I held my breath, caught up in the family tragedy. Sure, they were all CinSims, so it was like watching ghosts play out some long-dead script. But the drama was true to life.
“I died young, Son,” Lon Chaney admitted, “alone, before age fifty, from cornflakes, of all things, used to make snow on a set. I lost my voice at the end, as Cleva had, as my deaf-mute parents had before their births. A throat hemorrhage silenced me forever, seventeen years after Cleva’s mad attempt at self-destruction.”
“So why is she singing now?” Lon Jr. asked.
They turned to me, as if I were the image of Cleva. I was brunet, as the printout photo of her had been, but my hair was closer to jet-black. She’d looked high-hearted smart in a top hat and a monocle from some forgotten vaudeville or nightclub routine. We hardly resembled each other, but to the CinSims’ eyes, we were the eternal woman, heroine, victim, mother, child, lover, supporter, opponent.
“She wanted Creighton to hear what she had been,” I said to the Phantom. “And,” I said to the Wolf Man, “she wanted to see what you had become.”
“Yet,” the Wolf Man said, “she lived to a riper old age than either of us.”
“But … you’d never heard her sing,” I pointed out. “Now you have.”
The Wolf Man nodded. “The pack sings. It’s part of our heritage.”
“Are you the actor or the role?” I asked.
I gestured at the Phantom. “This is an inspired and impassioned instructor. You have a chance to replay all your roles over and over again, with Cleva as an invisible audience. I don’t think you’ll see or hear her again, except in your CinSim hearts.”
Frowns. The moment had passed. They resumed their roles, utterly alien to each other except in being monsters. Phantom and Wolf Man. Larry Talbot vanished into his woodland arena. The Phantom limped back to the bowels of the theater.
I reported to the head monster in the penthouse soon after.
*
“So you’re saying I leased a pair of CinSims with unresolved relationship issues?” Cicereau demanded. “What is the Immortality Mob pushing these days?”
“Leasing illusory surfaces of human beings is a dodgy business, even in these post–Millennium Revelation days,” I told him.
“And the ghost of the Chaney wife and mother decided my hotel-casino was the place to sing bloody murder about stuff that went down a hundred years ago, when she and Lon Chaney got divorced? Women! They never give up. Why me?”
“Perhaps you own daughter’s haunting created a channel for another woman who felt a trusted man had taken her life, one way or another.”
“I didn’t hire a psychoanalyst-investigator, Street. Out, out, damn Joseph Campbell! You quit the psychobabble and concentrate on being a babe and just guarantee that psycho siren is outta the Gehenna and my hearing for good.”
“Oh, she’s gone, and I will be too. Once you fork over what you owe me.”
He pulled a wad from his pin-striped pants and peeled off Benjamin Franklins, snapping the hundred-dollar bills to the desktop like he was laying out playing cards.
At three thousand, he paused for my reaction.
“I banished one ghost and reunited two CinSims, not to mention tussling with the Hunchback of Notre Dame, the Wolf Man, the Mummy, and the Phantom of the Opera.”
He resumed, slapping down hundreds until he reached five thousand. It made quite a pile.
“Tell me you don’t sing,” he asked with a beady eye on my throat.
“I don’t.”
“Fifty-two Benjamins for the whole deck of cards, covering a maintenance visit if the Chaney boys act up again.”
*
Lon Chaney, the Man of a Thousand Faces and reluctant postmortem “Sr.” to his son Creighton’s studio rechristening as Lon Chaney Jr., had hoped his feats of grotesque disguise proved that “the dwarfed, misshapen beggar of the streets may have the noblest ideals and the capacity for supreme self-sacrifice.”
Cleva Creighton had sacrificed her sublime voice in her tormented fight for the right to use it.