Medusa's Web (3 page)

And, experiencing it at one remove through the view of the man in the chair, Scott and Madeline had looked at what Madeline later referred to, in fearful whispers, as Usabo.

It had been another of the eight-limbed symbols. This one was more minimal and uniform, at first; then its eight arms had quickly bloomed with a spinning infinity of filaments and spilled the young siblings again through the world of vertical surfaces into, not one vision, but thousands of them.

Later, Scott would try to diminish the experience by comparing it to riffling through a million snapshots at once—with brief but
animate glimpses of cars, faces, bodies clothed and naked, cityscapes viewed far too briefly for any hope of recognition, guns firing—or comparing it to spinning inside an enormous sphere made of active television screens; but he could never manage to forget the vast, unseen, inaudibly roaring creature around or within whom all these visions whirled like fragments of houses in a tornado.

When the visions subsided, they had found themselves still in their parents' room; Scott was gripping the telephone receiver and pressing it to his ear.

In a few minutes they had been able to walk and see clearly, and they tore the paper into dozens of tiny pieces; then, fearful at having destroyed something that grown-ups had evidently considered important, Scott had cut out a similar-sized piece of typing paper and hastily drawn a random eight-limbed figure on it, then folded it and put it into the
Oneida Inc
envelope and tucked that back into the big manila envelope with the others. When they pushed the redial button on the phone, they found that the number Scott had apparently tapped out while in the vision had only four digits.

Their aunt Amity had noticed their lack of appetite and their clumsiness and evident exhaustion, and they had been too enervated to lie about what they'd done—Scott gave their aunt the big envelope and admitted that he and his little sister had looked at the “squiggle” in one of the envelopes inside it. And Aunt Amity hadn't been angry—instead she had shuffled through the dozen little envelopes, then wordlessly clasped the package to her chest before hurrying out of the room, and when she returned without it, she had taken Scott and Madeline out to the Snow White Café for as much ice cream as they wanted to eat.

SCOTT STOOD UP NOW
from the mattress and his scattered clothes, and though he held his hands out to the sides, his balance seemed mostly restored; but he found that he'd taken an involuntary step toward the hallway door.

“It was that way,” he said, pointing at the wall to the right of the door. “West of here, and a bit south. The folder. A woman was holding it.” Slowly he lowered his hand, though he was staring at the wall as if trying to see through it and out over the clustered lights of Los Angeles. “I almost feel like I could find the place. It feels like I'm partly still there.”

Madeline nodded. “That wears off. It's supposed to be sort of a hangover the spider visions give you.”

Scott turned to face her. “The spider visions?” He shivered. “What, does this happen a
lot
? To other people?” He recalled something she had told him earlier. “You said symbols like that are called spiders. Who calls them that?”

“Claimayne and Ariel. You moved out of Caveat thirteen years ago, before they started doing them.”

“Doing them?
Looking
at them, you mean?”

She nodded.

“Good God. But it can't be like this,” he asked, waving a still-shaky hand at himself and the mattress, “for them?”

“I think it is. I never saw them do any, but a lot of times they seemed like they'd been beat up. And Claimayne was in that wheelchair before I moved out.”

“But—” Scott's chest felt hollow and cold. If the spider symbols had the same effects on his cousins as this one had just had on him, then his experience couldn't be dismissed as the unique triggering of an old personal trauma.

How can eight lines on a piece of paper do that? he thought. Some kind of static, impersonal hypnosis? Maybe it's something like those stereogram pictures, clusters of dots that some people can see images in; suppose there are some that just invite your subconscious to provide the images.

“They look at these, these
spider
things, deliberately?” He shook his head. “
Ariel
does it?”

Madeline nodded unhappily. “Claimayne says it hurts but it keeps
you young, and you saw he does look sort of younger, or something. And I think he and Ariel were using them for fortune-telling—when I was in high school, they were making money for a while, like with the stock market. Then not.”

“Do a lot of people do this? I've never heard of it.”

“People who do it don't talk about it, I think,” Madeline said. “Apparently there's pretty bad predators.”

“So how did Claimayne and Ariel learn about them? They're both recluses!”

Madeline made a face. “He learned about them from spying on his mother.”

“Aunt Amity did that—” he began incredulously, then reminded himself that his aunt had left one of the things for him, and presumably one for Madeline too; and he remembered how happy she had been when he and Madeline had given her the manila envelope they'd found in the wall. “Did
you
ever do it?”

“After Usabo? No.”

“You're not missing anything.” Except for that timeless moment of nonself, he thought. He went on quickly, “Just a bunch of goofy hallucinations, and sore muscles afterward. If they made money consulting the things, it was just luck, like—” He stopped, for he had been about to say,
like doing what your horoscope advises
. Instead he finished with, “And Claimayne had some plastic surgery.”

“You don't think the visions are real?” Madeline asked. “Views of real events?”

Scott squinted at the wall again, then shivered and shook his head. “No, how could they be real? I saw Aunt Amity just now, and she's dead.” I even seemed to
be
Aunt Amity for a moment, he thought uneasily.

Madeline shrugged. “Usabo seemed pretty real, when we were kids. And we both saw the same thing then, that folder with the Medusa head on it, and the Usabo spider inside it. Can two people have the same hallucination?”

“They can believe they did,” he said firmly, “if they're kids, and they talk it over afterward. We saw the spider symbol that was in the envelope, so we imagined a scarier one and came to believe we'd actually seen
it
. These
visions
are no more real than the Wizard of Oz. And the Medusa folder was obviously just one of us thinking of the Medusa mosaic on that wall in the garden, and putting it into our story. Our shared story.” He nodded, reflecting that what he was saying made sense. He went on, “It's bad enough to—”

He stopped talking, for a loud grinding and clanking had started up in the walls. “What the hell!”

Madeline smiled and bit her lip. “That's Claimayne's elevator. They installed it after you moved out—it wasn't quite as noisy as this at first. I guess it's time for dinner.”

“Oh!” Scott made himself relax. “Okay. So let's—forget about all this morbid old stuff, and don't look in your envelope, right?”

“Right.”

“We should get into dry clothes. Drier, anyway. I should have brought a tie—Claimayne won't say anything, but he'll be disappointed.”

Madeline nodded and stood away from the door frame. “He's not much of a Martian.”

Scott blinked at her, wondering if he'd missed a sentence. “I, uh, suppose not.”

“I mean, Mars is the ruler of Scorpio, and he's a Scorpio. But Mars must not have been in Scorpio when he was born, or he'd be more assertive.” She turned to her own room and took hold of the doorknob, but paused. “Why did we call it Usabo? I forget.”

Scott laughed shortly, still very shaky and wishing she would let the subject go. “Right afterward, we saw a storage yard, and the letters on the sign had been messed up by the wind. It was supposed to say,
SEE US ABOUT OUR SPECIAL
, but—”

“I remember now. It said
SEE USABO U TOUR SPECIAL
. And we pretended it was talking about what we saw. What we thought we
saw.” She gripped the doorknob tightly. “I don't ever want to see him and tour special again.”

Scott looked down at the shreds of the paper on the mattress, and he wiped his hand on his damp jeans. “I don't either,” he said. But he remembered that initial moment of being outside of time and his own identity, and he had to repeat, more to himself this time, “I don't either.”

Madeline was peering at him and opened her mouth to say something, but he waved at her and said, “I'll see if I can fetch that heater up here without falling down the stairs.”

THE DINING ROOM TOOK
up most of the southern side of the ground floor, with a narrow kitchen tucked up against the west chimney behind a pair of swinging doors. Lights in frosted-glass wall sconces cast a lemony glow over the long room and threw shadows against the plaster ceiling from the open-work beams high overhead, and two of the French windows were opened now onto a view of the rainy night and the freeway lights in the distance. The air in the dining room shifted with the smells of wet vegetation and hot enchilada sauce.

The walls were cluttered with framed pictures and mirrors and shelves crowded with tiny figurines, and a pair of glass-fronted bookcases flanked the door to the entry hall. Four places had been set at the long table, two on each side, and two bottles of wine stood in the center; the place at the head of the table, where their aunt Amity had always sat, was bare.

Claimayne, wearing an embroidered dressing gown and a blue silk scarf, had already maneuvered his wheelchair to the place that would have been on his mother's right, with his back to the windows, and Ariel was just sitting down beside him when Scott and Madeline stepped in from the hall.

“Ah,” called Claimayne, “our future landlords!” Ariel scowled fiercely at him.

Scott pulled out a chair on the other side of the table for Madeline. “We'll let you both stay on rent free,” he said lightly as she sat down.

“
We
might let
you
stay,” said Ariel, “as the handyman. Isn't that what you do these days, now that you're always too drunk to be an
artist
anymore?”

Scott had begun to pull out a chair for himself, and after a momentary pause, he continued the motion and then sat down carefully.

Madeline shifted beside him. “Scott's an apartment manager,” she said, “at a complex off Sunset. Not a handyman.”

“We all have a whole week together,” said Claimayne to Ariel, carefully pushing one of the bottles of wine toward her. “Would you pour? According to my mother's will. It would be more effective theater if you began amicably, so that your venom later will have some prominence.”

“Her
will
?” said Ariel, almost spitting. Claimayne pushed the bottle again, and she picked it up with both hands, a bit shakily. “She killed herself before the ink was dry on it! Didn't just kill herself—got out of bed and climbed up onto the roof, with a
grenade
!—and blew herself to pieces! Sound mind, my ass!” She rubbed her jaw, as if it hurt to speak, and glowered at Claimayne. “And you were no help—in your room with the door locked, crying and cussing while she did it, and then sick in bed for four days while
I
arranged her funeral, which you didn't even
attend
.”

“And pour,” Claimayne prompted. As Ariel splashed wine into his glass and hers, he smiled. “Hamlet said ‘The Everlasting hath fix'd his canon 'gainst self-slaughter'—she opposed the canon with a grenade!” He shook his head and added thoughtfully, “I'm afraid that for a long time she had entertained thoughts of suicide.”

For a moment no one had anything to say, and the hiss and clat
ter of the rain outside the open French windows was the only sound; then, evidently to break the silence, Madeline said, “Entertained? I can see . . . harboring thoughts of suicide, indulging them . . . but not
entertaining
them.”

Scott simply held still, waiting for the tingling in his face to subside. Wow, he thought shakily. Ariel's cheerful welcome an hour ago was clearly faked, a calculated setup for this attack.

He leaned back and opened his mouth, and instantly Ariel was staring at him; he shut his mouth and looked away.

What she had said was true. He had resented computer-generated art and the alleged necessity of using social media like Facebook, and when he had neglected or skimped several commissions because of being drunk, he had soon found himself effectively blackballed as a commercial graphic artist. After that, he had tried to sell his paintings—at juried shows, then at nonjuried shows, and finally at any sidewalk arts-and-crafts fair, often alongside booths selling food dehydrators and innovative mops—and finally he had thrown out all his paints and brushes and lights and air brushes and compressors, and bitterly vowed that he would never again even sketch a sleeping cat.

White light flared silently outside the French windows, and a moment later Scott twitched as thunder cracked and rolled its echoes over the dark hills. Ariel half stood up, apparently meaning to close the windows, then just shook her head wearily and sat back down. Scott noticed that she was now wearing a little silver gyroscope on a chain around her neck.

“She was in very poor health, these last few years,” Claimayne went on imperturbably. “Colon cancer, chemotherapy, several operations—during the last year she had no rectum to speak of.”

“For God's sake,” Ariel burst out, “who'd
want
to speak of it? We're indifferent to your mother's rectum.” She winced and closed her eyes, then gingerly rubbed the corners of her jaw.

Scott's own jaw was aching, and he had just reached up to massage it, and he was wincing too, when she opened her eyes and stared
at him; both of them lowered their hands, and after a few seconds they looked away from each other.

Madeline said, he thought, that Ariel does spiders.

The swinging doors to the kitchen opened then, and white-haired Rita, who had been the housekeeper at Caveat for as long as Scott could remember, sidled in carrying a wide tray.

“Rita!” exclaimed Madeline. “We're back!”

The elderly Mexican woman smiled warmly at her. “Not to stay long in this terrible place, I hope, Madeline sweetie!”

Claimayne ignored her and waved toward the far side of the table. “Do have some wine,” he said. “Ravenswood zinfandel, 2009.”

Madeline picked up the bottle Ariel had poured from and filled the glass in front of her.

When Rita had shifted four steaming plates from the tray, Scott said, “Rita, is there maybe a Coke in the refrigerator?”

“I think maybe there is, Scotty,” she said and carried the tray back into the kitchen.

“On the wagon for all to see and admire,” observed Ariel, “with a bottle upstairs for dessert.”

“Scott hasn't had a drink in more than a year,” said Madeline, cutting into one of her enchiladas with a fork. “He told me so.”

“
Oh,
” said Ariel, “
well
then.” She turned to Claimayne. “And we've got a bunch of high-hat strangers coming over here on Saturday. Do you have any
other
intruders lined up?”

“That man is coming over here on Thursday,” said Claimayne, “at one thirty, to talk about my mother's unpublished books.”

Ariel nodded. “That Ferdalisi guy. Your mother refused to see him.”

“She was paranoid in her old age. Thought the gas man was an agent from the Vatican.” Claimayne tried to lift his wineglass, but only managed to make the base of it rattle against the table. “‘Dip into the wine thy little red lips,'” he said to Ariel, “‘that I may drain the cup!”

Ariel scowled at him, then sighed and rolled her eyes. “‘I am not thirsty, Tetrarch.'”

In spite of his aching muscles and his embarrassment at Ariel's unexpected scornful remarks, Scott couldn't repress a reminiscent smile, for Claimayne and Ariel used to do this Salomé-and-the-tetrarch routine when all four of them were living at Caveat. It was lines from the dialogue frames of a silent black-and-white movie called
Salomé
that their aunt Amity had watched frequently.

Claimayne had been a teenager in those days, older than the rest of them and too resolutely sophisticated and ironic to see any value in the strange, slow old movie his mother was so fond of, and his cousin Ariel, eight years younger, had happily cooperated in his mockery of the stilted sentences on the dialogue frames.

Ariel, as Claimayne had frequently observed, was a genuine Madden. She had been orphaned at the age of seven, but her father, Sam Madden, had been the brother of Edward Madden, Claimayne's father, and the fifteen-year-old Claimayne had had no objections when his mother took the girl in to live at Caveat. Scott and Madeline's father, Arthur Madden, had merely been adopted by their grandfather, and though they had grown up with Claimayne and Ariel, Claimayne had never regarded them as real family. Young Scott and Madeline had laughed at Claimayne's jokes but had seldom made any of their own.

Scott recalled that Aunt Amity had stopped watching the movie when he had been in the sixth grade.

Claimayne was still holding his wineglass and blinking at Ariel, who impatiently took his glass and drank off half the wine in it. When she clanked it back down on the table, it was light enough for Claimayne to lift it in his trembling hand.

“Aunt Amity's unpublished books?” ventured Scott. “Thank you,” he added when Rita brought him a glass of Coca-Cola and ice.

“It's good you quit the drinking,” old Rita said to him quietly. “You be careful here.” Scott nodded and mouthed
Thanks
.

Claimayne gulped some wine and then began cutting up his enchiladas, gripping the knife and fork tightly. “
The Shores of Hollywood,
in 1992, was my mother's last published novel. She kept writing them after that—a good two dozen of them—but even in '92 her vogue had passed.”

“The ones after '92 were no good,” spoke up Ariel.

Claimayne pursed his lips as he tried to work his fork under a bit of cheese and tortilla. “No worse than the previous ones, I think, or not much worse. The only real difference was that the novels she wrote after
Shores of Hollywood
were all written in the third person—that one was the last of her first-person novels.”

“Are they all,” asked Scott, “the unpublished ones, still about Cyclone Severiss?”

Cyclone Severiss was the protagonist of all Aunt Amity's published novels; the Severiss character had been a female private investigator in the Los Angeles of the 1920s. Scott had read most of the published ones and had always privately thought that Aunt Amity had tried so hard for period accuracy that the pace of the books dragged.

“The ones I've looked at,” answered Claimayne. The food dropped off his fork, and he patiently set about recapturing it. “In any case, this fellow Ferdalisi wants to look at them, and any notes she might have kept.”

“He's a publisher?”

“Or an agent, or something. We're hosting a memorial party here on Saturday, as Ariel mentioned, with some literary and film folk, so maybe he believes there could be a resurgence of interest in my mother's work.”

“And some money,” put in Ariel. Looking across the table, she added, “You two will still be in residence, to act out the charade of her insane so-called ‘last will'—but you don't need to mingle at the party.”

Scott kept his attention on the food in front of him and just nodded, but Madeline looked at her cousin across the table. “There was a cannon too?”

Ariel stared at her in incomprehension, faintly shaking her head.

“Claimayne said there was a cannon,” Madeline went on, “as well as a grenade.”

“Canon law,” said Claimayne, smiling at her over the mess he'd made of his plate. “God's law. Canon with only one ‘n' in it. My mother went against it, you see, with her grenade. I'm sorry I wasn't clear about that.”

Madeline nodded magnanimously. “Well, it's hard to be clear about grenades,” she allowed.

Claimayne nodded vaguely, then turned to Ariel. “Salomé!” he said. “Bite but a little of this enchilada, that I may eat what is left!”

Ariel glanced at his plate. “No,” she said. Then she gave Scott a narrowed look. “On her last day she made these stupid banners for you two, with a felt marker and an old box of accordion tractor-feed paper—‘Welcome home, Scott,' and ‘Welcome home, Madeline.'”

Scott's expression didn't change, but he felt his scalp contract and he carefully laid down his fork. He didn't look at Madeline.

“Oh?” he said in a neutral tone.

Ariel gave him a thin smile. “You won't see them. I threw them in the trash.”

“Oh,” said Scott.

“Oh,” echoed Madeline weakly.

Claimayne smiled. “Our Ariel just is
not
sentimental, is she?”

BEFORE GOING DOWNSTAIRS TO
dinner, Madeline had found sheets, blankets, pillows, and pillowcases in the same linen closet they'd always been in, and she and Scott had made their beds and got the windows open. Madeline had found a broom to sweep the worst of the dust and cobwebs away, and Scott had carried up the electric heater and plugged it in and stood it in the connecting doorway between their rooms.

Now, the awkward dinner having finally come to an end, they
had trudged back up the stairs, and Scott had absently knocked at the Garden of Allah door, and they were in Madeline's room. The air was now comfortably warm. Madeline was leaning back on her elbows on the bedspread and Scott was sitting cross-legged on the wooden floor.

After several seconds of silence, Madeline sat up and exclaimed, “No more real than the wizard of Oz!”

After a pause, “Maybe Ariel was listening, outside the door,” Scott began, “when I was talking about the Welcome Home banner . . .” But he shook his head unhappily. “Maddy, damn it, how
can
they be real visions? What
is
this, some kind of—”

“It could have been like a psychic Instagram,” interrupted Madeline. “Like Aunt Amity recorded a message, a video, on that spider you looked at.”

Scott grimaced. “So what are you saying . . . when we were kids, we really did see an actual guy on a boat open that folder and look at the Usabo spider?”

Madeline had drawn up her knees, and all Scott could see were her wide eyes as she said, “We didn't
see
him, we
were
him, remember?”