Another Kingdom Read online

  The monster stirred too, grumbling. I looked toward him, then looked toward the girl-rodent. But she was gone. She had vanished.

  There were noises now all around me. The jailer’s door creaking open. The emaciated man in the corner mewling to himself, “No, no!”

  The ogre chained to the opposite wall snuffed and huffed and lumbered to its feet.

  “Oh shit!” I said.

  Footsteps were coming to the cell door. Torchlight coming through the opening. The key in the lock. The hollow thunk.

  “God, forgive me! Help me!” wailed the emaciated man.

  And the monster—the ogre—went wild again. Roaring its high-pitched roar. Rattling its chains, straining to break free.

  Frightened, I leapt up. I tried to press my body through the stone of the wall behind me to get away from the monster. The monster went on shrieking. The emaciated man—the heretic in the corner—started whimpering. “Please, God!” He was in an agony of terror.

  The door chunked open. The ogre roared louder. The heretic cowered and wept. The jailer stood just outside the cell doorway, holding his torch.

  And into the cell came a figure of fear. I knew at once he was an executioner.

  What else could he be? Dressed in a robe of midnight black, his head completely covered by a black mask with holes in it for his mouth and nose and eyes. They were eyes that expressed a brisk professionalism, jovial, contented, and merciless. I could see the same professionalism in his rolling gait and in his bare, blunt, powerful, cruel white hands. Here was a man who was happy in his work and good at it.

  He strolled jauntily into the cell, and two husky guards strode in behind him. The jailer skittered in last, his beaked nose protruding from his cowl, his bug-eyes red with flame.

  The heretic fell to his knees, his hands clasped in front of him. “Mercy! Mercy!” he cried.

  My eyes flashed here and there in confusion and panic. The ogre went on squealing and struggling. For the second time, I saw dust fly up from the rings that anchored its chains to the wall. I thought I saw one of those rings wobble, loosening. But in the unsteady flamelight, with all the din and fear, I couldn’t be sure.

  “Mercy!” the heretic cried again.

  The executioner laughed—not cruelly, I thought, but just because the prisoner’s pleas struck him as amusingly predictable, like a child’s whining at bedtime.

  “You might want to save your screaming, heretic,” he said. “You’ll have plenty to scream about soon enough. Take him.”

  This last was to the guards. They moved forward at once and seized hold of the emaciated man. He howled and struggled wildly. Threw himself on the floor, clawing the dirt, trying to hold on. But the guards were skilled and swift. They pushed quickly past his flailing limbs. Detached his bonds from the wall. Then, holding a length of chain like a leash, one of them dragged the prisoner, kicking and screaming, across the floor and out of the cell. The whole operation took less than a minute, with the ogre roaring all the while.

  The executioner glanced at me where I stood crouched and gaping against the wall. It was a professional glance, I thought, assessing me as his next project. It made my heart go hollow.

  “Well,” he said to me then with a friendly wave, “have a pleasant evening.”

  And he pivoted on his heel and strode out as jauntily as he’d come.

  The jailer lingered only another moment to harass the monster with a few last passes of his torch. His sadistic giggles were drowned by the ogre’s frenzied cries.

  “Stop it, you idiot!” I shouted.

  Because this time, as the ogre struggled, I was certain I saw the ring in the wall start to wiggle out of its moorings.

  The jailer gave another nasty laugh and walked out, shutting the door behind him.

  Again, there was darkness. And again, the ogre raved and strained, and his chains rattled. I cowered against the wall, waiting for him to break free, to leap across the shadows and rip my head off with a single bite of those massive jaws. Christ, would I even see him coming?

  But again, slowly, he settled down. The roaring subsided. He sank to the floor once more and began to snore.

  ABOUT TWENTY MINUTES later, the shrieking started.

  I’d heard the expression before: My blood ran cold. But I’d never experienced it, not like this.

  Those shrieks—that uncanny sound: it was not like any other sound I had ever heard, ever. It made my breath short. It made my balls tighten. And yes, it made my blood feel icy in my veins.

  Somewhere deep in the belly of this nightmare place, the heretic was being tortured. That jolly, professional executioner was doing unimaginable things to him with expert skill. I knew this because the victim’s cries of agony were coming through I don’t know how many levels of thick stone and reaching me where I was as loud as if the man were right beside me.

  “Jesus! Jesus!” I whispered. My flesh was all bumps and tremors. It wasn’t as if I could feel the pain, but I remembered the executioner’s glance, and I could feel my own vulnerability to pain, how easily what was being done to the heretic could be done to me.

  Even the ogre stirred and muttered uneasily in his sleep.

  The shrieking went on and on and on and unbelievably on, a kind of torture in itself, a mental battering. You would have thought the poor bastard would lose his voice. You would have thought he would lose consciousness. You would have thought he would die—just, for God’s sake, die. But the executioner must have known every trick, every method to make the man suffer and yet keep him alive.

  Assaulted by that noise, I sank onto the floor again. I curled my body up and pressed my hands to my ears to try to block it out. It didn’t help at all. There was no blocking out those wails of agony. They were in my mind now, rising out of the blackest part of my imagination. On and on and on. They shrouded me, an acid shroud that ate away at whatever courage I had, whatever hope I had, whatever faith I had. What was happening to me? How had I gotten here? Was I going to die here? Like this? Like him? Tortured? Executed? Or ripped to pieces by a beast who couldn’t even exist? What was this place? Was I crazy? Or was I crazy before, back in LA? Was my real life some sort of dream? Was this hell reality?

  I curled on the floor, holding my ears, squeezing my eyes shut. The heretic’s shrieks went on and on and on.

  A tear ran down my cheek and fell into the dust on the dungeon floor.

  WHAT HAPPENED NEXT happened with shocking quickness. I must have slept again. It was a small mercy anyway. Suddenly, the cell door came crashing in. Suddenly, the ogre was roaring again. Suddenly, there were men in the cell: two guards and that other man, the black-bearded man in the red vest with the gold dragon on it, the man who had struck me down. Suddenly, the jailer was back with his torch held high and his hideous warty face cracked open in a grin.

  Groggy, confused, I was on my feet. The guards came at me and grabbed me. Freed me from the chains in the wall and wrenched my arms behind me. The man in the dragon vest stood directly in front of me, his eyes on mine, mine held by his. He gripped his sword in his hand, and I knew if I struggled he’d strike me down on the spot. So I just stood there while the guards manacled my wrists behind my back.

  Over the roars of the ogre, over the rattling of his chains, the man in the dragon vest said in a voice of perfect calm, “It’s time for your trial, Lively.”

  Then the guards grabbed my arms. The man in the dragon vest strolled out of the cell. The guards hustled me after him. I was forced across the threshold …

  And the next thing I knew, I was standing in the stairwell at Global Pictures, the world swirling around me.

  I REELED WHERE I STOOD. THE STAIRWELL SEEMED TO tilt and spin. I clutched my chest, swallowing hard, fighting down the urge to vomit.

  I staggered toward the edge of the steps. I reached out blindly for the wooden banister. Felt it. Grabbed it. Held on with both hands to keep from falling over.

  It took me a second or two to catch my breath, to get my bea
rings. Then my eyes ranged around the space.

  Was it possible? It was! The nightmare, the hallucination, whatever it had been—it was over!

  Gripping the banister, I bent double. I let out a gasp of relief. “What. Just. Happened?” I said—and for a moment, I was giddy with joy. I laughed out loud.

  But then, the moment after that, I thought: No, really. What just happened? I lifted my head. My vision was blurred with emotion. What the hell just happened?

  The only answer I could come up with was that there had to be something wrong with me, wrong with my brain, a tumor or something. Because that—what just happened—that was so insane, and so insanely real, too. The whole thing: the dead woman on the floor and the dungeon and the ogre and the shrieking heretic—it hadn’t been like a dream at all. It was like I was there. Like it was really happening. That couldn’t be normal. Could it? That was brain tumor stuff, for sure.

  Still, it was over. For now, at least. That was something anyway. Because so help me, that ogre was about to pull those chains out of the wall, I was sure of it.

  I laughed again, just once. “Ogre,” I muttered. Listen to me. Talking like there were ogres. Like there could really be ogres outside of a fairy tale or a movie or something.

  Still, I couldn’t believe how real it had all seemed.

  I started down the stairs. I kept a good, firm hold on the banister. My legs felt weak and unsteady. But with every step, the dizziness and nausea were receding. By the time I reached the bottom, I could feel the strength returning to my limbs.

  I pushed through the door, out onto the ground floor of the Edison Building. There, at the end of the hall, were the glass doors to the lot outside. The blessed California sun was shining through them. The blessed blue California sky was visible above the rounded roofs of the sound stages.

  I quickly made my way to the doors. I pushed out and took in a great big beautiful breath of the autumn air. How fresh it was! How free! Blowing away the stench of the dungeon, the shit and despair, erasing the memory of the manacles on my wrists, dispersing the suffocating fog of helplessness, confusion, and terror that had surrounded me.

  I hurried across the lot to my car, trying to gather my thoughts, trying to make some sense of what had happened. I would have to go to the doctor, I figured, get some tests, maybe a brain scan. A thing like this—it couldn’t be normal, could it? A hallucination that realistic—it was cause to worry, wasn’t it?

  It was. I knew it was. And yet, with every step, the entire bizarre experience seemed to be receding into a distant unreality. I glanced at my watch. It didn’t seem as if any time had passed from the moment I stepped into that tower room where the dead woman lay to the moment I returned to the stairwell. The whole nightmare had come and gone in an instant. So, whatever had caused it, how bad could it really be?

  By the time my battered Nissan came into view in its parking space, I was beginning to talk myself out of even my lingering anxieties. Maybe this little sword-and-sorcery fantasy of mine had just been some sort of harmless brain glitch, some little frizz of neural static. I was never a big drug guy, but I’d smoked some weed from time to time. The last time was more than a year ago but who knows? Maybe the dope had backed up on me somehow, caused a flash of dendritic weirdness, a sort of mental belch.

  I continued across the studio lot. I saw people stare at me as I went by. I saw the way they frowned and narrowed their eyes. But I didn’t really notice it. I didn’t notice anything. I was too lost in my own thoughts.

  I reached my car. I pulled the door open. I sank into the driver’s seat. Started the engine. Glanced up into the rearview mirror to check for traffic behind me.

  And I saw myself.

  The shock of it was like a blow to the chest. It seemed to stop my heart and knock the breath right out of me. I stared at my reflection in the rearview mirror, my eyes wide and white and full of horror.

  The side of my face was smeared with dried blood. On my forehead was the purple knot with split skin running across it—the wound I had felt with my fingers in the dungeon—the wound I had gotten when the man in the dragon vest had struck me with the flat of his sword and knocked me senseless.

  It was there. The wound. It was real.

  I looked at my hands. They were covered in dust. There were faint blue bruises around my wrists where the manacles had been.

  I looked up into the mirror again, my mouth open. The blood. The wound. They were real. It was all real. The dead woman, the dungeon, the ogre roaring in his chains.

  It had really happened.

  As my mind raced, I heard a whispered word break from my lips: “Galiana.”

  I DROVE UNSTEADILY back toward NoHo. I was fighting panic now. My thoughts were going in circles, trying to make sense of something that just did not make sense. I kept looking at my reflection in the rearview mirror, hoping the wound and the blood would be gone, gone like the dungeon and all the rest, another hallucination.

  But they were still there, always still there. And now that I knew they were there, my head began to throb and ache again. I began to feel weak and dizzy—maybe from the blow, maybe just from the shock and confusion.

  I parked my jalopy in the garage under my apartment building, but I didn’t go up to my apartment. I didn’t want to be alone there, staring into the bathroom mirror, desperately trying to understand what could not be understood.

  Instead, I hurried back to Hitchcock’s. And now I did notice the faces of the people who looked at me, the way they started and stared when I staggered past them on the sidewalk. All I could think was that they didn’t know the half of it. For all they knew, I could have gotten this wound falling against the curb or walking into a door. What if I told them how it had really happened?

  It was quiet at Hitchcock’s, the hour between breakfast and lunch. There was only a handful of stubble-chinned writer types sitting behind their laptops at the sidewalk tables. I scanned their faces. There was no one I knew. None of them even looked up from their work as I stumbled past them to the door.

  I pushed inside the cafe. I saw at once my usual table was empty. All of my friends had gone off to work or whatever it was they did all day. There were just a couple of yoga class girls having coffee in one corner, their rolled-up mats leaning against the wall. An out-of-work actor reading a paperback behind the bar. A protest of some kind was on the news on TV, people shouting, raising their fists, the volume low. It was quiet here, very quiet.

  My heart sank. No friends, no one to turn to, no one to help me.

  Then Schuyler Cohen shot out of the kitchen like a cannonball.

  She looked enormous as always, stuffed into her black T-shirt, and angry as always, with her red hair spiking off her head like a flame. She was carrying a plate with a sandwich on it.

  She saw me and the plate dropped from her fingers and shattered on the floor.

  SHE PRACTICALLY CARRIED me to her car, a colorless old Ford of some sort. Plunked me into the passenger seat. And drove me back to her house—which was really Jane Janeway’s house—cursing at me the whole time. Because she didn’t like men but she liked me but she didn’t like me because she liked Jane who didn’t like her, or not in that way, and she didn’t think it was fair the way men got women to take care of them but something in me brought that out in her which a lot of times actually made me uncomfortable because it annoyed her so much but right at the moment I was very grateful for it. It was complicated.

  “What did you do to yourself, you stupid asshole?” she said, glancing from the road to me. “Did you get into some macho ape fight? You did, didn’t you? If you did, so help me, I will fuck you up, you understand me? You will rue the day, Austin, I’m serious.”

  This, from Schuyler, was tender loving care. I leaned against the passenger window, weak and sick, letting the warmth of her affection wash over me.

  It was a lot of affection, twenty minutes of insults and obscenities. Jane’s house was in Los Feliz, near Griffith Park: a beauti
ful Spanish Colonial manse with yellow walls and a red tiled roof and all sorts of towers and chimneys rising into the branches of the surrounding oaks. The house belonged to Alexis Merriwether really, her movie star. It was one of Alexis’s smaller properties around town. She let Jane live there so to make sure she was available twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

  Schuyler parked in the driveway. I got out of the car, but she rushed around to grab hold of me as if I were about to collapse.

  “I can walk,” I said.

  “Shut up.” She gripped me hard, holding me upright as we went together toward the house.

  I was glad she did. Between the head wound and the insanity of it all, I really was pretty sick and dizzy by now. I drew strength and comfort from leaning against the generous feminine softness of her. She knew it too—she pressed me tightly against one enormous breast—though if I’d said it out loud she would’ve beaten me senseless.

  “Jane!” she bellowed as she pushed through the door and hauled me in with her. Between this and being dragged around the dungeons of Galiana by prison guards, I felt I hadn’t taken two steps on my own all day.

  We came into a hallway decked with colorful Spanish mosaics and paved with elegant Spanish tiles.

  “Jane!”

  Whenever she wasn’t picking up Alexis Merriwether’s dry cleaning or shopping for her furniture or accompanying her from place to place or listening to her complain or helping her pick out her wardrobe, Jane was often home during the day, working on her computer, making Alexis’s appointments, answering her email, and arranging her travel. I got the impression Alexis had two lives: the glamorous movie-star life she lived, and the life of everyday drudgery that Jane lived for her.

  Jane came out of her home office into the front hall and saw me in Schuyler’s arms, a wounded warrior carried off the field. She was wearing one of her shapeless sweatshirts and track pants—to hide her loveliness from her employer even now when she was nowhere near. And yet the look on her face was so full of compassion, so full of the feminine tenderness Schuyler felt but couldn’t show, that it pierced through even my panic and confusion, and I saw that mousey Jane was really beautiful. For the first time I wondered, down deep, only just above the level of panicking consciousness: What would it be like to actually earn the kind of devotion from her that her movie-star boss merely paid for?