Siren Queen(24)

I stumbled out of the office with a terrible ringing in my ears, and every step I took I knew that I had done wrong. Somewhere across the city, my sister was crying, though she didn’t know why. The excision and graft was so brutally quick and thorough it had made ghosts of us. The way we were was dead and gone. Now there was only Luli Wei and her sister, an anonymous girl on Hungarian Hill.

Janet gave me a load of contracts to fill out. It didn’t matter what they said, because Wolfe and I had done the song and dance, kiss and christening. It was done, and I was Luli Wei.

I was going to be a star.





ACT TWO





I


I got lost my very first day.

Cars were for queens, and so on the day I was scheduled to move into the dorms on Wolfe Studios, I did it by bus, carrying four stuffed shopping bags. The twine handles cut into my fingers, but those bags contained everything I owned, from dresses to shoes to jewelry. I had left nothing at home but my family.

The metal wolves at the gate gave me a cursory sniff before ignoring me, and the guard behind them did much the same. Then I was in Wolfe’s own country, and even the noise of the street and the smell of dust and hot asphalt behind me was faded into insignificance.

The information desk was closed, and the entire studio had a strangely hushed sound as I walked deeper. I knew that there was a small town’s worth of people working within these walls, but I couldn’t see them or hear them. Even as I walked, a strange sleepiness fell over me, and my shoes grew tighter and my bags heavier.

I woke up when a blue Packard raced by, nearly hitting me, and I looked up just in time to see a girl’s pale face pressed against the glass, distorted and strange. That woke me up, and taking a firmer grip on my bags, I kept walking.

I’ve heard that John Everest built his studio like a wheel. His own tower took the center and the lots, the dorms, production, editing, props, and costumes all spread around him like spokes, turning to grow his power. It seemed to me that there was no such organization at Wolfe Studios. I passed by closed lots as big as warehouses, an unmanned commissary that promised sandwiches and lemonade, and dust and dust and dust.

I hopefully followed a trio of girls all dressed in green velvet, but they disappeared into one of the lots, the steel door closing behind them with a permanent click. I turned around to backtrack, but then I was nearly swept off my feet by a crowd of people in togas and tunics leaving another set. Sword-and-sandal epics were big that year, and the crowd pulled me along and then spat me out by an artificial pond bordered by trees I knew couldn’t grow in Los Angeles. They were too tall, their green leaves too plump with water.

“You’re not supposed to be here any more than I am,” I said to one, but yet, here we were.

I started to turn from the water, but then a splash rang out. Something had tumbled in on the far side, and I froze, my heart beating faster as I scanned the ripples. I didn’t know how to swim—no child on my street did—but I could lower my hand, perhaps, or a branch?

For a moment, I thought that the water had played a trick on me, but then the glassy surface broke over a long and sinuous curve, something rising like an enormous smooth stone before sinking down again.

I saw the curve hump through the water twice more, and then, to my shock, a face pushed up out of the depths just a few yards from where I stood. I caught an impression of dark hair tangled with glass and trash, a dark round eye, and a mouth that opened like a wound to reveal teeth, so many teeth and too many teeth. It was something, I realized, that had been thrown away, dropped long ago and never picked up again. Then the water was as smooth as a mirror again, but I could see a dark shadow in it, swimming towards me, hungry and strange.

Underneath my sweat, I was icy cold, and I backed away from the pond. I let the trees close around their secret again, and as soon as I could, I turned on my heel and ran. I didn’t know what lived in that pond, whether it was a drowned ghost that refused to leave or some pet of Oberlin Wolfe’s, but I didn’t want to find out. Didn’t want to see that round eye or those teeth again.

Somehow, my mad dash away from the thing that lived in the pond had taken me right where I needed to be. I learned later that I wasn’t the only one who had problems getting to the dorms, and though that was the worst it ever was for me, there were still nights when the turquoise doors and pale stone were obscured by smoke and dust, leaving me to sit still and stay quiet until the world chose to right itself again.

I was given an uninterested glance and a key by the matron, and told to avoid the elevator, because it didn’t really work. I climbed up four stories to my room, and when I closed the door behind me, I felt a brief and vicious stab of triumph.

This place and this moment were mine, no matter what else happened. I had come to Wolfe Studios with no patron and no strength but my own. This terrible little room with the peeling linoleum was mine, from the fan that gently shifted the heat to the niche in the wall that held a forgotten saint, to the drugged and bandaged white girl sleeping on the couch. This studio which would try to devour me in a dozen different ways was mine, from the wolves to the pond I would never be able to find again, to the dust that scourged the paint from the signs.

It was all mine, and as strange as it was, as dangerous and as odd, that victory seized me and never let me go.





II


Eventually, hours after sunset, after I had arranged my few things in the dresser of my tiny bedroom and then rearranged them again to make it look as if I had more, the girl on the couch stirred. She was the suite’s only other occupant, taking the room across from mine. She moved as if she were under water, but she leaned in my door and asked me if I wanted coffee. Her voice was deep and hoarse from her sleep, accented with strange stops.