Wake Up and Dream Read Online Free

out of this city—but there you are. We fell in love and we moved in together in this rathole apartment, and I soon realized that Daniel Hogg was wasting his talent.”
    “His name wasn’t Lamotte?”
    “Can you imagine anyone ever making it in this town with a name like Hogg? So, that was one of the first things we decided to change. I liked the Daniel bit, and my name, Lamotte, was just about the only thing about my past life I was proud of. So he became Daniel Lamotte even before we married and I got him to start writing screenplays which, even back then before the feelies, was obviously where the real money was. That, and I also got him to fire his agent.”
    “Sounds like you were already doing that particular job for him, Mrs Lamotte.”
    Those eyes, which he decided really were green, flashed. “I haven’t brought you here to justify myself. You can take this story any way you like…”
    A story, he thought, which would have made a decent enough script itself. In fact, it probably was one, circulating somewhere from studio to studio in twentieth draft. Nurse (you’d probably need to make her an aspiring actress as well; no one would ever believe a good-looking broad in this city wanting to be anything else) meets pulp writer at some midnight diner. Maybe he’s scribbling on a notepad. Maybe she’s read one of his books. Or maybe she just spills coffee in his lap…
    “I know this sounds over-fancy, but Dan lived to write. He’d never written any kind of script before, but the stuff just flowed out of him, and it was good. Between us, with him doing the writing and me quitting nursing and doing whatever was necessary—and I do mean whatever —to get his scripts noticed, we finally started to get some work. He was especially good at twists and endings—events which seem inevitable once you’ve seen them, but which you’d never have been able to predict before. Have you seen Freedom City ? That was one of Dan’s very earliest. And then along came the feelies—”
    “I don’t go much for the feelies, Mrs Lamotte.”
    “But I guess you’ve heard of The Virgin Queen ?”
    He nodded. Not that he’d actually seen that one, but even he’d heard of it. A ruffs and codpieces epic, it had come out in around 1933 or 4 and, as much as anything, had been responsible for convincing the world that the Bechmeir field was the future of the entertainment industry.
    “Funny, isn’t it? One of the most famous of all the feelies, yet no one remembers the name of the guy who wrote it. Even those idiots at the Academy passed it over. But it brought us the kind of life I’d dreamed about when I came to this city. Dan’s work sold, and it did well, and for a few years we were happy. We both were…”
    He let his gaze travel slowly in the shafts of sunlight which were playing in narrower and brighter patches across the parquet as the light outside strengthened towards noon, and then he looked back to Mrs Lamotte. Even with her strange request, and although Daniel Lamotte was supposed to be the sort of writer who was above such things, he was still expecting some standard plot-twist to emerge at the end of this story. The new blonde secretary with legs up to here. That bitch in the house opposite who always sunbathes in the nude. The pool boy. He was used to most kinds of tale as to why lives and marriages went wrong.
    He risked raising a questioning eyebrow. “Everyone gets happy for a while, Mrs Lamotte. It’s an unwritten law of the universe. And then they get less so. That’s another law. And that’s normally where I come in.”
    “I suppose you’re right.” April Lamotte sighed. She did such a good job of the sigh that he wondered if she really hadn’t put in time as an actress as well as a nurse. Then she and her barefoot reflection resumed pacing the shining floor. “And after the success of The Virgin Queen , Dan could write the scripts he wanted and know they’d sell. But maybe that was part of the