Bride of the Rat God

by Barbara Hambly

  “Could have been a coyote,” he went on after a moment, using the California pronunciation, kai-yotey. “You hear anything, Chris?”

  She rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand, the gesture of a sleepy child. “Hear anything? After all that hiking around we did today? All I heard was Valentino’s voice, whispering to me to ride away with him as he gathered me to his chest... and for that matter I’m not sure whether I heard his voice or only saw a title card. But there was a whole lot of barking, you terrible little fussbudgets, you.” She held out her arms to receive Black Jasmine, whom Norah, at the tiny dog’s fierce insistence, handed to her. Norah had early on resigned herself to the fact that Christine would sleep with her dogs despite everything she, Norah, had to say. At least they were too tiny to jump up on the bed by themselves.

  “I’ll have a look around in the morning for tracks,” Alec said quietly. “But with everybody coming and going yesterday, I don’t know what finding tracks would prove. I checked around between the cabins and out as far as the privies, but it’s so dark in the shadows, I could have missed the Russian Army if they’d kept quiet. Whatever it was—a raccoon or coyote or whatever—it’s probably in Barstow by this time.”

  “Thank you,” said Norah.

  “And I’m going to be dead in the morning,” Christine continued in her high, despairing wail, “waking up this way. Did you set the alarm, Norah, darling? And did you remember to ask Mrs. Violet to order cucumbers from town with her newspapers? This dust is so bad for my complexion... You don’t mind slicing them for me, do you, darling? Oh, Alec,” she added, making her dark eyes wide, “please, please don’t tell anyone you saw me without makeup. I look awful.”

  He kissed his hand to her, smiling. “You’re always beautiful to me, Chrysanda.”

  She smiled amid the lace, her black dog cradled against her chin, far more breakable-looking than she had been as the queen of Babylon and infinitely sweeter. “It’s darling of you to say so, Alec, but it’s your camera I have to impress. I wonder if Lucky would part with some ice tomorrow morning before I get my makeup on. My eyelids are going to be balloons. Could you do that, Norah, when you get me my coffee?”

  She cuddled down into the blankets again, rolled over with her back to the candle, and settled in for sleep. Norah flicked out the lights above the vanity, shadows bellying in from every corner like dark hands reaching for the delicate bundle of white lace and black fur on the bed in the gold aureole of the candle’s light.

  Leaving the door open a few inches behind her, she went out to sit for a time on the edge of the porch at Alec’s side, Chang Ming lying between them. Buttercreme, offended by the cameraman’s presence, had retreated under Norah’s bed. They spoke in soft voices about the desert fauna and about taking pictures of cowboy children in small towns across west Texas, about Zane Grey and stuntmen, about the dark shapes of the watching hills and the extravagant jeweled pennons of Stardust overhead. In time Alec took his leave. As quietly as she could, Norah dragged a trunk in front of the door, and when she lay down to sleep, she did not blow out the candle. There was still an inch or so of it burning in a yellow pool of puddled wax when the alarm clock wakened her an hour before dawn.

  TEN

  HEAVEN OVER FIRE

  Sign of sacrifice.

  A good omen for gathering together in the wilds...

  An ambush awaits—take a high outlook upon it,

  but remain calm; nothing will happen yet...

  The defenses are breached, but the city is not yet taken...

  “FOR THREE DAYS the shooting of She-Devil of Babylon proceeded without incident. Norah, though plagued with a sense of some dark presence moving behind the sparkling winter sunlight, could find nothing to confirm her fears. The marks on the foundation of Christine’s house and on the house in which Keith Pelletier was murdered, the curious appearance and even more curious assertions of the old gardener Shang Ko... these seemed to form a web of some kind. But every time Norah stopped in her headlong rush of keeping track of scenes and exposures, of looking after Christine, and of trying to unravel the strange knots that seemed to keep tying themselves in her own half-healed emotions, the pattern she thought she might be seeing dissolved into nothing.

  She continued to dream, as she always had, about the utter commonplaces of her life: about developing test films or cutting up Christine’s cucumbers or going to lectures in Oxford. If in her dreams the dogs were always present, sniffing busily at doors and windows or watching her even from the corners of Sommerville College lecture halls with dark, shining eyes, it was insufficient cause for distress.

  Perhaps, she concluded, the stars simply were ill aspected.

  In any case, she did not have much time for introspection. Her mornings began an hour before dawn, less a hardship now than it might have been in the summer, for the sun didn’t truly come up until shortly after seven. Five minutes before the alarm was due to sound at five Norah woke, switched off the alarm button on her big tin clock, bundled herself in her robe, lit a candle, and took the freezing walk along what once had been the rear alley of the town, a thorn-grown pathway that led to the showers, followed by at least two and sometimes three enthusiastic dogs. Bred for the north of China, the Pekes reveled in the desert’s dry, piercing cold, pursuing lizards and starting birds with wild abandon and picking up whole botanical gardens of burrs and sticks and thorns in their long fur.

  The women’s shower was a small one but had been rigged with a string of lights from Doc LaRousse’s generator. As she washed in the narrow confines of the corrugated-iron coffin, Norah could see across the wide strip of dirt to the glow of lights from the men’s shower and hear the voices of the electrician, the two Neds, Alec, and the few extras joking and talking shop. By the time Norah was dressed, usually in a neat wool skirt, plain white shirtwaist, heavy shoes, and thick cardigan—neither of the hand-me-down fur jackets Christine had pressed upon her before departure was even remotely suitable for desert wear—the men would be in Frenchy’s Saloon, sleek, wet-haired, and drinking coffee. Alec, bundled in sweaters and looking cold and sleepy, would glance up from his coffee cup and the previous night’s Daily News and grin at her as Lucky loaded a cup of strong tea and two cups of coffee, a pitcher of cream, some sugar, and two small dishes of ice onto a tray. This Norah would bear off to the most difficult portion of her day’s work: rousting Christine and Emily Violet from their beds.

  Emily and her mother shared the modest frame house that had once sheltered the family of the town’s grocer. Getting Emily out of bed was easier for the simple reason that Mrs. Violet insisted that her daughter retire at eight-thirty, though Mrs. Violet herself frequently sat up reading the trade sections of all five Los Angeles papers and discussing studio politics with Mr. Hraldy and Ned Bergen. “Emily needs her rest,” Mrs. Violet would declare, and Emily, though she was making $5,000 a week and, Norah privately suspected, was probably of age despite her mother’s assertions to the contrary, would meekly go. At least she got out of bed without cries, curses, and piteous moans of protest.

  “What did Christine do before?” asked Alec, stopping by with a few slices of toast for each of the stars and a much more substantial plate of pancakes and eggs for Norah, after she had succeeded in forcing her sister-in-law into a quilted velvet dressing gown and frog-marched her to her vanity, where she now sat holding ice to her eyes and feeling sorry for herself while Black Jasmine sat at her feet and supervised.

  “I mean, I know she had a maid before you came to live with her, but how did she get along in life before she came out to Hollywood without someone to get her out of bed in the morning and pick up her stockings?”

  “What any sensible girl would do,” Norah replied, rolling a pancake into a cylinder and dabbing the end into the syrup. “She married men who were rich enough to provide her with maids.”

  “I can just hear her saying that.” Alec grinned. “With those big eyes she makes... What, don’t you ever feed these dogs? Or pet
them?” Chang Ming jiggled a little, staring up into his face with shining hope.

  Norah shook her head. “Never. Just ask them.” The three dishes of dog food sat, largely untouched, in three corners of the cabin, though once Buttercreme, the pickiest eater, had finished her first go at her plate, the two males had dutifully consumed a few mouthfuls of hers and one another’s breakfasts, in keeping with the fixed canine belief that the contents of anybody else’s dish were superior to one’s own. It had taken Norah weeks to train the males not to touch Buttercreme’s food until the delicate little bitch had eaten as much as she wanted; it seemed to be the principle rather than the quantity of the food that mattered. In fact, Buttercreme sometimes refused to eat at all and appeared upon occasion to decide that she was afraid of her dish.

  In the blazing electric glare that surrounded the dressing table, Christine had begun to apply “motion picture yellow” greasepaint and rouge with her usual absorbed attention.

  “I take it her family wasn’t rich.”

  Norah smiled, recalling the wartime letters Christine had written to her brother’s bride. One, in response to a photo of the couple, had read: “No wonder Jim likes you! You’re as tall as he is!”

  “Their father—hers and Jim’s—was part owner of a hardware store in Pittsburgh,” said Norah. “He’d been one of the chief men of the congregation back in Lodz and a respected Talmudic scholar. He was furious when Jim announced he wanted to learn design rather than be a rabbi. Jim worked to put himself through college. He was within a year of getting his degree in architecture when he... when he joined the army.” She still couldn’t say when he was killed. Quickly she went on. “Christine had already left home. I think Jim was the only one who still called her Chavaleh. She told her parents she was working in New York, but she managed to convey the impression she’d gotten some kind of genteel employment in a dress shop rather than that she was a chorus girl on Broadway. Good morning, Zena,” she added as the hairdresser, balancing her own cup of coffee and buttered toast, appeared from the direction of the mess hall and mounted the Sentinel’s steps, to be ecstatically greeted by Black Jasmine.

  “God knows what she told them about how she met her first husband. He was an actor, but he never seemed to have any roles and supported himself through gambling.”

  Alec laughed again, his breath showing white in the reflected makeup lights filtering out through the doorway. The starry black of the sky had diluted to a luminous navy blue, grading paler in the east. Clouds had piled above the remote crags of the Granite Mountains, but here the dry air was as sharp and bitter as alum. Ice rimmed the puddles where the hose to the darkroom shed had leaked.

  “So she ended up supporting him? She must have been awfully young.” He tossed Chang Ming a scrap of egg and immediately stuck his hands back in his jacket pockets.

  “Christine? She’s two years older than Jim was, four years older than me.” She smiled at his startled look. “But yes, she was about seventeen then. According to her, sometimes they made enough to afford an apartment on Fifth Avenue and a couple of maids. But they were always pawning things, and sometimes she’ll forget and talk about her ‘gentlemen friends’ who were nice enough to buy her things. One of them ended up as her second husband—Clayton Flint, who was very young and very silly and had just inherited a couple of mills or something in Charleston. She’s still great friends with his mother.”

  Chang Ming, who had settled down at Alec’s feet, sprang up suddenly, a tenor growl stirring deep in his throat. Norah turned quickly, and even Alec started. But all she saw was Blake Fallon striding lithely along the path to the showers as if he owned the desert and everything that stirred beneath its parched khaki sands.

  As the days progressed, it became increasingly clear that all three of the Pekes had conceived an intense hatred for Christine’s leading man. Curious, Norah thought, for Chang Ming and Black Jasmine had played quite happily with him back in the studio and Buttercreme had suffered him to stroke her while she was held by either Norah or Christine.

  But later that day, watching from a minor wing of the queen of Babylon’s pleasure pavilion—a marvelous structure on the edge of the desert whose gilded plaster terraces and fluttering silk were surrounded by exotic foliage anchored to the dust with spikes—Norah was aware of the three dogs at her side, leaning into their leashes and staring at Fallon. Even Buttercreme was growling, a strange guttural little rattle in her throat.

  Jealousy?

  Norah considered the matter. Certainly, since coming to Red Bluff, Fallon had quite clearly been trying to seduce Christine. All over her like a cheap suit was how Alec had phrased it: bringing her champagne at dinner every night with a knowing wink at the rest of the cast; lighting her cigarette as she sat with Emily, Mrs. Violet, and Zena in their endless rounds of mah-jongg; offering to walk her back to her cabin. Always touching or trying to touch.

  Having written down the scene and taken numbers both on the board and in the notebook and having made a record of the action—CF & BF from tent rt, CF hits gong, DB from left, CF hands wine, DB dies, CF speech—Norah watched them together now as Hraldy walked them through the lengthy master shot. Vashti leads Laban the Splendid from the pavilion, strikes a silver bell to summon a Nubian slave, a big, good-natured bit player named Deacon Barnes. She hands the hapless Deacon a goblet full of poison and orders him to drink it. Barnes drinks it and dies, at considerable length. Vashti’s triumphant gesture takes in the corpse at her feet, the splendor of the pavilion around them, the riches of the kingdom that is hers. “All of this is mine,” she tells him. “What need have I for such as you, save to serve me for a night, until I weary of your savor?” Laban buries his face in his hands, crushed with despair, and departs into the desert to die.

  It was the tenth walk-through so far. Christine, as usual, was overplaying wildly. Her dark eyes bulged and her red lips parted as though she were about to bite Hraldy through his crisp Arrow shirt, tossing her head so that her tempest of hair swept across her face to the swelling strains of Saint-Saens’s Route of Omphale from the little coterie of musicians. At least nobody was taking pratfalls into tubs of water on the other side of the rocks.

  Fallon, Norah was interested to note, still commanded a beautiful combination of power and restraint. Gone were the bugging eyes, the pulled-back lips, the jerky movements. The look on his face as he observed Deacon’s operatic death struggle was the look of a man who saw not only another man’s death but the true evil of one whom he had loved to folly and continued to love—horror, agony, hatred of self as much as hatred of her, grading into despair as he realized that for him there was no way out.

  And yet his eyes followed Christine even when Hraldy gave directions to Alec, Doc, and the other extra who had been drafted to help with the reflector screens. His every movement was an angling to get closer to her. His every glance, his every touch, the way he grasped her arm to murmur comments into her ear, was seduction.

  And Norah found that she was just as annoyed about it as the dogs were.

  “Is it ready now that we make take?” shouted the director.

  Norah picked up her notebook and the slate, ducked through the curtain of the pavilion, and wove among silk palmettos and orchids to the white string that marked the boundaries of the frame. Alec made a final check of the range finder and adjusted the Bell & Howell’s front turret while the musicians flipped pages back to the beginning of the piece. From the other side of the rocks Ned Bergen shouted “You got that tent up?” to whoever was helping him assemble the campsite of Vashti’s vengeful horde of desert warriors.

  “Music—camera—ACTION!”

  All three dogs went into a paroxysm of barking when Fallon and Christine stepped behind the gauze veils of the pavilion, ceasing only when Christine slashed the curtains aside and strode through. And perhaps they had a point, Norah thought, standing just behind Alec. With his newfound acting talents, Fallon’s arrogance had grown. In Hollywood he’d impressed Norah as a
harmless enough fellow, vain, certainly, but nothing to worry about. In fact, his puzzlement when neither she nor Christine had fallen panting with love at his feet had been rather comic.

  But the gleam in his eyes now was predatory. Predatory and something else.

  Momentarily, a fragment of a dream unfurled itself in Norah’s mind, like something glimpsed at a great distance. For one instant it was clear and whole, a terrifying realization, a scene that she did not understand but that she saw from beginning to end even as she saw the confrontation between Vashti and Laban, accompanied by the hideous understanding of how it related to...

  And then it was gone. Maddeningly, like soap slipping through her fingers in bathwater, the memory seemed to fold in on itself, leaving only that adrenaline jolt of realization and a sense of... of what?

  Music, she thought. But the wailing of the flute and the deep throb of the cello obliterated even the pseudo-recollection of whining, atonal notes. Darkness lit by candles. Incense reek covering...covering...?

  Then all that remained was the thin, dry smell of desert wind and an impression of moonlight.

  Late in the afternoon clouds began to gather. Hraldy—between close-ups of Deacon’s indefatigable agonies and artistic angles of Laban the Splendid’s reactions—started looking from the sky to the silk and plaster pavilion with wilder and wilder nervousness in his eyes. Finally Alec climbed the rocks that sheltered the pavilion in its magical glade and came back with the report: “They’re thicker to the west, and that’s where the wind is.”

  Everyone—including Norah, Christine, Fallon, Hraldy, and the musicians—spent the remainder of the short winter afternoon taking down and folding silk draperies and loading rustling fabric banana plants into Fallon’s Ford, Hraldy’s rented Studebaker, and the truck in which the crew had come up from Red Bluff. They made three trips back to the old livery stable (WAGGONS, BUGGIES, AND LADIES’ HORSES A SPECIALTY, announced the faded paint on the facade, LEN A. WEIN, PROP.) where the equipment was stored. These journeys involved jolting over a rutted track, going down a precipitous grade into a dry wash and up an even more precipitous one on the other side, and crossing the very scenic stretch of sand where Emily had almost perished of thirst Tuesday evening. By the time the last giant urn and gilded tent pole were stacked in the old stalls, everyone was filthy, exhausted, and cross. It was getting dark, but most of the men, Fallon excepted, climbed up onto the roof to stretch tarpaulins over the areas that seemed, in the greater Ned’s opinion, to be questionable, an activity not helped by the gale-force winds.