I crashed thorough the carefully planted underbrush to find a blunt-featured, perfectly respectable middle-aged man writhing on the forest floor.
“It bit me!” he cried. Then he spotted me. “Oh, are you all right, miss? You haven’t been bitten too? I tried to divert the wolf from hurting you.” He glowered over my shoulder at Sansouci.
I was no longer the accused witch Esmeralda outside of the great cathedral of Notre Dame, but the werewolf-threatened young woman Larry Talbot had saved from a werewolf bite in the forest, making himself the werewolf-to-be.
I knelt beside him, another CinSim, yet still wounded in spirit and fact. “I’m fine,” I told him. “You saved me. What’s your name?”
The distant trills above made him gaze up through the canopy of leaves. “What beautiful music I hear. It’s like a lullaby.”
“You mustn’t fall asleep,” I said, shaking him. “Concentrate. What’s your name?”
“Name? Creighton. No, Larry now. Not Creighton. I was walking in the wood to visit the Gypsy camp and saw you. An enormous wolf was threatening to bite you.”
“You stopped it,” I reassured him.
Meanwhile, my mind was on overdrive. Something was wrong here. His name was Creighton? There went my house of cards of a theory. The movie hero, Larry Talbot, had been played by the son of the Hunchback and the Man of a Thousand faces, Lon Chaney. I was now comforting Lon Chaney Jr., CinSim.
I’d now met both father and son CinSims, both famed for playing multiple roles, multiple monster roles. I should be bringing these events to a conclusion, but the scenario and cast were just getting more confused.
And who the hell was the ghastly, ghostly soprano still commanding the upper reaches of the Gehenna Hotel?
*
I had no trouble persuading Sansouci to leave the troubled man in the woods to his own devices.
“What a wimp,” Sansouci declared when we neared the main concourse. “I got ‘bit’ for eternity too and you don’t see me moaning around about it.”
“You’re not the angsty protagonist of a movie classic.”
He snorted derision.
“Scoff all you like, but Lon Chaney Jr. knew what his father knew, that a likable monster under the mask is much more intriguing than an evil being through and through. Cicereau would be more fully rounded if he’d actually regretted having his daughter killed.”
“No sell,” Sansouci said of his boss. “You can handle these schizophrenic CinSim shape-shifters?”
“I’ll have to. Give me the printouts you made for me. Lon Chaney Sr. mistook me for his movie leading lady. Most CinSims are leased in a single role, but this pair were known for metamorphosing. Maybe I can convince Larry Talbot I’m his love interest.”
“You’d do all this for Cicereau?”
“Heck, no.” I snatched the folding papers Sansouci produced from his inner jean jacket pocket. “I’ll do it for getting these helplessly entangled CinSims’ house in order. Whatever’s gone wrong has to do with the actors’ private lives. You’d better leave me to it.”
I stood there and listened after Sansouci left. The voice was still singing, although familiarity bred dismissal. It was becoming just more casino background music. Yet, Larry Talbot had been right. She’d been singing a lullaby while we’d talked in the ersatz woods, Brahms’s famous one, in fact, and it had almost put Larry Talbot to sleep.
Suddenly, I had a plan.
I headed back to the theater area. It was “dark” now, even during daylight, since only two evening shows played there. I knew my way around theaters, and had almost been an indentured attraction here, so I raced down the empty aisles and up the steps at the side of the stage, then into the dark and curtained wings at stage right.