The night. The cicadas. Murmuring music. A solitary car went by above him on Mulholland Drive. He listened for another, but he guessed it could be a long wait. The city glittered thinly now. It was late, and dark.
Loosening his necktie, hawking and spitting, picking shards of glass and bits of gravel off himself, he clambered his way around the Delahaye’s panels, pulled off the hose that had been fixed around one of the twin exhausts and threw the thing far out over the overlook barrier. He checked the trunk. Empty. No cardboard suitcase. Then he limped over toward the corner of the overlook where he’d thought he’d seen a parked car. That, too, had gone.
He slumped back down inside the Delahaye, holding the wheel and breathing hard. His head was pounding and his mouth tasted like a motor workshop floor. He found one of Daniel Lamotte’s handkerchiefs and used it to wipe his hands and face, then brushed out some more of the glass. He checked inside the lit glove compartment and stared at the packet of Lucky Strikes which lay there, but the last thing he felt like was a smoke. The radio’s backlit dial looked like sunset over some fairy city.
… and that’s the last word worth hearing tonight from here in Tinseltown. To America and all her brave allies, this is Wallis Beekins wishing God’s blessing and goodnight.
Then there was only hissing. Clicking it off, starting up the Delahaye's engine, he reversed from the overlook and turned back up onto Mulholland Drive.
FOURTEEN
COMING AT STONE CANYON from over the mountains instead of up from the city as he’d done yesterday, he had to reorientate himself. When he passed a pull-in and saw the glint of the reservoir under a quarter moon behind him, he realized that he’d gone too far. He swung the Delahaye around to head back uphill, and nearly lost the road as he did so. He rubbed at the blackness in his eyes as the offside front wheel spun over emptiness. Told himself to concentrate and slow down. The car still stank of fumes even with the air streaming in through the broken window, but he didn’t want to do a better job of killing himself than
April Lamotte had done. Or risk getting stopped by the cops.
It was quiet up here in that way that even the valleys above Hollywood eventually grew quiet. Too early to be called late; too late to be called early. The house parties and the private showings finally finished, the stars and the players grabbing a precious few hours of beauty sleep before the next power breakfast or early make-up call.
Here it was. Woodsville. He drove more slowly from the bend into the estate, looking left and right along landscaped roads which climbed in rivers of silver between darkened drives, until he saw a copse of firs by the left hand verge which he reckoned to lie about two hundred yards from Erewhon’s entrance. He pulled in, edged the car back and forth until it was parked mostly in shadow, then stopped the engine.
He sat. Waited. Listened. Only the wind now through the treetops. His elbow ached, he still felt awful, and the stink on his clothes and the taste in his mouth of automobile exhaust seemed worse now that he was breathing fresh canyon air. The car door made a clattering sound as he opened it. A bigger wave of nausea came over him. Hunched across the car, he waited until, in a sour acid flux, whatever was left of that expensive meal at Chateau Bansar emptied itself out of him.
What was he going to do when he got to Erewhon? He had no idea. There was no doubt that April Lamotte had tried to kill him, but why? Just thinking about it set his head spinning. It was a suicide she’d tried to stage, right? But if she wanted to kill Daniel Lamotte, surely she’d have killed him, not someone who looked like him…?
He wiped his mouth. The deal had always been too good. Should have thought this through earlier. But at least he was still alive—he had that on April Lamotte. He was alive, when she thought she’d succeeded in killing him. Her guard would be down tonight. She’d be relieved, relaxed, doing whatever she was planning on doing next. He probably even had the keys to Erewhon right here along with the Delahaye’s in his pocket. And he knew he didn’t have a great amount left to lose. Not when you considered all he’d already lost or thrown away. In that narrow sense, Clark Gable thought of himself as a realist.
The air here was denser, scented with all kinds of night plants. Wet fronds shoved against him as he hunch-ran along the side of the road. Something large and winged fluttered briefly against his face. Then, he saw the entrance to the drive leading to the house. He slowed. How big were the gardens? How long was the drive? Should have paid more attention yesterday, Clarkie baby, although he could hardly have expected to plan on the events of tonight. Still, doing what he was doing right now didn’t feel so odd. Creeping through undergrowth toward someone else’s home was a regular part of his work. Although he’d normally have brought along a camera loaded with high sensitivity film. He’d have dressed in darker clothes as well, although this suit was a whole lot grayer and more blotched now than it had been a few hours ago.
He ducked across the road to the marble sign beneath a fuchsia hedge. His fingers traced that odd word Erewhon. Then, as he worked his way around to look up the drive, he froze. A dark figure was standing in the shadows just up from Erewhon and on the far side of the road. A wave of dread washed over him. That thing in the car… But no. The figure was moving, hands in pockets, swaying its legs and working its shoulders in the way that a person might do in order to keep limber and warm. And the figure was slim, and tall, and dressed in some kind of uniform. He even caught the gold glint of a badge. Slowly, as noiselessly as he could, Clark backed off and around the fuchsia hedge. Leaning into the undergrowth, he took in a long breath. He could still hear the figure shuffling, hear the soft tread of boots on dew-damp grass. Could hear him whistling. It was a sound as thin and empty of melody as the wind passing through the nearby trees, but far more chilling. Whatever it was that the Gladmont Securities guy was doing here, it couldn’t have much to do with his normal business of keeping Fuller Brush salesmen out of Woodsville.
Clark backed further off, the nausea returning and his breathing more rapid now. He could wait here, he guessed. Or run. Venice? But April Lamotte and whoever else was involved in this knew exactly where he lived. Maybe somewhere further, safer, more anonymous. But where—and safe from what? He didn’t trust his judgment tonight. He knew his reactions were dulled and raw. But what the hell was this about? What had April Lamotte really been trying to do?
So he got this rental, a cheap place Downtown on Bunker Hill. Called it reconnecting. He went there, and he took his typewriter with him. That, and a few reams of paper and some old clothes. And I let him go, Mr Gable. I let him go …
FIFTEEN
HE TOOK EMPTY WILTSHIRE, past the Brown Derby and the Ambassador Hotel, then turned north and uphill away from the civic quarter. The streetlamps were fading. The sky in the east was already gray. Feral cats darted from gone-wild gardens as the Delahaye climbed the steep streets of Downtown.
On a series of rises, starting with Bunker Hill and heading north and east towards Pound Cake, the wealthy Angelinos of the previous century had built themselves an enclave of grand houses, given their new streets hopeful names like Spring and Flower and Olive, and settled down to live the kind of life they felt they fully deserved. A hundred years had passed. New Downtown had become Old Downtown and now Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, North Hollywood, Malibu and new valley estates like Woodsville were the places to live.
Pausing briefly to renew his old sense of direction, he took a left up from New High Street. Bladen? Barden? No, it was Blixden Avenue. As soon as he saw the street sign, he was sure that this was the address he’d seen on the topsheet of Wake Up and Dream. Some apartment—room 4A. And here at the far dead end was a residence that had once, according to the chiseled engraving on the gate pediment, been called Appleton Manor, and now had Blixden Apartments roughly painted on the brickwork beside. Yes, this was the place: a dark old mansion at the dark end of a street which had seen better centuries, let alone years, it was typical of the way these once-proud lodgings had been divided. Odd
bits of once-new window and half-assed plumbing warted the brownstone front. On the opposite side of the street was a weed-grown lot where one of the other large houses had finally given out altogether and collapsed like a rotted tooth.
What had April Lamotte called it, reconnecting? It sure as hell would have given the guy a change of perspective, Clark thought, as he stepped out into the early morning chill and worked the Delahaye’s door quietly shut. A dog was barking somewhere, but otherwise there was no one about. The type of residents you got on Bunker Hill didn’t get up much before noon, as he recalled. He flicked quickly through the Delahaye’s keys. The others were all new and shiny, but this well-worn Yale would be a good fit for a place like Bunker Hill. He creaked open the front gate and took the weeded path. There were the brass plates of a couple of registered offices beside the door, although they were so tarnished he doubted if the companies still existed. That, and a bellpull which he had no intention of pulling. There was no sign of a lock. He took hold of the big old doorhandle. It gave with a loose clonk.
The breath of ages swirled about him.
Floors creaking. People snoring. A man coughing. Taps dripping. The scurry of silverfish and cockroaches across communal kitchen floors. A vegetable stench which probably wasn’t vegetables at all. Whatever had made him think the Doge’s Apartments was a run-down dump? Old buildings really did retain an atmosphere—years of emotion were absorbed by their surroundings. Then, yet more slowly, it seeped back out.
He blinked and waited as the hallway slowly emerged in the pre-dawn wash of the fanlight above the doorway. A gas chandelier—a huge aggregation of tubular iron and cobwebs—hung from a dangerously cracked rosette. A wide and once impressive stairway curved up to his left. Common sense suggested that 4A wouldn’t be the first room he encountered, but he checked the two doors to the right, just to be sure. One had a card offering palm and tarot readings attached by a rusty pin. The other had nothing to indicate what it was. Down at the far end, another door led toward what Clark guessed was the old kitchens or cellars. It was locked.
The stairs’ first runner announced his presence with a shuddering creak, but, through years of practice of getting quietly in and out of houses for reasons that weren’t always entirely professional, he managed more quietly after that. A balcony curved one way across the second floor, and a corridor went the other. A mossy rooflight gave everything a greenish, underwater glow. The doors up here were numbered, their fine old mahogany roughly painted by what looked like the same less-thanartistic hand which had scrawled Blixden Apartments over the bricks outside. Following the passageway, he finally came to 4A. He listened for a moment, then glanced both ways along the bucking corridor. A woman laughed somewhere. A mattress creaked. A man cried out. The key fitted in the loose sort of way which suggested long use. It snagged, then turned.
He felt quickly for the light as he eased the door shut—expecting, what? Daniel Lamotte’s rotting body? April Lamotte waiting with a gun?—but only a tall cream-painted wardrobe and the humped blankets of a slept-in bed, actually no more than a mattress, swam into view from the bare lamp’s wan glow. Heaped in most of the other available spaces, including the floor, were piles of typed manuscripts. A blackened sink hung precariously from the wall beneath an equally blackened mirror. A cheap office desk stood close by the window. The air smelled sour and stale.
He picked his way through a detritus of empty Cream of Kentucky Bourbon bottles and cans of Campbell’s Tomato Soup. No sprawled bodies. No pools of blood. No bullet holes. No hanging corpses. No chopped-up limbs. The wardrobe contained nothing but clothes.
He pulled off the jacket and drooped it over the back of the chair and slumped down at the desk. A reporter’s typewriter sat there amid the overflowing piles of notebooks and cigarette butts: they were all Luckies. He flicked randomly through a few of the many typed pages. They all looked broadly similar to the white version he’d read of the script for Wake Up and Dream.
He glanced around again, trying to call his professional mind into order and get a proper impression of the place. This really was the pad of a writer, that much was for sure. He’d have put the occupant down as a troubled and penniless bachelor, but maybe that had been the effect Daniel Lamotte had been trying to recreate in an effort to entice his muse down from that pedestal on which he’d placed it back at Erewhon. The room was in such a mess that it was impossible to tell if anyone else had been here before him, but if they had, it would certainly be difficult to work out what they had taken.
There was no paper in the typewriter. He lifted a fresh sheet of pale blue paper from the sheaf on the left hand corner of the desk and wound it in through the rollers. He hit the m key. Then he searched around for the gizmo which made capital letters. After all tonight’s chaos, it was neat—the way the machine’s gleaming innards levered up—and the clacking sound it made was oddly reassuring. It filled the room in a way which his own presence alone did not.
m My n ame ias dDani eel Lamo
He stopped. Dim corners of the room seemed to shrink back in scuttles and eddies as he glanced around him. He even felt his face to see if he was still wearing the glasses, which he wasn’t. There was also a faint hissing sound. He shook his head. Gas? No, just tiredness. Or draughts. Or maybe ghosts of the times of lost grandeur in this house—some mustachioed patriarch who’d moved here from back east, big with his plans of all the things which he’d build in this new city… And the ladies with their parasols and calling cards… And clocks ticking and maids whispering, and all the many people who must have died here, or been born… Clark could feel the cold breath of all of these memories whispering around him…
Dragging the paper out and balling it, he looked around for a bin to aim for in the manner of all frustrated writers and failed to find one. Close by the desk, though, he noticed a darker shape lying on top of the other detritus. Just a sheet of carbon paper, although the thing felt slick and oily between his fingers when he lifted it up. It only seemed to have been used once; amid the deep gloss of fresh black ink, he could still even make out the marks of the individual letters on the sheet.
He held it up to the blotched mirror above the sink, and squinted hard.
Thrasis Thrasis Thrasis Thrasis Thrasis Thrasis Thrasis Thrasis Thrasis Thrasiss Thrasis Thrasis Thrasis Thrasis Thrasis Thrasis Thrasis. . Tthrasis Thrasis Thrasis Thrasis Thrasis Thrasis Thrasis Thrasis thrasis Tharsis Thrasis Thrasis Thrasis Thrasis Thrasis Thrasis yThrasis Thrasis Thrasis Thrasis Thrasis Thrasis Thrasis. ThrasisThrasis Thrasis Thrasis THrasis Thrasis Thra
sis aaa aa Thrasis
Thrasis
t THRASIS Thrasis
Thrasis
Thrasis Thrasis Thrasis Thrasia Thrasis Thrasis Thrasis Thrasis TThrasiis Thrasis Thrasis Thrasis Thrasis Thrasis Thrasis Thrasis Thrasis Thrasis Thrasis Tharsis Thrasis Thrasis Thrasis Thrasis
A stronger sense of things shifting washed over him. No, this time it was actual nausea. Dropping the carbon, he twisted on the sink’s tap. Distant pipes honked and yammered. Lukewarm water gushed. He splashed his face and drank. Then he jerked off his shirt and necktie and took the dried-up cake of soap and used it to wash himself.
His body ached. His throat felt raw. His left elbow throbbed. But at least he was alive. At least he wasn’t dead in that fucking car. After drying himself with a stale towel hung over the sink bracket, he peered once into the blotched mirror. All he could see was a vague blur. He tried rubbing it clear with the towel, but that only made it worse.
The shape of a face was there, but it wouldn’t settle. The stuttering movement reminded him of watching an old movie when the film kept slipping on the spool. No, it was more like one of those flip-things he’d made from corners of exercise books at school, with a face with a slightly different expression drawn on each page. And there was still that hissing, murmuring sound.
He blinked and glanced away from the mirror to steady his gaze. A wave of relief passed over him when he looked back and saw the b
lurring faces had steadied into something resembling his own. But it lasted barely a moment. The face hovering before Clark had something like his eyes, and mouth, and ears. But they weren’t the same. The nose was broader, and the cheeks and the jawline were covered by a poorly-trimmed beard. When he reached toward his chin, a hand within the mirror did the same. His fingers touched dense, springy hair.
He didn’t know if he cried out. But the hissing grew louder. That, and an undertow of echoing moans. And a terrible sense of pain. And then, like a balloon deflating, like a door slamming, like the wind falling after a thunderstorm, it was gone.
Clark grabbed back hold of the sink. He was staring through the smudged glass at nothing more than his own face. He looked ill and tired, for sure, but that was all. As certainly as some other presence had been in here with him, he was now certain that it was gone. Outside the sash window, another beautiful California sunrise was spreading across the sky. He slumped back to the desk chair and cupped his head in his hands.
SIXTEEN
A MUFFLED VOICE. A KNOCKING.
He started. A grubby fall of yellow light lay pooled beneath a window.
The knocking came again. “Mr Lamotte…”
Wake Up and Dream Page 7