Hey, everybody. As I’ve mentioned once or twice or twelve times, as of this week my thriller novel The Beginner is available for sale in Amazon’s Kindle Store for only $2.99, the Smashwords bookstore (also for $2.99), and in print via CreateSpace for a mere $13.99. But many of you may never have heard of this one before. Not to say that Other People’s Heroes is world-famous or anything, but The Beginner doesn’t quite have the same profile as that earlier project.
So for those of you who are undecided, today I’m going to share with you the full, unabridged first chapter of The Beginner, followed of course by handy links to where you can buy it, should you be so inclined. And if you’d be so good as to pass this page along to your friends, I’d be much obliged.
CHAPTER ONE
Fade In
Curtis noticed the first disappearance on the third day of shooting. Although he and Tom Henshaw already had one movie together under their belts, Wild Take was the first time they did a film with actual studio backing. Everything was on the Climax Pictures dole, from the sets to the costumes to the food, so when different people were manning the catering table that morning, Curtis didn’t know whether to think it was unusual or not. In fact, Curtis may not have noticed the change at all except that, on the last day anyone ever saw her, Tom Henshaw made eyes at the redhead serving lunch.
She was attractive enough — the green eyes and splash of freckles across her cheeks and the bridge of her nose were exactly Tom’s type, but he didn’t even manage a “hello” before she vanished back into the catering van and left him holding a turkey sandwich and chips. Curtis plopped down next to him at one of the picnic tables set up for the cast and crew. A thin smile, the most Tom Henshaw ever seemed to allow, cracked his lips. Curtis returned it.
“Why are you so happy?” Curtis asked.
“You saw that food service babe? She digs me.”
“And what, pray tell, do you base this hypothesis on?”
“I could tell,” said Tom. “It was in her eyes. It’s always in the eyes.”
Curtis shrugged. “Well, you do know she can handle cold meats. That gives her leg up on the competition.”
“Wiseass. Just wait, she’ll be back.”
“I’m still waiting for the windfall of ‘she’ll be back’s you promised in high school.”
“You weren’t a big-name director in high school.”
“I’m not a big-name director now.”
“Give it some time, Dupré. Once they see this movie every second-rate actress in Hollywood will be trying to get on your casting couch.”
“Funny, Henshaw. And always subtle.”
Tom nodded and sank his teeth into his turkey sandwich. A blob of brown mustard squirted from the other end and spattered his plate, and he casually dabbed the end of his bread into the stain. “The first batch of dailies looked pretty good, don’t you think?”
“Absolutely, they look great,” Curtis said. His eyes wrinkled as he said it.
“What’s wrong?”
“You do know that I have no idea what I’m doing, right?”
“I count on it. Gives the universe stability.” He dropped another gob of mustard and began rifling through the papers on the clipboard he’d taken to carrying. The paper still managed to get bunched, however, because he stuffed the entire thing in the gray backpack he’d carried around since ninth grade like a security blanket. “I’ve been getting phone calls from the Timberton Charger. They really seem to want an interview.”
“The Charger?” Curtis asked, biting into his own roast beef club. “We’re not even doing any filming in Timberton Parish.”
“I know,” Tom said, “But I think the editor is on some ‘local boy makes good’ kick. they want to do it this week.”
“Fine,” Curtis sighed. “Do I have a random five minutes open tomorrow we can set aside for her?”
“Consider it done,” Tom said, scribbling. “Now about the call from Climax Pictures–”
Curtis raised a hand and cut him off. “Whoa — don’t look now, Henshaw, but your girl is back.”
Tom took a glance over his shoulder at the craft services table. “So she is,” he said. “And she’s talking to your girl.”
Curtis felt the blood collect in his cheeks. He couldn’t believe he missed that. He had followed Rachel Gleason’s career for years, long before he had one of his own to consider. When he got word that she not only saw his first movie, Cover Story, but listed it as one of her favorites in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, he somehow conjured up the vertebrae necessary to send her agent the script for his next film. He had written the lead with her in mind, but never even let himself entertain the notion she would agree to do it.
Rachel usually made the sort of crappy teen movies that ended at a senior prom. At 26, she still looked young enough for the casting directors to pass her off as a teenager, and so to combat that she was trying a slightly different, older look for Wild Take. Her raven hair was cut down from its usual length near her shoulders to about chin-length, and she had refused the concealer Diane Heinberg, the makeup girl, was trying to slather on her face.
“You’re going to look like an old maid,” Diane grumbled. Rachel merely raised an eyebrow at Curtis.
“Can we get a verdict, chief?” asked Gloria Whitty, the assistant producer assigned by Climax, who was too worn down from arguing about the haircut to put much heart into the makeup debate as well.
“I think she looks perfect,” he said. After a brief, pregnant pause, he added, “for the part.”
Now at lunch, Curtis looked over at her talking to the redhead from craft services and giggling. The redhead laughed with her and Curtis felt a minor green tinge at being left out of the joke.
“She’s not my girl,” he said. “She’s an actress. A consummate actress, I’ll have you know, and she’s here for a role.”
Tom chuckled. “Consummate? What was the name of that movie you saw her in?”
That could be any of half a dozen films, but Curtis knew which one Tom was talking about. “Dancing ‘Till Dawn.”
“Right. Didn’t she actually play someone named Dawn?”
“Yes.”
“And didn’t you say that any movie that names the main character after a cliché in the title was–”
“Stop saying things.”
“I still can’t figure out what it is about her that gets you hot, man. I mean, she’s doing a fine job around here, but…”
Curtis frowned. “Look, I’m not saying it was a good movie, I’m just saying she had some sort of… quality in it. It was like she knew it was a bad movie and she was trying to make it better. And if she can do the same to my crappy movie, we’ll come out ahead. My interest in her is purely professional. I’ve got enough to worry about without dropping some female into the picture.”
“Was that a bad pun?”
“Is there any other kind?” Curtis popped a corn chip into his mouth. “Your little redhead isn’t bad, though.”
Time Lapse
But the next day, the little redhead wasn’t there at all. When Curtis called for a lunch break his eyes went immediately to the craft services van, waiting to see if Tom would gravitate towards her and make one of his trademark moves. There was a train of people serving food — a black woman, a pasty guy with bronze streaks in his hair and goatee, and a graying woman who reminded him a bit of his mother, but the redhead never made an appearance. Once he was satisfied that he saw everyone who was entering or exiting the van, he went up to the black woman and read her name tag.
“Excuse me, Vivian?”
She gave him a warm smile. “Yes, sir? Can I help you?”
“I won’t keep you long, I just wanted to ask if that redhead was coming back today.”
Her eyebrows furrowed. “I’m sorry, what redhead?”
“The one who was working here yesterday. I’m afraid I didn’t catch her name.”
She shrugged. “I’m sorry, sir, I don’t know who you’re talking about.”
“Were you here yesterday?”
“Yes sir, I’ve been here since the first day. I’m certain that nobody with red hair has done any work with craft services on this set.”
This time it was Curtis’s turn to raise his eyebrow. “But I’m sure… no, I’m sorry, I’m sure you’re right.”
He smiled and spooned a helping of potato salad onto his plate so it wouldn’t look like he was just there to harass the craft services personnel, and joined Henshaw at what was becoming their regular lunch table. “I’ve got some bad news for you, friend,” he said.
“Rachel rewatched your first movie and decided she wants out?”
“Jerk. No, it’s about your little redhead — it doesn’t look like she’s coming back.”
“What are you talking about, man?”
“The redhead.” Tom’s face stayed blank. “The one you were watching yesterday. They’re telling me nobody with her description ever even worked here.”
Tom shook his head. “I have no idea who you’re talking about, Curtis.”
Curtis had to force his mouth closed. “The redhead. Green eyes and freckles. We sat at this very table and watched her talk to Rachel. We had a whole conversation about her.”
“Are you sure the pressure isn’t starting to get to you?”
Curtis let out a breath. “Of course. That’s it.” There was a tinge of sarcasm in his voice.
Tom reached into his pocket and produced a pack of Camels. “Cigarette, man?”
“You know I don’t smoke.”
“Yeah, but if you’re ready to begin losing your mind, now would be the perfect time to start.” He flipped out his lighter and took a long, slow pull. “You’ve got an interview with the Charger in 20 minutes, by the way.”
“There you go, Henshaw, earn your keep.”
Cut To
Ellen St. Christopher was old enough to be a fixture with the Timberton Charger, but young enough to still raise Curtis’ eyebrow when she met him in front of his trailer that afternoon. Her skin was deeply tan and her eyebrows kept a slight almond shape that made Curtis suspect an exotic ancestry. Her hair was dark, pulled tightly against her head, except for the shoulder-length ponytail that frizzed out almost as soon as it left her scalp. If she were to straighten one of those curls, it would certainly reach her waist, if not halfway to her knees.
Her accent betrayed her as a native of Louisiana, though, if not of Timberton Parish itself. “Curtis Dupré, right?” she asked. “Nice to meet you — I really loved your first movie.” Although she tried to disguise it, her diction frequently drifted to the realm of elongated “U”s and dropped “R”s. Without the effort put forth to disguise it, it would have come out, “Luved yuh fehrst movie.” As it was, she managed to change enough so that only someone like Curtis, who fought the same accent himself, would have noticed.
“Nice to meet you too, Miss St. Christopher.”
“Ellen,” she said. “People who make movies that run four days a week on the Independent Film Channel get to call me by my first name.”
Curtis led her into his sparsely decorated trailer, where he had a short couch that he napped on when he needed it, telling Tom he was going in for a “conference.” They sat together and Ellen placed a miniature tape recorder on the coffee table.
“Do you mind?”
“No, not at all. Um… where would you like to start?”
“How about the basics?” she said. “Where you came from, how you got where you are…”
“Right. Well, I was born in Timberton Parish, in Cooper, to be precise — of course you already know that, and I graduated from South Timberton High seven years ago.”
“Uh,” Ellen said. “Stop making me feel old. Now you did go to college, right?”
“At Caufield University,” Curtis said, “Same as everyone else at STHS who didn’t get a scholarship to LSU or something.”
“What did you major in?”
“Computer Information Systems.”
“Sounds exciting.”
“Excruciatingly so. That’s probably why I dropped out after four semesters.”
“Okay, that’s five years back – but that leaves three years before you released Cover Story. What did you do in the meantime?”
Curtis laughed. “Bookstore coffee bar. I went from exciting to moon-launch levels of anticipation. I’m not trying to disappoint you, Ellen, but I’m afraid there isn’t that much exciting about me.”
“We’ll see.” Ellen tapped her pen on her notepad. “Okay, I saw your movie, there must be something worth telling in there.” She clicked the pen and the ballpoint extended from the tip. “Let’s find out what makes you tick.”
Time Lapse
Curtis never thought he was the sort to do an enormous amount of ticking, but somehow his conversation with Ellen St. Christopher went through fifteen minutes of questions, notes and personal revelations before she had what she needed. She gave him a warm smile and slipped him her card. “If you think of anything else you’d like in the article, just give me a call,” she said.
“Something else?” Curtis said. “I’m astonished that I conjured up as much as I did.”
Curtis was about to open the door to his trailer to let her out when a quick rapping came from the other side. Ellen raised an eyebrow. “Expecting someone?”
“It must be time for Rachel’s daily question,” Curtis said. “She’s quite the method actress.” He pulled the door open and smiled at Rachel Gleason, right arm raised and about to tap the door again.
“Oh, I’m sorry. Am I interrupting–”
“We’re done,” Ellen said. “But I’d like to ask you some questions later, if that’s all right.”
“Of course,” Rachel replied .
“Good. You guys may be out to make Curtis a big star in Hollywood, but if I have anything to say about it, he’ll be a star down here first.”
“Well, he deserves it,” Rachel said. She and Ellen switched positions, Rachel entering the trailer as Ellen left, and Curtis closed the door.
“Aw, that was sweet of you.”
“Nah, just honest of me,” she said. “Have I told you how much I like this script?”
“Frequently,” Curtis said. His lips curled into a smile. “So what can I do for you?”
“I had a question about today’s pages.”
“I rather suspected,” Curtis said. After the first read-through, Curtis announced to the cast that his door was always open if they had any questions about the script. Rachel had taken more liberal advantage of that offer than the rest of the cast. Every day Curtis had seen her since then, she arrived with questions in hand.
Rachel’s character, an angry young woman named Carla Gutierrez, was planning to simultaneously rob an armored bank car and break her boyfriend out of a police transport, then take off on a road trip to evade the police. It was the trip that was the bulk of the film, but since both the opening scenes and the climax took place in southern Louisiana, Curtis was filming all of those scenes first before doing a few location shoots in Texas (he wanted a Western feel for some of the middle segments) and finishing up the film in California. At first the questions seemed like the sort of thing Curtis expected from a professional actor trying to discover her character — “Why does Carla want to take Joey with her?” “When did they fall in love?” “How did she learn to tamper with the traffic signals to make the transport and the armored car to stop at the same intersection?”
Curtis managed to fast-talk something about her father having been an electrician with the Department of Public Works, so Carla watched him set up traffic lights all her life, but as soon as he’d answered that question she asked the first of many questions that started off surprising him but now were becoming unusually common.
“How could someone who was color-blind know what color the traffic light was?” she said.
Curtis was surprised at the question. “Carla isn’t color-blind,” he said, wondering what in the script he may have written to give her that impression.
“I know,” Rachel said, “I was just wondering.”
“Well… I guess color-blind people just have to remember that red is on the top and green is on the bottom.”
“What if they were dyslexic too?”
Curtis held in a chuckle at that one. “I don’t think dyslexia works quite that way,” he said.
“Are you sure?”
He opened his mouth to answer and realized that, in fact, he wasn’t sure. This was exactly the sort of thing he would be looking up on the Internet if he ever wrote a dyslexic character, trying to discover limitations and abilities and how best to use them in the story. In fact… now that he thought about it…
“Hey, Rachel? What if Carla was color-blind?”
“And dyslexic?”
“And dyslexic. I’ll bet that would make it hard for her to read a map, don’t you think?”
“Probably so,” she said.
“And I’ll bet the scene where Carla and Joey get lost would make a lot more sense if it was because she couldn’t read a map than because the sign got knocked down.”
Rachel thought about that for a minute. “But if she’s had this problem her whole life, wouldn’t she have learned not to trust herself to read a map?”
“What if she didn’t want to read it? What if Joey made her?”
“Why would he make someone with dyslexia read the map?”
“Oh, yeah.” Curtis was about to dismiss the whole thing when he felt something in the back of his head — an almost audible click that accompanied an idea that clarified everything. “But you’re a — I mean, Carla is a proud girl. She’s the sort of girl who wouldn’t tell someone she loved that she had that sort of problem…”
“Because it would make her look weak!” Rachel said.
“So she makes Joey read the map,” Curtis said. “But she harps on him because he doesn’t seem to know where he’s going either, he gets fed up with it and shoves the map in her hands–”
“And because she doesn’t want him to know she’s got a problem, she tries to fake it!” Rachel said, finishing almost to the word the thought Curtis began. “That’s great!”
“I’ll rewrite that scene tonight, Rachel. Think you’re up to playing a colorblind girl?”
“I think I can handle it,” she said, and for the first time he saw that glitter in her eye, as though a lightning bolt just fired off in front of her retina, and he knew they had something good.
Curtis winked. “Wundabar,” he said, scribbling down as much of their tandem planning session as he could before it slipped his memory. “You keep this up, Rache, and I’m going to have to give you a co-writer credit.”
She giggled like an April rain. “All I’m doing is asking a bunch of questions.”
“Yes,” Curtis said, but you’re asking all the right questions.”
“I’m glad you think so,” she said. “Most directors I try to talk to this way treat me like some uneducated cheerleader.”
“I’d never think of you like that.”
“I know,” she said, “But I feel bad, the way I monopolize your time. Isn’t there anything I can do for you for a change?”
Curtis had to force back a shocked, braying laugh. “How is it possible for you to not know how much you’ve improved this project?”
“Have not,” she said. “Come on, there’s got to be something.”
Curtis was about to protest again when his eyes fell upon a stack of (antiquated, he would admit) compact discs he kept in his trailer to listen to when he was doing a rewrite. “Well, if you insist, there is one thing I’d like.”
“Name it,” she said.
In the back of his mind Curtis could hear Tom Henshaw pointing out the various opportunities such a dangerously open-ended offer afforded him, but he suppressed it. Instead, he rifled through the CDs until he found the jewel case he was looking for. It was, as he suspected, embarrassingly close to the top of the stack.
“If it doesn’t lower your estimation of me to ask something so outrageously fanboy-ish,” he said, “would you do me the honor of an autograph?”
As soon as Curtis put the CD in her hands, Rachel exploded with laughter. He was asking her to autograph the soundtrack album for Dancing ‘Till Dawn.
“I can’t believe you bought this!” she squealed.
“I can’t believe I’m showing it to you,” he said.
“You know that’s not really me singing, don’t you?”
“You sang backup on Run Away and Hide,” Curtis said. Her jaw dropped and her eyes unmistakably conveyed the question, “How on Earth did you know that?” Curtis chuckled. “I’m the sort of geek who watches the behind-the-scenes features on a DVD,” he said.
“You have the DVD?”
“Oh, just sign it.”
She opened the case and removed the insert so she could inscribe something. “You’re cute when you blush, you know,” she said.
Curtis felt himself turn an extra sixteen shades of red when she said that. His mind quivered to come up with a response when Tom, who had impeccable timing and had never learned to knock, stuck his head in the trailer.
“Hey folks,” he said, “You have no idea how sorry I am to interrupt this, but do you remember that movie we’ve been talking about? Some of the other people and I were under the impression we were going to try to make some of it today.”
Rachel handed Curtis the autographed CD. “Sorry, Tom. I guess we got carried away.”
“I’ll bet,” Tom said, following Rachel out of the trailer. Curtis moved to join them, but before he stepped out, he glanced down at the CD in his hands to see what was written there.
“To the most deserving director I know. Love, Rachel Gleason.”
Deleted Scene
“Just – just call me when you hear this, dammit.” Mark Rourke pocketed his cell phone, disgusted, and glanced back at the seafood restaurant he’d just been expelled from. Talking too loud… God, this was Los Angeles, not Bite-My-Ass, Louisiana or wherever the hell it was Rachel was filming this week. It had been two years since her agent, his aunt, introduced them, and to be honest he couldn’t figure out why he was still with the girl. It’s not like she was going to be Julia Roberts or anything, dating her wasn’t going to get him any headway in his career – especially as long as she insisted on staying with Aunt Shannon instead of letting him manage her himself. The way he saw it, he was doing her a favor – who else would want to be with her after watching some of her lousy movies?
The strip was characteristically busy for sunset, with the tourists and rubberneckers retreating to their respective hidey-holes and hotel rooms and the other half of LA, the Night People, beginning to come out. Mark preferred the Night People; they had fewer pretenses. They knew what they wanted, be it a John or a cheap trick or a line of coke, and they went for it. Mark prided himself on being able to pick their desires at a glance – it was a skill that came in particularly handy as a manager.
Tonight, though, there was someone new. Not that Mark was on a first-name basis with the Night People, but it was easy enough to tell who was the junkie, who was the dealer, who was the tourist that was out too late. This man, though, this Dark Man, didn’t fit into any category. He leaned against the corner of the restaurant that no longer desired Mark Rourke’s patronage, black coat, black pants and midnight hair. Mark tried to make out the Dark Man’s features, but it was like trying to stare at a double-exposed photograph, only multiplied a dozen times. Layers and layers until Mark could comprehend nothing but a pair of obsidian eyes, somehow actually glowing black.
The man’s face was pointed down, aimed at his laceless jet shoes, not even really pointing in Mark’s direction, but somehow he knew those damn eyes were boring directly into him.
Mark shivered. It was 87 friggin’ degrees outside, he was wearing a three-piece suit, and those eyes were all it took to spike him with a chill like he’d never felt before. It wouldn’t even be sufficient to say it felt like someone was stepping on his grave… somehow, it was far worse.
Shivering again, Mark pulled his suit coat tight across his shoulders and resumed moving. If he didn’t look at the Dark Man, then maybe the creepy bastard wouldn’t pay any attention to him. He glided past the corner of the restaurant like he’d done a hundred times before, not looking back, not sparing a thought for anyone else until the Dark Man slipped past the corners of his peripheral vision and he was stupid enough to think That’s it, I made it. And then the voice said his name and everything ended.
“Mark Rourke.”
His own name had never given him a start like that before. The voice grated like a pair of steel-toed boots on gravel, scrambling down an incline, not intending to stop. He wanted to keep walking, to pretend he hadn’t heard the voice. He couldn’t.
“Forty-seven years old,” the voice said, and for a second Mark relaxed. He was nearly two decades younger than that, surely this man had mistaken him for someone else.
“You’re lifting weights in your garage,” the voice continued. “You just hired a new secretary. She’s young, sweet… and your wife is never around anymore. You’re up to pumping 150, planning to call her to come over, when the blood vessel bursts in your brain.”
Mark turned. Dammit, he turned. The man was fiddling with a black leather cord wound around his right wrist. It trailed back into his sleeve, connected to some weight Mark couldn’t see. And damned if that son of a bitch wasn’t looking right at him now.
And smiling.
“Are you talking to me?” Mark managed to squeal. The gravel voice answered.
“I’d like to have a word with you, Mr. Rourke.”
Dissolve To
It was well past midnight when Rachel made it back to her hotel room. The shoot had ended at 5 p.m., “before the sun gets too low and the mosquitoes get omnivorous,” Curtis said, but she wound up in his trailer again. They were there for six hours, Curtis typing the entire time, save for a pizza break at about eight o’clock. Sometimes she’d ask him a question, less frequently she would make a suggestion, mostly she just watched over his shoulder as the words flowed from his fingertips to the screen of his Dell.
The color-blind angle wound up working out even more spectacularly than either of them had suspected. Far from rewriting a couple of scenes, Curtis had to go back and make changes to nearly every segment of the film. She could already imagine Bradley Hemingford, who played Joey, complaining about having to learn something new. They would have probably worked all night if Tom hadn’t shown up asking if Curtis wanted to see the dailies before the American Film Institute tried to preserve the prints as part of a historical motion picture project.
So she got back to room 203 at the Boutte Comfort Inn – not nearly the level of luxury she was used to in Los Angeles, but nice enough on its own merits — and planned to relax until morning. After she took a particularly long, particularly hot bath, Rachel slipped into a hideous yellow T-shirt she’d had since she was 17 and refused to part with. She took out her cell phone, intending to plug it in and allow it to charge overnight, and saw a blinking icon indicating a new voicemail. The phone had been turned off when she was in Curtis’s office, she didn’t even know she’d received a call. She tapped the screen to play it, catching a glimpse of herself in the mirror as she did so. Even wet, she thought, her hair did look better short. She might keep it this way for a while.
“Rachel, it’s Mark,” said the voice on the machine. “Christ, are you still shooting? How late is that no-talent pissant going to keep you every night?”
There were a couple of voices in the background and Rachel’s caller began shouting. “What? No, I’m not going to keep it down. I’ve got a – What? What? Fine, you squirmy little prick! You hear this, Rachel? They’re throwing me out of Stingray’s!” He sighed – an angry sigh, not a sad one – and spat out, “Just – just call me when you hear this, dammit!”
There was a beep and a computerized voice announced it was the end of her messages. Rachel frowned. She didn’t like the tone of her caller. He was rude, he was abrasive… and now that she thought about it, she didn’t even know anyone named Mark.
She shrugged. Maybe she’d ask Curtis if he had any idea what that was all about tomorrow. She turned off the bedside lamp, slid under the blanket and fell into a warm, dreamful sleep.
——————————————————————————————
Well there you have it, my friends, the first chapter of The Beginner. What’s going on here? What happened to the craft services girl? Who’s the creepy little guy who approached Mark? And why doesn’t Rachel know who he is? All very good questions. You want the answers? They’re all in The Beginner, on sale now.
The Beginner will also soon be available for the Barnes & Noble Nook, the iPad, and in print from Amazon.com. I’ll let you know as each new format becomes available.
And don’t forget, my other two books are available in multiple formats as well:
My second book, The Beginner, was also given a revised second edition a couple of years ago, although the revisions to this book weren’t as extensive as those to Other People’s Heroes. Although I didn’t have a name for it yet, like OPH, this book has served as the launching pad for a continuity of related titles. But while the tales of Siegel City have been offbeat takes on the world of superheroes, the world of The Curtain draws its inspiration from the various realms of fantasy, monster movies, and horror.
Evertime Realms 
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