Bride of the Rat God

by Barbara Hambly

  TWENTY

  LAKE OVER THUNDER

  Sign of sacrifice.

  Favorable to the most ambitious of plans...

  You cannot have both the boy and the man...

  In pursuit of your goal

  you will fall into a trap...

  Imprisonment and sacrifice by the ruler...

  NORAH THOUGHT LATER that she should have guessed that Da Shu Ken would not sit quietly, waiting to be trapped.

  For all Frank Brown’s dire assurances that everyone must be prepared to work through Christmas and New Year’s, he had found that he simply could not get the crew to film on Christmas day. Ned Bergen and Doc LaRousse had families and children; Mary DeNoux told him placidly that she wasn’t going to deprive her little girl of Christmas to save Colossus Studios from Brown’s prophesied bankruptcy. They were all quite willing to work extra hours the rest of the week to make up, but they wanted their Christmas.

  So Norah had her first joyful Christmas in seven or eight years, with California sunlight sparkling on the newly bought ornaments of the tree they’d put up the previous night while a cozy fire burned in the grate and Charles Sandringham dippered eggnog for everyone amid a colored maelstrom of Christmas wrapping. Chang Ming and Black Jasmine, brand-new collars of one- and two-carat diamonds glittering around their necks—Buttercreme hid in the kitchen—fought fierce battles with the paper, shaking it with the characteristic neck-breaking fury of born vermin catchers. Christine doctored her eggnog and passed the flask along to Alec, who sniffed it cautiously before adding a dollop to his own, and Norah and Alec scrambled eggs and sliced green-black, vile-looking alligator pears for a very late breakfast amid smells of pine and coffee.

  “What heaven to have the day off!” Christine sighed. She fished in the pocket of her billowing lounging suit for her cigarettes, holder, lighter, and a dog biscuit, which she tossed to Chang Ming, who promptly ran away with it to a corner to guard, hotly pursued by Black Jasmine. “You know, I was almost forgetting what this place looked like in the daytime.”

  The words brought back a memory to Norah, a recollection of dream and fear.

  The dogs weren’t the only ones to have received diamonds for Christmas. Norah had been rendered just as speechless by Alec’s gift of a green enameled pin of a rocket ship with a thin line of diamonds down its side—folded in a paper that said “Welcome to Barsoom”—as she had been by Christine’s present, a Patou suit in ivory-colored raw silk (“I asked Mary Pickford about it, darling—she’s got the best taste of anyone I know.”). Christine, in her turn, had squeaked and bounced with delight over the astonishingly gaudy Chinese lantern Alec had given her and Norah’s gift of a huge traveling cosmetics case of intricately woven Chinese willow slats, lacquered dark burgundy and labyrinthine with tiny drawers, secret compartments, and interlocking boxes and vials.

  But the memory of her earlier dream, the glint of smiling teeth within the blackness of shadows among the eucalyptus, returned to Norah again and again. While Flindy and Christine quizzed Sandringham about what rules he played mah-jongg by (“...so, do you admit a sequence of one through nine in suit with a pair of winds and a set of dragons, all concealed except the last tile, as a no-limit hand or just a double?”), Norah slipped out through the front door and stood for a time on the porch. Christine had spent the previous day, from before sunrise until long after nightfall, in the studio, and nothing could have brought Norah to approach the eucalyptus trees in darkness. But now heatless sunlight winked on their yellowing leaves, and the wind that stirred down from the Cahuenga Hills called up a deep sighing in their branches. The shadows among them were not so dense, and she could see clearly that they were only trees.

  Hugging her brown cardigan closer around her arms, Norah descended the steps, edged past Flindy’s car, and approached the place where she had heard Jim’s voice in the darkness of dreams.

  She didn’t know why she wanted to look more closely at the place. Perhaps to satisfy herself that no man’s footprints marked the thin soil. The trees enfolded her like an embrace, trails of low-hanging branches brushing her shoulder as her mother’s shawl fringe had when she was small.

  Fragments of sunlight like threepenny bits flickered over the saffron carpet under her feet, and among the leaves something glinted. Before she even bent to confirm what it was—and it seemed to her that she knew instinctively—Norah felt her heart, her belly, her hands and feet turn to ice.

  Her hands were shaking as she knelt and picked up what she had seen.

  It was a gold ring, the half-carat solitaire diamond set off with two small topazes. Jim had put it on her finger the week after they had met.

  She remembered Lawrence Pendergast’s brassy-haired light-of-love admiring it shortly before it had disappeared.

  She flung it from her as far as she could into the brush on the hillside across the road. Then she walked back to the house, trembling with shock, already wondering if what she had seen—what she thought she had touched—was a dream itself, a hallucination. Wondering if she should force herself to cross the road and look around on the hillside and see.

  Wondering if she should tell Alec.

  He would have known something was wrong immediately even if she hadn’t gone on to play some of the worst mah-jongg in her life. To his concerned glance she returned a small gesture of talk later, but it wasn’t until Frank Brown appeared bearing an ermine coat, several pairs of hundred-dollar stockings with lace insets, and an inordinate number of roses that Alec was able to draw her into the breakfast room. “What is it?”

  Norah shook her head uncertainly. “I don’t... it sounds insane.” She wished now that she had kept the ring—if it actually was a ring—as evidence for herself as much as for anyone else. But the thought of putting it in her pocket, of having it on her person even for an hour, for some reason terrified her.

  “More insane than Blake Fallon’s corpse blowing up oil wells? What was it? Did you see something out there?” He nodded in the direction of the eucalyptus, and she guessed that whatever he had dreamed, it, too, had something to do with those trees.

  He listened without a word to her account of the dream, glancing down into the living room now and again to where Christine, Flindy, Sandringham, and Brown were building the Great Wall of China; under his rusty mustache his mouth had settled hard. “And Shang’s gone into Chinatown for the day,” he said when she’d finished. Mr. Shang, knowing there would be company in the house all day, had departed quietly after raking up the leaves that had fallen the night before. “Got any idea when he’ll be back?”

  Norah shook her head.

  “We’ll just have to keep an eye on her, then. God knows what that’s going to entail.”

  What it entailed eventually was joining Frank Brown, Flindy, and Christine for a lavish dinner at the Cocoanut Grove and then proceeding to the Cafe Montmartre to listen to mediocre jazz and watch Christine flirt with every handsome man in sight and everyone else in the extremely crowded club behave very badly indeed. By sheer good luck Mr. Brown guessed that the watch of black enamel and diamonds Christine wore had been Ambrose Conklin’s Christmas present to her and was in a possessive mood, so it didn’t take more than a few words from Norah to convince him to bring Christine home fairly early for Christine: “Filming does start at eight tomorrow morning, and frankly I think she’s looking a little tired, don’t you, Mr. Brown?”

  Christine was at that moment engaged in a frenzied Charleston with Gary Cooper and didn’t look a bit tired—certainly didn’t look like a woman who’d been nearly strangled by a Manchurian demon four nights previously—but after a few token protests about the fabulous party that was supposed to be going on in the speakeasy under the Antler Hotel in Venice, she agreed to be taken home at around two.

  Norah breathed a sigh of relief.

  She left Alec making Christine a cup of cocoa in the kitchen and descended the steps to the dark little path that wound to the cottage. The note she’d left on the door
was still there: Mr. Shang had evidently not returned. Hugging her ridiculous pink and black coat around her, she was starting back around toward the kitchen door again when she saw, among the trees at the top of the drive, a moving shred of white.

  Her first thought was panic, horror—but the dogs, which had accompanied the little party to both restaurant and club, were not barking inside the house. Shang himself?

  She stepped a few paces along the drive, trying to pierce the shadows.

  Something pale billowed, fell—a veil? Norah’s mind leapt back to the three Graces, circling one another to the breathless tootling of the flute... A moment later a tall, thin form emerged from the darkness, moving slowly down the driveway toward her. The moon was only a few days past full; its light slipped like quicksilver along the blade of the knife in the figure’s hand.

  It was the flaxen-haired girl, Norah realized, the one with the obsessed and hungry eyes. She walked haltingly, as if unsure of her balance, and as she came nearer, Norah saw that what she’d first taken for the gauzy veils of Grecian drapery was in fact the girl’s nightgown, sensible flannel and buttoned to her chin. If it weren’t for that, she supposed she would have frozen.

  He was cut to pieces...

  Her heart seemed to stop under her ribs. For a moment she saw the bloodied walls, the smashed mirror, and beyond them, behind them, seemed to hear the hammering of the iron drum and the scratchy whine of the dust wind off the desert...

  But the dogs weren’t barking.... Take a knife from the kitchen, she heard Jim’s voice saying, Cut her throat...

  She stepped forward out of the dark, trying desperately to remember the girl’s name, and called out, “Wake up!”

  The girl stopped, swaying in the moonlight; Norah could see the colorless silver of her open eyes. Her heart pounding hard now, wondering what on earth she’d do if she guessed wrong, Norah came forward and grasped the girl by the knife wrist. “Wake up!” she commanded again, and the girl gasped and staggered, the knife falling from her hand. “You’re all right!” she added, seeing panic flare in the pale eyes; the girl struggled for a moment, then all strength seemed to go out of her and she burst into wild tears.

  “He raped me!” she sobbed frenziedly. “Killed my parents—burned the house—threw me down and... and...”

  “Winnie!”

  Norah swung around at the sound of the voice, the swift scrunch of footsteps on the gravel. It took her a moment to recognize in the plump, elderly matron running down the drive in bathrobe and slippers the adept Kama Shakti whose dream had originally brought the ladies of the Sabsung Institute to Christine’s front door.

  “I’m so terribly sorry, Mrs. Blackstone. Please do forgive her.” Kama Shakti caught the tall girl in her arms and held her while she wept like a gangly, wretched child. “She’s a good girl really, in spite of the sleepwalking, and she says she’s felt so much better at the institute in spite of what her parents say... Her father is Felix Graham, of Pacific Slope Security Bank, you know... Why, after her last breakdown they wanted to have her put in a sanatorium! It’s just that she has dreams, you know. There, there, Winnie,” she added gently, brushing aside the straight, silvery curtain of hair from the girl’s face. “It was only a dream, you know.” She looked anxiously up at Norah. “Please don’t think badly of her. She’s really quite harmless.”

  “Quite harmless...?” began Norah, when Winnie twisted in her guardian’s arms, pointed hysterically up the driveway, and began to scream.

  “There he is! There he is! He killed them, he killed my parents...”

  Shang Ko stood, his long hair like frost in the moonlight, halfway down the drive.

  “I have to kill him! What he did to them... what he did to me...” She tried to bend down, reaching for the knife where it lay with its blade glinting in the dirt, and Norah kicked it swiftly behind her into the tangles of rhododendron that grew so thick around this side of the house. “I’ll kill him!”

  “What on earth is going on?” A bar of light from the porch lamp fell sidelong across the upper part of the drive; Chang Ming and Black Jasmine scampered around the corner of the house, heralding, a moment later, Christine like a little jeweled doll with Alec at her heels.

  Kama Shakti tugged the sobbing Winnie gently but with surprising force up the drive; Shang Ko stepped aside as they passed, stroking his long mustaches in troubled speculation and thought. The fact that she couldn’t get to the knife didn’t stop Winnie from slashing at the old man with her nails. “He killed me!” she screamed as she was led up the drive and into the denser shadows of the road and the hills, and her voice echoed back to them from the darkness. “He killed my parents, then he raped me and cut my throat!”

  “It was in a former lifetime, you understand.” Nadi Neferu-Aten cast an uneasy glance at the darkness pressing against the big French windows that opened onto the porch as if expecting to see an earlier and homicidal incarnation of Mr. Shang lurking outside. “He was an evil sachem of the Iroquois tribe, hating not only the white man but, in his heart, all of humankind. And in her dream last night this was revealed to Precious Peony—this and the man’s continued blackness of heart, his continued hatred of her... and of you.”

  She leaned forward in her chair, her eyes burning like a cobalt flame. “He hates you, Miss Flamande. She told me this last night, after I got her back to the institute and put her in a trance again to try to exorcise the pain of her prophetic dreaming. He pretends to want to help you, but he is leading you into danger... perhaps to your death. Send him away. For your own good, you must send him away.”

  “You’re quite wrong, darling.” Christine stubbed out her cigarette, baffled at the intensity of this onslaught. It had been a long day at the studio—Queen Vashti hadn’t successfully ordered her handmaidens flogged until nearly eight at night—and the promptness with which Neferu-Aten had appeared indicated to Norah at least that the former priestess of Isis had been watching for Christine’s car. “He’s done everything he can to help!”

  “And surely,” said Norah, “you’re not going to hold a person liable for deeds done in a previous lifetime.”

  “For that matter,” Christine pointed out, flipping back over her shoulder the trailing ends of the pink and bronze scarf that hid the yellowing bruises on her throat, “it isn’t any of your business what people do in this lifetime as long as they don’t go lying in wait for you or breaking your windows or anything, which I know Mr. Shang hasn’t done.”

  “It is my business,” the dark-haired woman insisted desperately. “That is... I mean, I am concerned for you. Send him away, Miss Flamande. No good will come to you if this evil man remains.”

  “You mean no good will come to the Sabsung Institute if Daddy Graham hauls his little girl out of that place and puts her in a rubber room for trying to carve up the neighbors with a bread knife,” remarked Alec after the counselor of souls had gathered up her gauze veils and left.

  “Would that even work if the Rat-God had taken her over?” Norah looked worriedly across at Shang Ko, who emerged from the shadows of the hallway with Buttercreme in his arms.

  “Not if he had taken her over, no.” The old Chinese shook his head. “But I doubt that is the case. This girl has taken neither drink nor drugs. My guess is rather that he spoke to her in a dream as he spoke to you, urging her to attack me so that he would then be freer to reach Miss Christine. From what I have seen in the quarter of town where my people live, even to raise my hand against an American woman in my own defense would cost me my freedom.”

  “I’m afraid you’re right about that,” Alec said gloomily.

  “Clearly Da Shu Ken knows that you are guarded, Miss Flamande. Now he will begin to take steps against the guards. Later tonight, when all sleep, I will go up to the walls of this institute and mark them as well as I can to keep him from entering again the dreams of those who sleep there.”

  He frowned, stroking Buttercreme’s long fur with his crippled fingers. “He holds great p
ower in dreams,” he went on in a low voice, “taking what form will most affect the dreamer and speaking in the voice they will best hear. Thus he has convinced them that although I have never done them harm, I am their enemy because I was so thousands of years ago, when they think humankind was different.

  “But men and women were never different.” He smiled a little and shook his head. “They loved, and wanted, and behaved blindly and for reasons they did not understand; they sometimes crippled their children even when they were trying to love them, and sowed good fruit and evil without being able to tell which was which, and did foolish things to escape pain that in the end could not be escaped. And perhaps she does remember.” He set the little dog down and, turning, vanished through the kitchen door and out into the night.

  “Well, whatever she does or doesn’t remember,” said Christine, getting to her feet, “I call it a lot of nerve. Now we’ll have to watch out for them, too.”

  Norah shrugged. “What can they do?”

  The police arrived at seven o’clock in the morning on the thirty-first of December to arrest Shang Ko.

  “Mr. Shang?” Norah stared in disbelief at the police lieutenant standing on the porch in the dove-colored presunrise light. Her breath puffed white as she spoke. “There must be some mistake.”

  She could hear men going around the side of the house to the cottage. In the kitchen Chang Ming barked challengingly, though Norah knew full well that if one of the officers came into the house, the sun-colored dog would be on his back in seconds, begging to have his tummy rubbed.

  “If there is, it’ll get straightened out at the station.” The lieutenant shrugged, a medium-sized man with a face as uncommunicative as shoe leather. “But we got a warrant for Shang Ko, employed and living at this address.”

  “He’s gone, Dave.” Two burly patrolmen appeared at the foot of the porch steps. “Looks like the captain was right about some kind of cult. There’s candles and all kinds of crazy drawings all over the floor back there.”