Medusa's Web (6 page)

Scott kept his voice level. “Yes. I leave the checks for the owner to sign.”

“Good. It's almost the end of the month, and you get the job of sorting through the bills and writing checks, at least for the utilities and taxes. Nobody's attended to that lately. I was doing it for a while, but—”

“It was a mess,” put in Claimayne. “I had to call all the creditors and apologize.”

Loudly speaking over his last few words, Ariel said, “
Bring the checks
back here. Claimayne and I are on the account, either of us can sign them.”

“And I'll probably have to apologize to everybody again,” said Claimayne.

“Back here?” said Scott.

“Aunt Amity has an office behind the Chase bank on Sunset,” said Ariel, “till the end of the year, anyway. Next door to a tax accountant. Claimayne, give Scott the key.”

Claimayne rolled his wheelchair forward, and his pale face was strained in a frown. “One of us should be with him; we can bring the key then.”

“Oh, for—give him the key while you're here, and not . . . you know, off distracted somewhere. He's going to be busy all day on the roof and in the basements anyway.”

After a pause, Claimayne smiled at Scott and hitched around in the wheelchair to reach into a pocket of his dressing gown, shaking his head. “She's so
alpha,
” he said. He pulled out a bracelet-sized ring with a lot of keys on it, and he selected one and worked it off the coil. “Don't lose it,” he said. “I'm only fairly sure we have a spare.”

“Right.” Scott took out his own key ring and threaded the new key onto it.

“I'd take gloves,” said Claimayne thoughtfully, “up on the roof. It wasn't far from the heater that my mother set off her grenade.” He smiled. “There might be bits of her still around.”

“I wouldn't be surprised,” said Scott quietly.

Ariel gave him a sharp look, but only said, “So go get the ladder out.”

“Okay,” said Scott, “what does the heater do, exactly, that's wrong? And have you got some tools? A socket set, a voltage meter . . .”

THERE WERE TWO BATHROOMS
on the second floor, and Madeline had chosen the one with a shower rather than a bathtub. Now, in fresh jeans and a brown corduroy shirt, she sat down on the bed in her room and unsnapped her leather valise.

In among her account book and dozens of blank astrological
charts was the envelope the lawyer had given her, and she slowly tugged it free of the other papers.

Her aunt Amity
had
asked that it be passed on to her.

“I think you did mean me,” she whispered, “at least partly, when you typed my name.” She held the envelope up to the light from the window and was able dimly to see crisscrossed lines inside. “Am I your way out of the tomb? Your guide?”

Scott and I were the children of your deceased husband's adopted brother, Madeline thought, but after our parents disappeared, you raised us, an eight-year-old girl and a thirteen-year-old boy, as if we were your own children.

Madeline stroked the edge of the envelope.

When Scott set one of the uphill garages on fire with a makeshift rocket launcher, and when I was playing in your car and got it into neutral and helplessly rolled backward onto Vista Del Mar Avenue and collided with a UPS truck, you quickly forgave us. And when Scott and I found the envelope full of spiders and confessed to having looked at one, you didn't yell at us at all. After you put them away, you took us out for ice cream so we'd feel better—though it pained you to walk on your bad foot, even with a cane—and you assured us that we'd feel better soon, and that any nightmares we might have would pass, which they mostly did. Now I wish we had admitted that we tore up the Oneida Inc one and replaced it with one that Scott drew. I'm sorry we kept that from you, when you were so forgiving.

Simply, you loved us.

Madeline stood up and looked down through the open window at the garden in morning sunlight. The sage and rosemary bushes had spread beyond the boundaries that Madeline remembered, obscuring many of the gravel paths, and dandelions and wild anise filled the squares that were once mowed grass. Tall flowering weeds furred the wide top of the Medusa mosaic wall, and the little pool below it had either been filled in or was completely obscured by long crabgrass.
At the crest of the slope, only the red tile roofs of a couple of the garages were visible over the treetops against the blue sky.

Madeline had moved out of Caveat seven years ago, leaving her aunt with Ariel and Claimayne and the solitary writing of her endless unpublishable novels. Scott had left six years before that, to get married, though when that Louise woman left him he hadn't moved back in.

We never came back, Madeline thought. Ariel hated Scott, so he stayed away, and I . . . somehow the whole house, the whole compound of added-on wings and garages and odd little bungalows and endless cellars, seemed like a convalescent home to me—Ariel and Claimayne were both suffering from their spider addictions, and Claimayne was soon confined to his wheelchair because of it . . . and old lame Aunt Amity was generally shut up in her little office, typing, typing . . .

Madeline turned back to the room and looked at the envelope she was still holding.

Scott looked at the spider in
his
envelope, she thought. Aunt Amity made Welcome Home banners for each of us. Ariel threw them away and said, You won't see them, but Scott saw his.

And Scott did not see the Usabo spider again. He said he knew it was there, but it stayed safely inside the folder that had the Medusa head printed on it. He apparently sensed it, powerfully—but no hands opened the folder this time. That was good.

Madeline tucked her finger into the flap of the envelope—Are you there, Aunt Amity? she thought, waiting for me, with your little Welcome Home Madeline banner?—and when she exerted force, the flap simply came open.

QUICKLY SHE PINCHED OUT
the slip of paper and let the envelope fall, and she looked at the ceiling as she unfolded the paper.

Madeline realized that she had passed the point of being able to keep from looking at it, and so she lowered her head and stared at the eight inked lines radiating crookedly out from the hub.

She couldn't move. She could feel the reciprocal reversed images on her retinas because they completed the figure on the paper, quickened it, and the ink pattern and the images inside her eyes were spinning, and curling and bristling with an infinity of ever-finer lines.

As if she were tilting outward on the roof edge of a tall building, Madeline's breath caught in her throat, and her skin seemed to contain only rushing cold air, and she had no name or memories and nothing changed, forever.

Eventually she dimly realized that there was motion, that she was perceiving what as a child she had called the Skyscraper People, the vertical-sided things with no perceptible bases or tops, which seemed somehow to be alive, and she was aware that their apparent height, any height at all here, was just a compensatory trick of her brain. They parted before her—

And she found herself sitting up in the bed with the high side
rails, and through a distorting blur she could see a long white rectangle some distance in front of her. She forced a pair of eyes that were not her own to focus, and soon she could recognize letters—
WELCOME HOME MADELINE
.

She tried to speak, but her teeth and tongue were the wrong shapes.

Then she was among the infinitely tall-seeming geometrical figures again, and they parted as she was pulled between them—

And now she was sitting on an ornately embroidered sofa in a spacious parlor with framed tinted prints on the pale green walls. A young woman stood by the window to her left, holding a curtain aside and peering out, her narrow face and hair backlit by morning sunlight.

Madeline felt the remembered subsonic roar—it rippled her view of the room, and she shivered with a current that almost made her feel that she could leap right out of this unfamiliar house.
Usabo is nearby,
she thought.
Why did I
do
this?

“Natacha,” the woman said without looking away from the street, “he won't let you leave him.”

Madeline choked, for she had tried to inhale just as her mouth began to speak. “He doesn't need me, Fridi,” she found herself saying. “He's got you. Hell, he's got lots of girls.” She realized that the odd thumping sensation in her palms was her fingers snapping. “Do you see my taxi?”

The woman turned to look at her. “I don't see it. He might let
you
go, but he won't let you take
that
away.” She nodded toward the knees of the body Madeline was occupying, and Madeline found herself looking down.

In her lap was the brown folder with the Medusa head imprinted in gold on the cover; the remembered red wax seal over the ribbon held it closed. Her hands were unfamiliar, with long tapering fingers and painted nails, and a silver chain bracelet was draped around her right wrist.

“It's mine,” came the voice out of her mouth. “And I'll be gone, where he can't find me, or it—long before he gets home from his hunting trip with DeMille.”

“Oh, Jesus!” exclaimed the woman, stepping quickly back from the window—and a moment later Madeline heard boots thumping on a porch beyond the front door, and then the door was kicked inward.

Madeline found her viewpoint rising as she faced the man who stood silhouetted in the doorway. She could see that he was curly haired and broad shouldered, and the object in his right hand was a long shotgun.

“You leave me, Fridi?” he shouted at the woman by the window, his voice seeming to shake the walls of the parlor. Madeline could see suitcases out there on the porch by his feet.

And then her voice was saying, “
I'm
leaving you, Kosloff.” Beyond the man, she saw an antique checkered taxi slow to a stop at the curb. “Get out of my way.”

“Damn,” the man shouted, pointing at her hand, “you not leave with the Beardsley!” Madeline could feel the rough texture of the Medusa folder against her fingers. Outside, the taxi's horn honked.

“I will,” she said, and moved to step past him toward the door and the sunlight outside—

—and the shotgun barrel came up and fired, and the deafening explosion knocked her off her feet. Her ears were ringing and all she could see was the afterimage of the muzzle flash, but she rolled into a crouch on the carpet and ran away from him, toward a hallway.

Another stunning boom sounded behind her, and a fist-sized patch of the wall ahead of her burst into dust and stinging fragments. She gripped a door frame and swung around it into a bedroom—the window ahead of her was open, and as two more blasts shook the house, she crossed the room in three awkward strides and dove through the window without touching the frame.

She tumbled through the green leaves and pink flowers of an oleander bush. As she rolled over in the grass, she saw that her skirt was
dark and gleaming with blood, and a pain like hot coals pressing into her thigh finally caught her attention. The first blast of shot had not entirely missed her.

Limping now and sobbing through clenched teeth, she flailed across the lawn to the old taxi and wrenched open the rear door.

“Go,” she said shrilly as she threw herself in across the seat, and the driver stepped on the accelerator.

“Damn, lady,” he said, exhaling, “that guy shoot you?”

“Get me to a hospital,” she said, clutching her thigh with both hands above the tangle of bloody shredded linen. The headwind blew the door closed. Her face was sweaty and cold. Madeline was aware that the just-inaudible roar and vibration were gone, and the woman seemed to notice the absence too—she glanced back, and whispered, “He's got it now, damn him.”

“Okay,” said the driver, nodding rapidly, “okay. Blood on my cushions, you can't help it, okay.”

He drove fast past boxy black cars parked under tall palm trees, then steered right, onto a bigger street. Madeline wondered frantically when this hallucination, or vision, would end, and she listened to the woman whispering, “Damn spider didn't work, here I am still, damn spider didn't work . . .”

Tears were mingling with the sweat on her face. Her mouth said, “Where—are we going?”

“Hollywood-Leland Hospital,” the driver said tensely, staring out through the windshield as he swerved around cars that looked to Madeline like Victorian cabinets, “Sunset and Vine.”

Madeline's view shifted to the cab's sagging fabric headliner as a low moan shook her throat—was the woman dying?—and Madeline managed to impose her will on the relaxed vocal cords, and speak. “It partly worked,” she said. “I'm with you.”

The body shivered. “Are you me?” came the woman's voice.

Madeline waited until the woman's throat relaxed again, and she was able to exhale and form the words, “No, I'm Madeline.”

A choked laugh preempted anything further she might have said. “Madeline,” said the woman's voice, “hold my hand, would you?” The view swept down to the woman's hands gripping her thigh. “Well, we can't let go. Hold my thumb.”

The blood-gleaming thumb of the right hand lifted away from the soggy linen, and Madeline found that she could move the left one; she curled it around the other, and then both thumbs were clamped down again.

“Stay with me,” said the woman breathlessly.

The woman's throat was too tense now for Madeline to reply through it, but she managed to nod the head slightly.

The eyes closed, and Madeline was aware only of the shaking and jogging of the taxi and the hot throbbing in her leg until someone was lifting her out and laying her on a moving surface, and soon a pinprick in her arm brought welcome oblivion.

WHEN MADELINE BECAME AWARE
of herself again, she was lying facedown on a hard surface. She tried to get up, but her arms wouldn't support her, and she lay panting in dimness, drooling onto what she could feel was a wood floor. In front of her was an array of different shades of dark brown, divided into rectangles narrower at one end; she crawled forward, and one of the rectangles expanded. She reached a hand toward it and realized that the shifting pale shape that intruded into her view was her own hand, and when it stopped moving, it was because her fingertips felt unyielding polished wood.

Her perspective largely came back then, and she saw that she was in the upstairs hall at Caveat, touching the door that had been salvaged from the Garden of Allah.
When is a door not a door?

Her tongue and the hinges of her jaw ached, and it occurred to her that it was because two other bodies had just briefly overlapped with hers—Aunt Amity's and then the Natacha woman's.

Madeline drew her legs up and winced; her left thigh throbbed
with an ache that seemed to go all the way down to the bone. She prodded her jeans, but the fabric was dry and the flesh of her leg felt springy and intact, and she exhaled in relief.

Carefully she turned her head to look up and down the row of unopenable doors. South was more or less in front of her, and what she had seen in the spider vision had been somewhere a bit west of that, and not far away; close enough that a hospital on Sunset and Vine was apparently the nearest one. She was sure that she could find the house where Natacha had been shot . . . if it was still there. The cars had looked like models from the 1920s.

She was panting, and she made herself relax and take deep, slow breaths. I'm back in 2015, she told herself. I'm Madeline Alice Madden, and I'm at Caveat.

With the doorknob to brace herself on, she managed to get to her feet, and she limped back to her room to call her client and cancel their astrological appointment for today.

THE ONLY PATCH OF
pavement Scott trusted to foot the aluminum ladder on was around back, west of his and Madeline's rooms.

He slung the leather tool bag over his shoulder and started climbing carefully; when fully extended, the ladder had a tendency to flex, momentarily lifting its top rails from the roof edge above, and so he moved slowly. Aunt Amity is lucky she didn't fall off this damn thing and break her neck, he thought. Well—she did make it alive onto the roof, anyway.

The breeze from over the top of the hill was cold on his back, but he was sweating and promising himself that he would find a better way down from the roof—several rooms and a garage had been added onto the building over on the east side, and he hoped to be able to find a low roof he could simply drop from, onto soft dirt.

Suddenly the breeze at his back was warm, even hot, and he inadvertently shook the ladder as he whipped his head around—

—and then he just clung to the ladder and stared.

The view out across the garden was divided on a wobbly diagonal, and the upper section showed bright sunlight on trees and bushes greener and more luxuriant than they had been when he had carried the ladder over here, while in the lower section, which was higher on the left side, he saw flickering puddles and leaves shaking with rain in dim light.

The two views were separated by a slanted, blurry gray line, and as he watched, it thickened like a peculiarly undispersing fog erupting from a crack across the landscape; he gripped the ladder rails tightly as the gray expanded to fill his vision.

A loud crack twitched the air and shook the building, and then in an instant the gray was gone, and the garden lay spread out in its ordinary winter disorder under the chilly blue sky.

His head still turned to look over his shoulder, Scott stared out across the slope and for nearly a full minute didn't let himself blink, for fear the normal landscape might fracture away again.

At last he relaxed, and after a few deep breaths even resumed climbing the ladder. It was an aftershock, he told himself, a residual flash of anachronism from the spider I looked at yesterday. Maybe spider users experience this sort of thing all the time. He managed a frail smile. I should ask Claimayne.

There had been some sort of sharp explosion at the end of the hallucination—had that been close thunder echoing out of the rainy-garden half of the vision?—or had it been the heater on the roof blowing up because Claimayne was adjusting the thermostat downstairs?

Up at the roof edge at last, Scott crawled out across the flat tarpaper, walking on the palms of his hands, until the tool bag bumped over the low coping and his feet lifted from the next-to-last ladder rung, and then he got up no higher than a crouch.

The weathered four-foot-square aluminum box that must be the heater stood on flat two-by-four sections several yards in front of him, just this side of the slanted shingle roof that covered the front
half of the building. Evidently this northern half of the structure had been added on at some point and been provided only with a flat tarpaper roof. No wonder the ceilings below it leaked. Fresh black tarpaper sheets held down by cinder blocks were spread out a few yards to his left, presumably where Aunt Amity had detonated her grenade.

He looked away from it and stood up cautiously, and before stepping toward the box he turned to glance back down over the roof edge at the garden. Off to the right, past the Medusa mosaic wall and out in the east yard where a couple of abandoned bungalows sat in sagging disrepair, he saw the lengthening shadow of a cellar door being lifted. He remembered it—it didn't sit flat on the ground, but was uptilted about ten degrees, like the storm-cellar door in
The Wizard of Oz.

Two children climbed up out of the cellar; from this distance he could see only that they were a girl and a taller boy, both in jeans and T-shirts. He thought of calling out to them, but their shadows didn't seem to fall in exactly the same direction as the shadows of trees that were closer, and instead he just watched as they scampered away south, toward the poolhouse and out of his sight.