Bride of the Rat God

by Barbara Hambly

  Then he shook his head. “Da Shu Ken’s greatest strength was at the solstice of the winter, when the moon was at its full. Now that is past. In two weeks it will be less yet. I have renewed the marks upon this house, so the dreams which visited you last night, Miss Norah, Alexander, should not return again.”

  Norah shivered. The dark bulk of the house blocked any sight of the eucalyptus at the head of the drive. She found herself wishing that the trees could be cut down, rooted up, every spearhead leaf and scrap of curling bark burned.

  “In the meantime,” said the old man, seating himself carefully in the hard kitchen chair, “I must have the date and year and hour, if possible, of your births—all three of you—that signs of strength may be drawn even from them. I will gather the power of the moon’s dark, the influences of the sea and the green star, and imbue them into the iron and silver of the inkstone I must make. With that ink I will mark the signs of imprisonment and time, the seals of the door gods and the August Personage of Jade himself, upon the silk where my grandson will paint. And there will be many sessions of dreaming, remembering, of calling back images into the silver mirror, before Hsu Kwan can begin to paint the Rat-God itself.”

  He spoke haltingly, and Norah remembered the shattered mirror above Charles Sandringham’s bar. Its eyes... I saw its eyes reflected...

  Impulsively, she said, “Would it help—would it go more quickly—if you could speak to someone the Rat-God inhabited? Whose body it had taken over to kill Keith Pelletier? Would you—or Hsu Kwan—be able to take the image of the thing from his mind?”

  “He is alive?”

  Norah and Alec traded a glance, then Alec said, “The alcohol probably cushioned his mind.”

  “He doesn’t remember what happened,” Norah explained. “But if he were hypnotized, or... or if you have some means of reading his dreams... You said the painting had to be not only of the Rat-God’s appearance but of its soul.”

  “As such things have souls, yes,” Shang agreed, leaning forward eagerly. “They are not souls as humans know them. Yes, Hsu Kwan would be able to read down through the blurring of alcohol and horror to see what lies beneath, even as he would read past the clouding of shock and pain that has made it difficult, through all these years of nightmares, for me to see the Rat-God clearly. The shamans used certain drugs to open their minds to the Rat-God’s use, and I think these also protected them from awareness, though there are tales of those who suffered death or madness through shock.”

  “I know the hougans in the voodoo cults are supposed to do the same thing through dancing,” Alec agreed, scratching at a corner of his beard. “I always figured their possession by their gods was some kind of psychological splitting of the personality, but now I’m not so sure. And anyway, I never saw it done. But I have to go down to Venice anyway to tell Charlie to report for work in the morning. I’ll see what he says about coming back with me tonight.”

  Shang Hsu Kwan arrived before Alec returned with Charlie, bearing a drawing pad and pencils. He and the Shining Crane sat in the warm kitchen of the main house, drinking tea and talking with the girls while the younger wizard warmed up by making sketches of the dogs. Once Dominga left, Buttercreme emerged from her seclusion beneath the stairs and flirted with both wizards; Norah had noticed before that the little moonlight Peke was definitely a “man’s dog.” She would shy away from women and in fact had never approved of Dominga, but if a man was in the room, she frequently pattered out of hiding and approached almost, but not quite, within patting range, tongue protruding pinkly, then scurried away again, as if performing a coy little fan dance with her tail.

  Charlie looked profoundly nervous when he arrived, but Norah took him gently by the arm and said, “It’s going to be all right. These are Shang Ko and Shang Hsu Kwan. They’re going to hypnotize you and get a description of Mr. Pelletier’s actual killer to help the police.”

  Sandringham started to speak, then simply nodded. He squeezed Norah’s hand, but not quickly enough to keep her from realizing that his hands were shaking. “Wonderful what they can do with hypnosis these days, isn’t it, my dear?” As she walked with him behind the two Chinese down the half dozen wooden steps and through the tangle of shrubs around to the cottage by the garage, she saw his eyes dart to every shadow and felt the muscles of his arm beneath her hand rigid, like an animal’s in a trap.

  “I’ll sit right here with you,” she said as they entered the candlelit cottage. Hsu Kwan fetched wooden kitchen chairs for Norah and Sandringham, placing them beside the small table. “It really will be all right.”

  The Shining Crane drew another diagram—one smaller than that which filled three-quarters of the rear of the cottage—in chalk and wax and silver around the table, the chair, and Sandringham himself. Incense burned at the four corners of the diagram in the usual assortment of hand-smoothed bronze holders from the Han Dynasty and old Coke and perfume bottles; Norah realized Shang Ko must have lighted them, though not by striking a match. The table itself had been cleared of scrolls and implements. All that remained now were two candlesticks, Hsu Kwan’s big sketch pad and pencils, and a mirror wrought of polished silver and another one, very ancient and turned facedown, of brass.

  The Shining Crane drew up another chair and took Sandringham’s hand.

  Norah could never afterward remember whether Shang Ko spoke in English or Chinese. In any case, the old actor slipped almost at once into a profound sleep.

  Her own words almost unvoiced, Norah breathed, “He did kill Mr. Pelletier, didn’t he?”

  Shang did not reply. Eyes closed, white hair hanging like a coarse curtain around his face and brushing the table before him, he sat with one hand on Charlie’s, the other resting like a deformed spider on the edge of the mirror. It was Hsu Kwan who nodded.

  “In that it was his body Da Shu Ken inhabited to do the killing, yes, he did. Before he returns to consciousness Grandfather will plant in his mind the memory of seeing some other man do this thing, a man whose face he cannot see. Dim and deeply buried, that memory, but enough to wipe out the still-deeper memory of his own hand covered with glass and blood.”

  “Thank you,” said Norah, and Hsu Kwan shook his head.

  “In coming here, in risking that the knowledge that he fears will rise to the surface of his mind, he has done a brave thing, perhaps the bravest thing he has ever done in his life,” the younger wizard said. “That risk may well save Miss Flamande’s life—perhaps mine and my grandfather’s as well. To help him sleep without fear of dreams is a small return.”

  Shang Hsu Kwan leaned forward, frowning down into the silver mirror, though in it Norah could see nothing but the glow of candles and the misty images of the ceiling joists like a ship’s spars visible through murky water. From the main house a thread of voices could be just discerned, Alec and Christine talking in the kitchen, and still farther off, someone in the walled garden of the Sabsung Institute played a flute badly. Sweet incense mingled with the smell of wax. Then, loud in the silence, came the hissing of Hsu Kwan’s breath.

  “It would probably be best, Mrs. Blackstone, if you did not look at what I am to draw.”

  Even in his trance Sandringham still held to Norah’s hand, so she simply turned her face away. Through the window she could see the bright spot of the kitchen’s reflected light on the dark leaves of the laurel and oleander. Shadows passed across it. That would be Alec, she thought, doubtless instructing Christine in the mysteries of operating a coffee maker. And if she knew Christine, her sister-in-law would plead for Alec to do the task instead of her because she hadn’t the faintest idea how to make all that coffee come out of those beans.

  Alec.

  That afternoon, walking along Seventh Street from the jeweler’s to Maskey’s candy store, she had realized that they were holding hands and that it wasn’t the first time. When they had entered the Fior d’ltalia for lunch, it had been natural to feel his hand at the small of her back, guiding her to her chair.

&nbs
p; Two mornings now she’d sat across from him at breakfast while Dominga fussed with the eggs and Christine slept upstairs. It had seemed the most natural thing in the world.

  What did he offer you? he had asked the previous night.

  She hadn’t said, nor had he. Their eyes had met for one long moment across the table, then he’d gone back to making cocoa, and they had resolutely talked of other things: Oxford, her brief stint with the VAD, the two nights he’d slept in the attic of a west Texas whorehouse in exchange for taking pictures of the girls. The spirits that the Shining Crane called gods, and what names they had gone by in the strange back roads of the haunted Soudi, and what they really were or might be. Other dreams they had had—but none recent. Why people feared death and what might lie on its other side.

  That stirred a thought in her, a sudden uneasiness, a remembrance of something she shook quickly away.

  When she had gone upstairs at last, unwilling to leave Christine alone for too long lest she wake up and be frightened, Norah had paused on the steps. In her dream she had seen Alec sleeping on the couch, his face very different without his glasses, and found herself wanting to go back down and see him so in fact. She was conscious of his presence and knew, to the marrow of her bones, him to be awake and conscious of hers. She had stood there in the dark for a long time before finally ascending to the dimly lit bedroom, but it had been long before she’d slept.

  She shook her head. Two weeks seemed an incredibly long time to trust in marks scribbled in light on the house’s foundation stones. To hope that nothing would come out of the darkness under those trees and speak her name. To hope that there wasn’t something in store that neither she nor Alec nor the ancient Chinese who sat so silently, eyes shut and brow furrowed with pain, had yet thought of.

  Afterward, there would be time to think about herself and Alec.

  But four years of anxiety, four years of fretting when letters did not come—when the newspapers spoke of the next big push or the next excursion over the top—had cut the nerves in her mind that ran forward to “afterward” and cauterized the stumps. Part of her desperately wanted Alec, wanted to know there would be a future for them, but she could not free herself of the certainty that it would not be.

  For her, there never could be afterward. Only a rushing forward into darkness without end.

  Shang Ko opened his eyes. His hand was trembling as he took it from the rim of the silver mirror; Hsu Kwan continued with his sketching, tongue protruding slightly and eyes distant and yet steely alert. Shang Ko touched Sandringham’s forehead and spoke softly to him, some words English, some Chinese. The actor sighed, and the look of horror and tension slipped from his features, leaving them only fallen-looking, immeasurably tired.

  “He will be well now.” The Shining Crane raised his head to look across at Norah. He looked ill and very old, colorless around the mouth. “I have put in his heart the knowledge that someone else did the deed. He will still recall nothing consciously, but in his soul the memory is changed. His only guilt is that he was not sober enough to protect his friend.”

  “Thank you.” Norah leaned a little to touch the wizard’s sleeve, frightened at the exhaustion that seemed to have added a dozen years to his face. “I realize it’s a terrible imposition to ask anything more of you, but can you do anything for him to keep him from going back to drinking? To help him with that?”

  The wizard shook his head. “Even were I... stronger... right now I could not,” he said. “That is an illness whose roots lie deeper than any sorcerer’s power. I know. Magic can sometimes dig out the dreams that send a man reaching for the bottle or the pipe, but it cannot free the soul from the sleeping need. Only the soul itself can win that victory.” He hesitated, frowning, as if at some personal memory of pain. “Could wizards do such a thing, we would have no sleep ever again, curing those who would come to be cured. But we cannot. Sometimes we cannot even cure ourselves. I am sorry.”

  She shook her head quickly. “I just thought I’d ask.”

  He took up the second mirror, the ancient brass mirror that had lain on the table facedown, and held it up before Sandringham’s eyes. The actor blinked and shook his head, his breath coming in a deep draw, deeply released. Norah took his arm and led him toward the door.

  Hsu Kwan rose and followed, stopping them before they left. “Miss Norah,” he said softly. “I can say for your friend that the pain and despair he has come through, the fear he has conquered in coming here, in allowing us to look into the darkness he feared to look into himself, may forge him a weapon sufficient to win him his victory. He will need your help.”

  Norah met the young man’s eyes gratefully. “He’ll have it,” she said, and Hsu Kwan smiled.

  Sandringham’s eyes were open now, but he seemed to see nothing. Only when the cold air of the garden touched his face did he come to himself, though he did not speak until Norah had guided him up the steps to the kitchen door. As she had suspected it would, the kitchen smelled of coffee. Christine sat on the table drinking a pink gin while Alec scrambled eggs, saying, “Well, honestly, Alec, I don’t think it’s so much to boast about. After all, it’s been years since I touched an egg; of course I’d lose the knack.” Quite a quantity of rubbery-looking scrambled eggs lay in the dogs’ dishes. Chang Ming and Black Jasmine, as usual, had picked at theirs and were eyeing Buttercreme’s; Buttercreme, secure in the knowledge that the males were forbidden to touch her food until she’d walked away from it, sat demurely beside her dish, looking from her anxious audience to Alec and back.

  “What a dreadful little bitch you are, Butterpie,” observed Norah, leading Sandringham to a seat at the table. The moonlight dog took one look at the newcomer, lowered its tail and head, and scuttled away into the breakfast room. Black Jasmine and Chang Ming promptly began to bark at one another over the abandoned eggs.

  “Oh, Charlie, darling,” Christine said, springing down, “how do you feel? Can I get you a drink?”

  Sandringham shook his head. “Just coffee will do,” he said. “And if you would,” he added, raising his head and holding out one fine, trembling hand to her, “and please don’t take this the wrong way, I’d take it as a great personal favor if you never said that to me again. Though God knows,” he went on, shaking his head with a sigh as Alec brought over a plate of scrambled eggs and toast, “if I’m going to be able to act when I’m sober.”

  “Blake couldn’t,” Alec pointed out cheerily, “and he did just fine.”

  After the kitchen’s warmth, the cold was sharp when Norah descended the back steps and made her way again to the cottage. She huddled Alec’s leather jacket tightly around her arms and wondered if her blood was thinning. She felt weary beyond reckoning. It was not the somewhat dazed exhaustion that had characterized her departure for Red Bluff three weeks earlier, but a deep sense of having lived several days since she and Alec had sat over coffee that morning solemnly perusing the Los Angeles Sunday Times’ Farm and Tractor Magazine.

  Most of the candles in Shang’s little house had been snuffed. The door stood half-open, and through it Norah could see the old man lying on his mattress, with Hsu Kwan kneeling beside him.

  By the glow of the few wax lights remaining, the marks of exhaustion in the old man’s face seemed even deeper. He held to Hsu Kwan’s arm, shuddering, his face drawn in a stoic effort not to register pain.

  I was hurt inside, he had said. It was long before I could work magic again.

  Hsu Kwan whispered something to him in Chinese. The old wizard reached out, groping for something, and the younger took his hand stayingly and returned it to his chest. He touched the old man’s temples and eyelids and ran his fingers lightly along the backs of the twisted, broken hands. Shang Ko’s breathing deepened and slowed, then slowly, he relaxed.

  He said something, a short sentence, wistful and sad, in Chinese. Hsu Kwan shook his head and murmured a reply. Shang Ko sighed, and his hand tightened briefly on his grandson’s fingers, a gesture of reassura
nce or of thanks.

  Norah looked down at the table beside her. The silver mirror still lay there, its iron rim decorated with twined dragons no larger than the baby lizards that basked in the autumn on the stone house foundations. The depths of the glass were dark, reflecting the darkness that seemed to be gathered under the rafters. The brass mirror lay beside it, facedown, shadows moving like tiny insects among the reliefs of bats, flowers, and animals on its back.

  Beside it lay a pad of cheap yellow sketch paper. And on that paper was the sketch Hsu Kwan had made, the sketch from which he would do his painting, the sketch of what he had seen reflected in the mirror’s quicksilver depths.

  Norah’s breath caught, and she turned her face quickly aside, but doing so could not eradicate what she had seen. Not then and not later, lying next to Christine in the glow of the night-light, listening to the soft creakings of the house and the click of the dogs’ toenails as they made their busy nightly patrol.

  The face was not just a rat’s; it somehow held the essence of the loathing Norah had felt every time she entered her attic room in the dark and smelled their droppings or saw their eyes. Filthy and ceaselessly hungry, it crouched, cunning with the cunning of darkness. The hairy body’s massiveness spoke of dreadful and disproportionate size, while the iron incisors, the naked paws folded in hypocritical prayer, the naked tail, and the slumped, malevolent posture of the thing both disgusted and terrified her. But it was the eyes that held the horror, blank as the opals of the necklace yet eerily intelligent. A mindless thing capable of thought.

  Da Shu Ken. The Rat-God.

  The thing Charlie had seen for one hideous moment looking out at him from the mirror above the bar.

  The thing that had gnawed furrows in the foundation of the house.

  The thing that had stood in the shadows of the eucalyptus trees at the turn of the drive and had spoken to her with Jim’s voice.

  The thing they would meet in two weeks—if it did not find them first.