I Married the Third Horseman (Paranormal Romance and Divorce) (6 page)

Officially, it was listed on the studio maps
as ‘Sound Stage Macbeth’, which meant you couldn’t even mention the
damned name of the place. See, people in the entertainment biz are
superstitious to a fault. The play
Macbeth
is considered the
unluckiest play in theatre. It’s such bad luck that actors won’t
even say the play’s title aloud. So the name of that specific
studio was like a little mental sign that read, “Keep Out, Here Be
Dragons.”

And Dora was telling me to go right into the
thick of it. I didn’t have a clue as to who the ‘mother of all
riddles’ might be, but I knew that’s where Dora was pointing. She’d
even ended her note with an old showbiz proverb. We don’t say ‘good
luck’ in my field. We say, ‘break a leg’, or ‘knock ‘em dead.’ Or
‘see you on the green.’

I hesitated on the way back to my car.
Returning to Burbank meant heading back towards Los Angeles.
Heading back towards Mitchel. That was enough to make me halt in my
tracks. I forced myself behind the wheel of the car, forced myself
to ignore the part of my brain that was yammering, “What are you
doing?”

Yes, it was wild, it was crazy, it was
possibly stupid, but you know what? After you find out that you
married the living incarnation of Pestilence, that you’d been
sleeping with the being who’d doomed billions of humans from
smallpox or measles or the flu, you find yourself open to a lot of
strange things.

Freeze Frame.

Pan shot across the high desert outside of
Bakersfield. A bit of artistic lens flare, dial down into where a
disheveled but unbowed blonde finishes pumping her car full of
high-octane gasoline. She pays and then pulls out onto the freeway
with a screech of tires on cold asphalt.

She throws the motor open wide with a roar,
kicking up a cloud of go-to-hell dust as she races south like the
devil’s after her.

I was heading back into La-La Land. Whether
in wisdom or foolishness, I didn’t know.

Hang in there with me, therapy buddy. I
really need the support right now.

Because deep down, I wish I knew what the
hell
I was getting myself into.

Here’s a fun trivia question for your next
party game: in September, what’s the average number of days that
the Los Angeles basin gets rain? Any takers? If you picked anything
higher than ‘one’, then I’m afraid you’re picking a number that’s
too high.

Now, anyone want to take a wild guess
which
day the rain decides to fall on?

If you chose ‘the one day that Cassie drives
back into the city’ then you win the dining room set and the
all-expense-paid trip to Fiji.

It really messed traffic up on the freeway.
What should have been a two-hour drive from Bakersfield took more
like four. And that’s not all.

The rare summer-fall rains in the San
Fernando Valley are things feel great at first. That lasts until a
half-hour after they roll out. Then the summer heat, now fortified
with an injection of moisture, turns the entire city of Burbank
into a sticky, gloppy imitation of Houston on a bad hair day.

Speaking of bad hair, the resulting extra
humidity was turning me into a blonde puffball of frizz. Luckily,
as I pulled the Porsche through the studio’s security gate, the
guard managed to control his laughter as he buzzed me through.
Misty raindrops sprinkled like pixie dust on my windshield as I
parked in the lot, as close as I could get to the golf cart
stand.

Like most working studios, this one required
you to leave your car in a lot before entering the sound stage
area. It’s an audio thing. Electric golf carts make almost no
noise, which is a big plus when working in a locale that’s been
wired to pick up sound six ways from Sunday.

I checked out one of the available carts and
zipped off towards the forbidden sound stage at the north end of
the studio lot. I passed through a couple clusters of buildings,
heard the buzz of people and equipment as filming was done. The
whine of a saw or lathe from one of the art departments. Off to one
side, a couple of prop guys hurriedly flung a tarp over an exposed
background wall set.

Even this light patina of noise subsided, as
I pulled to a stop in front of a weather-beaten wooden sign:
SOUND STAGE MACBETH.

My stomach went all crazy, like I’d swallowed
a whole flock of butterflies.

Ridiculous, I know. Part of it could have
been the doom-and-gloom curse that reputedly hung over anything
involving Shakespeare’s ‘Scottish Play.’ But I think the rest of
it…well, what exactly was I going to say to whomever I bumped into
at the sound stage?

Why, hello there…the strange rantings of a
new-age advice columnist directed me to see you, Mister DeMille.
Oh, yes, I’m ready for my close-ups, just don’t tell my husband,
because if he shows up, everyone here is going to have a very nasty
case of whooping cough…

I pressed my fingers to my temples, willed
myself to
calm down
and cut out the ridiculous thoughts now.
A breath, and I got the cart going again. Besides, there probably
wasn’t going to be anyone there, anyway. This whole thing would
turn out to be a wild goose chase, considering how the stage
looked.

The entire building had an air of neglect
hovering about it. As I came up the slope, drawing closer to the
half-dome shaped Quonset hut, I could make out rust-ringed dents in
the corrugated metal side of the building. The view didn’t improve
much as I rounded the back corner and pulled the cart to a stop by
the only entrance I could see. Chips of flaked-off paint littered
the ground next to a simple metal-frame door. I frowned, puzzled,
as I spotted the outline of a much, much larger entrance right next
to it. It looked like a hydraulically-powered roll-up exit, the
kind they used on hangars that stored medium-sized aircraft.

But why in the world would they have
that
out here? There wasn’t an access road – let alone a
runway – out at this end of the lot. The property actually ended at
this point, right where it butted up against the steep slopes of
the San Gabriel Mountains.

I shrugged the mystery off for a later date
as I shut off the cart’s motor and got out. The breeze kicked up a
bit, made the drizzle sting against my skin as I went to open the
metal-framed door.

I paused. No doorknob. I bent to look at the
knob plate, saw something else that puzzled me. Instead of a knob,
someone had etched a picture into the metal. And a pretty wild one
at that. From what I could tell, the etching depicted a muscular
man with a bird’s head, holding a crooked staff and a flail.

The plate glowed green and let out a chime as
I moved my hand close to it. I jerked back, startled, as the door
slid open smoothly, with a hiss of compressed air.

I swallowed, hard, and stepped inside.

I did my best not to flinch as the door
snapped shut behind me.

Warm amber light bathed the inside of a
narrow corridor, lined with glass cases displaying scrolls of
parchment, gold-trimmed headdresses, jewel-encrusted bronze swords,
and photographs of mummy cases, framed against teams of Egyptian
digging crews and Britons wearing the kind of pith helmets you saw
in the old pulp serials.

Definitely, these were some of the
best-looking props I’d seen in a long time.

At the end of the corridor lay the circular
shape of the kind of door used to seal off a bank vault. To my
complete lack of surprise, with a metallic
click
, it swung
open on perfectly oiled steel hinges. A warm breath of air, scented
with a magnificent, rich perfume, beckoned me within.

I had to step high to make it over the
threshold of the vault door. Strong light, much brighter than the
cloud-dimmed skies outside, washed over me, blinding me for a
moment. I squinted, trying to force my eyes to adjust.

“Hello?” I said, and my voice sounded high,
nervous. Probably because it was. “I’m…I’m looking for someone who
can help me.”

The face of a woman swam into focus as I
finished speaking.

Her straight, black hair had the velvety
sheen of a freshly spilled oil slick. It was cropped high off her
forehead, but it hung low around the sides, capped with gold braids
and beads. Her high cheekbones accentuated the slope of her nose,
giving her a timeless, regal look. And her eyes were a mesmerizing
shade of violet. In all, she looked every inch the cousin – heck,
the younger
sister
– of an early 1960’s Elizabeth
Taylor.

That was from the neck up.

From the neck down, she had the body of a
fully grown African lion. That is, if lions had white-and-gray
feathered wings furled up against their backs. She sat on her
golden furred haunches, her tufted tail twitching idly as she
regarded me.

My brain went into a kind of screen-saver
mode for a moment as it skipped a track on the
Cassie Van
Deene’s Life Gone Crazy DVD, Volume II and Counting
. Tried to
reconcile what I was seeing with reality.

The woman resembling Elizabeth Taylor’s
sister smiled, and replied, with a female voice so deep and
powerful, it could have belonged to Darth Vader’s sister.

“I know who you are, Cassie. I am the mother
of all riddles, and I’ve been expecting you.”

Getting travel directions from a newspaper’s
quirky advice column hadn’t been on my list of ‘expected things to
do’ this morning. That said, it was positively routine compared to
meeting a mash-up of a creature that looked like the love child of
Liz Taylor and the MGM lion.

My voice came out in a high-pitched
squeak.

“You…were expecting…
me?
”

“Indeed I was,” she replied, in that same
husky, feminine voice that I’d have immediately cast as a hard-ass
Secretary of State, or at least a broadcast news anchor. “You
received a summons from Dora, of course. You are quite lucky that,
for whatever her reasons, she has taken an interest in your
destiny. She is among the most far-seeing of us all.”

“Of us all?” I repeated. Yeah, sorry to sound
like the world’s blondest imitation of an echo, but really my brain
was just catching up to the reality. I fought to bring my voice
back into line. “I meant…I guess I’m not sure what you mean. Who
you are, what this is all about.”

A deep-throated chuckle at that.

“Who I am should be evident. I am The
Sphinx.” She pronounced those last two words in such a way that I
could clearly hear the Capital Letters in it. Neat voice trick,
that. “Perhaps you know of me from my history. What you call
‘legend’ today.”

I racked my brain, trying to recall anything
I knew. I looked around, saw that the room’s bright lights
illuminated a curved ceiling, painted the light blue of a desert
sky I’d seen once over Tucson. One wall of the cavernous interior
had been laid out as a modern-day office, complete with an
executive-sized teak desk, several wide flat-screen monitors, and a
keyboard with teacup-sized letter pads. Directly above the desk
hung a huge copy of the promo poster from the film
Cleopatra
, complete with king-and-queen sized signatures
from ‘Elizabeth and Richard.’ The remainder of the area had been
decorated with stands of date palms, stone obelisks, and golden
archways covered in painted hieroglyphs.

What I knew came back to me in a rush.

“You’re the mythical creature from ancient
Egypt,” I said, after a moment. “The one who would ask travelers a
riddle. If they couldn’t answer it, you’d…eat them.”

“Very good,” came the reply. Her face lit up
in a dazzling, white smile. My face must have still shown some
fear, for she added, “Don’t worry, I quit the ‘eating people’ thing
a while ago. It’s unpopular with the folks I work around these
days.”