Bride of the Rat God

by Barbara Hambly

  “Not exactly,” he said after a long hesitation. Like everyone else, he looked like ten miles of bad road, his hair pointy with sweat and his brow marked with small lines that spoke of a headache he probably hadn’t had time to notice. He sipped his coffee gingerly. It was the color of tar and smelled like it, too. “I’m doing some faking, telling Mikos I’ve got doubts about the exposure or that the gate was acting up. Which is all nuts to him; he loves extra takes. And Blake and Christine are sure helping me in that department with both hands.” He reached down and scratched Chang Ming’s head.

  Across the court the greater Ned dropped a bean sprout; the little dog bolted in instant pursuit. For the next five minutes he lay, holding the vegetable upright between his paws and licking it perplexedly, before giving up. Norah had set down plates of food for the dogs in the wardrobe room, and as usual Chang Ming and Black Jasmine had ignored their own, tried to steal bites out of each other’s, and waited with scant patience until the fussy Buttercreme had eaten a few mouthfuls, after which they had engaged in the obligatory yapping battle over what she’d left. Contrary to Norah’s expectations, the Pekes ate like cats: they would nibble for the rest of the evening.

  “The thing is,” Alec went on, “I know the lights that went out will work just fine when I get them back to the studio. When I was filming Salamis here with Campbell, we had a whole light tree come down on top of Dick Scott, and I’d double-checked the braces on the thing myself. He still can’t use his right arm properly; he’s lucky he wasn’t killed.” He shrugged. “I wouldn’t call it superstition. I’m just a little more careful when I’m here, that’s all.”

  In time Norah went into the house again, curled up in the chinchilla coat with her head on a silken heap of spare draperies, and drifted off to sleep to the dim strains of Ketelby’s In a Persian Market and snatches of Saint-Saens. But, perhaps because of the sweet and sour pork, she did not sleep well. She woke two or three times or dreamed that she woke, wondering why the room seemed so dark, wondering why she felt the clutch of terror at her throat, the sense that there was something moving in the room beyond the dark archway. From that she woke in earnest to hear the scurrying rattle of claws on the tiled floor in that farther room as the Pekes scampered to and fro, hunting mice or whatever it was they were hunting with savage enthusiasm. After that she slept better. When Alec woke her, she found all three Pekingese lying like little sentinels, one in each door of the long room that led to the rest of the house.

  SEVEN

  THUNDER OVER HEAVEN

  Avoid doing what is improper—a warning...

  An expedition is ill advised...

  An omen of peril...

  A ram butting its head upon a fence—

  unable to withdraw or to go ahead...

  FOR THE FOURTH time that evening the old man unwrapped the sandalwood box he kept at the head of his mattress and took from it a bronze vessel green with time and wrought in the shape of a bird. The metal was still warm to his touch.

  He shook his head, knowing that what he did was as useless as digging up a planted seed to make sure it was sprouting. But there was little else he could do.

  It was dark out on the narrow porch of the cottage and very cold. The night was filled with the scents of the alien, arid hills. Above and behind the cottage, the house loomed, garage and kitchen, the main bulk of the first floor, and, rising above that like a watchtower, the second story with its little balconies and tiled decorations and ornamental niches and figures beneath the eaves, dark as the hills themselves. The moon would not clear the hills for some hours yet. He had walked the circumference of the house twice already, seeing that the only lighted lamps were on the tall porch and in the living room beyond so that Chrysanda Flamande would not return to a dark house.

  So far she had not returned at all. Shang Ko sighed, weary and driven and wondering what on earth he could do. He feared for her—that surprising, vivid lady, wild and beautiful as a milkweed fairy—feared for her tall and quiet-voiced sister. He had marked both the main house and the cottage, marked the motorcar and the trees at the end of the drive, with signs of protection, but he feared—in his heart he knew—this would not be enough.

  He sank cross-legged onto the worn boards. From another compartment in the sandalwood box he took three coins he had been given many years earlier in another land, two bronze incense burners no larger than a child’s palm, and five sticks of the incense he had purchased several days before on Marchessault Street. Last of all he withdrew a small white stone, like the bird vessel warm and marked with fire, which he put into the bronze vessel again; the incense he arranged in the burners and in three small glass bottles that, by their smell, had once contained perfume.

  He threw the coins, observing both the static and the moving implications of the hexagrams they formed, shuffling with the adeptness of long practice the signs that would need to be drawn to counteract the evils of which they spoke, to take into account the lung of the surrounding hills and the xue and xiang of the house itself. Against Fire in the East, Water must be written. Against Thunder over Heaven—the sign of great power—Mountain over Heaven to increase the buildup of resources, though he knew that no matter how he built up his own resources, they would not prevail. They had not in the past.

  At least, he thought, the moon was waning. There would be some protection in that.

  His hand trembled a little as he marked the sign Chu, and he took a handkerchief from his pocket and rubbed it out again. Clearing his mind of those memories, he redrew the marks—Da Chu, “Big Cattle”—perfectly. As perfectly as a man could whose hands more nearly resembled the claws of a dried vulture than the fingers of a human being.

  When he had marked each of the six directions and drawn a protective sign around himself, he placed the incense, staring steadily at the tip of each joss stick until the flame glowed and then shrank in on itself in a frail ribbon of scented smoke. Likewise he placed twigs and papery chips of eucalyptus bark in the vessel of bronze around the white stone and called forth fire by speaking its secret name. The leaping light turned his face to a crazy quilt of shadow and amber, gleamed in the haunted depths of his eyes.

  He had seen too much, he thought wearily. When he had been young he had been a fighter, willing to risk his honor, his friends, his family, and his life that injustice might be stemmed, corruption banished, the land of his birth—the most beautiful land under heaven—freed of the conquerers who had held it prisoner for generations, freed to take its true place in the world. And he had been defeated, broken by those who served the emperor. Those he trusted had betrayed him, so with nothing more than his bare life he had fled at last from the land he had loved, to fetch up like a storm-beaten mariner in this land. A different world, he thought, with its pale-eyed silent people, its smoke-belching motorcars and food that had no taste, and its cement buildings slapped down any which way, with no regard for lung and xue and shui, the energies that moved across the earth.

  Now the emperors themselves were gone. When his sons had told him this, they had spoken as if they found it impossible to believe. Perhaps they did. His sons had always been a bit of a disappointment to him.

  In the brazier the fire strengthened. From the crowding hills came the long yikking sob of the coyote, as the Mexicans called the gray wolflet that prowled this land. By the stars it was just past midnight, midway through the Hour of the Rat, the tenth moon month ending. The Year of the Pig, but now that the emperors were gone, except for that poor boy trapped in the rose-pink walls of Peking, how would the cycles of years be marked?

  He sank his mind into the veiled core of the flames, swimming down into it as if into glowing water.

  Mrs. Norah and Christine had left the house. The old man saw this with some relief. Even through the silent medium of fire he had felt the evil of that place, rotted sorrows clinging like dust-filled cobwebs, unseen things scuttling in the corners. Under the incredible blaze of those tall white lamps, she had enacted again a
nd again those tiny fragments of a story—like a ghost herself, he thought as he watched, forever condemned to pace the same corridor, to weep for the same sorrow in the same place. That which stalked her would not manifest itself under those lights or come near those swirling mobs of people, not with the moon already past its last quarter, its power dwindled to a thread. Still, such things could use the sort of evil that lurked in the corners of that house. He was glad she had taken her guardian dogs.

  The dogs were sleeping now as the big open motorcar made its way along dark streets where tall wooden houses with peaked roofs slumbered between tropical pepper and palm. Chang Ming was curled on the floor at Mrs. Norah’s feet, snoring gently, no doubt, as was the way of such dogs. Black Jasmine and Buttercreme shared Norah’s lap, though Black Jasmine seemed to believe it necessary to assist Christine in her piloting of the vehicle and made repeated attempts to climb into her lap to do so. Then Christine slowed the car and turned the wheel, and the old man sat up straighter in consternation. Those were the movements of bringing the car to a halt. But he did not hear the automobile’s engine or see the yellow flash of its lights down the driveway.

  They had stopped somewhere else.

  His fist clenched in irritation, a ball of bones and calcined pain, but fear shrank and chilled his heart.

  “Do not do this!” he whispered, as if she could hear.

  Nowhere in the city was safe. He knew it, sensed it, as clearly as he had sensed it two nights earlier, the night he had been to the theater, where on film she—and others—had enacted their own deaths.

  “Come home! It is out there, and it seeks you!”

  But they were miles away, he knew not where, stopping for a purpose he could only guess. At night, outdoors, unprotected. And they were getting out of the car.

  “Christine, have you got any idea what time it is?” Norah transferred the slumbering Buttercreme to the seat she had just vacated and climbed rather stiffly from the big roadster, pulling her cardigan more closely around her for warmth. The night had gone chilly in earnest, and she could see her breath in the yellow glow of the streetlamp.

  “Not the tiniest bit, darling.” Christine, snug in her softly shimmering mound of chinchilla, with Black Jasmine trotting self-importantly at her heels, clicked her way up the walk. The diamonds in her big hat buckle flashed, and even out of costume she retained her slightly disarrayed look, a crazy and tousled temptress whose flamelike hunger for life would draw any man, mothlike, to folly.

  As it drew her, Norah thought, annoyed but following in spite of herself.

  The eight bungalows built around the narrow court were typically fake Spanish, their pink or white stucco fronts nearly hidden behind a fashionable jungle of bougainvillea and banana plants. Every window was dark.

  “When I drag you out of bed at six o’clock tomorrow morning—this morning, and may I remind you that’s less than five hours from now—you’re going to demand to know why I permitted you to do this.” She caught up with that ruffle of fur and diamonds, flicking on the flashlight she’d taken from the glove box and aiming its yellow beam at the ground.

  “Darling, you know I’d never say anything that unfair!” Christine’s brown eyes were wide with reproach. “Besides, if it’s only five hours, it’s probably better that we just—” She started guiltily as Norah signaled her to lower her voice with a gesture at the other bungalows. “—stay up.” Though her voice sank to a whisper, it didn’t slow down one whit. “In fact, we’ll need to if we’re going to finish packing. And if these people weren’t woken up by a full-blown murder, I don’t see that my voice would have much effect.” But she whispered anyway and elevated herself to the toes of her satin heels, which did nothing to improve her balance.

  Other than a certain smudginess under her eyes, Christine seemed none the worse for a sixteen-hour workday. She had, of course, insisted on renewing her regular makeup once the greasepaint was removed. After a few passionate embraces in the stairway, Frank Brown had departed with the rest of the crew. “Now you get on home and get some sleep,” he’d ordered, a command that Norah, even at the time, considered to be singularly ill judged.

  By then Hans Schweibler—the Hun of the Purple Sage, as Doc LaRousse called him—had shown up with three or four extremely brightly clothed and giggling young ladies in a golden Studebaker to pick up Blake Fallon. “You are stuck into the desert for ein week,” the cowboy star said cheerily. “We must fill you up so you do not die.” Fallon, who had visibly faltered during the last hours of filming, promptly disappeared into another part of the house and returned a few moments later, bright-eyed and talking fast, to pile into the jumble of rouged knees and cigarette smoke in the car and swoop off down the hill.

  And in a way, thought Norah, she couldn’t really blame them. The day after their arrival in Los Angeles Christine had been in the studio, starting on Sawdust Rose. Usually there was a gap of a week between pictures, but because of the prospective buyout of Enterprise, Brown had stepped up production. They’d “wrapped” the Western on Saturday, the twenty-fourth of November—at ten-thirty at night—and Monday morning had started on She-Devil of Babylon. Charlie Sandringham and Emily Violet—who was the heroine to Christine’s villainess—had been filming for a week already. Wednesday night Christine had stayed after She-Devil’s filming was done to do retakes of a saloon scene from the earlier picture.

  Given that kind of schedule, Norah reflected, it was hardly surprising that Christine took what relaxation she could, though all-night drinking bouts at the Café Montmartre, backroom flings with jazz musicians, and drunken auto races along Sunset Boulevard to the sea were scarcely her idea of rest. But she recognized that Christine was of an entirely different nature from herself, and the time and the energy had to come from somewhere, if only from a little ivory box.

  “I have finished packing.” She edged after Christine down the straitened path choked with calla lilies, tropicals, and castor plants that led to the tiny porch and kitchen door of bungalow three.

  “You haven’t really?” Christine stared at her, awe in her face in the dim glow of the flashlight beam. “I don’t believe it. It takes me days to pack.”

  “Nonsense,” Norah retorted briskly. “It never takes you days to pack because I’ve yet to see you start packing until the morning of your departure. Now, let’s get this over with so I can get a little sleep, anyway.”

  Not, she knew, that it was at all likely she would.

  “You’ll regret it,” Christine promised. “I mean, I always do if I go to sleep knowing I’ll just have to get up again. We’ll stop for coffee at the Grove instead, how’s that? They have the most marvelous bar... Now, where did Charlie put that hideout key?” She tiptoed to reach the struts that supported the roof sheltering the side door. Norah shone the flashlight upward, metal gleaming just above her feckless sister-in-law’s fingers where two beams joined. She reached in easily and drew forth a key.

  “I think you’re taller than me on purpose. Besides, you wouldn’t let me come down here yesterday—”

  “To be exact,” Norah said, “you were stopped by Mr. Brown showing up and the reporters. And they’d have been all over here yesterday.”

  “They were,” said Christine, unlocking the door while Black Jasmine desecrated the step. “Flindy tried—she came down yesterday morning, and the place was just teeming with them. She and I were going to sneak down after her party, and I think it was unfair of you not to wake me. By now Charlie’s landlord will have cleaned everything up, and there won’t be anything to see. I bet the police let Frank in.”

  “Mr. Brown,” Norah said in a voice like picked bone, “had already been in.”

  Christine stopped a step into the kitchen, her throat closing in a sudden small gagging noise. Norah realized that Christine hadn’t known there would be a smell.

  He was cut to pieces, Mr. Brown had said.

  Norah had not realized at the time that he’d been speaking literally.

&nbs
p; Foul and overpowering, the stench was not only the stink of two-day-old blood. It was the stink of death, the smell a reminder of the fact that a man had been gutted there, his flesh ripped from his bones and scattered broadcast, the contents of his organs spilled obscenely along the floor of the hall.

  Her jaw tightened hard. She remembered the smell from her days with the VAD and later, during the influenza, from the endless day of drifting in and out of delirium alone, smelling death in her parents’ room next door and wondering with what strength was left to her if she, too, would die before anyone came to see how they were doing. Uncle Sher and Aunt Francy—Clive’s parents and by then her father’s only surviving relatives—were supposed to, but they’d been as worn down with overwork and malnutrition as her parents. Weeks later Aunt Francy had come to the charity ward and told her Sher had died, too.

  But that had been nothing like this.

  Black Jasmine shrank back with a deep, rattly little growl, his silky ears flattening. After a moment Christine straightened her shoulders, remarked in a shaky voice that tried to be jaunty, “Phew! It really stinks in here,” and dug a cigarette from her very small and fashionable beaded bag. Her hand trembled so badly that she could barely light it; she didn’t even try to fit it to the holder. Nevertheless, she took the flashlight from Norah and preceded her into the living room.

  The landlord had in fact cleaned up after a fashion. But it would take refinishing to get the blood out of the floorboards, and looking at the brown ghosts of those dreadful spatters on the pale plaster walls, Norah was reminded—“The Canterville Ghost” notwithstanding—of a hundred tales of blood spots no coat of paint could ever hide.

  The furniture had all been hauled to one side of the small living room, the crusted rug rolled up and lying like a corpse across the couch. The smell, Norah realized, must be coming chiefly from that.

  “Looks like Attila the Hun’s been through,” said Christine, still attempting to show that she was a tough little flapper whom nothing could faze. She drew heavily on her cigarette and flashed the torch across the walls. Norah saw how the brown stains on the walls had been interrupted, as if handprints—at that height they had to be handprints—had been sponged out, and it came to her for the first time that Mr. Brown and Mr. Fishbein had come to Ivarene Street Saturday from here, that they’d been sitting there in their business suits, eating nuts and patting the dogs and comforting Christine twenty minutes after mopping up a dead man’s blood while his disemboweled corpse lay in the next room.