The House of Rumour A Novel - By Jake Arnott Page 0,71

what we have to grind. Start a conspiracy and watch how it gets passed on. We can see how information moves through the culture. Like a marked card in a shuffled deck.’

We started shooting Fugitive Alien a month later. Nemo became increasingly suspicious about changes in the script. Larry had an air of distraction on set. It was soon clear that he was falling for the female lead, Sharleen Stirling. With her milky-blue eyes full of fear and wonder, there was something damaged and ethereal about Sharleen. A natural blonde, almost albino, she had a light peach fuzz on her deathly-pale skin that carried a sheen of luminescence so that her face glowed under the lights. She had a real screen presence. But there was a sad hunger in her gaze, imploring and seductive, caught in a bad childhood she could never escape from.

I heard that Jack got fired from Hughes Aircraft and had lost his security clearance after an FBI investigation. This disqualified him from any job in serious rocket research in the US and, given the circumstances, the Israelis withdrew their offer of work. I felt a little bad about how things had turned out but it was all in the balance. For all those years that he had power over me, I was the one who finally controlled his destiny. Funnily enough, we ended up in the same business. He got a job with an explosives company that specialised in developing pyrotechnics for the film industry.

And now that I had caught a glimpse of the real secret world, I got over my fascination with the occult and a search for hidden meaning. Oh, I still believe in the supernatural, in something beyond. I just don’t take it personally any more. After all, I managed to sell my soul. And I can’t tell you how much of a relief that turned out to be. I could get what I wanted out of life. With a clean file I’d be off the greylist, and Fugitive Alien could be my calling card to getting work in the big studios. I knew that it was going to be difficult for a woman director to succeed, but I was determined to try.

There were arguments on the set over Dexter’s suggestion that Zoltar, our ‘dissident’ alien, should discover the good things about the American way of life. This wasn’t in the original script and Nemo wasn’t happy. But when Dexter proposed that Sharleen’s part be made bigger, that she should show Zoltar the benefits of our great nation, Larry was only too happy to write new scenes for her. I was worried that this might be too much for Sharleen to carry.

‘Oh, she can’t act, but then she doesn’t have to,’ Dexter reassured me. ‘She believes in this stuff. It gives her this real intensity.’

‘Really?’

‘Oh yeah. She thinks she’s seen one.’

‘What?’

‘A flying saucer. She has all these strange stories about her childhood too. She thinks Larry’s a genius. I tell you, Sharleen’s a whole project in herself.’

Soon after that Nemo stopped coming to the set, though Larry never missed a day’s shooting. I wasn’t happy about him and Sharleen falling in love but it was none of my business and I was far too busy to do anything about it. Dexter began to leave things to me with the filming but he would always come to watch the dailies. He was already planning his post-production strategy. He had decided that he would instigate rumours about the film: that the alien language used by Zoltar when he is aboard his ship is an occult incantation; that the mention of an air force report concerning flying saucer sightings refers to an existing top-secret memorandum (Dexter even suggested that a copy of this could be forged and used at a later date). His cleverest trick was to put about the story that we had used actual footage of a flying saucer landing as part of the movie. It meant that some of the special effects sequences were to be made deliberately blurred.

It was my idea to use Jack Parsons’ pyrotechnics company for these scenes. I knew he’d understand what we were after and would get it right. He believed in these things, of course. He told me that it was no coincidence that the spate of flying saucer sightings began just after he had been performing magical workings in the Mojave Desert. ‘We opened a portal,’ he said, ‘and something flew in.’ Dexter, of course, loved