Wake Up and Dream (34 page)

Clark wiped his glasses. Looked around him. This was getting ridiculous. He was chasing shadows, wraiths. Or, to be more exact—although exact didn’t seem to be the kind of term that was in any way appropriate—the shadows and wraiths were chasing him. And all of it happening in the easy sunlight of this bright, busy city, which was depicted as paradise on the sides of thousands of orange boxes and had spread its glow across the globe in a million other different ways. He thought again of something that April Lamotte had said to him about the quality of LA’s light and the quality of its darkness, although he guessed it stood to reason that shadows got blacker and deeper the brighter the sun blazed.

You’re thinking plain old crap, Gable. Thinking the same kind of mumbo-jumbo that got that guy Wilfred Bird—whom Clark vaguely remembered as the kind of big, breezy, happy-go-lucky, up-for-anything character who gave fairies a good name—lying dead in some Sunset sidestreet on the wrong side of 4 am. All it took when you got far enough out was a nudge, a mere word or suggestion, to send you falling all the rest of the way. And there was Barbara with her neat lines of pencils back in the Los Angeles library, and her plans to turn everything into commonsense. Some hope, although he felt a surge of the same old bug-eyed protective instinct toward her that had seen him breeze most of his life away on the kind of lost causes for which he rarely ever ended up getting paid. Or, for that matter, laid.

But just over the Biltmore’s turrets was the Hollywoodland sign, and it gleamed so much it looked like it was made of the breath of angels rather than being the tawdry thing of peeled paint and rusted metal he knew it really was. And as he stared at it, and then back at the space beneath the big old tree that was now filled with nothing but empty shade, a slow kind of dawning passed over him. Then it grew into a rush.

He slammed the Delahaye’s clattering door and scrabbled with the ignition and headed along Wiltshire and then cut through Hollywood and past Glen Oak and veered up into the tight winds of Beachwood Drive and through the pretentious stone gates where the development which that stupid sign had once advertised began. Huge cacti flourished here in the hilly little gardens of the upscale houses, and there on the left was the sharp rise of scrubland which called itself Mount Lee. He parked by a chainlink gate where the expensive real estate finally gave out in a heap of discarded
For Sale
placards and old litter. The fencing around the gate wasn’t much of anything. He was over it with only one tear snagged in the left elbow of his linen suit, and then climbing like some goddamn idiot up through the thorny brush. The Californian sunlight grew less benign and he was thinking of scorpions and blackwidow spiders and whatever else kind of nasties you were likely to encounter in what was still a dangerous wilderness for all the cookie cutter rooftops and blue pools below.

Breathless, and with more tears nicked in his suit, he finally made the top of the rise where those letters suddenly loomed close and grubby and fifty foot high. Now that he’d actually done the whole foolish thing and got here, he fully expected that he would be alone. But he wasn’t. A woman was sat on the dry ground before the H. She was petite and pretty and strikingly blonde, and she had a kind of aura about her of the sort that only genuine stars have. It seemed like Peg Entwistle had been staring out across the city, but she glanced over at him as he struggled over the last straggle of dirt and rocks and loped toward her. Then she looked back toward the city. There was nothing about his appearance here that seemed to cause her any surprise.

“Is it going to be you, Clark?” she muttered into the breeze. “Of all people—are you the one who comes to kill me?”

“Peg…” He slumped down beside her and fought for breath. “… that’s not what this is about.”

She pulled a bitter smile and tossed a rock down toward the undergrowth below. “You really don’t think so?”

“I barely know what the hell’s happening. I just know…” He had to stop again. His throat hurt and his glasses were dusty and kept slipping down his nose. He wiped them clear and put them back on. That really did seem to be better. He was getting to the point where, in order to see something, he actually felt like he needed to put the damn things on. “… well, I guess that all I really know is that name I said to you last night… and that maybe it’s a place—and that it’s something to do with Hilly Feinstein and a whole lot of other people who all went to the premiere of the first feelie. And that most of them have either done pretty well for themselves like you have Peg. Or they’re dead.” He shrugged and rubbed some grit from his mouth. “Or both.”

Peg nodded slowly. She was plainly dressed in midbrown slacks with a short knitted waistcoat over a mannish white blouse. The boots were low-heeled things—simple and sensible as well. Even though America was still resolutely at peace, this soldierly and utilitarian style of daywear had crept across from Europe.

“You’re supposed to be Daniel Lamotte, right?”

“How did you get to that?”

“Fairly simple, really. After all, you did mention his name at Herbert Kisberg’s last night. So I checked the guestlist after I saw you, and you weren’t on it but the Lamottes both were. I’ve even met Dan once or twice, and I used to know his wife quite well. But April’s dead, isn’t she? Unless the news is all wrong.”

“No, Peg. It’s not wrong.”

She blinked slowly, pursed her mouth. The Hollywood Reservoir glittered, off amid the brown and green scrub. Then the land swooped down toward the great amphitheater of the city. It was magnificent, yet it was paled and slightly blued by the day’s smog, like a Kodachrome panorama left for too long in a store window’s sun.

“What about Dan? Is he dead as well?”

“I wish I knew. That’s one of the many things I’m still trying to find out.”

She chuckled. “Right in at the deep end, Clark, as always. And you really haven’t been sent up here to kill me?”

“The nearest my current work gets to violence is when some husband’s broad comes at me with a pair of nail scissors. And she’s normally wearing a peekaboo negligee.”

“So you’re that kind of private eye?”

“Well, I was. I got roped into this because April Lamotte hired some other dick to find a lookalike for her husband, and I guess I was tall enough and jug-eared enough to fit the bill. I think her plan was to make it look as if Dan had killed himself by dressing me up as him and gassing me in his car, then stage her own suicide and make a run for it. Instead, she ended up dead, and so did the other private eye.”

Peg flung another rock. “She must have gotten really desperate.”

They sat there for a while in silence. Clark glanced over at Peg. The wind stirred her loose blonde hair, which he guessed was probably styled in this feathery way after the fashion of whatever character she’d most recently been playing. The loose strands of it seemed to cause the details of her face to blur, and he thought again of how difficult it was for someone like her. Always putting on the next veil, the next disguise. Even amid the car crashes and the marriage breakups, you were always playing someone other than yourself.

“You as much as anyone know how things were with me, Clark,” she said. “I could never see myself as anything other than an actress. I suppose it was down to my dad and the way I grew up. I only felt good about myself when I was onstage or in front of a camera… Or perhaps just before or after when I was in front of the dressing room mirror, putting on or taking off my makeup. Then Hilly comes along with all sorts of promises to lure me out to Los Angeles and tales about how this place was the future of everything. Which I suppose it probably was.

“So I took the train from New York and I went to all the parties and I attended all the auditions, and I met people like you, Clark. For a while I felt like I was floating, but then it seemed as if I was falling. I remember…” She gave a laugh. “The very day I arrived and came out of Union station I looked up at this sign. And even then it sort of passed through my head that if I failed I might as well throw myself off it. Hilly…” She shook her head. “Well Hilly somehow picked up on that without me ever consciously telling him. When he did those cards for me—the tarot, they’re called, aren’t they?—the symbol he kept coming up with was this figure falling from a high tower. And he said nonsense things about a circle of worlds, and how events can happen in several ways and send our lives off in different directions, but that certain places and people will always have some kind of magnetic draw. So when the work stopped coming… Well, to be honest, it hardly ever started, and this sign seemed to be forever gazing down at me, it eventually came to feel like only a matter of time before I…” She paused. “I don’t quite mean to say
threw myself off
. It isn’t that simple, and perhaps it never is. That evening when I walked along Beachwood and climbed over the fence and up here I was in part just curious. I felt as if watching myself scrambling up over these rocks. It was like some kind of experiment. To see how far you can take something, and if it really can be done. And then I guess I was lucky. If you can call it that. Anyway, the police came and I got arrested before I could work out how to climb my way up. And when they asked me what I was doing up here in the first place, I simply told them the truth. Which got me into the Met.

“It wasn’t so terrible. I mean, there are no poolside parties, no meetings with producers who basically want you to take your clothes off. When somebody in the Met tells you something, they mostimes genuinely mean it—even if it’s some story about little men from Mars. So I kind of got to like being in there. It was almost like throwing myself off this sign. Another form of letting go—or giving up. April Lamotte was a nurse there. And Penny Losovic—you’re heard of her as well, haven’t you?—she was a young intern. You form friendships in such places just like any others, and by some standards I was less mad than some of the other residents. I soon became a ward trustie.

“So when I’m asked if I’d be interested in helping in some research project, I really wasn’t likely to say no. They said it was a new facility, and that it might lead to some great insights into the workings of the human mind. This was late in 1929 and I’d been in the Met for several months, and the thing I suppose I feared above anything was having to go back into the outside world. And of course there was still Hilly. He was egging me on as well. So there it was. We were taken to this place of low, new fenced-off buildings. We called it Thrasis after the old mining town that had once been there, but it was so far out in the Mojave that it really wasn’t anywhere at all. I suppose we had to call it something, although I never liked the sound of that word.

“In some ways, Thrasis wasn’t so very different from the Met. I was the bright spark, the helpful patient—good little Peg Entwistle who can be relied upon to be sensible and helpful and toe the line. There was a doctor there—I think he was pretty famous for his work on the human brain.”

“Guy called Theobold?“

She nodded. “He’s dead now, of course. But he and other experts said they were especially interested in me because I was an actress, and because I’d attempted suicide. It seemed weird back then—although I know that now it would seem far less so—when I was asked to sit in this electrically shielded room and try to work myself back into that state. Try to imagine, they told me, that you’re climbing the back of that letter H, and then the moment of decision, and throwing yourself off, the act of plunging, falling… and how all of that might feel. It was sold to me like it was a kind of cleansing of the spirit, but in truth I think we all knew that this was about human minds pushed to their far extremes. I was mostly kept apart from the other residents. We lived I—I wouldn’t exactly call them cells. We weren’t allowed to mingle. But I knew enough. I heard enough. Sometimes, thick though the concrete walls were, you could hear screams. And I helped do the laundry, being good little Peg. And I tell you, Clark, there was far too much blood on the things that needed washing… So I’m not making excuses. I knew what was really going on in those shielded and soundproofed rooms at Thrasis, and in my own small way I was involved. I just chose somehow to close my eyes and heart and ears. I rather think that millions of people across in Europe are learning how to do the same…”

“So Thrasis really is a place out in the desert?”

“I think you could say that. But don’t ask me where it is, Clark, because it was and is nowhere. You know how the wind sounds when its been coming at you for miles? It seemed to be saying this word. It was some other kind of presence. And then Thrasis was closed and we achieved what we achieved and that presence seemed to follow those of us who returned to what were supposed to be our ordinary lives. Of course, we were all pledged to secrecy. But the deal almost seemed to be worth it, and for our silence we were lavishly paid. There was money behind Thrasis, Clark, like you wouldn’t believe, but there was influence as well. For me, it was about my career. For April, of course, it was getting Dan the breaks he needed to succeed as a writer of feelies. For Penny, it was a job where she could help others. It was…” She shrugged and wiped her eyes.

“A deal with the devil?”

“And we’re all still paying the price. I mean, it was never
said
. It was never
explained
. But you started noticing it in the papers, and amongst people who’d worked in Thrasis that you’d known. The deaths, the suicides, the disappearances. The message was pretty clear. If you cracked, or came close to going public, you died. It was worse than that, though. It was Hilly who explained that. He’d been involved as some kind of supplier of whatever was needed—bodies, patients, muscle. I suppose, in a way, he’d supplied me. But he was losing it himself by then—I guess all that nonsense talk of spirits and other worlds had finally got to him—and he called me one night to say he’d had this letter filled with sand and he knows that there’s nothing left to be done.”

“A letter filled with
sand
?” Even though he knew it was empty, Clark felt his hand move toward his suit coat pocket.