Bride of the Rat God

by Barbara Hambly

  “Already we are behind in schedule,” groaned Hraldy, shuffling pages of his script as gusts pounded the flimsy walls of Frenchy’s and made the string of bulbs overhead sway and flicker ominously. Lucky Kallipolis gathered the last of the trays and carried them to the little galley kitchen, checking in passing two oil lamps that stood, already lighted, on the side table where the steaks and biscuits and the potato salad and carrots had been. “Now we lose tomorrow, rebuilding sets, if he does not rain and wash us entirely away! And extras arrive Saturday for great battle between forces of Ahasuerus and those of Vashti’s father, Sheikh of Eastern Desert!”

  “It’s not gonna take us anything like all day to put up that pavilion again,” pointed out Ned Bergen, raising his head a little from where he was slumped, almost asleep, over his coffee. “With the stills Alec shot before we tore it down, it should be up by noon, good as new. Meanwhile you and Alec can go over the battlefield and pick out where you want to have that Brit fella set his wrath-of-God charges.”

  “Does that mean I actually get to sleep?” Christine looked brightly up from her rack of ivory tiles. Norah was amused to note that, having removed the layers of greasepaint and powder, Christine had carefully reapplied rouge, powder, Colura, and mascaro for the two hours of dinner and mah-jongg before bed. “Drat you, Emily, I just got rid of a three-bam! Can we eat breakfast at a decent hour and behave like civilized people for a change?”

  “Sure can, honey.” Fallon seated himself on the bench beside her and lit a match for her cigarette instants after she had lit one of her own. Though Christine had been speaking to Norah, she smiled her thanks and lit her own cigarette, something she rarely did or had to do; Norah hid an inward grin. Christine was a past master at the almost accidental-looking snub, the light air of having her mind on something else, as if Fallon—or any man—were a mere provider of her daily due of alcohol, tobacco, and admiration. The Pekes had been given their dinner and relegated to the cabin owing to their increasing tendency to growl at the star.

  “You’re perfectly welcome to this.” Norah gestured with the nontrade sections of the Daily News she had received from Mrs. Violet. “Though there doesn’t seem to be much of interest, except a new plan to stem inflation in Germany—”

  “That makes how many?” inquired the greater Ned sardonically.

  “—and some fellow claiming he knows where the Russian crown jewels are hidden. I’ve done the crossword, but other than that it’s good as new.”

  “Mah-jongg!” Zena announced triumphantly, and Christine, Emily, and Mary DeNoux squeaked and groaned and threw up their hands in protest.

  “You did the whole crossword?” asked Christine, staring at her in disbelief as the others totted up their scores and began figuring out who had how many doubles and to what effect.

  Norah merely nodded. After two years of dealing with the intricacies of British crosswords, which seemed largely composed by Oxford dons and Bloomsbury bluestockings determined to display their erudition via Latin distiches and trilingual puns, the American variety seemed laughably simple.

  “All today?” She turned to Fallon, still beside her, with wide eyes. “She does them in ink, too. Sometimes I don’t think she’s quite human.”

  “It says here that a woman has come forward claiming to have seen a man in a tuxedo staggering down Highland Avenue on the night of the Pelletier murder,” reported Mrs. Violet without looking up from the trade section of the Mirror. “She was on the opposite side of the street, but ‘her description fits the missing actor Charles Sandringham.’ “

  “So does a description of Mikos.” Alec got up quickly and went over to the neat little gray-clothed matron at the far end of the table. “Let’s see that.”

  Overhead the lights flickered, then blacked out completely for a moment, leaving the room with only the glow of the two oil lamps. Christine stubbed out her cigarette and said, “Saved by the bell, darlings. I’ve already lost two hundred and twenty dollars tonight, and I absolutely can’t seem to get more than a pung of anything. I think it’s time for this little girl to be in bed.”

  Fallon was on his feet immediately. “I’ll walk you over.”

  “You needn’t trouble,” said Norah, standing likewise. “I was just going over myself.”

  “Oh, the night’s early yet,” began Fallon.

  Christine smiled, enjoying his patent eagerness without reciprocating it in the slightest. “Truly, don’t bother, Blake. I’d be afraid Jazzykins would bite you.” She blew a kiss to the men around the table and flipped a final tile out of the newly made Great Wall of China in the center. “There, see? A five-crack, absolutely useless. Nighty-night, all. See you at breakfast, I don’t think.”

  Norah met Alec’s eyes as he glanced up from the newspaper with reassurance or understanding, as if words had passed between them, though she would have been hard put to say which words. But, turning to follow Christine into the sand-blown darkness, she saw Fallon’s face. The hard line of his mouth was not the rueful grimace of a thwarted Lothario but had an almost beastlike expression of sheer rage.

  She was, Norah thought, on the set of a movie. Though the barnlike stage was huge, undivided by the smaller walls that made up separate sets, it was nearly pitch dark. High overhead she had the impression of a tangle of crisscrossed shadows, but the carbon arcs that surely hung there were unlit. Only candles illuminated the somber blackness, candles and a few curious antique lamps.

  Alec, she heard herself thinking. Alec, we’ve got to stop it at f/12 at the lowest, and we still won’t get anything. And those red walls—the Ortho film will turn them black.

  But Alec was nowhere to be seen in the small group of extras—surely they were extras—filing through a narrow door, hands folded in the sleeves of voluminous black robes. Norah looked around for the cameras, for at least the notebook and slate so she could record the exposure and the action. But she found nothing. The floor, she noticed, was composed of slabs of stone. She felt a twinge of surprise, for it was clearly genuine, with the slight unevenness of wear that distinguished it from the excellent fakes produced by the greater Ned for palace scenes. Also, it was old, older than anything she had seen in this country.

  A sharp, clinking rattle made her turn.

  At one side of the hall, in the shadow of a low and much-stained altar, an old man sat tailor-fashion, throwing coins on the flagstoned floor. Three coins, their clear, hard ringing seeming to fill the darkened chamber. They’ll stick by their coin toss till hell freezes...

  The old man shifted his position and began to draw a pattern on the gray slabs in what looked like three colors of chalk. Though Norah stood at the far end of the hall, separated from him by nearly sixty feet, still it seemed to her that she could see his face clearly. It repelled her, his skin like a desiccated lizard’s, flaccid, fallen, clinging like rotted cloth to features seamed with contemptuous and self-indulgent evil, the face of one who had lived to ruinous age at the expense of everyone and everything around him. Under heavy epicanthic folds, the corrupt eyes gleamed with drugs, and Norah wondered how they’d found an actor that vile-looking, Chinese or American, and how, in fact, the studio had chosen a Chinese for the role at all. Even if the character was Chinese, she knew most studios hired Americans and made them up, usually badly.

  But this was no makeup. His clothing was outlandish; who on earth had come up with it? Though the hall was very Chinese, with rich red walls and the dull gleam of gold on the dark lattices of the rafters, the old man wore thick and clumsy furs and, on the strange rolls and braids of his snowy hair, a tall, conical hat crowned ridiculously with antelope horns. When he moved, the long brass tubes hanging from his belt jangled against one another and rolled noisily on the stone of the floor.

  Outside, she heard the rising wail of the wind. Somewhere close beside her, almost hidden under it, a voice spoke, the voice of someone she knew, familiar but hidden in shadow. But she could not remember who.

  The lights are too low, s
he thought, trying to keep her mind on her business. The film will never take. They’ll have to reshoot. God knows how much it will cost....

  The pattern on the floor was almost complete. An intricate web of squares and circles and hexagrams spread out before the altar, and in the jumping lamp flame Norah saw now that the altar itself was heaped high with a confusion of trash: flat-faced rag dolls whose embroidered robes gleamed in the wavery light, scrolls bearing crude paintings of beasts and demons, tiger skins whose empty paws hung down like the barbed gloves of dead men, the images of Chinese deities painted on silk. Brocaded bags hung like foul barnacles from the walls all around the altar, smelling of mildew and rot; nearby a footed iron cauldron loomed on a square of charred bricks and sand.

  In the half dark of a corner another fur-robed figure in a horned hat cracked a whip, the sound a flat, sickening slap in the silence. Somewhere, someone beat a deep-voiced drum. Music drifted on the air, though Norah could not see its source, queer and whining around the heavy heartbeat of the drum. There was something familiar about the rhythm... something from another dream? She couldn’t recall. The wind moaned in the rafters. The lamp flames cringed.

  Between the altar and the cauldron, a curtain moved. A man stepped out of an alcove of darkness there, tallish and clothed in a gleaming embroidered robe, leading by the hand a young Chinese girl whose hair hung in a single raven stroke to her knees. She tottered unsteadily, and, looking at her feet, Norah gasped. They were no more than curled and deformed stamps encased in jeweled red slippers scarcely bigger than a year-old baby’s shoes.

  Other men filed forth from the alcove, cold-faced and haughty—princes, Norah thought, their robes dark gardens of needlework. There were four, she thought, maybe five; among them was a woman of surpassing beauty in a towering headdress of ghostly pearls. Two of the princes reached forward to remove the Chinese girl’s robe, and beneath it Norah could see she wore an undergown of crimson silk, like blood. That will photograph black, Norah thought automatically. It was already clear to her that none of them was wearing the pallid, greenish greasepaint of cinema makeup.

  The girl’s face remained a blank, her eyes hazy with opiates. Someone lit tinder and wood beneath the cauldron, and the new brightness of the fire winked on the fingernail guards the woman wore.

  One of the princes bore a wooden box covered with brass and worked into strange designs. Opening it, the tall man lifted forth a necklace whose three white gems flashed coldly in the semidark like evil planets coming to some baleful alignment at the world’s end. In the central gem something seemed to shift like a live thing imprisoned within, or a shadow on the moon.

  The princes stepped forward, surrounding the tottering girl. She stared uncomprehendingly before her, swaying on her tiny feet as they put the necklace around her throat.

  The wailing music swirled and rose, a bizarre caterwauling like colored Maypole ribbon around the iron pulse of the drum. Smoke began to fill the hall from the flame beneath the cauldron and from a brick furnace built into one corner of the room. A witch-faced priestess with gray hair like a mare’s filthy tail handed the tall man a beribboned tambourine of copper and iron. He and his princes and the woman who had come with the princes stepped away to a cushioned bench halfway along the far wall, leaving the Chinese girl alone in the middle of the chalked diagrams, the necklace gleaming like evil eyes. The extras down in the main part of the room had fallen to their knees, swaying and chanting; now and then a black robe would part to reveal the flash of jewels or the glint of silk.

  The drugged priest spread out his arms before the drugged girl—acolyte, sacrifice, or bride, Norah could not tell which because like all films, except for the music, this one was silent—and began to dance.

  Something in the air, redolent with dust, incense, and smoke, or something in the old man’s gross and soulless face seemed to change. The drumbeat quickened, going faster and faster, until it was rolling like thunder. Norah wasn’t sure what was going to happen next—she was still trying to figure out where they had gotten all those Chinese actors—but something in the old man’s movements and in the way the girl swayed and giggled in the snaring nets of the chalked lines filled her with disgust and horror. One of the extras cried out, a woman’s voice, and bowed forward to hide her head in her hands, as if she knew what was going to transpire; Norah felt her heart beating faster for no reason she could determine. More and more, she was sure she didn’t want to be there at the ceremony’s climax.

  Her mind cloudy, she looked for a way out. She would, she thought, find Frank Brown and ask him if he knew what was going on in his studio, for this was like nothing she had ever seen or ever wanted to see. The music yowled and shrieked, with the tall man pounding on the tambourine and the old priest in his horned hat leaping and twisting to the cacophony of the brass tubes dangling amid fur and claws at his waist. Another extra, then two more hid their eyes.

  Somewhere in the darkness near the curtained alcove—though surely, Norah thought, the curtain was still closed—red eyes reflected the smoky light.

  She turned and thrust open the doors behind her, stepping out into the night.

  But instead of the familiar studio street, she saw only the stone paving of a high terrace separated from the court below by a line of square marble posts and a marble balustrade, colorless and sickly in the bleached light of the full moon. The moon stood resplendent above a crowding maze of walls, upturned eaves, and, in one place, naked, thrashing trees, but even as she watched, it was swallowed by clouds, leaving her in Stygian dark. Over the closely laid paving blocks of the courtyard below the groaning wind flicked long crescents of fine desert dust.

  Alec! she called out. Christine! Where am I?

  But no sound came from her throat. It was only a film, of course. Silent. Wind dragged her long hair loose and tore with icy fingers at her face.

  ALEC! Behind her she could still hear the glakking yowl of the music, the panicky heart trip of the drum. Smoke swirled on the night, masking another smell, she didn’t know what. From the corner of her eye she thought she glimpsed something scuttling along the wall behind her, but when she turned, there was nothing. It was very deep night, halfway between midnight and morning, winter and killingly cold. No one here knows what is being done, she thought, not knowing why she thought it or what she thought was going on in the hall behind her. Only these few. The rest would rather not know.

  She turned back toward the doors, seeing only a slit of candlelight that framed the shining ruby figure of the girl with her necklace of evil gems, eclipsed and reeclipsed every time the whirling priest passed between them.

  Then someone within closed the door, shutting Norah out into the howling dust of the night. The clouds parted briefly to reveal the full moon’s cold eye, then closed again. Wind seared over the pavilion’s double roof, its voice rising to a shriek. Distantly, among the maze of walls, came the frenzied barking of hundreds of tiny dogs. As she drifted toward wakefulness, Norah could not tell whether it was the wind that she heard just at the end, or whether, within the dark hall, the girl had begun to scream.

  ELEVEN

  THUNDER OVER LAKE

  No advance.

  Good fortune when a maiden marries

  with her younger sister as consort...

  The date of a marriage postponed—

  patience is advised...

  DESPITE HIS FLASH of temper the night before, Blake Fallon was all smiling affability in the morning, turning up at the pre-dawn breakfast with offers to assist the crew in loading the caravan of cars that would carry Queen Vashti’s pavilion back to its location. Norah, enjoying a leisurely breakfast with Alec for once, tried to think better of the actor—it was certainly a change from his blithe refusal to even notice that help was needed back in Edendale—but found within herself a deeply lodged distaste at the mere sight of him. She wondered if the unrecalled ugly dreams that had troubled her had something to do with him.

  “If we begin to film a
t noon, we can perhaps finish all pavilion scenes today,” Hraldy said, picking up and putting down script pages and moving his tiny cup of Turkish coffee here and there around them on the battered pine table. “You and I, Alec, we must inspect battlefield while pavilion is raise.” Outside, the wind had fallen to an occasional whisper in the sagebrush. “He goes more quickly than I thought him to yesterday.”

  The director glanced across to where Fallon lounged gracefully by the kitchen door, talking to the two Neds while Lucky loaded their plates with bacon and eggs.

  “Well,” Alec commented softly, “for one thing, you didn’t have to walk old Laban through by the hand.”

  “Exactement!” Hraldy made a gesture that nearly overset his coffee. “Is splendid how his acting is change. It is different man! I am only sorry now more cannot be done with him in this film.”

  “Why can’t it?” Norah sipped her tea, which was as usual execrable. Coffee, to Lucky, was more than a drink—it was a rite of manhood, and the Turkish variety Hraldy favored and everyone else choked on was the manliest of all. Tea was for old ladies and Englishmen, slapped together at random for those who insisted on making trouble for the cook.

  “I mean, Laban isn’t anywhere in the Book of Esther, anyway,” she pointed out. “Is it necessary that he die? Can’t you have him come thundering into battle at the head of a host of his tribesmen or something to save the day?”