Bride of the Rat God (40 page)

Go through danger without losing faith...

Constant pitfalls...

Trapped and helpless within the

deepest pit...

“A
RE YOU SURE
this’ll work?” Christine huddled deeper into her furs, her face a small white triangle against the sable cloud of collar. “I mean, if we’re laying down spells to summon the Rat-God, and we’re out here on a pier with water all around us, and we’ve got this box... Isn’t he going to—uh—smell a rat?”

Below their feet night-black water soughed among rows of wooden pilings. Against the cold arch of stars the outstretched arm of the Malibu headland curved away to the northwest, its cliffs as sharply cut as a painted backdrop. Like a far lower line of cliffs the square brick buildings of the Santa Monica suburb of Ocean Park crouched, visible through the darkened gimcrack of the gate at the end of the aisle of shuttered concession stands.

Pickering / Lick Pier closed at two
A.M.
on Sunday mornings after a Saturday night of jangling revelry seemingly unaffected by the winter’s dense chill. It was now close to four, moonless and clear. The piers to the norm were dark, turreted silhouettes against the crystalline phosphorescence of the waves. Between the bowling alley and the Breakers Restaurant, between Finlay’s Museum of Natural Wonders and the pavilion where the carousel animals stared with frozen eyes into the darkness, shadow hung like curtains of black velvet, masking a terrible and living stillness.

The Shining Crane’s voice was soft against the muffled roar of incoming tide, the faint tinkle of collar hardware and leash buckles, the hollow tread of feet. “He is a demon,” he said, “a slave, in part, to the ritual of his summoning. He cannot stay away.” He shifted the burden of the camera tripods on his shoulders with a faint creaking of leather straps. “More, demons do not think like men. He is cunning, knowing what to offer those he believes he can use, knowing what forms to take, what illusions to hold forth. But it is instinct, and those illusions are taken from the dreams of those he would use, as the speech is taken from their hearts, their mouths, and the action from their minds. It is you, rather than he, who weaves the forms of his demands.”

“Sounds Freudian,” Alec remarked, panting a little, for the velvet-draped cube of the demon trap was heavy with its strappings of silver and lead. “Like dreaming about a car and it’s really your father.”

“Freud was correct in saying that the mind clothes what the heart does not wish to see naked.” Shang Ko turned his head constantly as he spoke, dark eyes seeming to pierce the black slots between the closed raree shows, custard booths, and shooting galleries. The end of his dragon-carved staff made barely a sound on the thick wood underfoot. “Yet his truth is not the whole of Truth. Da Shu Ken can robe himself in any form, can take any voice in a dream, and those he takes are always those closest and most beloved by the dreamer. Did you not find this so?”

Alec looked away quickly. “Yeah,” he said, not elaborating.

What did he offer you?

“Good heavens,” squeaked Christine. “You mean all this time I’ve been dreaming about that
gorgeous
croupier at the Montmartre, or that lovely violin player, or Rudy Valentino, or that darling waiter at the Chief, or those absolutely scrumptious stuntmen... and it might have been the Rat-God?”

In spite of the tension, the terror that underlay the night like the thin note of unheard music, Alec had to grin. “I think you’re safe so far, Chris.”

They reached the end of the pier. Past the sleeping mass of wings and struts that made up the Captive Aeroplanes, starlight prickled on the slow draw of the surf. Behind them the concession stands and locked halls had a look of waiting: blank-faced, expressionless animals making up their slow and stupid minds to pounce. The grinning clown faces on Puzzletown’s exaggeratedly ramshackle facade gaped and grimaced with stilled, obscene laughter; the garish posters promising saber-tooths and curve-tusked mammoths in the museum seemed, with the movement of their vague shadows, to stir with uneasy life. The elevated track of the Whip and the spiky, many-armed hydra of the Frolic appeared to have only seconds before lurched into stillness, mindless and tarantulate, and on either side of the long aisle of buildings the two roller coasters rose like dragon skeletons rotting in starlight, dreaming in the midst of their decay.

The cold air breathed ocean and sand, creosote tar, stale popcorn, and peril. Norah drew closer to Christine, the dogs trotting self-importantly around their feet.

“Remain here.” Shang set his burden down and turned slowly, studying the uneven wooden wall of Over the Top, the wooden railings, and the dark expanse of sea behind them, as Doc LaRousse had studied the desert skyline at Red Bluff. “Unleash the dogs. He must not come before the trap is set.”

Norah had private doubts about unleashing the three Pekes, which had been busily sniffing and anointing every corner they passed along the night canyon of the midway. But when she obeyed, the three tiny animals sat in a row before the old wizard, tails curled, ears up, flat, solemn faces raised as he lifted his hand in a series of small gestures that drew the starry dark of their eyes.

“Guard us, my children,” Shang Ko said. “Anciently they turned you from what you were into the forms which now you wear, but your hearts are ever the same. Protect these ladies, as you protected all those ladies throughout the centuries, from the evils that have neither faces, nor bodies, nor names.”

They turned, ridiculous creatures, sun-gold, moon-pale, the black and white of starlight, and toddled with their businesslike Pekingese roll to the edge of the terrible velvet zone of shadow. Leaning heavily on his staff, Shang limped out into the open starlight at the end of the pier.

Alec was there already, quickly unfolding the cumbersome wooden tripods that ordinarily held cameras and reflectors. On one of them he had already set the demon trap, draped in the old mourning shawl of silk velvet that had been Norah’s mother’s. The other three held flash mechanisms rigged to a car battery, mechanisms whose light would serve, they hoped, to drive Da Shu Ken into the trap.

Taking the carpetbag from Christine, Shang Ko drew forth a number of small bronze incense burners and crystal perfume bottles, candles and incense, chalk and vials of powdered silver, and some dark fluid whose smell, even above the salt of the ocean, was a stinging, bitter blend of alcohol and blood. Last of all he took from the bag the set of flat black disks he called the
luopan,
the gold on it winking like jewels in the dark. Then from his pocket he drew three coins and knelt on the dirty wooden planks to throw them, reading the marks by starlight.

“Thunder over Heaven,” he said softly. “And here, the sign of fire. Fire over Wind—the sign of sacrifice... The omens are very bad. Lake over Heaven...”. He shook his head and with the chalk began to sketch the trigrams, small patterns of broken lines. “Against Lake over Heaven we must write Fire over Mountain, the sign of the traveler; against Fire we must write Water. Heaven over Fire, the City under Seige... it touches upon the stars in the constellation you call Lion and thus is strengthened by the auspices of Miss Christine’s birth.”

While he spoke, the Shining Crane drew a web of linked diagrams on the boards underfoot, now and then consulting the
luopan,
joining the sets of trigrams, and radiating strange small curls of power. “There, the dragon protects us from the northeast,” he said, gesturing back toward the rise of the hills along whose ridge Fourth Street ran and making a mark at the diagram’s edge. “This afternoon when the tide was low I came, I drew the dragon and the tiger upon the pilings, the
xue,
of the pier, and made sure that the
sha,
the sand of the beach, was as it should be...”

His crooked fingers flicked and spun at the concentric rings of the
luopan,
and he drew a few more signs. Norah shivered, half recalling the pattern from her dream in the desert, recognizing them as the signs sketched by the vile old priest in the horned hat.

It was like a mah-jongg game, she realized. If one happened to be east that round, it doubled one’s score—one’s existing power—and if east was one’s proper direction, it was doubled again. And whatever was in one’s hand—someone born in the Hour of the Monkey or under the sign of the snake, the new moon, the incoming tide—all of it counted, a few points here, a double there, to stand against the dreadful reality of the power that had blown up the oil wells, that had raped a kindly old drunk of his personality and will, that had caused to appear in the dry California grasses small bits of topaz and diamond that had vanished in Manchester two and a half years before.

Cold wind stirred Christine’s furs and sent a crumpled newspaper scurrying like a colorless rodent across the pier. For an instant the movement drew Shang Ko’s eyes, then he returned to his work. From the main octagon he drew a long aisle back toward the darkness of the midway, stretching into the shadow that lay like a dropped velvet stole beneath Over the Top’s uneven wood and canvas walls. Huddled in her hand-me-down coat, Norah could barely see him in that darkness, a blur of white hair, pale face, hands like moving shreds of moonlight, clutching awkwardly at the chalk with stiff and crippled fingers while he murmured thin music in his throat.

In the great circle’s center Alec measured out dollops of magnesium powder into the flash holders; he was quiet and serious, as if he were setting up lights to make an actress of dubious age look twenty-two again. His breath made puffs of diamond in the darkness. Over the sea, the stars seemed to bend close, like fairies fishing for their souls in the waves.

Only when Shang Ko stood up and started to walk back down that aisle of chalk did Alec remove the trap’s velvet veil. The camera lens gleamed faintly silver, like a moving eye. On the dull strips of lead that sealed the black-painted wooden sides of the box, rounded, deliberate signs of archaic Chinese stalked like strange bird tracks. The signs, Norah knew, made the wood proof against decay by water in perpetuity, doubled the seal of the solder, made fast the closures around the shutter and on the small compartment on the back where the necklace would go.

From the carpetbag Christine took the necklace itself. The remaining opal glared like a madman’s eye, with its shadow of a prisoned devil; the charred buttons of the pearls were a grin filled with rotted teeth. When Christine fumbled with the deformed clasp, Alec stepped toward her, hands outstretched to help.

“No! Do not touch her!” Shang Ko cried.

Both hesitated, surprised. Then Christine tightened her lips and forced the clasp open, shook aside her hair, and worked the half-broken thing closed again. Shivering, she straightened up and shed her coat, the black furs falling around her to reveal the crimson dress she’d put on back at Alec’s house, its color turned by the thready starlight to the blackness of old blood.

She looked, Norah thought, less like her dream and more like the ending sequences of
Kiss of Darkness
: the moon-white woman, the black gown, the gleaming jewels. Under-foot heavy swells beat the pilings as the tide moved in. Ashore, the city dreamed.

“Leash the dogs, Miss Norah.”

Turning, Norah saw that Shang Ko had donned a necklace of heavy brass cones, the metal clashing softly as he moved. In one hand he held a whip, and in the other, an immense tambourine hung with spell-written ribbons. His face was calm, but she saw the tambourine’s ribbons vibrate with the trembling of his hand.

“Take them to one side with you, but whatever happens, do not step outside the lines of the circle.”

After a moment’s hesitation Norah clucked her tongue, and the three Pekes trotted to her, none of them treading on the chalked spell lines. It seemed to her for a moment that above the scribbled marks of power a faint, shivering thread of light hung in the air.

It is real
, she thought. The magic of the moon and tides, the power the old man sought to summon from the shape of the Venice hills, and the marks on the pilings underfoot.

The Rat-God—the thing she’d glimpsed that night in Hsu Kwan’s sketch... That was real, too.

It was coming for them.

She fixed the leashes and drew the dogs clear to the far side of the ring, near a shuttered wooden shed whose face bore the words
PEANUTS—COTTON CANDY
. Only when she had done so did Shang Ko walk to the front of the circle, standing before the break in it from which the aisle extended away into darkness.

Norah found it suddenly difficult to breathe.

Then he swung the whip around his head, and Norah recalled the vile old shaman in the Hall of the Tranquil Earth, the whip crack that had begun the rite of summons.

But before Shang Ko could move, Chang Ming sprang to his feet with a soft, deadly growl.

The old man was still, whip upraised in his hand.

Black Jasmine and Buttercreme were standing, too, straining at the ends of their leashes. Far off, in the darkness of the pier, Norah heard a confused jangling of sound, like a calliope raving in delirious dream. The noise died almost before she could be sure she had heard anything, but in the silence the rush of the ocean below their feet seemed eerily loud.

Shang’s breath hissed. Christine said, “Norah...” in a tiny voice like a child.

Norah started to move toward her, but a vicious, sputtering clatter rose to their right, within the wooden walls of Over the Top. Machinery chattered, and small iron wheels stuttered over the sharp-cornered tracks, the fretful banging of a monstrous and demented baby. At the same moment, to their left, the spiky iron arms of the Double Whirl jerked into motion, swinging the cars on their ends like clubs, trapped around the central hubs but yanking and rattling, trying to get away. All three dogs began barking furiously, jerking on their leashes, hackles dark and ears up as they lunged.

Norah’s hands and feet had grown utterly cold. Like the fitful roar of an infuriated dragon, the Zip came to life in the darkness, a long train of empty cars rushing over the rails, slashing around the curve as if they would spring from the track and leap on the small group of humans who dared to believe they could trap the Kara-Kudai, the Black Rat of the Steppes, dared to think they could summon him to his destruction.