by Neil Mcmahon
In particular, he tended to target Lisa, her refusal to jump in bed with him no doubt figuring in. Her fear that he’d get her fired hadn’t materialized, at least; maybe he’d made a behind-the-scenes attempt that failed, or maybe he realized he had troubles enough and backed off.
But now she was worried that the film itself was going to suffer. With the hostile working atmosphere, morale was low and the performances had an off-base feel—undercutting the zest, spirit, life, that were all-important to a good production. She was doing her best to hold her own, but her hopes were fading that this role would be the springboard career move she yearned for.
Who do you have to fuck to get off this movie? was the grim old joke that kept coming around.
It was another thing that hurt and yet that I couldn’t touch. She’d made it clear that she didn’t want me getting into it with Sperry personally—as with a domestic dispute, that would only make things worse, and she was plenty capable of handling him herself. On a business level, she potentially had much more serious backup—agents, production people, investors, all with a tangible interest in success—but while I didn’t know much about that aspect, those voices seemed oddly muted. It was almost like a sort of jinx had sprung up, with everybody subconsciously sensing that something was really wrong, to the point where they were willing to let this project drift away downriver until it disappeared from sight.
“How’s the scene shaping up?” I asked Lisa as we walked across the courtyard.
“It should go okay—not much nuance in this one. Although Dustin’s being pissy even for him.”
I slipped my arm around her waist. “Hang in there, baby. A few more weeks.”
“Oh, I’ll make it. I just feel sort of worn-out instead of worked up. Not only me, everybody.”
She left me at the temple entrance and went on in to join the cast. I stayed just inside the doorway—remembering all too clearly the night when it was Cynthia who’d led me inside and playfully straddled the vapor-spewing chasm.
The fires were lit, the mist machine on full blast—without Kelso around to add in the nanos, the vapor was harmless—the place was warm and damp as a steam bath, and Lisa hadn’t exaggerated the feminine charms on display. Besides her, a dozen other lovely priestesses were taking their places in a ceremonial lineup, a spectacle pretty much like I’d imagined it—a sort of ancient civilization wet T-shirt contest. It was actually quite tame, a little eye candy to spice up a familiar, and hokey, kind of scene.
The setup was that Uther’s search for Sophia had brought him here to the temple. By now he knew that she was a demigoddess, and that the city’s rival factions warred constantly with each other to enslave her so they could use her power. He’d fought battles and had narrow escapes, made dangerous mistakes but also honed his survival skills; he was getting accustomed to this world and learning how to cope.
But at this point in the action, he’d been captured and his future looked short. He was hanging by his wrists from a rope, hovering over the chasm. The sinister high priest—who, of course, lusted after Sophia besides wanting to usurp her powers of prophecy—had devised a fiendish way to torture them both. She would be forced to cut the rope, plunging Uther to his death in the smoldering depths of the earth.
Instead, she would cry out mysterious words that started the temple trembling, and she would manage to cut Uther’s hands free. He would live to escape—but alone. As the building collapsed on the panicked assemblage, with flames and lava spewing from the chasm, the high priest would spirit Sophia away through a secret exit.
This would leave Uther facing a new enemy—doubt. Sophia seemed to have fallen as ardently in love with him as he had with her. But each of his daring rescue attempts ended with her being torn from his grasp at the last second. He was starting to fear that she might be contriving this somehow—toying with him for sport while luring him on to disaster—or even that she might really be one of the treacherous Nhangs.
The Nhangs. The guys playing those parts were definitely not part of Parallax; they were extras, bodybuilder types with hard eyes and lots of tattoos, and I could tell they made the rest of the cast uncomfortable. But they did their job—adding a creepy edge—real well.
Forty-Six
“Okay, cut,” Dustin Sperry called out, with an exasperated wave of his hand.
The action—just before the FX kicked in, with Lisa about to free Chris Breen as he hung in an invisible harness over the chasm—stopped. All the momentum that had been gathering, including a lot of sweaty, quivering flesh, stopped with it.
Sperry, seated on a telescoping boom, knuckled his Aussie bush hat up his forehead and sank back, rubbing his eyes.
“Lisa, does the term ‘phoning it in’ mean anything to you?” he said.
Her eyes widened in outrage. “Oh, fuck you, Dustin. I’m right on track, and so is everybody else. You’re the one who’s hanging it up.”
As she stalked over to face off with him, Chris Breen twisted his dangling body toward one of the technicians.
“Get me out of this thing, will you?” he said. The tech hurried to him to release him from his harness, and the other cast members broke ranks and drifted aside. There was a distinct sense of their frustration at slamming into a brick wall from a kind of spat that had grown too familiar.
“You’re obviously distracted, honey,” Sperry said condescendingly. “So why don’t you ask your boyfriend to leave, and then let’s do what we’re getting paid for? Take five, everybody.”
“What bullshit,” she said. But I raised my hand to signal okay, and I walked back outside.
It was bullshit. I’d been hesitant about coming today, precisely because I was worried that somebody might object. But she’d assured me that having guest observers was common, she’d cleared it with the rest of the cast, and she’d also told Sperry, who’d shrugged it off like it was beneath his notice. Now he was using it as a pretext to take a shot at both of us.
I was annoyed, of course; in fact, I was thinking about how much I’d love to jerk that ridiculous fucking hat down around his ears. But I wasn’t going to cause a fuss and throw another wrench into this already troubled project.
Lisa came hurrying out after me. “I’m sorry, Tom,” she said. “It’s just one of his two-bit power plays.”
“I know—it’s fine. And you’d have any audience in the world drooling into their popcorn.”
She smiled, but then her eyes got suddenly serious. “You’re the one who’s been phoning it in.”
I blinked, astonished.
“You know what I mean,” she said. “I’ve been letting it slide, but we’ve got to get straight. Let’s talk later.” She touched my cheek, then went back inside.
Well, I shouldn’t have been surprised. Of course she’d picked up on my uneasiness about her; I was no actor anyway, and if there was anybody who could see right through me, it was Lisa.
This was Friday, with the set clearing off for the weekend; she and I planned to stay here in the Lodge tonight. There was no way I could evade a close-range grilling from her. I couldn’t tell her the full truth, but I wasn’t about to try to lie.
She was not going to be happy, and she was right.
As I started walking out of the courtyard, I passed by several of the Nhang extras standing in a group, taking a break until things settled down inside. In this scene they played temple guards; they were wearing breastplate armor and plumed helmets, and carrying wicked-looking spears. They didn’t look friendly, but then, they weren’t supposed to.
Then I realized that they weren’t just unfriendly—they were all looking straight at me, with stares full of menace. A couple of them were toying with their spears, twirling them slowly or flexing their hands on the shafts.
Why the hell would they bring their spears out here on a break?
I stared back at them, my breath actually stopped in my lungs. They were like a bomb just a hair away from exploding.
But just as my fear started to re
gister in my conscious mind, it was swept aside by the same kind of sudden, almost blinding fury I’d felt at Dustin Sperry when I’d left the Lodge that first time. In those few seconds, I didn’t care what happened. Not about anything, not a shred.
“If you hear somebody busting off shotgun rounds over there,” I said, jerking my head in the direction of the Lodge, “it’ll be me, tuning up my aim.”
I turned my back and started away, my shoulders tensed for the thump of a blade between them.
I heard one of them spit venomously. But that was all.
By the time I got to the security gate and left the set, my temporary bravado had faded. I tried to tell myself that I’d imagined or at least exaggerated the incident. But I hadn’t.
And now I was starting to think about what had caused that sudden flash of murderous rage between total strangers, over nothing whatever. The other things like it that had happened weeks ago, I was sure, were the doings of Kelso’s nanos and Cynthia’s pendant. But he was long gone, and she was nowhere nearby.
Forty-Seven
I did have several guns stored in a safe at the Lodge—hunting rifles, shotguns, and some other pieces accumulated by Crandall men over the last few generations. I’d gotten quite familiar with them when I was younger, and I’d actually been a pretty good shot, although I hadn’t touched one in years. But my little display of posturing had been dumb enough; I wasn’t going to add to it by blasting a twelve-gauge into the air.
But I did need to work out what had just happened. When I left the film set, I kept on walking into the woods instead of going straight to the Lodge.
Spring was turning to summer; the afternoon was lovely, edging toward warm but just right in the shade of the trees. I hadn’t wandered around back here much in recent years, but the terrain was imprinted on my memory from childhood. Nothing significant had changed except for the feeding site that Kelso had staked out for the vultures, and I’d come back up here soon after Venner’s raid and gotten rid of every trace of it. Still, as I got close, I imagined that rotting beef smell lingering in the air. I skirted it, walked on a ways, then cut over to the creek and hunkered down to splash cold water on my face. That and the walking both helped. I started back homeward along the bank, taking my time.
There were still some other loose ends hanging around. When the set got dismantled a few weeks from now, they’d find the underground trailer, which would cause some head scratching. And eventually, people were going to realize that Kelso wasn’t really in Sweden. But those weren’t my problems, and once Parallax Productions was gone, I could discreetly take care of any leftover details that did fall to me. It had seemed like, on that level, the situation was coming under control.
But I’d never quite lost the gut feeling that the way it had wrapped up was simply too neat and easy.
There were all kinds of potential wild cards that I didn’t know about and that still might come into play. But the one I did know about was the single thing that bothered me most, and it bothered me a lot more after my run-in just now with the Nhang extras.
Cynthia.
Besides Kelso, she was the first person who came to mind as being capable of using the nanos to create rage like that. What was going on with her these days—really? Everything I knew about her suggested that she was amoral and very smart in a predatory way, with a keen eye for weakness and no hesitations about acting on it.
Enough so that she was conning Venner? Allowing him to think he had her under control, while she was quietly running her own game?
Maybe including revenge on the guy who’d gotten her busted? I sure hadn’t forgotten that look of hatred she’d given me as the handcuffs went on her wrists.
My little hike took about an hour all told; I got back to the Lodge around four. I poured a hefty slug of Bombay on the rocks, took it out to the porch, and watched the film set closing down for the weekend—the crew securing equipment, actors trekking in and out of makeup trailers, and the parade of vehicles starting back to L.A.
Lisa would be here soon.
I had one more worry that was linked to all this, and now it was back on my radar, too. She was still wearing the jade bracelet that Kelso had given her. I had wondered briefly if it might contain a microtransmitter that affected my feelings for her. But with Kelso gone, the feelings were still here; I’d assumed that he had to be around to operate the nanotechnology; and therefore, with relief, I’d decided he must not have anything to do with this.
But what if he didn’t have to be around? Maybe the bracelet was on some kind of automatic pilot. Maybe someone else—like Cynthia—could operate it. Maybe Lisa herself.
I wanted to stay in love with her, and I was afraid to find out.
Forty-Eight
Lisa got off the set about half an hour later and came walking across the meadow toward the Lodge, looking like she belonged in this century again, wearing her usual hangout attire of jeans and a sweater. I went out to meet her, made her a drink and another for myself, and we settled on the porch.
For a few minutes we chatted, mostly about how the scene filming had finished out. About the same as everything else, was her take; adequate, but it could have been a whole lot better. At least it was a wrap.
But really, we were sparring, with the tension of something brittle between us that was about to snap. The pauses got longer.
Finally, after one of them, she leaned forward and fixed me with those wonderful Mediterranean green eyes.
“You going to make me drag it out of you?” she said.
I exhaled. “Sorry. I’m not trying to be like that. I just can’t find a good way to say any of this.”
“So there is something.”
“Yeah.”
“Bad?”
My gaze moved of its own accord to the vultures; they’d been straggling out for the past hour and now were filling the sky.
“Pretty bad,” I said.
“And it’s got something to do with me?”
“I’m not sure. There are connections I don’t understand.”
Her hand rested on her chair arm, her slim fingers moving slightly like they were smoothing it down. Kelso’s bracelet clasped her wrist—possessively, it suddenly seemed.
“You know, for a guy who comes across so straight, you sure can spin a lot of loops,” she said.
“I didn’t plan it that way, believe me. It’s not that I don’t want to tell you—I can’t, and I can’t even tell you why.” I hesitated, but I couldn’t keep playing guessing games with her. I took it one more step. “I think it’s the same for you—there are things you’re holding back because you feel like you have to.”
A cautious tinge came into her gaze. “Such as?”
“Such as the way we met—you and Dustin at the stream, you calling me later, all that—did it really just happen all by itself, like it seemed?”
Her hand stopped moving, just for a beat. But it was answer enough.
“That’s not what this is about, Lisa—not really,” I said. “It’s about Kelso, Parallax—the underbelly, I can’t think of a better word. Whatever you know, please tell me. It’s very, very important.”
A long fifteen seconds passed.
Then she said, “Gunnar’s not coming back, is he?”
I didn’t answer. I didn’t have to.
She stood up, leaving her barely touched drink on the table, and went inside. When she came out a couple of minutes later, she had her overnight bag slung over her shoulder.
I’d been braced for this, but it was still a numbing shock.
“I’ll call you, okay?” she said. She’d put on sunglasses, and I couldn’t see her eyes. There might have been a tiny tremor in her voice.
I stepped over to her and put my hands lightly on her waist.
“I’m crazy about you,” I said. “You know that, don’t you?”
Her face turned aside. “Tom—this started out simple, but now it’s really complicated. I need time to think.” She pulled away from me a
nd hurried down the steps.
“Lisa, will you do one thing for me?” I called after her.
She took several more steps without slowing down, but finally stopped and half turned back toward me.
“Get rid of that bracelet,” I said. “Put it in a safe-deposit box, or mail it to your mother. Just keep it someplace far away for a while.”
I could see her mouth open slightly—maybe in bewilderment at what the hell I was getting at.
Maybe in dismay that I’d caught on.
She started walking again. Away.
I went inside and poured another drink, a stopgap attempt to stave off what I knew was coming—the slow spreading ache of cold emptiness, the nothing that replaced the intoxicating something, the aloneness you’d been so used to for so long that you hardly gave it a thought until it disappeared in love.
Forty-Nine
I hadn’t spent a night in the Lodge since Parallax had leased the property—I’d hardly been inside it at all. This wasn’t a cheerful homecoming. I’d looked forward to some private time here with Lisa, but with her gone, it just felt empty; and it’s always a little weird to come back to your place after strangers have been staying there. Even if they take good care of it, things aren’t quite the way you left them, and it somehow throws you off.
But there was a task that needed taking care of eventually, and I figured I might as well get a start on it. Kelso still had belongings here—Venner’s people had deliberately left them to reinforce the story that he’d be coming back—and there were probably some other Parallax remnants around. Once they finished filming and pulled up stakes, I intended to get rid of it all—wipe the place clean of their presence. First step was to look the situation over, assess what there was and what to do with it.