The Con Season: A Novel of Survival Horror Read online

  She watched as her manager, Toby, took cash from an older man.

  The fan wore thick glasses tethered to the back of his balding skull with one of those foam bands. The man was overweight, a round belly hanging over his shorts, and his T-shirt was speckled with what looked from Clarissa’s vantage like the remnants of a sandwich.

  Some stereotypes were cultural constructions meant to further rob power from the disenfranchised. And some stereotypes—as evidenced by the Urgeek standing in front of Clarissa’s manager—were rooted in cold, unvarnished truth.

  “Having her sign your own item is forty dollars per, and that price includes one picture with Ms. Lee,” Toby said.

  Without a pause, no deliberation as to whether he wanted to spend that much money, the Urgeek handed Toby a hundred dollar bill and with another twenty folded around it. He then turned to Clarissa.

  He did not wait to receive any change.

  The Urgeek’s economy of movement told Clarissa that this was certainly not the man’s first convention. In fact, it was very possible that she had signed for this guy last year and had already forgotten his face or blocked the memory out. There was a statute of limitations on how long she promised to remember their names.

  The Urgeek clutched an envelope to his chest. If Clarissa were in a movie, there’d be an ominous close-up insert of that envelope.

  “Hello Ms. Lee,” the fan said, years of experience grinding his fake bashfulness down to an autistic’s monotone. There’s still time for you to grow out of it, Marc, she thought, thinking back to the teenager. It was something to amuse herself while the guy laid the envelope on the table and fanned out the three glossy photographs he’d brought with him.

  “Could you sign all three of these ‘To Kurt, with love’? Please?”

  Before her, there were three faces, all pouting and all hers, six breasts, all raised with a twenty-seven year old’s indigence to gravity, and—in one picture—a dark wisp of pubis. Clarissa Lee’s Playboy spread, dating from the era where she’d first realized that film work might not keep coming in forever, was the gift that kept on giving.

  She did not clarify the spelling of his name, but she did sign Kurt’s photos “with love” and then took a picture with him, Toby squeezing himself out from behind the table to point Kurt’s digital camera.

  “You still look great,” Kurt whispered to her in the second before the flash. His breath was a fetid version of the pepperoni and bread stink that hangs on your clothes for a few minutes after visiting a Subway restaurant.

  Tired as she was, as much as she wanted the weekend to be over, Clarissa Lee did not break character. “Aw. Thank you,” she said, shooing him away with her eyes. Their transaction was finished. She did not regret the photoshoot, but it was interactions like this one that brought her damn close to it.

  The next fan in line looked like a spritz of fresh air. She was a girl in her late twenties or early thirties, buttons polka-dotting her hooded sweatshirt and messenger bag. In short: your classic “geek girl” type. She bought a single 8x10 for thirty dollars from Toby and then set down a small Tupperware container in front of Clarissa.

  The girl was adorable, but that Tupperware was worrisome.

  Clarissa asked her name with a manic quality that she hadn’t meant to creep into her voice.

  Oh Christ. Please don’t let that be—

  “I’m Sephera, and I hope you don’t think this is awkward or weird or anything, but I brought you a birthday cake.”

  Sephera opened the Tupperware to reveal a single cupcake. And there was the reminder, written in red gelatin icing meant to look like blood:

  Today, Clarissa Lee was fifty-five years old.

  Chapter Two

  It was possible that most conventioneers, because they attended the same cons every year and found the vendor rooms mostly unchanged, had no idea how quickly a hotel ballroom can be emptied. Subconsciously, there were probably many fans who thought the con stayed there year round. Like how Disneyland continued to exist even when you weren’t riding the Matterhorn Bobsleds.

  But as soon as the last attendee was scooted out the door by volunteer security, the tables and booths started disappearing. Wing-nuts were spun from collapsible signage, racks of grey market T-shirts (Clarissa certainly never saw any residuals from her likeness being sold two-for-twenty) were emptied into plastic containers, and black tablecloths were folded up.

  The convention was boxed and loaded into a fleet of trucks, vans, and the occasional hearse with the trained precision of a circus leaving town after the last of the rubes had been bilked. The fans themselves might linger in the hotel bar or hit the con suite for a dead-dog party, but the people for whom this was a business and nothing more? At five o’clock on Sunday it was time for them to jet.

  Clarissa and Toby didn’t have much to pack and their plane back to L.A. wasn’t until eight fifteen, so there was time. She stood and watched the room around her be dismantled.

  She could relax because there wasn’t much to pack. Well, there wasn’t much for Clarissa to pack. Toby would take care of it all, the vinyl banner that clipped onto the edge of the table and the stacks of 8x10s that had to be loaded back into their printer-paper boxes.

  On the other side of the aisle from her, she watched the awkward post-mating rituals of two celebrities who had the look about them like they’d gotten drunk and dirty the night before. She wasn’t close enough to hear what they were saying to each other but she could read the body language.

  The guy, an out of work bit player and still-working porno actor named Ivan Butinelli was trying to help a visibly hungover Gina Bright pack up her table. Even without hearing what they were saying, the interaction was painfully awkward. Clarissa couldn’t look away.

  Bright was a slightly younger Clarissa Lee knock-off, if Clarissa were petty enough to put a label on it, which she wasn’t. Not one bit.

  Clarissa doubted that Butinelli had a wife at home, but she wondered if Bright’s red-cheeks were due to some kind of shame or if they were always that red, these days.

  Despite both of the other celebrities being familiar faces on the con circuit, Clarissa wouldn’t have been able to place their names if she ran into them on the street. No, all weekend she’d had no choice but to stare across at their banners whenever business got slow at her own table. They were people she saw every few months, but watching them from afar, like an anthropological study. She always forgot to take notes.

  Breaking Clarissa from her voyeurist’s soap opera, Toby hefted the cashbox onto the table in front of her with a clatter. He then began to transfer Sunday’s take, a fat stack of bills, from the zippered envelope he’d been using to make change. He then locked the cashbox and handed the key to Clarissa.

  Giving her the key for safekeeping was unnecessary. Clarissa trusted Toby implicitly, but part of that trust stemmed from the fact that he was nervous to a fault. In fact, Toby was so concerned with not being seen as a cheat that it often worked against his ability to manage her career effectively, in some ways making him worse than if he were both successful and cheating her.

  “How’d we do?” she asked. By virtue of her line only flagging once or twice all weekend, she assumed they’d done okay.

  “Better than fair, I’d say.” Toby said, stacking photos, placing a page of acid-free paper between each variety so they were easier to unpack. The way he zoned in to focus on his work could have been exhaustion from the weekend or could have been him softening the blow of a lackluster con. It was hard to tell with Toby. He was a bad liar but also fidgety as hell when telling the truth.

  At cons Clarissa offered fifteen varieties of glossy photo. Two of them were miniature posters of her two most well known films. One was 1979’s Night Visitor, her first starring role and a mildly violent whodunit that had been in production around the same time as Halloween’s release. After Carpenter’s success and the first wave of imitators the film had gone back to Canada for gory reshoots and a star was bor
n. The other was 1988’s Death Birth, a critical and commercial flop that had recently grown a rabid fanbase because of the director’s later big-budget studio work.

  That director was Boyd Haight and Clarissa should have never married him.

  Or never have divorced him. At the very least she should not have pushed for separation when she did, when she had been the one who’d taken the hit in court. Now “once married to Boyd Haight” was the top piece of trivia on her IMDb and Wikipedia pages, no matter how many times she tried to log in and edit them. In 1991 it would have been the other way around. He would have been ‘the ex-husband’ instead of her being ‘the ex-wife.’ Had either of those websites existed back then.

  Many mistakes had been made, financial and personal. But Toby kept her in enough work, much of it voiceover, that she could pay rent.

  The rest of the 8x10s were various headshots and production stills, the most recent of which was fifteen years old and featured Clarissa with foam latex ridges on her chin, a prosthesis that she wore to play an alien in a recurring part on a basic cable sci-fi show.

  The Nebula Journey headshot didn’t move many units at a show like this weekend’s, but when she did sell one she knew to stay alert for the unanswerable continuity questions that were probably headed her way. The horror nerds asked her which international cuts of her films she preferred and the sci-fi nerds asked about FTL drives and the mating rituals of her character’s alien species.

  A few minutes later in the process of packing, Toby needed help wrestling a bungee cord around the vinyl banner. Ten minutes after that their bags were out of the coat check and placed into a cab.

  Sitting quietly while Toby messed with his phone, Clarissa watched the combination hotel and convention center recede into the distance.

  The sensation was like leaving a summer camp that you never much enjoyed, where even the friends you made weren’t really friends and you could never get the hang of sleeping through the night in your bunk. But there was still that pang of regret, wanting to say goodbye to a temporary home. There was also, Clarissa had to admit, something nice about spending a weekend being worshipped and desired. It beat most other work.

  Seeing the post-coital odd couple that was Ivan Butinelli and Gina Bright reminded Clarissa that she herself had only ever gotten lucky once at one of these things. And that once had been lucky enough.

  Her reluctance to hook up wasn’t just that old chestnut about mistakenly mixing business with pleasure, but also because there were slim pickings at these cons. Handsome as they could be, shacking up with a B-level actor would have been something she regretted, and she’d made enough similar mistakes during her TV years. With the convention’s guest list out of the equation, that only left vendors and attendees in the prospect pool.

  In terms of physique, men at these conventions were either perennial teenage string beans or guys who would do anything short of eat actual vegetation to be considered string beans. Neither did much for her, hence her celibacy.

  For her lone sexual conquest, Clarissa had chosen to avoid all three sub-classifications of con life entirely.

  It happened at New Jersey’s Chiller Theatre in 2008, an east coast convention easy to attend for both its proximity to JFK and the fact that Toby could schedule whatever New York meetings he could muster during the same week. Her and this guy, they’d met at the hotel bar and judging from his button-down shirt, stubble-less cheeks, and dress pants, he wasn’t a horror fan and was staying at the hotel on unrelated business. They didn’t spend their brief courtship talking about what they did for a living and if he’d recognized her at all then he’d been playing it like he didn’t.

  Their affair had been brief but successful, twice successful. But, lying in bed, he’d ruined the afterglow by saying he was at the con looking for investors for a project that she’d be great in. Insult to injury, he wanted to cast her as the grown protagonist’s mother.

  Clarissa gathered her clothes and advised the guy to make sure to fuck Dee Wallace next time.

  “Isn’t it a flat rate?” Toby said in a whine to the driver, his wrists resting against the cab’s partition. He was arguing with the cabbie about the meter.

  “No sir. I didn’t pick you up downtown. I’m sorry, I had to run the meter.”

  Toby, not much of a fighter, just shrugged and paid the man. He included a twenty percent tip, seemingly oblivious to the fact that he’d just voiced suspicions about being fleeced.

  They entered the terminal, Toby grunting when he had to lift her rolling bag over the curb.

  In the harsh light of the United ticketing area, Toby looked even more nervous than he had when stacking up 8x10s. Was it something he’d read on his phone that had soured his mood? Had she whiffed an audition? Was Clarissa being squeezed out of residuals? At this point in the day she didn’t much care, she just wanted to get back to her apartment, to her cat, to a city where most people weren’t familiar with the phrase “packing lip.”

  Toby approached one of the automated check-in machines, swiped his debit card, and swore as no boarding passes materialized.

  Over his shoulder Clarissa could read the words “See Desk” on the screen. There was no please, no thank you, just “See Desk.”

  Instead of starting towards the line to speak with a representative, Toby turned to Clarissa and asked: “Can I have the key please?”

  It took her a moment to figure out which key he meant.

  “My card was declined, I need to pay for our tickets with cash,” he said.

  Clarissa squinted at him, feeling her face begin to flush in an embarrassment that her conscious mind hadn’t quite settled into yet.

  “How about I just use my credit—”

  “No, your accounts aren’t in the greatest shape, it would be best if we just used the cashbox instead of a card.”

  Clarissa handed over the key, watched him count out a few hundred dollars in cash, and girded herself to have a terribly awkward in-flight conversation.

  She’d been told by several different people that having all-in-one representation had been a bad idea, a manager-slash-agent-slash-accountant, but the warnings never hit home until that moment.

  Chapter Three

  “If you don’t know Kane Hodder’s email or phone number then what the fuck are you good for?” Rory asked as he dipped low, brandishing the pliers.

  The kid tied to the chair was running low on fingernails. Rory pulled another one off.

  As soon as he was done screaming, he spoke: “I’m not! I’m not even related to him in…in…in,” he started to fade again, a broken record with a glistening string of spit now connecting his chin to his T-shirt.

  Rory had heard the excuse so many times by now he was starting to believe it. “But I’m not his assistant,” the kid had sputtered, back when he’d been able to string together full sentences. Before the broken teeth and Rory’s pliers. “I was a volunteer at the con, I hadn’t even met him until Friday! I just got him water and made sure that his line was wrapping around the table like it was supposed to be!”

  Not Hodder’s assistant? No, Rory guessed that made sense. Why would Jason Voorhees fly his own people out to the middle of nowhere? The man could handle himself, Rory was sure.

  “You get your shirt,” Rory said and pointed down to where it read ‘Staff’ over the kid’s heart, “and you start to think that you’re better than everyone else. Well, I’ve got this and I know that that ain’t true: Jonathan Benson from Ohio.” He read it O-Hi-O, really dragging it out.

  Rory had taken the kid’s license out of his wallet, along with forty bucks in cash and a Cheesecake Factory gift card for an undisclosed amount. Cheesecake Factory? Fancy. This fucking hick kid was used to putting on airs, Rory was sure of it.

  “You aren’t from Hollywood, Johnny,” Rory said. “So the way I see it: you brought this on yourself for acting like it. All we wanted from you was some information.”

  “We?” Jonathan asked, the word more of a whimper,
the squeaky release of air from a balloon, than it was a real question.

  That was right, Teeks wasn’t in the room with Rory. In fact, Teeks wasn’t aware of the snatch-up of Jonathan Benson at all. Boy, would Teeks be angry if he found out that Rory was striking out on his own. Even if he was just trying to help, he wanted to make Teeks some more ‘connections’.

  “Never you mind we, Jonathan. Never you mind,” Rory said, trying to channel his best TV investigator, the tall guy who beat up all those pedos on Law & Order. That guy was tall—way taller than Kane Hodder, it turned out—but Rory was taller and more jacked than both of them. “I’m gonna ask you one last time: you don’t have contact info for Mr. Hodder?”

  Johnny Benson didn’t speak, just nodded and mumbled like someone talking in their sleep.

  Rory took the blade from his boot, clapped a big hand over Johnny’s mouth, and ran the knife over the boy’s throat.

  It was only once the blood had gone everywhere that Rory panicked, realizing he’d have to get all of this cleaned up before Teeks called or came over looking for him.

  An unsanctioned kidnapping?

  Stupid stupid stupid, Rory. How are we going to succeed like this?

  Chapter Four

  To understand how things could get so fucked, to understand how Clarissa Lee couldn’t see the end of the drop coming until it was too late, one needed to understand one industry term: pay-or-play contracts.

  Not to be confused with the music industry’s pay-to-play or conscription model, pay-or-play is an agreement that sees on-screen talent getting paid even if the movie in question never ends up getting made.

  These kinds of deals weren’t typical in the world of straight-to-video—or now straight-to-Netflix—productions Clarissa had found herself working recently. But it wasn’t impossible that investors who put money into a C-level horror movie would also insist on at least one name fans would recognize. And it was just a small jump in logic from that proven trend to the idea that a “star cameo” player might be able to insist on money up front, not upon completion.