Medusa's Web
Through the arch he could see a gray-haired man sitting at a desk facing away from him, and the lace curtains on the far side of the desk showed only darkness beyond . . . and then Scott realized that another man was standing right beside him here in the dining room.
Scott would have jumped in surprise, but the body he was occupying didn’t shift at all. After a few seconds, his head turned to look at his companion, and Scott found himself looking at a young man’s lean, tanned face. The man’s eyes were wide and his lips were pressed tightly together. He met the eyes Scott was looking out of and nodded toward the living room.
As Scott stepped forward, he felt a sharp pain in his toe that would have made him gasp if he had been able to. And he could feel that he was once again in a woman’s body; but he lacked the volition to look down and see if the remembered chain bracelet was on the wrist, and though he was aware of that hand holding something, he couldn’t know if it was again, or still, the Medusa folder.
Stepping between a chair and a couch, Scott was distracted by the pain in this body’s toe—did the woman have a piece of glass in her shoe?—but he found that he was speaking. “Mr. Taylor,” came a woman’s voice from his throat.
The man at the desk looked around, then pushed back his chair and stood up. He reached to the side and switched off a radio on a nearby table, and in the moment the music ceased, Scott recognized it as some Debussy piece. “The Sunken Cathedral”?
In the glow from a standing lamp beside the couch, Scott could see that the man wore a three-piece suit and a tie, and the expression on his long patrician face was only quizzical, with one eyebrow raised. “You should have called,” said the man addressed as Taylor. “I was just editing a scene before going to bed. But tell me, why do you sneak in through the kitchen, and with a gun?” He spoke with a detectable British accent.
Scott still wasn’t able to make this body look down, but he realized that the textured pressure in his right palm was the grip of a handgun.
He found himself speaking. “Editing a scene? I thought you were between pictures.” His lungs filled, and the woman’s voice went on, “I want the Medusa spider.”
Scott was able to see, peripherally, a machine on the man’s desk; two big open-sided reels flanked a console with a light glowing in it, and a round, flat metal can as big as the reels leaned against it. A foot-wide mirror on a swivel stand stood on the other side of the machine, tilted forward.
“I think I know what you mean,” said the older man slowly. “But I was under the impression that you had it—bought it from a not entirely reputable rare-book dealer in London.”
Scott found himself speaking again: the woman’s voice said, “You haven’t been under that impression lately. You know very well that Theodore Kosloff stole it from me two years ago, shot me in the leg to get it, and he’d let me shoot him before he’d give it back to me.”
“As you say. But, child, why come to me?”
“Because I know you bribed one of his girls, Fridi, to photograph it for you—she was too scared to steal it like I tried to do. Fridi’s an old friend of mine, and she told me about it, even told me about the warpy glasses you insisted that she wear while she took the picture.”
She wiggled her foot, and the pain in her toe seemed to lance up through her shin to her knee; Scott felt the skin around her eyes tighten in a wince.
The young man standing beside Scott muttered something, and the woman’s voice said, “Wait outside, see that we’re not interrupted.” Then Scott was aware of her forehead kinking in a frown that felt like puzzlement, and her voice started to say, “I’m not sure I’m—”
And before she could finish the sentence, Scott felt another personality strongly exert itself in the woman’s body. “Wait outside,” her voice repeated, and it seemed more musical now.
The young man nodded and stepped past Taylor to the front door, and without looking at anyone he pulled the door open and disappeared outside. The curtains above the desk fluttered in the moment before the door was closed, and Scott had caught a brief glimpse of a moonlit gazebo out there.
Taylor gave her a frosty smile. “Very well—yes, Fridi is right. And, as the thing was yours originally, I’ll have the developer send you a copy. You didn’t need a gun to compel me.”
“You appear to be editing a film there,” came the woman’s newer voice. “What sort of film is it that has to be edited in a mirror?”
Before Taylor could summon an answer, the woman went on, “Never mind. You let Fridi guess your purpose—you’re using images of the Medusa spider to make some sort of exorcism film! Setting repetitions of the image in the fast tarantella frequencies to nullify it. You probably use the Medusa’s image a dozen times, a hundred, in that film!” The gun, a blued-steel revolver, appeared for a moment in Scott’s vision as the body pointed at the desk with it, and the remembered chain bracelet was indeed visible on the wrist of the slim hand holding it. “All I want is one frame of the film, one that’s got the image on it.”
Frowning now, Taylor raised a steady hand. “You must know I’ve tried to stop the havoc this sickness has caused in our community, Natacha! You can’t really want—”
Scott felt a smile tighten his face, and then his mouth opened: “I think Natacha did really want it. Not as badly as I do.”
Taylor lowered his hand, and his face lost all expression. “Who are you? Do I know you?”
“I won’t even be born for a long time.”
Taylor shook his head slowly. “My God, Natacha came here in a before? And then lost her spider before she could do the after?”
“She did the after, but I did an after-after, and I’m stronger than she was. Now, just as a formality—will you give me one of the frames with the Medusa spider image on it?”
Taylor shrugged. “Very well. One frame.” He turned toward the desk, but the woman stepped swiftly to the side, apparently unmindful of the pain in her foot, and her eyes saw that Taylor had flicked open a cigarette lighter and had his thumb on the flint wheel.
The gun muzzle flared and rocked upward as the short, hard explosion shook the air and numbed Scott’s eardrums, and Taylor was thrown forward across the desk; after one ringing moment, he straightened and took a step toward the door, but he sagged and fell backward, and then he was lying on his back on the rug, staring sightlessly at the ceiling.
The woman’s shoulder jiggled. “We’ve got somebody else aboard too, haven’t we?” said her voice. “And when are you born, stranger?”
The young man had hurried back inside, and he stared in evident horror at the body on the carpet. He waved a hand toward it, and a chain bracelet was visible on his wrist too. “Natacha!” he whispered. “You had to kill him?”
Scott’s perspective moved forward to the desk, and then he was peering without comprehension at the machine. He saw the woman’s hand twist a knob on the console and then spin one of the reels, and a glistening length of film snaked from one reel through the machine to the other, while the lighted panel flickered.
She spun the reel on the right over and over again until the left-side reel spun free and the end of the film was slapping against her hand. She flipped up a little lever on the spindle and pulled the right-side reel off the machine, fitting it into the film can and spinning the wide lid on tight.
Her arms clasped the can to her chest, and a subsonic roar made the room seem almost to vibrate out of focus, and for a moment Scott was convinced that gravity itself had briefly wavered.
Scott felt the woman inhale and exhale deeply, and then she was crouching and pulling off a high-heeled shoe. The flat head of a thumbtack was pressed against the underside of her big toe, and she got her fingernails under it and tugged the point free; a drop of blood showed on the skin in the moment before she thrust her foot back into the shoe. Then she straightened up, and her head jerked back toward the dining room. “Out the way we came in.”
Now Scott was hurrying back across the dining room and through a small d
ark kitchen to a back door; the young man pulled it open and they stepped down to a sidewalk on a narrow street. Scott caught a whiff of jasmine on the night breeze. Moonlight frosted the tops of waving palm trees and the tile roof of the apartment building across the street, but the woman and her companion were in deep shadow as they hurried left down the sidewalk to a wider street. On the far side of the intersection another apartment building was visible, and Scott was able to read Roxy over the doorway arch. Headlights illuminated a neatly kept hedge along that far curb, and a car swept past the intersection, then another; they were both angular upright black cars of the 1920s.
And then his vision lost depth, and the moving patches changed from the black and white of a moonlit street to points and curls of gold against blackness.
He was lying on his back, and his hands told him he was on a rug; and after a minute of breathing deeply and blinking, his vision recovered depth perception and he could see that he was in a dim room with lots of hanging brass vessels and gold statues on shelves. And then, turning his head stiffly, he could make out a bed with spiral-carved pillars, and a curtained window.
The aches that racked him were particularly strong in his hips and back and jaw, but he got up in a crouch and looked around, and behind him was a closed door. The knob turned when he had hobbled across to it, and when he pulled the door open, he exhaled with relief to see the familiar second-floor hallway of Caveat; as if to confirm it, the old structure creaked and shifted perceptibly. He stumbled a few steps forward, and he realized from the position of the stairs and the far window that he had just come out of Claimayne’s room.
That’s all I need, Scott thought desperately—to be caught coming out of his room! Why the hell would my briefly abandoned body have made its way there? He pulled the door closed behind him and limped down the hall to his own room.
CHAPTER 11
THE RINGING OF A telephone was echoing in his parents’ empty room, but the telephone itself was gone.
Scott had taken a couple of Madeline’s Advils and lain down on his bed, waiting for the postspider aches in his joints and jaw to abate, and he had managed to drift off into a restless sleep and a dream in which he shuffled endlessly through his aunt’s canceled checks, but the ringing phone brought him upright and swinging his feet to the floor.
He followed the ringing noise through Madeline’s room and into his parents’ empty sunlit room, and then he stared blankly at the two wires sticking out of the wall where the telephone had once been connected. The pulsing metallic clangor was coming clear and unmuffled from that corner of the room.
Somewhere there’s the actual phone, he thought, and it’s silent, but if I could find it and pick up the receiver I could talk to . . . whoever’s calling.
His hands flexed uselessly. Claimayne, where did your mother put our parents’ stuff?
At the seventh ring Scott automatically began waiting for an answering machine to pick up, but the ringing kept on. Wherever the phone is, he thought, the answering machine isn’t hooked up to it anymore.
Feeling foolish even though he was alone, but reasoning that sounds here, now, were fragmented in space and time, he knelt by the wires and ventured to say, “Hello?”
The ringing stopped. The following silence seemed to fill the room, crowding him. He wished he had brought the Valentino book with him from his room, so that he could look at his mother’s handwriting on the flyleaf.
“Mom?” His forehead was chilly with a sudden dew of sweat. “Is that you?”
But his heartbeat was all he heard, and after a full minute of kneeling on the floor, he wearily got to his feet, feeling the various aches undiminished.
He shambled to the window, but Claimayne and Ariel had apparently finished their lunch and gone inside. The wheelbarrow no longer stood in front of the Medusa wall.
He straightened and turned to face the far corner of the room. The apartment where Natacha had shot Mr. Taylor had been in that direction, southeast, and not far away.
Back in his own room, his scuffed leather jacket was on the floor, and he bent and picked it up, feeling the swinging weight of the bottle in the pocket as he wearily thrust his arms into the sleeves. The three remaining folded spider papers were still scattered on the bedspread, and he gathered them up and shoved them into the same pocket as the bottle.
He looked toward the door—the direction was still clear. He picked up his helmet and opened the door and stepped into the hall.
SCOTT RODE UP THE ramp from Argyle onto the southbound 101 Freeway, and since he wasn’t sure when its course might diverge from the destination he sensed, he stayed in the slow lane, passing pastel-colored apartment buildings beyond the high freeway walls and the more distant turrets and roof peaks of the Scientology Celebrity Centre to the north. At about Beverly the freeway began to swerve to the left of his psychically insistent course, and he downshifted off the freeway at the Rampart exit and, after a moment of indecision at the traffic light, turned south. When he got down to West Sixth Street he felt that he had passed it, and he made a left turn and sped along past the clustered trees of MacArthur Park.
At Alvarado Street he intuitively swerved north, and he knew that he had passed his goal in the same moment that he recognized the Roxy Apartment building on his left. In full daylight he could see the cornices and decorative friezes above the arched windows of the first floor, and its masonry was visibly tan now; it had appeared gray in the moonlight when he had seen it in the spider vision a little more than an hour ago.
He leaned the bike into a hasty U-turn, and a moment later made a left onto a very narrow street called Maryland, and he swerved past a startled fruit-seller’s cart into the parking lot of a Ross Dress for Less clothing store. He braked to a halt, reached down to switch off the engine, then slowly levered down the kickstand with his foot, swung his leg over the gas tank, and stood up on the parking lot asphalt.
He took a few tentative steps as he pulled off his helmet and goggles, and then stopped. The breeze was chilly in his sweaty hair.
He knew he was standing precisely where the woman Natacha had stood when she had shot Taylor. And the apartment it had happened in was long gone. From the moment when he had started his motorcycle, he had felt that he was following a line toward an end point, but in fact the end point was in a time he couldn’t get to.
THE DRIVER OF THE white Chevy Blazer was caught by surprise when Scott looped back, and he had to continue on up to Third Street and then turn right, and then down a long alley of the back ends of apartment buildings, all graffiti and fire escapes and abandoned mattresses propped against low, bumper-scarred walls; and when he finally rocked across Maryland Street into the Ross parking lot, he drove well past where Scott was standing and braked crookedly in a parking space closer to the store. His 7-Eleven Big Gulp cup had fallen onto the passenger-side floor and spilled open.
His cell phone was already in his hand, and he was talking before the SUV had entirely stopped shifting on its shocks.
“This is Polydectes. That Madden guy on the motorcycle is at the place where Taylor was killed! Right, Alvarado and Maryland—yeah, the Scott one, he came right here from the Madden house on Vista Del Mar . . . no, he’s off the bike, and I think he’s standing, listen to me, I think he’s standing exactly where Taylor’s bungalow was, in ’22.” He lit a cigarette with trembling fingers as he listened, and then he interrupted, “Sure, sure—but I’d say it’s a good bet that he’s got a hypertemporal line on the big spider.”
He listened for several seconds, sitting hiked around on the seat to keep an eye on Scott Madden and the motorcycle, then said, “I haven’t seen any of the Montreal crowd, but that doesn’t mean they’re not here. If they are, they probably saw me come in here fast—but it was from a different direction, yeah, they’d figure I just need to buy a pair of pants . . . pants, this is Ross, they sell clothes . . . okay, right, action only if there’s interference.”
SCOTT WALKED SLOWLY BACK to his motorcyc
le, and when he had put on his goggles and helmet again and got the bike’s engine started, he rode north on Alvarado, not hurrying—and not aware of the white Blazer behind him, much less of the white Saturn a few car lengths behind it.
As he reflexively worked the throttle and clutch and gearshift and the gathering headwind fluttered his shirt collar, Scott was trying to fit evident facts into a chronological order.
The Natacha woman had told Taylor that a man named Kosloff had stolen the Medusa spider from her and shot her while doing it, and in fact Madeline had experienced that in a vision yesterday.
Later Natacha and a companion had gone to the apartment of this Taylor, and then somebody—somebody from a more recent time period—had overridden Natacha’s control of her own body, and had shot Taylor, probably fatally.
Scott’s right hand was gripping the throttle, but he vividly remembered the recoil of the gun in his palm; and then Taylor had taken a step toward the door—reflexively, hopelessly, trying to walk away?—and Scott had seen the little hole punched in the back of the man’s jacket. Taylor had fallen over backward to the floor, and Scott remembered the empty look in the blankly staring eyes.
Scott was shivering and afraid he might vomit.
Abruptly his vision changed. The shapes of cars and buildings and pavement in front of him didn’t shift or disappear, but his view had lost all depth, and he seemed to be riding straight at a flat surface with projected shapes at the edges moving away from the center.
By sheer sense of balance he kept the motorcycle upright as he squeezed the front brake and trod on the back one, and, guessing that the diagonal tapering line at his right was the curb, he slanted in toward it and brought the bike to a skidding stop. Cars audibly roared past him on his left, presumably corresponding to shapes that appeared and diminished on that side. He swung his right foot off the footrest and sagged in relief when the toe of his shoe bumped the gritty corner of the cement curb.