Wake Up and Dream (8 page)

Glimpses east across Cahuenga Ravine toward Griffith Park. That big sign.
HOLLYWOODLAND
. Grey in the darkness. There’d been talk all these last ten years of getting it demolished but it was still there. He eased the big car on. Nothing but darkness ahead of them now. Nothing but stars above. A couple of times, he caught headlights in the rear-view. He braked slightly, curious as to what kind of automobile it was that was managing to keep up. But the lights hung back.

“You like the Delahaye?”

“Yeah. Who wouldn’t? Mind if I take these things off now?” Without waiting for a response, he tucked the glasses into his top jacket pocket.

“You sure as hell don’t drive like Dan.” “How does he drive?”

“Like a writer. The only risks he takes are in his head.”

He took another bend. The mountains were dark, the city a glittering sprawl.

“Let’s stop somewhere.” She’d slid closer to him. Her hand was on his thigh. “There’s an overlook. You see that turn ahead?”

He took it fast in a spew of dust. The tires rumbled to a halt just before the thin wooden fence that guarded the precipice.

“That’s better isn’t it?” She reached over him and turned off the engine and the lights. Silence fell. The city lay spread below them. He could smell summer thyme and Chanel
Cuir de Russie
and hot rubber. She didn’t pull back when he reached his arm around her shoulder and touched her hair.

The overlook was empty. Just them and the Delahaye and this night-lit city. Although, as his eyes grew more accustomed to the darkness, there looked to be the shape of some other car parked right off in a corner against the dusty edge of the land. But there were no lights, no movement. The only sound came from their breathing, and the cicadas, and the murmur of Los Angeles which rose up from the mountain-cupped bowl.

“I brought this.” Briefly, she pulled away from him to rummage in her purse. Something metallic glinted. He caught the tang of bourbon as she unscrewed the cap.

He chuckled. “I’d never had you down as the type.” She chuckled as well.

The bourbon was sweet and hard. He wiped his lips, swallowed back the oddly metallic after-tang, handed the flask back to her. She touched it to her lips, then gave it back. The cold metal still held the warm print of her hand.

“So,” Clark murmured as bourbon fizzed with Champagne in his blood. “What happens next?”

“Tonight? Or with me and Dan?”

He let the question slide. His fingers had been toying with April Lamotte’s hair. Now, they touched the jeweled lobe of her ear. Part of him was still doing its best to keep some detachment. She was, after all, a client, and he still hadn’t gotten that main check.

“This city isn’t good for any of us,” she said. ”It sucks us in. Look what it’s done to Dan.” She shifted slightly and laid her head across his shoulder. He breathed the scent of her hair. The flask was nearly empty and still in his hand. For its closeness, her body felt coiled and tense. “People, when they first came here from back east to make movies, they said it was because of the quality of the light. But what they didn’t talk about was the quality of the darkness. I mean whatever’s lurking underneath…”

He blinked. His eyes stung. He thought again of that sign they’d passed, and of all the things he’d done, and hadn’t done. April Lamotte was right about LA. He felt it as something huge and black and ravenous, pouring up toward him in a hissing roar.

She was still talking. “… so I reckoned that if we can get this new feelie finished, maybe it’ll be time for Dan and I to leave. I mean, he’s always said he just wants to write. And there are other, better, places you can write than LA. In fact, I can’t think of any worse…

“We could escape, we could cut our losses and shed the ghosts and live someplace else. And better, and cleaner, and more cheaply. Dan and I used to talk about re-locating to England. About writing real books there—proper novels that said something true. Of course, that’ll only work when the Germans have taken over, and Dan doesn’t like the Nazis much. So maybe we could try Argentina. It’s like this country was a hundred years ago when everything was new and fresh. We could sell Erewhon and get a ranch. He could write and I could… You okay?”

He nodded, swallowed. He’d heard people talk about escaping this city too many times before. It was as big a dream as the one which brought them here in the first place. Bigger, if anything, because it never came true. The dry roaring in his ears wouldn’t go away. “Think so.”

“Maybe I shouldn’t have given you that flask.” She pried it from his hand. “I can drive back. There’s no hurry, is there?”

The dim outlines of the car’s interior—the dials, the wood, the chrome, the switches, her stockinged legs, the leather bench—all seemed to blur. Then she reached forward across him toward the dashboard. Keys tinkled, the starter whirred, and the engine—a choir of pistons, a stroked tiger—resumed its easy purr. Then she fiddled with something else and a leather top slowly buzzed over them like a black wing, shutting out the stars.

“A little privacy,” she murmured in the humming warmth after the hood had completed its journey with a series of sharp clicks. “And it
was
getting cold.” He felt her fingers trace the buttons of his shirt. “For all the many things Dan’s been for me, he’s never been much of a husband in the physical sense…” The interior of the car was far darker now, but the closure of the top and the engine’s throb hadn’t shut off the hissing in his ears. He blinked again as her fingers found a space between the buttons. “You don’t wear an undershirt?” Her breath had quickened.

“Never have.”

Her burgundy suit was black now, and he saw the paleness of her flesh widen as she worked the top of it down from her shoulders and her arms. It was tailored in such a way that, underneath, she didn’t need to wear a bra.

She leaned around him. Almost straddling him now as she removed his glasses. Her scent came to him in a dizzy wave. “You
sure
you’re okay?“

Her breasts were full, and he longed to touch them, but the way she was sitting over him, and the dark weight of whatever else now seemed to be oppressing him, made it hard for him to move his arms. Her hands were on him, stroking the inner and outer sides of his suit jacket and down into his pants’ pockets, but with a purpose that didn’t feel entirely sexual. When her fingers went to his throat and touched him there as if to feel his pulse, he was reminded that she had once been a nurse.

“How are you feeling?”

He was vaguely aware that April Lamotte was sliding away from him and re-buttoning herself up. Of shifts and rattles as she collected things.

“You okay? Clark? Dan? Mr Gable? Can you hear me?”

He opened his mouth. His throat was filled with something dry and sandy that wouldn’t cough up. Her fingers touched his eyes. He tried to blink, bat her away, but his limbs seemed lost. He felt the rock of the springs, heard the door slam. Heard another door opening, closing. Decided that it was probably the trunk. The Delahaye’s vee eight engine was a warm, dull pulse like the pounding of his heart, which changed slightly as a dark oval, some kind of hose, was wedged into the corner of the window beside him.

There was movement. Footsteps. The indistinct sound of another car starting, a flash of headlights. Then, as he tried to claw himself toward consciousness and scrabbled for a key which wouldn’t budge, then window and door buttons which did nothing, he was only aware that he was inside a car, and that its motor was running, and that he was entirely alone.

T
HE DARKNESS STAYED WITH HIM
for what seemed like a long time. Then, vaguely, as he slumped down and forward, he was aware that the car radio had come on. Glowing dials through the choking haze, and the soothing strings of the Fred Waring Orchestra and the down-home southern drawl of Wallis Beekins on NBC with
stories, interviews and good old gossip live and living from the Land of the Stars
… The words and the city spread below him vanished through spasms of pain into a black, stinking tunnel.

Funny, really, to have come so far, and yet to have got nowhere. The same empty nowhere that everyone ended up, he supposed. He was floating further out from the blackness now, and the intense burning in his lungs and throat was lessening. Just a guy in a car on some midnight overlook slowly dying from lack of oxygen. He could see himself with a curious detachment. Could see the pumping black hosepipe jammed hard through the window which his paralyzed limbs were too feeble to remove. He was a slumped body, starting to judder now, the lips graying, the eyes rolling in some final spasm, that someone would find in the morning when all life was gone, and briefly wonder about why and how. But not that much…

The weirdest thing was, he knew he wasn’t alone. Something else was there with him inside the car. It squirmed up and out of the foul black air like a swimmer surfacing, and formed changing arms, and a face that wouldn’t stay still. With terrible eyes flecked with engine fire, with clouds of the exhaust roaring from its oily mouth, it leaned forward to regard him. The thing seemed to be made entirely of smoke. His tongue thickened in his throat, rooting for empty air as he tried to cry out, but it was useless, hopeless…

The thing, the shape, the presence, wouldn’t leave him. Perhaps it was death itself. And he knew it was close now. So close that he could feel it touching him. He saw his own hands lying lost and remote far down through the darkness, and felt stronger hands which burned and throbbed enclosing them. Their grip was remorselessly strong, and outflowing arms followed, drawing him into an ever-deepening embrace. And through it all there was a terrible pressure, an endless roaring.

He was past struggling. He was beyond help. But the thing of fumes really was holding him, lifting him, jerking his limbs like a puppet. He felt his head crack the steering wheel, felt his teeth snap sharp against his tongue. He saw his own hand twist out in front of him, saw it ablaze with rags of dark. Then his arm was wrenched sideways, and a sharp pain, bizarre in its ordinariness, slammed through him from his elbow. The pain flared again when the same movement repeated, but this time was followed by a glittering crash, and an extraordinary rush of air.

He grayed out for a moment. He gasped, gagged, his belly a writhing knot, as the fumes rushed out. But he was breathing. He was
breathing,
and the window beside him was broken and the black pipe which had been belching death had flopped away across the gravel and he was Clark fucking Gable and he was alive and his throat burned and his left elbow hurt like hell.

The engine was still running. He fumbled again at the key, wiggling the damn thing to and fro. Still wouldn’t budge. Everything in this car was clever, electric; far too clever for him. He felt down around the ignition slot. Something small and rough had been wedged in there with the key. He picked and fumbled with numb fingers until it finally gave. Half a matchstick. Nothing more. He turned the key again. The Delahaye’s vee eight subsided with a small, polite cough. The radio dial glowed. The soothing night sounds of the Fred Waring Orchestra playing
A Cigarette, Music and You
still poured out from the expensive Motorola speakers. He fumbled the door handle through a grit of broken glass. This time, it opened easily.

He stumbled from the car, fell to his knees in a spill of glass. He stayed hunched on all fours for some time, coughing and retching until the effort got too much and he slumped flat. Then, some unknowable time after, he came back to proper consciousness and—slowly, warily—used the Delahaye’s open door to drag himself back up. He leaned swayingly against the car and looked around the dark overlook. Some kind of
presence
had been here with him. He was sure of it—as sure as he was that it wasn’t some last spasm of his dying body that had broken that door pane. He listened. All he could hear was Wallis Beekins’ soft burr from the radio, the chirp of the cicadas and his own thudding heart. He held up his hands, but the faintness and blurring came only from his dried and weary eyes. They were streaked with nothing but dirt and blood.

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.

C
OMING 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