Medusa's Web (9 page)

Ariel shook her head. “The tarantella music would upset my cousin. He still uses.”

The bells on the street-side door jingled then, and Ariel looked around quickly; a short man in horn-rimmed glasses had come into the shop, but, seeing another customer already there, he turned around and walked out, pulling the door closed behind him.

Harry had stepped back from the counter and quickly put the glasses back on. His eyes appeared to be just swirls now behind the bull's-eye lenses.

He didn't take them off when he looked back at Ariel. “I may close early. You said your cousin still uses?”

“Yes, but I've been clean—”

“You live with him? Does he know you came here today? Does he know where this
is
?”

“No—I didn't know it myself till I got in the car and got on the website. And he's in a wheelchair and never leaves the house and he never has contact with anybody. He just lives for his
Medusa,
using the same old ones over and over.”

“Huh.” Harry relaxed and slowly took off the glasses. “He calls it Medusa? That's a very old term for it.”

Ariel shrugged. “He learned about it from his mother, I think.” She shivered and gripped her purse more tightly. “And then I learned about it from him.”

Harry stepped around from behind the counter and walked up to where she stood. “The term is a lot older than his mother, kid. Have you heard of
La Mano Negra
?”

“Black Hand. Sure. Italian extortionists in Chicago, wasn't it?”

“That was a different crowd.” Harry's breath smelled of Altoid mints. “
La Mano Negra
was a secret society in Andalucia, in Spain—the police called them anarchists, but all the legitimate anarchist groups—”

Ariel gave him a faint, quizzical smile. “I like the idea of legitimate anarchist groups.” She reached to the side and touched a can of High John the Conqueror good luck spray.

Harry shook his head, dismissing the interruption. “Well, they all said they had nothing to do with any
Mano Negra,
and in fact the group that the police rounded up in 1884 and executed—and burned all their papers, unread—were more like a religious order.”

“Uh . . . Christian?” She picked up the can and pretended to read the directions.

“Hardly. Their secret symbol was a black hand . . . with eight fingers. Their public symbol was a stylized Medusa head.”

“With eight snakes growing out of her head,” guessed Ariel, thinking of the Medusa wall in the garden. Harry nodded. “Eighteen eighty-four,” she went on. “I got the idea the spider patterns were invented in the 1920s.”

“Hell,
La Mano Negra
was centuries old by the time the Spanish police wiped them out; and they weren't the oldest branch, though they were the biggest.” He waved as if to indicate how old some of them were, and his hand brushed Ariel's shoulder. “Yeah, and spiders were a sort of secret fad with rich movie folks in the '20s, but those designs seemed to be more from India.”

Ariel was impatient to get out of the shop and this neighborhood, and she popped the plastic cap off the spray can, wondering if she might have to give old Harry a squirt in the face. “I bet there've been these shops forever, too, huh?” she said brightly. “Always charging too much for the merchandise.”

Harry looked down at the can in her hand and shrugged, and after a moment he stepped back behind the counter.

“So what did you want?” he said gruffly.

“Bull's-eye glasses,” she said, nodding at the pair he was holding, “both sunglasses and clear ones like that—one, no, three sets of each, damn it.” Why, she asked herself angrily, am I taking care of Scott and Madeline too?—when Claimayne says they're probably to blame for everything? I really am like the monkey that gets trapped because she can't let go. She shook her head and went on, “And a reversing single-mirror periscope.” I won't get them reversing periscopes, she thought. They can find their own. “How much for all that?”

“A hundred and fifty bucks.”

She knew the glasses and the periscope barrel would be cheap plastic, but she had complained about the prices once, a couple of
years ago—when Harry was running an apparent comic book store with the pale green light in the window, in Bellflower—and he had told her she was free to shop around openly for such things if she liked, and why not pay with a credit card while she was at it and really risk drawing attention to her peculiar purchases.

She pulled the roll of twenty-dollar bills out of her purse and flipped through eight of them and pulled them free. “I know you don't give receipts,” she said, “but I would like the ten bucks change.”

“What, did you always pay with the exact amount before? I don't give change. There's folks who can track it back to me.” He opened a drawer below the counter and, after rummaging around in it, found a Snickers candy bar. “This was going to be my lunch, but you can have it,” he said.

He tossed it across the counter and tucked the twenties into his pocket, then began filling a T. J. Maxx shopping bag with unmarked boxes from shelves behind the counter. Ariel put the candy bar in her purse.

“Flash bangs?” asked Harry.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Stun grenades, military reloads. They don't hurt anybody, just blind them with the flash and deafen them with the bang. Disorientation. Just drop it between you and somebody trying to show you a spider, and you're both out of action for a while.”

“Sounds like fun. And how much are they?”

Harry nodded at her bundle of twenties. “You don't have enough there.”

“That's good. Just give me what I asked for, thanks.”

He slid the filled bag over the counter to her, and Ariel nodded and turned toward the door.

“I won't be here next time,” Harry called after her.

“See you at the car stereo store.”

“Is that what I said?”

She pulled open the street door, and she was squinting in the
sudden hot sunlight as she crossed the sidewalk and fumbled out her car keys. When she had opened the passenger-side door and dropped the bag onto the seat, she put on her sunglasses, and she saw that the short man in glasses who had briefly come into the store was now leaning against the wall of the windowless and possibly abandoned one-story stucco building on the far side of the botanica.

Ariel watched him as she closed the car door. He was wearing rumpled dark wool trousers and a sport coat over a red T-shirt.

He nodded at her and slowly took off his glasses and tucked them into his jacket pocket, then pulled out another pair and put those on; even from several yards away, Ariel could see the circular ripples in the lenses.

He opened his mouth and said, “I've known spiderbits to blind themselves, so as to avoid maybe seeing one in a broken plate.”

Ariel didn't say anything.

“And then,” the little man went on, “they're afraid to sleep, because they might see one of the patterns in a dream. Sometimes they kill themselves.”

“It can't happen from a dream,” spoke up Ariel. “There's no physical original, and so no reciprocal image on the person's retina.”

The man nodded. “I know that. Too late to tell them, though.” He took a step toward her, and she tensed and darted a hand into her purse, where, down among the lipsticks and wallet and hairbrush, she kept an old Seecamp .32 semiautomatic pistol that had belonged to her mother. High John the Conqueror spray would have been enough for Harry, but this guy was an unknown.

“Could you spare a couple of bucks?” he said. “For a fellow spiderbit.”

“No,” she said. She hadn't found the pistol, but she impulsively pulled out the Snickers bar. “You can have this—it cost me ten bucks.”

He nodded again, so she held it out at arm's length, ready to run.

But he just took it and began tearing off the wrapper. “When the spiders go,” he said, then paused to take a big bite. Chewing the
mouthful was a stressful job that didn't seem likely to end soon, and Ariel had started to turn toward her car when he went on, “Do you think all the spiderbits will die?”

Ariel was startled. “Where would they go?” she asked. “The spiders, I mean.”

“Back to their own universe. And we've all got extra life from them, haven't we? Through them, anyway.” He took another bite.

“Well,” said Ariel dismissively, “I don't think they're going anytime soon. Uh—” She tried without success to remember the spiderbit phrase for good-bye and made do with, “Have a nice day.”

She had walked around the front of the car when he swallowed audibly and said, “Nobody gets flashbacks from the future anymore. Now is as far up as they go.”

Oh really, thought Ariel bitterly. Only yesterday I got a flashback from the future. The idiot future.

She opened the driver's-side door and abruptly remembered the phrase. “Look away!” she called.

“You too,” he said.

Ariel got in and started the car and drove forward, intending to take Vine north to Franklin. And as she shifted to the left lane it occurred to her that the overlap from her future self which she had experienced yesterday had only been from a couple of days ahead. That was pretty close to “now.” Claimayne may have misinterpreted the absence of any flashbacks from his future; instead of being an indication that he wouldn't be around for much longer, it might mean that the spiders would all shortly stop working.

Her face was tingling in the confined air inside the car. What then? she thought. The ink can't disappear from the pieces of paper—will the eight-legged patterns lose their psychic potency, become just inert marks? It would be as if the alcohol in all the liquor bottles in the world suddenly disappeared, leaving just flavored colored water.

She had to restrain herself from pulling over to the curb and downloading to her phone the app that would give her a ten-second
view of a spider, even though such apps were notoriously insecure. You d
on't
want that anymore, she told herself desperately—even if—even
if
the opportunity is about to disappear forever.

And in any case I know that the spiders still work for at least two more days, and I get to look at one at least once more.

She gripped the steering wheel more firmly and sped on toward Vine Street.

THE MAN IN GLASSES
watched the pretty woman's car recede, and he pulled a phone from his jacket pocket and tapped a speed-dial number.

“I got one,” he said a few moments later. “I don't know the name, but she's in a black Kia Optima.” He recited the memorized license-plate number and then described Ariel. “She gave me a ten-dollar candy bar,” he added. “Huh? Don't kid around. Full payment.”

IN SPITE OF THE
breeze, the early evening seemed to have paused, like a dancer halted on tiptoe. Dark clouds filled the northern sky, but the low sun bathed the back garden slope in a diffuse yellow light that cast no shadows; the gravel paths and bare tree branches were all in sepia tones, but the leaves of the lemon and bay trees glowed a vivid emerald green. The trees and untrimmed shrubbery looked closer than they really were, and the whole scene had the appearance of an “outdoors” movie set on a soundstage.

Scott had scuffed to a halt after walking past the Medusa wall to look around at the landscape, and for the first time in more than a year he felt the impulse to paint what he saw. The breeze faintly carried the smoke from some neighboring chimney, but he could almost smell acrylic paints and Crystal Clear spray fixative, and his fingers were unconsciously curled as if holding a brush.

He was reassured to glance to the west and see that the sun was perceptibly lower than it had been when he had last looked, and that the remembered seashell-studded wall had not appeared—he didn't want another anachronistic vision like his bisected view of the garden from up on the ladder this morning . . . or those two children, whose shadows had fallen a few degrees wrong for this time of year.

Let this cup pass away, he thought. I am not thirsty, Tetrarch. I can't stay here—spider visions, ghost cats, keyboards typing a dead woman's last-person novels! Back here at Caveat! It's my childhood, perversely served up as a living nightmare. I don't want to—I can't—walk any further into this impossibly animate decay. Vast forms, that move fantastically to a discordant melody . . .

Madeline will understand, when I repack my bag and ride away on my bike back to the Ravenna Apartments. Ariel will be glad. Claimayne won't care one way or the other. And back at the apartments, back in my 2015 life, I'm not likely to start thinking about painting again.

Right. I'm gone.

The resolution put a spring in his step as he turned back toward the house, and he seemed able to breathe more deeply. This is a sick place, he thought—

And abruptly he remembered Madeline saying, a few hours ago,
I'm just sick. If I didn't stay fit, I wouldn't be able to climb Mount McKinley
. And he remembered finding her terrified in the darkness beside the scare-bat in the cellar, expecting to be rescued by somebody she . . . how had it gone? Somebody she had sort of met in this house once.

He stopped walking, his mouth open as if to say something.

What will happen to her, here, he thought, if I leave? She'll keep reading her covert printouts . . . Aunt Amity's ghost-fingers curling up toward her through the keyboard . . .

Will she wind up huddled by the scare-bat in the dark again, for its negligible comfort? She used to make little paper costumes for it.

The light on the neglected garden was more golden now. We used to play back here, he thought, and all over the compound; those two children I saw from the roof—were they Madeline and me, glimpsed across the fractured years?

The evening still seemed stopped.

No,
he thought at last, unhappily, I can't do that, I can't leave her here. She
would
understand, and that would make it monstrously worse.

He exhaled, and for a moment allowed himself to reconsider—get on the bike, kick it to roaring life, gun it down Vista Del Mar and then speed away west on Franklin, never looking in the rearview mirrors—but already those actions had an imaginary tone, like his occasional thoughts of reuniting with Louise.

The breeze flicked his hair and he resumed walking, more slowly now, down the path toward the big old house he'd grown up in. I should shower and change before dinner, he thought emptily.

ALL THE FRENCH WINDOWS
in the dining room were open during dinner, and the jacaranda trees outside, their highest branches still lit by the westering sun, waved in the cold breeze that fluttered the napkins and made Claimayne draw up the collar of his dressing gown—though he wouldn't permit the windows to be closed, weakly citing fresh air as a necessity for a person in his condition. Ariel was subdued and kept glancing uneasily over her shoulder as if trying to see past the trees, and she managed to swallow about a third of the spaghetti on her plate before it evidently got too cold. There were no satiric quotes from the old movie about Salomé and the tetrarch tonight, and Madeline kept glancing at the empty chair at the head of the table.

Scott mentioned the repairs needed for the roof and the basement, and noted that he had ridden his motorcycle to the Home Depot on Sunset and bought a new thermocouple, but none of the others found these topics diverting.

Claimayne grumbled about cleaners and caterers who were due to arrive on Saturday morning. “And a plumber,” he said, waving toward the hall.

“How are we paying for this big party of yours?” Ariel asked him.

Claimayne tossed his fork across the table. “Credit cards! It's an investment. And this Ferdalisi fellow may give us some money for my mother's unpublished papers. You can't win if you don't . . .
play
.”

Dessert was still due, but Scott caught Madeline's eye and rocked his head toward the stairs, and she nodded slightly and rolled her eyes. They both stood up and asked to be excused, which was met with dismissive nods from Claimayne and Ariel.

Scott and Madeline hurried out of the dining room and tiptoed up the uncarpeted stairs, and they didn't speak until they had stepped into their parents' room and closed the door.

“House of Usher is right,” said Scott, sitting down on the wrecked old mattress. He had bought a fresh pack of Camels while he was out, and now lit one with shaking fingers. He glanced at the gathering darkness outside the window. “Hard to believe we're only a few blocks north of Hollywood Boulevard here,” he added, exhaling smoke.

“Or in 2015,” said Madeline. “I'll be back,” she added; she hurried through the connecting door into her room, and a moment later she returned carrying the sweater-bundled keyboard. “I'll sneak down, get Word open, and plug this in,” she said, “and I'll hide it behind the monitor and turn the monitor off, so nobody'll know it's working.”

Scott nodded bleakly, and she stole away down the hall.

He lay back across the plaster fragments on the mattress and blew smoke up at the exposed and discolored laths in the gap in the ceiling. The house creaked in the wind, and he imagined he could feel it shifting on the makeshift supports in the basement.

He was thirty-six years old, but all at once his memory of the parents who had lived in this room until he was twelve overwhelmed him. Through eyes suddenly blurred with tears he could almost see his mother's desk against the far wall, piled with shoeboxes and paperback books, and he thought he could nearly catch a whiff of his father's Dominican cigars. The air seemed to twang with the after-echoes of their voices.

I believe I needed you, he thought—I believe Madeline and I both needed you. Neither of us is quite okay, since you two disappeared. What was it that you preferred to us? How could you not ever call us, not ever write? How could you hear the words
Hollywood
or
Los Angeles
without thinking of us alone here?

When Madeline returned, Scott had his elbows braced on the windowsill and his head out in the wind, and he was blinking down at the darkening garden, where he had so recently considered escaping to from all this.

“Are you sick?” came her voice from behind him.

“No,” he said. He wiped his eyes before he straightened and turned around, but Madeline clearly noticed that he'd been crying and sucked in her lips in sympathy.

“You were remembering them, weren't you?” she asked quietly. “Hard not to, here. I'm sure you remember them better than I do.”

He waved the subject away. “So,” he said hoarsely, “why are you sick?” His hair was sweaty, and he pushed it clumsily back from his forehead.

She frowned at him in evident puzzlement. “Am I sick?”

He sat down on the mattress again and lit another cigarette. “This afternoon you said not to ask you about what happened today or why you're sick. So—here we are—what happened today? And why are you, or were you, sick?”

“Oh! That.” She leaned against the wall. “I guess I pulled a boner.”

He closed his eyes and shook his head. “What?”

“You know, made a dumb mistake? I looked at the spider in the envelope from the lawyer, this morning. The one Aunt Amity left for me.” She peered down at him as he shook his head. “You didn't mention that I would
become
Aunt Amity, and see the ‘Welcome Home' banner
through her eyes
.”

“You said you weren't going to look at it!”

“I know, I know. But I got to missing her, the way things used to be here, the past. The past,” she repeated. “It's always out there, isn't
it? I hate
now
. I hate that whenever you look at a clock, it shows a different time. What's the use of knowing what time it is, if it's always changing? And it's always
later
!”

Scott nodded, momentarily again picturing the room as it had been when his parents slept here. “Did you,” he asked, “happen to see anything . . . else, in the spider hallucination, besides the banner in the sickroom?”

She nodded vigorously, standing by the dark window. “
Did
I?
Anything?
Yesterday you said you saw the folder that had the Usabo spider in it. I did too, in a whole scene—I was in a house, holding that folder and waiting for a taxi, hoping to get away before some guy got back; but he kicked in the door and he had a shotgun and he shot me!” She patted the thigh of her jeans. “In the leg. Oh, Scott, it was so . . .
real
! It hurt a
lot
! And I jumped out a window and the taxi was there, and it was a 1920s flivver. The driver took me to a hospital, but I didn't have the folder anymore by then. I think Kosloff got it. That was the name of the guy who shot me, and my name was Natacha. And when I came down here, in the hall, I had a big bruise on my leg!”

Scott shook his head unhappily. “Did you by any chance have a bracelet on, made out of a chain?”

“Yes! What the hell, Scott!”

“When I saw the folder yesterday, I was in a woman's body, I think. And I saw a chain bracelet on her—my—wrist.”

“But listen! After I came down from it, I went for a walk in the garden,” Madeline went on, nodding toward the window. “And I looked at the Medusa mosaic, and it's kind of busted up these days, and then—” There were tears in her eyes. “Then all at once it was twilight, Scott, and the mosaic was whole, and I didn't hurt anymore, and I walked around to the front of the house and—and Hollywood was like a village, beautiful—!”

She was crying softly now, and he stood up, but she waved him back. “No freeway,” she said, her voice hitching, “hardly any lights—there was a cool breeze that smelled like roses and fresh-cut
grass. And I started down the steps like I was walking into Narnia, and then it all went fluey, and horrible 2015 came crashing back. It was all too loud, and I swear the damn freeway seemed to be sliding toward me, so I crawled under the house.” She sniffed. “I wish I could go back there, and stay.”

“I'd be happy just to go back to about 1990,” said Scott quietly. “The way we all were then.” Long before my talent for drawing was important to me, he thought.

Madeline nodded, looking at the molding around the closet door. “I wonder why we both saw the Usabo spider, yesterday and today—or not
it,
but the folder we knew it was in.”

“Maybe we'd always see scenes that include it, since we saw it . . . face-to-face, that one time.” He was looking at the door frame too. “Maybe it marked us—imprinted itself in us.”

“Yuck.” Madeline rubbed her arms vigorously, as if to get rid of clinging spiderwebs. “Back then, when we looked at it, right in this room—what do you remember?”

“Well,” said Scott reluctantly, “this room was empty. Mom and Dad were gone by then, and Aunt Amity had already put all their stuff in storage one day while we were in school. To spare our feelings. And we were poking around, looking for any kind of note they might have left, like under the floorboards, and we pushed on that section of the closet-door molding.”

“But what do you remember about . . . what we
saw
? When we found the envelope full of spider papers and looked at that one?”

“Oh. Yeah. We were in a room, a cabin, on a boat,” he said, “in a man's body, and we watched his hands—our hands, for a moment—break the seal and open the folder.”

“When I saw it today,” said Madeline with a shiver, “the wax seal was still whole.”

“It was when I saw it yesterday, too. But when we were kids and saw it, we saw the seal get broken—and then we were looking right at Usabo, and we fell into a million . . . flashbacks?”

“Memories?” said Madeline with a visible shiver. “Experiences? It felt like they were dissolving me like a Bromo fizz in a glass of water. But a young man was there, too, outside of the boat cabin and the hard waterfall of experiences—”

Scott frowned. “I don't remember a young man. You never mentioned any young man.”

“When I knew you didn't see him, I was too embarrassed to tell you. He, I still remember it like it just happened, it seemed like he took my hand, and he said, ‘My dear, my dear, it is not so dreadful here.' That's from an Edna St. Vincent Millay poem, and you could have knocked me over with a feather when I read it in a book, years later. He led me into a garden—music in the night, when stars are bright; he was handsome—gorgeous—and he was so kind to me! I was eight years old, and he was just a cheese dream—I fell in love with him.” She smiled. “How could I have told you something like that?”