by Zoe Wildau
“Wake up,” her conscious brain chastised her.
“Move!” her dream brain commanded.
She blinked hard, squeezed her lids together tight and opened them twice, and still the blackness persisted.
Dream Lilly moved.
Trailing her right hand along the rocky surface, she began to walk forward; then, feeling a wave of menace behind her, she ran. It’s just a dream, just a dream, she chanted in her head, but it did nothing to calm her hammering heart. Faintly, she registered a growing gray light ahead, still darker than night, but lighter than the pitch black of the tunnel. Slowing, she felt tentatively along the wall. She had reached an intricately carved archway that opened onto a ledge that rimmed a precipice. An underground canyon opened before her.
A faint shimmer of daylight glowed through another archway across the divide, but the chasm was much too far for her to leap over, even in a dream. The ledge upon which she stood was narrow and spanned left to right in either direction as far as she could see. Not waiting for the slithering something to come up behind her and push her into the abyss, Lilly scooted to her right, taking sideways steps and keeping her back plastered to the wall.
As she shuffled along, she turned her head, scanning in the direction she was moving, then back to the archway to see if the thing in the tunnel was going to follow her out on to the ledge.
Maybe there is a bridge, or a rope, or maybe the canyon ends eventually. Why have an archway that drops into nothingness if you couldn’t make it to the opening on the other side? You’d have to… have wings. Oh shit. Oh shit. Oh shit. Dream Lilly and conscious Lilly collectively cringed with the memory of the fiery winged Jake she’d repeatedly met in her father’s barnyard. Despite the chilled, wet air, her skin burned with the memory. Of all her Jake dreams, those had scared her the most. Her skin had bubbled, her freaking hair had caught on fire.
As if she’d summoned him just by thinking of him, she watched in horror as a flickering orangey glow bloomed in the archway to her left, as if a hundred men carrying a hundred lighted torches were approaching the opening. Shimmying sideways faster, trying not to fall, she swallowed the mounting dread threatening to overcome her, freeze her. But when an ear-splitting roar filled the underground cavern, she faltered and failed. Frozen to the wall, the rumble echoed through her bones.
First his head, then his broad shoulders and tucked wings protruded through the archway, barely large enough to accommodate him. Rocks splintered and fell away as he dug one clawed foot into the ledge and pulled the rest of his serpentine body out of the hole to crouch, impossibly balanced, on the edge of the canyon. Just before he sprang into the air, his slithering tail whipped from behind him, curling and snapping as he took flight. Gusts of hot air buffeted Lilly, threatening to blow her off the wall. Her body vibrated in time with the tremendous beat of his wings as he came to hover before her, bigger than a Harrier, with a tremendous, “woosh, woosh, woosh.” He sneered at her, and then opened his jaw so that she could see the lava burning, the flames fanning. He was going to light her up. Again.
Lilly screamed and jumped. Falling into the chasm was preferable to becoming another human torch. Dragon Jake followed her, a shooting arrow into the canyon. All about her, the air erupted in flame, and she could see the jagged rocky bottom of the canyon floor speeding up to meet her. Suddenly, she was jolted, her fall arrested by a hard grip on her shoulder.
“Lilly! Lilly!” The voice was concerned, loving.
“Lilly, wake up. You’re having a nightmare.”
Lilly clawed at the hand holding her shoulder, yanking away and backing across the bed to hit her back against the wall with a loud thunk. Kyle stood next to the bed, dumbfounded concern on his face.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I heard you in here, but you didn’t answer so I came in. You were dreaming. I’m pretty sure you were having one hell of a nightmare. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you.”
Kyle. Kyle. She was home. In her room. No pit, no fire. Home.
Smoothing her sweat-drenched hair from her face, she gave Kyle a trembling smile. “Thank you for waking me,” she said sincerely.
“You okay?”
“Yeah, yeah, I think so. Go on to sleep. I think I’ll just get up and get some water.” Scooting out of bed, she patted Kyle on the shoulder when he continued to look concerned. “I’m okay now.”
Both she and Kyle had had their fair share of nightmares as children. He let her go and headed back up to his attic room.
Lilly stood in the kitchen, gulping down a glass of cool water from the refrigerator dispenser. Heading into her studio, she flicked on the light and looked around at her collection of horrific Jake figures and drawings. There was not a blank space on the walls. In a fit of – she didn’t know – therapy, maybe, or exorcism – she paced back into the kitchen, pulled the stepladder from the pantry and opened it in the studio. Pulling out a bin of art supplies from under her desk, she selected an array of chalks. Black, gray, brick red, orange, yellow.
Tying on a utility apron, she dropped the chalks in the pockets and stood on the stool. With broad, dusty strokes, she began filling the white space of the ceiling. The dragon or balrog or whatever it was that haunted her began to materialize in horrific breathtaking depth. The ceiling was not large enough for his wings to unfurl. Instead, Lilly drew him as he must have appeared just before she awoke, like a hunting hawk that pivots just before the ground to snatch its prey: wings high and behind him, talons outstretched seeming to protrude into the room. As she shaded and colored, soon the stepstool wasn’t enough.
Heading into the kitchen, she turned her kitchen table sideways and pushed and shoved until she could maneuver it through the studio door. Setting it upright inside the room, she stood on the tabletop and continued. Six hours later, it was eight in the morning, and Lilly, covered in a film of chalk dust, lay on the table looking up at the Jake of her nightmares. Kyle was still asleep upstairs when she manhandled the table back into the kitchen and wiped away the trail of dust with a wet rag. She made sure to shut the studio door before heading for the shower.
Chapter 29
Lilly slapped the last label on the boxes stacked in her Lab, then stretched and rubbed the crick in her neck she’d gotten from drawing for so long on her ceiling that morning. She looked at her watch. Someone from the studio would be coming by any minute to pick up her supplies and molds and store them in a warehouse elsewhere on the Warner lot. Her Lab would be deconstructed the next day.
She checked her phone for a message from Jake, and then again after the movers had left. Still nothing. Complete radio silence. In frustration, she tossed the phone on the counter and refused to pick it up again. Ben Farrow had done this to her. She’d waited for days by the phone, knowing that he was not going to call, that he was out with one of the other girls his roommate had told her about.
At least then she had been innocently unaware that Ben had other women. Not this time. This time she was worse than a fool. She had let herself be used willingly.
Lilly walked down the hall to look around the Studio G soundstage. Most of the set was gone, taken down the week before while the film crew was in Hawaii. She swallowed a lump in her throat at the vast emptiness. It matched the way she felt inside.
At the bike stand in front of the studio, she still couldn’t help looking around for him as she rotated the combination dial on her bike lock. If he was there, he’d most likely be in the editing offices across the lot. She could legitimately go seek him out, since technically she was still in charge of the BTSV, but Park had that well in hand. It would be a flimsy excuse to see him, transparent really.
On the ride home, she tried to shake the bleak feeling that had been creeping up on her and had settled upon her in the empty soundstage. This isn’t how she should be feeling, she chastised herself. She’d done good work. Great work. She could do anything she wanted now.
But as she chipped away at the numbing bleakness, she uncovered something
harder to handle: her battered, bruised and broken heart.
How did she let this happen? She’d been so careful about protecting herself. This feeling crushing her chest, making it hard to breathe, this was why she hadn’t wanted to get close to Jake. When did she begin to so foolishly think that things would be different? If she had meant anything to Jake, anything at all, he would have sought her out by now. He would have at least called.
She needed to face reality. She was just a novelty to him. Quirky Lilly with the funny face and pocket-sized frame.
Lilly wheeled her bike into the alley behind her bungalow, emotionally and physically drained and sticky with sweat. When she walked up the back steps to her house after locking the backyard shed, she saw that the back door was ajar. Kyle must be home. Packing for Houston, she thought dismally.
Pushing open the door, she walked down the hall to the small kitchen for a glass of water. Odd. Her studio door was open, and she could hear him shuffling around in there. It wasn’t like Kyle to snoop.
Lilly nearly dropped her glass when a man that she didn’t know backed into the doorframe of her Jake room, wielding a small camera, trying for a better picture of the entire room. Trying to capture in one shot the walls and the ceiling and the plaster Jakes.
This man was ugly and thick and wore a cheap yellow polyester short-sleeved dress shirt tucked into high-rise khaki pants. She stepped backwards into the kitchen as silently as she could. She needed to call the police, but her cell phone was back at the studio, sitting on the counter where she’d tossed it in anger. Her only landline receiver was in the studio. As she watched him, the intruder pulled out his own cell phone and punched a number.
Holding the phone to his ear, he said, “Mr. Durant, I think you need to come in here and see this.”
Lilly froze. Durant? Jake?
Cheapshirt punched the phone to hang up and continued snapping pictures of her studio. In less than a half minute, there was a rap on the front door that made her nearly jump out of her skin. She ducked below the counter and listened in horror as Cheapshirt moved to the entryway, unlocked the door and stood back to allow Jake to enter, uninvited, into her house. He must have been parked right out front. He must have brought this intruder to her home.
“What is it, John?” Jake asked, frowning.
“You gotta see this, Mr. Durant,” he said, leading the way to her studio.
Without a protest to protect her privacy, becoming an intruder himself, Jake followed to stand in the doorway.
“I’ve seen this before, John, most of it anyway,” Jake said. “This is her work.”
She heard Cheapshirt opening and closing her desk drawers.
“Work? I thought you told me this was a vampire film.”
She heard paper flutter as Cheapshirt waved around her drawings. “These aren’t vampires. And look up, Mr. Durant. I don’t even know what to call that. This is Silence of the Lambs.”
“John, I don’t think….” but whatever Jake was going to say stalled on his lips. She peeked over the counter and watched the back of Jake’s head tilt to get a good look at her Sistine Hellish Chapel of Jake.
“Mr. Durant, I realize she’s a… friend, but even if you don’t want to consider that she may be our accomplice, you need to see that she’s her own breed of trouble.”
When Jake continued to study the ceiling, Cheapshirt continued, “Look, I’ve worked all kinds of cases. This,” he said, waving his arms around the room, “is unbalanced. Whacked.”
“She’s also gotten way too close to you and your family,” he said seriously. “That guy who broke into Ms. Nighly’s apartment, he’s got his own motive for disliking you, true, but why target Ms. Nighly? What he did with those personal photos, blackmailing her, the way I see it, that was just luck. He stumbled upon those photos and saw an opportunity to make some cash. I would bet my bottom dollar that he was there in the first place because this lady put him up to it.”
“He only drove by here once, months ago,” Jake commented. “That hardly sounds like a conspiracy.”
“The other boyfriend’s been here since she got home. The girly one,” argued John Cheapshirt.
“Look, you hired me to help you out. I’m gonna give you some friendly advice. You’re going to have a real problem on your hands when your friendship with this woman ends. She lives in a fantasy world.
“And you,” he said, gesturing around the room again, “are her obsession. Frustrated stalkers often turn violent, Mr. Durant. Obsessive love and obsessive hate are two sides of the same coin for someone like this, and it can flip suddenly. You need to watch yourself.”
At Jake’s continued silence, Cheapshirt said, “You brought me here, Mr. Durant. I’m just telling you what I see.”
Lilly slid to a crouch behind her counters. Silent, hot tears fell on the linoleum floor as she hung her head between her knees. There could be no doubt that Jake had authorized this. Some stranger invading her home. He thought she was stalking him. That she could be dangerous. What could she have done to give him that impression? Suddenly she saw her Jake room from the eyes of somebody like Cheapshirt. She did seem obsessed. She was obsessed – or whatever this was that she felt for him.
“Put those back where you found them,” said Jake to Cheapshirt, “and let’s get out of here.”
Without waiting for him, Jake walked out the front door.
Cheapshirt stuffed some of her smaller drawings into his bulging front pants pockets before following Jake out, closing the door behind him.
Chapter 30
After they’d gone, Lilly looked around her empty bungalow. What had always been a cheery, lovely place to her, felt sordid and dirty. Violated. She went to the doorway of her Jake room, standing where he had stood minutes ago, and surveyed the room. She felt sick. Grabbing the back of the rolling chair, she pushed it to the center of the room and plopped down into it. She kicked her heel to spin the chair, taking in all of the Jakes in full panorama. She marveled at her own idiocy. Turning faster, she closed her eyes and opened them again. She spun and spun until all of the Jakes melded into one beautiful and stunningly frightful vision of a beast of a man who was capable of shredding her to pieces. Who already had.
Dizzy and feeling nauseated, she pulled her feet up to hug her knees as she slowed to a stop, facing the holographic board of Allegrezza she’d drawn as Jake modeled in Culver City. Lilly sat staring at him until she lost track of time. Hours would have passed if it hadn’t been for Madcap, who clamored to be fed. Stiff and hollow, she pushed her knees down, setting her numb and tingling feet on the floor, and wandered into the kitchen.
Filling Madcap’s dish, she thought of her options. Wallowing was certainly one legitimate choice. Defend herself to Jake? How? What exactly would she say? Was she supposed to apologize? She hadn’t done anything wrong. He was the one who’d violated her, broken into her home, let some polyester hack ridicule her.
The echo of Cheapshirt’s accusations galvanized her into action. With contained fury, she marched back into the studio, picked up her landline phone and punched in Alison’s number.
“Alison, it’s Lilly,” she said, leaving her a message. “About that zombie gig, I’ve changed my mind. I’m all in.” Ravi had told her not to take the Tarantino project because the timing would conflict with the best Strange offer, the Art Director position. As Art Director, she would have been expected to play a large part in preproduction and start in just a few weeks.
Her anger at being forced to close the door on that opportunity threatened to engulf her. She used it, wrapping it like a fiery blanket around her heart.
Hanging up, she glared around her cluttered studio. High time to rid herself of this mess. Erase Jake from her life. She’d need supplies, and a little help.
Two hours later, Lilly made it back to the house, barely.
She’d ridden first back to the studio to collect her phone. Alison, she knew, wouldn’t have the patience to bother with a different number when s
he had Lilly’s cell number on speed dial. She had been right. When she grabbed the phone off the counter where she’d thrown it that morning, Alison had already called and texted twice. Lilly plugged in her earbuds with the built in mic, and hopped back on her bike, calling Alison as she peddled out of the studio gate.
Four blocks later, she nearly ran into the side of a moving bus when Alison said that if she wanted the job she needed to be on the set by the weekend. In New Zealand.
“Don’t they already have someone for special effects?” she asked. It wasn’t possible that they’d be this close to production without a special effects designer, especially given what little she knew about the plot.
“Well…” Uh oh. Lilly didn’t like the cagey tone in Alison’s voice. She could hear the wheels turning as Alison decided how to spin this opportunity.
“There was someone, but she’s on her way out. Look, I’ll just be straight. Quentin’s asked me to personally deal with this. There were some… relationship issues.”
Hearing this, Lilly knew she should run the other way. With a set up like that, who knows what she’d be stepping into, most likely a hotbed of resentment. But she needed to get out of LA, and getting that far – New Zealand far – seemed like a godsend.
“What’s her name? The woman I’d be replacing? I’m not doing it if it’s someone I know.” Her question signaled her acquiescence.
Audibly smiling, Alison piped, “She’s nobody. Katarina Nicholson or Mickelson something. She’s eastern European. No way you’d know her. I don’t even know her.”