Blast from the Past

by Kelner, Toni, L. P.

  Chapter 43

  Episode 8

  Sid and Marty, tired of being mobbed by fans, use elaborate disguises and tricks to avoid them. Then they run into a trio of orphans crying because they can’t go to the Blastoffs’ only concert on their planet, and realize how important their fans are. As Posit puts it, “The fans need us, and we need them!”

  —SATURDAY MORNING SPREE BY CHARLES M. LUCE

  THERE was even more confusion after that: sessions with the police, explanations to Dom and Nick, more explanations to Joni and Edwina, calls to June and Cooper, reporter dodging, and articles sent to Entertain Me! There were probably meals scattered in there, too, but she really wasn’t sure. She did know she was too tired to be hungry by the time she made her way up to her suite at the inn, and was about to throw herself down onto the bed, clothes and all, when there was a knock on the door.

  It was Pete Ellis.

  She’d have blown off anybody else, but him she wanted to talk to, so she let him in.

  “Hey,” she said. “Where’ve you been hiding?”

  “You mean while Hugh Wilder was trying to blow up John? I didn’t know anything about it until afterward. I was lying low like my lawyer told me to.”

  “Accepting the inevitable?”

  “Except it wasn’t inevitable, thanks to you.”

  “It took me long enough to figure it out.”

  “You mean about Wilder not having been Posit? I just spent time with the cops talking about that.”

  “You already knew, didn’t you?”

  He nodded.

  “Since when?”

  “Ever since that day we got to the Cape. As soon as I saw him, I knew it wasn’t Posit.”

  Now that he said that, Tilda thought she remembered Pete starting to say something about it not being Posit, but she’d interrupted him. “Why in the hell didn’t you tell me?”

  “I didn’t think it mattered. I knew the real Posit died years ago in a car crash, so if Wilder could make a few bucks, who was I to screw it up? You said yourself he was a good guy, so . . .”

  “Yeah, he sure had me fooled.” She’d leave people judging to Dom from that point on. “Who is he, really?”

  “He really is Hugh Wilder, and he really did work on the show—he just wasn’t Posit,” Pete said. “He mostly coordinated stunts.”

  “Including stuff with explosives?”

  “Yeah, some. We didn’t have a big special effects budget, but he helped with the rocket ship blasting off and did some flashy stuff with the band. And when we needed a body to wear alien costumes, he did that, too. He played the tie-dye gorilla queen and that shooty dog thing that helped win a revolution.”

  “I don’t even remember them. Posit is the one everybody remembers.” Then, realizing who she was talking to, she added, “Of the aliens, that is.”

  But Pete was grinning. “I know nobody remembers me. They wouldn’t remember John either if he hadn’t hit it big.”

  “So why is it you knew it wasn’t the real Posit right away, and Laryea never did figure it out?”

  “Because John’s kind of a jerk. No, that’s not fair. He was just really focused on his career, even then, and he would never have wasted any time talking to a dude in a fur suit. Hell, he barely spoke to me.”

  “I thought he was avoiding Wilder because of—” She stopped, because she wasn’t sure if Pete knew about Laryea’s height issues. “I mean, I guess he was avoiding Wilder because he didn’t remember him and didn’t want the guy to realize it.”

  “That makes as much sense as anything. Not that any of it really makes sense. I mean, why did he want to kill John? Or Foster? Which one was he after anyway?”

  “Neither. He was after you.”

  “Say what?”

  “You knew he wasn’t really Posit, right? That means you were a threat. You could have totally destroyed his world.”

  “But I told him I wasn’t going to tell anybody. I’d keep his secret, and he’d keep mine.”

  “You could have changed your mind. You could have been lying. You might have told somebody, someday.”

  “But I wouldn’t have—”

  “Pete, whether or not you really were a threat, Wilder thought you were.” Tilda was reminded of her roommate’s guinea pigs and how they’d reacted to the bag of food pellets being left on top of their cage as if it were a predator. “He decided he had to get rid of you somehow, and he must have known that you were going to be drinking that night.”

  Pete looked abashed. “I ran into him in the store where I went to buy beer. So yeah, he knew I was going on a bender.”

  “So all he had to do was wait for you to pass out, then steal the limo.”

  “How did he know that Foster and Laryea were going to be walking along that road?”

  “I don’t know that he did. I don’t think he cared who he hit. It could just as easily have been me.” In fact, Tilda realized, it nearly had been her. If she hadn’t been so gun-shy about cars that she’d gone away from the road when she heard the limo approaching, he probably would have hit her instead. “He didn’t need to kill anybody—he was telling the truth when he said he didn’t mean for Foster to die. He just wanted to hit somebody so you’d get in trouble. Best case scenario, you’d go to jail. Worst case, you’d be fired. He didn’t count on Dom believing you.”

  “Not Dom. It was you who believed me when nobody else did.”

  “Which is why Wilder came after me. I don’t know if he meant to kill me or scare me off, but either way I’d be out of his way. Come to think of it . . . Did you see him that night?”

  Pete thought about it. “Yeah, I did. He was at the inn, and might have heard me tell Nick I was going to take a walk.”

  “So he was probably planning to frame you for the attack on me, too. I mean, I was your only alibi, and if I was dead . . .”

  “Jesus, Tilda. The guy’s a psycho!”

  “That’s what my sister the psychologist said, too.”

  “I don’t know how I can ever thank you.”

  “I told you—being nosy is my job. But if you really want to thank me . . .”

  “You know I do.”

  “Can you drive me to my sister’s house some night in the limo? Just so I can see her face.”

  He laughed. “Sure thing. Though I’m surprised you didn’t ask for an interview about The Blastoffs, now that it’s all out in the open.”

  “I’m sorry about that, Pete. I had to tell the cops what I knew.”

  “Of course you did—I’m not blaming you. I guess it was time. I’m not saying I won’t be quoting the Serenity Prayer a lot over the next few days, but I’ll be okay. When things calm down, I’d be glad to sit down for an interview.”

  “I’d like that. It will be a great story, Pete, and I don’t think anybody will laugh at you.”

  After he was gone, Tilda finally got to bed, but lay there awake for a while thinking about Hugh Wilder and why he’d felt the need to lie. At first, it had been for the attention, and then to get the job on the cartoon show. But the real irony was that he’d killed a man, and had been willing to kill more, just so people would love him.

  Chapter 44

  wrap n Refers to the completion of film shooting (either for the day or for the entire production or project); in the early days of cinema, the cameraman would say after filming: “Wind, reel, and print”—abbreviated as WRAP. An entirely completed film is termed in the can.

  —TIM DIRKS, WWW.FILMSITE.ORG

  THE next day, they filmed the explosives scene for real. Security was incredibly tight, but a special vantage point was provided for Tilda, so she got great pictures and a plate of nachos while she waited.

  Laryea, despite his earlier scare, was in fine form, and Tilda heard Joni tell Edwina that maybe actually having been in danger had improved his portrayal of a man in battle. Or maybe he just wanted to get it right so he could get out of Glenham. Whatever it was, his performance was spot-on. After Joni yelled, “Print i
t!” there were cheers from the crew, and Laryea bowed happily.

  There was a clambake on the beach that afternoon to celebrate the end of the shoot. From what Tilda knew of moviemaking, usually a shindig like that would have been thrown after the whole movie had been shot, not just one location’s worth, but this was a special case. As Nick put it, they were celebrating their survival.

  It was a little chilly to eat outside, but nobody seemed to mind, especially not when Joni and Edwina handed out Pharos jackets to everybody, including Tilda and the security team. Nick and Dom were keeping an eye out so the rest of the guys could relax, but Pete was there, looking serene and happily sober.

  Since everybody was going to be leaving town the next day, the party ended early in the evening and Tilda headed back to her room to pack. It was surprising how quickly she’d spread her belongings all throughout the suite, and she realized she still had the page from Pharos that she’d used to eliminate the wannabes. So she went down the hall to Joni’s suite, but it was Edwina who answered her knock.

  “Joni’s on a video conference downstairs,” she explained.

  “I just wanted to return this,” Tilda said.

  “Add it to the pile.”

  Tilda went to put it on top of a stack of artwork that included the storyboards used on the shoot. The one on top was the one Edwina herself had drawn at the last minute, and Tilda noticed that she’d done an excellent job of drawing the lighthouse. She picked it up to look at it more closely, impressed by how close the style matched the comic book’s look. Then suddenly she wasn’t so impressed.

  “I hear you didn’t have any luck finding Leviathan,” Edwina said.

  “I wouldn’t say that, exactly.”

  “I thought all the wannabes were fakes.”

  “They were, but you’re not.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  Tilda looked her right in the eye. “You’re Leviathan.”

  Chapter 45

  When I was a child I was a dreamer. I read comic books, and I was the hero of the comic book. I saw movies, and I was the hero in the movie. So every dream I have ever dreamed has come true a hundred times.

  —ELVIS PRESLEY

  TILDA would have given fifty-fifty odds of whether or not Edwina would cop to it, but the producer seemed resigned to the discovery.

  “And I thought I’d covered my tracks fairly thoroughly,” she said.

  “You did,” Tilda said. “In fact, you covered them a bit too well, which should have been a clue. None of the wannabes struck me as being that careful, but a lawyer like you—”

  “Actually, I was only prelaw when I drew Pharos. But I suppose the instincts were already there. I was very good at hiding things.”

  “Including yourself?”

  “Especially myself. Growing up in my family meant there were certain expectations. I was to go to a good prep school, attend a prestigious college, and enter a certain kind of profession: business, medicine, or law. I did what the family wanted, too—played the right sports, had the right friends, and so on.

  “But I also had some friends I didn’t invite to have dinner with my parents, and they’re the ones who got me hooked on comic books. I read my way through a couple of friends’ collections, then started buying my own. I couldn’t collect, of course, because it would have been noticed, so I’d buy the titles I wanted, read them two or three times, then pass them on to friends.”

  “And reading led to writing?”

  “And drawing. I’d had a lot of art classes along the way—having an appreciation for fine art fit into my family’s plan. So I took all those lessons in sketching and oil painting and applied them to comic books.”

  “Pharos always did have a more formal feel than most comics.”

  “My friends thought I was good enough to get published, but I couldn’t do that. It would totally ruin my chances of getting into a good law firm, let alone making partner.”

  “But if you didn’t want to be a lawyer . . .”

  “I did want to be a lawyer. It just wasn’t enough. I wanted the comics, too.”

  “Like a superhero with a secret identity?”

  Edwina smiled. “Anyway, I drew a couple of Batman and X-Men pastiches purely for my entertainment. Nothing I could have sold of course—there was no way DC or Marvel would have let me mess with their biggest properties. Then some of my friends went to a comics convention in North Carolina, and told me about meeting Marc Fitzwilliam, who was just starting Regal. He handed out business cards, looking for talent, and a couple of my friends had decided they were going to submit ideas for a title.”

  “Did he buy any of them?”

  “No, they were dreadful. But seeing them go through the process taught me the mechanics of submitting: the kind of paper to use, what to put in a proposal, and so on. And I started working on Pharos in secret.”

  “You didn’t tell your comic book friends?”

  “I didn’t tell anyone. I couldn’t risk word getting back to my family. And I knew I had to come up with something different so my friends wouldn’t recognize my style. Since I’d only done superhero stuff before, I tried something supernatural. I worked up the first issue and submitted to Fitzwilliam, telling him we’d met at the con. Since he’d handed out business cards like a lawyer drumming up business, I figured he’d never know if he’d really spoken to me or not. When he accepted the book, I told him something mysterious about having to keep my identity secret, and he went along.”

  “No wonder. He said the book was the best thing ever submitted to him.”

  “Really?” She smiled again. “Of course, the whole idea of a secret creator appealed to him, too. Anyway, I set up a separate bank account, and for a little over a year, I got to be a comic book writer.”

  “And when Pharos was cancelled?”

  “In a way, it was almost a relief. I loved doing it, but I was in law school by then, and I didn’t have the time to do it properly anymore. Fitzwilliam wanted me to try to come up with another character, but I told him it was time to let Leviathan disappear.”

  “But he didn’t. Or she didn’t.”

  “No, and that was the amazing part. When Fitzwilliam sold Regal to MasterWork, they brought out the issues again.”

  “That reminds me. How could a lawyer, or even a pre-law student, sign away all those rights?”

  She looked embarrassed. “I wasn’t up to speed on intellectual property law, and of course Fitzwilliam didn’t know what he was doing, either. He swore that he was using an industry standard contract, and I did enough research to see that it was pretty close to what Marvel and DC were doing. What I didn’t know is that smaller companies usually let creators keep the characters.” Defensively, she added, “It’s not like I could ask anybody for advice.”

  “I suppose not.”

  “And I didn’t care about the money. My family had money. The comic book royalties would have been chicken feed in comparison. I just wanted to have the books out there.”

  “If it were today, you could have put it out on the Web.”

  “I might very well have done that.”

  “So why did you end up buying the rights back?”

  “I didn’t. Joni did. I’ve never told anybody about being Leviathan, not until now, but I did show the book to people. I wanted to know what they thought of it.”

  “What if they didn’t like it?”

  “They all liked it,” she said with a sniff. “Only Joni didn’t just like it—she loved it. Which is why I ‘found’ those original pages for her.”

  “I should have caught on to that sooner,” Tilda said. “Fitzwilliam said he didn’t have them, and I’d been told that they’d never been seen at art shows or made available on eBay. Yet Joni had a bunch. I take it you’ve got the rest.”

  “I have a couple of framed covers at my house, but the rest are in storage. I couldn’t show them or sell them without risking somebody figuring out who I was, and I didn’t want to sell them anyway. Giv
ing them to Joni was different. I think it was having the pages that convinced her that Pharos would make a terrific movie.”

  “You mean that wasn’t your doing?”

  “It honestly wasn’t, but I loved the idea. So I went about acquiring the rights, and we got the ball rolling.”

  “Why didn’t you tell her you were Leviathan? Why don’t you tell her now? You can’t still be trying to live up to your family’s expectations.”

  “I just never found the right time. Not to mention the fact that it would have been harder for us to get funding if we said, ‘This is my comic book—let’s make it a movie.’ And I was afraid Dolores wouldn’t be as willing to write the script—she would have been worried I’d be offended when she made changes.”

  “All good reasons. And I don’t believe any of them.”

  Edwina bent her head and fiddled with a pen, looking tentative for the first time since Tilda had met her. Finally she said, “I was afraid Joni wouldn’t believe me. She’s the creative one—I’m the businessperson.”

  “So now you’re living up to her expectations?”

  “Something like that. Are you going to tell her?”

  “God, no.”

  “What about the article you were going to write?”

  Tilda considered it. “I could still write it, if you’d cooperate. No picture, or only a fuzzed out one, and you can answer questions about the comic and the adaptation without saying anything about yourself. Joni won’t even have to know if you don’t want her to.”

  “How will people know it’s really Leviathan after all the wannabes?”

  “I’ll make that part of the story, including how I figured out why none of them were you. Besides, I do have a certain reputation in this field.” As she said it, Tilda was pleased to realize that she was right. She did have a good reputation.

  “Can I sleep on it?”

  “Sure, but only on one condition.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Can I have that storyboard you drew?”

  Edwina smiled broadly, then used the pen in her hand to add the Leviathan signature. “How’s that?”