Bride of the Rat God

by Barbara Hambly

  The chariot charge and fall had gone like clockwork. Christine threw back her head and flung out one arm in a suggestion of abandoned laughter. The explosion, up in the rocks but far nearer than Norah personally felt would be safe, was shattering, ten times larger than she had expected, flinging rocks and dirt and sawdust—which made it appear larger still—everywhere. To her own annoyance Norah didn’t even see the actual fall, for the shock made her flinch and close her eyes; when she looked around a moment later, Christine and Smoky Hill Dan lay sprawled on the kicked-up sand near the fallen wreck of the chariot and horses while Alec cranked a long test strip. When she saw the footage in the editing room some weeks later, she was more horrified still, because Alec had angled the camera for a forced perspective that made the explosion seem to take place under the horses’ very hooves, and she would have sworn that neither Queen Vashti nor her charioteer could have survived.

  But Christine’s only comment, examining a skinned spot on her elbow as Norah and Smoky Hill Dan got her to her feet, had been, “Well, that’s over, darlings. Now can we go home?”

  “How about this?” suggested Fishbein. “This is hardly the first time in her colorful life Chrysanda Flamande has faced danger...”

  “Hmm.” Christine paused in the act of fitting a cigarette to her holder, the faraway gleam of her true métier shining in her eyes.

  All the way back to Los Angeles, under overcast skies, Christine and Fishbein polished off his champagne and elaborated her adventures in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt while on expedition with a suddenly acquired archaeologist uncle, enthusiastically abetted by Alec. Norah would have helped also—she knew, for instance, that Bedouin raiders would not be found in the Valley of the Nile—if Hraldy had not insisted on sitting beside her and discussing the script revisions that changed Laban the Splendid from Esther’s lover to Esther’s brother, exclaiming over the scenes still to be shot, and praising the changes made.

  “A stronger, a far stronger, film will come of it, you will see,” he said, fixing Norah with his eager brown gaze. “Thus! These you have write, you give more to Laban, you make use of this newfound talent, this new power, in our Blake.”

  He glanced at the slim, vivid figure across from them, black beadwork panels flashing on the cream silk of her dress, toying with her long strands of pearls and amber as she talked, and lowered his voice. “And I see you have tailor role of Vashti, that it will not show out her weaknesses. Thus is true writing, Madame Blackstone. Is both kind and profitable to studio. Now when they see, those Philistines who run Colossus, who think of nothing but spectacle and armies, eh? Now they will let me pursue my dream!”

  “Dream?” asked Norah, distracted. Across from her, Christine was saying, “... and raising my head, I saw that I had been cast into a pit of vipers! They were coiled everywhere on the rocks around me, amid the bones of those who had perished there before...”

  “Of course. Having see him as Laban, having see his scope and ability, I see my chance! I see my cockroach!”

  Norah blinked, wondering if the director had misread his English and what word he actually meant.

  “With him as star, I will be able at last to make Kafka’s Metamorphosis! I do him exactly, each scene by scene! It will be succés fou of Hollywood, opening of new vistas, new genres, new meaning for modern cinema! Can you not picture Blake Fallon as six-foot insect with soul of man?”

  Norah bit her tongue to keep from saying Quite the reverse, but the director, enraptured by his topic, leaned closer to her, put his hand over hers, and lowered his voice still further. “Do not you think, perhaps, that this change, this renewal, this inner metamorphosis of Mr. Fallon’s powers might be due to love?”

  “To what?”

  “...seizing the camel’s bridle, he sprang into the saddle with a single bound and reached down, drawing me up into his powerful arms...”.

  “You ever tried to get on a camel, Chris?”

  Hraldy made a very European face and spread his hands. “One sees...”.

  “What I saw,” Norah said frostily, “was a man trying to seduce a woman and growing as angry as a spoiled child when he was thwarted. I admit I haven’t much experience, but I should think that anger would come out of pride, not love.”

  The director gave her a look that was intended to be worldly-wise but that succeeded only in being fatuous. “Ah, but that is a man, is he not? He have his pride, his pride in conquest of woman he love. May be that his pride fuel this newfound talent.”

  “It may be,” she agreed. “But if that is the case, I fear both he and Mr. Brown are in for a disappointment. I suppose there are women who are flattered by that kind of insistent wooing, but Christine isn’t one of them.” And annoyed with herself for being goaded into replying for Christine—something she hated to do—she went on briskly. “My question is, What are we going to do about the scenes with Mordecai? Have they located... I mean, has Mr. Sandringham returned?” She turned and raised a straight, dark brow inquiringly in the direction of Conrad Fishbein.

  “From everything we’ve heard, Charlie is still in Vermont with his father,” Fishbein replied in his soothing voice. “As we’ve told the press, we’ve had a telegram from him confirming that for reasons of privacy, his father has not used the name Sandringham for years. This dates back to Charlie’s first successes in the West End. But his father is quite old...”

  “He must be,” Christine commented with one of her disconcerting flashes of practicality. “I mean, Charlie’s sixty-three if he’s a day, and he told me once he was a younger son.”

  “Very old and very frail,” Fishbein said smoothly. “So you see, we won’t be able to tell anything for quite some time.”

  “But we cannot let it go comme ça!” protested Hraldy. “Even without change now written by Madame Blackstone, there remain entire trial of Haman, torture sequence in dungeons...”

  “My guess,” said Alec, leaning back in the glove leather of the seat with a cynical glint in his eyes, “is that we’ll have to find somebody else and reshoot the works.”

  “Reshoot!” The director’s eyes bulged with horror. “Is not to be! Orgy alone is cost...”

  Alec grinned. “Think of it as a chance to improve on what you’ve already done. Besides, you can’t say Blake was any good in that first orgy, so you can kill two birds with one stone... if he’s as good indoors as he was out.”

  Hraldy made a small, strangled noise of despair and retreated to pore over his pages of script; Alec took the opportunity to come around the table and take Norah’s hand, leading her to the vacant table across the aisle. Beyond the windows, the brown hills humped up like ruched velvet under slaty skies, reddish tangles of vineyards, and dark orange groves lying like lap robes over their knees.

  “Look,” Alec said softly, “I know this isn’t really any of my business, and ‘no, thank you’ is a completely appropriate answer, but I’m not thrilled about you two ladies staying in that house alone. We’ve got no idea where Shang is or if he’s a crook or just a harmless nut case or... Well, somebody set those charges. Until we can talk to Brown and get the Los Angeles police onto it, I’d feel better if I thought you were staying someplace else.”

  “I admit the thought of going up there tonight isn’t one I cherish,” Norah said slowly, looking from the gathering gloom to his face. In spite of the fact that it was only four o’clock, the lamps in the club car had been kindled, and a beautiful youth with the features of an African prince asked if people wanted coffee. “The Hollywood Hotel? They’d take dogs—or they’d take Chrysanda Flamande’s dogs, anyway, wouldn’t they? And... if Mr. Fishbein sent word of the attempt on Christine’s life to the papers, are we going to have to deal with a mob of reporters at the station?” The thought of it made her suddenly ill.

  He chuckled. “They took Mae Busch’s leopard. The management would welcome three housebroken little dust mops with tears of joy. But my thought was that the three of us—six, counting the fu-dogs—could get o
ff in Pasadena, take a cab all the way out to Venice, and check you two into the St. Mark’s. I could keep the dogs at my place overnight; it’s only a few blocks away. Then I could take you to dinner at the Breakers, and we could go visit the pier.”

  Aside from Christine’s—and Fishbein’s—insistence on a Los Angeles arrival (“Darling, as long as I actually was almost killed, I might as well get some publicity out of it!”), the program met with unqualified approval. While Christine languished for the lightning storm of reportorial flash powder on the platform with Black Jasmine in her arms and SAVED FROM DEATH almost visibly written above her head, Alec, Norah, and a heavily tipped porter piled the lighter luggage, Alec’s precious gramophone, and twenty or thirty sealed magazines of exposed film into Alec’s disreputable Ford, along with Chang Ming and Buttercreme like a purdah empress in her wicker box. With the Bell & Howell cradled on Norah’s lap, they puttered westward through the clearing dusk along Venice Boulevard, red streetcars clattering past them among the bean fields, orchards, and long, marshy stretches of rank, head-high grass and startled waterfowl, making for the sea.

  “It’s supposed to look like the real Venice,” Christine had told Norah some weeks earlier, when Venice of America had been mentioned during a break in filming Sawdust Rose. “They’ve even shot some costume stuff down there by the bridges and under those arcade things on Windward Avenue, but they have to film at night because of the streetcar tracks.”

  It had sounded to Norah like a peculiar idea to begin with, but no description could do justice to the cockeyed charm of the place, even on a mizzly evening with the fog moving in. It was Hollywood’s bright fantasy skewed by earnestness into a truly otherworld absurdity: crenellated pseudo-Italian palaces of ornamental tilework and Moorish arches facing the beachfront boardwalk; winged lions and Celliniesque satyr faces decorating pillared walkways, cheek by jowl with the glaring ballyhoo of a carnival pier whose gateway blazed with lights spelling out RACE THRU THE CLOUDS; Oriental towers and Romanesque turrets capping establishments like the Owl Drug Store and assorted tattoo parlors and hot dog stands; streetcars clattering prosaically along the banks of silver canals whose waters reflected aisles of colored lights and the fading winter sky.

  Alec’s house was on a sort of island reached by a decorative camelback bridge in a district a little removed from the noise and lights of the piers. Palmetto, eucalyptus, Spanish dagger, and elephant ear grew everywhere; ducks quacked and flapped in the canal that lay within feet of his front door; and a small electric passenger train, nearly empty on this dank evening, rumbled past them as they negotiated a turn up a narrow alley to the back. Chang Ming flung himself out of the car and dashed to the water’s edge, getting his toes wet and barking wildly at the ducks.

  “I got the place because it was cheap,” Alec said, carrying magazines of film from the car to the sagging rear porch while Black Jasmine investigated the jungle around the house and Buttercreme huddled disapprovingly in her wicker box. “It’s romantic as hell to have a canal instead of a street in front of your house, but not everybody wants to shlep through the alley and the backyard. Besides, the canal floods at high tide and stinks like a fish market the rest of the time.”

  Through the plaster arch that led from the small, hopelessly cluttered front room into the bedroom, Norah glimpsed a single bed half-hidden in the ghostly folds of an old-fashioned mosquito bar. “What’s the neighborhood incidence of malaria?” she asked, and Alec grinned.

  “Seven or eight cases per summer—why do you think all the speakeasies under the piers serve gin? It goes with the quinine. Not that the summers are all they’re cracked up to be. We’re in a fog belt here.” He placed the gramophone carefully beneath an old bulb-legged table that was quite clearly its home and unpacked the shellac disks. A much larger electric cabinet phonograph occupied most of one wall, with a path to it cleared through a miscellaneous junk pile of light stands, reflectors, and a small electric generator radiating cables in all directions like an octopus.

  “In Los Angeles it’ll be clear and hot, but the fog’ll hang on here until two in the afternoon some days, then retreat out to sea and come sneaking back around six. Drives me nuts when directors try to film down here. Well, hi, Rube,” he added to an enormous golden tomcat that appeared on the back porch. “Long time, no see. Miss Hazel been feeding you decent? Miss Hazel lives next door,” he added, carrying the cat—which must have weighed nineteen or twenty pounds and, as was the way of cats, was loudly proclaiming imminent death from starvation—into the kitchen.

  Alec introduced the cat to the dogs, which came rushing in to see and rapidly discovered that cats were not to be played with, then put down food and water—on the floor for the dogs and on the tiled counter for Rhubarb. After that he led the two girls back out through the game trails of the overgrown yard, down the alley, and to a small street that paralleled the canal.

  “The problem is, the man who built Venice was a cigar manufacturer, not an engineer. You can’t get enough of a tidal scour to keep the canals fresh, and the breakwater they built to protect the pier plays hell with the currents around the beach. The real Venice is built the way it is for a purpose: to drain a series of low-lying islands. This is a movie set.”

  “But you love it anyway,” Norah said quietly, almost subconsciously reaching out and taking his hand.

  He looked at her, startled, and their eyes met with perfect understanding. Then he ducked his head, a little embarrassed, as he had been when she’d accused him of superstition at that queer Arabian Nights house in Edendale. “So sue me.”

  At the end of the street they turned left, crossed another camelback bridge over glassy dark water (“It’s only about four feet deep,” reported Alec), and found themselves walking along what appeared to be a half-scale railroad track under the shadow of the most enormous roller coaster Norah had ever seen.

  “The Race Thru the Clouds,” Alec explained, gesturing to the strings of lights that outlined the scaffolding to their left like illuminated dew. He raised his voice as a roller coaster car rocketed by in a terrifying rattle of wheels, trailing excited screams like banners of triumph in its wake. “And that,” he added with a sweep of his right arm, “is the Venice Lagoon.”

  “I think we call such things ponds in England,” Norah said gravely, contemplating the modest expanse of water in whose surface the lights of a small hotel on the far side glinted mistily, like a half-size Avalon. Despite the roller coaster, the scene was oddly pastoral. The point of land opposite them was thick with trees through which gleamed the occasional lights of a cottage window. Norah scrunched her hands more deeply into the pockets of Christine’s hand-me-down fur jacket, which had turned out to be made of vivid petunia silk, paneled with vaguely Egyptian motifs on the back and sleeves and adorned with an enormous collar and cuffs of trailing black monkey fur. She could smell, against the sewery reek of the lagoon, the salt bite of the ocean. The roar of the Race Thru the Clouds behind them was answered by the sweeping bellow of another roller coaster, like unimaginable beasts yearning to mate.

  She found herself wanting to rise up suddenly on her toes and dance. Christine was right, she thought, although Conrad Fishbein had actually written the lines. Sometimes one had to pick the rose and not worry about the thorns.

  They bypassed Venice Pier and took the red trolley car up Electric Avenue to the much more impressive Pickering/ Lick Pier, which stretched almost a thousand feet into the ocean on pilings and boasted nearly that much street frontage on Ocean Front Walk. The Breakers was situated about halfway along the midway, a plain white wooden building wedged between a billiards and bowling establishment and Finlay’s Museum of Natural Wonders, whose marquees were plastered with posters advertising a special exhibit of monsters of the prehistoric world.

  “I’d take you to the Ship down on Venice Pier,” said Alec, “except that’s where all the movie folks go. The reporters would be sure to look for you there. That all right?”

  “O
h, absolutely,” said Christine. “I mean, it’s one thing to escape death and get your picture on the front page of every paper in town getting off the train, but nobody looks beautiful while they’re chewing. Oh! Red liquorice! That stand over there has red liquorice...!” And she darted off with her borrowed mackintosh flapping and the diamonds on her hat sparkling, leaving Norah to stare around in wonder at the colored lights, the flamboyant posters, the freak shows, custard counters, and chop suey stands, and the crowds that even on a winter evening strolled along the dark and slightly splintery planks of that aisle of noisy glare.

  It had been a long time, she thought, since she’d come to a place like this purely for a child’s pleasure in carnival lights and saltwater taffy. Hawkers and shills yelled their dodges to the snap of the shooting galleries and the clank of Test Your Strength. Opposite them, glittering like an illuminated wedding cake in its domed pavilion, the most beautiful carousel Norah had ever seen circled serenely in a glowing lake of music. Behind that towered the scaffolding of something billed as the Blarney Racer Roller Coaster: It Will Scare You to Death.

  “It’s not bad,” Alec agreed judiciously as Christine returned with her hands full of rubbery snakes of red candy. “But for my money, give me the Zip over on the other side of the pier.”

  Christine let out a squeal of delight; Norah rolled her eyes. For a vampire who lived on the heart’s blood of discarded men, Christine was a sucker for roller coasters, and Norah resigned herself to an evening of comparing the merits of the two and quite possibly those of the Big Dipper and the Some Kick on Venice Pier as well. Her suggestion that supper be postponed until afterward was scornfully rejected as lily-livered, and as the Pacific fog closed in, Norah found herself, with a certain amount of amusement, standing next to the lighted posters advertising prehistoric monsters trapped in the tar pits of death and watching Alec and Christine wait for a chance in the Blarney Racer’s cars.