Bride of the Rat God

by Barbara Hambly

  “Don’t be silly, darling,” she’d said earlier, when—only an hour late for the party, which for Christine was good—Norah had uneasily tried to talk her out of wearing the Moon of Rats. “Ambrose is going to be there, and what with him sending me all those roses and the way Blake has been following me around, I think Frank needs to see where my affections still lie.”

  Short on sleep from dinner with Brown the previous night and weary from a day’s filming, Christine had clearly dosed herself with “razzle-dazzle” and had the dangerously brittle brightness that brooked no argument. Watching her now, Norah guessed by her languid amorousness toward the young horse wrangler and her restless, flippant, provocative glances in Frank Brown’s direction that she’d had another dose of the same at some point in the evening, on top of copious quantities of gin and champagne—far from the only person in the room to have done so. Dale Wilmer had already been escorted off the premises, stumbling into pillars as he went. In the harsh electric glare the shadow in the central jewel didn’t seem to move at all until one took one’s eyes off it.

  Norah sighed. I’m not her mother, she thought wearily. If she disappears upstairs for half the evening—Flindy McColl was on her third trip—it isn’t any of my business. She wondered if Alec would mind giving her a lift home.

  Then Christine’s voice cut into her consciousness over the din of the crowd, “Well, I always thought there was something fishy about it,” she said, now holding on to the boy’s hand and gesturing with the other hand in a line of cigarette smoke. “I could swear I saw Charlie in Venice a week ago, getting off a streetcar...”

  “My dear Norah,” a voice said behind her, and a small, bony hand closed like a shackle on her wrist just as she was heading in Christine’s direction. Turning, she saw Mrs. Violet, severely robed in mauve and pearls and quite clearly not about to have a good time.

  “Excuse me,” she began, but Mrs. Violet kept her grip.

  “Now, my dear, I know you’re from a foreign country and don’t know all the ins and outs of Hollywood, so surely you won’t take it amiss that I warn you against men like that dreadful Ken Vidal...”

  Norah cast a despairing glance back at Christine, just in time to see her and the stuntman vanish, through a very tall bronze door into some other room. She thought she heard someone ask, “What would Charlie be doing in Venice, Chris?”

  “Looking for a drink, darling, what else?”

  That little idiot...

  “...mansions on Adams Avenue and disgraceful carryings-on designed to turn the heads of good girls like yourself, let alone girls like Christine, and believe me, I hold nothing against Christine, but...”

  Damn it, thought Norah. There was literally no telling who was here tonight. But if Aaron Jesperson had been telephoning the police as well as the newspapers—a logical assumption—it stood to reason that they would have sent some well-dressed informer to circulate at the Colossus Christmas party.

  “Ah, my dearest Madame Blackstone!” cried Hraldy, edging his way through the crowd and completely ignoring the still-fulminating Mrs. Violet. He led a tall and extremely queenly woman in purple chiffon, irresistibly reminding Norah of an overly eager poodle dragging its mistress on a leash. “All evening I am look for you to introduce you to so-fabulous Miss Glyn.”

  Apparently the distractedness of her replies and her increasingly obvious efforts to conclude the conversations and leave went unperceived. Quite possibly, she reflected, neither Mrs. Violet, Elinor Glyn, nor Mikos Hraldy could conceive of anyone wanting to escape from their company. It was ten minutes before Alec cut ruthlessly into the little group, caught Norah by the arm and said, “Norah, Mr. Brown wants to see you right away,” and steered her out of the nearest door—fortunately, the bronze monolith through which Christine and the stuntman had disappeared.

  The room was a sort of study, its low ceiling painted dark blue and studded with stars a la early dynastic paintings. Monkey-faced gods peered out from between massive bookcases and lotus-headed columns flanking French windows whose curtains—printed with papyrus and more hieroglyphics—belled gently with the cold influx of the night wind.

  “The idiot!” sighed Norah, flinging open the curtains and stepping out onto an expanse of granite terrace beyond. Sphinxes, their necks wreathed in ivy and mistletoe, guarded steps leading down into a darkness of grass still wet from two days of rain. The full moon hung cold in midheaven, flooding the lawn with a nacreous light and turning the grass to a carpet of quicksilver beads. Beyond a thin line of trees the parked autos gleamed like polished steel eggs.

  Against those distant trees Christine’s silvery dress glimmered fairylike, blending with the black shape of the young man upon whose shoulder she leaned.

  “You going after her?” Alec perched on the back of a sphinx as Norah paused irresolutely. His glasses flashed as he turned his head to look across the acre of lawn, where the far-off shapes made their leisured way toward the darkness of the woods.

  Then he said “What the...?” and sprang to his feet. Norah, following his eyes, saw the white gleam of Christine’s dress as it wavered and fluttered with sudden movement like a lily in the wind. Against the dark of the trees it was hard to tell, but there was blurred movement; it was quite clear when Christine fell—or was thrown—to the ground.

  Both she and Alec were halfway across the lawn when they heard her scream.

  SIXTEEN

  LAKE OVER MOUNTAIN

  Sign of sacrifice.

  Auspicious to take a bride...

  Ill omens—it is better to stay home...

  LATER, NORAH SUPPOSED that she or Alec should have run back into the house for help, though she suspected that Christine would have been dead before enough sober guests were found to undertake a rescue. Even while she and Alec were racing across the sodden grass, she guessed the scream wouldn’t be heard over the din of the party.

  It was only when Alec yelled “BLAKE!” that Norah realized who it was bending over Christine’s body.

  Norah had stopped to pull off her shoes. She had a blurred impression of Fallon straddling Christine and thought for one furious second that in a drunken rage he was trying to rape her. The next moment she realized his hands were around Christine’s throat. Christine’s body bucked and heaved, trying to twist free of him, and Norah, still running madly across what seemed dreamlike miles of lawn, saw a white arm snake up past the black one and rip at the down-bent face.

  The next second Alec reached the two struggling figures and seized Fallon by the shoulders, heaving at him like a man trying to thrust over a great weight. Christine clawed at Fallon’s hands, and Norah glimpsed blood, huge gouts of it splashing everywhere—she could smell the heavy stink of it—far more than fingernails could have drawn. Then Fallon turned his head.

  Christine had gouged out his left eye.

  And he didn’t seem to notice.

  Blood covered Christine’s hand, ran down her arm, dribbled thickly onto her white dress; the whole side of Fallon’s face was masked in it. He wore no expression of pain, no expression whatsoever.

  Alec sprang back, unable to break the insane strength of the larger man’s grip, and delivered a kick to the side of Fallon’s head with all the strength in his body. Norah saw the head whip sideways and heard, small but very clear, a sound that had to be the spine snapping. At the same instant Christine wrenched her arm around and rolled with the whole of her weight against the hands upon her throat. Fallon fell sideways, Christine slithering from under him, up onto her hands and knees, long hair dragging down over her face, stockings torn, and white gown a tangle of grass and mud and gore.

  Head lolling like a half-decapitated doll’s, Fallon lunged at her again.

  By that time Norah was looking around for a weapon, cursing the fact that she’d left her high-heeled shoes somewhere behind. For the first time she saw the body of the boy Monty in the velvet shadows of the shrubbery, head covered with blood, the stubby glint of a tire iron nearby. Everything
seemed to be taking place on film that had been cranked very high so that it moved cold-treacle slow when shown at normal camera speed: Christine’s struggles against the hands that tore at her breasts, her face, her clothing, trying to reach her throat again; Alec on Fallon’s back, ignored as if he weren’t there. Norah caught up the tire iron and strode forward, raising it above her head like a navvy driving a rail spike. “Alec!” she screamed, and Alec dropped aside as she brought the bar down with all the strength in her arms.

  The skull caved like a split melon, the sound and smell hideous, blood, hair, and worse things splattering everywhere. Alec grabbed Christine, pulled her free, and held her while she hung on to him with her bloody hand, sobbing, and Norah stepped back, trembling, staring down at what she had done and feeling that she was about to be sick.

  The tire iron dropped from hands that suddenly seemed to have no strength left. Absurdly, she remembered Jim’s first letter to her from the front: I never killed a man before. I didn’t know if I could. And now I’ve killed two, three... And those only the ones I could see. I didn’t even ask myself what I was doing. When some total stranger is coming at you with a bayonet, you don’t ask.

  Archipelagoes of blood and matter strung the shimmer of her dress, soaking through like warm glue against her legs.

  Alec started to gasp, “Are you all right?” but even that sentence wasn’t finished.

  Fallon rolled over and started to get up.

  For one second Norah thought—probably they all thought, she reflected—that it was only some bizarre motor reflex. But when he gathered his hands under him and stood, brains and gore leaking down his tuxedo-clad shoulders, when he picked up the tire iron with a hand dark with his own blood, when he looked at them with his single remaining eye reflecting red in the glare of the parking lot lights on the other side of the tennis court, they knew.

  He shouted something, Norah didn’t know what. Tire iron in hand, he came at them, but she and Alec were already running, dragging the exhausted Christine between them. Fallon—Fallon’s corpse, murder like the cold blaze of the moon in his face under the black striping of blood—was between them and the house. Trees scraped at Norah’s bare arms as they crashed through the woods toward the temporary parking lot, and Norah could hear the whip and hiss of the foliage around another body shambling just behind her. She could smell the blood and the waste his body had voided when life had left it. She wasn’t even conscious of a sense of nightmare, only that she had to escape, whatever the cost, that she must not let the thing behind them touch her.

  Alec flung himself into the nearest open touring car, jammed the starter pedal and hit the button on the dash, then stamped the accelerator as Norah shoved Christine in before her, scrambling over the running board as the vehicle sprang forward and the thing burst from the woods and hurled itself at the rear of the car. Thank God the engine’s still warm, Norah thought blindly.

  A moment later there was a surging roar, another engine firing up; those in the rear ranks of the lot would be the latest arrived. Norah turned, but they were jolting at top speed up the winding driveway and she could see nothing but the wink of occasional moonlight on metal only a few yards behind.

  Christine was on her knees on the seat beside her, leaning, as Norah herself was doing, over the back. With one hand Christine held on to the tucked velvet upholstery; the other was pressed against her throat, hair swirling around her face in the slipstream. She was gasping “Oh, shit, oh shit...” in a ragged voice very unlike her own. Her silver-tissue dress reeked of blood and clung to her breasts.

  The car behind them, a huge open Studebaker undoubtedly belonging, like their own, to some studio executive, was gaining. Norah got a brief, dissociated flash of a frosted-glass sculpture of two leaping gazelles on its hood as it drew opposite their rear quarter, then veered sharply to clip them nearly off the road. Norah and Christine grabbed hard at the seat, and Alec swore, fighting to keep from going into a skid. They flashed into moonlight as they passed the monolithic bulk of the house, and Norah saw Fallon’s face behind the Studebaker’s wheel, dark clots flying backward from the hollow socket, lips drawn in a fixed grimace of animal viciousness.

  “Norah! Chris!” Alec yelled as they accelerated down the wide drive toward Benedict Canyon Drive. “Search the car; some of these guys carry guns.”

  “You think that’s going to do any good?” Norah shouted back as she ran desperate hands over the lacquered rosewood of the interior sides, the delicate fluting of the hardwood flooring, and the inlaywork below the velvet seats. She found two silver flasks—full—four tubes of lipstick, and a small celluloid box whose contents she had neither the time nor the inclination to investigate and flung herself forward over the intervening seats to pull open the glove box, ill with terror that the next sharp turn or strike from the car behind them would hurl her out. The long wings of her gown dragged at her shoulders, red and silver sails in the wind. The Studebaker was only feet behind them, slightly to the right and fighting to gain enough for another clip.

  “Shoot the tires!” croaked Christine, still searching in the back.

  “Don’t be ridiculous. You’d have to be William S. Hart to bit them!”

  “Radiator,” Alec said, and then, “Hang on!” as he whipped without slowing around the corner and onto the tree-lined blackness of Benedict Canyon Drive. Now and then Norah could glimpse the marble face of the full moon. Who had said, He takes his strength from the moon...? “Find anything?”

  “No!” yelled Norah, and Christine added, “Fucking pacifist!”

  Trees and darkness blurred around them. The car jarred with another hard blow to its rear quarter; Norah gasped, belly-down across the back of the seat, arms braced to keep herself from being flung out as she searched. Through the flapping back drapes of the dress that had seemed such a good idea on Saturday afternoon, she had a flying glimpse of lights through the trees to her right, the stumpy towers of the Beverly Hills Hotel isolated against the sky. Alec wove and dodged as the Studebaker, heedless of terrain, tried to cut them off by crossing Sunset. As they plunged down dark streets among the scattered, sleeping houses, Alec hit the horn, trailing noise like a desperate banner.

  “Downtown!” he yelled over the blaring of the horn and the roar of the road as he eluded the pursuit by inches to swing onto Wilshire. The cars leapt like deer over the bare hills, pebbles flying from beneath the wheels, past orchards and bean fields. Then the spiky, alien derricks of the oil fields loomed against the glow of Los Angeles in the eastern sky. “Police have got to come...”

  Evidently Fallon was aware of this as well. Weaving and swinging on the fast straightaway of Wilshire Boulevard, he managed to catch them sidelong, ramming them a third time as Alec tried to pull out of the skid. There was a hideous bump, and Norah felt one of the off-side tires blow. Alec braked hard, and the car fishtailed off the road and up onto a flat desolation of bare ground as the Studebaker flashed past, brakes squealing in the cold, moonlit night.

  They were in bad ground, packed dirt and empty fields studded with oil derricks like H. G. Wells’s Martian machines, scattered with the ruins of abandoned housing developments and what had been orchards.

  Pools of stagnant water gleamed slimily in the frost-cold light. Not more than a mile off, sprinkled gold showed where La Brea Avenue lay. Alec was already out of the car, dragging Norah and Christine. The Studebaker swung around and roared back toward them. Alec yelled, “High ground! Derricks—tools...”

  “There might be tools in the boot!” Norah yelled back, turning against his pulling hand with some idea of going back to the car even as she stumbled barefoot after him.

  Her mind registered Too late as she saw the Studebaker stop, the dark form rise in its driver’s seat, the white blur of a hand outstretched.

  What happened then Norah could only put together in pieces afterward, as if her mind could not deal with the whole of it at the time. It was hard to tell in the latticed shadows of the derricks al
l around them, but it seemed to her that the ground moved, a hiccup or belch, a heave of the earth beneath her feet. Fissures split in the moon-blanched dust. For an instant the air reeked of sulfur, shimmered behind them, around the car...

  Then, with a thunderclap, the shimmer burst into flame. Alec and Christine fell to their knees with the impact. Oily heat rolled over Norah like a wave, and she heard someone—herself or Christine—scream. Fire tongued through the bare dirt. Behind them the car exploded with a shattering roar. Norah ducked, covering her face as burning fragments of shrapnel rained around them and the air filled with lung-rotting smoke, the stink of tar, burned rubber, and dust.

  She didn’t remember falling, but somehow Alec was hauling her to her feet, yelling, “That way! Away from the derricks!” She had an impression of a black shape clambering out of the Studebaker in the road, hunched now, arms hanging, beastlike with its dripping face and lolling head. A single eye shone red in the reflections of the fire. More flame roared up around them, the earth heaving and jerking again, and the sulfurous smell of gas choked her. Foxtails and tufts of scrubby grass caught, flared, and burned with a smoky ferocity despite yesterday’s rain. What would have happened if the grass had been dry Norah dared not think. A ragged zone of intermittent flame surrounded them, fifty feet across. The gas flames on top of the derricks stretched, elongated, brightened against the abyss of the sky. Dear God, if one of them goes up...