Hollywood, California. August, 1983. 

The morning after, Ellis Denning sat in a makeup chair and watched himself become a monster. 

The detached heads of a dozen or so creatures–some covered in scales, as he would soon be, others fur, one nothing but a featureless glob of foam rubber meant to resemble melted flesh–looked down at him from above the mirror, the faces slack, cheeks hollow. Patient, gruesome toy soldiers waiting for a spark of movie magic to bring them to life. Beneath the masks worked Doc Hooper, hands moving swiftly over rows of bottles, canisters, and brushes.

“Lift your chin,” Doc said, dipping a fat brush in a dish of green-gray paint on the counter. The masks were his creations, all of them original designs. No off-the-rack shit for Doc Hooper, no Star Wars ripoffs or cheap Halloween masks turned inside out. The guy might not have looked like an artist–Ellis always thought Doc’s distended gut and endless collection of flower-patterned shirts gave him more of an extra-in-a-Hawaii adventure-flick vibe–but that’s exactly what he was. Probably the only true artist on the whole set, for whatever that was worth. 

Sometimes Ellis thought about that as he sat in the chair, but this morning all he thought about was how the lights above the mirror were too goddamn bright and what he’d do for a joint. Not a drink, that’d caused his problems to begin with, but a joint would smooth everything right out. Take the hard edges and round them over, get rid of the buzzing that felt like a single bee had found roost in his skull right between his eyes. It was just the one for now, but Ellis knew from experience there’d be a whole hive in there soon, droning and stinging and threatening to tear his head clean off and fly away with it. A joint would also dull the pain in his left eye. There, a black patch stretched halfway down his cheek where something–presumably a fist–had struck it the night before. But that was only a guess. 

He pinched at the bridge of his nose and the buzzing retreated to the back of his head, if only for now.

Doc looked at him in the mirror and whistled through his teeth. “Most the time I think it’s a crime to monster up those movie star looks of yours. Today I’d say it’s a vast improvement.” 

Ellis chuckled despite himself. Laughing hurt. This morning, everything hurt. “Yeah,” he said, still holding his head to keep the bees–now there were at least two of them in there–at bay. “Long night.” 

Doc grunted, a sound that somehow conveyed both I hear that, and I’ve been there. Now he was dabbing a small brush into a dark, crusted-over jar of adhesive. He painted thin lines of the stuff over the back of what would become Ellis’s hideous but much-beloved visage. The appliance lay on the counter. It was nothing more than strips of cast, as yet unpainted rubber, but in Doc’s hands it would soon be a horror. Ellis had spent nine years of mornings in this chair–many of them hungover, particularly in the last few years–but to him, seeing Doc work still seemed like something close to magic. 

He watched in the mirror as Doc began laying on the rubber strips, each one bearing row after row of intricate, hand-sculpted scales. Next would come the air brushing, then detail paint, then a full-head cowl complete with a row of spike-like quills stretching from the tip of his spine to the base of his skull. And finally the contacts that turned Ellis’s baby blues into narrow green slits, like inverted snake eyes. The contacts were the worst. They tunneled his vision, made the world feel as if it was at the end of a long dark hall. Not to mention they itched, dried his eyes out.

The price you paid for magic.

Doc stepped back, looked Ellis over, made an adjustment to one of the strips and layed on another. A polaroid showing Ellis in the finished, screen-ready makeup was taped onto the frame of the mirror, but Doc hardly ever checked it. No need. After so long he could probably do this makeup in his sleep (and some mornings, Ellis thought, he pretty much had). But if he ever needed something to refresh his memory, he had far better options than the tiny three-by-three. A line of posters hung on the wall of the trailer behind the makeup chair, seven of them in all. In a few months after they wrapped shooting, it would be eight. Each one showed Ellis at his most monstrous–fangs out, razor-sharp quills standing on end. In most of them he was walking out of the creature’s beloved swamp, dripping with slime. All of them featured a buxom heroine, sometimes in his arms, sometimes reacting in wide-eyed shock at the sight of her unlikely hero. In the first few it was a blonde, then they switched to brunettes, and now for the last couple flicks they had been on a redhead kick. The producers were convinced it actually mattered, but Ellis thought their target audience wasn’t so discerning. As long as the woman was in peril and the creature came out of the muck to save her and she swooned in his arms as the credits rolled, they’d go home happy and ready to buy a ticket when the next one rolled around. Not the most tasteful of business models, but it had been a profitable one.

The creature had started out as the villain, of course. An evil beast brought from a mythical lake somewhere to the Louisiana swamps and set loose on the world. After menacing the beautiful starlet through the bayou for ninety nerve-wracking minutes he would be shot by her heroic fiance and that would be that. It was never supposed to be a long-lasting job, which was why Ellis had taken it in the first place. He was new to L.A. then, hungry but realistic. The monster flick would pay his rent until a better gig, a real gig came along. It was a stopgap, nothing more. Not something he was thrilled to have his name on but it was a short-term thing and hey, at least no one would see his face behind all that makeup. 

Then the creature became a hit. They resurrected him in the sequel, and by the time the third movie rolled around he was no longer a vile, muck-dwelling abomination to be feared, but the hero. Then came the interviews and the tabloid pieces, the one dubbing Ellis the “new face to be feared” being a particular hallmark, and then one day he looked up to find the one-off side gig had become a career.

So now Ellis sat in the chair and felt the ever-growing drone of that mental beehive as he had glue smeared on his face for what must’ve been the ten thousandth time. Stardom, it turned out, wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. For every glitzy premier there was a lonely morning to follow, for every red carpet a black gutter straight through your soul. After the lights stopped flashing and the cameras quit rolling and reality swept back in like a cold front, you found yourself longing for that warmth of surreality only Hollywood could offer: adoration, affirmation, fame. It was an addiction, every bit an intoxicant as the liquor you grabbed when it was all you could reach. Even the paychecks came with a price, it turned out, paid usually in relationships. You got some money and you started to wonder if people stuck around because they liked you, or because they liked how you always picked up the bill. After a while it was just easier to drink alone, as he had last night.

As he did every night. 

And shit, he was just a B-rate horror actor. What the Pacino’s or the Deniro’s of the world must’ve gone through, he couldn’t imagine. But those guys, at least they did the big movies, the real movies. It was pretty absurd to think of works of fiction as being more or less real than one another, but that’s how it sat in Ellis’s head. Real movies had drama, they had intrigue, they had mystery–and not just the mystery of what color will the starlet’s hair be this time? They were sophisticated, the kind of movies people wrote about in newspapers and magazines that didn’t have sex line numbers in the back. He had wanted to be in those movies once, in the time before the monster became the hero and the big checks had started rolling in. After that he would’ve done just about anything. Some people would call that greedy, but let them stand on his mark and see how long they stayed so goddamn principled. 

Doc danced a brush around one of the rubber strips he’d cemented to Ellis’s face, then took a step back and nodded. Good enough. The makeup was halfway there, with one side of Ellis’s face mostly done and painted, the other side still bare–a beast caught mid-transformation. 

Doc took a few steps over to his stool and settled his considerable backside onto it. “Break time,” he said, and fetched a pack of cigarettes from his pocket. He took one and gave another to Ellis and lit them both up. They sat there for a few minutes, the smoke circling their heads like a special effect. The cigarette helped the droning subside–not as much as a joint would, but a little. The image of beekeepers using smoke to calm their hives came to mind. 

Finally Doc took a long drag and looked at Ellis through the exhaled plume. “You look tired, Ellis.”

“Like I said, long night.” 

“That’s not the kind of tired I mean.” 

“I’m fine,” Ellis said. “It’s just been a long week.” 

“Long night, long week… They all string together, don’t they?”

Ellis looked at Doc in the mirror. The big man shifted uncomfortably on his stool. 

“I ain’t trying to preach at you, Ellis. We’ve known each other too long for that. I just… Well I see you just about more than I see my own family most the time, and I can’t help but notice what I notice.”

Now it was Ellis’s turn to find his seat uncomfortable. He’d never heard Doc talk like this before. Chatter in the makeup trailer was kept mostly to what teams they had for the playoffs that year or what restaurant they’d tried over the weekend. In all this time they’d managed to keep their relationship strictly professional, which was just how Ellis liked it. Better that way, easier. 

“And I know the kind of tired you’re feeling,” Doc went on. “The kind you try to sleep off but can’t, so you try to drink it away and it only makes it worse.”

Ellis felt a sudden flare behind his eyes, a flash of rage so bright it surprised even him. It stoked the bees anew, sent a fresh wave of pain rippling through his head. Goddammit. He didn’t need this, not now, not when the lights were so bright and his head thrummed with the beat of his pulse.

“I’m fine,” he said again, more force in the words this time. 

Doc sighed, more smoke dribbling out from between his lips. “You say so.” 

“I do.” 

They sat in silence, Ellis trying to hide his rage and failing. The part of his face not covered by rubber scales had gone red–an embarrassing tell he’d had since childhood and could never shake. He debated what to do. If he wanted, he could have Doc fired. Didn’t even need a reason, not really. That was the power you had when it was your face–no matter how obscured it might be–on the poster. A reward for the responsibility it brought, too. And what would Doc know about that? Not a goddamn thing. The thought made Ellis seethe. The big man had the balls on him to act like he understood the first fucking thing about what Ellis went through, but he didn’t. How could he? 

Doc might’ve been a mindreader, because it was just then he reached into the breast pocket of his obnoxiously bright shirt and came away with something, flicked it in Ellis’s direction. Ellis snatched it out of the air, more on instinct than anything. 

“What’s this?” 

“Look at it.” 

Ellis worked the object to the tips of his fingers where he could examine it. At first glance it looked like a gold coin, dollar-sized and thick. Then he looked closer at the design on its embossed surface: A triangle surrounding a circle with a V etched in the center. And around the design, the words UNITY. SERVICE. RECOVERY.

Doc said, “Five years ago, I got tired of being tired. I was angry all the time and didn’t know why. Wife couldn’t stand me, kids couldn’t stand me. And the worst thing was I couldn’t stand me either. Somebody saw it in me, a friend. Offered to help. I’m doing the same now, Ellis. That’s all. ‘Cause I’ve been there. I know what this kind of tired can do… What it can make you into. Don’t let it.” 

Ellis worked the chip through his fingers. It was heavy and cool to the touch. He felt Doc’s eyes on him, a strong but patient glare. 

Finally Ellis tossed the chip back to Doc, who caught it without looking. “You should get back to work, Doc. Calltime’s soon.” 

Doc nodded slowly, stuffed the chip back in his pocket. He tapped his cigarette out on the counter, leaving a faint black circle on the formica, and picked up his brush.

They didn’t speak again that morning.

Find out what happens next.