Bride of the Rat God

by Barbara Hambly

  When the light began to fail, Alec set up the darkroom while Mikos and Ned Bergen scouted likely spots for army encampments and Queen Vashti’s pavilion. Lucky Kallipolis, the camp cook, organized the kitchen. The three Pekingese went exploring and found every patch of thorns, weeds, and stickers in the vicinity to bring home in their trailing fur.

  Blake Fallon showed up just after dinner, driving a studio Ford and filled with suave apologies and convincing accounts of the misfortunes that had prevented his making it to the station on time. “Honestly, I don’t know which was worse, the police or the reporters,” he said, sipping the wine he’d brought with him. By that time very few people were left in the long building—Frenchy’s Saloon, said the faded sign above the door that Lucky had taken over for the mess hall. Alec had already retired to the tent he was sharing with Doc, and Norah had just come across to fetch a glass of milk for Christine, who reposed amid a pile of dogs in the one-room offices of the former Red Bluff Sentinel, claiming she was on the point of dying of sunstroke from the afternoon’s exertions. What was likelier, thought Norah, was that she was simply exhausted. The effects of repeated pick-me-ups had finally worn off, leaving her to deal with forty sleepless hours, of which nearly half had been spent on camera.

  “They seem to think anyone connected with Colossus Films knows everything about that little pansy’s murder,” Fallon went on. “When Frank and Fishy ran them off the lot, they hunted around for anyone else they could catch. You’re lucky you got Chris out of your place on time, Norah,” he added, turning toward her with a dazzling flash of smile. “You probably beat them down Highland Avenue by minutes. Would you like some of this?”

  He hefted the wine bottle and moved to put his arm around her. Norah stepped clear and shook her head politely. On the set he’d seemed merely cloddish, a good-natured and incredibly vain man who spent his time surreptitiously looking for reflective surfaces in which to check his appearance. Why she felt an active distaste for him tonight she could not have said. Perhaps it was the way he followed her, making a second try at taking her arm. Perhaps, she added to herself, it was her own overtiredness. Christine wasn’t the only one who’d been up for a day and a half.

  “You have inconvenience everyone by stopping to talk to these people,” Mikos Hraldy said crisply from the table where he was sipping a small cup of black Turkish coffee. “You have put us behind schedule already, and extras all coming to film great battle Saturday, and all else must be done by then. Days are short, and soon will begin rain. So you will obligate me by beginning to film at dawn, as soon as he is light enough to work. This way we may catch ourselves. Good night.”

  He set down his little cup of curdled mud and stalked out. Mrs. Violet calmly turned a page of the trade section of the Hollywood News, which she had arranged to have brought out by courier to Red Bluff for the duration of her stay.

  “Gee, I’m sorry,” Fallon apologized to the room at large. “Say, Christine isn’t mad at me, is she?” he added, rising to intercept Norah at the doorway. “Maybe I can come over to her cabin with this—” He gestured with the wine bottle. “—and make it up to her.” He widened his flag-blue eyes with an attempt at boyishness, but Norah felt only annoyance. She thought for a moment that his clothes had a vaguely musty smell, sweetish and unpleasant, as if he had spent the night sleeping in a cellar where mice had made their nests.

  “I think she’d be likelier to appreciate a good night’s sleep.” Norah evaded his hand again. “Particularly since we are all going to begin filming at dawn.”

  She pulled her cardigan more firmly about her and stepped through the door; glancing back, she saw him turn away, back to the tables, and there was something odd in his movement that it took her a moment to identify.

  The big mirror over the bar, dingy, flyspecked, discolored with age and the smoke of forgotten cigars, was almost the only portion of the old saloon’s decor that had survived the years. She had almost subconsciously expected Fallon to turn and admire himself in it out of the side of his eye.

  But he didn’t.

  He avoided the sight of it completely.

  The peculiar thing was, she thought, returning to the hanging forest of test strips, that, perhaps in contrition, Fallon had given an absolutely stunning performance that day. It might have been only the effect of the open air or the largeness of the wasteland around him, but his movements lost their contrived jerkiness and took on a kind of animal strength. His formerly stagy gestures now combined the sweep of power with a spare grace precisely suited to the intimacy of film. She held up a strip of tiny, progressive images of Fallon enfolding a fainting Christine in his arms and asked, “Was it my imagination, or was he really good today? I thought he made poor Christine look terrible.”

  “He did.” Alec came over to the table, wiping his fingers on the towel hanging at his belt, and carefully used the back of his wrist to rub his eyes. “I didn’t think he had it in him.” He checked the magazine of exposed film on the table and made a note in his book, only smiling when he noticed that in addition to scene number, take number, and exposure and shot description, Norah had jotted down the time it had taken from the moment Hraldy had started trying to explain to Christine what he wanted to the command “Camera.”

  “Well, he did look wonderful in Guns of the Sunset, and that was an outdoor picture,” she pointed out. “That might have something to do with it. He was a cowboy, wasn’t he?”

  “In that he spent six months repairing fences in the Chicago stockyards when he was fifteen, you could say so.” Alec stretched his cramped shoulders, then took her by the hand, led her to the other end of the table, and lifted a long strip of film to hold to the red light. “The same definition would qualify me for the title on the strength of my stint in chaps and a ten-gallon hat taking pictures of kids in Scratch Ankle, Alabama. Here. Take a look at these.”

  Norah obeyed. “What are they?” She could make out Christine’s hip and shoulder in one and something that might have been Fallon behind a curious cloud that blotted most of the shot. They seemed to be standing in front of a vine-covered wall.

  “The film we took Monday night in Edendale. I tested exposures last night since I didn’t have time to look at the stock before we left.”

  Norah ran the sprocketed edges doubtfully through her fingers, then picked up another shot. Strange blurs and fogs obscured shot after shot, as if lights had been shining into the camera from odd angles. Half a dozen takes were simply white, as if the film had been exposed in the magazine. Others were scored with long marks like scratches. In one an animal seemed to be running along the wall, though Norah knew the dogs had not been in the courtyard during the shooting.

  She looked at Alec, puzzled.

  “Could those lights have been reflected off the fountain? Or from the windows beneath the balcony?”

  “Could have.” He shrugged. “But then they would have showed up to some degree on all takes.”

  “A problem with the camera? There’s a lot of scratching.

  “There’s ten times more scratching than I usually get. There’s really not a lot that can go wrong inside a camera, Norah. It’s just a dark box; artists and philosophers were making them in the Middle Ages. They just didn’t have the film. The modern parts of a camera are the lenses, the shutter, and the mechanism that moves the film through the gate.”

  The music had ceased. Alec walked over to the gramophone, wound it again, and put on more blues, a woman singing this time, gay and sad at once, like a stranded angel who had traded holiness for humanity but remembered what it used to be like to know God.

  “This kind of thing always happens, shooting in that house.” He shrugged and set the film aside. “I just didn’t want you to think I was superstitious.”

  “I didn’t,” said Norah. “Well, not as such.” She smiled a little, and their eyes met.

  For a moment she thought, with a pang of hurt so intense that it was almost physical, about Jim, about waking up in the morn
ing and reaching across to touch his arm, not wanting to wake him, only wanting that contact with his skin. She’d known every mole and freckle and vertebra of his back. She didn’t know for how many months of long nights in Mrs. Pendergast’s unheated attic she’d conjured him, building the memory of weight and warmth and smell, of every square inch of his skin, in the bed beside her.

  Alec’s skin would be completely different.

  She looked away, and if it hadn’t been for the crimson light of the safe-lamp, he would have seen the scald of color that heated her from collarbone to hairline. But he must have seen her eyes, for he turned back to the table and said, “Not that I wasn’t brought up to it, of course. My Aunt Vera didn’t enter my mom’s apartment for four years after a pigeon knocked up against the window one day while she was having tea there. She did her damnedest to take us three kids away as well, swearing somebody in the place was going to die.”

  Norah burst into laughter that stemmed in part from relief. “I see she and Mrs. Pendergast would have become bosom friends, provided Mrs. Pendergast could have been brought to exchange three words with someone of your mother’s faith whose husband hadn’t made a fortune and changed his name to Smith. I don’t know how much she paid that Oneida Majesta woman to come every Tuesday night and communicate on the astral plane... Certainly more than she paid me,” she added ruefully, and stood for a moment, running the film strips through her hands.

  “The trouble is, I keep wondering if Mr. Shang is another Oneida Majesta.” She set the film down and rubbed her hands against the dry desert cold. Their breath was beginning to show as glowing ruby vapor in the light, and Alec bent to turn on the small electric heater that would keep the water in the vats from freezing overnight. That morning, when he’d come in to collect his cameras, he’d found two scorpions and a very young rattlesnake next to the heater and had trapped and disposed of them without much evidence of surprise.

  “They have an expression in the Los Angeles Police Department,” he said after a long minute’s thought. “If something’s completely incomprehensible, they say, ‘That’s Chinatown.’ ‘Chinatown’ meaning something that you can’t figure out by logical means and probably shouldn’t be messing with, anyway.”

  He made a final check of the drying test strips and guided her to the door, shrugging into his war-weary brown leather jacket and switching off the red safe-light as they went out. The railing of the barbershop’s wooden porch had long since perished; two planks of desiccated gray wood formed steps to the level of the unpaved street. Tumbleweed crouched all around like monster hedgehogs, colorless in the dark.

  “I’d like to think I’m not one of those people who won’t let a Chinaman in the front door,” he went on, double locking the door behind him and settling himself on the edge of the porch. “But the Chinese are different. They come from a different world: different religion, different beliefs about how people are supposed to deal with each other, different ways of thinking about why things happen. So it’s hard to tell what he’s after, why he attached himself to Chris the way he did.”

  He broke a dry stick of some coarse, dark pricklebush that grew next to the steps as Norah settled down beside him, gazing for a moment into the eviscerated shells of the few buildings across the street, the thin glaze of starlight alternating with shadows like cut slabs of infinity. To their right a few squares of sulfur light marked the mess hall and the brick assay office that was Hraldy’s headquarters; Doc LaRousse had wired a portable generator in the back of the old saloon, from which cable snaked to every building. At the far end of the pale trace of street the half-raised walls of a brick opera house stood like something undertaken by children and abandoned at the prospect of supper.

  “Film’s a tricky thing,” he went on softly. “It drags you into it. You’ve seen that. You forget there’s a screen between you and those folks up there. Like you saying you wanted Blake Fallon to carry you off, when what you really meant was that you wanted to be carried off by Cliff Ironjaw or whatever his character was called.”

  She chuckled ruefully. “Well, particularly after meeting the man in the flesh, yes. And that little show he put on at the Montmartre. But yes. Those silly twits Lawrence Pendergast used to bring to the house... they really did think poor Mr. Valentino lives in a tent and ravishes a different woman every night. I’m sure he’s nothing like that in real life.”

  “Exactly,” said Alec. “He’s actually a nut for motors and gadgets. Valerie von Stroheim told me some fans asked her recently if her husband dragged her around the house by her hair.”

  “So you think Mr. Shang may have fallen in love with Christine?”

  “Either that,” said Alec quietly, “or he showed up hoping to—”

  From down the street, among the dense shadows of the broken houses, came a furious tirade of barking.

  Norah stiffened. “That’s Chang.”

  It wasn’t the staccato yap-yap-yap of a small dog whiffing coyote and rabbit. Wild and harsh, it was a danger bark, a rage bark.

  It was barking, Norah realized, such as she’d heard the night of the windstorm after the premiere of Kiss of Darkness, the night when, elsewhere in Los Angeles, Keith Pelletier was being carved up with a champagne bottle.

  Beneath it, gruff and surprisingly deep, sounded Buttercreme’s voice and Black Jasmine’s, louder and stronger than she’d ever heard them.

  “Something’s wrong.” Together they almost ran down the weed-grown street and into the black gulf of shadow that hid the peeling gray newspaper office Christine and Norah shared.

  The moon had set before the sun that afternoon. Above the buildings’ inky silhouettes a breathtaking rainbow of stars drenched the desert with a weird, blanched glow that did not quite seem to be light. The air, pungent with dust, was a knife in the lungs, glittering with each exhaled breath. Norah sought Alec’s hand in the darkness, fearful that he might stride ahead of her and leave her alone in this huge stillness. If something else moved in the darkness, it was impossible to see, and the scrunch of their own footsteps and the wild barking of the dogs drowned whatever stealthy tread might have been heard.

  Then a patch of wavery orange light flared in the Sentinel’s swaybacked wall. Norah quickened her stride and all but sprang up the step, calling, “Christine? It’s me, Norah,” while Alec ducked away from her to walk around the cabin itself.

  Within, she could hear Christine saying, “All right, all right, my little sweetnesses, what’s all this? Do Mama’s preciouses smell a nasty old coyote?” She pronounced it the way the stuntmen did, kai-yoat. By her voice Norah could tell she was scared.

  “Are you all right?” Norah opened the door and stepped inside just as Christine, her hands shaking, put a match flame to the candle beside her bed. All three dogs, Norah noted uneasily, had gone from wrathful barking to the purposeful patrol-and-sniff routine they had performed at the house that night—not the darting movements of cat hunting but quick, thorough scans of every wall, every hole in the floorboards, every corner, tails like curled banners, hackles raised, petticoats flouncing.

  “What a start they gave me!” Christine sank back into her bed as Norah crossed to the makeup table and switched on Doc LaRousse’s lights. Sufficient wattage to let Christine make a good, even application of her makeup in the predawn darkness was more than lavish for the small, unpainted room. Amid the shrunken plank walls, unceiled rafters, and bare floors, the lace-edged pillows and satin comforters of Christine’s bed were glaringly incongruous. The smell of old dust and of sagebrush growing under the floor was almost completely concealed now by the odors of Nuit d’Amour, dusting powder, and Russian cigarettes. A feathered slipper lay like a killed bird in the middle of the floor—Chang Ming would transport slippers, though he never chewed them—and soft heaps of silken underclothes gleamed on the tops of the trunks ranged along the wall.

  Footsteps mumped hollowly on the boards of the porch. Christine was startled, but Alec’s voice inquired, “All right in there?”
accompanied by a light tap at the door. Christine hastily drew the comforter over her flimsily protected bosom as Norah let him in.

  “Fine.” The dogs charged out around Alec’s feet, fluffed with rage and indignation. Norah stepped quickly after them. In the reflected glow of the windows she could see the three little fluff balls make a rapid patrol around the outside of the walls, sniffing everything in sight.

  “Chang, Jazz,” she called out, mindful of creatures that could make two mouthfuls of any Pekingese, let alone one as tiny as Black Jasmine. After a moment they came trotting back, tails high, pausing only to ceremoniously urinate on the corner of the steps. Norah had to pick up Black Jasmine, who was too small to get up onto the porch again.

  “I didn’t find anything,” Alec reported softly, leaning in the half-open doorway through which Christine could be seen, still sitting up in bed with the covers drawn to her chin, her black hair a smoke cloud around a face that was both much older and more childlike without its accustomed artistry of paint. There were lines of weariness in the corners of those huge dark eyes; in its natural coloration, her mouth was softer and more generous than its film version, and the hollows under her cheekbones looked less dramatic and far more fragile.