Bride of the Rat God

by Barbara Hambly

  They’d pulled into the Santa Fe station on Broadway to find that echoing sandstone mosque mobbed with reporters, all shouting questions about Keith Pelletier’s murder and Charles Sandringham’s disappearance. As Norah breasted through the press with one hand gripping the carpetbag and the other clutching Christine’s wrist, she repeated over and over, “I’m sorry, we’re going to miss our train. I’m sorry, we have to catch our train now.” She had by this time developed a throbbing headache that the flash powder going off all around her did nothing to improve; nor did the fact that Chang Ming and Black Jasmine kept crossing up their leashes and running under her feet. Everything blended into a bizarre kaleidoscope of jostling faces and shouted words through which her mind fastened with a strange lucidity on the pink sandstone frieze with its inscription, EAST OR WEST, SANTA FE IS BEST. “Darling, can’t I pose for just one teensy picture? I can’t let them take a picture of me being dragged along like this. Surely they’ll hold the train for us.”

  Alec was waiting for them on the platform. So was A. F. Brown, stalking up and down in a cloud of cigar smoke, watch in hand and face purpling toward apoplexy, while Conrad Fishbein gave yet another measured account of Charles Sandringham’s movements on Saturday night, elaborated with a hair-raising tale of racing along Wilshire Boulevard at ninety miles per hour to catch the midnight Flier and buying a toothbrush in one of the lobby shops. “Of course he didn’t take the train under his own name, gentlemen. If you were as famous as Mr. Sandringham and laboring under such a burden of grief and anxiety, would you have wanted to risk the possible delays that revealing your true identity might have incurred? As he got on the train, he told Mr. Brown that he hoped to return to Hollywood in time for the premiere of his newest adventure film, The Midnight Cavalier, a stirring drama of...”.

  “I’m gonna kill that Fallon,” Brown growled as Christine dashed up to give him a quick embrace.

  “I phoned Suzanne.” Ned Bergen came up beside them as Brown and Christine—and Black Jasmine—posed momentarily for a burst of flash powder and Alec, Shang, and Ned Divine manhandled the four trunks from Shang’s hand truck into the baggage car. “And that redhead over at Vitagraph he’s been seeing...”

  “Oh, he was at the Montmartre last night,” Christine said, turning to pose with Black Jasmine and Chang Ming for another shot. “See, darling,” she added over her shoulder to Norah. “We made it here in just oodles of time, like I said we would.”

  A blue-uniformed station official tugged despairingly at Brown’s sleeve. There was a deep chugging and a burst of steam from the engine.

  “He was with Hans—Hank—” She corrected herself with a quick glance toward the reporters. “—and those girls who came up to the Edendale shoot last night. I think one of them’s an extra over at Jasper . . .”

  “Miss Norah.” Shang Ko’s hand, like a bundle of dried vines, stayed her as she passed Buttercreme’s box up to Alec. The old Chinese was stronger than Norah had at first imagined—of course Christine hadn’t even thought to ask if he was physically able to perform the burly Felipe’s tasks—but his touch was as tight as a cat’s inquiring paw. The previous morning before first light she’d seen him through the kitchen windows, performing what looked like a very slow and elaborate series of exercises in the small space of level ground at the bottom of the driveway in front of the garage. She wondered how old he actually was.

  Her mind was dragged from its exhausted drifting by the anxiety under the calm softness of his voice. “This place that you went to last night with Miss Flamande, this house...”

  “The one in Edendale?” She flinched at some undercurrent of memory connected with the house, like a half-recalled nightmare obliterated by the variegated avalanche of subsequent events. Fear and the scurry of tiny claws in the dark...

  “No. The other house, the house where the blood was. The house where the young man was killed.”

  “How on earth do you...?”

  He shook his head violently, waving the question away. Conductors were herding Christine toward the train, and she lit a cigarette and posed for one final picture, every line of her body implying that she crushed the life from male hearts every day and twice on Sundays instead of spending most of her time playing mah-jongg.

  “It is not important,” said Shang. “Who was this young man? He was the same one of whom Mr. Brown came to speak to you and Miss Flamande. What was he to Miss Flamande? It is important that I know,” he added, seeing the doubt and distaste on her face. “I would not ask were it not desperately important. Please.”

  Norah shook her head. “He was just a stunt performer on the last picture she did,” she said, mindful of a star’s reputation and the baying throng of reporters just outside the platform gate. “Mr. Sandringham—another actor, whose house it... it happened at—was helping him get his start in pictures. But how you knew—”

  “It is not important how I knew,” Shang repeated, glancing worriedly along the platform, where a uniformed official was telling Brown something the producer didn’t wish to hear.

  “If that worthless playboy isn’t here inside of two minutes...” Brown’s voice carried clearly to them over the reportorial clamor that echoed off the high ceiling. “Fishy—FISHY!”

  “He was an actor with her?” pressed Shang.

  “No, a—a stuntman.” Norah passed a hand over her face. Her headache was getting worse by the moment, exhaustion making her shake. She knew she should press the issue of how he knew where she and Christine had been the previous night. Had he followed them? He couldn’t have; he couldn’t drive a car. And what of Christine’s mysterious illness Sunday night and the disparity between the grandson who had been with him at the Million Dollar premiere and his claim to have no family? But someone seemed to have poured cold treacle over her brains.

  “If the script calls for Christine to do something dangerous—like that scene where she hung by her hands over the cliff—she doesn’t really do it. The stuntman—Mr. Pelletier—put on her dress and jewelry and a wig, and did the fall, with the camera far off enough so that it looked like Christine falling.”

  “So.” The word was little more than an indrawn breath, and his black eyes widened, shocked, as if he had seen some dreadful thing. “I see. In the opera—the Chinese opera, you understand—it is often so. A tumbler dons the mask and costume of an actor who cannot spring and tumble. And, of course, in the opera all of the women are in fact men.”

  “How do you know we went there?” pleaded Norah, trying desperately to collect her fatigue-sodden thoughts. “What were the marks on that house? I saw the same ones—”

  “All aboard!”

  The old man put a quick hand on her elbow and guided her to the door of the car. “Miss Norah, you must remain close to her in the desert. You must watch her. The desert...” He hesitated, as if stopping himself from saying something, then changed it to, “Her stars are in a very poor aspect right now, very poor. Her life is in danger.”

  “What makes you say so?” she demanded, clinging to the railing in the door as the train gave a starting lurch. “You said that on the night of the premiere—why? Why did you lie about it later?”

  “If you love her, Miss Norah, watch out for her.” Like a desiccated walking stick he followed along the platform, steam blowing his white hair in long wisps around his face. “Do not let her be alone with strangers. She is too trusting; she loves life too much and does not think. Do not let her be alone.”

  “Who on earth would want to hurt her?” Shock and confusion as well as exhaustion clouded her thoughts; her mind kept flitting back to the darkness in the bungalow with its brown-stained walls and stench of blood, back to the way the flashlight beam glanced off the shards of broken mirror above the bar. They passed Frank Brown like a puffing monument, glaring furiously out across the still Fallonless platform; Shang almost had to run to keep up now. Flash powder coruscated, and Norah turned to see Christine leaning far out the doorway at the other end of the carriage,
Black Jasmine cradled in her arms, her head thrown back as she blew a languid kiss at the gentlemen of the press.

  “Protect her, Miss Norah,” Shang called out. “Stay by her side.”

  Clouds of steam veiled him; he was backlit by a final blaze of flash powder as he raised one scarred and crooked hand. The next instant—though, tired as she was, Norah wasn’t sure how long her eyes might have been shut in a blink—he was gone.

  She rubbed her forehead now, trying to recall whether it had actually happened that way. It all seemed to blend into the events of the night and of the day before, with the memory of blood trailing away into darkness and of clouded, suffocating dreams of old griefs, while the Pekes scratched furiously in the comers, hunting something she was never able to see. Mikos Hraldy’s voice came to her from what seemed like an enormous distance away.

  “...new drama, modern drama, with heart and soul and meaning as great as timeless stories of Old Testament. But your Mr. Brown, he say, ‘How can make a film about a man who awaken up to find he has transform in night into giant cockroach? What will ladies in Pretoria—”

  “Peoria.”

  “—Petoria say to that? And what can you do with attitude like that, eh?”

  And like the scent of flowers in the background, soft twittering voices, “...that’s a pung, two kongs, and a pillow, and doubled because they’re all ones and nines, and doubled again because I’m south and that’s summer and another double because...”

  “...danced around the house in these veil sort of things. But they did say my mystical attraction for Chinese tilings is because I was a Chinese princess in my previous incarnation—Flindy was, too—though if I wanted to remember it like they do, I’d have to give up gin and saxophone players and take cold showers outside at the absolute crack of dawn...”

  The jogging of the train car was like the rocking of a ship, the steady throb of the wheels over the rails like the beating of some curiously benevolent metal heart. She forced her eyes open and regarded without comprehension the emerald landscape with its spidery windmills and slowly-circling hawks. Beneath the table, Chang Ming barked in his dreams so vigorously that his plump body bounced.

  Did he dream about chasing unseen things in the darkness of an empty house in Edendale? Norah wondered. Or about guarding the doors against something huge and invisible, scuttling along the house wall in the screaming wind?

  It is old, Kama Shakti had said.

  Do not let her be alone.

  Her head sank back onto the sturdy corduroy shoulder that had lately been supporting it, and she drifted again to sleep.

  NINE

  HEAVEN

  A sign of great sacrifice.

  A time of preparation, not action...

  Cultivated persons work hard in the daytime,

  are alert by night, and thus are safe

  in a situation of danger...

  Good omens for the true of heart...

  “DID YOU TELL Christine?” Alec lifted the end of a three-foot strip of film from the vat of developing fluid, his glasses catching the weak, bloody glow of the safe-light like an insect’s eyes. “Thanks,” he added as she took the strip from him.

  “It only happened at the station. She was asleep by the time I finished helping you set up here, and I haven’t had time to talk to her alone today.”

  “I mean about Shang being the old man at the premiere.” He went back to washing the next test-strip as Norah carried the film to the spiderweb of wires at the back of the blacked-out cabin, a shabby structure that had started life as the Red Bluff barbershop. The interior had been thoroughly tar papered the first time a film company had used the town as a base; Alec and Norah had spent an hour Tuesday evening rechecking the paper and adding more where it had shrunk or cracked. Then they’d swept the place before and after setting up the tanks, hoses, and slatted drum-shaped racks, with the result that today Norah felt as if she’d been beating carpets.

  “How does that look, by the way?”

  Norah hesitated, holding up the strip to the red light. It was difficult to judge the black for white of a negative, but her eye was improving. “I think it looks a little washed-out. Is that something you can fix when the scene is printed?”

  “Not really. Too dark you can fix, though it’ll look fixed even if you tint the stock. Washed-out is washed-out. What was the next take?”

  “Eight.” During Monday’s shooting at Colossus Norah had frequently looked over Alec’s shoulder at his notebook of shots, which listed, among other things, the exposures of each to be matched against the test strips he ran at the end of every take. Today, Norah had taken over the notebook and the running log of the action, recording close-ups of Queen Vashti’s exhortation to her currently nonexistent troops and scenes of Emily Violet staggering through the desert in search of Blake Fallon. She had learned a good deal about changing film in a bag as well.

  “She said just what Shang did, that he had to speak to her about taking over Felipe’s job. He denies that he said it was life or death, and I can’t swear to his exact words, but I know he said something of the kind.” She hesitated, wondering if she should tell Alec about the throat-cutting gesture he had made, but decided that it was too inconclusive. “She says he isn’t acting like a fan.”

  While Alec held another strip under the thin trickle of wash water, Norah walked back to the rack where the finished test films hung drying. Canisters of exposed, undeveloped film made a small stack on the plank trestle table, draped in sheets to protect against the all-pervading dust. They would be sent to Los Angeles in the morning, though they would not be processed until Alec returned with his tests. All the cans were carefully marked in his neat block printing.

  No wonder, she thought, studying a discarded leader, savages thought one’s soul would be trapped forever on a piece of film if one allowed one’s picture to be taken. As she peered through the negative at the red tight, it gave her an odd feeling to see herself in clear-etched miniature, clapper board in hand, all elbows and knees with her snuff-brown hair pulled back under her wide-brimmed felt hat.

  Immortality of a sort, though she herself would end up, as they said in Hollywood, on the cutting room floor. But fifty years from now people could run this film and know how Christine had looked at thirty (her claims of twenty-one notwithstanding), posturing and pouting and then sitting up with an indignant shriek as pomegranate juice exploded all over her chin.

  The later takes of that particular scene had been done with a silver knife, as sensuous an exhibition of fruit carving as Norah had ever seen, though Christine had been in serious danger of cutting off a finger. It had taken four tries before they got a take where the juice didn’t drip, and that had occurred only because Norah, on her second trip down to the grocery on Franklin Avenue, had had the wit to purchase a grossly unripe specimen that was then painted with Christine’s nail polish.

  “But he is behaving like a fan,” Alec said. “His protectiveness of her is very... proprietary. Which is what fans are all about. The marks you saw him making the night he circled the house that way were probably to put a protective joss on the place. He probably marked the car, too.”

  “Joss?”

  “Magic. Gris-gris. If his magic coins tell him she’s in danger, he’s doing what he can to keep her safe. They tell fortunes by throwing coins,” he added. “Heads or tails, but they use three coins tossed twice and have sixty-four ways of interpreting the results, and they’ll stick by their coin toss till hell freezes.”

  The grainy strains of “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik,” which had filled the red-lit darkness, died away. Alec turned to the gramophone he’d brought to Red Bluff with great trouble, along with his light stands, reflectors, and vats. “I’ve got Rossini—Berlin Phil with Nikisch conducting—Paderewski doing the Brandenburgs, or Fats Waller.”

  “Who?”

  “Blues singer. I happen to love him, but blues isn’t for everybody.”

  “Is that like jazz?” She’d heard t
he terms used in the same breath.

  “Sort of. It’s not as popular, but you’ll hear both in the clubs along Basin Street. It’s hard as hell to get recordings, and most of the race labels have rotten sound quality, but it’s the best I can do.” He cranked up the motor and set the needle down on the brittle shellac. The recording itself sounded no worse than the Mozart, the deep voice filled with gritty, unrepining alien grief. After Mozart the contrast was jarring, but there was a haunting quality to it, too.

  “As for the marks on the house...” Alec shook his head. “Could have been a puma. A mountain cat they call them in Texas. They still spot them in the San Fernando Valley if it’s been a dry winter and the deer come down out of the hills. Tell me if you can’t stand this, by the way. I’ve never heard of one going down as far as Hollywood, but it’s possible.”

  “Maybe,” Norah said slowly. But the marks she had seen had been gnawed, not scratched; she was willing to swear to it. And if Brown and Fishbein had found animal tracks in Sandringham’s bungalow, they would have trumpeted the fact. Outside in the bitter-cold darkness a coyote raised its voice in a drawn-out howl; closer, and clearly audible through the shack’s thin walls, came the stride of a man crossing to the privies that ranged behind Red Bluff’s dozen or so surviving buildings, the last outposts of civilization on the verge of a wasteland of ocotillo, sand, and moonlight.

  They had reached the town at two in the afternoon after a jolting drive across the desert from the dusty cattle-town of San Bernardino. Rather to Norah’s surprise, it hadn’t been hot at all but sunny and clear, the air like crystal and the “high desert,” as Alec termed it, a rolling expanse of lizard-colored dust and scrub punctuated by ridges of reddish rock hills. Hraldy had intended to film that first evening, when the light acquired an exquisite molten beauty, but in the absence of Blake Fallon he had been forced to be content with numerous takes of desert scenery, two or three scenes of Queen Vashti in form-fitting silver armor exhorting the hordes of extras who wouldn’t put in their appearance until later in the week, and the gauzy-veiled and demure Emily Violet stumbling through the sand dunes in quest of her vanished lover, staring into the sunset with yearning eyes and stretching out to faint with thirst upon artistic patches of sand from which the rocks and bull thorns had been carefully removed.