Medusa's Web (30 page)

Scott didn't lose consciousness, and this time he didn't see the illusory vertical shapes of spiders viewed end-on—Madeline's Skyscraper People, the horizontally viewed spiders whose perfect flatness was interpreted by his visual cortex as infinite height.

Instead he toppled into the stuttering Medusa image.

And from moment to jigging moment he strode in a procession between thick pillars that spread like flower petals at their distant capitals, and he cowered in rooms carved into the solid rock of volcanic stone towers, and he glimpsed balconied structures rising to the
clouds from the tops of ornate domes, and he chased men through narrow cobblestone streets between overhanging half-timbered buildings in the rain; and he was bleeding, falling, choking, thrusting bladed weapons and firing clockwork rifles, straining to breathe deep under water, straining to give birth to a child, sweating among laboring bodies in harsh sunlight and painfully flexing frostbitten fingers on glacial plains in blinding snow; and his mind reeled helplessly in an onslaught of momentarily urgent emotions: bowel-loosening terror, rage, hilarity, tunnel-vision lust. His ears rang with screams, clanging, roaring, and orchestral music.

But because the spider's rotation was negated by the strobe effect of the fast black frames, each vision was interrupted before Scott had fully fallen into it—and so he was able to remember that he was sitting in a chair upstairs at Caveat—and remember too that he had seen the Medusa spider before, in a very different situation.

He exerted his will over the hampered power of the stilled Medusa, and he imposed on the tumultuous cascade the remembered view of Ince's hands—and the hands appeared, holding the opened brown-paper folder, with the wood paneling and the porthole beyond; all sounds had ceased, and the view was now static, as motionless as a still photograph. Scott projected his consciousness down through the eight unmoving ink lines in the folder—and he found himself staring at a sallow, bony face in a mirror.

It was a young man with red hair cut in neat center-parted bangs. He wore a black bow tie and a high white collar.

A pale, long-fingered left hand reached out and tilted the mirror downward, and in the reflection Scott saw the Medusa inked on a piece of paper on a blotter, the curl of its limbs reversed in the mirror. The ink at the end of one limb glistened for a moment before going matte.

“Who are you?” came a voice from what felt like his own throat.

Scott was able only to exhale in reply, but he felt the head nod in response.

“You arrive unsummoned!” the voice went on in a now evident British accent. “Through her.” Scott felt the face smile, though the facial muscles felt stiff. A right hand holding a steel-nibbed pen waved over the paper. “I synthesized her, deduced her lineaments from those of her weaker sisters. She is harmless viewed through a mirror, as Perseus knew. But can we be satisfied knowing her only through her reflections?”

Scott recalled what Valentino had said to him, in his house that had stood in the fated path of the 101 Freeway:
Beardsley got it, figured out how it should look, from studying a portfolio of lesser spider drawings his father brought back from India. The studying was bad for Beardsley, I gather—his health was destroyed, and he died very young.

“On your deathbed,” Scott managed to pronounce through the young man's throat and mouth, “you will—ask that it be destroyed.”

The left hand swung the mirror back up, and Aubrey Beardsley was staring straight into his own eyes again—straight into Scott's. The brown eyes narrowed, but then Beardsley shrugged. “‘Indeed, indeed, repentance oft before / I swore,'” he said softly, “‘but was I sober when I swore?'”

Scott recognized the line; it was from Omar Khayyam's
Rubaiyat
. He recalled the last two lines:
And then and then came Spring, and Rose-in-hand / My thread-bare Penitence apieces tore
.

Beardsley was still smiling. “You know the verse, I'm sure. A
deathbed
repentance, though, would surely be a definitive one! That is reassuring to hear, and I thank you for it. But it would seem that this
last instruction
of mine is not to be followed, hm?” He swiveled the mirror down, so that he and Scott together were looking again at the reversed Medusa. “Else you wouldn't have been able to pay me this visit.”

Beardsley was fading, and Scott moved his consciousness in a different direction.

Now he stood at the top of a neatly terraced garden slope, and
when he turned, he was facing Caveat. For a moment the structure was wood sided, and the inscription on the stone lintel over the front door was complete:
CAVEAT PROGENIES
; then it was the newer stuccoed walls and the broken lintel that he saw, and he projected his viewpoint inside and up the still-carpeted stairs.

All the wainscot doors in the hallway were open, and daylight or lamplight streaked the floor of the hall in front of several. Voices and laughter and the clink of bottles on glasses echoed up and down the hall. Scott moved forward, and as he was passing one dark doorway, he saw his shadow beneath his feet; he looked up, and for a moment the house was gone, and the full moon shone on low broken walls under a starry night sky. The cold breeze carried the acid reek of doused campfires.

“Scott!”

He turned, and he was in the hallway again, and in daylight streaming from one doorway he saw that Madeline was standing by the stairs, with a man he recognized as Rudolph Valentino.

“Scott,” cried Madeline again, hurrying to him and grabbing his arm, “come with us! It's too late for you to get back, you're
in
the Medusa, and the future here is very short.”

“Maddy,” said Scott, nearly choking, “how are you here? I meant to save you—”

“You are saving me, the Medusa is blocked by repetition, about to go away, and Aunt Amity will be plain dead without its living tentacles to reach in my head with. Oh, I took your coin-toss spider and looked at it again, right away—I didn't really
stop
looking at it—I'm in a spider vision right now, and the Medusa will be gone before the vision would have had an ending. I'm not going back.”

“But it was a
clean
spider!”

She held up the crumpled, blood-spotted piece of paper. “He and I will give it a thousand afters.”

Scott could feel tears welling up in his eyes. “Where, Maddy? When?”

“In the past. I've been patient.”

“Maddy. I've got to go back, to Ariel. I can find the way. Come with me.”

Valentino stepped forward and took Madeline's elbow. To Scott he said, “You found the film I hid, my friend. I'm glad. Do not worry about your sister—I will be to her all the things no one else has been.”

And he turned and led Madeline down the stairs; she looked back pleadingly, but Scott just waved. “I love you, Maddy!” he called hoarsely.

Then they had disappeared in the entry hall on the first floor. Scott looked into the sunlit room beyond the open door beside him; an old woman holding a violin smiled at him as he crossed to the window and looked out. Behind him the old woman softly began a passage from Rimsky-Korsakov's
Scheherazade
.

Hollywood was a scattering of bungalows and Victorian houses on the descending green hills in bright morning sunlight, and there were no skyscrapers or freeway. He saw Madeline and Valentino emerge from under the hooded porch light below, and as they crossed the short lawn toward the descending steps, Madeline looked back.

“I love you, Scott!” she called. A cat bounded across the grass to her, and Scott was sure it was Bridget, the one they'd seen from her bedroom window Tuesday night. Madeline picked up the cat and then she and Valentino were hurrying away down the steps. Scott turned away.

The room he stood in was empty, the walls bare and spotted with mold. He didn't look out the window again but walked through the doorway into the hall and up the sagging wooden stairs, through sweeps of darkness and flickers of colored light, as voices rose and fell in brief snatches around him.

The apiary was lit only by a stormy gray radiance through the windows, and a crowd of shadowy figures filled all the chairs. Scott could dimly make out bowlers and feathered hats on the indistinct heads, and the cold air was tainted with the smells of cigars and perfume and damp clay.

His own chair was out in front of the others, and he didn't look at the smoky figure there as he disrupted it by sitting down.

Abruptly the room was dark behind him and the screen was again, or still, flashing white like the muzzle of a machine gun. Scott's heart sped up as if trying to match the staccato pace of the flashes, and he was once again in the torrent of vivid but momentary stressful experiences; and his battered consciousness was aware that he was not breathing.

The spider intermittently visible on the screen still seemed to be static, not rotating at all. Alla Nazimova had said,
Like a phonograph record spinning on a turntable in a dark room, illuminated by a light flashing seventy-eight times a minute; the record would appear to be stationary. And the spider, this is the master spider, remember, would effectively lose its spin—become stationary. It would thus find here an impossibility of itself and be excluded in future from this universe.

But as Madeline had said, Scott's consciousness was
in
the Medusa now. Would he be banished with it? He still wasn't breathing.

He tried to project a thought to the alien entity that was the spider:
Can you hear me, recognize me, perceive me?

For a moment he was back among Madeline's Skyscraper People, the illusively vertical shapes, and then they parted and he was surprised to find himself experiencing someone's memory of a canvas beach chair rotating as it moved slowly through the air against a blue sky; it sank toward a glittering swimming pool, and then Scott's perspective was from the surface of the water, where the beach chair only existed as several expanding, unconnected intrusions into the plane of the water's surface. Immediately the vision switched to a lit cigarette on a newspaper—Scott could see that the headline was about the repeal of Prohibition—and a ring of glowing red spread out from it across the paper as the circumference of an irregular black disk. Then that was gone, and he saw a column of tan skin that he recognized as a human throat, and the flat blade of a knife moving toward it.

Dazedly he wondered why had he been shown these particular memories: a couple of intrusions of a third dimension into a two-dimensional plane, and then a two-dimensional plane approaching a three-dimensional volume.

He forced himself to concentrate again on altering the visions, in the same way that he used to revise his clear mental image of an intended painting. The newspaper was back in his view, and it was flaming now, but he visualized the flames dying and the bright ring on the page shrinking, and the cigarette rising away to leave the paper unscorched; and when the turbulent swimming pool appeared next, he imagined the chair rising back out of the water and flying away out of view, leaving the surface of the water unbroken.

Then it was the blade and the throat that he saw, and he struggled against mental resistance to impose a view of the blade retreating—and he at least managed to halt it.

The visions faded, and all he could see now was the flickering Medusa image on the screen in front of him.

He had forcibly reversed the sequence of events in the trio of hurled memories, reversed the definitive instances of collision between two dimensions and three dimensions.

And he was able to breathe again. His sense of balance was gone, but he tried to stand up, and then his left hand flared in immediate personal pain. After a moment he realized that he had fallen out of his chair; and the pain was like a long extension cord connecting him to his own cubic universe.

Forcing himself to occupy his own body, he saw that he was now lying on the floor, on his back, with his head toward the screen, helplessly staring up at the repeating projected image.

And, viewed from this angle, the strobing Medusa on his retinas was narrowed, foreshortened. It was tilted away from him, and he sensed that he had in some way separated himself from it.

He pushed himself forward with his heels and both hands, and as the gash in his left hand dragged agonizingly over the rough floor
boards, the Medusa appeared narrower still. He could barely see the gaps between its tensely motionless limbs now.

Another thrust with his feet pushed his head against the wall. Above him, the Medusa had rotated a full ninety degrees and was now a flat line over him—

And then on his retinas it compressed to infinite flatness, and his affronted visual cortex interpreted that impossible state as a shift to infinite vertical height; the Medusa was just another one of Madeline's Skyscraper People now, and as always they parted to let his viewpoint pass between them.

The universe seemed to roll over, and reality seemed to spring back to reoccupy vacated space. For the first time in twenty-three years, Scott was completely alone in his own mind. He could hear himself panting in the chilly air.

Patches of varying color in his vision slowly separated from one another, out of flat uniformity. He was staring up at the metal ring on the bottom dowel of the screen, and at the cracked old plaster ceiling, and the lightbulb in the ceramic socket.

He sat up in flickering yellow light. The projector had caught fire. The round magazine on top was smoking, and flame quickly snaked down the acetate film strip into the mechanism behind the housing door and out into the can of ejected film. Now flames were shooting out of the rim of the magazine and licking at the ceiling.

I should have oiled it, he thought.

He managed to sit up and then struggle to his feet by leaning heavily on the wall and the screen, and the screen case came loose from its nails and fell on his head. He thrashed it aside with his right arm and staggered to the door; and when he opened it, Ariel was standing right outside, and she crouched to get her shoulder under his arm.