Bride of the Rat God

by Barbara Hambly

“All I’d ask,” she went on after a time, “is that you go to a psychiatrist and get help.”

  “Oh, God,” he whispered brokenly. “Yes, yes—I know I don’t have any other way of making a living, you see. Acting is all I know, all I’ve ever done. But the police, if they question me...” He looked up at her again, naked terror in his eyes. “If they hypnotize me, you see, I’m afraid of what I’ll say. Not so much because of what they’d learn, but because then I’d know.”

  She reached out and took his hands, her own fingers shrinking involuntarily from the bandages that covered cuts inflicted by a broken champagne bottle. “Christine’s having dinner with Mr. Brown tonight,” she said. That had been one of the handful of messages waiting for them when they’d returned to the St. Mark’s the previous night. “I’ll ask her to find out how much the police know, how much of a chance we might have of bringing you through this. In the meantime, if you need money...” She hesitated again. “I don’t have much, but Mr. Hraldy is paying me as a scenarist for the rewrite I did on She-Devil of Babylon.” That had been another of the messages, and it had surprised her almost as much as the one that invited her, as well as Christine, to Frank Brown’s Christmas party in Beverly Hills a week from Friday night. A third missive was from Conrad Fishbein, reminding both girls that they’d just heard from Charlie Sandringham in Vermont, if anybody asked. “So I can give you a hundred dollars, if that will help.”

  “A scenarist?” The tired lines blended into the wan illumination of a smile. “My dear girl, brava! You made sense out of that dreadful mishmash? Trust a woman who knows her Shakespeare! It’s really a woman’s picture, regardless of all that muscle flexing.”

  “Well, I thought so.” Norah smiled, oddly pleased and relieved to see in the expression on his face the look of a man who had found, in pleasure for a friend’s sake, a few moments of respite from the iron jail of obsession and fear.

  “Thank you.” He bowed his head to kiss her hands. “It is terribly good of you.”

  “I haven’t done anything yet,” Norah said. “And if this is something a psychiatrist can help you with, better that you get help than... than disappear into Mexico with... with whatever it is still inside you. All right?”

  His voice was barely audible. “All right.” As she drew her hands away, he looked up at her again, a fragile glint of humor returning to his haunted eyes. “Did her little dog really turn the chariot horses aside?”

  Norah nodded. “The big red one. Chang Ming.”

  He smiled wanly. “I thought that, of all things, had to be Fishy’s patented banana oil. Amazing.”

  She smiled at him as she left, but as she descended the stairs and walked along the trashiness of Electric Avenue in the thinning late-morning fog, she shivered at the recollection of that penitential room. He had been there a week, she thought, reading the newspapers, hoping things wouldn’t go wrong, fearing every knock on the door and every time he closed his eyes in sleep. Dreaming of seeing a rat’s eyes in the mirror just before darkness came.

  As she took a cab back up to Ivarene Street with a great pile of carpetbags and dogs, Norah wondered again what the dogs had been hunting in the dark house in Edendale where her own sleep had been plagued by evil dreams.

  “You are a cheat and the son of a Hakka whore! You turned that tile over once already...!” Like the gust of warmed air from the curtained door of a noodle factory, the words blew over the old man from a ramshackle balcony, then faded. Elsewhere, among ancient canyons of adobe and brick that seemed to bleed darkness, the sweet notes of a zither soared, men faded. Men’s voices muttered behind a tightly closed door in a crumbling wall. A woman laughed with false charm.

  Leaning on his staff, the old man called the Shining Crane moved on like the shadow of his own ghost, invisible in the dark.

  Nestled around its few blocks of alleys and squares, Chinatown seethed with clandestine life. Lights shone from the windows of restaurants in upper stories ringed by gaily painted balconies, though it was very late indeed; bands of brightness lent color to the banners that hung down over the centuries-old walls. On either side of the street, steps led down to doors that had once been at street level or, here and there, to sunken patios where barrows were still set up, hawking tunas—red and yellow cactus fruit—or cheap toys of braided straw and feathers. Figures jostled in lightless and unpaved alleys, men released from the silent burden of jobs washing shirts or rolling cigarettes to seek what meaning life might have to offer in pai-gow, or opium, or a woman’s arms. The sweetish breath of patna smoke wandered like incense above the stink of stale oil and cabbage leaves in the gutter. The Shining Crane stopped and turned his head, remembering his own years of respite in those quiet dens of sleep.

  He shook his head and moved on. Even now the molten amber quality of those dreams seemed good to him, too good. He could sleep for a month or a year, and when he woke, for better or worse, the cause of his anxiety would be gone. It would be easy. It was, after all, they who had driven him away, they who had refused to believe. He owed them no more.

  He paused on the corner of Alameda Street, where a small cinema stood, crowded between a hotel for single men only and a brick building that housed a grocery store on its lower floor and a restaurant on its upper and, he knew, a house of prostitution in its cellar and an opium den in the cellar below that. Light still surrounded the ticket booth, for the films would be running all night. One of his grandnephews had for a time held a job there, translating the English titles into Chinese and in places reinterpreting the story so that it would make more sense, for instance, explaining to the audience that Rudolph Valentino had been condemned to be gored to death by bulls for ravishing one of the mayor’s concubines rather than that he or anyone else would be so foolish as to fight them by choice.

  Shang Ko had been asked to mark the building with signs of protection. He could still see them glimmering on the seedy brickwork on either side of the door, the green dragon’s name on the left, the white tiger’s on the right. The names of the door gods themselves were scribbled in Shang Ko’s shaky scrawl on the cinema’s doors: Shen Shu and Yu Lei. In fact, it was one of the few buildings in the street that had not been robbed.

  Shang Ko sighed. His magic was strong. For human magic.

  Above the buildings the moon rode high in the clear, desert-bright sky. It was waxing toward full, bright enough now to be surrounded by a ghostly ring of light in the cold.

  The old man shivered. His heart and his flesh alike flinched from the recollection of red eyes taking shape in smoke before him, from the chisel glint of teeth and the pain of old scars that still ached outside and in. From the suffocating horror of the god’s mindless rage.

  He had marked the house in the hills, the house of the doomed lady Christine, with all the signs of power he could muster. Tiger and dragon, the door gods and words of warding on every window, and the eight trigrams on the eucalyptus trees that shadowed the drive. He had warned her. What more could he do?

  What more could he do?

  He gazed out across the street called Broadway into the bright lights of the American theaters; the moving glowworm brilliance of the lamps on automobiles, streetcars, taxicabs; the colored lights with which the Christians heralded the coming of their winter feast.

  The police would be watching for him. Even if they did not put him in prison, they would send him out of the country, and there were men in China who had long memories. Detectives had come looking for him twice already, though his friends had told them that he had not been seen, that he had left town already. His grandsons had urged him to actually do so, to travel to New York or San Francisco, where he had nephews and grandnephews. This, he knew, would be best. All his life he had been a wanderer, though never so alone as he had been since he had come to this country. He was used to the pain of losing family, home, pieces of his life.

  But as the moon grew stronger night by night, as the sun weakened and the days grew shorter, he remained.

  �
�Say what one will about California,” sighed Norah, stepping carefully out of the yellow Nash and wrapping her borrowed chinchilla around her, “under the circumstances, I am finding it very difficult to take Christmas seriously.”

  A red-jacketed Filipino youth climbed behind the roadster’s wheel and drove it away between sycamores whose leafless condition was the only indication of the season. An ad hoc car park, as far as Norah could tell, had been established down the hill on the far side of the tennis court.

  “That’s wonderful, darling,” Christine said sunnily, fishing in the pocket of her sables for cigarettes and her gold match case. “That there’s finally something you can’t take seriously.”

  Norah laughed. Christine’s beautifully drawn black brows arched, but Norah couldn’t very well explain why she had laughed. How indeed could one take anything seriously standing in an aisle of lights shining from lotus-shaped sconces held by ten-foot granite colossi that led up to the facade of a house built to resemble something from the Valley of the Kings?

  It was as if A. F. Brown had seen the exquisite Arabian Nights house in Edendale and decided to do it one better and on a far larger scale. Windows glowed in the winter darkness between pharaohic bas-reliefs of chariot-borne kings and stylized dancers. Two massive pylons flanked a doorway straight out of King Tut’s tomb; lotus-topped columns supported a frieze of hieroglyphs at the level of the second floor. For some reason it reminded Norah forcibly of the hot dog stand near Pershing Square that was actually shaped like a hot dog in a bun, and the wreaths of holly and ivy hanging from the massive bronze doors added the completing touch of silliness.

  How wonderful it was, she thought with delight, to own a studio and be able to live on an estate in Beverly Hills that looked exactly the way one wanted it to! And she laughed again at the sheer ponderous absurdity of so much Luxorian splendor rising amid the palm trees from the acres of green California lawn.

  “I mean,” Christine went on as they ascended the mighty sandstone steps to the lighted doors, “the way you frown and sigh and consider things with Alec, you’d think he was asking you to sign yourself into indentured servitude in a leper colony in Venezuela instead of jump into bed with him.”

  “He hasn’t asked me to jump into bed with him.” Norah’s voice was cool, but something inside her flinched at Christine’s words. In the week and a half of shooting that had followed their return from the desert, she had seen little of Alec alone. She was at the studio, looking after the dogs and working on scenarios in between acting as Alec’s assistant with the camera from eight in the morning until nearly nine at night, and the fact that the police had yet to find any trace of old Mr. Shang made her unwilling to leave her sister-in-law’s side. On two occasions when Frank Brown had taken Christine out for dinner, she had remained in the cutting room until after midnight, talking to Alec and listening to his gramophone before he drove her—dogs still in tow—back to Ivarene Street in time for her to tiptoe through the back door so that Christine would not be alone when Brown left.

  Between Brown’s jealous eye on his errant mistress and the continued animosity of the dogs, Blake Fallon kept his distance, but Norah was aware of his continued interest.

  She wondered if he’d make a pass at Christine in the convivial chaos of Colossus Studios’ Christmas party and what Christine would do about it if he did.

  “Hasn’t he?” Christine widened her kohl-fringed eyes. “Well, they never ask in so many words, you know, darling. But that’s what they all want. Really, darling, you’re going to turn into an old stick...”

  “I turned into an old stick years ago,” Norah replied calmly.

  “Should I ask him his intentions? Merry Christmas, Bainbridge... Norah, darling, this is Bainbridge, Frank’s butler. I think he’s the one who gave Frank all his information about dinner parties and high society for Kiss of Darkness. Oh, my God, look at the booze! Is that real French champagne, Frank, darling?”

  She trailed off in the direction of her stout and glowering host and the laden buffet table behind him, leaving the elderly black butler with an enormous armload of sable and chinchilla.

  “Of course it’s real French champagne.” Alec stepped from between two ebony and gold copies of Rameses II’s statues on the upper Nile. “The man out in Lankershim who brews it in his bathtub is named Pierre Thibideaux, and he’s as French as they come. And that—” He took Norah’s hand and held her out at arm’s length to view her dress. “—is exquisite.”

  “Christine bought it for me Saturday.” Her hands brushed the silk charmeuse of her dress, pale dust-beige and perfectly unornamented except that the great drapes of heavy fabric hanging at her back were lined with cardinal red that flashed like occasional fire when she moved. It was the first time in nine years she’d had a new evening gown—the styles had changed completely since the summer before the war. The first time in six years she’d worn an evening gown or anything new at all. Her hair, released from its customary bun, cascaded from the top of her head in a somewhat Grecian fashion, though she had serious doubts that the curls would last the evening. At the moment when Bainbridge had opened the doors, Norah had experienced a qualm of dread at meeting Alec after Christine’s casual words, but when she saw him, the feeling evaporated immediately.

  That’s what they all want.

  Well, perhaps they all did, thought Norah. But for some of them there was more to it than that.

  “That is to say, she dragged me down to I. Magnin and made me pick out something when she got hers, saying she couldn’t very well have me coming to Mr. Brown’s party looking like her duenna. That’s a very elegant suit.”

  Alec ran a thumb along the satin lapel. “Western Costume is a wonderful institution. Lon Chaney wore this very suit in Streets of London. Can I get you some Chateau Van Nuys, vintage 1923?”

  The interior of the mansion was just as much a set as the facade was. The massive hieroglyphed walls and lotus-columned doorways and the enormous reception room with its black and gold colossi and sarcophagus-pattern side tables bore a strong resemblance to something a Hollywood decorator would claim was the interior of the Great Pyramid, had King Khufu thought to furnish the place with nile-green and white enameled chairs, crocodile-footed tables, and a grand piano with baboon-faced gods reproduced on its legs. The addition of ivy garlands, crimson bows, wreaths the size of tractor wheels, and a towering and lavishly decorated Christmas tree beside the basalt monolith of the great stairway made Norah fight desperately against the urge to giggle. Between yet another pair of Ramesean colossi a small dais had been set up for Alice and the Rothstein brothers, who played “Good King Wenceslas” and “Silent Night” between selections from “Chu Chin Chow.” Since the basalt of the floor was relieved by polar bear rugs only in places, the voices of the five hundred well-lubricated guests rang loudly against the stone surfaces.

  Norah shook her head. “I am speechless. I am also overwhelmed with curiosity: Does he sleep on one of those spindly-legged couches one sees in the British Museum?”

  “Want to go up and look?”

  Norah watched as Flindy McColl, clothed in a truly startling confection of rose-colored fringe, floated up the stairs with the air of one virtuously on her way to powder her nose. Roberto Calderone had ascended a few moments earlier with the casual calm of complete innocence. “I tremble to think what we might interrupt.”

  “Alec!” called a soft southern voice from behind them. “Alec, Billy’s been dying to meet you.”

  Norah recognized the tall, slightly stooping form of D. W. Griffith, with a burly man at his side who had Alec’s way of angling his head to look at lights. While Alec was speaking to them, Blake Fallon appeared, fair hair smoothed back and blue eyes questing over the room in search of Christine, and introduced Norah to a handsome man whose name—Ken Vidal—she thought she recognized as that of a well-known director. “I’m so pleased to meet you,” she said, holding out her hand to him as Fallon was absorbed once more into the crowd. “
I’ve admired your work.” A politic lie since, other than Kiss of Darkness and Guns of the Sunset, she hadn’t seen a movie in four years.

  “Have you, my dear?” he purred, looking her up and down. Then he smiled graciously and took her by the arm and for the next half hour escorted her assiduously around the room, introducing her to men she recognized as the owners of studios or to somewhat more elderly and substantial gentlemen whom he described as “financial backers.” The only one she knew to talk to was the frail, gracious septuagenarian Ambrose Conklin, who had sent a thousand red roses to Chrysanda Flamande’s dressing room at Colossus three days earlier, to the profound annoyance of A. F. Brown.

  Christine, naturally, had immediately telephoned the film columnists of all six major newspapers in Los Angeles to have photographs taken of herself and the Pekes reclining in a sea of crimson blossoms. “Darling, it’s absolutely fabulous publicity for the picture,” she’d reassured Brown, passing a hand over his beefy shoulder. “And fabulous publicity for me,” she’d added to Norah later as they packed up the flowers to be carried by the carload to Ivarene Street. “I mean, just between the two of us, I’m not getting any younger, so if I can get a really big contract from Triangle or Lassky out of this, I’ll do it.”

  Conklin patted Norah’s hand and said, “Really, dear child, I didn’t know you knew Ken,” with a doubtful glance at the suave, dark man.

  Only later, when Alec had finally extricated himself from conversation with an almost incoherent Dale Wilmer, did he ask, “Do you know who that is?”

  Norah shook her head. “Vidal... isn’t he a director?”

  “That’s King Vidor... Ken arranges meetings between wealthy producers and beautiful would-be stars for the mutual benefit of all three parties. I hope you didn’t give any of those financial backers your telephone number.”

  Norah rolled her eyes. “What a childish piece of malice! Mr. Fallon introduced us—getting back at me for playing gooseberry, I suppose.” She looked quickly around but saw nothing of his fair head and broad black shoulders. Christine, slightly drunk, was leaning on the piano, raptly engaged in conversation with a tuxedoed and extremely shy-looking Monty, the stuntman from Red Bluff. Even more than Alec, she seemed to have acquired her outfit at Western Costume instead of I. Magnin, with an eye toward Mr. Brown’s decor: diaphanous silver tissue exquisitely pleated and caught together by a massive appliqué of Egyptian beadwork—turquoise, crimson, and bronze—on the left hip, trailing a cascade of bronze fringe almost to the floor. A similarly Egyptian jewel gleamed on her brow, supporting a tassel of peacock feathers, and the cold whiteness of the Chinese necklace shimmered on her half-bared breast.