Medusa's Web (7 page)

He frowned and turned away, and now his attention was on avoiding any pieces of his aunt that might still be scattered across the roof. He saw only a couple of scraps of lacy yellow cloth, but those might have been from anything, and he walked across to the aluminum box.

One side of it was deeply dented, and the service panel lay a few feet away, bent and twisted; but it still had a little puddle of rainwater on it—at least there hadn't been an explosion up here lately.

Scott pulled the tool bag off over his head and knelt by the now-open side of the furnace housing. Inside, a few inches above the dusty aluminum floor, four iron mixing tubes hung behind the manifold pipe, and their air shutters were not only open but appeared to be rusted that way. The furnace was obviously old—a sooty thermocouple wire was bent over the nozzle of a pilot light; at the apartment
building he managed, all the furnaces had flame sensors and ignition coils instead.

Claimayne had said the fan came on, but no heat issued from the vents.

The gas shutoff valve was on the outside of the housing, but Scott left it in the on position and pulled a yellow Bic lighter out of his pocket. He turned the pilot light knob, then waved a flame over the nozzle while he pushed the reset button, and a thumb-sized blue flame sprang up, enveloping the end of the thermocouple wire. Scott held the reset button down for fifteen seconds, then let it up. The pilot light wavered and went out. Apparently the thermocouple was no longer producing voltage to hold the interior gas valve open, whether because Aunt Amity's grenade had fractured it or because of plain age.

It would be easy enough to buy a new thermocouple. He reached around the outside of the housing and twisted the handle of the gas valve to the crosswise off position; but it was rattling loose in its housing, probably a result of the grenade concussion. Really, Scott thought, they should replace the whole unit.

He straightened up and looked north. From up here on the roof he could see over the row of garages on the ridge to the treetops above the houses that were farther up in the hills, and above them, clear in the morning air despite the distance, the white letters of the Hollywood sign. He took a step toward the roof edge and looked down, and he saw someone now standing in the garden by the Medusa mosaic wall. Squinting against the sun and the rooftop breeze, he saw that it was Madeline.

He opened his mouth to shout to her and ask her to help him find a better way down from the roof, but he glanced warily up at the sky first; when he looked down at the garden again, she was no longer visible—evidently she had walked around to the far side of the wall. He crouched, bracing himself with one hand on the roof coping, and waited for her to reappear.

When a full minute had gone by without her stepping out from behind the wall, he sighed, fetched the tool bag, and got up to go look around for another way down from the roof.

HAVING CALLED HER CLIENT
and canceled their appointment, Madeline had gone downstairs and stepped out through the back kitchen door and begun walking at a slow pace along one of the gravel paths, sometimes having to duck under a thorny mesquite branch or step wide around shaggy Jerusalem sage.

The aches in her joints and face had seemed to be loosened by the crisp morning sunlight, and she had moved steadily east along the overgrown paths toward the sun until she was in the shadow of the Medusa wall.

The bathtub-sized pool below the wall had indeed been filled in, or removed altogether—if she hadn't remembered splashing in it as a child, she wouldn't have known a pool had ever been there. She looked up at the surface of the wall above the pool—a new crack, fuzzy with green weeds, ran down one side of it, and rain and sun had popped many of the mosaic stones out, but the Medusa face was still intact at the center.

The face was no more than six inches across and made of only twelve flat stones, black and white—two black rectangles for the eyes, a smaller one for the mouth, white triangles for the cheeks and a fan of them for the forehead—but the tendrils of the snaky hair spiraled out in all directions across the rest of the wall, in a variety of shades of purple against a gold background. Madeline remembered how they seemed to glow, even to pulse, in the coppery light of late October afternoons.

And in fact their colors were faintly rippling now, as if the stones of them were dark opals; and Madeline's shadow dimmed the glow of a patch of them in front of her.

She turned around, and it wasn't morning anymore—the sun
hung in remote wings of gold and topaz clouds in the west, just above the seashell-studded wall that divided the garden from the croquet court. The sunlight was horizontal—what Aunt Amity had called “Griffith's magic hour,” because the director D. W. Griffith had believed faces were best photographed in that fleeting evening light.

At her left, the house was farther away than it had been only a few moments ago, and she didn't recognize the windows and doors. One of the upstairs windows glowed, and Madeline could hear someone playing a slow passage from
Scheherazade
on a violin—and she realized that no other sounds intruded on it. She was belatedly aware that there had always been a faint background hum, even here, a very weak infusion of the mingled noises of automobiles and sirens and helicopters and probably even distant voices, and that it was now absent. And no faintest hint of exhaust fumes tainted the jasmine-scented breeze.

The Medusa mosaic had no crack across it, and none of the stones were missing.

Madeline looked away from the Medusa's face—and moved around the north end of the mosaic wall, toward the shadowed path by the east side of the house—for she could feel an almost unbearable happiness welling up inside her, and she didn't want to put that stark little black-and-white face into this experience, whatever it was.

There were none of the remembered structures added on to the east side of the house now, and so she strode quickly across the neatly mowed grass—all her aches and weariness were gone—and soon rounded the corner to the front of the house, and then she paused, breathing deeply. The marble-railed porch was the same one she remembered, but the slope below her was visibly terraced now, not a jungle, and ranks of red and white roses waved in the shadows.

And below, beyond the slope, was Hollywood, lit only by the twilight glow in the sky. No, yellow lights shone here and there in the scattered shapes of houses, but there were no lights on the freeway. In fact of course the freeway was gone, or rather not built yet,
and there was only a view of distant muted lights in the space where the Capitol Records building would one day stand.

The steps that led down to the parking lot were swept, and no branches or vines hung over them. The apartment building no longer stood down there to the left, and the parking lot was half the size she remembered, and unpaved.

Two girls in dresses were hurrying up Vista Del Mar, and Madeline could clearly hear their voices. One was worried that they had left the water running in Uncle Cecil's swimming pool, and the other hoped it hadn't overflowed and flooded the tennis court.

Madeline began stepping down the cement stairs, and so quiet was the evening that the girls heard her and stopped to look up the slope. Madeline smiled and waved . . .

But the light brightened abruptly, and a sound like distant surf drowned the faint rustling of the leaves. The black parking lot gleamed in bright sunlight below, and the apartment building reared its unlovely stuccoed walls down there to her left.

She yelled “Wait!” in the hope that the connection to the past might not quite have ceased; and then she sat down on the steps, hidden from the street and the house by the overhanging trees, and cried.

A FIRE ESCAPE CLUNG
like scaffolding to the east side of the house, and Scott had at last decided it was the best way down from the roof. He held the tool bag out over the edge and let it drop to the roof of the garage two stories below.

He was able to hang from the roof edge and drop three feet to the iron-grille platform outside the third-floor windows, and he exhaled in relief when the grille under his shoes didn't give way. He started down the rusty ladder to the next platform, carefully placing his feet squarely on the rungs and gripping the cold rails.

The next ladder ended on the flat roof of the long-unused garage
that had been added on to this end of the house. The leafy branches of a tall mesquite tree shaded the north side of the roof, and he considered climbing down it to the ground; but the mesquite had thorns, and he recalled that a trapdoor on the roof gave access to a wooden ladder that was bolted to the interior garage wall.

When he was able to step away from the ladder and stand up on the sagging garage roof, he noticed a narrow metal rod and a tangle of wires a few yards away on the tarpaper. He carefully shuffled out across the roof to it, and he knew it was the remains of an umbrella only because he recognized the wooden handle—the beak was broken off now, but the rest of the carved duck's head was familiar from his childhood. This had been his aunt's favorite umbrella, cherished because it had allegedly once belonged to the silent-movie star Clara Bow. A few scraps of the purple cloth he remembered still clung to the bent ribs, as yet unfaded.

He stepped back and gingerly craned his neck to look back up at the top edge of the third story, a stained and flaking ridge against the bright blue sky. Had she carried her precious umbrella up there, along with the grenade? He tried to remember if it had rained last Wednesday; had she sat up there for a while, looking out across the garden from under the umbrella?

His aunt had always said that Madeline was to get the Clara Bow umbrella one day, and Scott considered bringing it down; but he couldn't imagine Madeline being glad to have it now.

He picked his way back to the house side of the garage roof, retrieving the tool bag, and crouched to pry up the old tarpaper-covered trapdoor. When it came creaking up, he pushed it over the other way and lowered it to the roof, and then he peered down into the square hole.

The garage below wasn't completely dark, and he remembered that there were three windows in the broad door at the far end. He sighed and sat down on the edge and found the rungs with his feet.

The wooden ladder held up under his weight, and when he was
standing in the shadows on the cement floor, he looked up at the square of blue sky in the garage roof and thought he should somehow have shut the trapdoor. But from the brown-streaked walls and the sour mildewy smell he concluded that the roof leaked anyway, and to hell with it.

Against one wall leaned a tinfoil-paneled plywood spaceship as big as an SUV, constructed for some 1950s science fiction movie, and in the dimness Scott could see the three foam-rubber space-alien manikins leaning against it, their big bald heads a bit saggier than they used to be. Madeline had never wanted to explore in here, and even teenaged Claimayne had found the aliens obscurely troubling. “They always look to me like they want to get a life,” he had told Scott once, “by force if necessary.”

Shoved up against the opposite wall was a twenty-foot-long model of the Los Angeles skyline with metal disks still suspended on cobweb-draped wires above it to represent flying saucers.

The cement floor in between was littered with leaves and sagging cardboard boxes, and Scott kept his hands out in front of him in the dimness as he made his way between old stoves and stacks of children's bicycles toward the three windows at the east end.

The big garage door would certainly not swing up anymore, and the ordinary door set into it was locked; but when he kicked it, the bolt tore out of the frame and the door swung outward, letting in fresh air and a dazzling glare of daylight on weedy pavement, and then the hinges pulled free and the door toppled over onto the driveway with a clatter that echoed back from the cypresses at the east end of the estate.

Scott stepped hesitantly out onto the cracked old driveway. It ran north to connect with the garage road, and in the other direction sloped down past the vacant apartment building to a vine-hung and long unused gate that faced directly onto Vista Del Mar. He shoved his hands in his pockets and began trudging around the north side of the house, toward the garden and the door to the main house cellars.

ARIEL PUSHED OPEN THE
front door under the broken Caveat lintel and glared up the hall and into the dining room.

“Claimayne!” she called. There was no answer, so she quickly tapped up the wooden stairs to the second floor and hurried down the hall, away from Scott's and Madeline's rooms to Claimayne's door, and knocked on it.

“Oh, go away,” came her cousin's weak voice.

Ariel tried the knob—the door was unlocked, and she opened it and stepped into the room. In the sudden dimness she peered around at the faintly gleaming glazed ceramic pigs and rats and the gilded Buddhas to be sure where the walls and low tables were, and then she focused on the recumbent form of her cousin sprawled across the four-poster bed. His wheelchair stood in front of the bedside table.

The smell of incense imperfectly covered the aggressive menthol-and-eucalyptus tang of Bengay. One streak of daylight slanted in between the heavy velvet curtains, and for a moment she saw her own taut face reflected in one of the dozen mirrors on the walls.

“Later, later,” whispered Claimayne.

“Now,” she said, crossing the carpet to stand beside the foot of the bed. She could feel the floor sagging under her feet and hoped it wasn't about to give way. “I just walked outside.”

“Good. Do it again.”

“Claimayne, what's
happening
around here? Is it Scott and Madeline? I was going out to get in my car, and then all at once it was evening, and the car was gone and there was some kind of old Laurel and Hardy car there instead! And I had
not
looked at a spider! And—”

She was interrupted by a deep boom that shook the house and momentarily made the floor springy. The shellacked mahogany pillars of Claimayne's bed were carved coiled dragons, and they seemed to sway.