Bride of the Rat God (29 page)

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 all 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...

And then, quite clearly in her mind, she heard the voice of old Mr. Shang, the Shining Crane:
I saw the necklace upon her throat... I knew it for what it was.

In the firelight, still circling Christine’s neck, the opals had exactly the red gleam of the eyes of rats, the gleam of Blake’s eye as he sprang toward them, the tire iron that had killed him upraised in his hand. The shadow in the center jewel was definitely moving; it wasn’t just the wild light of the flames. Alec shoved them toward the higher ground, where part of a half-constructed house stood, but with a sudden wrench Norah pulled her arm free of his grip. She tore at Christine’s throat, breaking loose the catch on the Moon of Rats and pulling free the ancient chains of pearl and opal and bronze. Alec yelled “NORAH!” in a voice she had never heard from him, but she dared not stop, dared not think about what she was doing. Holding the jewels high in her hand, she raced back to the burning car, toward the stooped, scuttling shape that ran toward them, its face twisted into nothing human. Flame was everywhere around her, framing the thing as it hesitated and turned toward her; the heat seared her face and bare arms, unbearable after the icy wind of the night.

She stopped within ten feet of Fallon—within ten feet of the burning wreck of the car, as close as she could get to the inferno—and flung the tangle of jewels and chains into the heart of the blaze.

Above the roar of the flames she heard Fallon scream. He—it—threw itself at her, past her, into the fire, but she was no longer looking. Rocks heated by the burning weeds and scrap lumber all around cut and scorched her feet as she clutched her skirts and ran as she had never run before, back to where Alec and Christine—
The idiots!
she thought frantically—waited for her by a half-constructed bungalow. It was only when she reached them that she dared to glance back and saw that Blake no longer pursued them.

From the shadows of the house frame and half-fallen roof where she clung grasping Alec’s shoulder, she saw the dark figure silhouetted against the fire, tearing and digging at the burning wreck.

Orange-yellow glare exploded off to their left. The derrick nearest the car was sheeted in a cone of flame. Suffocating heat poured into her lungs, beat on her like a physical force, so that she could barely draw breath. For the first time she felt pain in her feet. Somewhere sirens wailed.

Alec pulled them into the aborted ruin of the bungalow and out the back, collecting a yardlong chunk of two-by-four for himself and another for her. Christine, stumbling between them in her bloody gown, was barely on her feet.

“That’ll be the Gilmore Oil boys,” he said, leading the way through a dark jumble of dead trees and ankle-deep rustling leaves. Now and then Norah would bark her shins painfully on something iron and ash-smelly, as if the grove were scattered with rusty little stoves. Above the smoke the night smelled thickly of rotting oranges. “LA County wouldn’t get their engines out here this fast.”

His voice sounded quite normal. Norah wondered how on earth he could manage that until she heard herself say, “He’s trying to get the necklace.” The black figure could still be seen moving around the burning car, prying off pieces of flaming iron.

There was a long, long silence.

Then Alec breathed. “Jesus.”

“He made the ground catch fire,” whispered Christine. “Can he... can he follow us? Can he just burn us up where we sit?” She sank down onto a stump, shaking all over, her voice barely more than a rattle. Norah realized that here, away from the flames, it was surprisingly cold, and she was racked with wave after wave of uncontrollable trembling. Alec stripped off his suit jacket and put it around Christine’s shoulders, then cast a helpless look at Norah. Fumblingly, she pulled the wings of her dress forward around her own bare arms. Wounds from the shrapnel left trails of blood through the coating of filth. Somewhere in the back of her mind she thought,
There goes three hundred dollars of Christine’s money...

“I don’t think so,” Alec answered Christine’s question after a time. “He may not be able to track us without the necklace. I think what he did was... was explode the underground methane or maybe the oil beneath the surface of the ground. Jesus,” he whispered again. He, too, had begun to shake.

“You killed him,” Christine said slowly. “Norah—Alec—I gouged his eye out. I knew he was going to kill me, I jammed my thumb in his eye, and it just... just...” She shook her head and bowed over suddenly, retching, holding her black and gummy hands to her mouth. After a moment she spoke again, her voice a broken wheeze, and Norah reflected that it must hurt her to speak at all. “He just kept... kept coming. Like he didn’t even feel it.” She pulled the tux jacket closer around her shoulders and hunched over again. She could not stop trembling.

“No,” Alec said softly. By the glare of the distant flames Norah could see how the sweat glittered in his beard. Soot and blood made a long, charred-looking V down the front of his marble-white shirt. His hand was unsteady as he pushed up his glasses, watching the first of the fire trucks arriving, the men swarming around the column of fire that spouted from the burning well. Overhead the resplendent full moon seemed to watch, indifferent in its halo of ice.

Nobody went near the flaming wreck of the car. There was no sign of Blake Fallon.

“Poor Blake,” whispered Christine after a time.

“Yes,” Norah said softly, hearing a broken voice whisper,
The rat... I saw its eyes reflected in the mirror above the bar...
“Poor Blake.”

Her mind went back to the giggling girls in the Cafe Montmartre, the drugged glitter of Fallon’s eyes and his roars of silly laughter as he dumped his drink over the waiter’s head.

It must have got him that night,
she thought quite clearly, as if she were reading a title card in a film.
The way it got Charlie, drunk out of his mind on bootleg champagne...

Christine looked up and pushed the thick hedgerow of her hair from her eyes. She had lost her jeweled bandeau with its peacock feathers, and under Alec’s jacket her white throat was a mass of cuts where Blake’s hands had driven the bronze links into the flesh. In her broken voice she whispered, “What happens now?”

“Now?” Norah looked out at the confusion of men and fire trucks in the red glare around the oil well. She took a deep breath. “Now we take the streetcar back to Hollywood and phone Mr. Brown to tell him that Blake Fallon went mad and tried to murder you—and may very well have murdered that poor boy you left the party with.”

“Monty!” Christine pressed her bloodied hands to her mouth again. “Oh, poor Monty!”

“If they haven’t found him by this time, they will when we call,” Norah said firmly. “I’m sure Mr. Brown and Mr. Fishbein between them will figure out what to tell the police. Tonight we all get a good night’s rest—preferably all in the same room—and tomorrow,” she concluded, “I think we had best go to Chinatown and see if we can find Mr. Shang.”