Medusa's Web by Tim Powers

where all the screw jacks are.”
    â€œI’ll tell him to fix the heater first.” The coffee bubbling up in the glass knob at the top of the percolator was brown, and Madeline turned down the heat and fetched two cups from the cabinet.
    â€œThere’s,” said Ariel hesitantly, “trays up there too.”
    Madeline smiled. “Thanks.” She levered a wooden tray free of the pans around it and set it on the counter, set the cups on it, then poured coffee into them. Lifting the tray, she added, “I’m sorry about the monkey thing. It’s just that I read—”
    â€œJust shut up and take the poor boy his coffee.”
    As Madeline sidled out of the narrow kitchen into the dining room, Ariel called after her, “I’ve read that too—the monkeys can’t let go of it, the peanuts or whatever, and they get trapped.”
    With no hand free, Madeline nodded in acknowledgment.
    Her shoes knocked and scuffed on the uncarpeted stairs and then on the worn planks of the second-floor hallway, but she paused for a moment beside the door to what had been Aunt Amity’s bedroom, on the other side of the hall from the row of salvaged doors with nothing but wall behind them; and when she walked farther and kicked the door of Scott’s room and he pulled it open, she said, “There’s some kind of noise in her room.”
    Scott took the tray from Madeline and set it on the recessed shelf in the plaster wall, beside the row of cigarettes he had laid out last night. “We have to get furniture up here.” He picked up one of the steaming cups, then hastily set it down again. “What sort of noise?”
    â€œVery soft, like—a lot of mice running for their lives.” She touched the other cup and left it where it was. “I don’t want to go sit in my stupid office today. Astrology’s too sad.”
    â€œYou’ve got an office now?”
    â€œWell, it’s still the living room in my apartment. The landlady thinks I run kind of a botanica .” Scott knew that meant a Hispanic witchcraft shop. Madeline sat down on his bed. “I’m not going.”
    â€œDo you have an appointment?” She nodded. “Is the person going to pay you?” She nodded again. “Then I’d say you better go.”
    â€œWe’re going to inherit this house in a week.”
    â€œYou know we’re not. Why is astrology sad?”
    Madeline made a face. “Because you can’t get there, to where it’s describing! The sun and the planets aren’t circling the earth anymore—I mean, nobody thinks that anymore, except maybe my clients—but astrology is based on that old business. And the calendar has moved on since our charts were written; the sun comes into the Taurus constellation in May now, for instance, but we do the calculations as if it still comes in in April, like it did a thousand years ago. We’re always describing the past, but we can’t get to the past!” She waved a hand. “But there I am anyway, calculating what the exact sidereal time of a native’s birth was, figuring what the ascendant was at that moment, then looking up where all the planets were—”
    â€œNative? What, you get work from a reservation or something?”
    â€œThat’s what we call clients.” She waved a hand impatiently. “You know—natal, birth date.”
    â€œI thought you just went by what month they were born in, like they have in the newspapers.”
    â€œNo, that’s no good—that would be like deciding what one guy’s blood alcohol level was by measuring everybody in the bar and figuring the average. And doing it a month late anyway!” She shook her head. “Ariel says you have to fix the heater on the roof. The pilot light won’t stay lit.” She laid the list on his bed.
    â€œI can probably do that.” Scott picked up one of the cigarettes;it