Marty remained on his feet, pacing.
“Now,” he said, “it’s your turn. Hollywood is listening! How many of you would rate -” He consulted his clipboard. “- Dario, You So Crazy! as one of the best programs you’ve ever seen?”
She waited for the hands to go up. She could not see any from here. The tall man blocked her view and if she moved her head Marty might spot her.
“Okay. How many would say ‘very good’?”
There must not have been many because he went right on to the next question.
“ ‘Fair’?”
She closed her eyes and listened to the rustle of coat sleeves and wondered if she had heard the question correctly.
“And how many ‘poor’?”
That had to be everyone else. Even the tall man in front of her raised his arm. She recognized his plaid shirt. It was Number Sixteen.
Marty made a notation.
“Okay, great. What was your favorite scene?”
The silence was deafening.
“You won’t be graded on this! There’s no right or wrong answer. I remember once, when my junior-high English teacher ...”
He launched into a story to loosen them up. It was about a divorced woman, an escaped sex maniac and a telephone call to the police. She recognized it as a very old dirty joke. Astonishingly he left off the punchline. The audience responded anyway. He had his timing down pat. Or was it that they laughed because they knew what was coming? Did that make it even funnier?
The less original the material, she thought, the more they like it. It makes them feel comfortable.
And if that’s true, so is the reverse.
She noticed that there was a two-way mirror in this room, too, along the far wall. Was anyone following the discussion from the other side? If so, there wasn’t much to hear. Nobody except Marty had anything to say. They were bored stiff, waiting for their money. It would take something more than the show they had just seen to hold them, maybeWrestling’s Biggest Bleeps, Bloopers and Bodyslams or America’s Zaniest Surveillance Tapes. Now she heard a door slam in the hall. The executives had probably given up and left the observation room.
“What is the matter with you people?”
The woman with the multi-colored scarf hunched around to look at her, as Marty tried to see who had spoken.
“In the back row. Number . . .”
“You’re right,” she said too loudly. “It’s not poor, or fair, or excellent. It’s a great show! Better than anything I’ve seen in years. Since -”
“Yes?” Marty changed his position, zeroing in on her voice. “Would you mind speaking up? This is your chance to be heard . ..”
“Since The Fuzzy Family. Or The Funny boner.” She couldn’t help mentioning the titles. Her mouth was open now and the truth was coming out and there was no way to stop it.
Marty said, “What network were they on?”
“CBS. They were canceled in the first season.”
“But you remember them?”
“They were brilliant.”
“Can you tell us why?”
“Because of my father. He created them both.”
Marty came to the end of the aisle and finally saw her. His face fell. In the silence she heard other voices, arguing in the hall. She hoped it was not the people who had madeDario, You So Crazy! If so, they had to be hurting right now. She felt for them, bitterness and despair and rage welling up in her own throat.
“May I see you outside?” he said.
“No, you may not.”
The hell with Marty, AmiDex and her job here. There was no secret as to why some shows made it and other, better ones did not. Darwin was wrong. He hadn’t figured on the networks. They had continued to lower their sights until the audience devolved right along with them, so that any ray of hope was snuffed out, overshadowed by the crap around it. And market research and the ratings system held onto their positions by telling them what they wanted to hear, that the low-rent talent they had under contract was good enough, by testing the wrong people for the wrong reasons, people who were too numb to care about a pearl among the pebbles. It was a perfect, closed loop.
“Now, Miss Rayme.”
“That isn’t my name.” Didn’t he get it yet? “My father was Robert Mayer. The man who wrote and producedWagons, Ho!”
It was TV’s first western comedy and it made television history. After that he struggled to come up with another hit, but every new show was either canceled or rejected outright. His name meant nothing to the bean-counters. All they could see was the bottom line. As far as they were concerned he owed them a fortune for the failures they had bankrolled. If he had been an entertainer who ran up a debt in Vegas, he would have had to stay there, working it off at the rate of two shows a night, forever. The only thing that gave her satisfaction was the knowledge that they would never collect. One day when she was ten he had a massive heart attack on the set and was whisked away in a blue ambulance and he never came home again.
“Folks, thanks for your time,” Marty said. “If you’ll return to the lobby . . .”
She had studied his notes and scripts, trying to understand why he failed. She loved them all. They were genuinely funny, the very essence of her father, with his quirky sense of humor and extravagent sight gags - as original and inventive as Dario, You So Crazy! Which was a failure, too. Of course. She lowered her head onto the desktop and began to weep.
“Hold up,” said Number Sixteen.
“Your pay’s ready. Fifty dollars cash.” Marty held the door wide. “There’s another group coming in . . .”
The lumberjack refused to stand. “Let her talk. I remember Wagons, Ho! It was all right.”
He turned around in his seat and gave her a wink as she raised her head.
“Thank you,” she said softly. “It doesn’t matter, now.”
She got to her feet with the others and pushed her way out.
Farther down the hall, another door clicked shut. It was marked Green Room. She guessed that the executives from the other side of the mirror had decided to finish their argument in private.
Marty grabbed her elbow.
“I told you to stay home.”
“You’re hurting me,” she said.
“But you just wouldn’t take the hint, would you?”
“About what?”
“You can pick up your check in Payroll.”
“Get your hands off me.”
Number Sixteen came up next to her. “You got a problem here?”
“Not anymore,” she said.
“Your pay’s up front, cowboy,” Marty told him.
“You sure you’re okay?” asked Number Sixteen.
“I am now.”
Marty shook his head sadly.
“I’ll tell them to make it for the full two weeks. I liked you, you know? I really did.”
Then he turned and walked the audience back to the lobby.
Farther down the hall, she saw Human Resources, where she had gone the first day for her interview, and beyond that Public Relations and Payroll. She didn’t care about her check but there was a security door at the end. It would let her out directly into the courtyard.
Number Sixteen followed her.
“I was thinking. If you want some lunch, I’ve got my car.”
“So do I,” she said, walking faster.
Then she thought, Why not? Me, with a lumberjack. I’ll be watching Martha Stewart while he hammers his wood and lays his pipe or whatever he does all day, and he’ll come home and watch hockey games and I’ll stay loaded and sit up every night to see Wagons, Ho! on the Nostalgia Channel and we’ll go on that way, like a sitcom. He’ll take care of me. And in time I’ll forget everything. All I have to do is say yes.
He was about to turn back.
“Okay,” she said.
“What?”
“This way. There’s an exit to the parking lot, down here.”
Before they could get to it the steel door at the end
swung open.
The rain had stopped and a burst of clear light from outside reflected off the polished floor, distorting the silhouette of the figure standing there. A tall woman in a designer suit entered from the grounds. Behind her, the last of the private security cars drove off. The Eyeball News truck was gone.
“All set,” the woman said into a flip-phone, and went briskly to the door marked Green Room.
Voices came from within, rising to an emotional pitch. Then the voices receded as the door clicked shut.
There was something in the tone of the argument that got to her. She couldn’t make out the words but one of the voices was close to pleading. It was painful to hear. She thought of her father and the desperate meetings he must have had, years ago. When the door whispered open again, two men in grey suits stepped out into the hall, holding a third man between them.
It had to be the producer of the pilot.
She wanted to go to him and take his hands and look into his eyes and tell him that they were wrong. He was too talented to listen to them. What did they know? There were other networks, cable, foreign markets, features, if only he could break free of them and move on. He had to. She would be waiting and so would millions of others, an invisible audience whose opinions were never counted, as if they did not exist, but who were out there, she was sure. The ones who remembered Wagons, Ho! and The Funnyboner and The Fuzzy Family and would faithfully tune in other programs with the same quirky sensibility, if they had the choice.
He looked exhausted. The suits had him in their grip, supporting his weight between them, as if carrying a drunk to a waiting cab. What was his name? Terry Something. Or Barry. That was it. She saw him go limp. He had the body of a middle-aged man.
“Please,” he said in a cracking voice, “this is the one, you’ll see. Please . . .”
“Mr Tormé?” she called out, remembering his name.
The letters shuffled like a deck of cards in her mind and settled into a new pattern. It was a reflex she could not control, ever since she had learned the game from her father so many years ago, before the day they took him away and told his family that he was dead.
Barry E. Tormé, she thought.
You could spell a lot of words with those letters.
Even . . .
Robert Mayer.
He turned slightly, and she saw the familiar nose and chin she had tried so many times to reproduce, working from fading photographs and the shadow pictures in her mind. The two men continued to drag him forward. His shoes left long black skidmarks on the polished floor. Then they lifted him off his feet and he was lost in the light.
Outside the door, a blue van was waiting.
They dumped him in and locked the tailgate. Beyond the parking lot lay the walled compound, where the razor wire gleamed like hungry teeth atop the barricades and forgotten people lived out lives as bleak as unsold pilots and there was no way out for any of them until the cameras rolled again on another hit.
Milton Berle and Johnny Carson and Jackie Gleason watched mutely, stars who had become famous by speaking the words put into their mouths by others, by men who had no monuments to honor them, not here or anywhere else.
Now she knew now the real reason she had come to this place. There was something missing. When she finished her sculpture there would be a new face for the courtyard, one who deserved a statue of his own. And this time she would get it right.
The steel door began to close.
Sorry, Daddy! she thought as the rain started again outside. I’m sorry, sorry . . .
“Wait.” Number Sixteen put on his Ray-Bans. “I gotta get my pay first. You want to come with me?”
Yes, we could do that. Simple. All we do is turn and run the other way, like Lucy and Desi, like Dario and Mr Bean, bumbling along to a private hell of our own. What’s the difference?
“No,” she said.
“I thought -”
“I’m sorry. I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“I just . . . can’t.”
She ran instead toward the light at the end, hoping to see the face in the van clearly one last time as it drove away, before the men in the suits could stop her.
<
* * * *
KELLY LINK
The Specialist’s Hat
Kelly Link lives inSomerville, Massachusetts. She has worked in bookstores, libraries and as a babysitter. She once won a trip around the world by answering “because you can’t go through it” to the question, “Why do you want to go around the world”.
Her short fiction has appeared inAsimov’s Century and, more recently, in Fence and online on Event Horizon. She won the James Tiptree Award in 1997 for her story “Travels with the Snow Queen”, which also happens to be the title of her collection from Edgewood Press.
“This story comes from three places,” explains the author. “A friend of my father’s was describing a house that he had lived in as a child, where he rode his bicycle upstairs, in the enormous attic. In Raleigh, North Carolina, at an outdoor folklore exhibit, I read a piece of oral history about snake whisky. Finally, in the Peabody Museum in Boston, I found the chant for the Specialist’s Hat, although the hat, of course, was missing.”
* * * *
W
hen you’re dead,” Samantha says, “you don’t have to brush your teeth.”
“When you’re Dead,” Claire says, “you live in a box, and it’s always dark, but you’re not ever afraid.”
Claire and Samantha are identical twins. Their combined age is twenty years, four months, and six days. Claire is better at being Dead than Samantha.
The baby-sitter yawns, covering up her mouth with a long white hand. “I said to brush your teeth and that it’s time for bed,” she says. She sits crosslegged on the flowered bedspread between them. She has been teaching them a card game called Pounce, which involves three decks of cards, one for each of them. Samantha’s deck is missing the Jack of Spades and the Two of Hearts, and Claire keeps on cheating. The babysitter wins anyway. There are still flecks of dried shaving cream and toilet paper on her arms. It is hard to tell how old she is - at first they thought she must be a grownup, but now she hardly looks older than them. Samantha has forgotten the baby-sitter’s name.
Claire’s face is stubborn. “When you’re Dead,” she says, “you stay up all night long.”
“When you’re dead,” the babysitter snaps, “it’s always very cold and damp, and you have to be very, very quiet or else the Specialist will get you.”
“This house is haunted,” Claire says.
“I know it is,” the babysitter says. “I used to live here.”
* * * *
Something is creeping up the stairs,
Something is standing outside the door,
Something is sobbing, sobbing in the dark;
Something is sighing across the floor.
Claire and Samantha are spending the summer with their father, in the house called Eight Chimneys. Their mother is dead. She has been dead for exactly 282 days.
Their father is writing a history of Eight Chimneys, and of the poet, Charles Cheatham Rash, who lived here at the turn of the century, and who ran away to sea when he was thirteen, and returned when he was thirty-eight. He married, fathered a child, wrote three volumes of bad, obscure poetry, and an even worse and more obscure novel,The One Who is Watching Me Through the Window, before disappearing again in 1907, this time for good. Samantha and Claire’s father says that some of the poetry is actually quite readable, and at least the novel isn’t very long.
When Samantha asked him why he was writing about Rash, he replied that no one else had, and why didn’t she and Samantha go play outside. When she pointed out that she was Samantha, he just scowled and said how could he be expected to tell them apart when they both wore blue jeans and flannel shirts, and why couldn’t one of them dress all in green and the other pink?
Claire and Samantha prefer to play inside. Eight Chimneys is
as big as a castle, but dustier and darker than Samantha imagines a castle would be. The house is open to the public, and during the day, people - families - driving along the Blue Ridge Parkway will stop to tour the grounds and the first story; the third story belongs to Claire and Samantha. Sometimes they play explorers, and sometimes they follow the caretaker as he gives tours to visitors. After a few weeks, they have memorized his lecture, and they mouth it along with him. They help him sell postcards and copies of Rash’s poetry to the tourist families who come into the little gift shop.
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 10 - [Anthology] Page 33
