He dug a pack of Camels out of his left jacket pocket and shook a cigarette onto his lip, and as he struck a match to it he looked around the long room. The gray daylight in the windows cast no clear shadows, and the room was nearly as cold as the sidewalk outside had been.
A two-inch-wide pipe stood in the corner on the far side of the door, rising from a mound of ancient putty on the floor to disappear through a square hole in the ceiling, and Scott crossed to it and gripped it; it didn’t shift when he tugged at it. He sighed and walked back to where the women sat, his footsteps echoing.
“I’m going to finish this cigarette and drink that coffee,” he said, “and then I’m going to chain myself to that pipe.” He reached into the right jacket pocket and pulled out one of the two remaining crumpled, folded slips of paper; he flattened it out and saw that Claimayne had lettered Scaramuccia on it.
“Like Odysseus tied to the mast,” said Ariel, nervously touching her silver gyroscope pendant.
Madeline too had guessed what sort of paper Scott held. “Why?” she asked plaintively.
“If he’s going to do without his drink,” said Ariel, “he needs to get his precious oblivion somewhere.”
Scott took a drag on the cigarette and exhaled a pale stream of smoke before he looked up from the folded paper to squint at Ariel.
She shook her head sharply. “I’m sorry. I’ve read that amputees still feel pains and itches in their missing limbs. The place in my head that hates you has been cut off, but—there’s still a twitch there sometimes.”
Like when you chose to do the after of your three-day-old spider in front of us last night, Scott thought; and he thought of the box of credit cards in the uphill garage and the scare-bat in the basement, which ought to be negations of his years of hating his parents.
He smiled at her. “I know how that works.” He turned to Madeline. “The spider visions always show us a place, a time, where the big spider image is—and after Hearst burned Natacha’s original, that leaves just the images in the Taylor film. So far it’s always been a time in the 1920s, but I think they’ve been chronological, each one a bit more recent than the last. I’ve got to . . . hope to . . . see a place where the film might still be now.”
“Chain me to the pipe, then,” Madeline said. “You did two spiders, day before yesterday. It’s bad for you to do a lot of them—look at Claimayne.”
Scott knew she wasn’t craving the moment of selflessness—and he insisted to himself that he wasn’t either—but that she hoped to see Valentino again, as Scott had on Thursday night.
To Madeline, Ariel said, with evident skepticism, “I thought you didn’t want the film to be found.”
“But I think it’ll be okay if I can be the one to watch the film,” Madeline said. “That would block Aunt Amity out of me, and at the same time spill me into the hurricane.”
From which, thought Scott, you imagine the spirit of Valentino will again rescue you and take you back to that moonlit garden.
“We can watch it together,” he said, though he was resolved not to let her do it. “We looked at the Oneida Ince spider together.”
“No, Scott,” Madeline said. “I know you don’t mean to let me watch it at all—because you love me!—but Rudolph Valentino might not save you. He told you that whoever watched it would die of it.”
Scott suspected that she used Valentino’s whole name because just the first name would have seemed presumptuously familiar, while just the last name would have seemed too remote.
“I don’t think you have any hope of finding it at all,” said Ariel, standing up. She waved toward the pipe. “So go ahead.”
“Right.” Scott picked up his cup and drained it in four big swallows, then had a last deep inhalation on the cigarette and dropped the butt into the cup and set it down. “Pay attention to whoever occupies me while I’m gone,” he said, picking up the chain. “But don’t let him know we’re after the film.”
“Or her,” said Madeline.
“Or, as it might be, her.” Scott tossed his keys to his sister, then walked to the pipe and flipped the chain around it and drew the two ends together over his belt buckle. It was a comfortably snug fit. He clicked the padlock shut through the two end links.
He felt jumpy and sick and wondered if his imminent occupier would vomit. “Geronimo,” he said and flipped open the Scaramuccia paper.
For a breathless and vertiginous moment the spider expanded to fill his vision, its lines bristling and spinning, and then he was nobody; after a measureless time, he found himself moving through the deceptively vertical-seeming things—
Then he was standing on a thin carpet and looking out through an open door at a sunlit wooden balcony. He took a careful step forward, out onto the balcony, and saw that he was two or three floors above a street that sloped steeply downhill to his left; hotels or apartment buildings with pillars and ornate turrets lined the street, their first-floor windows level with the second- or even third-floor windows of buildings farther down the incline. He gripped the balcony rail and looked down. The bonging sound he’d been hearing was coordinated with Stop and Go signs that swiveled out of traffic signal boxes on the street corner, and the cars moving up and down the lanes looked like models from the 1940s. San Francisco, he thought. He stepped back and looked down at himself and saw that he was in a male body, dressed in gray slacks and a short-sleeved white shirt.
He turned to face the room, and he could feel the presence of the Usabo image like static electricity in the hairs on his arms. The room was narrow but high ceilinged, with a transom window over the door; an iron-frame bed with a battered leather trunk beside it, a dresser with a lamp, and a couple of metal-tubing chairs at a Formica-top table were the only furniture, aside from a big chrome clock and an age-darkened framed print on the yellowed plaster wall.
He glanced around nervously, but his impression that someone else was present seemed to be wrong.
With his hands out in front of himself he shuffled across the carpet toward the door, trying to feel where the faint vibration in the air and the sensed-but-not-quite-heard roar were most detectable; and he found himself facing the wall with the bed and dresser against it.
On the dresser were only a ring of keys and a scattering of coins and a clean tin ashtray. Scott pulled open the drawers, but they contained nothing but socks and shirts and boxer shorts and a bottle of Korbel brandy. He patted the bed and lifted the mattress, but found nothing. The latches on the trunk weren’t locked, and when he pulled the lid up, he discovered a collection of small tins and glass jars and brushes, and several wigs and false beards—blond, brown, and black. Was the person whose body he was in an actor?
He got awkwardly down on his knees and peered under the dresser—and saw only some old cigarette butts—and then under the bed; a stainless steel .45 semiautomatic lay where a person in the bed could easily reach down and grab it, but there was nothing like a film can.
How long will I stay here? he thought worriedly. He glanced up at the clock, which was made from a flat hubcap with wire numerals around the rim; its triangular chrome hands showed ten minutes to ten. I should be okay for several minutes in any case, he thought, but I should find something I can hurt myself with, to prolong this. As hard as he could, he pinched the wrist of the body he was in, but it didn’t seem like enough.
There was no bathroom or kitchen. A narrow closet proved to contain a wide-lapeled striped seersucker suit and a pair of polished wingtip shoes; Scott felt through the pockets of the suit but found nothing besides a silver-certificate five-dollar bill and a matchbook from the Trocadero. On the shelf above the hangers was a hatbox that proved to contain only a man’s fedora hat.
He turned back to the room. It’s here, he thought, somewhere—and then he noticed that the hands of the clock were still at ten minutes to ten.
How long have I been here? he thought.
He hastily dug out the matchbook again and flipped it open, intending to strike a match and bu
rn his finger—but his vision lost all depth and the colors changed, and he knew that the sudden pain across his abdomen must be the chain holding him to the pipe in the apiary. He got his feet under himself and stood up straight, easing the chain, and concentrated on breathing deeply. He was alarmed to taste blood in his mouth.
Shapes changed in front of him, and he tried to recognize human figures. Madeline’s voice said, “Scott? Are you with us?,” and he recognized the brown of her sweater.
“Maddy,” he said, keeping his voice level, “am I bleeding?”
“Here,” she said, and he felt her hand press a wad of paper tissues into his palm and then raise his hand to his nose. “You’ve got a nosebleed. Press on it.”
“Oh,” he said hoarsely. “Thanks.” He held the tissues to his nose and cleared his throat. “Have I been shouting?” He narrowed his eyes, and he was able to pick out the figures of Madeline and Ariel among the shifting fields of muted colors.
“Not shouting,” said Madeline, “but your voice was grittier.”
“Did you see your film can?” came Ariel’s voice.
“No. I felt it, it was there—maybe taped to the back side of the dresser—but I didn’t see it.” He could feel blood on his chin, and he wondered what his shirt must look like. “It was in San Francisco, I’m pretty sure—1940s, from the cars.” He held out his free hand. “Can I have my keys?”
He saw Madeline’s hand come closer, and then he was able to see the whole room in perspective—the two women standing a yard away, the TV screen behind them, and the stacked tables farther away against the wall.
Scott took the keys from Madeline, found the padlock key and freed himself from the chain, and immediately stumbled to the nearest chair and sat down, still pressing the tissues to his nose.
“It’s a nice drive, to San Francisco,” said Madeline.
“You wanted to know—” began Ariel. “I mean, the guy in your body wanted to know who we were, and who you were, and what year it is.”
“He seemed scared,” put in Madeline, “by us, as much as by the chain around him. He said you ambushed him—he meant to be in his own body, someplace he was familiar with.”
Scott gingerly prodded his stomach. “He was straining pretty hard against the chain. What did you tell him?”
“I told him it was 2015,” said Madeline, “and he looked at the window and said I was lying.”
“He thought you were telling him what time it was,” said Ariel. Madeline raised her eyebrows and nodded.
“Did he say who he was?” asked Scott.
“I asked him,” said Ariel. “He sort of laughed and said he was between names.”
Scott held the red-blotted tissues away, and his nose seemed to have stopped bleeding. Looking down, he saw that his shirt was streaked with blood.
“I couldn’t get close enough to give him tissues while he wasn’t you,” said Madeline apologetically.
“No,” Scott agreed. He started to stand up, then sat back down, peering left and right. He pointed at the hallway door. “That’s north, isn’t it?”
Ariel rolled her eyes. “You lived here how long? Yes, that’s north.”
“San Francisco is north of us,” he said.
Ariel visibly smothered a sarcastic rejoinder and just nodded.
“The place I was at was that way,” he said, pointing away from the door at the windows, “south, and not far from here.” He dabbed at his lips and chin with the tissue. “I sure didn’t recognize the neighborhood, but I want to go check it anyway.”
“You’re probably a bit wobbly to be riding your bike,” said Ariel. “And I still haven’t heard back from the cops about my car. Maddy, you up for a drive?”
“Sure. Won’t your guys from yesterday follow us?”
“I bet they don’t know about the back driveway. Nobody’s used it in forever.” She smiled brightly. “We can have lunch somewhere—no use trying to do anything today in the kitchen here. Let’s meet in your room in half an hour.”
CHAPTER 24
WHEN THEY STEPPED OUTSIDE, Ariel glanced at Scott in the gray daylight, and she pointed at a rosemary bush beside the driveway. “There’s a gun in that bush,” she said. “Grab it, would you?”
He gave her an uncertain smile, but shuffled across the asphalt and bent over. The revolver she had taken away from Claimayne two days ago was suspended in the aromatic branches, and he tugged it free and carefully tucked it into the right-hand pocket of his jacket. He straightened up with an effort.
“Would you rather do this later?” Ariel asked. “How long do you think you’ll be able to sense where the thing is? Or was?”
“Hours, at least,” he said, starting forward toward Madeline’s car. “But let’s do it now.”
“Hello, Louise,” said Madeline, and Scott wheeled around.
He could make out the figure of Louise Odell leaning against the wall beside the kitchen door, dressed in woolen trousers and a dark blue quilted jacket. Her short blond hair looked as if she’d just run her fingers through it, and sunglasses hid her eyes.
“Hi, Maddy,” Louise said. Then she faced Scott. “I need to get to the bank and pull all my money out,” she said, her voice quavering. “I drove here, and I’m parked by those trucks in your driveway—but they’re following me. They may even have some kind of tracker attached to my car!”
“Who’s following you?” asked Ariel.
Louise shook her head. “Damn it, it’s Scott’s fault, he talked to them on Thursday, on my phone, so they can’t use me as a, a spy anymore. I’ve got a friend in—well, never mind where, but I can hide out at her place till they’re done with all this—if I can get away from them.” She snatched off her sunglasses and blinked at Scott. “You’ve got guys doing work on the place? Pay one of them to sneak me into their truck, rolled up in a carpet or something.”
“Is one of your them a guy named Ferdalisi?” asked Ariel.
“I don’t know any of their names. Scott, you owe me—”
Ariel went on, “Bald, with a beard but no mustache, so his face looks upside-down? He seems to be their field man.”
Louise looked dismayed. “That’s the one I’ve met.”
“The workmen here were hired by our cousin,” said Ariel, “and they might want to get his okay on your girl-in-a-carpet stunt, and I’m pretty sure he’s in touch with Ferdalisi. It might be Ferdalisi that’d unroll the carpet.”
Louise moaned faintly and stamped her foot.
Ariel went on, “Do your friends know about the back easement down to Gower?” When Louise gave her an uncomprehending look, she clarified, “A driveway from the uphill garages that leads down to the next street east.”
“I guess not. I didn’t know about it. Yesterday I came right up the main driveway from Vista Del Mar. And they’re not my—”
“Let’s go,” said Scott. “Everybody in Madeline’s car. Close the doors quietly.”
“I’m abandoning my car here,” said Louise. “Sorry.” She pulled her phone out of her pocket. “And I don’t dare keep this either,” she added, dropping it onto the cement.
Madeline tossed some papers and clothing from the backseat of her car into the trunk, and then opened the driver’s-side door and slid behind the wheel. Scott got in on the passenger side, and Ariel and Louise folded themselves into the backseat.
“I figure north and then west,” Madeline said. “Basically up Gower and then out through the bendy streets like Primrose to Cahuenga, and get on the 101 from there.”
“And south on that,” agreed Scott as she started the car and clicked the console gearshift into reverse. He pulled the seat belt across himself and clicked the tongue into the buckle; Claimayne’s gun was pressing against his ribs.
“Uh,” said Ariel, “don’t back down the driveway to where the garage road branches off. You’d be visible from the street. Drive straight across the lawn and catch the garage road up here.”
“There’s logs bordering the road,” said
Madeline.
“Scott can roll one of the logs out of the way.”
“No problem,” said Scott, privately dreading the effort of using his aching muscles.
Madeline clicked the gearshift down to drive, steered the car off the cement onto the grass, and set out slowly across the west lawn. Scott peered nervously past her profile in the direction of Vista Del Mar, but all he saw from this high up the slope were the rooftops of buildings on the other side of the street; Madeline’s Datsun wouldn’t be visible from pavement level.
Scott hiked around in his seat when Ariel said to Louise, “What can you tell us about the people you were spying for?”
Louise looked down at her hands. “The guy with the beard started talking to me at a Starbucks and said I could make some money by getting back in touch with Scott and you all—find out what you know about your dead aunt and the spiders. I owe a fortune in student loans, and after I got my degree in education and tried to apply it, I caught on that the emperor had no clothes—”
“Who?” interrupted Madeline. The logs bordering the garage road were visible now between the widely spaced palm trees, and she was slowing down.
“Who what?” said Louise.
“Who had no clothes? When was this?”
“The emperor,” said Louise impatiently. “Like in the kids’ story.”
“That’s in a kids’ story? What did he do? The naked guy, this emperor.”
The car had come to a stop on the grass, and Scott had his hand on the door lever.
Louise whispered, “For God’s sake.”
“You were going to tell us,” said Ariel, “about the people you took money from, to spy on us.”
“The emperor just went home,” Scott told Madeline, “after everybody laughed at him.”
“Some story.”