The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 10 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Stephen Jones

  She smiled at the monitors.

  Except for Angie they barely acknowledged her, continuing their conversation as though she were not there.

  They know, she thought. They must.

  How much longer till Marty saw through her game? She had him on her side, but the tease would play out soon enough unless she let it go further, and she couldn’t bear the thought of that. She only needed him long enough to find the answer, and then she would walk away.

  She went to the glass doors.

  The rain had stopped and soon the next group would begin gathering outside. The busts of the television stars in the courtyard were ready, Red Buttons and George Gobel and Steve Allen and Lucille Ball with her eyebrows arched in perpetual wonderment, waiting to meet their fans. It was all that was left for them now.

  Angie came up next to her.

  “Hey, girl.”

  “Hey yourself.”

  “The lumberjack. He a friend of yours?”

  “Number Sixteen?”

  “The one with the buns.”

  “I never saw him before.”

  “Oh.” Angie took a bite of an oatmeal cookie and brushed the crumbs daintily from her mouth. “Nice.”

  “I suppose. If you like that sort of thing.”

  “Here.” She offered Lisa Anne the napkin. “You look like you’re melting.”

  She took it and wiped the back of her neck, then squeezed out the ends of her hair, as a burst of laughter came from the theater. That meant Marty had already gone in through the side entrance to warm them up.

  “Excuse me,” she said. “It’s showtime.”

  Angie followed her to the hall. “You never miss one, do you?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Aren’t they boring? I mean, it’s not like they’re hits or anything.”

  “Most of them are pretty lame,” Lisa Anne admitted.

  “So why watch?”

  “I have to find out.”

  “Don’t tell me. What Marty’s really like?”

  “Please.”

  “Then why?”

  “I’ve got to know why some shows make it,” she said, “and some don’t.”

  “Oh, you want to get into the biz?”

  “No. But I used to know someone who was. See you.”

  I shouldn’t have said that, she thought as she opened the unmarked door in the hall.

  The observation booth was dark and narrow with a half-dozen padded chairs facing a two-way mirror. On the other side of the mirror, the test subjects sat in rows of theater seats under several 36-inch television sets suspended from the ceiling.

  She took the second chair from the end.

  In the viewing theater, Marty was explaining how to use the dials wired into the armrests. They were calibrated from zero to ten with a plastic knob in the center. During the screening the subjects were to rotate the knobs, indicating how much they liked what they saw. Their responses would be recorded and the results then analyzed to help the networks decide whether the show was ready for broadcast.

  Lisa Anne watched Marty as he paced, doing his schtick. He had told her that he once worked at a comedy traffic school, and she could see why. He had them in the palm of his hand. Their eyes followed his every move, like hypnotized chickens waiting to be fed. His routine was corny but with just the right touch of hipness to make them feel like insiders. He concluded by reminding them of the fifty dollars cash they would receive after the screening and the discussion. Then, when the lights went down and the tape began to roll, Marty stepped to the back and slipped into the hall. As he entered the observation booth, the audience was applauding.

  “Good group this time,” he said, dropping into the chair next to hers.

  “You always know just what to say.”

  “I do, don’t I?” he said, leaning forward to turn on a tiny 12-inch set below the mirror.

  She saw their faces flicker in the blue glow of the cathode ray tubes while the opening titles came up.

  The show was something calledDario, You So Crazy! She sighed and sat back, studying their expressions while keeping one eye on the TV screen. It wouldn’t be long before she felt his hand on her forearm as he moved in, telling her what he really thought of the audience, how stupid they were, every last one, down to the little old ladies and the kindly grandfathers and the working men and women who were no more or less ordinary than he was under his Perry Ellis suit and silk tie. Then his breath in her hair and his fingers scraping her pantyhose as if tapping out a message on her knee and perhaps today, this time, he would attempt to deliver that message, while she offered breathless quips to let him know how clever he was and how lucky she felt to be here. She shuddered and turned her cheek to him in the dark.

  “Who’s that actor?” she said.

  “Some Italian guy. I saw him in a movie. He’s not so bad, if he could learn to talk English.”

  She recognized the co-star. It was Rowan Atkinson, the slight, bumbling everyman from that British TV series on PBS.

  “Mr Bean!” she said.

  “Roberto Benigni,” Marty corrected, reading from the credits.

  “I mean the other one. This is going to be good . . .”

  “I thought you were on your break,” said Marty.

  “This is more important.”

  He stared at her transparent reflection in the two-way mirror.

  “You were going to take the day off.”

  “No, I wasn’t.”

  The pilot was a comedy about an eccentric Italian film director who had come to America in search of fame and fortune. Mr Bean played his shy, inept manager. They shared an expensive rented villa in the Hollywood Hills. Just now they were desperate to locate an actress to pose as Dario’s wife, so that he could obtain a green card and find work before they both ran out of money.

  She immediately grasped the premise and its potential.

  It was inspired. Benigno’s abuse of the language would generate countless hilarious misunderstandings; coupled with his manager’s charming incompetence, the result might be a television classic, thanks in no small measure to the brilliant casting. How could it miss? All they needed was a good script. She realized that her mind had drifted long enough to miss the screenwriter’s name. The only credit left was the show’s creator/producer, one Barry E. Tormé. Probably the son of that old singer, she thought. What was his name? Mel. Apparently he had fathered a show-business dynasty. The other son, Tracy, was a successful TV writer; he had even created a science-fiction series at Fox that lasted for a couple of seasons. Why had she never heard of brother Barry? He was obviously a pro.

  She sat forward, fascinated to see the first episode.

  “Me, Dario!” Benigni crowed into a gold-trimmed telephone, the third time it had rung in less than a minute. It was going to be his signature bit.

  “O, I Dream!” she said.

  “Huh?”

  “The line, Marty. Got you.”

  The letters rearranged themselves automatically in her mind. It was child’s play. She had almost expected him to come up with it first. They had kept the game going since her first day at AmiDex, when she pointed out that his full name was an anagram for Marty licks on me. It got his attention.

  “You can stop with the word shit,” he said.

  He sounded irritated, which surprised her. “I thought you liked it.”

  “What’s up with that, anyway?”

  “It’s a reflex,” she said. “I can’t help it. My father taught me when I was little.”

  “Well, it’s getting old.”

  She turned to his profile in the semidarkness, his pale, cleanshaven face and short, neat hair as two-dimensional as a cartoon cutout from the back of a cereal box.

  “You know, Marty, I was thinking. Could you show me the War Room sometime?” She moved her leg closer to his. “Just you and me, when everybody’s gone. So I could see how it works.”

  “How what works?”

  She let her hand brush his knee.
“Everything. The really big secrets.”

  “Such as?”

  “I don’t know.” Had she said too much? “But if I’m going to work here, I should know more about the company. What makes a hit, for example. Maybe you could tell me. You explain things so well.”

  “Why did you come here?”

  The question caught her offguard. “I needed a job.”

  “Plenty of jobs out there,” he snapped. “What is it, you got a script to sell?”

  The room was cold and her feet were numb. Now she wanted to be out of here. The other chairs were dim, bulky shapes, like half-reclining corpses, as if she and Marty were not alone in the room.

  “Sorry,” she said.

  “I told you to stay home today.”

  No, he hadn’t. “You want me to take the day off?”

  He did not answer.

  “Do you think I need it? Or is there something special about today?”

  The door in the back of the room opened. It connected to the hall that led to the other sections of the building and the War Room itself, where even now the audience response was being recorded and analyzed by a team of market researchers. A hulking figure stood there in silhouette. She could not see his features. He hesitated for a moment, then came all the way in, plunging the room into darkness again, and then there were only the test subjects and their flickering faces opposite her through the smoked glass. The man took a seat at the other end of the row.

  “That you, Mickleson?”

  At the sound of his voice Marty sat up straight.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I thought so. Who’s she?”

  “One of the girls - Annalise. She was just leaving.”

  Then Marty leaned close to her and whispered:

  “Will you get out?”

  She was not supposed to be here. The shape at the end of the row must have been the big boss. Marty had known he was coming; that was why he wanted her gone. This was the first time anyone had joined them in the booth. It meant the show was important. The executives listened up when a hit came along.

  “Excuse me,” she said, and left the observation booth.

  She wanted very much to see the rest of the show. Now she would have to wait till it hit the airwaves. Was there a way for her to eavesdrop on the discussion later, after the screening?

  In the hall, she listened for the audience reaction. Just now there must have been a lull in the action, with blank tape inserted to represent a commercial break, because there was dead silence from the theater.

  She was all the way to the reception area before she realized what he had called her.

  Annalise.

  It was an anagram for Lisa Anne, the name she had put on her application - and, incredibly, it was the right one. Somehow he had hit it. Had he done so naturally, without thinking, as in their word games? Or did he know?

  Busted, she thought.

  She crossed to the glass doors, ready to make her break.

  Then she thought, So he knows my first name. So what? It’s not like it would mean anything to him, even if he were to figure out the rest of it.

  She decided that she had been paranoid to use a pseudonym in the first place. If she had told the truth, would anybody care? Technically AmiDex could disqualify her, but the family connection was so many years ago that the name had probably been forgotten by now. In fact she was sure it had. That was the point. That was why she was here.

  Outside, the rain had let up. A few of the next hour’s subjects were already wandering this way across the courtyard. Only one, a woman with a shopping bag and a multi-colored scarf over her hair, bothered to raise her head to look at the statues.

  It was disturbing to see the greats treated with such disrespect.

  All day long volunteers gathered outside at the appointed hour, smoking and drinking sodas and eating food they had brought with them, and when they went in they left the remains scattered among the statues, as if the history of the medium and its stars meant nothing to them. Dinah Shore and Carol Burnett and Red Skelton with his clown nose, all nothing more than a part of the landscape now, like the lampposts, like the trash cans that no one used. The sun fell on them, and the winds and the rains and the graffiti and the discarded wads of chewing gum and the pissing of dogs on the place where their feet should have been, and there was nothing for any of them to do but suffer these things with quiet dignity, like the fallen dead in a veterans’ cemetery. One day the burdens of their immortality, the birdshit and the cigarette butts and the McDonald’s wrappers, might become too much for them to bear and the ground would shake as giants walked the earth again, but for now they could only wait, because that day was not yet here.

  “How was it?” said Angie.

  “The show? Oh, it was great. Really.”

  “Then why aren’t you in there?”

  “It’s too cold.” She hugged her sides. “When does the grounds crew get here?”

  “Uh, you lost me.”

  “Maintenance. The gardeners. How often do they come?”

  “You’re putting me on, right?”

  She felt her face flush. “Then I’ll do it.”

  “Do -?”

  “Clean up. It’s a disgrace. Don’t you think so?”

  “Sure, Lisa. Anything you say . . .”

  She started outside, and got only a few paces when the sirens began. She counted four squad cars with the name of a private security company stenciled on the doors. They screeched to a halt in the parking lot and several officers jumped out. Did one of them really have his gun drawn?

  “Oh, God,” said Angie.

  “What’s going on?”

  “It’s the complex. They don’t like people taking pictures.”

  Now she saw that the man in the dark trenchcoat had returned. This time he had brought a van with a remote broadcasting dish on top. The guards held him against the side, under the call letters for a local TV station and the words EYEBALL NEWS. When a cameraman climbed down from the back to object they handcuffed him.

  “Who doesn’t like it?”

  “AmiDex,” Angie said solemnly. “They own it all.” She waved her hand to include the building, the courtyard, the parking lot and the fenced-in apartments. “Somebody from Hard Copy tried to shoot here last month. They confiscated the film. It’s off-limits.”

  “But why?”

  “All I know is, there must be some very important people in those condos.”

  “In this neighborhood?”

  She couldn’t imagine why any VIP’s would want to live here. The complex was a lower-middle-class housing development, walled in and protected from the deteriorating streets nearby. It had probably been on this corner since the fifties. She could understand AmiDex buying real estate in the San Fernando Valley instead of the overpriced Westside, but why the aging apartments? The only reason might be so that they could expand their testing facility one day. Meanwhile, why not tear them down? With its spiked iron fences the complex looked like a fortress sealed off against the outside world. There was even barbed wire on top of the walls.

  Before she could ask any more questions, the doors to the theater opened. She glanced back and saw Marty leading the audience down the hall for the post-screening discussion.

  She followed, eager to hear the verdict.

  The boys in the white shirts were no longer at the counter. They were in the War Room, marking up long rolls of paper like doctors charting the vital signs in an intensive care ward. Lights blinked across a bank of electronic equipment, as many rackmounted modules as there were seats in the theater, with dials and connecting cables that fed into the central computer. She heard circuits humming and the ratcheting whir of a wide-mouthed machine as it disgorged graphs that resembled polygraph tests printed in blood-red ink.

  She came to the next section of the hall, as the last head vanished through a doorway around the first turn.

  The discussion room was small and bright with rows of desks and acoustic tiles i
n the ceiling. It reminded her of the classrooms at UCLA, where she had taken a course in Media Studies, before discovering that they didn’t have any answers, either. She merged with the group and slumped down in the back row, behind the tallest person she could find.