Bride of the Rat God (11 page)

Hollywood, Norah thought again, watching Alec setting up reflectors on that fairy-tale balcony beside the exquisite queen. In the courtyard that might have belonged to Cyrus the Great, Blake Fallon in his charioteer’s tunic was rolling a golf ball for Chang Ming to chase, although Chang Ming, in typical Pekingese fashion, could not bring himself to actually give it up for another throw once he’d caught it. The clapper board rested against the base of the fountain. Ned the lesser, in his baggy corduroys and suspenders, made sure no cables showed within the camera lines.

Nobody gave any sign that they’d already worked twelve hours that day and would probably be there till midnight. Norah was well aware that this wasn’t the first time—she’d watched Christine doing retakes until ten on several occasions during the filming of
Sawdust Rose
—and found it rather curious that film stars routinely worked hours that would have had factory hands striking in England.

For six thousand dollars a week, she supposed one would do whatever the producer asked.

Behind her, Norah heard Black Jasmine bark. There was no mistaking that flat little quack. She reentered the house, passed through the long makeup room, and looked into the chamber beyond.

Black Jasmine and—surprisingly—Buttercreme were engaged in furious pursuit of something Norah couldn’t quite make out in the shadows. Probably a mouse or a stray golf ball from Mr. Fallon’s game with Chang Ming. Norah smiled, leaning in the doorway to watch them: ostrich-plume tails curled tightly up over their backs, fur flouncing in all directions like a couple of sixteenth-century children running about in farthingales and trains, they darted among the shadows of the far wall, eyes gleaming in the stray light that leaked through from the courtyard. Their toenails clattered on the terra-cotta tiles, and now and then one of them would bark, the curious barks of Pekingese, small and fierce and the farthest sound possible from the nervous yapping of most toy dogs. The noise echoed queerly in the low-raftered chamber.

They filmed until after midnight. Part of this was due to Alec’s determination to shoot nearly twice as much film as usual, and part to Blake Fallon’s absolute inability to rise above the level of an extremely comely department store mannequin. Faced with the most gut-wrenching moral dilemma of his life in the garden of the queen, he paced up and down beneath her balcony with the brow-clutching hyperventilation of a high school production of Romeo and Juliet. In a later scene—for which Christine changed from shimmering and abbreviated black into shimmering and abbreviated gold—he received the news of his banishment from his cruel goddess’s favors with the spastic jerks of a string-activated wooden toy.

“I can see why Mr. Brown teamed them up,” Norah remarked to Alec during one of Hraldy’s impassioned demonstrations of alternately spurning himself and falling at his own feet in despair. She hugged her cardigan closer about her; the night air was definitely turning cold.

Alec nodded wisely. “He does make her look good, doesn’t he? Part of it’s the coke—that’s why he keeps flubbing. But even sober he comes in second to the scenery.”

“Do they
all
dope?” demanded Norah, exasperated as much as horrified. “I know Christine does; I see Flindy McColl and Wilmer and Calderone...”

“Christine’s not as bad as some, but she’s playing with fire,” Alec said bluntly. “Studio doctors prescribe it like cough drops; they have to if the stars are shooting fourteen, sixteen hours a day, six days a week sometimes. About a third of the crew uses it, too; I don’t, but I have a standing prescription for as much as I want. And the stars who don’t use it to stay awake use it to stay skinny. The camera puts about ten pounds on a person. And that,” he finished with a grim glitter in his eye, “is Hollywood, too.”

At ten Frank Brown showed up, and Norah and the lesser Ned walked down to T’ang’s on Hollywood Boulevard for food for the crew. It was of a piece with the night, she thought, to sit in the royal gardens of Babylon watching Queen Vashti, her godlike young lover, and the two shining-muscled Nubian guardsmen downing fried rice and sweet and sour pork out of paper cartons.

“I want you to keep an eye on her out in the desert,” said Brown, hunkering clumsily down at Norah’s side. Norah felt startled, gratified at this evidence of his care, until he added, “I don’t expect Hearst’ll get reporters out that far, but he might.”

She looked across at the big man. The doughy face looked even heavier with fatigue, sleeplessness bloating the flesh around the cold celadon eyes. She recalled his arrival at Christine’s house the previous day, minutes before the reporters, and how he had remained, a traffic cop to the interview, until the last had gone. “So they’re not accepting your story?”

The pale eyes flashed irritably. “Damn vultures don’t care for what’s true, only for their goddamn stories,” he snapped. “I drove Charlie Sandringham straight from my place to the train station, and that’s that. We both saw that barnstorming pansy drive off, and I was with Charlie every minute after that.”

Norah was silent.

Brown sighed and shook his leonine head. “Wolfman on the
Trib
tells me they got a call saying Sandringham was the kid’s sugar daddy. That’s what got them out there for seconds yesterday. It’s got to be Jesperson from Enterprise Studios. He knows if
Midnight Cavalier
goes under, not only do I not buy him out, he buys me.” He straightened up and looked down at Norah on her marble bench. “So you keep her clear of anyone you don’t know when you’re out there, okay?”

With a fat man’s heavy roll he strode to the bench where Fallon and Christine sat. Fallon had been flirting earlier with Christine in a manner that reminded Norah strongly of Lawrence Pendergast’s self-confident attentions, but he moved aside quickly for the producer. At the sight of Brown, Christine fairly sparkled with animation and delight.

After fifteen hours of hard work under the dehydrating blaze of the lights, it was pretty good. Watching her, Norah thought about what Alec had said. Between takes the crew at least had the option of looking tired and grumpy as they went about their chores. Christine didn’t, in the presence of the man who expected his mistress to be as vivacious as she always appeared on camera. Norah’s own exhaustion weighed like lead in her bones—she dreaded having to get up and catch the train in the morning—and she had only looked after the dogs, fetched and carried for Christine, and held the boards for test footage and shot headers.

“We’re not doing badly tonight,” Alec remarked, coming over with steaming cups of coffee and tea in hand and Chang Ming trotting hopefully at his heels. Norah had issued strict orders to the entire crew not to feed the Pekes, and to her surprise they’d been obeyed, even by Fallon, whose idea of a roaring joke was to get the studio cat drunk on the contents of his flask. “Only two lights have gone out, and that rope Blake was climbing broke when he was only a foot or so above the pavement. Not bad for this place.”

Norah lowered her chopsticks and regarded him curiously. “Do you really believe the place is haunted?”

“Not exactly,” he said after a long hesitation. Like everyone else, he looked like ten miles of bad road, his hair pointy with sweat and his brow marked with small lines that spoke of a headache he probably hadn’t had time to notice. He sipped his coffee gingerly. It was the color of tar and smelled like it, too. “I’m doing some faking, telling Mikos I’ve got doubts about the exposure or that the gate was acting up. Which is all nuts to him; he loves extra takes. And Blake and Christine are sure helping me in that department with both hands.” He reached down and scratched Chang Ming’s head.

Across the court the greater Ned dropped a bean sprout; the little dog bolted in instant pursuit. For the next five minutes he lay, holding the vegetable upright between his paws and licking it perplexedly, before giving up. Norah had set down plates of food for the dogs in the wardrobe room, and as usual Chang Ming and Black Jasmine had ignored their own, tried to steal bites out of each other’s, and waited with scant patience until the fussy Buttercreme had eaten a few mouthfuls, after which they had engaged in the obligatory yapping battle over what she’d left. Contrary to Norah’s expectations, the Pekes ate like cats: they would nibble for the rest of the evening.

“The thing is,” Alec went on, “I know the lights that went out will work just fine when I get them back to the studio. When I was filming
Salamis
here with Campbell, we had a whole light tree come down on top of Dick Scott, and I’d double-checked the braces on the thing myself. He
still
can’t use his right arm properly; he’s lucky he wasn’t killed.” He shrugged. “I wouldn’t call it superstition. I’m just a little more careful when I’m here, that’s all.”

In time Norah went into the house again, curled up in the chinchilla coat with her head on a silken heap of spare draperies, and drifted off to sleep to the dim strains of Ketelby’s
In a Persian Market
and snatches of Saint-Saens. But, perhaps because of the sweet and sour pork, she did not sleep well. She woke two or three times or dreamed that she woke, wondering why the room seemed so dark, wondering why she felt the clutch of terror at her throat, the sense that there was something moving in the room beyond the dark archway. From that she woke in earnest to hear the scurrying rattle of claws on the tiled floor in that farther room as the Pekes scampered to and fro, hunting mice or whatever it was they were hunting with savage enthusiasm. After that she slept better. When Alec woke her, she found all three Pekingese lying like little sentinels, one in each door of the long room that led to the rest of the house.

Avoid doing what is improper—a warning...

An expedition is ill advised...

An omen of peril...

A ram butting its head upon a fence—

unable to withdraw or to go ahead...

F
OR THE FOURTH
time that evening the old man unwrapped the sandalwood box he kept at the head of his mattress and took from it a bronze vessel green with time and wrought in the shape of a bird. The metal was still warm to his touch.

He shook his head, knowing that what he did was as useless as digging up a planted seed to make sure it was sprouting. But there was little else he could do.

It was dark out on the narrow porch of the cottage and very cold. The night was filled with the scents of the alien, arid hills. Above and behind the cottage, the house loomed, garage and kitchen, the main bulk of the first floor, and, rising above that like a watchtower, the second story with its little balconies and tiled decorations and ornamental niches and figures beneath the eaves, dark as the hills themselves. The moon would not clear the hills for some hours yet. He had walked the circumference of the house twice already, seeing that the only lighted lamps were on the tall porch and in the living room beyond so that Chrysanda Flamande would not return to a dark house.

So far she had not returned at all. Shang Ko sighed, weary and driven and wondering what on earth he could do. He feared for her—that surprising, vivid lady, wild and beautiful as a milkweed fairy—feared for her tall and quiet-voiced sister. He had marked both the main house and the cottage, marked the motorcar and the trees at the end of the drive, with signs of protection, but he feared—in his heart he knew—this would not be enough.

He sank cross-legged onto the worn boards. From another compartment in the sandalwood box he took three coins he had been given many years earlier in another land, two bronze incense burners no larger than a child’s palm, and five sticks of the incense he had purchased several days before on Marchessault Street. Last of all he withdrew a small white stone, like the bird vessel warm and marked with fire, which he put into the bronze vessel again; the incense he arranged in the burners and in three small glass bottles that, by their smell, had once contained perfume.

He threw the coins, observing both the static and the moving implications of the hexagrams they formed, shuffling with the adeptness of long practice the signs that would need to be drawn to counteract the evils of which they spoke, to take into account the
lung
of the surrounding hills and the
xue
and
xiang
of the house itself. Against Fire in the East, Water must be written. Against Thunder over Heaven—the sign of great power—Mountain over Heaven to increase the buildup of resources, though he knew that no matter how he built up his own resources, they would not prevail. They had not in the past.

At least, he thought, the moon was waning. There would be some protection in that.

His hand trembled a little as he marked the sign Chu, and he took a handkerchief from his pocket and rubbed it out again. Clearing his mind of those memories, he redrew the marks—Da Chu, “Big Cattle”—perfectly. As perfectly as a man could whose hands more nearly resembled the claws of a dried vulture than the fingers of a human being.

When he had marked each of the six directions and drawn a protective sign around himself, he placed the incense, staring steadily at the tip of each joss stick until the flame glowed and then shrank in on itself in a frail ribbon of scented smoke. Likewise he placed twigs and papery chips of eucalyptus bark in the vessel of bronze around the white stone and called forth fire by speaking its secret name. The leaping light turned his face to a crazy quilt of shadow and amber, gleamed in the haunted depths of his eyes.

He had seen too much, he thought wearily. When he had been young he had been a fighter, willing to risk his honor, his friends, his family, and his life that injustice might be stemmed, corruption banished, the land of his birth—the most beautiful land under heaven—freed of the conquerers who had held it prisoner for generations, freed to take its true place in the world. And he had been defeated, broken by those who served the emperor. Those he trusted had betrayed him, so with nothing more than his bare life he had fled at last from the land he had loved, to fetch up like a storm-beaten mariner in this land. A different world, he thought, with its pale-eyed silent people, its smoke-belching motorcars and food that had no taste, and its cement buildings slapped down any which way, with no regard for
lung
and
xue
and
shui,
the energies that moved across the earth.