Bride of the Rat God (39 page)

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.

“It’s silly.” Christine pushed both of them from her with hands that shook. “They’ll just make me feel awful, and the dope’ll give me worse dreams. I know that.” She looked up into Norah’s face, the flesh around her eyes braised-looking and traced all over with thin lines of fatigue and pain. In a small, very careful voice she went on. “I don’t... think I can keep this up much longer.”

“It’s just until Saturday night,” said Norah. She rested a hand on Christine’s shoulder. “Shang Ko says that’s the night of the new moon. If you’re still willing...”

“Not that.” Christine’s hand strayed to the bruises on her neck, then moved away quickly. She managed another firefly smile. “I mean, I’ll be glad to have that... over...” Her voice was so pinched, Norah could barely hear. “And I’ll do what I have to do.” From the darkness of the living room Alec’s breathing was deep and soft, and not even wind stirred the jungle of castor and banana around the little house.

“But I mean everything.” She drew a long breath, as if trying to make herself let go of the tension in her muscles, her bones. “All of it. I’m thirty, you know. I don’t feel like I’ve rested in years. I don’t want to end up like Dale Wilmer, taking whatever horrid roles I can get and nobody willing to risk hiring me anymore, or poor Wally Reid, dying in a sanatorium... and anyway, you can only keep going so long on things like dope and gin and stuntmen with pretty eyelashes.” She reached down and stroked Buttercreme’s head, letting Black Jasmine lick her wrist and Chang Ming rub anxiously against her ankle. “Sometimes I see myself that way, and I get scared. I have to stop. What use is it to run away from the demon if I just kill myself with cocaine.

“I’m sorry,” she apologized, and rose. “I didn’t mean to wake you, dear, and I really do try not to be like that awful old lady who made you stay up to read to her.” She blinked hard, her eyes swimming with tears, and shook her head, denying their existence, denying their power over her. “I’m just tired. I’ll be all right in the morning.”

“Of course you will.” Norah took the unopened ivory box and replaced it in the dresser drawer, picked up the glass of gin, and started to carry it to the kitchen.

“Don’t, darling. That cost ten dollars a bottle! Pour it back in the flask... and I don’t see what’s so funny,” she added. Then she laughed herself, as Norah was laughing, and her face lost some of its haggard look as she returned to the sagging bed. But it was still some time before she slept, and for a long while Norah was aware of her nervous twitching and stifled moans as she wandered in some incomprehensible dream.

“I always thought it was all nonsense, like the crap Tante Rivke cooked up—Tante Rivke was supposed to be a witch.” Alec leaned on the post of the porch and put his arm around Norah’s waist as Shang Ko’s thin form dissolved into the fog along the canal. “Don’t put your hat on the bed because it means death, don’t put your hat on the table because it means you’ll lose money, don’t put iron near the door or walk on the same side of the street as Mrs. Ginsberg because she’ll give you the evil eye...”

He pushed up his glasses to rub his eyes. He looked dead tired. Norah had been awakened by the sound of the old sorcerer’s departure and had no idea what time it was, but the silence was complete; no sound came from the direction of the pier. Fog drifted thick above the water at the foot of the brick steps. Inside the house, Chang Ming woofed at goblins in his sleep.

“And now I don’t know what to think.”

“‘There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’” Norah’s arm tightened around his waist, and she shivered, not so much at the damp cold—it was less cold here than it was in the Cahuenga Hills—as at the recollection of the sketch she had seen so briefly and the horror of the house with the broken mirror and the bloodstains on the walls.

“Sometimes I still think it’s bullshit, you know,” said Alec. “I see the little spell papers he makes, and I hear him talk about drawing power down from the new moon, and I think,
This is nuts.
Then I remember Blake getting up again after you hit him and the way the fire came out of the ground... and I think about meeting that thing again tomorrow night on the pier...”

He shook his head; his arm drew her closer to him. “And I think,
This had better work
.”