Bride of the Rat God (16 page)

For a moment she thought, with a pang of hurt so intense that it was almost physical, about Jim, about waking up in the morning and reaching across to touch his arm, not wanting to wake him, only wanting that contact with his skin. She’d known every mole and freckle and vertebra of his back. She didn’t know for how many months of long nights in Mrs. Pendergast’s unheated attic she’d conjured him, building the memory of weight and warmth and smell, of every square inch of his skin, in the bed beside her.

Alec’s skin would be completely different.

She looked away, and if it hadn’t been for the crimson light of the safe-lamp, he would have seen the scald of color that heated her from collarbone to hairline. But he must have seen her eyes, for he turned back to the table and said, “Not that I wasn’t brought up to it, of course. My Aunt Vera didn’t enter my mom’s apartment for four years after a pigeon knocked up against the window one day while she was having tea there. She did her damnedest to take us three kids away as well, swearing somebody in the place was going to die.”

Norah burst into laughter that stemmed in part from relief. “I see she and Mrs. Pendergast would have become bosom friends, provided Mrs. Pendergast could have been brought to exchange three words with someone of your mother’s faith whose husband hadn’t made a fortune and changed his name to Smith. I don’t know how much she paid that Oneida Majesta woman to come every Tuesday night and communicate on the astral plane... Certainly more than she paid me,” she added ruefully, and stood for a moment, running the film strips through her hands.

“The trouble is, I keep wondering if Mr. Shang is another Oneida Majesta.” She set the film down and rubbed her hands against the dry desert cold. Their breath was beginning to show as glowing ruby vapor in the light, and Alec bent to turn on the small electric heater that would keep the water in the vats from freezing overnight. That morning, when he’d come in to collect his cameras, he’d found two scorpions and a very young rattlesnake next to the heater and had trapped and disposed of them without much evidence of surprise.

“They have an expression in the Los Angeles Police Department,” he said after a long minute’s thought. “If something’s completely incomprehensible, they say, ‘That’s Chinatown.’ ‘Chinatown’ meaning something that you can’t figure out by logical means and probably shouldn’t be messing with, anyway.”

He made a final check of the drying test strips and guided her to the door, shrugging into his war-weary brown leather jacket and switching off the red safe-light as they went out. The railing of the barbershop’s wooden porch had long since perished; two planks of desiccated gray wood formed steps to the level of the unpaved street. Tumbleweed crouched all around like monster hedgehogs, colorless in the dark.

“I’d like to think I’m not one of those people who won’t let a Chinaman in the front door,” he went on, double locking the door behind him and settling himself on the edge of the porch. “But the Chinese are different. They come from a different world: different religion, different beliefs about how people are supposed to deal with each other, different ways of thinking about why things happen. So it’s hard to tell what he’s after, why he attached himself to Chris the way he did.”

He broke a dry stick of some coarse, dark pricklebush that grew next to the steps as Norah settled down beside him, gazing for a moment into the eviscerated shells of the few buildings across the street, the thin glaze of starlight alternating with shadows like cut slabs of infinity. To their right a few squares of sulfur light marked the mess hall and the brick assay office that was Hraldy’s headquarters; Doc LaRousse had wired a portable generator in the back of the old saloon, from which cable snaked to every building. At the far end of the pale trace of street the half-raised walls of a brick opera house stood like something undertaken by children and abandoned at the prospect of supper.

“Film’s a tricky thing,” he went on softly. “It drags you into it. You’ve seen that. You forget there’s a screen between you and those folks up there. Like you saying you wanted Blake Fallon to carry you off, when what you really meant was that you wanted to be carried off by Cliff Ironjaw or whatever his character was called.”

She chuckled ruefully. “Well, particularly after meeting the man in the flesh, yes.
And
that little show he put on at the Montmartre. But yes. Those silly twits Lawrence Pendergast used to bring to the house... they really did think poor Mr. Valentino lives in a tent and ravishes a different woman every night. I’m sure he’s nothing like that in real life.”

“Exactly,” said Alec. “He’s actually a nut for motors and gadgets. Valerie von Stroheim told me some fans asked her recently if her husband dragged her around the house by her hair.”

“So you think Mr. Shang may have fallen in love with Christine?”

“Either that,” said Alec quietly, “or he showed up hoping to—”

From down the street, among the dense shadows of the broken houses, came a furious tirade of barking.

Norah stiffened. “That’s Chang.”

It wasn’t the staccato
yap-yap-yap
of a small dog whiffing coyote and rabbit. Wild and harsh, it was a danger bark, a rage bark.

It was barking, Norah realized, such as she’d heard the night of the windstorm after the premiere of
Kiss of Darkness,
the night when, elsewhere in Los Angeles, Keith Pelletier was being carved up with a champagne bottle.

Beneath it, gruff and surprisingly deep, sounded Buttercreme’s voice and Black Jasmine’s, louder and stronger than she’d ever heard them.

“Something’s wrong.” Together they almost ran down the weed-grown street and into the black gulf of shadow that hid the peeling gray newspaper office Christine and Norah shared.

The moon had set before the sun that afternoon. Above the buildings’ inky silhouettes a breathtaking rainbow of stars drenched the desert with a weird, blanched glow that did not quite seem to be light. The air, pungent with dust, was a knife in the lungs, glittering with each exhaled breath. Norah sought Alec’s hand in the darkness, fearful that he might stride ahead of her and leave her alone in this huge stillness. If something else moved in the darkness, it was impossible to see, and the scrunch of their own footsteps and the wild barking of the dogs drowned whatever stealthy tread might have been heard.

Then a patch of wavery orange light flared in the
Sentinel
’s swaybacked wall. Norah quickened her stride and all but sprang up the step, calling, “Christine? It’s me, Norah,” while Alec ducked away from her to walk around the cabin itself.

Within, she could hear Christine saying, “All right, all right, my little sweetnesses, what’s all this? Do Mama’s preciouses smell a nasty old coyote?” She pronounced it the way the stuntmen did,
kai-yoat
. By her voice Norah could tell she was scared.

“Are you all right?” Norah opened the door and stepped inside just as Christine, her hands shaking, put a match flame to the candle beside her bed. All three dogs, Norah noted uneasily, had gone from wrathful barking to the purposeful patrol-and-sniff routine they had performed at the house that night—not the darting movements of cat hunting but quick, thorough scans of every wall, every hole in the floorboards, every corner, tails like curled banners, hackles raised, petticoats flouncing.

“What a start they gave me!” Christine sank back into her bed as Norah crossed to the makeup table and switched on Doc LaRousse’s lights. Sufficient wattage to let Christine make a good, even application of her makeup in the predawn darkness was more than lavish for the small, unpainted room. Amid the shrunken plank walls, unceiled rafters, and bare floors, the lace-edged pillows and satin comforters of Christine’s bed were glaringly incongruous. The smell of old dust and of sagebrush growing under the floor was almost completely concealed now by the odors of Nuit d’Amour, dusting powder, and Russian cigarettes. A feathered slipper lay like a killed bird in the middle of the floor—Chang Ming would transport slippers, though he never chewed them—and soft heaps of silken underclothes gleamed on the tops of the trunks ranged along the wall.

Footsteps mumped hollowly on the boards of the porch. Christine was startled, but Alec’s voice inquired, “All right in there?” accompanied by a light tap at the door. Christine hastily drew the comforter over her flimsily protected bosom as Norah let him in.

“Fine.” The dogs charged out around Alec’s feet, fluffed with rage and indignation. Norah stepped quickly after them. In the reflected glow of the windows she could see the three little fluff balls make a rapid patrol around the outside of the walls, sniffing everything in sight.

“Chang, Jazz,” she called out, mindful of creatures that could make two mouthfuls of any Pekingese, let alone one as tiny as Black Jasmine. After a moment they came trotting back, tails high, pausing only to ceremoniously urinate on the corner of the steps. Norah had to pick up Black Jasmine, who was too small to get up onto the porch again.

“I didn’t find anything,” Alec reported softly, leaning in the half-open doorway through which Christine could be seen, still sitting up in bed with the covers drawn to her chin, her black hair a smoke cloud around a face that was both much older and more childlike without its accustomed artistry of paint. There were lines of weariness in the corners of those huge dark eyes; in its natural coloration, her mouth was softer and more generous than its film version, and the hollows under her cheekbones looked less dramatic and far more fragile.

“Could have been a coyote,” he went on after a moment, using the California pronunciation,
kai-yotey.
“You hear anything, Chris?”

She rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand, the gesture of a sleepy child. “Hear anything? After all that hiking around we did today? All I heard was Valentino’s voice, whispering to me to ride away with him as he gathered me to his chest... and for that matter I’m not sure whether I
heard
his voice or only saw a title card. But there was a
whole
lot of barking, you terrible little fussbudgets, you.” She held out her arms to receive Black Jasmine, whom Norah, at the tiny dog’s fierce insistence, handed to her. Norah had early on resigned herself to the fact that Christine
would
sleep with her dogs despite everything she, Norah, had to say. At least they were too tiny to jump up on the bed by themselves.

“I’ll have a look around in the morning for tracks,” Alec said quietly. “But with everybody coming and going yesterday, I don’t know what finding tracks would prove. I checked around between the cabins and out as far as the privies, but it’s so dark in the shadows, I could have missed the Russian Army if they’d kept quiet. Whatever it was—a raccoon or coyote or whatever—it’s probably in Barstow by this time.”

“Thank you,” said Norah.

“And I’m going to
be
dead in the morning,” Christine continued in her high, despairing wail, “waking up this way. Did you set the alarm, Norah, darling? And did you remember to ask Mrs. Violet to order cucumbers from town with her newspapers? This dust is
so
bad for my complexion... You don’t mind slicing them for me, do you, darling? Oh, Alec,” she added, making her dark eyes wide, “please,
please
don’t tell anyone you saw me without makeup. I look awful.”

He kissed his hand to her, smiling. “You’re always beautiful to me, Chrysanda.”

She smiled amid the lace, her black dog cradled against her chin, far more breakable-looking than she had been as the queen of Babylon and infinitely sweeter. “It’s darling of you to say so, Alec, but it’s your camera I have to impress. I wonder if Lucky would part with some ice tomorrow morning before I get my makeup on. My eyelids are going to be balloons. Could you do that, Norah, when you get me my coffee?”

She cuddled down into the blankets again, rolled over with her back to the candle, and settled in for sleep. Norah flicked out the lights above the vanity, shadows bellying in from every corner like dark hands reaching for the delicate bundle of white lace and black fur on the bed in the gold aureole of the candle’s light.

Leaving the door open a few inches behind her, she went out to sit for a time on the edge of the porch at Alec’s side, Chang Ming lying between them. Buttercreme, offended by the cameraman’s presence, had retreated under Norah’s bed. They spoke in soft voices about the desert fauna and about taking pictures of cowboy children in small towns across west Texas, about Zane Grey and stuntmen, about the dark shapes of the watching hills and the extravagant jeweled pennons of Stardust overhead. In time Alec took his leave. As quietly as she could, Norah dragged a trunk in front of the door, and when she lay down to sleep, she did not blow out the candle. There was still an inch or so of it burning in a yellow pool of puddled wax when the alarm clock wakened her an hour before dawn.

Sign of sacrifice.

A good omen for gathering together in the wilds...

An ambush awaits—take a high outlook upon it,

but remain calm; nothing will happen yet...

The defenses are breached, but the city is not yet taken...

“F
OR THREE DAYS
the shooting of
She-Devil of Babylon
proceeded without incident. Norah, though plagued with a sense of some dark presence moving behind the sparkling winter sunlight, could find nothing to confirm her fears. The marks on the foundation of Christine’s house and on the house in which Keith Pelletier was murdered, the curious appearance and even more curious assertions of the old gardener Shang Ko... these seemed to form a web of some kind. But every time Norah stopped in her headlong rush of keeping track of scenes and exposures, of looking after Christine, and of trying to unravel the strange knots that seemed to keep tying themselves in her own half-healed emotions, the pattern she thought she might be seeing dissolved into nothing.

She continued to dream, as she always had, about the utter commonplaces of her life: about developing test films or cutting up Christine’s cucumbers or going to lectures in Oxford. If in her dreams the dogs were always present, sniffing busily at doors and windows or watching her even from the corners of Sommerville College lecture halls with dark, shining eyes, it was insufficient cause for distress.