Medusa's Web by Tim Powers Read Free Book Online

she was unlikely to see it, and returned to his bed.

CHAPTER 4
    BY MORNING THE SKY had cleared, and the sun was casting the shadow of the house across the western lawn all the way to the shaggy palm trees lining the driveway that curled up to the garages and down the hill on the other side to Gower Street. The breeze was chilly and smelled of mesquite and the distant ocean. Claimayne had already angled his wheelchair out onto the west balcony, and he was sipping coffee and setting pebbles on folded slips of paper laid out on a little wrought-iron table when Ariel stepped through the doorway and lowered herself into the chair opposite. She shivered, frowning behind very dark sunglasses, and pulled her bathrobe more snugly up to her chin. Her silver gyroscope pendant lay across her shoulder.
    Claimayne glanced at her, his round bald head reminding her of the gilded Buddha statues he kept in his room. He gestured at the slips of paper. “Hair of the dog? They’re all clean, freshly copied, never looked at. I don’t like dirty ones for breakfast.”
    Ariel shuddered and turned away. “No, thank you.”
    â€œYou sure? You could burn it right afterward—no possibility of an after, that way, no flash-ahead vision—just the not-me rush.”
    The breeze paused, and for a moment the eternal creaking of the old house was the only sound.
    Ariel reached out and touched one of the pebbles, then made a fist and pulled her hand back. “I’m staying clean,” she said unsteadily. “Yesterday was the exception that proves the rule.”
    â€œSince you say so.”
    She looked across the table at him. “In yesterday’s flash-ahead, three days in the future—two days, now!—Scott and Madeline were patient, friendly. They obviously knew I’d arrive mad, but they were calm. And then I was back here, sick, pushing you into the dining room while they marched away up the stairs. So you saw the exchanged me from that future point—and I was welcoming to them?”
    Claimayne took a mouthful of coffee and carefully set the cup down. “If it was a real flash-ahead, a real after, and not a hallucination—”
    â€œIt was real.”
    â€œâ€”which I apologetically but profoundly doubt—then apparently when you look at the spider again, two days from now, you won’t have any quarrel with Scott and Madeline anymore.” He leaned back and smiled. “Maybe you charm them into signing a preemptive quitclaim in the meantime, who knows? They seem passive enough. Maybe we offer them a solid buyout to forestall even the remote risk of a judge validating my mother’s crazy last will. You—”
    â€œBuyout. I could go a couple of hundred dollars, I think. I wish we’d invested better.”
    Claimayne shrugged. “We did what we could, when we could, with what we had—and we’re secure for a few years yet.” He eyed the slips of paper on the table wistfully. “And sometimes the cumulative clogging effect does relent—phases of the moon, variations in air pressure, blood pressure, tire pressure?—and volition is still possible in the befores and afters, for such as we.”
    â€œIt relented for me last night. I called them ghouls and grave-worms—which is to say I will call them that, two days from now. That’s volition. And . . . and the exchanged ‘me’ from up there had volition: I was hospitable! What did I say?”
    â€œIf it was real, my dear, you have only yourself to blame for our dwindling fortunes. Instead of cussing at them, you should have found a newspaper and noted some stock prices or horserace winners.”
    â€œDamn it, what did I say ?—to them, last night?”
    â€œOh—I had started to tell them that they had gone to needless extra trouble in dragging their luggage up the steps, as they were to stay in the street-side apartments, and you interrupted and said no,