“Out here in front of everybody?” she said.
“None of them are paying attention. Their eyes are stitched closed, anyway.”
Bone felt self-conscious and underdressed, though the sweater she had borrowed from Crystal was causing her to sweat. It was the first time she’d sweated since coming to Darkmeet as a fresh spirit. She tried to keep calm, but since she had no heartbeat, she couldn’t tell if her pulse was racing.
“So you’re playing hard to get?” Royce plucked a bouquet of fresh red roses from Poe’s grave and thrust the flowers toward her. “Here. Now, let’s swap tongue.”
Bone folded her arms across her chest, looking around. This first date was going as badly as most of her mortal ones. The only difference was it didn’t come with a free dinner.
She remembered something her mother had told her once: Women get plenty of time to make up their minds, but no time to change their minds.
“I like you, Royce,” Bone said. “But I don’t think I’m ready for that.”
“Here, take the flowers.”
She did. A thorn pierced her palm but she couldn’t feel it. “We should spend some time getting to know each other.”
“What you got in mind?”
Somewhere dark but safe. “How about a movie?”
Royce’s upper lip curled sideways. He gave a chopping motion in the air with one hand and the birdsong stopped as if on cue. The cemetery was eerily silent, even for a place whose occupants were supposed to be sleeping.
“A movie,” he whispered.
He gave a muscular but awkward pirouette, one boot thumping the concrete urn. He lifted his arms and turned his face to the sky in a martyr’s gesture. “A movie,” he said.
“Take it easy. It was just a suggestion.”
He threw himself on the ground and yanked fistfuls of artificial grass, tossing green tufts in the air. “A movie!”
“For Gosh sakes, Royce, pull it together. You’re acting like a brat.”
He did one wriggling, wormlike flop and rolled onto his back so that he lay in the depression of an ancient, sunken grave. The granite headstone was too worn to reveal a name.
“Acting,” he said. “Thank you.”
“Huh?”
“I coulda been a contendah,” he said, rolling to his knees and throwing a couple of shadowbox punches.
Bone looked around, hoping none of her friends saw her with this lunatic. Not that she had any friends, or cared what they thought. Well, she did have one friend, but Crystal was too busy playing Lungs Are for the Living to help a sister out in a time of need. Even Tim was nowhere around.
“Brando,” he said. “Get it?”
“Sure.”
He hopped up on a tombstone, wobbled for a moment on one leg, and then stuck his arms out like a bird trying to catch the wind. “I’m the king of the wooooorld!”
“Leo, right?”
He leaped from the tombstone, did a surprisingly masculine dance across the grass, and kicked his heels together, bowing with one arm outstretched toward an invisible audience. “West Side Story, Guys and Dolls, Grease, I could have done those. I just never got my big break.”
Another person who didn’t get a fair shake, huh? Well, get in line, because that one runs around the block and down the golden stairs.
Still, his movement had caused her cheeks to flush just a little. Maybe passion could stir her to life. Maybe fatalism was a state of mind, maybe if she wished hard enough—
“Are you looking at me?” He gave a malicious sneer and quick-drew his pointy finger as if it were a pistol. “Are you looking at me?”
“DeNiro in ‘Taxi Driver.’”
“I could have played Travis Bickle even better. Not so over the top, a little more vulnerable.”
“Were you an actor?”
“Were? Were?” He echoed the DeNiro bit, going a little over the top, letting his lower lip tremble and one eyelid twitch.
“Sorry, nothing personal.”
“Everything’s personal in the Graveyard, Dollface.”
“I guess I’m still getting used to all this.” She waved her hand at the sky, which looked like an upside-down bowl of mashed potatoes. “Being dead, I mean.”
Royce, ignoring her with all the self-absorption of an unknown celebrity, said, “Were I an actor, the world would have been saved.”
Bone wasn’t sure the grammar was correct, but he’d spoken with an emphatic British accent and she dared not challenge him. “I didn’t know the world were lost.”
He swooped an oily lock of hair from his forehead, eyes grown weary now with the gravity of it all. “My rightful place among the stars was denied, and the design of heaven thus was frustrated.”
“Shakespeare?”
Royce shook his head and the lock fell back over his eyes. “Nah. Mine. I’m a screenwriter, too.”
With lines like that, you ought to be as famous as…as famous as…
She couldn’t think of any famous screenwriters.
“Tell you what, Royce,” Bone said. “I just wanted to see a movie, not be a movie. Maybe we can just go for a walk or something.”
“Brando.”
“Huh?”
“I would have been good for him. His problem was he didn’t have anybody to push him. He settled because he didn’t have any challengers.”
“He had James Dean.”
Royce’s face twisted as if someone had dropped a handful of hell’s hottest coals down his pants. Puffs of smoke boiled from his ears and his eyes grew narrow, the pupils glistening yellow. When his lower lip curled in a pout, she finally noticed the resemblance.
“Hey, come to mention it, you kinda look like him,” she said, figuring it would flatter and placate him.
After all, Dean had been a deity of the cinema, all the more revered because his career had been cut so tragically short. He’d courted some of Hollywood’s most beautiful starlets, and the rumors had tied him to some men as well. Sure, he was pretty much squaresville now, compared to Brad Pitt, Johnny Depp, Robert Pattinson, and the modern breed of boy candy, but legends never die.
“James.” Royce spat the name as if it were a slimy bug that had flown into his mouth. “The no-talent hack didn’t do nothing right but die young.”
“A tad jealous, are we?” Bone had known some kids in the high school drama club, and the ones that weren’t gay had been insufferably vain. But competing for attention with a dead person seemed like overkill even for a drama queen.
“You don’t get it,” he said. “You’re just like all the rest.”
“Thanks for making me feel special.”
He ruffled his hair and thrust his hips forward. “Come on, Dollface. You been dead how long now?”
“A year and nine months, give or take a few centuries.”
“And you figure I’m dead, too.”
“You’re in Darkmeet, aren’t you?”
“I can’t be dead, because I was never born.”
“Excuse me?” She wasn’t sure about all these crazy afterlife rules. For all she knew, half the souls here were waiting for someone to call their number, like picking up an order at a Chinese restaurant.
“It should have been me.”
“What?”
“It should have been Royce Dean who lived in Hollywood, who got a star on the Walk of Fame. I should have been the showstopper and the scene stealer. I should have gotten the dough and the dames and the fast cars.” Royce’s face twisted in a mocking sneer. “But it all went to him.”
Royce spun, hurling a fist at the monument beside him. As the punch cracked against faux marble, Bone cringed, momentarily forgetting that Royce was unborn and couldn’t feel pain.
“Hey, those are the breaks,” Bone said.
He turned away. His shoulders shuddered.
Christ. Is he… he’s CRYING.
He suddenly became much more irresistible. She drew closer, hating herself. But a tough guy who could weep? He had to be dynamite in the sack.
>
“What happened?” she said. “You can tell me.”
“We were twins,” Royce said, standing over the rubble of the Poe monument, hunched against a cold wind that skirled from the northern edge of the cemetery.
“James Dean didn’t have a twin.”
He wiped at his eyes and his voice strengthened. “Exactly. I was a possibility that didn’t happen. I’m deader than dead. I never even got born. At least you had a life. All I got is woulda-coulda-shoulda.”
“I’ve got it worse, because I know what I’m missing,” Bone said, stroking his cheek and digging the stubble. “For you, life is like watching a movie. All you see are the actions and motions and lines. You don’t know what it’s like to feel.”
He looked at her with those dewy blue eyes, heavy lashes drooping. “Oh, I feel it, Dollface. So much it hurts.”
“This place,” she said, waving her hands at the pristine graveyard. “The worst thing about it is it imitates life. It mocks life.”
“Yeah,” he said, sneering again. “That’s why I’m going back and doing it right.”
Bone shook her head. “No. You belong here now.”
She wasn’t sure if she said it out of a lingering sense of morality or because she was afraid to lose whatever chance they had together.
“This is bigger than me,” Royce said, putting on his stage face again. “If I don’t go back, the world will never turn out the way it was supposed to be. I’m the future.”
He sure had the ego to be a star. But she didn’t see how Fate could hinge on a teddy boy’s screen tests. His defection was likely to upset the balance of both sides, just like the Judge had warned.
“This is all hard for me to wrap my head around,” Bone said. “You have to save the world?”
“Yeah. In a movie. But then the movie becomes real life.”
“And all this happens in Parson’s Ford?”
“Gotta start small and work my way up.”
“Why not hell or Hollywood?”
“Same place. You know Marilyn?”
Bone ran down the mental list of her high school classmates. “Doesn’t ring any bells.”
“Marilyn Monroe. Talk about a dollface. Whooo-whee.”
Charming.
“Anyway,’ Royce said. “She said Hollywood is a place where they’ll give you a thousand dollars for a kiss and fifty cents for your soul.”
“And still you want to be a movie star?”
“I don’t have a soul, Dollface. Sold it long ago.”
Great. I really know how to pick ‘em.
But she needed information if she was going to be able to help Crystal. And herself. She put an arm around him before he launched into another routine. “Tell me more.”
Chapter 12
Dempsey was the first customer of the day. He had a stack of VHS tapes under his arm and looked like he’d been watching them straight through until morning.
Crystal was still two cups of coffee from awake herself. “Hey, Dempsey.”
“I’m returning these.” He was as brusque as she was, slapping them on the counter.
“Wait a sec,” she said. “These aren’t the ones you checked out.”
“I’m donating them.”
“Look, I had a rough night. I don’t want to deal with this right now.”
“If you had come over to my place, your night would have been a lot better.”
“I have a boyfriend.”
“Sure you do. Every girl has a boyfriend until she goes out with me. I understand. Gotta protect yourself, right?”
Pettigrew’s pick-up pulled in front of the store with its throaty rumble.
“No, I mean I have a boyfriend.”
“Whatever. Put these in circulation for me, okay?” He winked one crusty, bleary eye.
“First I’ll need the boss’s approval, then I’d have to list them in inventory and bar-code them and everything. It’s a real pain in the butt.”
The bell jingled as the door opened. Crystal kept her attention focused on her customer, though she was sizing up Pettigrew’s stride out of the corner of her eye.
“I made these, okay?” Dempsey said. “You promised to help.”
Crystal didn’t remember making any promises. “Cheesy horror isn’t my thing.”
It’s just my life.
“Do you know how hard it is to get an audience these days? You can’t get a screen unless you’re Paramount, Sony, or Pixar.”
“Ever heard of YouTube?” Crystal said.
“Take them,” Dempsey said, raising his voice. “Spread the gospel according to Royce.”
“Royce?”
“You bothering the lady?” Pettigrew said, in his Wild West-marshal voice. Or maybe he had a cold.
Now that they were side by side, Crystal could do some comparison shopping. Pettigrew had four inches on Dempsey, and a little more in the shoulder department. But Dempsey had that leather thing going on, and the black eyeliner gave him an alluring air of mystery. Pettigrew was big-chinned and clear-eyed, the kind of guy you could trust.
But Crystal was eighteen. She didn’t trust anybody yet.
“We’re cool,” she said. “Dempsey here is a Stone Ager. Still believes in customer service and dead technology.”
“You’ll find out about ‘dead’ soon enough,” Dempsey said.
“Whoa,” Pettigrew said. “Don’t go getting creepy, dude.”
“Relax,” Crystal said, though her inner woman was pleased to have two hunks vying for her attention. “Dempsey’s a creative genius. You know how they are.”
Pettigrew raised a wary eyebrow. “Creative genius? In Parson’s Ford?”
“I am an auteur,” Dempsey said, tapping the stack of VHS tapes. “And Crystal is helping me reach my audience.”
“I didn’t agree to anything,” Crystal said. “Like I said, it’s the boss’s call.”
Dempsey gave her the dark, smoldering glare. “There are two types of geniuses. Those who create it, and those who recognize it.”
Crystal shivered despite herself, and a womanly warmth swept through her body. “Okay, leave them here and I’ll see what I can do.”
Dempsey winked, and she was done for. Those tapes would not only be on the shelves, she’d keep a few on the counter and push them by hand.
Pettigrew cleared his throat, feeling left out. “Uh, what kind of movies are those, anyway?”
“They’re PG-13,” Dempsey said. “Don’t think you’re old enough yet.”
Before Pettigrew could snap back, Crystal cut in. “Horror movies. You know indie horror is the fastest-growing market sector, right?”
Pettigrew picked one up. “’The Worsening.’ A woman’s hand holding a bloody butcher knife. Real original.”
Dempsey snatched it away. “You obviously don’t know the meaning of the word ‘homage.’”
“It’s French,” Crystal said helpfully.
“The closest this guy’s been to France is fries,” Pettigrew said.
“Why don’t you go check your oil or something?” Dempsey said. “The lady and I are having a conversation.”
Before Crystal could protest being called a lady, Pettigrew grabbed Dempsey by the collar of his jacket and pulled him close. “This lady is my lady. And the conversation is over.”
Crystal scrambled to lift the hinged tabletop that separated the service desk from the store, expecting Dempsey to throw an ill-advised punch. But by the time she was close enough to put her hands between them, Dempsey was laughing.
Which was almost as dangerous as throwing a punch, judging by Pettigrew’s twitching jaw.
Crystal pushed them apart and looked from one to the other, but their eyes were locked in conflict.
Dempsey gave one more chuckle. “Well done, my tall friend. You get the part.”
“Part?” Pettigrew unclenched his fist.
“Did anyone ever tell you you’re a young Clint Eastwood without the facial tics?”
Despite himself, Pettigre
w cocked his head as if contemplating the possibility. Crystal took the opportunity to sandwich herself between them. Not at all enjoying being wedged between two hunks.
Riiiight. She wished they’d fight forever.
“You’ll be perfect for my new project,” Dempsey said, talking over her head. Literally.
“Project?” Without looking, Crystal knew Pettigrew was sporting that slack fish face he got when he didn’t understand something.
Love. What could you do?
“’The Halloweening,’” Dempsey said. “It’s an atmospheric supernatural thriller, but it has some action, too. You could play the tough guy.”
Pettigrew stood straighter and glanced toward the storefront, as if seeking his reflection in the glass. “Tough guy.”
“We won’t have to change your accent. He’s a good-natured, bumbling type with a slow mountain drawl—”
Pettigrew darkened. “You mean I don’t gotta learn French?”
“A little Sean Penn touch. Nice.”
Crystal was annoyed that they’d forgotten she was there. She much preferred them fighting over her. To make matters worse, that weird interdimensional Orifice was pulsing on the wall…
“Guys, why don’t you have your people talk to each other and hammer out the details?” she said. “Pettigrew, I know you have to get back to work.”
“It’s lunch break,” he said.
“Well, then, why don’t you two go talk this over at the coffee shop?” She gave them a nudge toward the door, hoping Dempsey wouldn’t notice the Orifice and bring it to Pettigrew’s attention. “I have a lot of inventory to shelve.”
“What about later?” Pettigrew said. “I get off at five.”
“Call me.”
“Talk to your boss, mademoiselle.” Dempsey pointed to the videotapes. “I need an audience. Or else.”
Or else what?
But right now the Orifice was spreading, the size of pancake. To the untrained eye, it looked like a splotch of mold, and therefore fit right into the store’s decor. But if a Lurken tentacle poked out…
“Sure, sure,” she said to Dempsey, shooing him toward the door. Pettigrew blew her a kiss which she pretended not to notice. Dempsey saw it, however, and smirked.
October Girls: Crystal & Bone Page 9
