The Grin of the Dark

'Welcome to California,' she says and holds out a slim hand. Her handshake is warm and firm, but her skin isn't quite so young and smooth as it appeared from a distance. Eventually she lets go and says 'Pull your bags?'

A black traveller flashes me the whitest grin I've ever seen. 'Take the offer, man.'

'I've just got the one. I'll be fine.'

Both women look secretly amused. My driver shrugs and leads the way out. It's close to midnight, though not inside my head, but beyond the automatic doors December feels like summer. Taxis raise a primitive fanfare to hail my guide. She holds a lift open while my suitcase and I stumble in. 'Feel like coming home?' she says.

I strive to grasp what she's asking. 'Should it?'

'For a lot of movie people it does. This is where it all began.'

That's an excessively simplified view of film history, but I mightn't argue even if I weren't so tired. 'I don't make films, I write about them.'

The lift halts two floors up the car park, and she ushers me to a red Lexus. 'Even our kind?' she seems eager to know.

'If it helps with my research, why not?'

I dump my suitcase in the boot, and she slams the lid. I don't know if my answer prompts her to say 'Sit up front with me.'

I don't want to nod off against her. As I strap myself in, having slung my jacket onto the back seat, I say 'Please don't be offended if I drift off.'

While she eases the car down a ramp she rests a hand on my thigh. 'Need any drugs? There's plenty at the house.'

'I should think I'll be away as soon as I fall into bed. It's not worth losing my sleep.'

She glances at me as she halts at a pay booth. 'What isn't?'

I struggle to reach the wad of dollars in my jacket, but she has already paid the attendant. When the Lexus moves into the traffic she turns her head to me again until I answer. 'Just some rubbish on the Internet,' I say wearily. 'Someone trying to destroy my reputation that won't even give their name.'

'They're out there.'

This jerks my eyes open. I thought I closed them only for a moment, but we were passing a horde of dormant airliners, whereas now we're far along a wide street of houses that crouch behind palm trees. The pavements are broad enough to accommodate a platoon on the march and utterly deserted. 'Who are?' I blurt.

'Monsters from the depths, we call them.' I'm resisting an impression that the trees have increased their resemblance to undersea growths, especially in the way their leaves appear to undulate, by the time she adds 'It's like the net dredges them up. We've had your kind of trouble with them.'

'I'm sorry to hear it.'

'They were saying some of our performers are under age. You'll know how much time you have to pee away dealing with them.'

I wouldn't have said the film company's troubles were too similar to mine, but her fingertips on my inner thigh seem to be suggesting the reverse. Then they're gone, and we're speeding past illuminated signs that dwarf palm trees scaly with neon. 'Do you know who they are?' I ask mostly in an attempt to stay awake.

'Could be somebody who can't stand sex or maybe a rival. Me, though, I think it's someone crazier.'

'Someone like my problem, then.'

'They're all connected, these fools. It's the Internet,' my driver says and laughs. 'I don't mean they're in touch, not all of them. I mean it turns them into monsters.'

'You don't think they already are.'

'Some of them, sure. But most of them, because they can say anything they like and they're not afraid anyone will find out who they are, it's like they're speaking direct from their subconscious. It lets them be everything they'd want to hide from people, maybe even from themselves.'

'You sound as if you'd be in favour of censorship.'

'I'm not,' she says and looks insulted. 'It never works. You can't suppress stuff. It only comes back worse.'

I rest my eyes and my brain for a moment, until a shiver restores me to consciousness. The air-conditioning has overwhelmed me, but I could imagine that the cold is reaching out of the dark that surrounds the car. The headlamp beams are drawing a portion of the blackness towards us, and it takes me an effort to realise it's the surface of the road. 'Where are we?' I gasp.

'Not much further.'

I assume that means we're almost at our destination, not barely on our way. From the dashboard clock I gather we've been driving for more than an hour. The edges of the beams catch rocks and dusty cacti beside the unfenced road. The uniform hum of the wheels and the monotonous unrolling of the road are more effective than any number of sleeping pills, but do I glimpse an illuminated tent across the desert? It could have been a kind of church, even if dancers inside it were casting gigantic spindly shadows on the canvas. I'm trying to decide whether it was a dream, unless I dream that too, when my driver says 'Here we are.'

She withdraws her hand before I can be absolutely certain that she laid her fingers on my crotch. The car is turning left at a sizeable rock carved with the word LIMESTONES. In a moment I see why: at the end of a concrete driveway fenced with spiky cacti as tall as guards, an elongated single-storey house is built of the material. The headlamp beams glare out of a long window curtained by a white blind as the car veers into an open space that could hold about a dozen vehicles. The house raises the door of a garage and closes it behind us with no sound I can hear. As I climb none too steadily out of the car I feel as if I'm still travelling. 'Ready for bed?' says my driver.

'Ready to get my head down,' I say, which seems less than ideally phrased.

She retrieves my case and wheels it to a door into the rest of the house. A corridor shaggily plastered in white and paved with large grey stone tiles leads past four doors to an extensive lobby. My escort opens the first door on the left and turns up the concealed lighting to an intimate glow. 'Everything you need should be in here,' she says and leaves the case at the foot of the lightly clothed double bed. 'Sleep as long as you like.'

'I shouldn't say hello to Mr Hart, should I? I expect he'll be asleep.'

She halts in the doorway with her back to me. 'Mr Hart.'

The sudden flatness of her voice makes me feel as if I'm asking for the late Orville. 'Willie Hart,' I say. 'The film director.'

She turns her head and then the whole of her front view towards me. 'I thought you were a movie researcher.'

'I am. What do you mean?'

'Where did you get your information?'

'From the online database. He's the grandson of Orville Hart.' When she gazes at me I insist 'He is. I've had emails from him.'

'You didn't read it right.'

'What?' It doesn't help that she has decided to be amused. 'I'm not surprised, the way he writes.'

'Not the emails.' Her amusement wavers and returns, if more wryly. 'I'm sorry if you don't like my style,' she says.

I feel as if the room has quivered like an image on a monitor, but it must be my stance that has. 'You're...'

She gazes at me to be sure I've finished, and then she plants a hand on her left breast. 'Wilhelmina,' she admits. 'I never liked the name.'

TWENTY-SEVEN - SIRENS

I have the impression that faces are moving over me, and when I leave the dream behind I'm tied up. I can't move a limb. The sight of pudgy pallid faces crawling over one another clings to my mind as my eyes bulge open and I bare my teeth, which doesn't help me to utter a sound. I'm tangled in a nylon sheet and clawing at the one beneath me on the double bed. All this would be more reassuring if I weren't adorned with an erection. Once it subsides beneath the weight of my dismay with the nightmare, I fling off the clammy sheet and drain the glass of water that I can't recall pouring. Also on the bedside table is my watch, showing ten past eleven for a moment before the digits grow identical.