Free Shuteye for the Timebroker by Paul di Filippo Page A

enclosure.
    “Wow,” Landisberg finally said. “What’s this all about, Budd?”
    Reluctantly, Billy explained.
    Landisberg gradually recovered his normal aplomb, until once again he seemed in control of the situation. He took Billy’s hand and shook it. “This place is freakier than Hollywood! Well, let me be the first to congratulate you, Budd. I’m sure it’ll be a happy marriage. But let’s get going. You’re needed on the set.”
    The two departed from the clearing. The director seemed once more mentally immersed in the technicalities of his project, as if he had never seen the startling sight in the hidden dell.
    But Billy observed the strange and covetous glance Landisberg cast back over his shoulder as they left.
     
    * * *
     
    Sitting once more on the stump in his clearing, Billy breathed deeply, then coughed at the obscene odor he had inhaled. Damn that Freddie Cordovan, he thought. When was he going to keep his promises?
    It was now June. The Landisberg film company had been shooting for over a month, and the town still had not received its promised rewards from the state. Middenheap Mile was unchanged, a long stretch of rutted clay. More disturbingly, the beached whale was an inescapable rotting presence on the town’s shore. The smell was now so inextricably intertwined with the presence of the movie stars that everyone in the town was calling it “the Landisberg aroma.”
    Billy shifted uneasily on his uneven seat. June sunlight filtered down at an angle through the full canopy of leafy trees that surrounded his future bride. His frequent visits to his prospective mate had once been his only source of pleasure, amid the pressures of keeping both the townspeople and Luke Landisberg happy. Now, however, even these visits had become something to worry about.
    And like everything else wrong in the town, this trouble could be traced directly to Landisberg.
    Ever since the brash young director had dared to look upon Billy’s bride, Billy had noticed—or imagined he noticed—a change in the womandrake. Whenever he read aloud to it, it seemed to stir restlessly, as if in discomfort. Whereas before it had seemed to appreciate his readings, now it reacted to them as if they were boring or actually distasteful. Billy chalked it up to growing pains of some sort—after all, he had really sped up his mates normal development. But what he feared was contamination from the movie set.
    What they had done to one of Billy’s favorite novels was really a horror story in itself. Gone were all the original work’s meditative passages on society and ethics. In their place, the supernatural happenings never explicitly endorsed by Hawthorne had been blown up to gigantic proportions, and now made up the bulk of the action. Murders, chokings on blood, supernatural sexual thralldom, and fits of insanity now ensured that Hellhouse of Seven Gables would be another Landisberg triumph.
    Billy looked wistfully up from his copy of Melville’s The Confidence Man , which he had been about to read to the womandrake. It hardly seemed worth it now. The beautiful words would probably only cause the plant to wince and shudder. He would just have to wait out these last couple of weeks of filming—which coincided with the last weeks of the plant’s development—and hope that when the strangers left, his bride would be OK.
    Getting to his feet, Billy headed back toward the Mowbray mansion, wondering what troubles today’s filming would bring.
    Entering the manse, he wasn’t even surprised when he nearly stepped on the newt that was shrilly screaming at Landisberg, “This is the last time I do anything you tell me to, Luke!”
     
    * * *
     
    Billy had survived. He prided himself on that. Although he couldn’t have said how he had done it, he had outlasted the filming, which had wracked Blackwood Beach with unprecedented turmoil.
    He had endured the countless shouts of “Hey, Weed,” which was what the cast and crew had begun to