This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Otherwise, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2022 by Garth Nix

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Amazon Original Stories, Seattle

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  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Amazon Original Stories are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781662510021 (digital)

  Cover design by Will Staehle

  Cover image: © Art Collection 2 / Alamy Stock Photo

  Jordan Harper was just leaving his bungalow on the Pharos Pictures lot when a breathless messenger ran up. Unusually, it wasn’t one of the boys from the North Office but a girl from what was known as Animal Corner, the studio’s small zoo, which naturally excluded the horses that were over at the more salubrious Grand Corral (though that wasn’t much more than a stable and paddock). Harper recognized the girl in the blue overalls with the missing front teeth as Trudy, the eight-year-old daughter of the Pharos dog trainer, Jim Lowgen.

  “Sir, sir! Dad wants you to come straightaway.”

  “Let’s go, then,” said Harper. He’d been hoping to head over to the Lookout Bar on Hollywood to make a couple of phone calls best not overheard by the switchboard girls, but as was so often the case for the studio fixer, something had evidently come up.

  “What’s the problem?” he asked as they walked past a procession of four Assyrian chariots, all linked together and towed by a Fordson tractor, heading over to the Twenty Acre back lot, where a temple had been built for The Wolf on the Fold, a semibiblical, not noticeably epic film, very loosely based on Lord Byron’s “The Destruction of Sennacherib.”

  One of the reasons it was very loosely based was because it costarred a dog, a German shepherd called Kon Kar Kin, who was actually played by three near-identical sibling canines. Pharos was being sued by Warner Bros. for the obvious copying of the far more successful Rin Tin Tin, but that would probably follow the usual Pharos trajectory: the suit would be settled after four or five quickie films, and there would still be a profit in it. Sol Theakston, the head of the studio, was trying to move away from these imitative films and inevitable lawsuits, but he had inherited the series from the previous management. There was one more Kon Kar Kin picture in the works after The Wolf on the Fold, but it would be the last.

  “It’s Ellsworth,” said Trudy.

  “Who’s Ellsworth?” asked Harper, momentarily puzzled. He thought he knew every Pharos employee. It was part of his job. He kept files on them all.

  “The oldest Kon Kar Kin,” replied Trudy. She looked astounded he didn’t know. “The main one. He does the most, and Bud and Ken—I mean Budworth and Kenworth—we get them to do some special tricks they know but he doesn’t.”

  “Okay,” said Harper. He turned down the lane between Stages Six and Seven, immediately noting the gaggle of gaffers and grips passing a bottle in a brown paper bag outside the fire door of Stage Seven. The bottle disappeared, and the gaggle dispersed back inside as they saw him, but he had already memorized everyone who was there, and they would have their pay docked later. The scheduled morning break was over, and drinking on the lot was forbidden, save for actors and executives, and they were required to be as discreet about it as possible. He also made a mental note that shooting had evidently stopped on The Violets of Spring, which needed to be looked into.

  “Ellsworth is sick,” said Trudy.

  “Has Doc Vance seen him?” asked Harper.

  Vance was primarily the horse doctor, but he was a pretty good all-around veterinarian. He’d also come in handy a few times for human medical procedures that had needed to be kept secret from the press, an unfortunate necessity given Harper had recently discovered the new medico they’d gotten after old Dr. Schenk had retired was prone to taking bribes from the gossip columnists.

  “He’s there now; he doesn’t know what’s wrong. He says Ellsworth is asleep, but we can’t wake him up. He gave him a ’jection, but that didn’t work neither. Then Dad said to get you. Can you wake him up?”

  “I’m not sure,” said Harper cautiously. He felt the prickle of something strange, an intimation of dread, the hair lifting on the back of his neck. It was never a welcome feeling—the two or three times he had experienced it previously, it had warned him something unusual and terrifying was about to happen.

  Why would Lowgen call him for a sleeping dog?

  “I love Ellsworth,” whispered Trudy. She wiped her eyes and grimaced. Harper pretended he hadn’t heard or seen anything. All the kids who worked in the studio were tough as nails, and it took a lot for one to show any kind of emotion that might be construed as weakness. He started walking faster, thinking about the implications. At least they had the other two dogs, so filming on The Wolf on the Fold would not be delayed. But he’d need to send a wire to Sol, who was on his way back from New York via Chicago on the Chief—it’d be delivered at one of the train’s brief stops.

  More importantly, Sol’s personal assistant, Mrs. Hope, would get the telegram and read it first. In many ways she was the true fixer at the studio, knowing everything and everyone and fixing the more unusual problems, even those that were beyond the ken of mere mortals, though Harper had not known this until their encounter with the horrible multiplicity of feeding mouths in the service of the ancient sorcerer who called itself Ozymandias. This had ended with Harper blowing a silver five-franc piece into the sorcerer’s head, unfortunately losing the tips of his thumb and forefinger on his left hand in the process.

  But it had been worth it, and Harper knew he had survived only because of Mrs. Hope’s peculiar knowledge of the arcane. She had told him what to do, though she still had not fully explained how she had come to know of such things, other than to say it was part and parcel of a long and continuing struggle against evil. A hidden war where long periods of inaction were interspersed with sudden, vicious confrontations. She was a foot soldier in that war.

  Harper was looking forward to Mrs. Hope being back, but not simply because of her efficiency and knowledge and now his presentiment of danger. The confrontation with Ozymandias had brought them together, cementing something that had long been brewing, almost without his awareness. He had always thought her more attractive than any of the film stars he knew but hadn’t thought his attraction might be reciprocated. And as it turned out, there was no Mr. Hope.

  He’d missed her the week she had been away. They still kept their new personal relationship secret from everyone else but now spent most nights together when Harper wasn’t working or Mrs. Hope wasn’t engaged in some confidential business of her own.

  “I wish you were here, Mrs. Hope,” said Harper under his breath. “I really wish you were here.”

  “What?” asked Trudy. Harper was surprised she’d caught any of his muttering; the girl must have very sharp ears.

  “Nothing,” he said gruffly and quickened his pace, the girl skipping along at his side. He noticed she was trying to look—while not being caught looking—at the well-disguised prosthetic thumb and fingertips on his left hand, made by the same people who had made Harold Lloyd’s. He’d never said what had happened to his hand the year before, and he knew the studio was rife with stories about it, all of them wrong.

  Animal Corner was fenced off from the rest of the lot by a log stockade that often doubled as a US Cavalry fort, which was what it had been built to be in the first place, a decade or so back in the early twenties, the key set for the Lost Troop series of films when Hoot Gibson had briefly been at Pharos. Trudy led the way through the gatehouse, being careful to shut the outer gate behind them before opening the inner one. Jim Lowgen trained his kids as meticulously as his assistants.

  “Dad’s got Ellsworth over at the house,” said Trudy when Harper began to turn toward the row of kennels by the south wall. The studio had a number of different dog stars for different purposes, and though the publicity about them said they lived in rich apartments and were waited on hand and foot, in fact they all lived in the row of kennels, though they were usually allowed to roam about the stockade. Right now, every dog was chained up in front of its kennel, even the toy poodle, Charlotte, who was generally too lazy to go anywhere, having gotten used to being carried around in a handbag in the My Secretary, the Detective films.

  The house was a bungalow identical to Harper’s own, looking rather out of context not lined up with the others in Executive Row, even more so because it had been built behind the really old, Spanish-era gravel pit that had been repurposed as the tiger pen. There were no tigers there at present, the last one having died old and toothless the previous year, but the iron rails around the pit remained.

  The main path to the bungalow ran around the pit to the right, alongside a large monkey cage built over two long-since-expired deodar cedars. The cage still housed a small tribe of monkeys, who would howl and shake their bottoms at everyone who passed. They had been procured for a jungle picture but could not be trained, even by Jim Lowgen.

  “Your dad still hasn’t got

rid of the monkeys?” asked Harper.

  “No one will take them,” said Trudy with distaste.

  “Maybe I should just shoot them,” said Harper.

  He flipped his coat open for a moment, revealing the .45 automatic in the shoulder holster. He had kept it from his service in the war but very rarely had to use it.

  “I wish you would,” said Trudy.

  Harper glanced at her. She looked like she meant it.

  “I was joking, Trudy. I wouldn’t shoot a monkey for doing what monkeys do. We’ll find a zoo or somewhere to take them.”

  “Dad says you shoot people,” muttered Trudy. She looked up at him and hastily added, “Bad people, I mean.”

  “Is that right?” asked Harper. He stopped and looked at her carefully, his face neutral. “He say that to you?”

  Trudy hung her head. “Naw, I was listening, but I couldn’t help it; I was holding the—”

  “Who’d he say it to?” interrupted Harper.

  “Only the doc,” said Trudy anxiously. “Not an outsider.”

  By outsider she meant someone not employed by the studio.

  “Sorry, Mr. Harper,” she whispered. “Did I get Pa in trouble—”

  “Not this time,” said Harper easily. “But don’t go around repeating what anyone says, you hear? About me or anyone else in the studio.”

  He reached in his pocket, felt around the small weighted sap, and pulled out a nickel, then flicked it to her. She caught it expertly and disappeared the coin in one swift movement, relief smoothing her small furrowed brow.

  Not for the first time, Harper wondered how he could soften his reputation as the hard man of Pharos Pictures. He didn’t like to think of himself as a terror. Violence and fear were always his last resort, used only on those who employed it themselves. He fixed things with talk far more often than with force. But what people remembered and talked about was always the action.

  The monkeys screamed as Harper and Trudy approached the front door of Lowgen’s house. Harper wrinkled his nose. Animal Corner quite often smelled worse, particularly if there was some sort of jungle production underway and the central court was packed with animals in wheeled cages borrowed from circuses or other zoos, but the monkey cage stank like a powerful, disgusting spice that rose above all else.

  Trudy opened the door but didn’t go in, instead shouting, “Mr. Harper’s here, Pa!” before streaking away.

  Harper went inside. Lowgen peered around the door to the parlor and gestured for him to enter. Again, it was a carbon copy of Harper’s own bungalow, with the same studio-issued furniture. Ellsworth, a majestic German shepherd, lay atop a tartan blanket on the lounge, his black snout and one front paw hanging over the side. His characteristic tall ears were laid back, and he was snoring gently.

  Lowgen and Doc Vance were standing by a polished-steel-and-glass cocktail cabinet, tumblers of bourbon in their hands. Vance’s gladstone bag was open at his feet. It was almost twice the size of a human doctor’s and must have weighed a ton, but Vance was a big man and easily carried it around. Lowgen, on the other hand, was short and slight; he’d been a jockey before moving into animal training. Yet of the two of them, Harper would rather have Lowgen at his back in any serious trouble. The little man was all sinew and get-up-and-go, whereas Vance was merely big.

  “So what’s going on with the dog?” asked Harper, shaking his head as Lowgen gestured toward the bottle.

  “I never seen anything like it,” replied Lowgen. “He wasn’t needed on set until after lunch today, so I let him lie in his kennel. I was a mite surprised he wasn’t up and about by ten, so I went to see . . . but I couldn’t wake him, and the other dogs wouldn’t go near him. His brothers! They usually roll around on each other like they’re still pups, but they wouldn’t go near Ell today—no, sir! Me and Harry carried him back here, and I called the doc, but—”

  “I can’t wake him either,” interrupted Vance. “I don’t understand it. He’s not in a coma—as such, he simply appears to be asleep. I gave him a stimulant, to no avail. The only thing he responds to . . . well, watch this.”

  The vet took a large Eveready electric flashlight out of his bag, flicked it on, and pointed the beam at the dog. The light was much brighter than the weak sunshine coming through the gauze-curtained windows. As it lit up the dog, Ellsworth’s skin rippled violently, his ears stood up, and the hair rose along the ridge of his spine. He didn’t wake but shook like a jelly from head to tail until the vet switched off the light again. The dog became still, his flanks slowly rising and falling, the faint snore resuming.

  “I flicked it on to look in his ears,” said Vance. “I have no idea what causes this reaction.”

  “Why’d you call me over?” asked Harper. “I mean, if the doc can’t do anything—”

  “I reckon you’d want to know, private like,” said Lowgen. “Ellsworth is due on set for the close-ups with Miss Celine this afternoon, and Bud and Ken are no good for that—”

  “What?” snapped Harper. This was serious.

  “The other dogs can’t act,” said Lowgen. “They do stunts, but Ell is the actor.”

  Harper shook his head slowly.

  “I’ll take that drink now. I thought the whole point of having three identical dogs was so they could stand in for each other?”

  “That was the plan,” said Lowgen. He inspected a glass from the cabinet, found it clean or clean enough, and poured Harper a decent slug. “But Ellsworth is just a lot more talented. He can make his eyes—”

  A phone rang in the office across the hall. Lowgen stopped talking and turned toward the sound. Another one of Lowgen’s daughters answered it immediately—Harper could hear her voice. Several seconds later, she appeared in the doorway. It was Kelly-Ann, the oldest, who would probably take over from her father in due course.

  “Uh, Mr. Harper, they need you over at Miss Celine’s,” she said.

  “What now?” asked Harper. It never rained, but it poured.

  “They just said you’re needed fast,” said Kelly-Ann. “Real urgent.”

  Harper drained the whiskey in one gulp and was out the door, calling back over his shoulder, “No one say a word about this! Not to anyone!”

  It was bad enough to have an apparently irreplaceable dog star down, but Celine Howard was the closest thing to a real star Pharos had ever managed. It was a minor miracle she hadn’t already been poached by one of the majors. Sol had big plans for her, and she was not only a key part of the renaissance the studio chief hoped for but a massive investment. Celine’s salary had been doubled with every successful film, and she was now on $3,000 a week. Her next film was planned to be Pharos’s biggest ever, and she wouldn’t be costarring with a dog—it would be George Brent. Sol had won the actor from Harry Warner in a poker game, at least for a single film.

  Harper walked fast along the gravel path, the monkeys too slow to scream at him. He went out through the double gates like a whirlwind. In five minutes he was back at Executive Row, gathering his breath outside Celine’s accommodations. Befitting her recent elevation to the top of the roster, her bungalow was double the size of any other, even Sol’s hideaway, though his suite in the North Office was probably larger overall.

  Harper knocked on the door but didn’t wait for a response, going straight in. This bungalow had a large reception room, and the two people waiting in it jumped up as Harper entered, almost as if caught out in wrongdoing. Both were junior executives, of no account. Harper ignored them, striding past to the hallway and then on to Celine’s bedroom. He knocked there and did wait, the door being opened a few seconds later by June, Celine’s dresser, confidante, and, secretly, lover. She was pale and shaken and stood aside, quivering. Dr. Kastenberg was behind her, wringing his hands.

  Celine was sitting up in bed, fast asleep, with three pillows behind her. Revealing her true background as a farmer’s daughter from Bixby, Oklahoma, Celine wore a plain flannel nightie done up to the neck, one sleeve rolled up past the elbow. It was nothing like the sleepwear she sported in the magazine stories that claimed she was the love child of a titled Englishwoman and a Canadian war hero, sadly killed three days before they could be married.

  “I can’t wake her,” said Kastenberg. He licked his lips nervously, not quite looking at Harper. He had been warned recently about tipping off gossip columnists and knew his job was on the line, or maybe something worse. “She seems simply asleep, but nothing will wake her. It isn’t any drug I know—”

 

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