Blood Engines(48)

 

“After I quit working in the movies.” He laughed. “When I stopped making illusions, I started to see the truth. I thought I was crazy at first, but eventually I got tired of thinking I was crazy. It seemed like insanity should be more…volatile. Mostly I just wandered around, seeing stuff, talking to things. It freaked me out, but it’s not like aliens were telling me to kill politicians or kidnap children, you know? The things I talked to just answered my questions. So I decided I wasn’t crazy.”

 

Marla grunted. Most seers were crazy, by any conventional standard, and B was something both more and less than a seer. “There wasn’t any trauma that might have triggered your powers? Something physical, or emotional, some upheaval?”

 

In her short time with B, Marla had grown used to his natural warmth. His charisma had doubtless helped him in his career as an actor, and his descent into half-magical dereliction had not made him any less sympathetic and approachable. Now he closed up, his face becoming stony, a nearly physical wave of cold radiating from him.

 

“You should read the tabloids, Marla,” Rondeau said. “Is…ah, B, do you mind if I…?”

 

“Whatever,” B said. “The whole world knows.” He walked faster, putting some distance between them, enough that he didn’t have to listen.

 

Marla fell into step beside Rondeau. “Well?”

 

“B had a lover,” Rondeau said. “I forget his name. He wasn’t an actor or anything, just some guy. Anyway, they used to party a lot together, get drunk, go out, do drugs. But one night, in some empty lot, B’s lover overdosed on something and died right there in front of him, puking up blood and everything. That’s when B’s career went to hell. After a pretty serious binge, he went into rehab for a while, and when he came out, people thought his career would get back on track. Not long after that he tried to strangle the director on his new movie, and that was it for his career. That was six or seven years ago, I think.”

 

“How do you know all this?”

 

Rondeau shrugged. “When you’re a kid living on the streets, the sordid lives of celebrities have an unusual allure. And I sometimes read those shitty newspapers I used for bedding.”

 

B slowed down and resumed walking with them. “I didn’t try to strangle the director,” he said, in a resigned tone. “He was hag-ridden. There was this monster clinging to his neck, like a lamprey, and it was sucking out his blood or his mental emanations or something and filling him with poison, making him mean, turning him into a monster himself. Nobody else could see the monster, but after H—that was my lover, I called him H—died, I could see all sorts of shit. H—or his ghost—told me how to kill the monster, so that’s what I did, I soaked my hands in a potion of ditch water and belladonna that enabled me to touch insubstantial things, and I choked the monster to death. Everybody thought I was trying to kill the director. I didn’t care, though. Nobody pressed charges—I think on some level the director knew I’d saved him, but it must have been deep in his subconscious, because he sure screamed when he fired me—and I didn’t want to be an actor anymore anyway.” He shrugged.

 

“So all this started after H died,” Marla said.

 

B nodded.

 

“And you still talk to him? To H?”

 

B shook his head sharply. “Fuck, no. I talk to his ghost, an echo, an afterimage. It’s not the real H.”

 

“Good,” Marla said, relieved. “I just wanted to make sure you understood the difference.” Just as she now had a better understanding of what had happened to him. The shock of seeing his lover die had knocked something loose in B’s head. It happened that way sometimes—when old worlds fell apart, new worlds opened up. But in B’s case, it was possible that something more profound had happened. It wasn’t just his perception that had changed. The way he affected the world changed. Now where Bradley Bowman went, wonders and terrors followed. Maybe.

 

And if “maybe” turned into “definitely,” Marla was sure she could come up with some use for those powers.

 

They walked the rest of the way in silence, past houses crowded shoulder to shoulder, with tiny lawns and neat fences, until they reached a commercial district. “There,” B said, and pointed to a sign that read “East Bay Vivarium.”

 

“Ah,” Marla said. “I see.”

 

They went into a spacious, cluttered store. Glass terrariums on metal shelves lined the dark walls, and the sound of bubbling humidifiers registered faintly in Marla’s hearing. B led them around several freestanding shelves, past tanks full of turtles, lazy snakes, huge scorpions, and lizards.