Win all or lose all, there was only one thing to do. Letting go with his left hand, he curled his body around, and struck at the thing on his ankle.
For an instant he thought he would be dragged over, and then the moan was cut off, and his ankle was free from the crushing force.
He lay panting on the shelf, weak with strain, until he had the courage to crawl to the edge and look down. The cliff sparkled in the sun, light laughed from the blue waves of the Minch, the trail below was empty of all threat.
He looked at his ankle; the cloth of his trouserleg was twisted and driven into his boot, and when he pulled it away, he saw why. Something fell out of the cloth as he pulled the cuff up, and after he examined the curve of indentations in the leather, the yellow tooth was merely objective confirmation of the horror. If it had been an inch above the boottop and broken the skin, Percy was sure no antitetanus, antivenom, or antibiotic would have saved him.
He put on his gloves before he picked it up, wrapped and knotted it in a handkerchief folded double, and began to limp up the Pass of the Dead.
At first all Angus Donnan said when Percy told him he’d had a fall was, “Must have been a bad one,” but when he invited Percy into the bar even though it was late afternoon, and sat him down for a glass of his best malt, his glance at the climbing gear was knowing. “Now that’s medicinal, Mr. Percy, and even if it’s between licensed hours, I consider you a benighted traveler. Precisely where did you fall?”
Percy took a fiery gulp, but his shudder came before the whisky hit his throat.
“Was it perhaps some place you shouldn’t have climbed, some place you were warned against?”
So Percy told him the gist of it, watching Donnan’s face for signs of disbelief. But the innkeeper listened solemnly, not saying a word till he was done, and when Percy put on his gloves and unwrapped the tooth, looked at it with dour interest. “Aye. You’re a lucky man indeed. Would you mind telling one other man of this?”
“Who?”
“He’s called Daft Rabbie,” then seeing the look on Percy’s face “but he’s no daft at all. I’m thinking you’d like to change your room—the room next to ours is empty, and I know the knowledge would be a great comfort when you’re going to sleep.”
Percy was ready to say he wasn’t a child, but thought again, and gratefully accepted.
When the pub opened again at five, Percy went down and stayed. He wanted company, and the regulars had accepted him. He ate his supper there, but drank sparingly, still shaken enough not to let down his guard. Near closing time a giant of an old man came in, long gray hair hanging from under his knitted cap, but when he took it off Percy saw he was bald. “I heard you were asking after me,” he said to Donnan.
“Aye,” said Donnan, and beckoned him closer so he could speak in a low voice. Then he led him over to Percy’s table. “This is Rabbie MacLeod, Daft Rabbie.”
Percy could see why Angus had insisted he was misnamed; MacLeod’s look was like a hawk’s, though without the ferocious fixity. “As soon as we’re closed I want you to tell Rabbie what happened.”
Daft Rabbie and Percy drank the whiskies Percy ordered, talking desultorily till Donnan gave the ten-minute warning. Even on such short acquaintance, Percy felt comfortable enough with MacLeod to share silence with him.
Afterwards, by the one light left on in the bar, Percy told the old man his story while Angus cleaned up quietly, so as not to miss a word. This time he went into more detail, and Rabbie now and again moved his head assentingly. “Aye, that’s what I saw,” he said at the end, “that’s what I saw myself forty years ago when I looked down Bealach a’ du Mairbh. Except for the one in rags—that would be the Johnson.”
When Percy brought down the handkerchief in his gloved hands and unknotted it, Angus came over, and the three of them stared down at the relic. “Memento mori,” whispered Rabbie, “as Parson’s so fond of saying.”
“Not with the help of this,” said Percy. “It’s a souvenir I can do without. But what to do with it?”
“I’ll fetch the paraffin,” said Angus.
So it ended with the three of them out on the hillside in the night. Percy soaked and resoaked the handkerchief and the bare rock around it, and then touched a match to it. As they watched the flames shifting in the wind, Angus said, “Let’s not talk of this.”
“Indeed not,” said MacLeod. “I know better now, and there’s no reason for you to be Daft Angus and you to be Daft Harry.”
DEATHTRACKS by Dennis Etchison
This past autumn marked a long overdue major event in the history of horror literature—the publication of The Dark Country, Dennis Etchison’s first collection of short fiction. This book is overdue by at least a decade; in 1971 what was to have been Etchison’s first collection of stories, entitled The Night of the Eye, was stillborn when its publisher went bankrupt on the eve of publication. Etchison has been selling short stories since 1961, and it’s unthinkable that fans have had to wait an additional ten years to read a collection of his work.
Born March 30, 1943 in Stockton, California, Etchison is finally receiving deserved recognition as the finest writer of psychological horror this genre has produced. Etchison’s nightmares and fears are intensely personal, and his genius is to make us realize that we share them. He is that rarest of genre writers: an original visionary, whose horrors are those of loneliness, of an individual adrift in a society beyond his control, beyond his comprehension, in which only sheeplike acceptance and robotlike nonawareness permit an individual to survive until his allotted time. The reader in avid search of shambling slashers and tentacled monstrosities will only be baffled by Etchison’s fiction. A longtime resident of Los Angeles, Etchison is deeply interested in films and has written a number of screenplays from his own material and from works by Stephen King, Ray Bradbury and others. Recently Dennis Etchison has written the paperback novelizations for the horror films The Fog, Halloween II, Halloween III, and Videodrome (these last three under his pseudonym, “Jack Martin”).
ANNOUNCER: Hey, let’s go into this apartment and help this housewife take a shower!
ASSISTANT: Rad!
ANNOUNCER: Excuse me, ma’am!
HOUSEWIFE: Eeek!
ANNOUNCER: It’s okay, I’m the New Season Man!
HOUSEWIFE: You—you came right through my TV!
ANNOUNCER: That’s because there’s no stopping good news! Have you heard about New Season Body Creamer? It’s guaranteed better than your old-fashioned soap product, cleaner than water on the air! It’s—
ASSISTANT: Really, rad!
HOUSEWIFE: Why, you’re so right! Look at the way New Season’s foaming away my dead, unwanted dermal cells! My world has a whole new complexion! My figure has a glossy new paisley shine! The kind that men . . .
ANNOUNCER: And women!
HOUSEWIFE: . . . love to touch!
ANNOUNCER: Plus the kids’ll love it, too!
HOUSEWIFE: You bet they will! Wait till my husband gets up! Why, I’m going to spend the day spreading the good news all over our entire extended family! It’s—
ANNOUNCER: It’s a whole New Season!
HOUSEWIFE: A whole new reason! It’s—
ASSISTANT: Absolutely RAD-I-CAL!
The young man fingered the edges of the pages with great care, almost as if they were razor blades. Then he removed his fingertips from the clipboard and tapped them along the luminous crease in his pants, one, two, three, four, five, four, three, two, one, stages of flexion about to become a silent drumroll of boredom. With his other hand he checked his watch, clicked his pen and smoothed the top sheet of the questionnaire, circling the paper in a cursive, impatient holding pattern.
Across the room another man thumbed a remote-control device until the TV voices became silvery whispers, like ants crawling over aluminum foil.
“Wait, Bob.” On the other side of the darkening living room a woman stirred in her beanbag chair, her hair shining under the black light. “It’s
time for The Fuzzy Family.”
The man, her husband, shifted his buttocks in his own beanbag chair and yawned. The chair’s styrofoam filling crunched like cornflakes under his weight. “Saw this one before,” he said. “Besides, there’s no laughtrack. They use three cameras and a live audience, remember?”
“But it might be, you know, boosted,” said the woman. “Oh, what do they call it?”
“Technically augmented?” offered the young man.
They both looked at him, as though they had forgotten he was in their home.
The young man forced an unnatural, professional smile. In the black light his teeth shone too brightly.
“Right,” said the man. “Not The Fuzzy Family, though. I filtered out a track last night. It’s all new. I’m sure.”
The young man was confused. He had the inescapable feeling that they were skipping (or was it simply that he was missing?) every third or fourth sentence. I’m sure. Sure of what? That this particular TV show had been taped before an all-live audience? How could he be sure? And why would anyone care enough about such a minor technical point to bother to find out? Such things weren’t supposed to matter to the blissed-out masses. Certainly not to AmiDex survey families. Unless . . .
Could he be that lucky?
The questionnaire might not take very long, after all.
This one, he thought, has got to work in the industry.
He checked the computer stats at the top of the questionnaire: MORRISON, ROBERT, AGE 54, UNEMPLOYED. Used to work in the industry, then. A TV cameraman, a technician of some kind, maybe for a local station? There had been so many layoffs in the last few months, with QUBE and Teletext and all the new cable licenses wearing away at the traditional network share. And any connection, past or present, would automatically disqualify this household. Hope sprang up in his breast like an accidental porno broadcast in the middle of Sermonette.
He flicked his pen rapidly between cramped fingers and glanced up, eager to be out of here and home to his own video cassettes. Not to mention, say, a Bob’s Big Boy hamburger, heavy relish, hold the onions and add avocado, to be picked up on the way?
“I’ve been sent here to ask you about last month’s Viewing Log,” he began. “When one doesn’t come back in the mail, we do a routine follow-up. It may have been lost by the post office. I see here that your phone’s been disconnected. Is that right?”
He waited while the man used the remote selector. Onscreen, silent excerpts of this hour’s programming blipped by channel by channel: reruns of Cop City, the syndicated version of The Cackle Factory, the mindless Make Me Happy, The World As We Know It, T.H.U.G.S., even a repeat of that PBS documentary on Teddy Roosevelt, A Man, A Plan, a Canal, Panama, and the umpteenth replay of Mork and Mindy, this the infamous last episode that had got the series canceled, wherein Mindy is convinced she’s carrying Mork’s alien child and nearly OD’s on a homeopathic remedy of Humphrey’s Eleven Tablets and blackstrap molasses. Still he waited.
“There really isn’t much I need to know.” He put on a friendly, stupid, shit-eating grin, hoping it would show in the purple light and then afraid that it would. “What you watch is your own business, naturally. AmiDex isn’t interested in influencing your viewing habits. If we did, I guess that would undermine the statistical integrity of our sample, wouldn’t it?”
Morrison and his wife continued to stare into their flickering 12-inch Sony portable.
If they’re so into it, I wonder why they don’t have a bigger set, one of those new picture-frame projection units from Mad Man Muntz, for example? I don’t even see a Betamax. What was Morrison talking about when he said he’d taped The Fuzzy Family? The man had said that, hadn’t he?
It was becoming difficult to concentrate.
Probably it was the black light, that and the old Day-Glow posters, the random clicking of the beaded curtains. Where did they get it all? Sitting in their living room was like being in a time machine, a playback of some Hollywood Sam Katzman or Albert Zugsmith version of the sixties; he almost expected Jack Nicholson or Luanna Anders to show up. Except that the artifacts seemed to be genuine, and in mint condition. There were things he had never seen before, not even in catalogues. His parents would know. It all must have been saved out of some weird prescience, in anticipation of the current run on psychedelic nostalgia. It would cost a fortune to find practically any original black-light posters, however primitive. The one in the corner, for instance, “Ship of Peace,” mounted next to “Ass Id” and an original Crumb “Keep on Truckin’ ” from the Print Mint in San Francisco, had been offered on the KCET auction just last week for $450, he remembered.
He tried again.
“Do you have your Viewing Log handy?” Expectantly he paused a beat. “Or did you—misplace it?”
“It won’t tell you anything,” said the man.
“We watch a lot of oldies,” said the woman.
The young man pinched his eyes shut for a moment to clear his head. “I know what you mean,” he said, hoping to put them at ease. “I can’t get enough of The Honeymooners, myself. That Norton.” He added a conspiratorial chuckle. “Sometimes I think they get better with age. They don’t make ’em like that anymore. But, you know, the local affiliates would be very interested to know that you’re watching.”
“Not that old,” said the woman. “We like the ones from the sixties. And some of the new shows, too, if—”
Morrison inclined his head toward her, so that the young man could not sec, and mouthed what may have been a warning to his wife.
Suddenly and for reasons he could not name, the young man felt that he ought to be out of here.
He shook his wrist, pretending that his collector’s item Nixon-Agnew watch was stuck. “What time is it getting to be?” Incredibly, he noticed that his watch had indeed stopped. Or had he merely lost track of the time? The hands read a quarter to six. Where had they been the last time he looked? “I really should finish up and get going. You’re my last interview of the day. You folks must be about ready for dinner.”
“Not so soon,” said the woman. “It’s almost time for The Uncle Jerry Show.”
That’s a surprise, he thought. It’s only been on for one season.
“Ah, that’s a new show, isn’t it?” he said, again feeling that he had missed something. “It’s only been on for—”
Abruptly the man got up from his beanbag chair and crossed the room.
He opened a cabinet, revealing a stack of shipment cartons from the Columbia Record Club. The young man made out the titles of a few loose albums, “greatest hits” collections from groups which, he imagined, had long since disbanded. Wedged into the cabinet, next to the records, was a state-of-the-art audio frequency equalizer with graduated slide controls covering several octaves. This was patched into a small black accessory amplifier box, the kind that are sold for the purpose of connecting a TV set to an existing home stereo system. Morrison leaned over and punched a sequence of preset buttons, and without further warning a great hissing filled the room.
“This way we don’t miss anything,” said the wife.
The young man looked around. Two enormous Voice-of-the-Theatre speakers, so large they seemed part of the walls, had sputtered to life on either side of the narrow room. But as yet there was no sound other than the unfathomable, rolling hiss of spurious signal-to-noise output, the kind of distortion he had heard once when he set his FM receiver between stations and turned the volume up all the way.
Once the program began, he knew, the sound would be deafening.
“So,” he said hurriedly, “why don’t we wrap this up, so I can leave you two to enjoy your evening? All I need are the answers to a couple of quick questions, and I’ll be on my way.”
Morrison slumped back into place, expelling a rush of air from his beanbag chair, and thumbed the remote channel selector to a blank station. A pointillist pattern of salt-and-pepper interference swarmed the 12-inch screen. He pushed up the volume in anticipa
tion, so as not to miss a word of The Uncle Jerry Show when the time came to switch channels again, eyed a clock on the wall over the Sony—there was a clock, after all, if only one knew where to look amid the glowing clutter—and half-turned to his visitor. The clock read ten minutes to six.
“What are you waiting to hear?” asked Morrison.
“Yes,” said his wife, “why don’t you tell us?”
The young man lowered his eyes to his clipboard, seeking the briefest possible explanation, but saw only the luminescence of white shag carpeting through his transparent vinyl chair—another collector’s item. He felt uneasy circulation twitching his weary legs, and could not help but notice the way the inflated chair seemed to throb with each pulse.
“Well,” trying one more time, noting that it was coming up on nine minutes to six and still counting, “your names were picked by AmiDex demographics. Purely at random. You represent twelve thousand other viewers in this area. What you watch at any given hour determines the rating points for each network.”
There, that was simple enough, wasn’t it? No need to go into the per-minute price of sponsor ad time buys based on the overnight share, sweeps week, the competing services each selling its own brand of accuracy. Eight-and-a-half minutes to go.
“The system isn’t perfect, but it’s the best way we have so far of—”
“You want to know why we watch what we watch, don’t you?”
“Oh no, of course not! That’s really no business of ours. We don’t care. But we do need to tabulate viewing records, and when yours wasn’t returned—”
“Let’s talk to him,” said the woman. “He might be able to help.”
“He’s too young, can’t you see that, Jenny?”
“I beg your pardon?” said the young man.
“It’s been such a long time,” said the woman, rising with a whoosh from her chair and stepping in front of her husband. “We can try.”
The man got slowly to his feet, his arms and torso long and phosphorescent in the peculiar mix of ultraviolet and television light. He towered there, considering. Then he took a step closer.
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