Medusa's Web (25 page)

Then Madeline sagged, and Scott caught her and held her against his chest to keep her from falling down. He could feel her rapid heartbeat. His foot was in a puddle of warm coffee—at some point Madeline had kicked over her cup.

After a few seconds she shook herself, twisted her head around, and grinned sheepishly at him. “What,” she said, straightening and stepping back, “did I faint? Thank you for catching me.”

“You were Aunt Amity again,” Scott said breathlessly, “and it was possession again, not a spider vision—and she's not
gone,
even now, just . . . resubmerged. She said she was going to steer Madeline off the freeway at the Ince exit, and find Alla, in the past.” He took a deep breath and added, “And she doesn't care if it destroys you.”

Madeline nodded, but she was staring up into the branches of a
big mesquite tree. Following her gaze, Scott saw nothing but a scrap of yellow lace caught in the high branches.

Ariel stepped up beside him, having lost her own coffee cup somewhere, and she waved two fistfuls of the printout pages. “Is this by any chance the novel you said she's been typing?”

Scott caught his sister's shoulder. “You are Madeline, right?”

She nodded, then looked down and smiled at him. “I'm Madeline, all right, as long as I concentrate on it.”

Scott turned to Ariel. “Yes,” he said, and he briefly told her about the discovery of the active keyboard and how Madeline had been following the disjointed and nearly incoherent narrative.

When he had finished the story, assisted by interjections from Madeline, he said, “I've got to go get something from my bike. Does Claimayne have his crew messing around in the apiary?”

“No,” said Ariel. “The party's entirely on the ground floor, in the dining room and the music room.”

“Meet me in the apiary then.”

“I'll bring up coffee,” said Madeline, stooping to pick up her cup.

Ariel gave Scott a mistrustful look and then followed Madeline.

SCOTT FETCHED THE SECURITY
chain and padlock from the sissy bar of his motorcycle, and he sidled past Ariel and Madeline and the buckets in the kitchen on his way to the stairs. He stopped on the second floor to finally put on shoes and socks and pick up his leather jacket—and consider and then regretfully dismiss the idea of sneaking a gulp or two of the bourbon. When he walked into the apiary on the third floor, Madeline and Ariel had already arrived and were sitting down and blowing on fresh cups of coffee; Ariel had even found time to shed her pajamas and pull on a sweater and jeans. A third cup had been filled and was sitting on a chair next to Madeline. Scott draped the chain down beside it and slowly slid his arms into the sleeves of the jacket.

He dug a pack of Camels out of his left jacket pocket and shook a cigarette onto his lip, and as he struck a match to it he looked around the long room. The gray daylight in the windows cast no clear shadows, and the room was nearly as cold as the sidewalk outside had been.

A two-inch-wide pipe stood in the corner on the far side of the door, rising from a mound of ancient putty on the floor to disappear through a square hole in the ceiling, and Scott crossed to it and gripped it; it didn't shift when he tugged at it. He sighed and walked back to where the women sat, his footsteps echoing.

“I'm going to finish this cigarette and drink that coffee,” he said, “and then I'm going to chain myself to that pipe.” He reached into the right jacket pocket and pulled out one of the two remaining crumpled, folded slips of paper; he flattened it out and saw that Claimayne had lettered
Scaramuccia
on it.

“Like Odysseus tied to the mast,” said Ariel, nervously touching her silver gyroscope pendant.

Madeline too had guessed what sort of paper Scott held. “Why?” she asked plaintively.

“If he's going to do without his drink,” said Ariel, “he needs to get his precious oblivion somewhere.”

Scott took a drag on the cigarette and exhaled a pale stream of smoke before he looked up from the folded paper to squint at Ariel.

She shook her head sharply. “I'm sorry. I've read that amputees still feel pains and itches in their missing limbs. The place in my head that hates you has been cut off, but—there's still a twitch there sometimes.”

Like when you chose to do the after of your three-day-old spider in front of us last night, Scott thought; and he thought of the box of credit cards in the uphill garage and the scare-bat in the basement, which ought to be negations of his years of hating his parents.

He smiled at her. “I know how that works.” He turned to Madeline. “The spider visions always show us a place, a time, where the
big spider image is—and after Hearst burned Natacha's original, that leaves just the images in the Taylor film. So far it's always been a time in the 1920s, but I think they've been chronological, each one a bit more recent than the last. I've got to . . . hope to . . . see a place where the film might still be now.”

“Chain
me
to the pipe, then,” Madeline said. “You did
two
spiders, day before yesterday. It's bad for you to do a lot of them—look at Claimayne.”

Scott knew she wasn't craving the moment of selflessness—and he insisted to himself that he wasn't either—but that she hoped to see Valentino again, as Scott had on Thursday night.

To Madeline, Ariel said, with evident skepticism, “I thought you didn't want the film to be found.”

“But I think it'll be okay if I can be the one to
watch
the film,” Madeline said. “That would block Aunt Amity out of me, and at the same time spill me into the hurricane.”

From which, thought Scott, you imagine the spirit of Valentino will again rescue you and take you back to that moonlit garden.

“We can watch it together,” he said, though he was resolved not to let her do it. “We looked at the Oneida Ince spider together.”

“No, Scott,” Madeline said. “I know you don't mean to let me watch it at all—because you love me!—but Rudolph Valentino might not save
you
. He told you that whoever watched it would die of it.”

Scott suspected that she used Valentino's whole name because just the first name would have seemed presumptuously familiar, while just the last name would have seemed too remote.

“I don't think you have any hope of finding it
at all,
” said Ariel, standing up. She waved toward the pipe. “So go ahead.”

“Right.” Scott picked up his cup and drained it in four big swallows, then had a last deep inhalation on the cigarette and dropped the butt into the cup and set it down. “Pay attention to whoever occupies me while I'm gone,” he said, picking up the chain. “But don't let him know we're after the film.”

“Or her,” said Madeline.

“Or, as it might be, her.” Scott tossed his keys to his sister, then walked to the pipe and flipped the chain around it and drew the two ends together over his belt buckle. It was a comfortably snug fit. He clicked the padlock shut through the two end links.

He felt jumpy and sick and wondered if his imminent occupier would vomit. “Geronimo,” he said and flipped open the
Scaramuccia
paper.

For a breathless and vertiginous moment the spider expanded to fill his vision, its lines bristling and spinning, and then he was nobody; after a measureless time, he found himself moving through the deceptively vertical-seeming things—

Then he was standing on a thin carpet and looking out through an open door at a sunlit wooden balcony. He took a careful step forward, out onto the balcony, and saw that he was two or three floors above a street that sloped steeply downhill to his left; hotels or apartment buildings with pillars and ornate turrets lined the street, their first-floor windows level with the second- or even third-floor windows of buildings farther down the incline. He gripped the balcony rail and looked down. The bonging sound he'd been hearing was coordinated with Stop and Go signs that swiveled out of traffic signal boxes on the street corner, and the cars moving up and down the lanes looked like models from the 1940s. San Francisco, he thought. He stepped back and looked down at himself and saw that he was in a male body, dressed in gray slacks and a short-sleeved white shirt.

He turned to face the room, and he could feel the presence of the Usabo image like static electricity in the hairs on his arms. The room was narrow but high ceilinged, with a transom window over the door; an iron-frame bed with a battered leather trunk beside it, a dresser with a lamp, and a couple of metal-tubing chairs at a Formica-top table were the only furniture, aside from a big chrome clock and an age-darkened framed print on the yellowed plaster wall.

He glanced around nervously, but his impression that someone else was present seemed to be wrong.

With his hands out in front of himself he shuffled across the carpet toward the door, trying to feel where the faint vibration in the air and the sensed-but-not-quite-heard roar were most detectable; and he found himself facing the wall with the bed and dresser against it.

On the dresser were only a ring of keys and a scattering of coins and a clean tin ashtray. Scott pulled open the drawers, but they contained nothing but socks and shirts and boxer shorts and a bottle of Korbel brandy. He patted the bed and lifted the mattress, but found nothing. The latches on the trunk weren't locked, and when he pulled the lid up, he discovered a collection of small tins and glass jars and brushes, and several wigs and false beards—blond, brown, and black. Was the person whose body he was in an actor?

He got awkwardly down on his knees and peered under the dresser—and saw only some old cigarette butts—and then under the bed; a stainless steel .45 semiautomatic lay where a person in the bed could easily reach down and grab it, but there was nothing like a film can.

How long will I stay here? he thought worriedly. He glanced up at the clock, which was made from a flat hubcap with wire numerals around the rim; its triangular chrome hands showed ten minutes to ten. I should be okay for several minutes in any case, he thought, but I should find something I can hurt myself with, to prolong this. As hard as he could, he pinched the wrist of the body he was in, but it didn't seem like enough.

There was no bathroom or kitchen. A narrow closet proved to contain a wide-lapeled striped seersucker suit and a pair of polished wingtip shoes; Scott felt through the pockets of the suit but found nothing besides a silver-certificate five-dollar bill and a matchbook from the Trocadero. On the shelf above the hangers was a hatbox that proved to contain only a man's fedora hat.

He turned back to the room.
It's
here, he thought, somewhere—
and then he noticed that the hands of the clock were still at ten minutes to ten.

How long have I been here? he thought.

He hastily dug out the matchbook again and flipped it open, intending to strike a match and burn his finger—but his vision lost all depth and the colors changed, and he knew that the sudden pain across his abdomen must be the chain holding him to the pipe in the apiary. He got his feet under himself and stood up straight, easing the chain, and concentrated on breathing deeply. He was alarmed to taste blood in his mouth.

Shapes changed in front of him, and he tried to recognize human figures. Madeline's voice said, “Scott? Are you with us?,” and he recognized the brown of her sweater.

“Maddy,” he said, keeping his voice level, “am I bleeding?”

“Here,” she said, and he felt her hand press a wad of paper tissues into his palm and then raise his hand to his nose. “You've got a nosebleed. Press on it.”

“Oh,” he said hoarsely. “Thanks.” He held the tissues to his nose and cleared his throat. “Have I been shouting?” He narrowed his eyes, and he was able to pick out the figures of Madeline and Ariel among the shifting fields of muted colors.

“Not shouting,” said Madeline, “but your voice was grittier.”

“Did you see your film can?” came Ariel's voice.

“No. I felt it, it was there—maybe taped to the back side of the dresser—but I didn't see it.” He could feel blood on his chin, and he wondered what his shirt must look like. “It was in San Francisco, I'm pretty sure—1940s, from the cars.” He held out his free hand. “Can I have my keys?”

He saw Madeline's hand come closer, and then he was able to see the whole room in perspective—the two women standing a yard away, the TV screen behind them, and the stacked tables farther away against the wall.

Scott took the keys from Madeline, found the padlock key and
freed himself from the chain, and immediately stumbled to the nearest chair and sat down, still pressing the tissues to his nose.

“It's a nice drive, to San Francisco,” said Madeline.

“You wanted to know—” began Ariel. “I mean, the guy in your body wanted to know who we were, and who you were, and what year it is.”

“He seemed scared,” put in Madeline, “by us, as much as by the chain around him. He said you ambushed him—he meant to be in his own body, someplace he was familiar with.”

Scott gingerly prodded his stomach. “He was straining pretty hard against the chain. What did you tell him?”

“I told him it was 2015,” said Madeline, “and he looked at the window and said I was lying.”

“He thought you were telling him what time it was,” said Ariel. Madeline raised her eyebrows and nodded.

“Did he say who he was?” asked Scott.

“I asked him,” said Ariel. “He sort of laughed and said he was between names.”

Scott held the red-blotted tissues away, and his nose seemed to have stopped bleeding. Looking down, he saw that his shirt was streaked with blood.

“I couldn't get close enough to give him tissues while he wasn't you,” said Madeline apologetically.

“No,” Scott agreed. He started to stand up, then sat back down, peering left and right. He pointed at the hallway door. “That's north, isn't it?”