Medusa's Web (29 page)

“You'll destroy it?” asked Claimayne.

“After saving some frames of the Medusa.”

Claimayne's smooth face was twitching as he shifted on the floor and massaged his left arm now, but he looked up at Scott with a tight smile. “So near and yet so far, eh, old boy?
You
were the one watching when I killed Taylor and took it from him, weren't you? And at Valentino's house where the freeway runs now, and Speas's hotel room on Bunker Hill. That was
you,
riding along on
my
spiders.” He nodded toward the film reel in Louise's lap. “And now you lose it, and everything.”

Ferdalisi pushed Ariel away and got to his feet. “Put the lid back on,” he told Louise, “and give it to me.”

Louise bent over the dartboard to reattach the lid, and only Scott was facing the back end of the garage as she handed Ferdalisi the dartboard; the trapdoor in the roof was still open, and the shaft of drab daylight back there dimmed for several seconds and he thought he heard faint scuffling. Scott made himself squeeze the broken glass edge harder into the flesh of his palm; sweat broke out on his forehead and he breathed deeply to keep from fainting.

Ferdalisi stepped back and waved the barrel of his pistol from Scott to Louise. “You two lie facedown now, with your hands behind you.”

“Are you going to kill us?” gasped Louise.

“Just bind you, for now. Lie down.”

A wild yell and loud clattering suddenly erupted from the back of the garage, and even Scott gasped in astonishment at what came wobbling out of the shadows.

One of the rubber space aliens had been propped up on a bicycle with training wheels and propelled toward the fan of daylight by the open doorway. Its knees pumped up and down and its long arms waved loosely over the handlebars and its big-eyed head wobbled in all directions.

Claimayne inhaled a scream and flopped onto his back, twitching and clutching at his chest.

Ferdalisi had spun to face the oncoming thing, and now he fired two fast loud shots at it, to no evident effect.

Scott dove for the dropped revolver.

Ariel rolled over and kicked upward, driving her shoe into Ferdalisi's groin. He hunched forward with a shrill grunt and spasmodically slammed the butt of his pistol against her head, and as she tumbled away from him he aimed the pistol at her.

Crouched on the floor, Scott pointed the revolver up at the middle of him and pulled the trigger; the noise of the gunshot echoed in
the garage. Ferdalisi lowered the pistol and slowly turned around to stare at Scott with wide eyes; Scott wasn't sure where his shot had hit the man, if it had hit him at all, and he gritted his teeth and centered the muzzle on Ferdalisi's chest—

But at that moment Madeline came rushing out of the darkness at the back of the garage with a spray-paint can in each hand, and she sprayed bright neon-orange paint into Ferdalisi's face and eyes; the man exhaled sharply and then fell to his knees, and the gun tumbled out of his hand.

Louise had snatched up the dartboard, but she dropped it when Madeline swept the spray in a zigzag pattern across her face and chest.

Ferdalisi pitched forward across Ariel's legs.

The floor of the garage shifted, and streaks of dust fell from the ceiling. The cobwebby flying saucers swung back and forth over the plywood Los Angeles skyline against the wall.

Madeline threw the spray cans at Louise and kicked the dartboard aside, and then crouched to roll Ferdalisi off Ariel. Louise moaned and ran out empty-handed through the doorway.

Scott glanced at Claimayne, but he was just gasping and pressing both hands to his chest, his eyes tightly shut. Scott hiked himself across the floor to where Ariel lay.

Madeline had rolled Ferdalisi's heavy body off Ariel's legs—Scott looked away from the man's slack orange face and open orange eyes—and Ariel had sat up, her arms still bent around behind her. Blood ran down from her scalp and streaked her face.

“Gimme a lighter,” said Madeline. “They've got a cable tie around her wrists.”

Scott dropped the revolver and dug a Bic lighter out of his pants pocket and handed it to Madeline; a moment later he smelled melting plastic, and then Ariel's arms were free and she tilted forward. Scott caught her; her head was against his chest and he could feel her hot blood through his shirt.

“Your hand,” she muttered. “All bloody.”

Scott remembered to squeeze the wineglass fragment again, and now he let himself wince and let out a harsh “
Ah!
” at the pain. “I'll live,” he gasped.

“He's in a spider vision,” said Madeline. Ferdalisi was lying on the floor with his bright orange face and beard tilted back, and she prodded him and then felt his throat. “I think my spray paint killed him!” she whispered. Her nose was bleeding again, and she absently swiped a hand across her red-streaked chin.

“Scott shot him,” said Ariel. She lifted her head from Scott's chest and peered around. “Claimayne.”

A couple of yards away across the cement, Claimayne opened his eyes and looked across at her. His teeth were bared, and his face was sweaty and white as chalk. He waved one hand weakly.

“Salomé,” he gasped, “hand me my gun, so that I may have shot our guest!”

Ariel reached to the side and picked up the revolver Scott had dropped, and she walked on her knees to where Claimayne lay.

“But he—” began Madeline.

“My cousin,” said Ariel, “has no reason to hurt us now. We need him to fire it.”

Madeline threw a wild glance at Scott, who shook his head helplessly and then nodded.

Ariel took hold of Claimayne's right hand, and she gently laid the grip of the gun in his palm and guided his forefinger into the trigger guard. She lifted the hand so that the barrel was pointed at the ceiling.

“Thank you, Tetrarch,” she said softly and squeezed his hand. The gunshot seemed louder than the previous ones had been, and the gun had jerked out of Claimayne's hand in recoil and now spun on the floor.

“Nobody touch it now,” said Ariel. She stood up; both Scott and Madeline got to their feet to help her, but she waved them off. “I can walk,” she said. “Slowly.”

“But I'm not sorry,” whispered Claimayne, lying on the floor behind her, “Ariel. For anything.” The exhalation that followed was shaky and seemed never to end. Ariel peered down at him, frowning.

Scott tried to comprehend the evident fact that Claimayne was dead.

And he glanced at Ferdalisi's sprawled body and flexed his right hand; it wasn't the hand that was bleeding, but he had actually killed that man with it.

He forced the thought away, took a deep breath and let it out, and crossed to the space alien, which was now leaning backward on the still-upright bicycle. He took hold of one of its hands and twisted it; it resisted for a moment, and then a glued seam gave way and he was able to pull the hand off a rusty wire support. He tucked the thing inside his jacket and tugged the zipper up.

Madeline had picked up the dartboard with one hand, pinching her nose with the other.

“I—might still be able to stop Louise from stealing your car,” Scott said to her. “You two meet me in the apiary. I'll surely be a while getting there, so wait for me.” He looked with concern at Ariel, who was now pressing one bloody hand to her scalp. “You two take Claimayne's elevator rather than the stairs.” Madeline nodded. It's Ariel and Madeline, Scott realized, who were using—will shortly be using, that is—the elevator; it wasn't—won't be—Claimayne after all.

“What about Claimayne?” asked Madeline.

“He's dead too,” Ariel told her flatly. She looked at Scott. “See you in the apiary.”

He nodded and opened his left hand, and then he had to shake his hand to dislodge the glass fragment. He hurried out of the garage and around the corner of the house and started across the grass. He was still several yards short of the Caveat front porch when he fell out of the spider vision.

ALL SCOTT COULD SEE
was a field of brown. He could feel that his right hand was holding a metal knob, and he sagged and gripped it tightly as the weight of having just done two spiders fell on him again. He was back in real time again.

Where am I? he thought dizzily. Well, where was I in the last moments of the after vision? In it I found myself on the grass out in front of Caveat, and I dragged myself along the wall and the railing to the front porch, and I had just touched the doorknob when I fell out of that vision. So that's where I am—I'm holding on to the doorknob and this brown expanse must be the front door.

He looked away from it at a broad gray shape that mingled along one edge with mottled, shifting green, and he knew he must be seeing the gray sky and the jungly front slope.

Scott looked back at the door, and it seemed to move away from in front of his face to a distance of about a foot. He looked down and saw his left hand on the knob, and he could see that his hand and the knob were not part of the plane of the door. His depth perception had returned.

He glanced behind him at the bench where he had sat to catch his breath, only a minute ago in real time. Smears of blood streaked the marble seat where he had touched it with his left hand.

Lowering his head, Scott allowed himself a brief smile. And when I was sitting there, he thought, I wondered where the gun had got to, and whether or not I had managed to find and save Ariel. I wondered if she were dead, or in an ambulance. Well, I did save her—with the help of Madeline and the rubber alien.

He patted the front of his jacket and of course didn't feel the rubber alien's hand. He looked at his watch: 11:45. I walked out of the garage with the rubber hand in my jacket—leaving Claimayne and Ferdalisi dead on the floor nineteen minutes ago!

He glanced to his left, toward the driveway, then shook his head wearily. Let Louise take Madeline's car, he thought. She's surely gone
by now, and I'm in no shape to struggle with her if she's not—and anyway, I've got to save
Madeline
now.

Twisting the doorknob, Scott pushed the door open. He stepped wearily into the entry hall; for a moment he considered climbing the two flights of stairs, then shook his head and started for Claimayne's elevator. He won't mind now, he told himself.

“WE'RE ALL A MESS,
aren't we?” said Ariel when Scott finally limped into the apiary. She was frowning critically, but there was relief in her voice.

And it was certainly true. Madeline and Ariel had wiped most of the blood off their faces, but Madeline's right eyelid was swollen and taking on a silvery blue color, and Ariel's hair was darkly matted on top. Scott hadn't yet washed his hand, and he could smell his own sweat.

“Thank you,” Ariel said to him. “That was clever and brave.”

Everything Scott could think of in reply sounded flippant or shallow, so he just nodded and waved it away.

Madeline had the dartboard under her arm, and Ariel was unspooling the 220-volt extension cord as she walked toward the window. One of them had already wheeled out Aunt Amity's tall old 35-millimeter projector and opened the round film magazine on top of it.

A square metal can hung below the projection mechanism where the take-up reel would ordinarily be; Scott recalled that Aunt Amity had always called it the molasses can, and said that a take-up reel was the part of a projector that generally caused problems and inter
rupted the film, since it steadily got heavier and slower, whereas just letting the exiting film fall and coil loosely into the can avoided all such mechanical difficulties.

I wonder if her damned old machine still works, Scott thought. Would I really be unhappy if it didn't?

“You're going to have a real black eye there, Maddy,” he said.

She shrugged and looked away. “You should see the other guy.”

Scott suppressed a shudder as he recalled the revolver's recoil in the palm of his hand, and his last view of Ferdalisi.
Orange beard, dead orange eyes . . .

He forced the intolerable memory aside. “You're all right?” he asked Ariel. “No concussion?”

“Fine except for a headache.” She sat on the windowsill and gave him a tired smile. “Madeline tells me my pupils are the same size.”

“You've done two spiders in less than an hour,” Madeline said to Scott. “You're in no shape to watch this film.”

“I'm fit enough,” Scott said. And I don't think it matters, he told himself bleakly. Say good-bye to Hollywood. He took the dartboard from Madeline and turned it around, looking for the switch or latch that Louise had found. “How did you know where we were?”

“You went up the hill and on past the ridge garages,” Madeline said, “but I heard the bike's engine stop, instead of fade away down the easement on the far side. I figured you'd want to coast silently, and so you were either heading for the apartment building or the old east garage. I ran over and saw your bike by the garage, so I climbed the tree and came in through the roof. Luckily the trapdoor was already open.”

“I'm glad you did,” Scott said. He had found a lever on the rim, and when he pushed it to one side, the top of the dartboard was loose. “And the alien on the bicycle was genius.”

“I had to pull the seat off the bike and then . . .
impale
him on the post. Anally, as it were. God knows what somebody will think happened, if they go in there.”

“My blood's on the floor,” he said, taking the film can out of the round case. “So is Ariel's, and yours too, probably. Talk to a lawyer before you say anything to the police.” He opened the film can and carefully lifted out the reel of film.

“It'll stand up that Claimayne shot Ferdalisi,” said Ariel.

“At least neither of you did.” Scott lifted the tail end of the film. It was clear, and the word
LEADER
was printed in grease pencil on the last inch of it. “I'm glad Natacha wound it back to front,” he said. “Rewinding it here would have been a chore. Madeline, could you get me some blankets—and nails and a hammer—to cover the windows?”

“Right,” she said, and hurried out of the room.

“She is
determined
to be the one to watch it,” said Ariel when Madeline's footsteps had receded down the hall.

“I know.” Scott unspooled three feet of film from the reel and then fitted the reel onto the central bobbin in the magazine. “This is a short film—a full reel's only about fifteen minutes, and look, this is less than half filled.” He fitted the film through the slot at the bottom of the magazine and closed the cover, and then he turned and looked at Ariel. “You've got to get me a clean spider.”

Ariel's eyes widened, and after a few seconds, she said, “I guess that's kinder than tying her up or knocking her out.”

“I'm going to throw the extension cord out the window, so you can plug it into the old 220 socket in the dining room. You can get the spider while you're doing that.”

“Scott, I don't think anybody should watch the damn film. It's sure to be dangerous—maybe fatal!—and not at
all
sure to accomplish anything.”

“Damn it, do you think I—I'm looking
forward
to this? Sorry, sorry—but it's the only way, if there's any way, to exorcise the spiders, cut them right out of this universe. Taylor thought it would. And with the spider vector . . . conduit, opening, live wire . . . severed, Aunt Amity will have lost her link with Madeline.” His
hands were shaking. “I truly don't want to do it. I don't. It's only minutes away now.”

“Let
me
do it. No, I mean it, listen—you both looked at the Medusa spider when you were kids, maybe a fresh—”

“I think that's what's going to save me, if anything does. It'll be my second time touring special. Ariel, I have to do it.” He heard Madeline's footsteps in the hall, and he realized that he had only seconds in which to tell Ariel something important.

“Ariel,” he said quickly, “I love you.”

She stared at him.

Scott stared back, helplessly. “By the way,” he added.

Madeline came shuffling in with a pile of blankets in her arms. Her voice was muffled as she said, “Hammer and nails in my pockets.”

Ariel cocked her head at Scott and gave him a wry smile. “Well—likewise. Sincerely. Since I was a . . . an idiot teenager.”

Scott's breath caught in his throat, and now more than ever he didn't want to watch the film. But he opened the side panel on the projector and unlocked the lens holder and opened the film gate.

“Ariel will swear Claimayne shot Ferdalisi,” said Madeline. “Won't you, Ariel?”

Ariel nodded, glancing at Scott.

Madeline's statement, of course, presumed that Scott would be alive when the police investigated, and therefore that Scott would not be the one to watch the film.

He didn't argue. “You talk to a lawyer before you say anything to anybody,” he told her.

He snapped the pressure rollers away from the sprocket wheel and the take-up sprocket, and he twisted the frame-line setting knob until the cross on the sprocket wheel had rotated a few degrees to vertical. As far as he could recall from having watched his aunt do it many times when he was a boy, the machine was now ready to have the film threaded through it. He knew it took oil, and he remembered his aunt cleaning out the oil system with gasoline, but she had
done that much more seldom and he didn't remember the procedure. The old oil should keep it running for the few minutes required, he thought.

He sighed deeply.

“Ariel,” he said, picking up the socket end of the extension cord, “maybe you could throw the other end of this out the window and go downstairs and plug it in.”

She brushed damp strands of dark hair back from her forehead and stared at him for several seconds. “Okay.” She unlatched the window and hauled it up, and she gathered up several loops of slack cord and then threw it out the window. “It might take me a few minutes.”

“You want help?” asked Madeline.

“I've got it, sweetie. You help your brother.” Ariel hurried out of the room without looking at Madeline or Scott.

Madeline shivered in the cold wind blowing in now through the window. “She doesn't want you to watch the film.”

“No,” Scott agreed.

“She loves you, and you love her.”

“Yes.”

“We've both found somebody.”

Scott knew that Valentino was who Madeline believed she had found.

He nodded and walked to the window. He bent down and rested his right palm on the windowsill and looked out over the waving green trees and vines of the slope to the arched windows and red tile roofs of the houses across Vista Del Mar, and for a moment he thought the sudden yearning that seized him was the desire to go downstairs to his room and finish the Wild Turkey bottle; then he recognized it as a response to the volume and shapes and colors of the view—he very much wanted to capture all the light in dabs of paint on canvas. Reproduce it flat, he thought, in two dimensions!

“Scott,” began Madeline, “I hope you—”

He straightened up. “I've got to thread the film,” he said, walking back to the projector. “Do you remember how it used to go?”

She pursed her lips. “Oh, I can watch. I bet I'll know if you do it wrong.”

He fitted the yard-long strip of film around several rollers and wheels and laid it in the open film gate. He touched the film gate knob, but Madeline caught his hand.

“Slack.”

“Oh, right. And below the gate too.” He pulled a loop in the film between the feed sprocket and the film gate and did it again between the bottom of the film gate and the sprocket wheel, and then he closed the gate.

Below that, he pushed the film into place around various wheels and rollers to the take-up sprocket and let the end hang down into Aunt Amity's molasses can.

“Look right?” When she nodded, Scott locked the lens turret and then clicked all the pad rollers back into their closed positions, fixing the film into place. “Did you find the screen?”

Madeline nodded. “We can nail its case to the wall, same height she used to have it in the dining room.” She carefully took hold of his left hand and looked at the cut in his palm. “You should get Neosporin on that and bandage it. Scott, I may not come back. I may stay in the past, with Mr. Valentino.”

“I don't think we can predict what will happen.” And will you hate me, he wondered, for supposedly keeping you from Mr. Valentino? Will you ever understand that Aunt Amity would simply have swallowed and digested you, if I had not done this?

Ariel came hurrying down the hall and stepped into the apiary.

“It's plugged in,” she said. “Let's get those windows covered.” She clasped Scott's right hand as she walked past him, and when she released it and moved on toward the windows, he had a folded slip of paper in his hand.

A FEW MINUTES LATER
the bare overhead lightbulb cast the only light in the long room, and Scott held up one end of the screen case against the wall while Ariel stood on a chair to nail the thing to the wall. When she stepped down, he took hold of the ring on the bottom edge of the screen and pulled it down, and the glittering white sheet stayed down and the case didn't fall off the wall.

Scott returned to the projector and made sure the changeover switch was still set on sixteen frames per second, then faced Madeline. She stared back at him defiantly.

“I'll flip you for it,” he said.

The spider Ariel had passed to him was now trimmed of all margin and pressed into the palm of his right hand, with the spider lines against his skin.

Madeline laughed in surprise. “Will you abide by it? Will I? Let me see the coin.”

He dropped a quarter into her extended palm, and she looked at both sides of it and flipped it in the air several times, catching it and slapping it onto the back of her other hand and peering at the result.

“Does a coin count as two-dimensional or three?” she asked. “I guess three—it's got bumps, and two sides.” She held it out, and he carefully took hold of it between his thumb and forefinger. “I guess that's as fair as we can hope for,” she said. “Sure, okay, toss. I pick heads.”

Good-bye, Madeline,
he thought.
Try to remember me with love.

He tossed the coin spinning into the air, caught it, and slapped it onto the back of his left hand; and he flexed his right palm to free the spider. Luckily the back of his left hand was sticky with blood.

He held his overlapped hands out in front of her, and she pulled his right hand away, bending over to see the result. She gasped and hastily covered the spider with her own hand, but her pupils had already sprung wide open, and Ariel caught her when she sagged.

“Both of you out in the hall,” Scott said, and as Ariel walked Madeline to the door, he quickly switched on the projector's xenon lightbulb. “And get the light!”

Ariel reached out to the side and turned off the overhead light as she and Madeline stumbled out of the room. “God be with you,” she called over her shoulder.

Scott had never felt so alone as when he pressed the motor start button and the protector-flap open button and sat down on a chair four yards from the screen. He noticed that the spider Ariel had given him was no longer stuck to the back of his left hand, but there was no time to see if it was lying on the floor.

The screen was bright white as the clear leader strip passed through the projector, and then with no preamble he was facing a four-foot-tall image of the Medusa spider.

SCOTT RECOGNIZED IT IMMEDIATELY
and intimately, even after a gap of twenty-three years, and in fact he knew there was no meaningful gap at all. He could almost feel eight-year-old Madeline beside him, and see Thomas Ince's hands on either side of the image.

The image was flickering rapidly, visible only in momentary flashes between split-second black frames; and since each new frame was a fresh projection of the spider on Scott's retinas, none had time to split and grow bristly before the next replaced it; and because the flashes were in the tarantella frequency, the spider was always caught in the same segment of its rotation, so that its inherent spin appeared to be stopped.