It was completely unlike any of Dora’s missives before. Rather than rambling on for a full page about who was boffing who in their sacred chakra, it was relatively short, sweet, and to the point.
The hair on the back of my neck stood on end as I read it.
“Dancer of the Sun,” it began, “you know the doom which stalks you now. Return to where one lives on the castle hill. Return to the place where forty dreams live at a time. Enter the space that none dare speak of by name. The mother of all riddles will help you. See you on the green.”
“Oh, shit,” I said, and for emphasis, I added, “Shit, shit and shit!”
A businessman in a rumpled suit looked at me from across the shop with a disapproving frown. I mouthed a ‘sorry’ back at him and his eyes swiveled back to the sports section of his own paper.
No, I hadn’t been cursing because of the creepy-cool nature of the riddle. I’d cursed because it wasn’t a riddle at all to me. It was as if Dora knew that I was going to read that column, that she’d sent out a radio signal into my brain at just the right frequency, using just the right words that I’d know.
It did occur to me that I was totally losing it. That my brain had finally gotten fried between lack of sleep, stress, and the syrupy sweetness of the caramel. Maybe I’d finally crossed over into that never-never land where you’d be catching the former Miss Topanga Canyon yapping away at parking meters and spotting Elvis’ face on pieces of freshly made French toast. I pressed my nails into the sides of my temples and forced myself to inhale the blessedly caffeine-infused fumes of my drink until the wave of panic subsided.
Hell of a ‘Dancer of the Sun’ I made.
That brought a snort of laughter out of me. I’d ended up married to one of the Horsemen of the friggin’ Apocalypse, and now I was worried about losing it over seeing a personalized message in an advice column?
It looked like marriage really had changed my perspective on things.
I chewed my lip as I read the message again. Yeah, I was the Dancer of the Sun, and I sure knew the ‘doom’ that stalked me. Intimately, as a matter of fact. As for returning to ‘where one lives on the castle hill’…that was a bit of trivia I’d known since I was a kid. The Old English word for that kind of place is Burbank. And Burbank, California was where most of the studios I’d worked for were located.
Of all the studios in Burbank to choose from, the place I’d edited Machupo had – get this – forty different sound stages, each filming separate television shows, pilots, sitcoms, or movies. Forty different dreams being turned into reality at any time. Yes, there were forty stages, but forty-one buildings. Way out on the rear lot was a lonely outlying building that no one ever used. I’d driven past the place many times on my way to prop storage. It was an isolated Quonset hut of a building, a silvery arch of metal that sat shimmering in the sun at the base of the San Fernando foothills.
Officially, it was listed on the studio maps as ‘Sound Stage Macbeth’, which meant you couldn’t even mention the damned name of the place. See, people in the entertainment biz are superstitious to a fault. The play Macbeth is considered the unluckiest play in theatre. It’s such bad luck that actors won’t even say the play’s title aloud. So the name of that specific studio was like a little mental sign that read, “Keep Out, Here Be Dragons.”
And Dora was telling me to go right into the thick of it. I didn’t have a clue as to who the ‘mother of all riddles’ might be, but I knew that’s where Dora was pointing. She’d even ended her note with an old showbiz proverb. We don’t say ‘good luck’ in my field. We say, ‘break a leg’, or ‘knock ‘em dead.’ Or ‘see you on the green.’
I hesitated on the way back to my car. Returning to Burbank meant heading back towards Los Angeles. Heading back towards Mitchel. That was enough to make me halt in my tracks. I forced myself behind the wheel of the car, forced myself to ignore the part of my brain that was yammering, “What are you doing?”
Yes, it was wild, it was crazy, it was possibly stupid, but you know what? After you find out that you married the living incarnation of Pestilence, that you’d been sleeping with the being who’d doomed billions of humans from smallpox or measles or the flu, you find yourself open to a lot of strange things.
Freeze Frame.
Pan shot across the high desert outside of Bakersfield. A bit of artistic lens flare, dial down into where a disheveled but unbowed blonde finishes pumping her car full of high-octane gasoline. She pays and then pulls out onto the freeway with a screech of tires on cold asphalt.
She throws the motor open wide with a roar, kicking up a cloud of go-to-hell dust as she races south like the devil’s after her.
I was heading back into La-La Land. Whether in wisdom or foolishness, I didn’t know.
Hang in there with me, therapy buddy. I really need the support right now.
Because deep down, I wish I knew what the hell I was getting myself into.
Chapter Ten
Here’s a fun trivia question for your next party game: in September, what’s the average number of days that the Los Angeles basin gets rain? Any takers? If you picked anything higher than ‘one’, then I’m afraid you’re picking a number that’s too high.
Now, anyone want to take a wild guess which day the rain decides to fall on?
If you chose ‘the one day that Cassie drives back into the city’ then you win the dining room set and the all-expense-paid trip to Fiji.
It really messed traffic up on the freeway. What should have been a two-hour drive from Bakersfield took more like four. And that’s not all.
The rare summer-fall rains in the San Fernando Valley are things feel great at first. That lasts until a half-hour after they roll out. Then the summer heat, now fortified with an injection of moisture, turns the entire city of Burbank into a sticky, gloppy imitation of Houston on a bad hair day.
Speaking of bad hair, the resulting extra humidity was turning me into a blonde puffball of frizz. Luckily, as I pulled the Porsche through the studio’s security gate, the guard managed to control his laughter as he buzzed me through. Misty raindrops sprinkled like pixie dust on my windshield as I parked in the lot, as close as I could get to the golf cart stand.
Like most working studios, this one required you to leave your car in a lot before entering the sound stage area. It’s an audio thing. Electric golf carts make almost no noise, which is a big plus when working in a locale that’s been wired to pick up sound six ways from Sunday.
I checked out one of the available carts and zipped off towards the forbidden sound stage at the north end of the studio lot. I passed through a couple clusters of buildings, heard the buzz of people and equipment as filming was done. The whine of a saw or lathe from one of the art departments. Off to one side, a couple of prop guys hurriedly flung a tarp over an exposed background wall set.
Even this light patina of noise subsided, as I pulled to a stop in front of a weather-beaten wooden sign: SOUND STAGE MACBETH.
My stomach went all crazy, like I’d swallowed a whole flock of butterflies.
Ridiculous, I know. Part of it could have been the doom-and-gloom curse that reputedly hung over anything involving Shakespeare’s ‘Scottish Play.’ But I think the rest of it…well, what exactly was I going to say to whomever I bumped into at the sound stage?
Why, hello there…the strange rantings of a new-age advice columnist directed me to see you, Mister DeMille. Oh, yes, I’m ready for my close-ups, just don’t tell my husband, because if he shows up, everyone here is going to have a very nasty case of whooping cough…
I pressed my fingers to my temples, willed myself to calm down and cut out the ridiculous thoughts now. A breath, and I got the cart going again. Besides, there probably wasn’t going to be anyone there, anyway. This whole thing would turn out to be a wild goose chase, considering how the stage looked.
The entire building had an air of neglect hovering about it. As I came up the slope, drawing closer to the half-dome shaped Quons
et hut, I could make out rust-ringed dents in the corrugated metal side of the building. The view didn’t improve much as I rounded the back corner and pulled the cart to a stop by the only entrance I could see. Chips of flaked-off paint littered the ground next to a simple metal-frame door. I frowned, puzzled, as I spotted the outline of a much, much larger entrance right next to it. It looked like a hydraulically-powered roll-up exit, the kind they used on hangars that stored medium-sized aircraft.
But why in the world would they have that out here? There wasn’t an access road – let alone a runway – out at this end of the lot. The property actually ended at this point, right where it butted up against the steep slopes of the San Gabriel Mountains.
I shrugged the mystery off for a later date as I shut off the cart’s motor and got out. The breeze kicked up a bit, made the drizzle sting against my skin as I went to open the metal-framed door.
I paused. No doorknob. I bent to look at the knob plate, saw something else that puzzled me. Instead of a knob, someone had etched a picture into the metal. And a pretty wild one at that. From what I could tell, the etching depicted a muscular man with a bird’s head, holding a crooked staff and a flail.
The plate glowed green and let out a chime as I moved my hand close to it. I jerked back, startled, as the door slid open smoothly, with a hiss of compressed air.
I swallowed, hard, and stepped inside.
I did my best not to flinch as the door snapped shut behind me.
Warm amber light bathed the inside of a narrow corridor, lined with glass cases displaying scrolls of parchment, gold-trimmed headdresses, jewel-encrusted bronze swords, and photographs of mummy cases, framed against teams of Egyptian digging crews and Britons wearing the kind of pith helmets you saw in the old pulp serials.
Definitely, these were some of the best-looking props I’d seen in a long time.
At the end of the corridor lay the circular shape of the kind of door used to seal off a bank vault. To my complete lack of surprise, with a metallic click, it swung open on perfectly oiled steel hinges. A warm breath of air, scented with a magnificent, rich perfume, beckoned me within.
I had to step high to make it over the threshold of the vault door. Strong light, much brighter than the cloud-dimmed skies outside, washed over me, blinding me for a moment. I squinted, trying to force my eyes to adjust.
“Hello?” I said, and my voice sounded high, nervous. Probably because it was. “I’m…I’m looking for someone who can help me.”
The face of a woman swam into focus as I finished speaking.
Her straight, black hair had the velvety sheen of a freshly spilled oil slick. It was cropped high off her forehead, but it hung low around the sides, capped with gold braids and beads. Her high cheekbones accentuated the slope of her nose, giving her a timeless, regal look. And her eyes were a mesmerizing shade of violet. In all, she looked every inch the cousin – heck, the younger sister – of an early 1960’s Elizabeth Taylor.
That was from the neck up.
From the neck down, she had the body of a fully grown African lion. That is, if lions had white-and-gray feathered wings furled up against their backs. She sat on her golden furred haunches, her tufted tail twitching idly as she regarded me.
My brain went into a kind of screen-saver mode for a moment as it skipped a track on the Cassie Van Deene’s Life Gone Crazy DVD, Volume II and Counting. Tried to reconcile what I was seeing with reality.
The woman resembling Elizabeth Taylor’s sister smiled, and replied, with a female voice so deep and powerful, it could have belonged to Darth Vader’s sister.
“I know who you are, Cassie. I am the mother of all riddles, and I’ve been expecting you.”
Chapter Eleven
Getting travel directions from a newspaper’s quirky advice column hadn’t been on my list of ‘expected things to do’ this morning. That said, it was positively routine compared to meeting a mash-up of a creature that looked like the love child of Liz Taylor and the MGM lion.
My voice came out in a high-pitched squeak.
“You…were expecting…me?”
“Indeed I was,” she replied, in that same husky, feminine voice that I’d have immediately cast as a hard-ass Secretary of State, or at least a broadcast news anchor. “You received a summons from Dora, of course. You are quite lucky that, for whatever her reasons, she has taken an interest in your destiny. She is among the most far-seeing of us all.”
“Of us all?” I repeated. Yeah, sorry to sound like the world’s blondest imitation of an echo, but really my brain was just catching up to the reality. I fought to bring my voice back into line. “I meant…I guess I’m not sure what you mean. Who you are, what this is all about.”
A deep-throated chuckle at that.
“Who I am should be evident. I am The Sphinx.” She pronounced those last two words in such a way that I could clearly hear the Capital Letters in it. Neat voice trick, that. “Perhaps you know of me from my history. What you call ‘legend’ today.”
I racked my brain, trying to recall anything I knew. I looked around, saw that the room’s bright lights illuminated a curved ceiling, painted the light blue of a desert sky I’d seen once over Tucson. One wall of the cavernous interior had been laid out as a modern-day office, complete with an executive-sized teak desk, several wide flat-screen monitors, and a keyboard with teacup-sized letter pads. Directly above the desk hung a huge copy of the promo poster from the film Cleopatra, complete with king-and-queen sized signatures from ‘Elizabeth and Richard.’ The remainder of the area had been decorated with stands of date palms, stone obelisks, and golden archways covered in painted hieroglyphs.
What I knew came back to me in a rush.
“You’re the mythical creature from ancient Egypt,” I said, after a moment. “The one who would ask travelers a riddle. If they couldn’t answer it, you’d…eat them.”
“Very good,” came the reply. Her face lit up in a dazzling, white smile. My face must have still shown some fear, for she added, “Don’t worry, I quit the ‘eating people’ thing a while ago. It’s unpopular with the folks I work around these days.”
I still felt a little leery. “So…no ‘riddle’?”
She rubbed her forehead with one furry paw and sighed. “Fine. What time is it when an elephant sits on your Porsche Boxster?”
I blinked, only slightly surprised by now that she knew the make of my car. For all I knew, Dora had faxed the Sphinx my birthdate and shoe size.
“Ah…” I said cautiously, “time…to get a new car?”
“Got it in one. Now that you’re aware of ‘who I am’, you need to know what this is all about.”
With that, the Sphinx got up and paced over to the office desk. Her lion’s tail flicked idly as she touched several of the keys. Three monitors on the wall lit up in high-definition color. A stunning, long-tressed brunette wearing a bejeweled silver evening gown and glittering top hat graced the first screen. The next displayed a trio of women in conservative business attire, looking like three generations of the same family of accountants. They looked vaguely familiar to me.
A small group of people crowded into the final screen. The Sphinx sat on the far left, decked out in a dazzling red, blue, and gold Egyptian collar. On the right sat an even larger creature – a lion-bodied being with the dimensions of a small truck, with similar gray-and-white wings and a stern eagle’s face. Between the two creatures stood…I let out a gasp of surprise as I recognized the heads of four major studios.
“I see you know a few of my friends,” the Sphinx said, nodding towards the closest of the screens. “Allow me to explain. All of the beings who’ve populated your ‘myths from long ago’ still exist in the modern world. It’s only logical, when you think about it – where else are we going to go?”
“I can’t exactly argue with that,” I said honestly.
“But in this day and age, especially with humans being so omnipresent in the world, creatures like me needed a way to blen
d in. In short, we needed day jobs.”
I considered. It did make sense. “So…you have a day job? Here, in Burbank?”
“Of course. I’ve put my riddling skills to good use,” she said smugly, with a satisfied twitch of her tail. “Who do you think writes the questions for all of your television game shows, each and every day?”
“I never really stopped and thought about it before,” I admitted. I nodded towards the first screen. “And who is your companion on the right?”
“The griffin? He’s my executive producer. His name’s Merv.” She smiled, grinning at her own private joke, and then went on to the next screen. “These three ladies here are the Moirai, whom you call ‘The Fates’.”
I thought for a moment. Realized why they looked familiar – I’d seen them, at a distance, at the party at the Thantos’ family ranch.
“They’re the ones who decide how long someone lives or dies,” I said.
“Correct. They’re also the number one life insurance saleswomen in the country. Trust me, they’ve never, ever lost money on a policy.” The Sphinx went on to the final screen. “And this is Cee Cee. You might know her as Circe.”
That name didn’t ring a bell with me. “I’m afraid I don’t.”
“Then do yourself a favor: go pick up a book or something that can help you.” The Sphinx tapped two more keys. The printer on her desk spit out a sheet of paper, which she nudged in my direction. I picked it up as she added, “I’m giving you her address in Las Vegas, and instructions on how to get in without her security manhandling you.”
“Thanks, I think…but why do I need this any of this?”
“Because of the reason Dora sent you to me. You’re having an issue with at least one of the Four Brothers Grimm, aren’t you?”
“How did you know–”
I Married the Third Horseman (Paranormal Romance and Divorce) Page 4
