by Sharon
Susan bent, calling the youngest children to her, putting her hand under the curling leaf of a jack-in-the-pulpit to uncover the tiny green figure below.
Without warning, the forest in front of her exploded in a violent shower of nodding branches. From the epicenter, something rose—a beast… a creature… a thing of nightmares.
She froze in horror.
The monster's eyes burned, twin flames in the pit of a carbon-black face. Under each lifting arm was a membrane that opened like a bat's wing. Its vast, hooked talons were spreading slowly. It was immense, macabre, silent.
Then, like a lightning bolt, it lunged at her and the children. Terror ripped a scream from her throat.
Susan had no time to think, no time to decide why the nightmare creature stalked a forest where she often walked. No time to plan strategies. She only knew that it was terrible, and ravage, and she threw herself between it and the seventeen children who were in her care. It never would have entered her head to act in any other way.
She had chased it twenty feet into the clearing and hit it twice when it spoke.
"It's a costume, lady! A costume!" it said quite clearly.
She'd scarcely taken in that it had a voice when she realized that the peaceful meadow she had known all of her twenty-five years was filling with the strangest human beings she had ever seen. And they were running at her, yelling. A reed-thin person with spiky orange hair and a golden earring was having to be physically restrained.
"Let me at her, dammit. Five days of work…" he said with rasping fury.
Susan staggered backward. The grass seemed to shudder under her feet. The stick dropped from her numbing fingers, and she frantically ushered up a prayer.
The crowd swept apart to admit a man who passed through in a way that showed her the projection of power before it showed her the source. The man stopped not ten feet from her, and she had scattered impressions of height and graceful limbs. The breeze riffled through his thick, dark hair, stroking it.
His features were full of expression, more than she could absorb, revealing the complexity of the man within. Emotion played with captivating lightness on the clean contours of his face. His mouth was an elegant stretch, the span wide, the corners uplifted in a tender crook. But his eyes held secrets that took hold of her. They were a soft, very clear hue that so intermixed green and blue, it became impossible to discern the shade. The color was brilliant, the effect lavish, startling in its lightness against the sun-gilded richness of his skin. His gaze probed gently, briefly touching her body, stealing her breath. There was nothing left of innocence in those eyes, she thought.
"Not a child, after all," he said, his eyes continuing their slow warming.
She had never heard a voice like his—soft, the tonal quality harmonic, the vowels silky and spread, perhaps the residue of an accent from the American south. Only perhaps. She had little acquaintance with non-Amish tongues.
From her posture of frozen shock she watched him half-turn to the man with the earring and say in that soft, seductive tone, "Let's let her escape without violence this time. 'Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.'"
"A tooth for a tooth, an eye for an eye," said the man with the golden earring, shaking off his captors.
"Possibly. But if anyone's going to yell at her, it's going to be me," he said.
He began to walk toward her, not quickly, not with a threat to his stride, but her sense of disorientation was so profound that she swung her body defensively backward. Something solid connected with her ankle. She lost her balance and fell, landing on her hip. Stunned, she inhaled the marshy perfume from the bruised grass around her as a chilly dew began to seep through her skirts. She caught sight of the thing that had caused her fall. Her hand, her hem, and one of her feet were resting on the ravaged and bloody remains of a human being.
She couldn't cry out—or escape.
Through the paralyzing agony of pity and terror, she saw wildly that the man with light eyes was covering his face with one beautifully gloved hand, shaking his head, making a gesture of mock weeping, commanding softly, "Curt, stand up before you give her a coronary."
Under her hand and foot she felt the damaged flesh stir, then tense. Her hands were clenched under the arc of her rib cage, pressing into her frantic stomach. The ruined body stood with a young man's grace and gave her a smile.
"It's not what you think." The compelling voice came closer, then the light-eyed man knelt, facing her. "This man is an actor. And though you won't be able to tell it now, or when he rolls out of bed in the morning, he's not dead." He directed a brief glance over his shoulder. "Joe, will you hand me some blood?" He turned back with a cup in his hand. "Fake blood. You see? You can taste the alcohol base."
His light eyes beating into her, he touched the cup to his wayward, smiling mouth and took a healthy swallow of the red fluid inside.
"Of course, it's much better with orange juice," he said, offering her the cup. "Try some—you'll see. Fake."
For a moment she was convinced she was going to be ill, and she bent the force of her will to keep that from happening. He must have seen—perhaps she turned green— because he removed the cup and offered his hand instead.
"I'm Alan Wilde, overlord of all this madness."
Susan watched his fingers surround hers, the supple glove leather imparting the deep warmth of his body. His grip was surprisingly strong, the tips of his fingers lightly stroking her tender inner wrist. Tattered heartbeats filled her throat.
"I'm sorry you had to stumble on us like this. To ward off the sane we hire security people, but they seem to have made themselves invisible. Are you all right?"
He released her hand, his fingertips trailing a slow caress over the contour of her palm, between her fingers. Her heartbeats grew quicker. Every rational process of thought had been engulfed by five minutes that went beyond the total of her life experience. Every sensation was heightened and stinging. Through the wreckage of her reason, she saw his brilliant, curious gaze fasten on her, searching, searching. It was as though they were alone together, and she realized with a jolt that he was finding her as foreign and puzzling as she found him. They were close only physically, an illusion of space. Their diverse cultures parted them, two strangers facing each other across a vast chasm. Inside his easy study of her she read prejudgment, studious interest, and something that might, on the deepest plane, have been ridicule. In spite of that, multiplying her shock, she felt the unfamiliar response of her body as it welcomed his touch.
Retreating from that knowledge, and from the gathering bitter embarrassment over what she could now see was her idiocy in front of these strangers, Susan demanded motion and support from her uncertain limbs, and rose unsteadily to her feet. The monster took an instant protective posture behind Alan Wilde, the huge form exaggerating a cringe.
Susan Peachey felt the rush of painful color to her face.
She faced the monster, trying to look with something like composure into one of its remaining bloodshot eyes. "I can see…" The words faded as her throat muscles constricted from tension. She took a breath and tried again. "I can see that I've made a terrible mistake. If there are any amends I can make—" The heat from the blush became suffocating.
Desperation or some more complicated emotion, one that she couldn't name, made her look sideways, her gaze arrested by Wilde's amused expression. Again she experienced that deep tug on her senses.
In that moment her mind cleared. Actors. Fake things. Actors. A glance at the hillside showed her the black box of a camera, the lens glaring down at her like the eye of some malevolent idol. She knew cameras. They intruded without care or compassion into the intimate passage of Amish life. They had come to John's funeral, feeding on the long, somber line of buggies. The sharp spots of heat in her cheeks turned to ice.
Her dignity returned in a flood. She didn't flinch. She didn't cover her face. As though it were happening to someone else, she heard her own voice give her name, and the direction
of her home in case there were damages they wished to assess against her. Once more she issued an apology, this time resisting those light, translucent eyes, though she sensed the caress of their interest. That man's gaze must have followed her as she turned, because tiny eerie sparks played along her nerves. She began to run toward the children, where they stood saucer-eyed in the bushes, the youngest seeking refuge in the arms of the older ones. She swept up little Deborah, who was tearful, and led the others swiftly with her into the forest.
He continued to stare after her, fascinated, though the branches disturbed by her flying skirts had folded back into place, closing behind her like a turnstile to another world. Susan Peachey. Her name was so apt.
The director of photography joined Wilde. The D.P.'s cap was pulled down further, his collar was turned up, and the wadded handkerchief he was pressing crossly to his nose had reached a critical stage of saturation.
"Amish," he said, briskly sniffing. "And they say we have all the nuts in California. Alan, if you want another take we'll have to do it again tomorrow. Lessa says he'll be awake all flight getting the monster prettied up again."
Wilde ended his dreamlike study of the misted trees. "It doesn't matter. We'll use the footage we've got. Tell them to go ahead and print it."
"I already have. Do you know we had film rolling until about a minute ago? I told them to cut it and print everything up to Dash's great leap from the bushes. Is that okay?"
Wilde recaptured the image of an earnest figure in long skirts, her face upturned in solemn apology to a monster, and remembered his own unfettered laughter. "No. Print everything."
"What's the point?" Max asked, face buried in innocent misery in the depths of his handkerchief. "Why spend the money to have a piece of film processed that has no earthly purpose—"
"I hire you to carry out my decisions, not debate them," Wilde said sharply. "Print every foot of film whether you think it has an earthly purpose or not."
Max's brow furrowed in amazement. Wilde was surprised himself at his own uncharacteristic flare of temper. Life was an intangible disappointment, and he often felt a nagging inner impatience with things, but he usually restrained it behind a shield of cool, practiced humor. But here was the impatience, rising to the surface like steam.
Max fed the handkerchief into his coat pocket and gave his director a doleful look that asked: why, if you have to be difficult, do you do it on a day when I have a bad cold? He said aloud, "You want a print from it, you'll get a print from it. We'll print you the damned leader if you want. Satisfaction guaranteed."
Wilde smiled a brief retraction of the anger, and when Max's expression thawed he began to walk up the hill, draping an arm around the older man's shoulders. The dispassionate narrator of his life pulled back again and observed with regret that there was little kindness in the affectionate gesture, that it sprang from a desire to charm and control.
Can you cure cynicism or is it a terminal condition? he wondered, and began, with inner desperation, to coolly tease Max, telling him all the ways that his cold was going to get pampered back at the hotel—chicken soup, bed, hot toddies…
Satisfaction guaranteed. Satisfaction had become like happiness to him—elusive.
Chapter 2
They screened film in the hotel library, a room that Alan had decided could be appreciated only by people whose tastes ran to heavy doses of Hemingway masculinity. The stuffed wildlife mounted on the walls was a maid's nightmare. Ben Rose, the producer, had said he hadn't seen so much oak paneling since Perry Mason's courtroom went off the air. They were already in Dutch with the management because someone on the crew had painted shark fins into the duck-pond landscape, and an elk's head had been filched from the wall and lashed to the nose of a caterer's van.
Wilde sat in a leather armchair watching the rushes from the day's filming. A ribbon of smoke rose from the cigarillo forgotten in his lax fingers and funneled into the wall-to-wall haze. He'd had Bad news this afternoon. Ulcer-making news. Carrie Tippett, his female star—if you could put a label like "star" on a twenty-two-year-old who wore a retainer, and spent half the day under a Sony Walkman—had put herself into the hospital after a careless experiment with heroin. He'd worked with Carrie twice. She was not stupid, but her eye-opening Bo Derek facial features had little elasticity. The "face" couldn't act and the girl knew it. For Wilde's movies it didn't matter. Shakespeare this wasn't. He needed two things from a woman: great looks and great screams. Carrie knew she would never have more to offer a director, and it produced anxiety within her that ticked like a time-charge. On the phone this afternoon with Carrie's agent, Alan had gotten the bad news at about the same time that she should have been arriving from California for a two-day settling in before they began shooting her scenes on Monday. He'd responded with a moment of some little-practiced emotion that resembled heart-struck pity, but it had passed swiftly to anger as soon as he'd learned Carrie was going to recover.
"Next time she wants to try to kill herself," he had said gently into the phone, "tell her to put a gun to her head and pull the trigger. It may not be as chic, but it's a hell of a lot less agony than heroin, and cheaper."
The anger had continued in several variations through most of dinner. A waiter in a white jacket had been attempting to serve him coffee, when he had risen abruptly, going to the temporary location office to phone Los Angeles and order Carrie three hundred dollars' worth of flowers, with a note attached sending his love and promising her a part in his next movie. Outside the office, he heard two of the production assistants whispering.
"Three hundred dollars. Ah-hah. Think he's sleeping with her?"
He returned to the dining room, drank his cold coffee, and made soothing remarks to Ben, who was wringing his hands over what they were going to do for a female lead. Every day the crew was idle would cost them fifty grand.
It was a crisis, so Wilde became calm. In fact, he became so calm that Ben remarked acidly that if he mellowed out any more, he was likely to need CPR.
The calm lingered during the rushes until the final footage, when a girl in Amish clothing ran from the bushes, chasing his monster. He watched it to the end, and then spoke over his shoulder to the projectionist.
"Let me see it again."
"Maybe we can sell it to Monty Python," Dash said, sliding into the seat beside Alan as the scene began to flicker over the screen a second time. He removed the cigarillo from Alan's fingers,- dragged on it, and put it back.
"Thought you'd quit," Dash said.
"I have. I'm just holding it."
"It's been in your mouth twice."
"Just keeping it lit."
Alan watched the girl run across the frame, and tried to assimilate the clamor she caused in his body. What have we here? Love at first sight? Fascination with the exotic? Infatuation? Lust? He knew himself fairly well, so he settled with resignation for lust.
His first thought was that she moved like a dancer. But he had lived with dancers, and he knew that when they weren't dancing they weren't always graceful. In this girl, every motion played with space, every line seemed merry, like a willow in the wind.
Film adored her face. She had amazing skin, the almost mythical ivory complexion of classic literature. An inner luminosity seemed to shine through the rich, pale color. Five or six freckles were scattered over a small, straight nose. And her mouth—Lord, that mouth. The lips were soft as a child's, the shape and color erotically evocative. He wanted to edge them with his thumb. He wanted to film her in a love scene, move in tight with a camera, cover a thirty-foot screen with her parted lips. Under escaping dark curls and black velvet brows, her eyes were sweetly brown, acorns with sparkles.
The scene changed. Wilde saw himself come into the upper-right-hand corner of the screen, looking half frozen, his ghost of a smile dripping patronage. I should see myself on film more often. It reads me.
He looked back at the girl in the film image as she gazed up at him. What eyes she had. He'd never se
en eyes that embodied so much sensuality and reserve at the same time. Touch me, they whispered; don't touch me. Innocent, yet provocative. Cast the lady in a perfume commercial.
"Now, there's a mouth that would sell a lot of toothpaste," Dash said comfortably.
"Funny. I was just thinking perfume." Alan glanced sideways and saw Dash's smile. Reflected light from the screen fluttered over the old cowboy's weathered maze of smile lines and his thin mouth, and twinkled in his Newman-blue eyes.
"I figured out why she took out after me with a stick." Dash straightened his long legs and crossed his lizard-skin boots at the ankle. "She'd kinda appeared outta the blue, and I was starin' at her, wonderin': What in the blazes… ? Then it hit me that she was real scared, so I was about to step out and tell her things were cool, when I tripped— that damned costume. She must've got the idea I was goin' for her."
"The woman must have the mental capacity of wilted kelp." Ben sounded tense, querulous. "Sure, it's a very sophisticated costume, but it's still obviously a costume. Unless she thought we were under Martian attack."
Wilde was an open channel to the dark-haired girl on the screen; half-attentive, he shaped the thought that Ben was looking for an argument. Ben liked to fight when he was nervous, and Wilde recognized his own sense of obligation to give the man his cathartic hassle, and yet he was strangely reluctant to make the dark-haired girl—God, why couldn't he remember her name?—its subject. It was an imprecise emotion. A protective shadow. I want to protect you, sweetheart. And I want to take you to bed. To see your pretty eyes wide open with passion. To see your delicious mouth wet from my kiss.
Susan Peachey. Her name came to him suddenly. Susan. It was prosaic, yet he liked it. It was simple. Clean. Like her skin. He couldn't remember ever seeing skin that looked so clean, so completely undefiled.
Wilde's attention drifted back to the conversation in the room. Joan, conscientious as always, was giving Ben his argument.