by Tim Waggoner
Tasha had loved that. It was so Jarrod Drayton. Witty, urbane, self-deprecating, and sentimental, the lines delivered in an avuncular, almost tongue-in-cheek style. But his words had also saddened her because she knew the real reason for them. He was dying, and other than Jarrod himself, she was the only one working on the film who knew it, including Inez.
Tasha sat on the floor, back against the wall, knees drawn to her chest, arms wrapped around her legs. This was the point in her room that was closest to where Jarrod was at the moment – lying on his bed – and while she didn’t need to be this close physically to connect with him, it did make it easier.
The declining state of Jarrod’s health should’ve been obvious to anyone with a functioning pair of eyes and a few working brain cells. But people in show business expected their colleagues to age poorly. Too much booze, drugs, cigarettes, and sun made anyone look older than they were. You were expected to look like shit if you survived to reach your golden years. It was almost a status symbol, evidence that you’d wrung every drop of pleasure out of your life and were still – at least some of the time – standing. So no one gave Jarrod’s appearance – or how his energy began to flag as the day wore on – much thought. He’d managed to reach his twilight years more or less intact, and in the entertainment industry, that counted as a victory.
But Tasha knew the truth. She always knew.
She’d first realized she was different when she was two. Her mother had misplaced her wedding ring and was running around the house searching for it, frantic. Tasha didn’t like seeing her mommy upset like that, so she took a quick peek into Mommy’s mind to find the memory of where the ring was. Tasha didn’t understand why people said they forgot things when the memories of every second they’d lived were stored in their brains, but for some reason, they couldn’t access most of these memories. They just sat there in people’s minds, unvisited and lonely. That made Tasha sad.
“Ring in the shower, Mommy,” Tasha had said. Her vocabulary was far beyond her age, but this didn’t bother Mommy or Daddy. They liked it, thought Tasha was a genius who was going to grow up to do great things someday. But when Mommy found the ring where Tasha said it would be – it was on the soap holder, right where Mommy had left it – she gave Tasha a funny look.
“How did you know where it was?” Mommy asked.
Tasha answered truthfully. “I can see inside your head.”
Mommy frowned as she slipped her ring back onto her finger. Tasha could sense the emotions inside her mother – disbelief, wonder, excitement, but most of all, fear. Fear of Tasha, yes, but mostly it was fear for her.
“Thank you for finding my ring.” Mommy smiled, but it was strained. “But you must be careful not to look inside other people’s heads. It’s not polite. People have a right to the privacy of their own thoughts. Do you understand?”
Tasha did, but even though Mommy had told her not to look, she had little control of her abilities yet. That would come later. So she saw the images in Mommy’s mind, the ones that accompanied the thoughts she didn’t want to speak aloud. Tasha on an operating table as doctors cut into her head to see how her brain worked. Men and women in uniforms telling her that it was her duty as a citizen to use her gifts for her country. People in business suits telling her she belonged to them now and she’d damn well better tell them what they wanted to know – about competitors, the stock market, the lottery, outcomes of sporting events . . . There were other images, too. People with wild eyes and angry expressions shouting Freak! Witch! Demon! People who would choke her, stab her, shoot her, kill her in any way they could as fast as they could because they were scared to death of her.
In that horrible, awful moment, Tasha understood that she was different than other people. Some would try to use her abilities for their own gain, some would seek to destroy her, but none of them would love her or value her or take care of her. Not like her mommy would.
Her mother never told her father about the ring, and from that day on, Tasha hid who she was and what she could do. She learned how not to look into people’s minds, and when someone accidently projected a thought or emotion so strong she couldn’t help but sense it, she pretended she didn’t. And for the most part, she’d managed to live a relatively normal life. She’d remained alone for the most part. She couldn’t have close friends, and she especially couldn’t have lovers. She couldn’t block the thoughts of people she became close to, no matter how hard she tried.
She’d had sex exactly once in her life, with Bobby Waters who lived down the street from her when they were both fifteen. One night when her parents were out, she invited Bobby over. She thought she might need to read his mind – if only a little – to find out how to make him want her, but it was unnecessary. He was a horny teen boy who got an erection whenever the wind blew, and he happily accepted her advances. The whole time he was thrusting in and out of her, he was mentally replaying violent sadomasochistic porn videos he watched on the Internet, only he imagined her face on the bodies of the women in the videos. Luckily, he came quickly, and she pushed him off her, got up, ran to the bathroom, and locked herself in. She vomited before she could reach the toilet, throwing up all over herself, the sink, and the floor.
The next day, still nauseated and suffering one of the worst headaches of her life, she sat on the couch in her PJ’s watching TV. Her mom assumed she was having a bad period and gave her some medicine to take and a heating pad for her nonexistent cramps. Tasha zoned out as she watched whatever was on the screen, feeling miserable and, not for the first time, contemplating suicide, when Jarrod Drayton entered her life.
The movie was called The Mindkillers, and Jarrod played a psychic who battled a group of extra-dimensional entities that fed on people’s thoughts and emotions the same way vampires fed on blood. The film was cheesy, but Tasha had never seen someone like her portrayed as a hero before, and watching Jarrod defeat the Mindkillers cheered her up considerably. She’d fallen in love with Jarrod that day. Not in a sexual way, but in a deeper, truer way. He’d become a symbol for her, a role model of sorts, showing her that not only was there nothing wrong or bad about her, but that she was actually special and could do important things if she wanted.
She became Jarrod Drayton’s biggest fan after that. She watched all his movies over and over, read or watched every interview with him she could find, collected every item of Jarrod Drayton memorabilia she could get, plastered the walls of her bedroom with posters and photos of Jarrod. She’d even gotten a tattoo of the logo for The Mindkillers across her shoulders. After she graduated from high school, she went to a college near her hometown in Ohio and majored in film history and criticism. She wrote papers about Jarrod’s movies, even made a documentary about him for one of her classes.
And during her senior year, only a couple of months before graduation, she learned Jarrod was going to be making an appearance at a horror convention only six hours from her school. She had to hustle to scrape up the money to go, but she managed – her parents helped – and she drove to the convention, paid her entry fee, and made her way to where the celebrities in attendance sat at a table, chatting with fans, signing photos, and taking selfies with them. Most of the celebrities charged for signatures and photos – some of them quite a bit – but not Jarrod.
She’d almost chickened out at the last moment. What if he turned out to be an asshole or a perv? She would be crushed if she discovered the Jarrod Drayton she’d come to love and almost worship existed only in her imagination. But she made herself go up and talk to him, and she quickly relaxed. He was kind, sweet, and good-humored, and although she didn’t pry into his thoughts, she could sense he was a good person. Unfortunately, she also sensed he was ill – seriously so – and this knowledge hit her like a punch to the gut. She could no longer resist peering into his mind then. She had to know what was wrong with him. So she looked, and she learned about his leukemia, and how he was done fighting the disease. He’d accepted his fate and was at peace with it,
and that helped her accept it, too. But she also learned that in the summer, he would be shooting a film in Texas. His last film. And right there and then, she decided she had to be a part of the crew, no matter what.
She gleaned all the specifics she needed from his mind, and after she graduated, she moved to LA, visited Imagitopia Entertainment’s offices, and – using her abilities – said all the right things. That got her an unpaid internship, which meant she did whatever scut work needed doing around the building. But with her abilities, it didn’t take long for her to learn that Inez Perry was the one to talk to about getting on the crew of Devourer from the Deep. And so one day she simply went into Inez’s office, said the right things that persuaded Inez’s assistant to let her pass, and then she introduced her to Inez and said the right things that landed her a job – an extremely low-paying one – as Jarrod’s personal assistant during the filming of the movie.
She wanted to spend as much time with Jarrod as she could before he died, wanted to learn everything about filmmaking that he could teach her. But most of all, she wanted to get to know him as a person and not as an actor or the characters he portrayed.
Now her dream had come true, and while it was everything she’d hoped for, it came with something that she hadn’t anticipated. The more time she spent in Jarrod’s presence, the stronger her psychic bond to him became. There was a deep well of loneliness at the core of Jarrod’s being – and while she could identify with this, for she had a similar loneliness inside her – it hurt to feel it all the time. And while Jarrod might tell himself he wasn’t afraid of dying, and on some level believed it, on a deeper level he was terrified, as she suspected all beings were when they knew the end of their life was drawing close. She felt this fear in addition to his loneliness, and together they were almost more than she could bear. In a way, it felt like she was dying, too.
But she was determined to endure. She wouldn’t abandon Jarrod, no matter how hard it was to remain close to him. She needed him in a way that she didn’t fully understand. And she would do what she could to alleviate some of his loneliness. No one should die alone, and she would not abandon him, no matter the cost to herself.
So she sat on the floor, feeling Jarrod’s mind through the wall that separated them. And when he finally got back enough strength to go to Flotsam, she’d wait a few minutes – so it wouldn’t be too obvious – and then she’d follow. And she’d spend the night in the presence of her hero, doing what she could to take away a little of his loneliness and fear, at least for a short while.
But something besides Jarrod’s illness gnawed at her mind. When she’d brought him a cigarette on the beach earlier, she’d sensed . . . well, she wasn’t sure exactly what she’d sensed. A presence of some sort, a living thing in the water near the shore. A big thing. At first she’d thought it was an animal of some kind, most likely a whale. But she’d touched thousands of animal minds in her life – the main reason she was a vegetarian – but she’d never experienced anything like this. Animal thoughts were simpler than those of humans for the most part, but the presence she felt was a strange combination of simple and complex. Its mind was far larger than any she’d ever touched before. There was a great deal of communication happening between its various parts. But that communication was extremely basic, kind of like the signals sent back and forth through a central nervous system. It was as if she had sensed the most sophisticated neural network that had ever evolved, but there was no mind attached to it.
Its thoughts, such as they were, sounded to her mind like the buzzing of a million insects, orderly but utterly inhuman. But as alien as this presence was, what disturbed her the most was the impulse that motivated it more than any other: hunger. It was always hungry, had always been so, and never in its long, long life had it been satiated. Not once. In its own way, she found this as sad as she did Jarrod’s loneliness. Its hunger was so strong, it was almost overwhelming. But even though she’d tried, she’d been unable to sense what the presence hungered for. And that frightened her.
A lot.
CHAPTER FOUR
After Inez dismissed the cast and crew, she returned to where Saul and Boyd were standing. They’d continued talking in low voices while she’d told everyone they could go, and now that she was coming back, they broke off their conversation and turned to look at her, both of their faces masks of innocence. She knew they’d been complaining about her behind her back. She’d have been disappointed if they hadn’t. Her job wasn’t to make friends. It was to ensure that Imagitopia’s films got made on time without going over their meager budgets. This was why she insisted on being on set during a shoot. She wanted to keep an eye on things, make sure directors didn’t film too many takes and that actors showed up on time and reasonably clear-headed. And if she had to be an overbearing bitch to get the job done, then so be it. She’d produced fifty-seven films for Imagitopia in her career, and while none of them had been award-winners or major hits at the box office, she liked to think they were solid pieces of entertainment.
Inez loved movies, had ever since her parents had taken her to see The Wizard of Oz on the big screen during a classic film series at a local cinema when she was a child. Of all the art forms in the world, movies were the most magical. They had the ability to draw audiences into a story unlike anything else, and they could reach millions, even billions of people, moving hearts and changing minds across the planet. Inez’s love for film was wide-ranging and unconditional for one simple reason: she had no critical faculties. A rowdy sex comedy which made almost no money was, in her mind, equal to a grand historical drama that swept all the awards the year it was released. She wasn’t deluded, though. She understood that some films were better than others, but she found some measure of enjoyment in watching all of them. It was this quality – her love of movies regardless of how great or shitty they might be – which made her so excellent at what she did. She knew a film didn’t have to be a great work of cinematic art or cost a trillion fucking dollars to make to be good.
So let people complain about what a tightwad she was when it came to a film’s budget, and let directors bitch that she didn’t understand their “vision.” As far as she was concerned, she was the one who really made the magic happen, and she was determined to do the same for Devourer from the Deep – even if their Devourer itself was, at the moment, mechanically indisposed.
When she rejoined Saul and Boyd, she said, “Tell me your brilliant ideas for working around our disabled friend over there.” She nodded to the mechanical pliosaur, whose inner works Enrique continued to examine while muttering a string of profanities.
Saul and Boyd exchanged uneasy looks.
“It’s kind of hard to shoot a monster movie without a monster,” Saul said.
Boyd nodded.
“We’ll have our monster,” Inez said. “Don’t worry about that. The question is how much of it we’ll have and how well it will work. What I need from both of you are ideas of how to rework scenes so that we shoot them with minimal effects while still keeping them scary and suspenseful.”
“I’m not sure that’s necessary,” Boyd said. His hipster glasses slipped down on his nose, and he pushed them back. It was a nervous habit he had, and it drove Inez nuts. “We can shoot the scenes as written, and you can put in the effects shots later using CGI.”
Saul rolled his eyes. “Here we go.”
Boyd had never worked with Inez before. If he had, he’d have known better than to make that suggestion. Inez spoke slowly, as if she were a teacher addressing a child who was having difficulty following a lesson.
“Those kind of effects cost money. And they take time to create. We need to finish our film and get it out ASAP, while everyone’s still excited about those dinosaurs.”
“Pliosaurs aren’t technically dinosaurs,” Boyd said.
Inez blinked several times. “Excuse me?”
“They’re reptiles. Distant cousins of turtles, actually.” He smiled. “I pride myself on my researc
h.”
Inez scowled as she tried to determine if Boyd was somehow making fun of her.
“They have saur in their name, don’t they?” she said. “That makes them dinosaurs as far as I’m concerned.”
Boyd opened his mouth to respond, but Saul put a hand on his shoulder and shook his head. Boyd got the message and shut his mouth.
Inez gave Boyd a slow, dangerous smile. “Tell me, Boyd. Given your vast professional experience, do you think it’s normal for a writer to be present during a shoot?”
“Uh . . .” Boyd looked to Saul for help, but the director had turned his attention to a nearby gull that was trying to dig something out of the sand with its beak.
Inez continued. “It is not normal. But I always invite writers to my sets. And I do it for reasons like that.” She stabbed a finger toward the inoperable pliosaur. “Things happen on set, things you can’t always plan for. And that sometimes means the script will need some tweaking to work around whatever problem has arisen. Your entire purpose for being here is to tweak the script when I tell you it needs tweaking. Do you understand?”
Boyd nodded, a trifle sullenly, she thought.
“Good. Now I want you to go back to your room, fire up your laptop, and do what?”
“Tweak,” Boyd said in a small, miserable voice.
“That’s right,” Inez said, almost purring. “I want you to tweak like a sonofabitch.”
* * * * *
“Fuck, fuck, fuck!”
Enrique smacked the side of the mechanical pliosaur – which he’d nicknamed Bob – in frustration. He’d built the goddamned thing, and he’d done the best he could with the budget he’d been given. But he hadn’t been able to insulate the inner mechanism the way he would’ve liked, and as a result, the saltwater was playing merry hob with Bob’s guts, turning him into an expensive, but useless, statue.