Bride of the Rat God

by Barbara Hambly

  In the front room Christine was curled up on the divan, looking slightly sulky with Black Jasmine in her arms; Chang Ming had made fast friends with the elder of the two attendant Graces and was grinning happily in the enamored woman’s lap. On her way through the kitchen Norah had glimpsed Buttercreme’s little face peering reproachfully around the corner of the stove.

  “...transmission of souls down through the ages,” Nadi Neferu-Aten was explaining. “This was why we selected the house at the top of San Marcos Avenue in the first place, not only for the calm of its setting but because it is mystically impregnated with esoteric vibrations necessary to meditation and the clearing of the mind.”

  Norah had already surmised that Neferu-Aten and her retinue were members of the cult up the street. Not only were the Grecian draperies unmistakable—although she had heard such things were by no means uncommon in southern California—but the three women had appeared on foot, and the fragile sandals they wore would never have made the climb up from Highland Avenue.

  She set the tray down and poured herself some tea as Neferu-Aten continued. “I, for instance, so clearly remember my incarnation as the high priestess of Isis in the days of the ancient pharaohs that I have retaken the name for my own, feeling far more comfortable with it, as if I had come home. With experience in the clarifying procedures of the institute, Precious Peony here and Kama Shakti have come to feel the same.”

  The two attendant Graces nodded eagerly. The younger—the fair one—left off twisting her fingers nervously and picked up the water glass in two hands, those strange, hungry eyes not quite seeming to see anything but her leader. Norah wondered what Nadi Neferu-Aten had been called before she’d remembered her days as a priestess of Isis.

  “But this process of purification, this physical and spiritual freeing, has made many of us—myself included—sensitive to emanations from the astral plane.” The counselor leaned forward, her blue eyes grave. “Last night Kama Shakti had a terrible premonition in the form of a dream about this house. I, too, slept uneasily, feeling something was severely amiss. There is some danger here, Miss Flamande, some evil...” She paused, looking around at the long room with its black and cream silk furniture, its gaily colored Chinese bric-a-brac and brass-inlaid gramophone, frowning as if trying to identify something that troubled her. “Scoff if you like, but—”

  “I wouldn’t dream of scoffing, darling,” Christine said airily, starting to sit up. “Only in about half an hour we’re going to have reporters and police all over us like ants at a picnic, so I really can’t—”

  “What danger?” Norah asked quietly.

  Christine looked at her in surprise.

  Kama Shakti, the plump and elderly one, frowned for a moment, then replied slowly. “It was something about... about the dogs barking. Something trying to get in. Something waiting, crouched in the dark. Something...old...”.

  Nadi Neferu-Aten raised one long-fingered hand to her temple in a gesture worthy of Pavlova; Norah could see Christine’s eyes follow and knew that particular manner of leading with the wrist was going to show up on screen very soon. “The answer lies upon the astral plane,” the counselor said in a hollow voice indicative of deep meditation. “We must ascend to that plane to seek it.”

  “Better not get your ladders set up yet,” remarked Alec, coming back in from the porch. “The Trib’s just parked on the other side of the road, and I think the car that just pulled up is the Times.”

  Christine sprang to her feet with a squeak, clutching Black Jasmine to her bosom, “Shit! And me not dressed!” She bolted up the stairs. From the kitchen Buttercreme emitted a few small, disapproving ruhs to indicate her opinion of the entire proceedings, and Chang Ming dashed eagerly to the door to greet his newest set of long-lost parents.

  “We shall return,” Neferu-Aten promised, and swept past the reporters on the porch with the cold aplomb of a priestess ignoring supplicants upon the temple steps. But then, thought Norah, she’d probably done that kind of thing through several lifetimes and was good at it.

  “You’re never going to get rid of them, you know,” Alec warned her later as Norah walked him to his car. Christine was still in the house, reclining artistically on the sofa, hand pressed to her brow, breathing a low and husky account of Frank Brown’s party. Every now and then a bright burst of light in the windows indicated a photographer’s interest. Knowing Christine, even in the grip of such a mind-searing shock to her sensibilities, the titles Kiss of Darkness and She-Devil of Babylon were going to figure prominently in interviews, plus accurate reviews of last night’s premiere. “I should have warned you earlier, California’s the breeding ground for table tappers and Ouija readers...”

  “Oh, I knew that,” Norah said slowly, folding her arms as he climbed into the rickety Model T that was parked in front of the press cars on the other side of the street. The rain had ceased, but the sky still lowered above the hills; the world breathed of wet spiciness and damp stone. “In fact, I’m sure they’ll be back for a séance tonight. Cecily Pendergast went in for it—spiritualism, that is—and had half a dozen regulars, and all of them were reincarnated priestesses of Isis or Mayan temple virgins who’d got themselves chucked down sacred wells. I kept wanting to ask them if there was some rule about it—that priestesses and temple virgins and the like were required to come back as spiritualists, or whether fishwives or charladies ever got considered for the job after they died.”

  He advanced the spark lever, got out again, and walked around to the front of the car. “And did you?”

  “No.” She chuckled a little. “I’m sure they’d have explained that it did happen, but they were perfectly sure they’d been priestesses, and cite all the things they recalled from former lives to prove it. One of them—Oneida Majesta, she called herself—once discovered an ill omen in the way the smoke curled around the candles, and on the strength of it Mrs. Pendergast refused to leave her room or to let me leave my room for twenty-four hours, until the stars had jiggered themselves into a more favorable position.”

  “I hope you counted the silverware once the stars got realigned.” He put his shoulder to the radiator, grasped the crank in one hand and the choke wire in the other, and turned the engine twice, then released the choke wire and, gritting his teeth, spun the crank with all his strength. Norah stepped back. After three or four spins the engine exploded into life with a roar, and he bolted around to leap back into the seat and advance the spark. The engine settled down into a dull, steady roar that shook the little car’s bones, and he half turned, one foot on the accelerator and the other resting on the running board. “So why give them a handhold if you knew they’d jump on it?”

  Norah frowned, looking back toward the house. She barely recalled what she had dreamed the previous night, before the dogs’ barking had wakened her. About Kiss of Darkness, she thought, though why it should have troubled her she didn’t know. Aside from being beautifully photographed, it had struck her as the most incredible nonsense she’d ever seen. “Maybe because of Mr. Pelletier’s death,” she said. “Or because I had nightmares, too, last night.”

  “It might have been the tea,” he pointed out. “It keeps some people awake, like coffee does.”

  “I suppose.”

  “I will bet you,” he added with a wry quirk to his mouth under the reddish beard, “that when those ladies show up tonight with their ouija boards, they’re going to discover that Christine’s problem stems from somebody she was married to in a previous incarnation—my guess is an Italian count in the Renaissance, with a saver on an Egyptian pharaoh—who isn’t resting easy on the astral plane because of Christine’s current impure life. And I’ll also bet that the condition can be corrected by cold baths and meditation at the Sabsung Institute for the Weil-Being of Souls. Yikes,” he added, glancing back over his shoulder at the road. “Here comes the second wave.”

  Black cars bearing the lettering LAPD slowed and—their drivers apparently getting a look at the driveway—
began to park on the narrow dirt strips on either side of the road or in the small bays of more or less level land among the slopes.

  “No bets.” Norah grinned. “Though it might very well be an Indian sachem. I shall see you Monday at the studio.”

  “I’ll expect a full report.” He slammed the car door, gave her a brisk thumbs-up, and put the little car into gear.

  Unlike the reporters, the police did not regard Norah as invisible, and for nearly an hour, while Christine spun contradictory accounts of Frank Brown’s premiere party—a narrative not improved by the fact that she’d been well and truly drunk during all the operative events—Norah answered questions about Sandringham’s brief visit to Enyart’s. Chang Ming did his best to assist the police and reporters in the execution of their duties, Black Jasmine supervised, and Buttercreme hid in the kitchen. No sooner had they departed than Flindy McColl appeared, an energetic redhead wearing the longest scarf and the shortest skirt Norah had ever seen. She insisted on giving her own press conference for the few reporters left: “Ya know, Frank can’t kick, ‘cause if he buys out Enterprise Pictures from old Jesperson, you and me’ll be just like sisters!”

  She also approved heartily of the idea of a seance that night. “What a scream! Can I stick around? Madame Ayshaya—that’s my astrologer—says I had this one lifetime where I was a nobleman’s daughter, and I got kidnapped by pirates and sold to a harem in Algiers.” She cracked her gum. “Maybe you’ll find out the same thing happened to you, huh?” She produced a small gold flask from her extravagantly fringed bag, took a hefty swig, and offered it to Christine, who took the hint and—the reporters being gone by then—produced an unmarked bottle from one of the brass and lacquer allegedly Chinese cabinets.

  “If it did, why can’t I remember it?” countered Christine. “And why can they? And how does dancing around in the moonlight to those awful flutes they play and bathing outdoors in cold water—you know, they have a marble shower stall the size of my bedroom. I’ve seen it, darling—how does all that make them remember? The least they could do is hire a decent musician, like that gorgeous boy we’ve got working at Colossus, or buy a gramophone. And if Frank buys out Enterprise, we’ll not only be sisters, but you’ll get to have the Rothstein boys playing on your sets as well instead of that awful old German fiddler you’ve got now.”

  Norah had visited Enterprise Studios and heard Herr Hertler, formerly a soloist for the Berlin Philharmonic. Only Christine, she thought resignedly, would speak of that elderly maestro as an “awful old German fiddler.” She walked out onto the porch, overcome once more by the sense of the utter alienness of this world. In fairly short order, she supposed, she’d be dragooned into a mah-jongg game.

  Like nursery cribbage.

  White-painted walls, shabby volumes of King Arthur and Robin Hood... her brother Sean and the Whittaker cousins, Clive and Edward. Another world. Eleven, Trenton Gardens, prior to 1914, the year she went up to Oxford. The year Clive died in Belgium. She wondered what Charles Sandringham had been playing in, in 1914. He’d been at the height of his powers, she calculated, traveling between London and the New York film studios; she remembered her mother going to see some costume epic because he was in it.

  The Fugitive King, that was it. A little short for Charles II, but that perfect profile amid raven lovelocks drove historical considerations from any sane woman’s mind.

  That was when they’d still had money. When they had still had servants. Before her mother had turned, almost overnight, it seemed, from an active, intellectual suffragist to an overworked, exhausted drudge, fighting desperately to keep a household together on less and less money, less and less food. Even before Sean had returned, or the little that was left of Sean.

  Norah closed her eyes, putting the past third of her life aside with the firmness of long and bitter practice. Like skipping chapters in a novel... If I don’t read past page ninety, it won’t have happened to them. Black Beauty will still live with all his friends at Birtwick Park... the knights will be able to go on having jolly adventures without Lancelot meeting Guinevere and bringing the whole Round Table crashing down into ruin on their heads. Sean and Mother and Papa will still be alive, and I’ll still be that tall skinny girl in the pink sash, practicing my piano and reading the socialist papers in the sunlight of the breakfast room. I won’t have to know what happened to them—what happened to us all.

  Behind her in the house she could hear Christine’s voice, breathy and sweet as a child’s. “...Ambrose Conklin, the most darling millionaire, and he followed me all around the party, getting me drinks and telling me how much he adored the film—not, between you and me, darling, that he could remember whether Charlie was supposed to be my husband or my father or what.”

  Norah almost laughed out loud, since Christine, even while Kiss of Darkness was being made, had had a good deal of difficulty remembering whether she was actually supposed to have married her final victim.

  “D’ja think that spiritualist’ll find out Ambrose Conklin and I were connected in a previous life?”

  In time Flindy dashed down the front steps and sprang into her red and silver Studebaker like Tom Mix leaping into the saddle, bound, Norah guessed, for Ah Lum’s down on Hollywood Boulevard for take-out. Chinese food, which she’d eaten for the first time upon their arrival in New York, had been a revelation to her after a lifetime of roast beef and puddings with jam; six weeks in and out of Colossus Studios had convinced her that half the film industry lived on egg foo yung.

  Curious, she thought, watching Flindy roar away with even less regard for the correct side of the pavement than Christine customarily demonstrated. In her little stateroom aboard the Ruritania, when she’d thought about the fact that she was actually going to Hollywood, she’d thought in terms of things she would see, not of new foods. Certainly not about the fact that she could sit on her sister-in-law’s porch on the first day of December without so much as a sweater on. That the grass by the pavement would be green. The air smelled like rain again, and wind was starting up, an angry gust that whined over the red roof tiles, then died with a sinister scratching of branches on walls and glass.

  What was it, she wondered, about the dream that had troubled her the night before?

  Why had she encouraged the return of a group of patent crackpots to the house that evening to inquire about some problematic danger threatening them from the astral plane?

  On impulse, she stepped lightly down from the porch and descended the steps, circling the house sunwise to climb the steep rise of the ground where the oleanders grew thick. She realized that Felipe, who usually appeared even before Dominga in the mornings, hadn’t shown up at all that day, and that was odd, too. In the house Black Jasmine barked, one or two flat, quacking yaks, probably in defense of one of his toys. Like an echo, the barking in her dreams floated through her mind.

  Coyotes? Merely cries of the wind, that had given nightmares to humans and perhaps to dogs as well?

  For some time she studied the dark foliage that masked the stone of the foundation. Bare, turned-up earth was just visible beneath the sweeping green-black petticoats of the shrubs’ lowest leaves. Cautiously, she grasped a large branch and pulled it aside to reveal the stucco of the wall.

  “Norah, darling!” Christine leaned over the porch rim above her, the white and black egret feathers of her bandeau flicking in the breeze and the jet beading that scaled the bosom of her crimson charmeuse dress glittering. Behind her in the shadows stood a tall form, and a moment later it stepped into the archway beside Christine, revealing the ancient Chinese gentleman from the lobby of the Million Dollar Theater.

  “Norah, this is Shang Ko.” Long facility with mah-jongg and Cantonese appetizers had given Christine great adept-ness with the pronunciation of Chinese names. “He’s a friend of Felipe’s. He says Felipe is no longer able to come up and work here, so he’s taking his place. Wasn’t that nice of him?” And she smiled her most dazzling smile.

  Before No
rah could speak—and she felt it was going to be quite some time before she could find the right thing to say—the old gentleman bowed and said, “I am pleased to make your acquaintance, Mrs. Blackstone. Miss Flamande has been so good as to offer me room in the cottage behind the garage, as I have no family and it is a long walk back to Los Angeles each evening.”

  “Indeed,” said Norah, completely nonplussed. She released the branch rather numbly. Had he, standing in this spot this morning, come to see what she saw on the stucco of the house’s foundations?

  “And isn’t it wonderful, Norah?” Christine babbled. “With him here, the house won’t be empty when we go off to the desert, and you know I was worried, since Dominga lives in town, too. Oh, good-bye, Dominga, thank you.”

  Beaming, the housekeeper bustled down the front steps and away to catch the streetcar down on Highland Avenue.

  “Won’t you show him the cottage and give him the keys and everything? I’m dying of exhaustion, and Flindy will be back any minute with dinner, and those spiritualist people are coming at seven to tell me all about the astral plane, and—good heavens, Mr. Shang, you don’t happen to play mah-jongg, do you?”

  The dark eyes, with their strange greenish lights, which had gazed so somberly down at Norah, changed and took on a deeply hidden flicker of amusement. “It is many years since I played manchang, Miss Flamande, and then I never pursued it as others did.” He bowed as he spoke. “But to oblige you, between the performance of my duties in the garden, I would make the attempt.”

  “That would be fabulous!” She glowed with delight, beautiful in the last of the sunshine. No wonder, thought Norah, elderly millionaires followed her from room to room in Frank Brown’s mansion and directors who knew she couldn’t act to save her life still struggled to make her look good on the screen. “Maybe we’ll have time for a game this evening before those spiritualist people show up. I wonder if I knew Frank in a previous incarnation. Or that lovely young croupier at the Dome casino. Darling, do you think you could possibly make up some fresh coffee? Those reporters left me absolutely prostrate, and I was wakened far too early this morning, and come to think of it, I’m starving...”