle.

He remembered to fit the drawers back into the desk before he left the office.

CLAIMAYNE HAD WHEELED HIMSELF
out through the kitchen door into the sunlight, and then had Ariel hold a cushion-layered wheelbarrow steady while he got up and shifted himself into it; then Ariel, with a picnic lunch in a blue nylon backpack, had trundled the heavy wheelbarrow out along the gravel path to a cleared spot in front of the Medusa mosaic wall. She was sweating and cross when she finally lowered the back end of the wheelbarrow and flexed her hands off the handles. Her new bull's-eye lens sunglasses had slipped down on her nose, and she impatiently pushed them back into place, though it meant that she couldn't clearly see whatever she was looking at directly.

The wind at noon was still cold enough to make her zip up her yellow nylon windbreaker before she shrugged out of the backpack. She unbuckled it and took out a towel and spread it over the weeds below the wall and sat down.

“You're sitting in Alla Nazimova's bathtub,” remarked her cousin. His dressing gown was buttoned up to his neck, and a conical bamboo hat sat on his bald head.

“Where it was,” said Ariel.

“It's still there, somewhere along the time-thread.”

“Said the termite tetrarch. That Ferdalisi fellow is due when?”

“One thirty. We've got more than an hour. Don't wear your novelty glasses when he's here.”

“What does he want, exactly?”

“I don't know,
exactly,
” said Claimayne with a shrug, lifting his eyebrows; and it occurred to Ariel that he was probably lying. “He's interested in my mother's novels and notes, at any rate. New critical editions, a movie option?” He shrugged again. “Money, with luck.”

Ariel considered telling him what the stranger had said to her out in front of the spiderbit shop yesterday—but she wasn't sure he'd consider it good news that he might live many more years without spiders. And in any case, that weird little man had hardly been a reliable source of information.

From the backpack she pulled a wrapped sandwich and a carton of macaroni salad with a plastic fork and a paper napkin rubber-banded to it, and she reached up to hand the carton to Claimayne. “It's too late in the year for these picnics. I think the ground's still damp from the rain.” Next she lifted out a half bottle of Storybook Mountain zinfandel with the cork already pulled and loosely replaced, and she passed that too to Claimayne; and finally she pulled free a thermos for herself.

As she unscrewed it and carefully poured hot coffee into the plastic cap, Claimayne tugged the cork out of the bottle and flicked a splash of wine toward the mosaic wall.

“I think she took the tub away so she could sit in it in the privacy of her office,” he said. He splashed some more wine toward the wall.

“I should have opened a full-size bottle for you,” said Ariel, “if you're going to give half of it to your beheaded Medusa.” She recalled Harry's story about the nineteenth-century spider worshippers in Andalucia, and their Medusa symbol, and she looked away from the wall.

“Not beheaded,” Claimayne corrected her. “You can see in the earliest mosaics that the old Greeks knew she was never anything
but
a little bitty head—with eight long, lovely, snaky tresses. It's too bad this mosaic is only the artist's imagining of her!”

Ariel gripped her plastic cup more tightly but said with careful flippancy, “Sure, and if it was a real portrait, everybody who looked at it would turn to stone, right? We could go into the statuary business. I'm glad Perseus killed her.”

“I told you it doesn't literally change a person to stone. The Greek noun is really something more like ‘rigidity.' And Perseus didn't kill her, he just brought her to Sephiros, though he was careful only to look at her in a mirror.” Claimayne lifted the bottle to his lips and took a sip. “I wonder if poor young Madeline knows that the oldest Sumerian astrologers knew her too. And according to an old Hebrew midrash, when David was being pursued by King Saul, David hung a spider tapestry over the cave he was hiding in, and Saul's soldiers were too disoriented to find him.” A gust of wind blew a dry leaf into his macaroni salad, and he picked it out with trembling fingers.

“Greeks, Babylonians, Hebrews!” Ariel shivered. “Are the things really
that
old?”

“At least.”

After a pause, Ariel said, “I think poor young Madeline is brain damaged.”

“Actually, I think she
is
. No, not damaged, precisely—permanently concussed, say. Permanently distracted, at least. I told you I think she and her brother both looked at the one my mother was saving for
special
.”

“Scott seems all right.”

“On the surface,” agreed Claimayne, “but I'll wager dementia sets in at an unusually young age.”

Ariel frowned and opened her mouth to say something, but through the open kitchen and dining room came the rattling growl of an inadequately muffled motorcycle engine, which stopped after a few seconds.

“Speak of the bedeviled,” said Claimayne. “And he parks his velocipede up here by the house now! Cheeky.”

Faintly they heard thumping on the interior stairs, and Ariel
lowered her glasses to look up toward the open window of Scott's room.

“Scott?”

Scott's face appeared in the window, his dark hair tossing in the wind as he glanced around at the paths and shrubbery of the untended garden. Ariel waved, and he waved back and then ducked back inside.

Claimayne raised an eyebrow. “You called to him why?”

“I—don't want him thinking nobody's home, and snooping around.” She pushed the glasses back up on her nose.

“I'm always home these days.” After a pause, Claimayne went on, “I've got microphones in their rooms. Your Scott has hired some people, on spec, to forge letters from my mother stating that it's her intention to leave everything to him and Madeline. Back-dated a couple of years, to make it look as though it was her intention for an extended period, not just something she dreamed up on the day she killed herself.”

Ariel stared in his direction, though she could see only shifting rings through the lenses. “You're such a liar. Not that I don't think he'd do it, if it occurred to him, but—when would you have put in these microphones? You didn't know they'd be staying up here in the main house till I said they could, and they've been underfoot ever since.”

Claimayne laughed and had another swig of wine. “It's a good idea, though.” He smiled across the weeds at the little black-and-white Medusa head. “
You
know what those two are up to, don't you, darling?” he said to it.

Over the wind in the trees they could again hear shoes knocking on the interior stairs, and a moment later Scott stepped out through the kitchen door. Ariel hesitated, then took off the glasses and tucked them into her blouse pocket.

Scott trudged up the gravel path and paused a few yards short of where Ariel sat on her towel and Claimayne in his wheelbarrow.

“I'm, uh, home,” he said diffidently. “Back, I mean.”

“We'd ask you to join us,” said Ariel coldly, “but I don't want any more towels getting muddy.”

“And I don't think there's another wheelbarrow,” put in Claimayne.

Scott waved it off. “I've got stuff to do. Claimayne, I picked up your mother's mail and checkbook, and I hope there's a lot of money in the account, since you're a couple of months in arrears on everything.” Claimayne was frowning and opening his mouth as Scott turned to go back toward the house, but before he could say anything, Scott stopped and looked back and added, “Who is Genod Speas? A brother of your mother's?”

Claimayne's mouth snapped shut, then opened again as he exclaimed, “Fuck me!” He took a deep breath, then said loudly, “I told you not to go into my mother's office unless Ariel or I were with you! What did you—”

“You gave me the key,” said Scott.

“I did not! Did you break in? I'll see that you—”

“You did give him the key,” interrupted Ariel.

“I gave him the
wrong
key! He broke in!”

“That was the wrong key?” Scott shook his head. “Actually I never even tried it. The door wasn't locked.”

“Bullshit it wasn't locked! She never—”

Ariel burst out, “Oh, who cares? I told Scott to deal with the bills, and he's doing it. Probably your mother did forget to lock the door.”

Claimayne visibly forced himself to calm down. “How do you know about Genod Speas?”

“She was writing checks to him,” said Scott. “They were in the same drawer as the rest of the old checks.” He cocked his head and stared at Claimayne. “Why? Who is he?”

“Yes, her brother, her older brother. You went through her desk? Did you find a little cloisonné box?”

“The only drawer that was unlocked was the one with the old checks and the checkbook in it. There wasn't any cloisonné box in that one.”

Claimayne gave him a truly venomous stare. “Do not go back there. Ever.”

“Jeez, Tetrarch,” said Ariel, a bit awed by her cousin's uncharacteristic anger.

Scott shrugged. “I've got no reason to go back. I brought all the bills here, and the checkbook.” He took his key ring out of his pocket. “I should give you that key back. It probably goes to something.” He worked the key off the ring.

Claimayne held out his palm, and Scott dropped the key onto it. “Oh, and while I've got you,” Scott said, “do you know what became of our parents' stuff? Furniture, books, junk? I'm sure your mother didn't just throw it all out.”

Claimayne gave him a blank stare. “You miss the orange couch? The heraldic wet bar?”

Ariel snorted and giggled.

Claimayne closed his eyes. “I have no idea.”

Scott frowned and started to say something, but then he jumped and spun to face the house, for a very loud, close boom had shaken the air.

Ariel looked past him at the roof, but there was nothing to see.

“It's just Claimayne's mother blowing herself up,” she explained. “We get reruns.”

“I heard it yesterday too,” said Scott, still staring at the house.

“Like I said, reruns.”

Scott nodded slowly, and half turned as if again about to say something, then just walked away toward the house, still nodding.

Ariel turned to Claimayne, and she forced a breezy smile. “Will that
stop,
before the party on Saturday, do you suppose?”

Claimayne seemed distracted. “What? Oh—well, that's rather up to her, isn't it?”

BACK UPSTAIRS IN HIS
room, Scott locked the door and leaned against it, staring at the bundled raincoat on his bed and trying to think of the other things in it, not just the spiders. At last he took a deep breath and let it out, pushing away from the door and crossing to the bed.

Reruns! Like Madeline's brief walk to old Hollywood yesterday?

He unbuckled the raincoat and flipped it open. To start with, he picked up the book in the plastic bank bag and tugged at the plastic until it tore and he was able to pull the book free and get a good look at it. The picture on the dust jacket was of the old silent-movie star Rudolph Valentino in some sort of Eastern headdress, carrying a young woman in his arms. Opening the book, Scott saw that it had been published in 1967, with deckle-edged pages and a section of black-and-white photographs, all of which seemed at a first hasty glance to be of Valentino in elaborate costumes. He saw no underlining or laid-in papers, but there was writing in ballpoint ink on the front flyleaf—and it was in his mother's well-remembered handwriting:
Keep it, I've got more copies.
The ink had spread and faded a little, over the years. His breath caught in his throat, and he put the book aside for now.

Why are we back here? he thought. She's gone, they're both gone.

He could feel the hard angularity of the bottle in his pocket, but when he sat down on the bed, his attention was on the four pieces of folded paper that had been in the cloisonné box. A moment later the
Il Capitano
one was in his hand, and he was tapping a tooth with it.

He told himself that he shouldn't, he shouldn't give in to this and throw away all of . . . all of what, precisely? His relationships, his accomplishments?

He wished he had arrived at the Ravenna Apartments earlier this morning, when Louise had been there. What
could
she have wanted to see him about? She had left him eleven years ago because he had seemed to have no prospects, and now, having found and lost a moderately successful career, he was back in that same position again.

He remembered her as she had been in 2002—a sophomore at USC majoring in education, tall and young and clear-eyed, her blond hair generally pulled back in a ponytail, athletic shoulders and legs fairly radiating health—idealistic—and he wondered what she was like now. Successful at something, certainly. She'd be thirty-three now, the same age as Ariel.

What could she see in . . . the man who had been hunching about on the roof and in the cellars of Caveat yesterday, hungover from having looked at a spider; who was in fact holding a spider in his hand right now . . .

“Fuck it,” he said and flipped open the piece of paper and stared at the eight-limbed pattern on it.

And for an indefinite period the world stopped, and he was bodiless in a space so different from reality that familiar things like personal identity couldn't follow. Later, when his consciousness had coalesced enough to be aware again, he was among the featureless vertical entities that seemed to extend away to infinity above and below him, and his abandoned body in the bare Caveat bedroom clenched its teeth against whatever might be coming next.

And then he was standing in a small lamplit dining room that
was separated by an arch from a living room; under his too-tight shoes was a carpet that covered the middle of the polished hardwood floor, and a crown molding soffit overhead ran around three sides of the room, with decorative mugs and mismatched ceramic figures arranged in rows. He could hear music, turned down low, piano and orchestra.

Through the arch he could see a gray-haired man sitting at a desk facing away from him, and the lace curtains on the far side of the desk showed only darkness beyond . . . and then Scott realized that another man was standing right beside him here in the dining room.

Scott would have jumped in surprise, but the body he was occupying didn't shift at all. After a few seconds, his head turned to look at his companion, and Scott found himself looking at a young man's lean, tanned face. The man's eyes were wide and his lips were pressed tightly together. He met the eyes Scott was looking out of and nodded toward the living room.

As Scott stepped forward, he felt a sharp pain in his toe that would have made him gasp if he had been able to. And he could feel that he was once again in a woman's body; but he lacked the volition to look down and see if the remembered chain bracelet was on the wrist, and though he was aware of that hand holding something, he couldn't know if it was again, or still, the Medusa folder.

Stepping between a chair and a couch, Scott was distracted by the pain in this body's toe—did the woman have a piece of glass in her shoe?—but he found that he was speaking. “Mr. Taylor,” came a woman's voice from his throat.

The man at the desk looked around, then pushed back his chair and stood up. He reached to the side and switched off a radio on a nearby table, and in the moment the music ceased, Scott recognized it as some Debussy piece. “The Sunken Cathedral”?

In the glow from a standing lamp beside the couch, Scott could see that the man wore a three-piece suit and a tie, and the expression on his long patrician face was only quizzical, with one eyebrow
raised. “You should have called,” said the man addressed as Taylor. “I was just editing a scene before going to bed. But tell me, why do you sneak in through the kitchen, and with a gun?” He spoke with a detectable British accent.

Scott still wasn't able to make this body look down, but he realized that the textured pressure in his right palm was the grip of a handgun.

He found himself speaking. “Editing a scene? I thought you were between pictures.” His lungs filled, and the woman's voice went on, “I want the Medusa spider.”

Scott was able to see, peripherally, a machine on the man's desk; two big open-sided reels flanked a console with a light glowing in it, and a round, flat metal can as big as the reels leaned against it. A foot-wide mirror on a swivel stand stood on the other side of the machine, tilted forward.

“I think I know what you mean,” said the older man slowly. “But I was under the impression that
you
had it—bought it from a not entirely reputable rare-book dealer in London.”

Scott found himself speaking again: the woman's voice said, “You haven't been under that impression lately. You know very well that Theodore Kosloff stole it from me two years ago,
shot me in the leg to get it,
and he'd let me shoot
him
before he'd give it back to me.”

“As you say. But, child, why come to me?”

“Because I know you bribed one of his girls, Fridi, to photograph it for you—she was too scared to
steal
it like I tried to do. Fridi's an old friend of mine, and she told me about it, even told me about the warpy glasses you insisted that she wear while she took the picture.”

She wiggled her foot, and the pain in her toe seemed to lance up through her shin to her knee; Scott felt the skin around her eyes tighten in a wince.

The young man standing beside Scott muttered something, and the woman's voice said, “Wait outside, see that we're not inter
rupted.” Then Scott was aware of her forehead kinking in a frown that felt like puzzlement, and her voice started to say, “I'm not sure I'm—”

And before she could finish the sentence, Scott felt another personality strongly exert itself in the woman's body. “Wait outside,” her voice repeated, and it seemed more musical now.

The young man nodded and stepped past Taylor to the front door, and without looking at anyone he pulled the door open and disappeared outside. The curtains above the desk fluttered in the moment before the door was closed, and Scott had caught a brief glimpse of a moonlit gazebo out there.

Taylor gave her a frosty smile. “Very well—yes, Fridi is right. And, as the thing was yours originally, I'll have the developer send you a copy. You didn't need a gun to compel me.”

“You appear to be editing a film there,” came the woman's newer voice. “What sort of film is it that has to be edited in a mirror?”

Before Taylor could summon an answer, the woman went on, “Never mind. You let Fridi guess your purpose—you're using images of the Medusa spider to make some sort of exorcism film! Setting repetitions of the image in the fast tarantella frequencies to nullify it. You probably use the Medusa's image a dozen times, a hundred, in that film!” The gun, a blued-steel revolver, appeared for a moment in Scott's vision as the body pointed at the desk with it, and the remembered chain bracelet was indeed visible on the wrist of the slim hand holding it. “All I want is one frame of the film, one that's got the image on it.”

Frowning now, Taylor raised a steady hand. “You must know I've tried to stop the havoc this sickness has caused in our community, Natacha! You can't really want—”

Scott felt a smile tighten his face, and then his mouth opened: “I think Natacha did really want it. Not as badly as I do.”

Taylor lowered his hand, and his face lost all expression. “Who are you? Do I know you?”

“I won't even be born for a long time.”

Taylor shook his head slowly. “My God, Natacha came here in a before? And then lost her spider before she could do the after?”

“She did the after, but I did an after-after, and I'm stronger than she was. Now, just as a formality—will you give me one of the frames with the Medusa spider image on it?”

Taylor shrugged. “Very well. One frame.” He turned toward the desk, but the woman stepped swiftly to the side, apparently unmindful of the pain in her foot, and her eyes saw that Taylor had flicked open a cigarette lighter and had his thumb on the flint wheel.

The gun muzzle flared and rocked upward as the short, hard explosion shook the air and numbed Scott's eardrums, and Taylor was thrown forward across the desk; after one ringing moment, he straightened and took a step toward the door, but he sagged and fell backward, and then he was lying on his back on the rug, staring sightlessly at the ceiling.

The woman's shoulder jiggled. “We've got somebody else aboard too, haven't we?” said her voice. “And when are
you
born, stranger?”

The young man had hurried back inside, and he stared in evident horror at the body on the carpet. He waved a hand toward it, and a chain bracelet was visible on his wrist too. “Natacha!” he whispered. “You had to
kill
him?”

Scott's perspective moved forward to the desk, and then he was peering without comprehension at the machine. He saw the woman's hand twist a knob on the console and then spin one of the reels, and a glistening length of film snaked from one reel through the machine to the other, while the lighted panel flickered.

She spun the reel on the right over and over again until the left-side reel spun free and the end of the film was slapping against her hand. She flipped up a little lever on the spindle and pulled the right-side reel off the machine, fitting it into the film can and spinning the wide lid on tight.

Her arms clasped the can to her chest, and a subsonic roar made
the room seem almost to vibrate out of focus, and for a moment Scott was convinced that gravity itself had briefly wavered.

Scott felt the woman inhale and exhale deeply, and then she was crouching and pulling off a high-heeled shoe. The flat head of a thumbtack was pressed against the underside of her big toe, and she got her fingernails under it and tugged the point free; a drop of blood showed on the skin in the moment before she thrust her foot back into the shoe. Then she straightened up, and her head jerked back toward the dining room. “Out the way we came in.”

Now Scott was hurrying back across the dining room and through a small dark kitchen to a back door; the young man pulled it open and they stepped down to a sidewalk on a narrow street. Scott caught a whiff of jasmine on the night breeze. Moonlight frosted the tops of waving palm trees and the tile roof of the apartment building across the street, but the woman and her companion were in deep shadow as they hurried left down the sidewalk to a wider street. On the far side of the intersection another apartment building was visible, and Scott was able to read
Roxy
over the doorway arch. Headlights illuminated a neatly kept hedge along that far curb, and a car swept past the intersection, then another; they were both angular upright black cars of the 1920s.

And then his vision lost depth, and the moving patches changed from the black and white of a moonlit street to points and curls of gold against blackness.

He was lying on his back, and his hands told him he was on a rug; and after a minute of breathing deeply and blinking, his vision recovered depth perception and he could see that he was in a dim room with lots of hanging brass vessels and gold statues on shelves. And then, turning his head stiffly, he could make out a bed with spiral-carved pillars, and a curtained window.

The aches that racked him were particularly strong in his hips and back and jaw, but he got up in a crouch and looked around, and behind him was a closed door. The knob turned when he had hobbled
across to it, and when he pulled the door open, he exhaled with relief to see the familiar second-floor hallway of Caveat; as if to confirm it, the old structure creaked and shifted perceptibly. He stumbled a few steps forward, and he realized from the position of the stairs and the far window that he had just come out of Claimayne's room.

That's all I need, Scott thought desperately—to be caught coming out of his room! Why the hell would my briefly abandoned body have made its way
there?
He pulled the door closed behind him and limped down the hall to his own room.