Bride of the Rat God

by Barbara Hambly

  “Screw Flindy or Emily!” Christine got to her feet, setting Black Jasmine aside, her lips tight and her whole body fairly quivering with fury. “The fucking nerve of him, just sitting there this evening! What can we do? I mean, how can we get in touch with Mr. Shang? Go back to Chinatown?”

  “I suspect,” Norah said, “that Mr. Shang will get in touch with us. He did before.”

  “And until then?”

  Alec walked over to the door and moved the curtain that covered its little window aside, looking out as far as fog and darkness would let him to the barely seen pewter gleam of the canal. Over his shoulder he said softly, “We wait.”

  Toward four Norah woke to the sound of the dogs barking. She sat up, startled and disoriented and wondering why she felt so stiff, and discovered that she had fallen asleep on the couch leaning against Alec’s shoulder. Every light in the little room still burned, showing her the half-familiar shabby furniture, the boxes of phonograph records stacked against the walls and the shelves of dog-eared paperback books, the big phonograph and the smaller portable gramophone, the camera equipment and the black, staring squares of the windows behind their cheap muslin curtains. Christmas cards were tacked to the mantel of the room’s doll-sized fireplace, above the small gas heater. There was, of course, no tree. Chang Ming and Buttercreme pattered nervously around the room as they had on the night of wind, the night of Keith Pelletier’s murder, sniffing and scratching at the door.

  Norah felt as if her blood had stopped in her veins.

  Alec sat up, ruffled and creased-looking, and fumbled his glasses from the lamp table beside the couch. In the bedroom Black Jasmine’s sharp, staccato quacks could be heard. A moment later there was a scuffle of bare feet, and Christine, wrapped in her gaudy kimono, appeared in the doorway, her face like chalk.

  “There’s something outside,” she whispered. “Something outside the window. I heard it scratching.”

  “Turn out the lights,” Alec said promptly, and reached into the pile of equipment for a crowbar and a flashlight. “At least we won’t be blinded looking out. Any suggestions about how to deal with demons?” By the glare of the flashlight his eyebrows stood out like black smudges against the sudden pallor of his face. Norah, who had changed earlier out of her filmy silks, felt her heart thud sickeningly under the sensible cotton of her shirtwaist.

  “Would fire help?” Christine asked timidly. “It did against tigers in Strongheart of Africa.”

  “He can call fire,” Norah said, looking around for a weapon. She crossed to the kitchen, where Buttercreme was fairly bouncing with rage, her usual timid, almost whispered barks transformed into a sharp and angry fusillade. But Norah stopped in the doorway, gasping, as something vast and formless scuttled past outside the window high above the sink. She shrank back against the door, cold to her marrow, wondering if in spite of the darkness it could see her. The drawer she sought was to the right of the sink, near that pitch-dark window. Her heart hammering so that it nearly sickened her, Norah backed out of the room again. She caught up the mop from behind the door with shaking hands. Nothing could have gotten her across the floor to the knives.

  “It’s outside.” Her hand tightened hard around the futile weapon. “Alec, what are we going to do if it comes into one of our minds as it did to poor Charlie?”

  “Charlie was drunk,” Alec said briefly. “So was Blake. If it could have taken over someone sober, it would have gotten that institute girl rather than talking her into it through dreams.” He picked up the telephone from the table beside the couch, cursed in Yiddish, and set it down again. “Dead.”

  “Can we run for it?” Christine whispered. The flashlight’s beam wavered dizzily in her trembling grip, making the shadows lurch and sway. “It can’t be thirty feet to the house next door.”

  “I wouldn’t want to risk it.”

  “Shall we scream?”

  “They haven’t been home all night. It’s New Year’s Eve. The pier’s not closing down till dawn.” While he spoke, Alec was disentangling the small generator from the miscellaneous junk pile along the wall. He checked a cable, pulled a jackknife from his pocket, and cut and stripped one end. “Even if he cuts the electricity, he can’t get this,” he said quietly. “I’m going to fire her up. That should give us about a thousand volts on the bare end of this thing. With luck I should be able to zap whatever comes through that door before he can get his thoughts together to blow the donkey engine on the turbine.”

  His free hand wrapped itself twice in the end of the starter cable. Around them, the dogs had ceased their barking and ran busily from room to room, fur flouncing, sniffing doorsills and outside walls with their flat little noses, their round eyes reflecting weirdly where they caught the flashlight’s beam. For a long time there was no sound but the tiny clatter of their toenails on the wooden floor. Then, apparently satisfied, they trotted back to the living room and sat in a group at Christine’s feet, ears up, wrinkled faces grave.

  Alec glanced at Norah, the starter pull unused in his right hand, the cable end ready in his left.

  After a few moments Chang Ming sprang to his feet again and toddled to the door. He did not bark but sat in prick-eared expectation, his extravagant tail curled. Presently it started to switch eagerly back and forth.

  Footsteps creaked on the small porch. Black Jasmine’s and Buttercreme’s tails sprang up onto their backs as well, and they hastened to join the bigger dog. A moment later someone knocked. “Miss Flamande? Mrs. Blackstone? It is I, the Shining Crane.”

  A great trail of mud and water glistened across the damp grass as though some vast, heavy thing had dragged itself from the canal. All around the house mud splotched the walls behind crushed and slime-dripping banana and castor plants. Alec’s flashlight beam picked out the chewed marks on the foundations. The whole night smelled of rats, thick and foul. Norah shuddered, drawing Christine’s chinchilla close around her, but could seem to find no relief from the cold. Christine said nothing, but Norah could sense her tension, wound to breaking point with the aftermath of liquor and drugs and fear.

  “I have been afoot, walking and hiding in the orchards, for many hours,” the Shining Crane said, poking in the broken and violated plants with his staff. “My grandson is in the hands of the police. They say he will be held in prison, perhaps deported. An irregularity, they say.”

  “An irregularity in the Chinatown beat,” Alec remarked with a rubbing gesture of his fingertips.

  Silently, they filed back into the house.

  “I felt the thing’s presence from afar.” Shang Ko ran the deformed links of the necklace through his broken fingers. “It fled from me. Surrounded by water and with the moon on the wane, it had little strength, and I do not know what form it was able to take. But it will be back. It has had its taste of blood, the strength of the one life it has already taken. It feels the coming of the year’s end. It will have its sacrifice.”

  He looked down at the deformed ghost trapped within the central gem, and the scarred, bent fingers became entangled in the chain.

  “Can Kwan’s sketches be used?” Norah asked after a time. “Could you, or one of us, maybe, use the prepared ink to draw over the sketch? Ink it in as they do magazine illustrations?”

  Shang Ko shook his head without looking up. “I do not believe so. Yes, the paper could be treated with spells, and yes, the ink I have prepared could be used. But wizards see things in a way others do not. What my grandson would have drawn is not what he sketched. What you suggest, though it might work, might not hold the demon once it is driven forth from the body it will take to attack us.”

  He held up his hand, and Norah saw that only the thumb and two of the scarred fingers were mobile. “It is long since I could do the calligraphy necessary for spells of this kind. Ni Kuei Nu used to do my writing for me... and now my writing grows more and more like the patterns of grass blown by the wind. And to tell the truth,” he added with a twitch of his mouth beneath the long mustaches, �
��it was never beautiful. Not like my grandson’s or the Mud Tortoise’s. I can see the Rat-God in my mind, but that image I cannot place on the silk. If the image is not perfect in all respects, it will not hold the Rat-God’s soul.”

  There was momentary silence, during which a car could be heard roaring along some black alley of Venice and, distantly, the sound of music on one of the piers.

  Then Alec said, “What about a photograph?”

  The Shining Crane regarded him for a moment in blank surprise.

  “You mean take a photograph and copy it?” Norah asked doubtfully.

  Alec shook his head. “I mean white man stealum soul in magic box.” He nodded toward his camera equipment. “Hell, my Uncle Avram wouldn’t let me take his picture because he was afraid it would steal his soul. I’ve run across dozens of old folks down on Delancey Street, and all through the bayou country, and in Chinatown here, who thought the same thing. That they’d get their soul trapped in the picture. Which is exactly what we’re trying to do to Da Shu Ken.”

  “Yes,” said the Shining Crane. “And one cannot do it to a human, because the body protects the soul.” His dark eyes widened as if he contemplated some unthought-of light. “But the demon has neither soul, as we understand it, nor body—only a spirit of malice. And that could be trapped if the correct substances were used.”

  “We’ve got a whole range of possibilities,” said Alec, perching on a corner of the table again. “The processes we use now were chosen mostly because they’re cheap and they’ll work on celluloid film. You can make a photographic emulsion out of dozens of things, depending on what effects you want. The only reason they don’t use high-concentration silver these days is because of the expense. Old-time photographers used silver salts, in different proportions, on glass or paper of whatever. Original daguerreotypes were made on a film of silver iodine.”

  “Silver.” The old man’s voice sank to a whisper upon the word. “Silver is the element which will capture and hold the bodiless ones, the spirits of evil.”

  “And it’s the easiest thing in the world to make a camera obscura. Just tell me what it needs to be made out of and how big it needs to be. You can put whatever spells you need on it, and we can put together a silver iodine plate. On the night of the new moon we set ourselves up at the end of Lick Pier, where we’ll be surrounded on three sides by water. And then...” He looked from the old man’s face, to Norah’s, to Christine’s in the grimy electric glare, his own features fired with enthusiasm and a kind of grim delight behind the flashing lenses of his glasses. “And then we’ve got ourselves a demon.”

  “Alec, I could kiss you!” cried Christine, and did. Norah could see she was shivering all over with the release of tension, with nerves and fear and hope. “This calls for champagne. What a pity all I’ve got is gin, but,” she added, her face brightening again, “as long as we’re all up and it’s nearly morning anyway, let’s all drive out to Pasadena and watch the game!”

  They worked at night, mostly in the house in Venice. Shang Ko marked it with signs of protection, with the green tiger and the white dragon and the door gods Shen Shu and Yu Lei, on its cardinal points. Neither Norah nor Christine felt safe in either house, but Alec’s was surrounded by water, and the neighbors were closer and not as likely to be influenced by strange visions or dreams.

  It was an exhausting week. The filming ran late every night as Brown pushed to make up for lost time. Christine got by mostly on cocaine, drinking gin in the evenings to fall asleep, and, not surprisingly, slept badly. Norah still assisted Alec at the camera in between looking after the dogs on the set and organizing a cowboy epic for Dale Wilmer and Emily Violet and reading Kafka’s Metamorphosis, which made even less sense in print than it did in Hraldy’s excited semi-English.

  Time took on a strange, juggled quality, days seeming to last for weeks until they were suddenly over. Shang Ko made a series of cautious foot treks around the Venice sand hills, checking their orientation and that of the pier with his luopan or studying the tides; nights, he and Alec worked on the trap until long after midnight and sat up discussing magic and Tao and photography while the wizard worked spells that would render the trap impermeable to water or put the finishing touches on everyone’s horoscopes.

  “Light is the enemy of the demon,” said Shang Ko one night when Christine had stumbled to bed and Norah sat at Alec’s side, brushing her long hair while Alec tested the trip mechanism of the shutter. “If we can drive him forth from the body he will wear when he is summoned, light will force him into the trap and fix his image there forever.”

  Accordingly, Alec procured flash powder and spent the following evening out in the jungle of the yard making blinding explosions with batteries, cables, and electrical splitters until he could get three flashes to fire at once. Shang Ko seemed very pleased about the fact that Alec had been born in the Year of the Sheep under the influence of wood in the Month of the Sheep and the Hour of the Rabbit in the country whose fixed element was metal; Norah could only shake her head and brace herself as the dark future seemed to rush at her with terrifying speed.

  Christine gave an interview that played for all it was worth on Blake’s connection with mysterious Chinese murder cults: “I always feared some dark secret from my girlhood in the mystic Orient would return to haunt me,” she said, pressing the backs of her fingers to her alabaster forehead and holding out her cigarette for six reporters to light, wrist leading the gesture, Norah noticed, in a copy of the way Nadi Neferu-Aten moved her hands. “The police are following every lead, every clue...” She cast a smoldering look in the direction of Frank Brown, and whatever Frank Brown knew or guessed about his dreams, or Chinese cults, or the disappearance of the Moon of Rats on New Year’s Eve, he kept to himself.

  But sometimes Norah thought she saw him watching Christine with a look of speculation in his eye.

  That might, of course, have been because on Thursday Ambrose Conklin had come to visit Christine on the set, courtly and anxious and bearing a large velvet-covered box. Thursday was also the day that Dale Wilmer had chosen to collapse in hysterics on the set of The Gentlemen Clown and be taken away to a sanatorium, and while Mr. Brown tried desperately to hush up the matter and find a replacement, Christine disappeared into her dressing room with the millionaire. Though she didn’t really suspect Conklin of being Da Shu Ken’s latest incarnation, Norah strolled by with the Pekes nevertheless and smelled through the thin plywood the scent of Conklin’s pipe tobacco and heard Christine’s voice, broken by low, delicate, and completely manufactured sobs.

  She had never in her life actually heard Christine weep, but something told her those dovelike whimpers were no more genuine than her protestations of love for Mr. Brown. She would have wagered a week’s salary—Christine had given her a salary rather than simply doling out cab fares, lunch money, and the cost of new stockings upon request—that those tears were unaccompanied by red eyes or a swollen nose and would leave her makeup miraculously intact as well.

  On his way out of the studio, Conklin paused to grasp Norah’s hand and say, “Mrs. Blackstone, your sister-in-law is a brave, brave woman.”

  To which Norah had the wits to respond, “I’m glad someone realizes that, Mr. Conklin. She has had so much to bear in this—this tinsel factory.”

  “Darling, these are real diamonds,” Christine greeted her, dry-eyed, when she entered the dressing room. She held up a two-inch choker that flashed in the dressing-table lights like cold, colored fire. “They’re huge. He said if he was too old to bring justice to the scoundrel who marked my neck—he did notice at Frank’s party!—the least he could do was conceal them in a manner worthy of my beauty. I could live for a year on this. Only,” she added, looking up with a sly smile under her painted lashes, “now it looks like I’ll never have to.”

  “Did he propose?” Norah leaned interestedly against the door frame.

  Christine’s eyes sparkled like the jewels that filled her hand. “Darling, he owns
miles of land up in the San Fernando Valley.” She held up another jewel, a solitaire pink diamond the size of Norah’s little fingernail, like an unspeakably vulgar star imprisoned on a golden ring. “I told him I just couldn’t wear this until I’d finished my next picture—the last one in my contract with Frank, and truthfully, dear, I want to see what kind of contract I might be able to get... Did I tell you Charlie got a simply tremendous offer from Lassky on the strength of some of the rushes from She-Devil? But really, Mr. Conklin is such a dear.” And she pressed the diamonds to her face like a glittering washrag and laughed.

  But in the night Norah would wake in the dimness of the night-light to hear Christine’s breath drawing raggedly like a dull saw, and she would turn over and see the rigid body curled with her back to her and know she was not sleeping. One night she found Christine wrapped in her gaudy robe in the chair by the makeshift dressing table, hands clenched between her knees, shoulders bowed so that her black hair streamed down over her face, shivering as if with dreadful cold. Norah slipped quickly from beneath the covers, groping for her own robe, confused thoughts of dream visitations and the theft of souls flooding her mind.

  All three Pekes were clustered around Christine’s feet. Black Jasmine stood on his hind legs, forepaws against her knee, looking up worriedly into her face.

  Christine raised her head with a jerk at the creak of the springs and manufactured a ghastly smile. “I’m sorry, darling. I tried not to wake you.”

  On the table—which had been brought in from the front room and covered with her pots of powder and skin food and creme aux marrons—sat the small ivory box she kept her cocaine in and a full glass of clear liquid whose metallic juniper-berry smell seemed to fill the small room.