Maggie took a swallow, and then reached down into her tapestry bag, rummaged around for a bit, and came out with something.
“This was us,” she said. “Taken on the set.”
She handed over a plastic sleeve containing a 4×6 color photo that had obviously been around a while before someone decided it was worth protecting with the sleeve. In the shot, a group of about twenty beautiful young people smiled into the camera. They were wearing costumes from the early seventies. Okay, the photo was taken in 1971, but they were still costumes—Hollywood’s idea of what flower children looked like. Flower children, and a couple of Hell’s Angels who looked as young and innocent as the pseudohippies. All of them a lot cleaner than their real-life counterparts probably managed to be, and with hair so perfect you knew a stylist with a brush and a big can of hairspray lurked just out of the frame. The women, all sporting long, pre-Raphaelite hair, wore granny gowns, Indian-print dresses, fringed or beaded halter tops over artfully frayed jeans. The men’s tresses were almost as long—some less obviously wigs than others—and most wore beards or mustaches and flowered shirts or tie-dyed T-shirts in rainbow colors.
I could see the younger Maggie, near the back of the group. The QB—Tammy, as she was then—near the center, draped artfully on the shoulder of one of the most attractive young men. All the men seemed to be standing closer to her than they had to. I could see why. She had a glow—that’s the only way to describe her.
And off at one side, Nate, looking as if he’d walked onto the set from another movie, or maybe out of a bad high school yearbook picture. Tall, skinny, with thick glasses, wearing a badly fitting suit. Oddly enough, he looked less ridiculous than most of the men in the picture. Or at least less painfully dated. But he certainly didn’t look as if he fit in, or expected to. The photographer had probably told them all to move closer together for the camera, and the men around Tammy had done so eagerly, and Nate had sidled perhaps an inch closer before the shutter immortalized him, standing awkwardly on the periphery, the perpetual outsider.
Which was usually how he looked today, even after thirty years. The badly fitting suit was visibly more expensive, but otherwise nothing much had changed. In the photo, he looked almost like a time traveler from the present. Had he been ahead of his time, or had he simply found, early on, a kind of anti-style that endured better than fashion? I recalled looking in my high school yearbook recently, and noticing, to my surprise, that from a distance of nearly two decades, the cool people didn’t look nearly as cool anymore. The fashionable clothes and trendy hairstyles hadn’t worn well. And all the rest of us, the little people who’d despaired of ever being that cool—we looked rather normal. Time, the great leveler.
I wondered if I’d recognize any of those beautiful young actors if I saw them today. Apart from Maggie and the QB, of course. Probably not. Thirty years can do a lot to a person. Any one of them could be walking around, pretending to be nothing more than an aging Porfiria fan.
And Maggie was right. The QB looked like Porfiria. Not the aging Porfiria of the TV show, but the young, vibrant, earthy Porfiria of Ichabod Dilley’s drawings.
“Acid Dreams?” Maggie said. “Acid something. Acid Visions; that was it. Acid Visions. God, what a stinker. I haven’t seen it in ages. Not that I usually sit around watching my own movies, but I notice when they’re on TV, and it’s been years since I saw a trace of that one.”
“Check the dealers’ room,” I said. “I’ll bet anything one of the dealers has got a copy, even if it’s only a bad quality bootleg tape.”
“I said I hadn’t seen it, not that I wanted to,” she said, with a laugh. “But maybe I should go and buy up all the copies they have. Protect my reputation as a serious actress.”
“You’d go broke buying up all the copies,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said, gulping the last of her iced tea. “If anyone gives me a hard time, I usually just tell them that I did my best, and it paid the rent that week. And besides—what the hell?”
A sudden shower of mixed nuts and pretzels rattled down on our heads, and we both looked up to see that a monkey perched above our table had learned how to open the childproof lid of a snack jar.
“And on that note, I think I’ll leave before the gathering primates descend,” Maggie said, laughing as she tossed her head to shake the pretzels out of her mane. “Gotta run anyway; another panel.”
She ran off, leaving more money on the table than necessary to cover her share of the tab. Since I could see monkeys traveling from the far corners of the bar to hover over our table, I decided she had the right idea. I added enough cash to the tip to make sure the bartender remembered us both fondly. As I stood up, the weight of the little tape recorder in my pocket reminded me that I still didn’t know why Maggie was running around the convention telling people to prepare to die. And for that matter, now I had another question—why had she brought that particular photo to the convention? Was it only nostalgia? I sighed, brushed a few clinging peanuts out of my hair and reached the exit just as the first fight broke out among the swarming monkeys.
Chapter 33
Once I stepped out into the lobby, I found myself wondering if I should even bother going back to the dealers’ room. It was probably still deserted, since any fans not attending panels were still milling about the lobby and the hallway, trading rumors, and watching the press.
I went over myself to peer out the front windows of the hotel.
“God, there are more of them,” I muttered.
“Yeah,” said an Amazon security guard standing next to me. “And it’s getting to be a real pain, keeping them out.”
I glanced around the lobby. Yes, unless they had donned Porfirian disguise, the press were all outside, having grown tired of interviewing the desk clerks and photographing the wildlife. They hadn’t gotten into the convention proper. My respect for the Amazon security guards increased exponentially.
“My lord wizard! Can you not dispel the rabble infesting my courtyard?” another Amazon trilled, in the high, affected voice fans usually used when mimicking the QB. The words sounded vaguely familiar, so I assumed they must be a quote from an episode I’d seen.
“They are the envoys of a wise and ancient people,” a nearby Michael clone intoned. “We must approach them with subtlety and discretion.”
I recognized this as one of Michael’s lines from a recent show. A line that, as usual, provoked gales of laughter, not because it was particularly funny in and of itself, but because on the show, after Michael said it to Walker in his most solemn voice, they had simultaneously whirled and punched the two envoys in the jaw. Fortunately the Michael clone omitted the fisticuffs from his rendition.
A thought struck me. I fished out the tape recorder, turned the sound down, queued up the scrap of dialogue in Maggie’s voice, turned the volume back up, and stuck it out in the middle of the group of Amazon guards.
“Porfiria trivia quiz,” I said. “Identify this.”
I played them the snippet, the one where Maggie could be heard saying, “Prepare to die, you—whoops!”
“The Duchess, of course,” one said. “Maggie West.”