Medusa's Web (15 page)

“You don't think it's wrong to . . . abandon her here?” she said. “She did love us. Does.”

“She loves you the way a drowning person loves somebody they can push down and climb on top of.” Madeline was still staring at him, so he clarified, “No, it's not wrong.”

She nodded solemnly. “Thank God. Thank God she went too far. It's been no fun after all, being back here.”

She leaned to the side and picked up the phone book Scott had brought back from Amity's office. “I hope they don't stay up too late. Whose blood do you think she meant? Crying out?”

“Hard to say.”

“Aunt Amity stopped watching that movie when we were kids. Do you remember when she stopped?”

“Some time before we looked at
Oneida Inc,
for sure.” Scott took a long draw on the cigarette, then said, exhaling, “Otherwise that scene where Salomé had the tendrils growing out of her head would have had you and me diving right out the window.”

Ride down Sunset again, he thought, tonight, with the cold fresh wind in my face, and never ride up Vista Del Mar again.

“I only saw it for a second, before she shoved me,” said Madeline, nodding, “but it knocked me for a row of carrots.” She had been flipping through the pages of the phone book and paused at one page. “Here's Paul Speas, in L.A. It's old, a four-digit number. That was Aunt Amity's dad, right?”

Scott dropped his cigarette into a coffee cup on the windowsill. “Let me get the envelope.” He hurried through Madeline's room to his own and lifted one corner of the mattress. Under it, the unopened pint bottle of Wild Turkey was lying beside the manila envelope on which their mother had written
Backup copies.
He pulled out the envelope and carried it back to their parents' room, where he shook out the papers onto the ruined mattress beside Madeline.

He picked up one of the photocopied pages and peered at it. “Right. Paul David Speas married Charlene Claimayne Cooper in '21.” He looked up. “And sometime a Paul and Charlene stole the exorcism film reel from your Natacha, according to your printout. And presumably that's the same Natacha Rambova who made the sets and costumes for that damn movie.”

“And here's a Genod Speas, in Culver City.”

Scott nodded. “I found a bunch of checks Aunt Amity wrote to him. Claimayne says it's a brother of hers.”

“A brother? Who knew?” Madeline was still leafing through the phone book. “And here's Adrian Ostriker. Where did we hear of the name Ostriker?”

“Here.” Scott picked up the sheet that was a copy of notes their mother had made. “Mom wrote,
Ten percent finder's fee to Ostriker?
And she put the name Ostriker in quotes, like it's an alias.
If he squawks. And point out that he should be grateful for no exposure of him, i.e., wheelbugs,
and under that she wrote,
And WDT murder?
”

Madeline shivered. “That Taylor guy you saw get shot, I bet his
initials were W. D. T. I'm glad we're getting out of here. Do you think she remembered the canned 'sparagus?”

“What?” Scott shook his head. “Who, Mom?”

Madeline giggled. “No—Ariel. Tonight at dinner.”

“Oh! I don't know. That'd be nice.”

“She said she didn't mean to, but she
would
say that. She wants to make sure she doesn't like you anymore.” Madeline put the phone book down on the mattress. “What's the other book?”

“I think she's pretty sure.” Scott picked up the Valentino biography and handed it to her. “There's no writing or bookmarks or anything, except for a note on the front flyleaf in Mom's handwriting.”

After glancing at the cover picture, Madeline opened the book to the flyleaf and stared at the writing for a moment. “
Keep it, I've got more copies,
Mom wrote. That sounds like, ‘Keep this print, I've got the negative.' More and more it looks like blackmail.”

“True. Though I don't see how anything to do with Valentino could be relevant.”

Madeline flipped through the pages of the book, pausing at the section of photographs in the middle.

“I think—” she began; then she gripped the book tightly, staring at one photograph. “Oh my God, Scott, oh my God!”

Alarmed, Scott sat down beside her on the bed; the pages the book was opened to showed two black-and-white photographs, one of Valentino in sporting clothes in front of a car and a house, the other of Valentino in a sweater standing with Douglas Fairbanks and a young Jackie Coogan.

“What?” Scott asked, a bit shrilly.

“That!” exclaimed Madeline, letting go of one side of the book to tap the picture of Valentino alone. “And there he is too,” she added, sliding her finger to Valentino's half-shadowed face on the opposite page. “That's—I swear that's the man I saw in the Usabo vision! When we were kids! He took my hand and led me out of the horrible rush of . . .
avalanche
of other people's experiences,
stinging
experi
ences. He told me ‘My dear, my dear, it is not so dreadful here.'” Scott saw tears actually spurt from Madeline's eyes as she asked, “Is he dead?”

Scott spread his hands helplessly. “No deader than he was when he spoke to you then. He died young, as I recall. Is this really the first time you've ever seen a picture of Rudolph Valentino?”

“No—but like on the cover, he was always made up and wearing a, an Arab curtain-hat, you know? Not like a normal person, like he is here.” She exhaled shakily. “I found him. I knew I would, I
always
knew I would.”

Scott remembered finding Madeline in the basement yesterday—she had at first mistaken him for someone else, come to save her:
somebody I sort of met in this house once . . .

He peered over her shoulder at the pictures in the book, and now his chest suddenly felt hollow. “Madeline,” he said carefully; he paused to stare again at the face in the two photographs. Certain now, he went on, “Madeline, that's the guy who was with Natacha when she shot the Taylor guy.”

“What, are you sure? But—you said he didn't want her to, right?”

“He didn't seem happy to come back inside and see she'd done it. Of course it wasn't
really
her that did it.”

Madeline hefted the book. “I finally know who he is!”

Was,
thought Scott. He reached past her elbow and flipped through the other photograph pages, and at one he paused. “That's weird,” he said.

He leaned over the photocopies on the mattress and palmed the top sheets aside. He found the copy of the nude photograph of their aunt and straightened up with it.

“Oh, put that down, Scott,” Madeline said, again looking away from it. “I wasn't—”

“Look at it—not at her, at that couch-thing behind her, and that bolster on the carpet.”

Madeline peered at the paper sideways. “I see them.”

Scott held it up beside the book Madeline was still holding. “Now look at that picture of Valentino.”

Madeline looked from the photocopied page Scott was holding to the picture in the book, which showed Valentino dressed as some sort of rajah in front of the same ornate settee.

“It's the same place,” she said.

“Maddy, look at the wrinkles in that bolster on the floor! Look at the angles of the pillows! It's the same
time
!”

Madeline frowned at the two pictures, and nodded. “I thought Valentino was in silent movies. Like in the '20s.”

“He was—here, give me the book.” Scott opened it to the beginning of a chapter near the end and flipped through several pages. “Uh, it says he was married to Natacha . . .” He saw Madeline frown and quickly turned some more pages. “Ah. He died on August 23, 1926.”

Madeline took the photocopy page from Scott and finally looked at it closely; then she looked at the photograph in the book. “But—Aunt Amity was born in 1944.”

“That picture of her was taken no later than 1926, unless nobody moved those cushions and stuff for about forty years.”

“It looks real. And it's her, unless she was a twin of her mother.”

“With the same mole on the throat?”

“Oh. Yeah.” Madeline looked away. “Could it have been photoshopped?”

“Why would somebody fake up a photo that's obviously impossible? And anyway, it's been in the wall here since at least 1991. I don't think Photoshop was around yet.”

“
This
must be the blackmail thing, somehow,” Madeline said, “not her being naked.”

Scott took the book from Madeline and flipped to the page before the section of photos, and then he picked up the photocopy sheet with the picture of the two naked women in a passionate embrace.

“Right. Look at the Post-it note on this one—
‘IS following 244.'
The photos in the book follow page 244. And,” he went on, closing the book to look at the cover, “the author's name is Irving Schulman.
I.S.
The blackmail . . . thing, issue, is apparently that she's documentably there in the 1920s.”

“And all that stuff,” said Madeline, waving at the copies of the birth certificates and the marriage license, “must be part of it, right? Or else why would Mom and Dad have included them in the blackmail package?”

“And who could Mom and Dad have been threatening to show it all to?” He waved his free hand. “Whoever Aunt Amity . . . I don't know, stole a time machine from?”

“Maybe she just walked back to 1920 the same way I did yesterday.” Madeline yawned. “It looks like she got to stay a lot longer than I did. At least she had time to take off her clothes.”

Scott got to his feet and gathered up the papers and slid them back into the envelope. “We should pack up our stuff, and we might as well take this with us.” He was more saddened than he would have expected at the prospect of never seeing Ariel again.
She wants to make sure she doesn't like you anymore,
Madeline had said.

He looked at Madeline. She had stood up and was giving him a stricken look.

“What?” he said, suddenly apprehensive.

“Oh, hell,” she wailed, “I can't leave now, Scott!”

His heart sank, and he pretended to misunderstand her. “We can wait till morning—I'll stay up with you—”

“
He's
in all this! Him, Valentino! I can get back to him if I stay, I know it. Aunt Amity—I'm scared of her, but it was her Oneida Ince spider that led me to him. That spider's gone now, but . . . Aunt Amity isn't.” She crossed to her purse and slid the Valentino biography and the old phone book into it.

Scott forced his voice to stay level. “It's all just ghosts, Maddy. Like watching the people in that old movie. When I saw Valentino at Taylor's apartment, he wasn't aware of
me
.”

“He was aware of me in the Usabo vision,” said Madeline. She sniffed and looked around the bare room. “But you don't have to stay; you can leave. I've just got to find
him
again. He'll know what to do.”

“Maddy, he's
gone
. That was
me
who found you in the basement yesterday.”

“I know. But it was almost him.”

Scott wondered bleakly if he could somehow just kidnap his sister and forcibly take her far away from all this.

I need to find the exorcism, he thought.

CLAIMAYNE WAS SWEATING, AND
his heart was pounding at an alarming rate; the pains in his chest were like tightening wires. He sat back gingerly in his bed and switched off the intercom when the tinny speaker transmitted the clumping of Scott walking back to his own room. The notes he had scribbled on a legal pad were crabbed and hasty, and he painfully leaned sideways to see them better in the light from the bedside table lamp.

He took a deep breath and let it out. His heartbeat was beginning to subside, the pains lessening. I
knew
they looked at the
Oneida Inc
spider! he thought. Apparently that was the occasion of what Madwoman calls the . . . what was it, the Gustavo vision? The Ysabeau vision? Something like that.

And—Rudolph Valentino spoke to her in it? Poor child, I think
that
was definitely an hallucination! But she may well have walked to 1920, through the same kind of spontaneous gap that let Ariel see that old car in the driveway today.

He shook his head sharply and looked at another of his notes.

They'd discovered an awful lot about his mother. Oh well, can't threaten a dead woman.

Who, he wondered, is Adrian Ostriker? Art and Irina were apparently considering paying him a finder's fee, for the blackmail
information. I knew they tried to blackmail my mother, but I never managed to find their evidence. Hidden in a wall and an old biography of Valentino!

And Scott was clearly lying this afternoon, when he said he had not found my cloisonné box.

Claimayne took several deep breaths to let his heart slow down again.

The pad fell to the carpet as he groped for his cell phone on the bedside table; and when he had got it, he had to dig into the pocket of his dressing gown for the business card.

At last he was able to punch in the numbers on the card.

“Hello?” he said after a few seconds. “Mr. Ferdalisi? This is Claimayne Madden. I'm sorry our meeting this afternoon ended in some acrimony.” After a few seconds he went on, “But I find I
do
after all have something concrete to bargain with. And I want to keep one-half of it.”

AFTER LYING IN BED
in the dark for an hour, Scott swung his feet out from under the covers to the floor. He was oddly tense, and at first he assumed that it was the bottle of Wild Turkey under the mattress that was nagging at him. Like the princess and the pea, he thought. He considered pulling the bottle out, and when he discovered that the idea held no particular attraction, he went on to imagine opening it and taking a fumy mouthful of the bourbon.

But that felt . . . irrelevant. What, he thought cautiously—have I lost the old compulsion?

Then it occurred to him that he had discovered a new one.

He didn't switch on the light, because the connecting door to Madeline's room was open, but he picked up his leather jacket from the floor and carried it to the window, where a shaft of moonlight illuminated the windowsill and a patch of the wooden floor.

I'm thinking of Madeline, he told himself. Now that she's convinced that Rudolph Valentino—for God's sake—is a part of all this, accessible here, she won't ever leave this house and Aunt Amity's predatory presence. But Taylor's exorcism might very well tear the whole web apart.

And I saw it, that film can. I held it—decades ago, through Natacha Rambova's hands.

During these last two days, Madeline and I have consistently had visions in which the Usabo spider was present, but we didn't look directly at it. And the visions have been sequential—I saw Natacha's hand holding the Medusa folder, then Madeline saw the Kosloff fellow get it away from her, and this afternoon I saw Natacha steal the film with the image on it—the exorcism film, which Taylor put together to nullify the Medusa spider and with it all the spiders.
You must know I've tried to stop the havoc this sickness has caused in our community, Natacha!

If I look at another spider, I'll probably see a more recent location for that film reel. Possibly I'll see where it is now.

Scott reached into the pocket of his jacket and pulled out one of the three remaining folded spiders that had been in the cloisonné box. It was crumpled, and he straightened it between shaking fingers. Squinting, he could just make out the word
Innamorati
penciled on it.

That moment of no identity, he thought, of not being
me
for a blessed measureless interval—

No, he told himself, you're doing it for Madeline.

Quickly, before the ostensible virtue of that thought could fade, he opened the paper and stared at the eight radiating lines.

WHEN THE VERTICAL FIGURES
moved aside and he was again aware of who he was, he was staring at a lamplit face a few feet away from him, and it was the face of the young man who had been with Natacha at Taylor's apartment—this was Rudolph Valentino.

Only after a moment did Scott become aware of the long jaw, the unlined forehead under close-cropped brown hair; the heavy-lidded eyes caught and held his attention. One looked straight into his, and the other stared slightly to the side.

The lips parted. “You narrow your eyes in a strange way,” said Valentino. “I think you are not Natacha.”

Scott was able to interrupt the steady breathing of the body he was occupying. “No,” he managed to say. And this encounter is obviously not much more recent than our previous ones, damn it. Too far back!

“Can you move your hands?” The voice was faintly accented; Italian, Scott supposed.

Scott concentrated, and then saw Natacha's right hand rise in the lamplight, fingers spread. The chain bracelet slid down the wrist.

“Here.” From his pocket Valentino produced a pack of Black Jack gum and pulled out a stick and pressed it into Natacha's palm. His quick smile was sympathetic.

Scott frowned in puzzlement, tensing Natacha's forehead. He opened her mouth and said, “Gum?”

“The tinfoil,” said Valentino patiently. “Chew on it. It will hurt, against her fillings in her teeth, but not do any damage to her. It's better than her thumbtacks, which I tell her could give her an infection.”

Scott had got Natacha's fingers to close on the stick of gum. “Why,” he articulated, “hurt?”

Valentino cocked his head. “Spirit, are you a novice? Pain makes the visitation last longer. Why have you come? Natacha was hoping to hear from herself in the future.”

I preempted her, Scott thought, because the Usabo image must be nearby. “A film can,” he said clearly. “It's here.”

But, he thought, according to Aunt Amity's last-person novel, at least, it will eventually be stolen from Natacha, somewhere in the Adirondacks, by Charlene and Paul. How reliable is her crazy novel, though?

Valentino sat back in what Scott could now see was a carved and polished wooden chair. Behind him, gold lettering on book spines gleamed in dimness. Scott carefully rotated Natacha's head, and to
his right saw a curved wall with five tall arched windows and darkness beyond; looking the other way, the room seemed to be all black marble and red curtains. All he could smell was mimosa perfume.

Valentino was frowning now. “Are you the one who killed Bill Taylor?”

Scott made Natacha's long fingers tear the paper from the gum and unfold the thin sheet of foil, and he pushed the foil between her lips and bit down; bright razory pain lanced through her jaw, and he winced, but the pain seemed to settle him more firmly into the host body; and it was slightly preferable to the thumbtack Natacha had had piercing her toe in the earlier vision.

“No,” he said, “though I was present then, just as I am now. Someone else overrode her and me, and shot him.”

And in fact Scott thought he could sense another presence now, hovering unfamiliarly in Natacha's nervous system; but it didn't assert itself and in any case the sensation was faint.

Valentino shook a cigarette out of a pack on which Scott could read the brand name Abdullah and lit it with a gold lighter. “So you know she was innocent of that. We had hoped that it would be her future self who came now, and she would tell us that Natacha—and I—are never to be connected with that murder.”

Scott wished he had at least skimmed the biography before looking at the spider. “I never—heard that you were,” he said lamely.

Valentino pushed out a puff of smoke and then inhaled it. “I think you are a human being, since you speak easily. Are you a man or a woman?”

Scott looked down at the body he was in, disoriented to see the cleavage of breasts under a white blouse. “A man, in spite of—” He waved his hand.

Valentino laughed softly. “It must be . . . disconcerting!”

Scott nodded Natacha's head.

Valentino leaned forward. “What is your . . . concern, with the film in the can?”

“It's here, isn't it?” Scott inhaled with the foreign lungs. “In this room. Otherwise I wouldn't have ended up here.” Remembering how short these visions could be, he bit down on the foil again, and shuddered, wondering if the thumbtack had really been that bad. “I need to know where the film goes, in the future.” And this visit is no help, he thought, if Aunt Amity's disjointed typescript is accurate. But maybe it's not.

Valentino stood up, and Scott saw that he was wearing a gray sweater vest over a white shirt, and tan slacks; it was still odd to see him in anything but Arab garb. Valentino stepped lightly to an arch behind his chair.

“Can you walk?” he asked. “I'd sooner talk outside.”

Scott pushed down with the unfamiliar arms, straightened the long legs under a linen skirt, and managed to stand up. Luckily Natacha was wearing slippers. “Yes,” he said breathlessly. “But bring the film can. I think it's my . . . tether, here. Now.”

Valentino crouched and reached under the chair, and when he straightened, he was holding the flat metal can that Scott had last seen in Natacha's hands outside Taylor's apartment.

Squinting through the curling cigarette smoke, Valentino said, “I'll hold it, if you don't mind.”

Scott nodded and followed him out of the room, bare legs clumsy under the skirt. A door in the far wall opened onto three steps that led down to a gravel path in a moonlit garden. The night breeze was cold, and smelled of recent rain and occasional wisps of Arabian tobacco smoke from Valentino's cigarette. Scott wished Natacha had been wearing a blouse with long sleeves.

“I grew up,” began Valentino rapidly, then he went on at a more measured pace, “in a town in Taranto, in Italy. Do you know of the tarantella?”

“No. Unless you mean the dance?”

Valentino nodded, and in the moonlight Scott could see the tip of his cigarette glow brightly as he inhaled. “It is,” Valentino went on,
each syllable riding a puff of smoke, “where the name of the spider, tarantula, comes from. The dance, the old version of the tarantella, was to cure what they call
tarantism
—a kind of spider bite; but not a literal bite of a literal spider.” He began striding toward the front of the house. Over his shoulder he called, “You know the kind of spider I mean.”

“Yes,” said Scott, shuffling and spreading his arms to keep his balance as he followed him.

Valentino said, “I was always a good dancer.”

A lawn sloped down to a narrow curving street with the dim bulk of a terraced Spanish-style house on the far side under bending palm-tree silhouettes. Valentino dropped his cigarette onto the gravel and looked up at the half-moon.

“There were many gorges, ravines, near our town,” he went on, “and caves, some with old frescoes on the walls, and crazy men living in them. Hermits,
filosofos naturales
. Priests and my mother said not to go into those caves, but—I was a wild boy with no care for my life. When my mother told me the meek would inherit the earth, I told her all I wanted of it was the shovelful that would cover my cold face. My friends and I went into the caves, and in one I saw the very old fresco, in the deep tunnels.” He smiled and raised the film can. “It was this one, the mother of them all, the Medusa. The government dynamited that tunnel, later. People said the Vatican ordered it.”

Scott hastily bit the foil again, suppressing a whimper and blinking tears out of his left eye. “The dance?” he said. “Saved you?”

“It's not the dance, it's the music.” He shook his head. “It's not the music, in fact, it's the
time
. Eighteen eight! Nine beats in a four-four measure; it's too many for you to keep track of the rhythm; you can't tap your foot to it, and dancing to it needs a lot more than just footwork. One of my friends was able to sing and beat out the rhythm with rocks while another ran home to get a drum. I was . . . insane, with the too many visions all at once, but my friends saved my life. It was dark outside by the time the chattering noise drove the
spider out of my head, and even so I had nightmares for a year, other people's nightmares, people long dead . . .”

Valentino had the cigarette pack out again and shook one onto his lower lip. As he bent over the flame of the lighter he was squinting at Scott, and Scott suddenly hoped the man wasn't thinking about the body he was wearing.

“It's decidedly odd,” Valentino said, “to talk about Natacha with what seems to be Natacha herself!”

“It's not, though,” said Scott hastily.

“No. But I still want to say ‘you.' But she found a—an incarnation? Should we spell it with a K, like ink?—of the Medusa spider in a portfolio of abstract drawings by an English artist, this Beardsley fellow. You could look at it safely in a mirror, and she believes that Beardsley drew it in a mirror too.”

Scott remembered the tilted mirror that had stood over Taylor's film-editing machine.

“Beardsley,” Valentino went on, “got it, figured out how it should look, from studying a portfolio of lesser spider drawings his father brought back from India. The studying was bad for Beardsley, I gather—his health was destroyed, and he died very young.” He looked at Natacha's eyes. “What do you hope to do”—he waved the film can—“with this? If you find it where you come from?”

Scott hesitated. Natacha had wanted a frame from the film—presumably to use its power somehow. She would not have wanted anything like an exorcism.

“Tell me the truth,” said Valentino.

He apparently experienced the Medusa spider in that cave, Scott thought, and directly, not secondhand through somebody else's eyes, the way Madeline and I did. And it came close to killing him.

“I mean to use it to exorcise the Medusa spider. And I hope it will kill all the lesser spiders too.”

Valentino laughed softly. “It would do that, yes. The lesser ones are reflections of the Medusa herself. But someone—the way that
poor Taylor fellow meant it to work—someone has to
watch
the film, and I think it would kill that person. I think Taylor meant to do it himself, because a woman he loved was addicted to the spiders.”

“My sister—is caught in the web.” And imagines that she met you there, he thought, and that she might meet you there again.

“Of course you want to save her. Does your sister, too, intrude in our visions?”

Scott remembered Madeline's story about Kosloff shooting Natacha, and the taxi ride to the hospital. “She has.”

“Is her name Madeline?”

Startled, Scott nodded Natacha's head. “Yes.”

“Natacha was grateful for Madeline's company and comfort, when she was wounded.” Valentino took a long draw on the cigarette, dropped it to the gravel and stepped on it, then tapped the film can. “I was going to burn this tonight. Natacha would have hated me for it, but—but instead I believe I will take the . . .
easy way out
and leave it under the chair in the dining room for now. And I'll hide the film in this house, for you to find, in your day. In the attic, behind a board I will paint red, yes?”

Scott spat out the bit of chewed foil. He was still holding the stick of Black Jack gum, and he slid it into the pocket of Natacha's blouse, wondering what she would think when she found it . . . very soon.