Medusa's Web (14 page)

Scott didn't move. “You said, ‘when I was an actress.'”

Madeline rolled her eyes. “That was
I
in the
dream,
Scott.
I've
never been an actress.”

She started to say something further, then just shook her head. “We better go down to dinner before Salomé feeds it all to the tetrarch.”

“You go ahead,” he said, “I'll catch up.” And when he heard her steps receding in the hall, he pulled the bourbon bottle out of his jacket pocket and hurried into his own room and shoved it under his mattress.

ARIEL WAS NOT SITTING
at her place when Scott and Madeline walked in from the hallway, and as Claimayne waved them to their own chairs he said, “Rita isn't here, and so Ariel is cooking dinner tonight.”

The tall windows in the dining room were closed this evening, though the long room still smelled faintly of diesel exhaust from down the hill, and lit candles stood in three wax-dribbled wine bottles on the table. Aunt Amity's empty chair still seemed to dominate the room.

Scott glanced toward the swinging kitchen doors—he heard steps and faint clattering, and considered and then instantly dismissed the idea of getting up and going in there to see if Ariel needed any help.

When he looked back to the table, Claimayne was smiling at him, so Scott quickly said, “Is Rita sick?”

“I think she's going to retire, actually,” said Claimayne. “Yes, she had something like a stroke today. A window cracked, and she was unwise enough to look directly at it.” Claimayne was staring intently at Scott now. “You'd think she'd know better, after working in this house for so many years, wouldn't you?”

Scott sat back in his chair and considered how to answer. Finally, “Yes,” he said.

“Is she all right?” asked Madeline.

Still watching Scott, Claimayne said, “I think so. She was very shaky afterward, as you'd expect, but at least it was a fresh . . . set of cracks. Not dirty.”

“I hope you broke the glass out of the window,” said Scott.

Claimayne pushed at an opened bottle of Mondavi merlot, clearly finding it too heavy to lift. He glanced impatiently toward the kitchen.

“No,” he said, “I think it might be rather entertaining to look at it myself one of these days.” He slapped the arms of his wheelchair. “Let Rita briefly have seen how the lower half lives.”

Scott frowned. “Where is it?”

“God knows! Today's Thursday, her day for vacuuming and dusting everywhere. I found her on the stairs—which is apparently where I'll leave her when our overlap expires.”

The kitchen doors swung open, and Ariel, wearing glasses now, stepped into the dining room carrying two plates with wedges of steaming frittata on them; she carefully set them at her place and Claimayne's, then returned to the kitchen.

“I bet I find the window,” said Madeline cheerfully, “and I bet I break it. Poor old Rita doesn't deserve to be you, even just for a few minutes. No offense,” she added. She looked at the plate in front of Claimayne. “Frittata! With 'sparagus and bacon! Your old favorite, Scott.”

“I don't remember that,” said Ariel, pushing through the swinging doors again with two more plates. She clanked one down in front of Scott without looking at him, and Madeline took the other from her and set it down gently.

“And you leave Rita alone,” said Ariel to Claimayne.

“Your fault,” said Claimayne, “for not giving her your glasses. Would you pour the wine?”

Scott looked at Ariel more closely and then smothered a surprised laugh—the lenses of her glasses were rippled in a bull's-eye pattern, making fragmented rings of her eyes.

Madeline had noticed it too. “It's a good thing you were cooking frittata,” she said, and when Ariel turned to her, she added, “since it's round. I bet we all look like blowfishes to you.”

“I pass on that,” said Claimayne. “Salomé, the wine?”

“Leeches is what you look like,” said Ariel. She lifted the bottle and splashed wine into her glass and Claimayne's, then pushed it across the table.

Madeline poured a few ounces into her own glass and said, “Is there any more Coke?”

“I don't keep track of such things,” said Ariel as she pulled out her chair and sat down.

Madeline started to get up, but Scott waved her back and got to his feet.

“Damn it, Ariel,” said Claimayne, “you could fetch him his—”

“It's okay,” said Scott, stepping around the table and pushing open the kitchen doors. Behind him Claimayne exhaled in exasperation.

The kitchen had not changed since Scott had moved out thirteen years earlier—the green-and-white tiled counters, the O'Keefe and Merritt double-oven stove—and the old green refrigerator that he had always thought looked like a 1950 Buick stood on end; the refrigerator door looked bare without some of Madeline's crayon drawings held on by souvenir magnets.

He levered open the door and leaned down to peer in at the ranks of yogurt cartons and translucent Tupperware containers half full of unattractive stuff, and by the ice sheet in the back he saw two cans of Coke. He lifted one free and straightened up.

Thinking of Claimayne's irritation that Ariel hadn't fetched the Coke, he looked around at the kitchen, and after a few moments noticed that the lace curtain over the door window was yellowed at the edges but white in the middle, as if it had been fastened aside for a long time and only recently loosed and drawn across the glass.

He crossed the worn linoleum to it and, being careful to stare at the red can in his hand, pulled the fabric to the side. Peripherally he could see cracks in the windowpane, possibly eight of them, radiating from a point in the center. They glowed in the slanting western sunlight.

Scott turned to the sink, unhooked an oven mitt and slipped it
onto his free hand, and punched the glass out of the window. The shards clattered on the walkway pavement outside, and the early evening breeze through the empty frame was cold and smelled now of juniper. He beat the mitt over the trash can and hung it up again and then carried the Coke back to the dining room.

“The window was—in the kitchen!” said Madeline to Claimayne around a mouthful of frittata. She swallowed and went on, “You found Rita on the kitchen floor, not on the stairs.”

As Scott pulled out his chair and sat down again, Claimayne looked at Scott's hands. “You didn't cut yourself, I hope?”

“Oven mitt,” said Scott. He dug his fork into the wedge of thick omelette on his plate.

“Good,” said Ariel. To Claimayne, she went on, “And Rita's older than you! You want your blood even more worn out than it already is?”

“It is bitter,” said Claimayne with a smile, “but I like it because it is bitter, and because it is my blood.” He took a sip of wine and waved his free hand. “Paraphrased from Stephen Crane.”

“I was just gonna say,” said Scott, who knew nothing about Stephen Crane except that he might have written
The Bridge of San Luis Rey.

“This is canned 'sparagus,” said Madeline, “not fresh. Scott always said canned was better in frittatas.” To Ariel she added, “You remember?”

Ariel just frowned and shook her head.

For nearly a minute no one spoke, and the only sounds were chewing and the clink of cutlery. Ariel several times lifted her bare fork to her mouth, then impatiently lowered it and tried again to get some piece of frittata onto it; clearly she couldn't see it through her peculiar glasses.

Finally, “We've all been tense,” said Claimayne. “Testy.
Out of sorts.
I think it would relax us all, as a family, to watch a heartwarming movie together.”

“A movie?” said Ariel. “No, I'm not going to—”

Madeline shook her head sharply, as if dislodging a fly. “Yes,” she said, “I'm afraid it's high time.”

Scott thought of the wainscot door in the upstairs hallway.
When is a door not adore?
“It might be worthwhile,” he admitted, “at that.”

Ariel pulled off her glasses impatiently and glanced from one face to another. “What are you all—oh. The Alla Nazimova movie.
Salomé
.”

“In honor of my mother,” agreed Claimayne, “who loved it.”

“How do you spell her first name?” asked Madeline. “Nazimova, not your mother. I know how to spell
her
name.”

“We won't test you, child. But Nazimova's first name was A-L-L-A. When her estate on Sunset was broken up into rental bungalows, the new owner called the complex ‘The Garden of Allah,' with an H at the end, like for the Islamic deity.”

“Her real name was Adelaida,” said Ariel, rubbing the bridge of her nose. “Back in Siberia or wherever she came from.”

Madeline was giving Scott a wide-eyed look, and he frowned and nodded slightly. Yes yes, I remember that passage, he thought—
i loved her cyclone I know charlene and alla loved me too at first
—don't draw attention.

But Ariel had caught the look and nod, and asked, “What?”

“That's the password,” said Madeline quickly. “On your computer. Adelaida.”

“My mother's computer,” corrected Claimayne. Evidently having had enough of the dinner, he pushed his wheelchair back from the table.

Scott glanced at the wall above the hallway door, and noticed for the first time that the long metal retractable-screen case was missing; he could see the patches where the screw holes had been puttied over.

“This room is no longer the home theater,” said Claimayne. “Now we've got a TV in the apiary. I've got a VHS version of
Salomé,
and we've still got the VHS player, so we no longer need the projector and those worn-out reels.”

The apiary had been the household name for a ballroom on the third floor. When they had all been children, it had been stacked with old furniture.

“Are the bees gone?” asked Madeline worriedly, pushing back her chair and standing up.

“She got rid of the bees when you were still in grade school,” said Ariel. “You never did grasp that.”

“I never did like bugs,” said Madeline.

“Bees aren't—”

“I'll meet you all upstairs,” said Claimayne.

THE LONG, WIDE ROOM
had been largely cleared of the Victorian furniture that had once been packed in from wall to wall and nearly to the high ceiling, and now between the legs of neatly stacked tables Scott could see several windows from the inside for the first time. The center of the hardwood floor had been cleared, with a big flat-screen television set on a metal cart at the east end and two dozen mismatched chairs at the western end by the hallway door. A bare lightbulb in an old ceramic socket in the ceiling threw a jaundiced glare over everyone's face.

“You're ready for a lot of guests,” Scott remarked to Ariel as he and Madeline walked across the booming floor and took two chairs at one end of the front row.

“Easier than stacking them.”

“I don't smell bees,” said Madeline cautiously. Scott thought the room smelled of sour dust and, faintly, of anchovy pizza.

The whole house shook then with such a tumultuous clamor that he thought Claimayne's mother must be exploding on the roof again; but a few moments later, after brief further clanging, he heard Claimayne's wheelchair rolling along the hall.

“Ought to just hoist him up and down with a damn pulley,” muttered Ariel.

Claimayne appeared in the doorway, pallid and unhealthy looking. He wheeled his way across the floor to the television set and began rattling through a stack of VHS cases on a lower shelf of the cart.

“Here it is,” he said finally, slipping the black cassette out of its cardboard sleeve and sliding it into the VCR. “Ariel, turn off the lights.”

Ariel was still standing by the door. “Tell me again why this is a good idea.”

“It's a . . . a shared event,” said Claimayne, tapping buttons on the remote control now. “An opportunity for bonding. We all watched it together when we were children.” He looked back over his shoulder. “The lights?”

“Bonding!” whispered Madeline.

“We made fun of it,” said Ariel. “Only your mother paid attention to it.” But she reached to the side and pushed the off button on the old electric switch, then took a seat at one end of the front row of chairs.

The screen lit up.

Scott found that he remembered the movie more than he would have expected—the images were in sepia tones rather than the starkly black-and-white version his aunt had always watched, and there was spooky music now, but the image of a Judean castle on a cliff, behind the opening credits, strongly brought back the smell of his aunt's Pall Mall cigarettes.

The third screen card read,
Sets and Costumes by MISS NATACHA RAMBOVA (After Aubrey Beardsley)
, and Madeline leaned over to whisper in Scott's ear, “Natacha! And in the vision, Kosloff called the spider in the folder ‘the Beardsley'!”

Claimayne had propelled his wheelchair halfway back across the floor to where the other three sat, and Scott saw the silhouette of his head lift. “Beardsley, you say?”

“Madeline knows I like Beardsley's drawings,” said Scott.

“Ah! Very nasty, a lot of his drawings were.” Claimayne resumed rolling and parked his chair on the end of the front row, beside Ariel.
“On his deathbed he asked that certain ones be destroyed, though in fact those were . . . abstracts.”

“I hate when people do that,” put in Madeline. “They should destroy the stuff themselves, if they feel so strongly about it, before they die. Not stick friends with it.”

Claimayne shrugged. “Sometimes you have to work posthumously.”

The credits ended, and on the screen was a view of the tetrarch Herod's banquet, with black slaves waving fans and smoke curling up from braziers in the background.

Scott found himself remembering each grotesque detail as the movie progressed—the captain of the guard with scale-patterned tights and hair that little Madeline had always said looked like a lot of rum balls stuck to his head, midget white-bearded priests with hugely inflated striped turbans, the fat old tetrarch theatrically ogling young Salomé—and Salomé herself, boyishly slim in a skimpy dark tunic and sporting what might have been dozens of cotton balls suspended on wires in her hair. The action was slow and stylized, the characters frequently pausing to strike poses like figures on an art deco lamp, and Madeline was shifting and twitching in her seat, apparently agonizingly bored.

“We could just go,” Scott whispered to her. “We've seen it before.”

She shook her head and raised a spread hand.

On the screen, Salomé had eventually made her way from the banquet to a birdcage-like structure on a moonlit terrace, and looked down—a new camera shot revealed that the bars covered a well, and on the floor at the bottom of it stood an emaciated John the Baptist, called Jokanaan in the intertitle cards. The tetrarch Herod sent a slave to summon Salomé back to sit beside him, but she ignored the request and ordered the guards to release the prisoner; and when Jokanaan had ascended the steps and faced Salomé, she begged him to permit her to kiss him.

When Scott and Madeline and Ariel had been children, the teenaged Claimayne had at this point generally provided impromptu
additional dialogue between Salomé and Jokanaan, to much smothered hilarity; but when Scott glanced down the row of chairs now, Claimayne's smooth face was still, his eyes glittering with tears as he watched the screen.

It was his mother's favorite movie, Scott reminded himself, and she committed suicide only a week ago. He looked back at the screen.

Jokanaan, with prolonged eye-rolling and posturing, had rejected Salomé's advances and returned to the well, and the guards locked the cage.

The torchlit dimness of the movie's scenes, viewed in the dark old third-story ballroom of Caveat, made Scott wish he could race down the stairs and get on his motorcycle and ride it to some place full of light and cheery music. The awful old movie seemed to be made of elements from childhood nightmares—stiff figures moving slowly but ominously, contorted white faces under spiky headdresses mouthing unintelligible words, screens on which the stylized ivy patterns seemed to pulse. When they had all watched the movie in the dining room, years ago, there had been interruptions while Aunt Amity changed reels, but now it was mercilessly continuous.

At the far end of the row, Ariel was cursing in whispers.

The scene arrived in which Herod's dialogue card read, “Dip into the wine thy little red lips, that I may drain the cup!” to which Salomé's reply was, “I am not thirsty, Tetrarch.” Scott didn't smile or glance at the others.

The tetrarch then asked Salomé to take a bite of fruit, so that he might eat what was left; and Salomé replied that she wasn't hungry. At last he asked her to dance for him, for which favor “thou mayest ask of me what thou wilt, even unto the half of my kingdom.” Salomé refused this too and looked through the bars down into the well; Jokanaan saw her and cried—unwisely, Scott thought, in retrospect—“Ah, the wanton one! Let the captains of the hosts pierce her with their swords!” Stepping away from the bars and looking
torn, Salomé asked Herod if he would indeed give her anything she asked, and he swore that he would, “by my life, by my crown, by my gods!” And Salomé consented.

At this point four women wearing black capes as square as boxes came onto the terrace with an oddly halting gait, like huge insects carefully walking upright; they surrounded and hid Salomé, and when they stepped back, their capes swinging now like ponderous bells, Salomé was revealed in a white tunic and with short, straight white hair. She began to dance around the terrace, to music visibly provided by half a dozen dancing dwarves in antlered helmets, and finally she spun rapidly around and collapsed to the floor.

Beside Scott, Madeline was quietly weeping, but when he touched her shoulder, she slapped his hand away.

Now the corpulent figure of the tetrarch Herod, who had appeared to nearly expire of joy during Salomé's dance, straightened up on his throne and asked her “What wouldst thou have?” and, after characteristic delay, she told him, “I ask of you the head of Jokanaan.”

“It's coming,” whispered Madeline, “it's coming.”

What, thought Scott, Jokanaan's execution? As he remembered it, the eventual beheading took place offstage, and even when Salomé would appear ostensibly holding the severed head on a shield, the head was never actually visible at all. It had been a disappointment when he had first watched the film.

The tetrarch Herod, horrified by Salomé's request since he believed Jokanaan was a holy man, again offered her half his kingdom, instead; and she repeated her demand. Then he offered her the largest emerald in the world, and she refused that substitute too.

At this point, and it had always seemed to Scott to be a sharp diminishment in the magnitude of the proposed gifts, Herod said, “Salomé, thou knowest my white peacocks! In the midst of them thou wilt be like unto the moon in the midst of a great white cloud—”

Scott had glanced aside at Madeline then, and so he saw her chair kicked backward as she leaped to her feet; he was peripherally aware
that Claimayne had grunted explosively, as if he'd been struck, but Scott's startled concern was with his sister, who was staring at the television screen.

Scott followed her gaze—and cringed back in his chair.

On the screen, against a dark background, was a still image of Salomé's head with dozens of white tendrils curling out from it in all directions across the sky; and it was eerily similar to the moment in a spider vision when the eight limbs broke into many and began to move.

“Claimayne!” shouted Madeline hoarsely. “From the ground, from under the floors and pavements, the blood cries out!”

At the first few words Claimayne had pushed his wheelchair forward and begun rolling down the row in front of the chairs, and now he collided with Madeline's knees and scrabbled at her hands.

“My mother?” he screeched up at her. “Where is it—” he went on, dragging his shaking fingers across Madeline's palms. “You've got a spider of my mother's, how do you dare look at it in front of me—!”

Ariel had stood up and hurried down the row of chairs, and now pulled his wheelchair back. “She didn't look at anything but the screen,” she said loudly. “It's just the influence of this damned house!”

“Bullshit she didn't,” gasped Claimayne, still flailing toward Madeline. “That was my mother's voice—she must have—”

“I adored her!” shouted Madeline again, still staring at the screen. “But evil things in robes of sorrow . . .”

Then she stopped and raised her hands to her face, and Scott saw scratches in her palms. She held them out and looked around at the taut faces of the others and said, “Did
I
break the window?”

Claimayne exhaled in a long hiss.

Scott was on his feet, and he put an arm around Madeline's shoulders. “Let's go back to our rooms,” he said.

Madeline blinked at him, clearly disoriented. “Is the movie over?”

“Oh, it's
over,
” said Claimayne, spinning his chair and pushing it out across the floor toward the television.

Ariel stared after him. “What did you hope to do here?” she called.

“To—turn back some pages,” said Claimayne, so quietly that Scott barely heard him. Claimayne had turned the television off and was gripping the remote control with both hands. “Not that many.”

Ariel turned to Scott and Madeline. “Go,” she said.

After a pause, Scott nodded and led Madeline across the dark room to the hallway door.

In the light from the hallway he could see the glint of tears on Madeline's cheeks. “Am I—your sister again?” she whispered to him.

“Yes,” Scott told her, “and we'll keep it that way.”

MADELINE WAS STANDING BY
the window of their parents' room looking out at the dark garden. She seemed to have stopped trembling.

“Blood under the ground?” she said finally.

“That's what you said,” Scott replied, shaking a cigarette out of a pack of Camels. “And under pavement, as I recall. ‘Crying out.'”

“And I adored her?” Madeline hugged herself and shivered. “I mean
she
adored her? Adored who, that Alla? Nazimova?”

“I guess so.” Scott snapped a Bic lighter at his cigarette. “You were looking at the screen.”

“
She
was looking at it. Aunt Amity.
I
was asleep or something. How old do you think that Nazimova woman was, in that movie?”

“Oh—thirty?”

“I'll look her up on Google. But she'd have been pretty old by the time Aunt Amity could have met her, if she ever did.” She looked at her scratched palms. “You said Claimayne thought I looked at a spider of hers?”

“Well, you did, yesterday,” said Scott, exhaling smoke. “This was apparently a continuation of that.”

Madeline clenched her fists, wincing, and for a while neither of them spoke.

“You're right,” she said finally. “I haven't been channeling her—
she wants to possess me, she
was
possessing me a few minutes ago.” She rubbed her jaw. “She used my mouth all wrong, talking.”

Scott leaned back against the closed door and said, carefully, “Is it too scary yet?”

She giggled, though there were tears in her eyes. “Me getting kicked out of my own body, and next time maybe never coming back?” She walked quickly to the connecting door and back. “I don't want to inherit this creepy old house anyway.” She was pacing back and forth across the bare floor now. “Let's get our stuff packed, and sneak out tonight after Claimayne and Ariel have gone to bed. Should we leave a note?”

Scott thought of what Ariel had said to him at the front door this afternoon—
Could you just not speak? Could you please do me that one favor?
—and he answered, “No.”

Madeline sat down on the bare mattress and flexed her hands in her lap, wincing.