Dark Labyrinth 1 Read Online Free PDF

practice my lines. This blasted makeup takes so blasted long that I forget my blasted lines by the time it comes to shoot. Was I supposed to say ‘Don’t let it happen here !’ in that scene? Hand me the script.”
    “No, Mr. Lance. That line comes much later—it follows ‘Oh no! I’m transforming!’” Zoltan smeared shadow under Lance’s eyes. This would be just the first step in the transformation, but he still had to increase the highlights. Veins stood out on Zoltan’s gnarled hands, but his fingers were rock steady with the fine detail.
    “How do you know my lines?”
    “You may call it gypsy intuition, Mr. Lance—or it may be because you have been saying them every morning before makeup for a week now. They have burned into my brain like a gypsy curse.”
    Lance glared at the wizened old man in his pale blue shirt and color-spattered smock. Zoltan’s leathery fingers had a real instinct for makeup, for changing the appearance of any actor. But his craft took hours.
    Lance Chandler had enough confidence in his own screen presence to carry any picture, regardless of how silly the makeup made him look. His square jaw, fine physique, and clean-cut appearance made him the perfect model of the all-American hero. Now, during the War against Germany and Japan, the U.S. needed its strong heroes to keep up morale. Besides, making propaganda pictures fulfilled his patriotic duties without requiring him to go somewhere and risk getting shot. Red-corn-syrup blood and bullet blanks were about all the real violence he wanted to experience.
    Lance took special pride in his performance in Tarzan Versus the Third Reich . Though he had few lines in the film, the animal rage on his face and his oiled and straining body had been enough to topple an entire regiment of Hitler’s finest, including one of Rommel’s desert vehicles. (Exactly why one of Rommel’s desert vehicles had shown up in the middle of Africa’s deepest jungles was a question only the scriptwriter could have answered.)
    Craig Corwyn, U-Boat Smasher , to be released next month as the start of a new series, might make Lance a household name. Those stories centered on brave Craig Corwyn, who had a penchant for leaping off the deck of his Allied destroyer and swimming down to sink Nazi submarines with his bare hands, usually by opening the underwater hatches or just plucking out the rivets in the hull.
    But none of those movies would compare to Wolfman in Casablanca . Bogart would be forgotten in a week. The timing for this picture was just perfect; it had an emotional content Lance had not been able to bring into his earlier efforts. The country was just waiting for a new hero, strong and manly, with a dash of animal unpredictability and a heart of gold (not to mention unwavering in Allied sympathies).
    The story concerned a troubled but patriotic werewolf—him, Lance Chandler—who in his wanderings has found himself in German-occupied Casablanca. There he causes what havoc he can for the enemy, and he also meets Brigitte, a beautiful French resistance fighter vacationing in Morocco. Brigitte turns out to be a werewolf herself, Lance’s true love. Even in the script, the final scene as the two of them howl on the rooftops above a conflagration of Nazi tanks and ruined artillery sent shivers down Lance’s spine. If he could pull off this performance, Hitler himself would tremble in his sheets.
    Zoltan added spirit gum to Lance’s cheeks and forehead, humming as he worked. “You will please stop perspiring, Mr. Lance. I require a dry surface for this fine hair.”
    Lance slumped in the chair. Zoltan reminded him of the wicked old gypsy man in the movie, the one who had cursed his character to become a werewolf in the first place. “This blasted transformation sequence is going to take all day again, isn’t it? And I don’t even get to act after the first second or so! Lie still, add more hair, shoot a few frames, lie still, add more hair, shoot a few