Thorn by Fred Saberhagen (reading like a writer TXT) 📕

all he knew, she might be home, reconciled with her parents; or maybe in some other situation that she wouldn’t be anxious to leave, just to hit the road again with Pat. So he ought to have some kind of hopeful proposition ready for her, something really attractive to suggest.

      He would talk about—what else?—getting her into movies of some kind. Every girl liked that idea, and Annie was quite good-looking enough to make it credible. In fact, now that he thought of it…

      Now that he thought about it, making movies with Annie was suddenly the one thing Pat wanted desperately to do.

      Sure. Of course. There would be some way. Why not? Almost forgetting to work at picking up a ride, Pat hiked excitedly along the shoulder. The mountains to his right were forgotten, as was the intermittent roar of traffic at his left elbow. He would find Annie, and they would go off somewhere and make films, and everything in his whole screwed-up life might fall into the right place for once…

      He remembered now how he had been talking with her in Chicago once, and she had been fascinated by some of the stories of movie-making that he’d had to tell. She seemed to understand that he was telling her the truth … or maybe it wasn’t in Chicago. Somewhere. She had been with him somewhere else, before Chicago, now that he came to think of it. Or was it after?

      Somewhere else. A place he didn’t want to think about right now. But she had liked him, and it had been so good, that special way that they’d made love…

      A movie with Annie in it was certainly a great idea, and if he wasn’t crazy he would have thought of it before now. Could he really do it? Could he really at last straighten out his own life that much? The idea, when put in those terms, scared him a little.

      He knew he could handle the movie itself, if he ever got the chance. He would pick up Annie, and they would go somewhere where he could get a job with some film-maker. Maybe even right here in New Mexico. There were bound to be people here somewhere making films, and some of them had probably heard about Pat from people out on the Coast. When you were good, word got around.

      Porn was by far the easiest kind of work to find, for Pat at least. Particularly when they found out that he was ready, willing, and able to double as an actor. He did well in front of the camera as well as behind it, though acting or performing of any kind wasn’t really what he liked to do. His androgynous good looks were in demand, for straight, gay, or free-style porn. There was only one kind of thing he’d never touched, and never would. So he took part in the filmed sex smiling like the madman he sometimes was, faking the sex as much as possible, meanwhile continuing to keep himself happy by thinking how he would do the lights and the camera work and time everything differently if he were put in charge. Of course there was a dreary sameness in all porn, or almost all. But there were an infinite number of ways to disguise the sameness, if you knew what you were doing. Pat never doubted that he did.

      But very rarely had he ever been allowed to take charge, to show what he could really do, though sometimes his suggestions on specific points were taken, by filmmakers who were always gratified with the results. The equipment and the space had always belonged to someone else. Nowhere, as far as he knew, was there a complete film of any kind that he had made. Once he had been allowed to take complete charge, at some real madman’s house in Mexico. And once, another time, in this mansion with giant roof beams they had been going to let him take over, but…

      …something had happened. And now here he was, hiking north on Interstate 25 and trying once more not to think about Phoenix. Today for some reason was a day for struggling with that problem. Maybe just because this was the first time he had returned to the Southwest since…

      …someone had brought him into that rich guy’s mansion out there, someone promising what they called a party. And Pat had thought he understood what that entailed…

      His thought recoiled now, twisting, from a half-vision of blood. The memory faded, like a dying dream, almost as quickly as it had come. It left behind it no new knowledge, only a wash of sick fear. What he couldn’t stand was the fear that that time he had been maneuvered into working on a snuff film.

      Real torture on film, and real death. That would be for Pat an ultimate profanation, a blasphemy. He would have no part in it at all, though what exactly was being profaned, he could not have said…

      His inner thoughts had become a burden, and it was a great relief when a car stopped for him at last. A new yellow Pinto, stopping cautiously, well ahead. Pat hitched his small backpack higher on his back, and trotted. The face peering back at him from the window on the driver’s side was that of a middle-aged man with steel-rimmed spectacles, alone in the car. A fatherly type, it would appear. Perhaps genuinely so. As soon as they were under way, the man would begin to wonder aloud just why a young kid like Pat was hitchhiking alone; didn’t he realize it could be dangerous?

      “Hi, young feller, you going up to Santa Fe?”

      Something about the name sounded reasonable. “Yeah,” said Pat, and climbed in on the right. Santa Fe was one of those towns whose name everyone had heard, but he had never seen the place before. Right now, though, it sounded congruent with Annie.

      The car was rolling, easing cautiously off the shoulder onto pavement, picking up speed. The