Bridgetown, Issue #1: Arrival (21 page)

Scoble was ever the showman. He capitalized
on this interest by rapid-firing an array of bombastic,
superlative-laced proclamations at a dizzying clip.

"A spectacular tale of drama and
intrigue!"

"A monumental achievement in the manipulation
of light and energy."

"A New Renaissance, an enlightened era of art
Emerges with this work!"

Jesse had to admit, the man knew how to work
a crowd.

Production moved to an old warehouse that was
to be a stand-in for the nefarious factory. Jesse decided he had to
pay some men from the docks to act as security, just to keep out
the curious fence-jumpers who tried to make their way onto the set.
Scoble made sure the press knew about this development, too.

On the sixth day of production, Jesse checked
off the last item on his shot list.

"That's a wrap!" he announced. This was met
with only blank stares. "We're done," he clarified. "We
finished."

Everyone in the cast and crew cheered. Jesse
was sure they had drank together, fought together, and slept
together. He'd always been in the thick of those tangled, knotted
webs of interdependence that emerged backstage. But not this time.
He was apart from these people, these aliens from another world.
Besides, he had a job to do.

Principal photography was complete, and it
would soon be time for Jesse to return to Bridgetown. His stay in
Chicago had been a whirlwind. Ms. Marsh and the other actors were
thanked, congratulated, and dismissed. He promised the
school-dodgers and dock workers who'd been wrangled up that their
movie would soon come to the city, and they would be able to watch
themselves projected on a great big silver screen. Jesse and Scoble
went back to Scoble's place to watch dailies, so he could make sure
he really had everything he needed.

The last of the reel had run through the
projector upstairs before Jesse noticed Scoble was no longer beside
him.

"Mr. Scoble?"

He got up, and wandered the length of the
screening room. The extravagance of its plush sofas and polished
gold railing was just creepy without anyone else around to see it.
Only now did Jesse notice the intricate inlay of the ceiling, done
up in a Spanish motif. There was an opulence to this room that had
been hidden by the dark, It was the one place spared the clutter
that had overtaken the rest of the house. Jesse hadn't thought of
Scoble as a particularly rich man before, but a place like this
didn't come cheap. His three-story was a busy mess, the playground
of an obsessive old man stuffed full with his old toys of the
trade. Scoble seemed to use his house as a storage shed. Scoble
called it a "shop," but in the week since Jesse had arrived, he
hadn't seen any customers. Nor had he spotted price tags on
anything, for that matter.

To hear Scoble tell it, it sounded like this
screening room was regularly populated by a whos-who of Chicago's
elite, drinking and dancing while moving images flickered on the
wall. But now, Jesse began to doubt any of that. He wondered if
Scoble had had any other guests the whole year.

Jesse felt like he was in a lounge for
ghosts.

He flicked off the projector and made his way
down the staircase. At the landing, he spotted the old showman
downstairs, going through a worn brown trunk full of odds and ends.
Scoble picked out a ventriloquist dummy and held him up, a thin
grin coming over his face, as if seeing an old friend for the first
time in years. He set the dummy aside, gently, and pulled out a
length of faded, tied-together flags and a ragged stovetop hat.
Jesse began to feel uncomfortable, like he was spying on him.

"There you are," he said, if only to
alleviate his own unease.

Scoble responded with a bit of a jolt. "Oh,"
he said. "I was just getting this trunk ready for you. To carry the
film back west. Had to clear out a few things."

"I see." Jesse walked down the flight and
joined Scoble on the first floor. He picked up the dummy. Its face
was frozen in a rictus exclamation that seemed pure agony, eyes
slightly crossed. Its hair was matted and had fallen out in clumps,
and the paint on its apple cheeks had long ago worn thin. Perhaps
the most unsettling thing about it was how its flesh had turned a
mottled, jaundiced yellow with smoke exposure and natural decay. It
seemed to Jesse the color a body might turn, after a few weeks
facedown in a bog.

"Good ol' Johnny-boy," Scoble said. He lifted
the doll from Jesse's hands, and placed him at his own side. He
cleared his throat.

"Johnny-boy," Scoble began, addressing the
dummy in a projected, overly-enunciated stage voice. "Why don't you
tell our friend here about your carnival days?"

"I don't wanna tell him nothin'!" the puppet
protested.

"Now, Johnny-boy, if you can't play nice with
our friend here, I'm gonna have to put you back in the box."

"No, sir! Anything but the box! I been in
that box for months! I got to see my girl first! Maybe get me a
whisky and play a hand of—"

"Tell Jesse about the old days!" Scoble
interrupted.

Jesse wasn't sure what to make of this
strange interlude, but the doll seemed to oblige at last with a
cartoonish sigh.

"Back then," the puppet began, "I seen it
all. Bearded ladies, honest-to-goodness elephants, you name it. I
even remember a little boy, back when, who—"

But the puppet didn't get to finish his
story. His jaw fell off, and Scoble kept up the act, emitting a
muffled shriek and making Johnny-boy mime a hyperventilating panic
as the doll peered down, looking for his missing piece. At last,
the showman allowed Johnny-boy to simply pass out from fright,
collapsing into a bundle of cloth and wood, lifeless once more.

"And that," Scoble professed to Jesse, "is
why Johnny-boy doesn't get to be in the show any longer." He
laughed.

"I actually felt sorry for the puppet," Jesse
admitted.

"Funny how that works, isn't it?" Scoble
said, as he gathered the bits of Johnny-boy up and put him aside.
"I long ago realized, when I was just a boy, that people buy into
illusion. We make the unreal more real than reality. More
meaningful, at least, that the mundane that is all around us. We
need fantasy, to make sense of the frailty of the universe."

He turned to Jesse, and took a breath, before
going on. "When I was just a boy in Montana, before the carnivals
started traveling all around, there was a show some of the locals
would put on every summer solstice. The shadows were growing
longer, the woods becoming just a bit more ominous in their
darkness. You could just feel the order of this world turning
upside-down, the spirits coming out to dance. It was as if the
changing of the seasons commanded the carnival to happen whether we
wanted it to or not.

"As a lad, this fascinated me, even if I
couldn't yet put it into words. But I understood, even then, that
illusion was to be my calling. That unreality was my playhouse. So
when I first saw the Kinetoscope, I knew I was witnessing the
greatest magic trick I'd ever seen. Life breathed into
lifelessness. Time captured in a silvery gelatin, preserved to be
put on show wherever and whenever one pleases. Yet, like the best
magic tricks, it was so elegant in its simplicity."

"Where I come from," Jesse said, "People have
forgotten that movies are really magic tricks. They think of them
like theater, or books. Stories, but not magic."

"They're all illusions of one sort or
another," Scoble countered. Then his countenance changed in the dim
light, that gleam once again in his eye.

"Tell me something, Jesse. Where you come
from, has Man yet stepped foot on the surface of the Moon?"

"What?" Jesse was taken off guard by this. He
didn't know how to respond.

Scoble snorted, and turned towards the
stairs. Only now did Jesse notice how hobbled with age his walk
was, how much each step labored on worn-away knees.

"We'll be arriving in Los Angeles in five
minutes," the conductor announced, wiping the sweat at his brow
with a pocket-corner.

Jesse woke from his half-sleep to an arid
blast of warm air forcing its way through the open train window. He
found the heat welcoming, familiar. At his side, his hand rested on
Scoble's brown traveling trunk. Inside it, a projector, and the
fruits of his labor, were safely stashed away. Protected from the
heat and the elements.

His efforts had only begun. He would return
to Black's camp, where he would edit the film together and prepare
its premiere for an audience of Bridgetown residents. They were who
the film was made for. They were the only audience he cared about,
and with any luck, it would be a film that made them very angry.
Angry enough to spur them into action behind a unified cause.

Jesse was counting on that.

The train pulled into the station, marked
with a sign that read "LA GRANDE STATION." Outside the window,
Jesse soaked in the architectural details of the Moorish structure,
especially its great green dome with an ornate weather vane that
pierced the sky. It was a beautiful building. Jesse wondered what
would come of it, and what would one day lead to its inevitable
dismantling.

He stepped off the train into the oppressive
late August heat. He did not seek out a drink or the solace of
shade. Carrying the case with his film in it was just too
nerve-wracking. Even though Scoble had retained the original
negatives as a part of their agreement, he dreaded the thought of
going all the way back to Chicago to obtain new positives.

He found a stagecoach taxi to take him back
to Bridgetown. The ride was uneventful, and with the driver
outside, he could spend the two-hour journey mostly lost in his own
mind. He appreciated not being stuck in a cabin with a chatty
stranger.

The cab dropped him off by the Bridgetown
livery. Jesse gave him a generous tip, and lugged the trunk down
the street towards the saloon.

Inside, he gave a nod to Clayburn, and to old
one-legged Earl McInnis. McInnis never seemed to leave this place,
did he? The Irishman gave Jesse a knowing nod, a kind of salute, as
Jesse made his way towards the back. He passed the tables full of
Lotus Boys and opened the door to the back room. He had been told
to do so in Black's last telegram.

What he found beyond the doorway was a cellar
staircase, planks of bare wood leading down into a dark tunnel. He
looked for a lightswitch, but there was none.

"Jesse?"

Jesse turned, and saw one of the Lotus Boys
was talking to him. He was a bit older than most of the gangsters,
his eyes a clear azure that contrasted with his copper beard.

"Eli," the man said, putting out a hand to
shake.

Jesse set the trunk down and shook it. "Nice
to meet you."

Eli nodded. "You're going to want this," he
said, producing a kerosene lantern.

"Thanks." Jesse took the lantern, and turned
back towards the open cavity leading down to the depths below the
saloon.

"I'll see you on the other side," Eli
said.

Jesse wasn't sure what that meant. He hoisted
up the case with the film in it, and began the walk into the
abyss.

The wooden planks that formed a staircase
creaked with each step. The tunnel walls, simply dug out of the
earth and reinforced with lengths of rebar, were cold and wet. The
lantern gave off just enough light to not trip up and die, but it
was difficult to make out much of anything.

A hollowness came over every sound he made.
It was an echoic quality that reminded him of the insides of
Devil's Peak. But there were no magical blue stalactites down here,
only the cold, wet earth.

At last he reached the base of the tunnel. He
estimated he was thirty or forty feet below street level. The
sounds of gaiety back in the saloon had receded and were barely
audible now.

He held up the lantern to make out where he
was supposed to go next. The wall ahead of him curved and
doubled-back to his right; he proceeded with caution, not wanted to
land a foot in a puddle, or worse. There was a scurrying beneath
him. Reflexively, he glanced down, and saw a rat dart across. He
pressed on.

At the end of the tunnel, he came to a
chamber carved out and walled with plaster. Here, candles were
everywhere, wax dripping down their bone-colored sides. The space
had the hazy quality of a cathedral, and the walls were mostly
bare, save for a few paintings in a style Jesse didn't
recognize—and a bookshelf at the rear.

At the center of the room, Black sat behind a
desk. Jesse was equally startled, and unsurprised, to find him
here.

"How did it go?" Black asked.

"Good."

"You're confident you'll be able to win over
the hearts of Bridgetown?"

"We just need to start the conversation,"
Jesse said. "They'll come to see the truth."

"So when do we get to watch it?"

"I'll start assembling the footage right
away."

"Good."

"What is this place?"

"A convenient way to do business when the
outlands won't suffice," Black said, matter-of-fact. "Nothing more.
Your brother's convinced himself he's exiled me to the wastes. He
has no idea how tenuous his hold over Bridgetown truly is." He took
a breath. "Well then, now that you're here, we can go home."

Black stood up, stretched, and blew out the
candles at his desk. Then he turned to the bookshelf. Jesse was
only half-surprised when Black pulled at its side and it opened on
a hinge, revealing yet another hidden passageway. This one was
tiny, though, and Black had to crouch to get through. He signaled
for Jesse to follow.

On the other side there was a ladder. A shaft
of daylight rained down on them from a grate at street level. Black
began the climb.

"I'm not gonna be able to go up the ladder
and take the trunk," Jesse protested.