Bride of the Rat God (7 page)

“Father,” Fishbein corrected in an undertone.

“Father, and had to leave town.”

“Oh, of course.” Christine clasped her hands before her breast. “Such a terrible, terrible tragedy, and then for news of an even greater horror to pursue him...”. Norah could see her rehearsing poses for interview pictures. There were even tears in her eyes.

“Enough to break your heart,” remarked Mr. Mindelbaum.

Brown glared at him. “And if I hear one word beyond that,” he added, “you’re going to be back taking pictures of kids on ponies in Lubbock. I’ll see you all in the station at seven.”

“I can’t believe Mr. Sandringham did such a thing.” Norah settled her back against one of the pillars that supported the roof of the porch, from which a flight of brick steps dropped precipitously to the few feet of grass and ivy that bordered the road. Frank Brown’s car was making its careful way up the drive to Ivarene Street again, rocking a little with the uneven surface; the producer had catechized Christine on the subject of who was in the library with whom when and why she shouldn’t mention her recollections of just when Brown had hauled her away from dance competitions with the girls from the Cocoanut Grove. From the living room behind her Norah could hear that breathless voice:
“Murdered,
Flindy darling! Absolutely horrible! Frank’s just been up here, and Charlie Sandringham’s left town.”

She rolled her eyes. Rain still pattered on the eucalyptus trees that grew on the hillside above and below the rough shoulder on which the house was perched, and in the gray afternoon light the tangles of Spanish dagger, stunted oak, and other bizarre growths she could not identify blended into a somber mottling of dark and light greens. Even more amazing than the indoor plumbing—wonderful to Norah after a lifetime of chamber pots and “backhouses” in her parents’ and Mrs. Pendergast’s old-fashioned establishments—were the green grass of the California December, the geraniums and the roses. Another world indeed.

The pink stucco house, like a miniature Mediterranean castle, was the only visible dwelling in this part of the hills, though Norah knew other lots had been sold. Hollywood—in fact, the entire Los Angeles basin—was a patchwork of real estate developments. A few hills over, some enterprising salesman had erected enormous white letters spelling out
HOLLYWOODLAND
above a housing development of that name; it was plastered with lightbulbs and could be seen for miles.

“Is that why you gave them the time Charlie must have left the party?” Mr. Mindelbaum perched himself next to her on the low parapet and plucked a long, narrow leaf from the oleander that grew almost up to the level of their elbows. In spite of the rain, the day was not cold, at least not compared to Manchester. Though the cameraman wore a rather worse for wear brown cardigan over a turtleneck sweater, Norah was completely comfortable in her cotton shirtwaist and long wool skirt.

“It won’t do any harm. And I think wherever he is, poor Mr. Sandringham needs all the help he can get.”

She smoothed the dark fabric of her skirt across her knee. After a moment she added, “Thank you, by the way, Mr. Mindelbaum, for... for the moral support, I suppose.” She raised her eyes to his with a fleeting half smile. They’d talked at Enyart’s until almost one, the kind of lazy, gliding talk that she hadn’t engaged in for years, not since those nights she’d lain pillowed on Jim’s shoulder in a London boardinghouse speaking of everything and anything that came to mind. She barely recalled the content of it now: music and technique for developing photographs, Lawrence Pendergast’s worthless friends, and the things one saw on Basin Street in New Orleans late at night. “It really
is
like being in Oz, you know.”

He grinned. “Then if we’re in Oz, you don’t need to go on calling me Mr. Mindelbaum,” he said. “Alec will do. And I’m pleased to come to your rescue. But the fact that Charlie was concerned that Chris might be bullying you doesn’t mean he couldn’t have killed Keith, you know.”

“No, of course not.” She regarded him with slight surprise. “But Mr. Sandringham must be sixty at least, and not in very good shape. Besides, he was almost too drunk to stand when we saw him, and that was before the two bottles of champagne. I don’t think he
could
have killed a twenty-two-year-old athlete.”

Alec sighed, twirling the leaf in those soft, deft fingers. “You ever spend a night in a flophouse when one of the alkies goes off his head from Jamaica ginger and decides the guy next to him is a seven-foot warthog who raped his sister?”

“Hmmn,” said Norah. At length she asked, “What makes you think he did it?”

He hesitated. “I never said I thought that.”

He slipped down from the porch wall and straightened the kinks from his shoulders. “But it’s just like Brown to get everybody out of town. Do you mind going to the desert? Red Bluff’s a ghost town three hours drive from Berdoo—some nice rocks near there and one of the best battlefields in the business, but you’ll be shaking scorpions out of your shoes the whole time. They shot the cattle drive scenes of
Sawdust Rose
there. If you don’t think you can...”

His voice trailed off as he saw her attention leave him; Norah was staring up Ivarene Street at three white-robed figures that had appeared from the shadows of the trees.

As they came closer, Norah saw that they were women clothed in diaphanous veils designed for a somewhat more classical climate than even California’s. The veils hung limp with the rain; presumably umbrellas were not known in the Arcadian lands. But even that did not diminish the serene dignity of the tall, graceful woman who led, her dark hair hanging loose about her shoulders and her pale blue, piercing eyes made paler yet by the same heavy
mascaro
that Christine favored. “We have come to warn you!” cried the tall woman, raising a hand upon which gleamed ancient gold. “The shadow of evil lies upon this house!”

They picked their way over the rough ground to the brick steps and collected their veils for the climb. The other two women did not wear damp cheesecloth nearly as gracefully as their leader did. One of them was a short, elderly, rather pudgy type who looked as if her name should be Aunt Edna; the other, tall, thin, and flaxen fair, had a restless, hungry gaze.

They stopped a few steps short of the porch itself, and the dark-haired leader lifted her hand again. “Hail, fellow sojourners in this lifetime! A warning has come to us, a warning of disaster. Your life, and Miss Flamande’s, may be in deadly danger.”

Alec propped his glasses more firmly onto the bridge of his nose and turned to Norah. “You going to introduce us?”

Sign of sacrifice

I did not seek out the innocent ones; rather,

it was they who sought me out...

The first omen was correct,

the second and third were incorrect...

“I
AM
N
ADI
N
EFERU-
A
TEN
, counselor of the Sabsung Institute for the Well-Being of Souls.”

“So pleased,” murmured Christine, holding out one hand. By the gleam in her dark eyes Norah could tell she was anything but pleased by the incursion into her house of a woman who was not only taller and more elegant than she but clearly had a backstory that beat even being the illegitimate daughter of a French adventurer in the Grand Turk’s harem. “Norah, darling, could you fetch us all some coffee—I’m absolutely
dying
—and
please
rip that phone out of the wall!”

It was ringing again, jaggedly and insistently. Alec went to get it.

“We of the institute do not drink coffee,” intoned Nadi Neferu-Aten. “Caffeine is a drug, clouding not only the senses in this life but the sight of the inner eye in its quest for the vistas of eternity.” She folded her long hands with their seal rings and cartouches.

“Well, caffeine may be a drug for you, but for me it’s the stuff of life, right up there with chocolate and gin and that adorable saxophone player at the Grove. Frank really does serve excellent booze at his parties, except for the gin, and God knows what possessed me to drink
three glasses
of it last night...Cigarette?” She batted eyelashes like enameled wire.

Nadi Neferu-Aten looked thoroughly affronted. Norah sighed as she slipped through the swinging door to the kitchen. At least the only drugs Christine had proffered so far were tobacco and caffeine.

When she came back bearing a tray of coffee things, a small teapot for herself, and three glasses of iced mineral water—at a guess, the only thing the Sabsung Institute considered pure enough for the well-being of its attendant souls—Alec was saying into the telephone, “...police have requested that we not discuss it. No. Yes. Yes, I’m familiar with the First Amendment to the Constitution.”

In the front room Christine was curled up on the divan, looking slightly sulky with Black Jasmine in her arms; Chang Ming had made fast friends with the elder of the two attendant Graces and was grinning happily in the enamored woman’s lap. On her way through the kitchen Norah had glimpsed Buttercreme’s little face peering reproachfully around the corner of the stove.

“...transmission of souls down through the ages,” Nadi Neferu-Aten was explaining. “This was why we selected the house at the top of San Marcos Avenue in the first place, not only for the calm of its setting but because it is mystically impregnated with esoteric vibrations necessary to meditation and the clearing of the mind.”

Norah had already surmised that Neferu-Aten and her retinue were members of the cult up the street. Not only were the Grecian draperies unmistakable—although she had heard such things were by no means uncommon in southern California—but the three women had appeared on foot, and the fragile sandals they wore would never have made the climb up from Highland Avenue.

She set the tray down and poured herself some tea as Neferu-Aten continued. “I, for instance, so clearly remember my incarnation as the high priestess of Isis in the days of the ancient pharaohs that I have retaken the name for my own, feeling far more comfortable with it, as if I had come home. With experience in the clarifying procedures of the institute, Precious Peony here and Kama Shakti have come to feel the same.”

The two attendant Graces nodded eagerly. The younger—the fair one—left off twisting her fingers nervously and picked up the water glass in two hands, those strange, hungry eyes not quite seeming to see anything but her leader. Norah wondered what Nadi Neferu-Aten had been called before she’d remembered her days as a priestess of Isis.

“But this process of purification, this physical and spiritual freeing, has made many of us—myself included—sensitive to emanations from the astral plane.” The counselor leaned forward, her blue eyes grave. “Last night Kama Shakti had a terrible premonition in the form of a dream about this house. I, too, slept uneasily, feeling something was severely amiss. There is some danger here, Miss Flamande, some evil...” She paused, looking around at the long room with its black and cream silk furniture, its gaily colored Chinese bric-a-brac and brass-inlaid gramophone, frowning as if trying to identify something that troubled her. “Scoff if you like, but—”

“I wouldn’t
dream
of scoffing, darling,” Christine said airily, starting to sit up. “Only in about half an hour we’re going to have reporters and police all
over
us like ants at a picnic, so I really can’t—”

“What danger?” Norah asked quietly.

Christine looked at her in surprise.

Kama Shakti, the plump and elderly one, frowned for a moment, then replied slowly. “It was something about... about the dogs barking. Something trying to get in. Something waiting, crouched in the dark. Something...old...”.

Nadi Neferu-Aten raised one long-fingered hand to her temple in a gesture worthy of Pavlova; Norah could see Christine’s eyes follow and knew that particular manner of leading with the wrist was going to show up on screen very soon. “The answer lies upon the astral plane,” the counselor said in a hollow voice indicative of deep meditation. “We must ascend to that plane to seek it.”

“Better not get your ladders set up yet,” remarked Alec, coming back in from the porch. “The
Trib
’s just parked on the other side of the road, and I think the car that just pulled up is the
Times.”

Christine sprang to her feet with a squeak, clutching Black Jasmine to her bosom, “Shit! And me not dressed!” She bolted up the stairs. From the kitchen Buttercreme emitted a few small, disapproving
ruh
s to indicate her opinion of the entire proceedings, and Chang Ming dashed eagerly to the door to greet his newest set of long-lost parents.

“We shall return,” Neferu-Aten promised, and swept past the reporters on the porch with the cold aplomb of a priestess ignoring supplicants upon the temple steps. But then, thought Norah, she’d probably done that kind of thing through several lifetimes and was good at it.

“You’re never going to get rid of them, you know,” Alec warned her later as Norah walked him to his car. Christine was still in the house, reclining artistically on the sofa, hand pressed to her brow, breathing a low and husky account of Frank Brown’s party. Every now and then a bright burst of light in the windows indicated a photographer’s interest. Knowing Christine, even in the grip of such a mind-searing shock to her sensibilities, the titles
Kiss of Darkness
and
She-Devil of Babylon
were going to figure prominently in interviews, plus accurate reviews of last night’s premiere. “I should have warned you earlier, California’s the breeding ground for table tappers and Ouija readers...”

“Oh, I knew that,” Norah said slowly, folding her arms as he climbed into the rickety Model T that was parked in front of the press cars on the other side of the street. The rain had ceased, but the sky still lowered above the hills; the world breathed of wet spiciness and damp stone. “In fact, I’m sure they’ll be back for a séance tonight. Cecily Pendergast went in for it—spiritualism, that is—and had half a dozen regulars, and
all
of them were reincarnated priestesses of Isis or Mayan temple virgins who’d got themselves chucked down sacred wells. I kept wanting to ask them if there was some rule about it—that priestesses and temple virgins and the like were required to come back as spiritualists, or whether fishwives or charladies ever got considered for the job after
they
died.”