“Yes!” in unison.
“Oh, by the way; there are real alligators in this swamp. And poisonous snakes. Is everybody ready?” The crew is ready. The cast is ready. “Go!”
The blast of the gun fractured the nervous silence, sending birds flying from the limbs of cypress trees with eerie screeches of alarm, and a predictable pandemonium ensued as the contestants scrambled over and through one another in their race to the canoes, and camera and sound crews struggled to keep up with the action.
It couldn’t have gone more perfectly if scripted. The director was pleased. “Beautiful.” He made his way to the video trailer where he could view the proceedings on a bank of monitors from the comfort of his hand-crafted leather recliner.
As far as the contestants were concerned it was to be a glorified game of paintball, carried out under extreme conditions over a period of twenty-one days. That’s what it said in the prospectus. There was no designated ‘murderer’ among them. Any one of them could fill that role. Lord willing. The risk was that they’d start to snap too soon. It had to be played out carefully; anything less than twenty-one days before the ‘event’ and the project would be in jeopardy.
He was the puppet master, playing them from the command center, devising ‘surprises’ on the spot, inserting situations, throwing people together or tearing them apart, provoking reactions, encouraging extreme responses, matching prospective couples, playing upon jealousies, weaknesses, fears. And lying. All the time lying.
But it all had to be managed with delicacy. Finesse. None too far, too soon. For that he relied upon the psychologist, who sat beside him, watching for telltale signs, telling him to extract one or the other from a given situation at just the right moment. Reactions must be impeccably controlled. Timing was everything.
The cameras rolled. Twenty-four hours a day. Day in and day out. At first the contestants were inhibited, constrained by their unfamiliarity with the situation, and with one another. Before three days had passed—realizing that extreme behavior was rewarded by those behind the hungry, insatiable eyes of the cameras—they had become exhibitionists, flaunting themselves, manifesting behaviors of which, only a week before, they would have thought themselves incapable.
Within a week, madness reigned. The New Jersey housewife had cut herself repeatedly to relieve herself of demons in her blood. Great footage. In the ghoulish green of night-vision cameras, the fisherman and the manicurist sated themselves on one another with all the restraint of wildebeests on the African plain. The Broadway understudy had been convinced the hairdresser was the murderer. For his part, the hairdresser had been informed that the insurance salesman was a closet homosexual who wanted nothing more than to be ‘outed.’
On and on. It was easier than the director had imagined. Every day presented some new and fantastic aberration that surpassed even his expectations. And the cameras rolled, feasting and gorging.
Exhaustion and deprivation were the keys. These had to be maintained in exquisite balance, and for this his reliance on the psychologist was complete.
The director only caught naps now and then. Nothing must be left to chance. The crew worked in rotations, so they had plenty of rest. As did the psychologist. Egghead. He wasn’t up to the stresses of network TV.
Strong coffee fueled the director’s nervous system. It was good to be on edge. He had no time for food—a bag of chips, some brownies from the craft wagon when he thought of it. If he felt too out of it, he always had the little bag of pills. They’d never let him down. He was no longer concerned about his career. The first two weeks were already in the can, and if the last week went half as well, he was in like Flynn. He’d write his own ticket after this. His players had punched big, gaping holes in every taboo. Their improvisations even made him cringe, way beyond anything he could have hoped to contrive. They’d reached the bottom of the cesspool only to discover it was false. There were whole new layers beneath to explored! But he’d get the credit. That was the important thing.
All that remained was the final act; he just had to hold on through one more week, then he could get all the rest he wanted. Cancun. Paris. Anywhere his heart desired. Of course, he’d have to schedule time for the Emmys.
That psychologist, he was a regular Joe. Had his head on straight. Didn’t quibble about the ethics of his profession, like some of those he’d interviewed in pre-production. He always talked about it as this great experiment in human psychology. Great. Let him justify it that way if he wanted. He was being well paid.
Besides, he was good company. Easy to talk to late at night when there wasn’t much else going on. The second-unit director could handle the contestant’s bed-hopping and night terrors.
One night, as they were watching the waitress shrivel in horror from some imagined nemesis in her dreams, the psychologist had confessed his own worst fears.
“I have abandonment issues,” he said with a rueful smile. “My father left home when I was thirteen. My mother fell to pieces. Might as well have abandoned me herself, for all she was worth after that. Most of our fears have their beginnings in actual events, whether we’re aware of it at the conscious level or not. In retrospect I can see that I became clingy and whiny. So I didn’t have many friends. More abandonment, from my perspective. It’s just a vicious cycle that continues to deepen. The harder we try to compensate, the more ingrained it becomes. Our characters develop flaws as a result. I guess that’s why I became a psychologist, to find a way to heal myself.”
It was an invitation to intimacy the director couldn’t resist. “We all deal with that kind of stuff, don’t we? What do you think about recurring nightmares?”
The psychologist leaned back and yawned. “They have the same roots. Why, do you know someone who has them?”
“Yeah. I do.”
“You?”
The director shrugged. “A doozie.”
“Care to tell me about it?”
The director considered. “Why not? It’s all about midgets.”
“Midgets?” the psychologist laughed lightly, which he knew he was expected to do.
“Probably started the first time I saw The Wizard of Oz,” the director said, also with a cosmetic laugh. “I’m in this place . . . this house with all these rooms and no doors. I’m being followed by midgets. Five. Ten of ’em. I can’t see them, but I know they’re there. I’m frantic, you know? I don’t know why. But I run through the house, trying to find a room with a door. If only I can find a room with a door I know I’ll be safe. But there aren’t any. All the rooms are open. There’s nowhere to hide.”
“What happens?”
“Well, as I go through the house, I start to become blind. Not like a natural blindness, but like I’m wearing this blindfold that’s slowly falling over my eyes, and I can’t do anything about it. I mean, I can’t just reach up and take it off. It’s part of me.” He stared blindly at the monitor in which the waitress had started to bang her head against a wall. “Before long, I’m completely blind, stumbling through that house, feeling for a door that isn’t there. That’s when the worst happens . . .”
The psychologist waited.
“I start to feel ’em all over me.”
“The midgets?”
The director nodded. “First they grab at my clothes. Little tugs, almost like they were nibbling at them. Then they start to pull me down—I can smell their breath, hot and heavy on my neck. They’re kissing me. Licking my face. Pulling my hair. Saying horrible things—don’t ask me what, I don’t remember. All the time, I’m pushing ’em off, hitting at them. Screaming at them to leave me alone. But they just keep coming.”
There was a silence.
“Sounds foolish, doesn’t it?”
“Do you think it’s foolish?”
“I suppose. But, I’ll tell you this, I’ve never had a midget on the set.” He laughed. “Some suppressed memory, you think?”
It was the psychologist’s turn to shrug. “The midgets represent something in your p
ast, I’m sure. If you don’t suffer as a result, I mean in your life, your work or relationships, I wouldn’t worry about it. But if the dreams bother you . . . or if they get to the point they do, you can get professional help. Two or three months of therapy should do the trick.”
Another prolonged silence followed. The psychologist stood up, yawned again, and stretched. “I’m a little worried,” he said, bending toward one of the monitors.
“About?”
“Our progress. I’m not sure we can accomplish what you have in mind in the time we have left. Maybe we should push them a little harder.”
“Harder? For the most part, they’re blithering idiots already.”
“Maybe so. But they’re simply reacting to situations turning into themselves. The passive stage. I’d expected that. Some, as we’ve seen, have become self-destructive. But I thought that, by this time, at least a few would have tried to take things into their own hands. Become more proactive. Aggressive. That’s what you want.” He glanced casually at his watch. “I just hope there’s time. Anyway,” he said with another yawn, “I’m going to turn in. You look like you could use a little shut-eye yourself.”
The director wasn’t listening. Already his mind was leaping ahead, propelled by the possibility of failure after all, attempting to devise ways in which to spark aggression. Stir the pot. Six days left.
Eventually he fell into a fitful sleep.
He woke in an empty trailer. “Where is everyone?” he said, rubbing his eyes. “Scotty! Bryce!”
No one replied.
The monitors revealed row upon row of empty rooms.
“Where is everyone?”
He threw open the trailer door and stepped into the heavily-misted pre-dawn gloom. Everything was as it had been, but there was nobody there. He called and bellowed, and cursed, but, apart from the mocking of crows, not a sycophant or a lackey or even an actor replied. He shouted every crew name he could remember. Nothing. Something terrible must have happened on the island.
A small outboard motorboat was moored at the dock. He jumped in, started the engine and bolted across the swamp to the island where he got out and—the omnivorous specter of failure rampaging through his gut—tore up the overgrown path toward the mansion.
His footfalls resounded with deafeningly empty echoes as he leapt up the steps onto the porch. Again he called out. Again there was no reply. He ran inside, too blinded by a rising tide of fear to realize the front door had been removed.
Inside the mansion he ran from room to room, shouting out the actors’ names. All of their residue was there. The sleeping bags. The wash basins. The food. Scraps of paper. Books. Candles.
Cameramen, soundmen, gaffers, and grips. They’d all vanished. There was not so much as the breath of life.
Something else was strange. Something had changed.
None of the rooms had a door.
Suddenly he became aware of a presence other than his own. Somewhere behind him. Somewhere in the darkened precincts of the mansion. Soft, padding footsteps. Coming toward him. Slowly up the stairs. Slowly down the hall. Slowly toward his room with no door. No refuge. Little feet. Little feet with little sounds of scuffling and shuffling.
The midgets were coming.
The network had asked the psychologist to make the presentation to the sponsors.
“Of course, what the director didn’t know was that he was the star of the show.
“When he first approached the network with the concept, they felt something was missing. That another dimension of psychological intrigue could be added. So they approached me,” he nodded at the chairwoman at the opposite end of the table; she smiled back, “to see what I could suggest.
“It seemed obvious to me; we simply turn the tables at the end. Rather than play upon the fears of our actors, we discover the director’s fears and play upon them. Which is what we did.”
“You mean,” said a soft-drink manufacturer, “the whole thing was a set-up?” He had a smile in his eyes as he spoke.
“Exactly. The actors are all people of consummate theatrical skill, as you have seen. They were all in on it, as was the crew.”
“So,” said the woman from the detergent conglomerate, “while he thought he was filming them, you were filming him.”
“The real command post, if you will, was about five miles away,” said the chairwoman. She twiddled her thumbs in satisfaction.
“Then, he really did go mad?”
“Oh yes. Terrible that. We never imagined he’d actually kill himself,” said the network attorney. “Any more than he imagined one of his contestants would actually murder another. However, as it’s all on tape, it would be foolish to waste it. The public has a right to know what happened.”
“Of course,” said the ad agency rep, though he still had reservations. “I’m worried how the audience will react, though. Won’t they turn on you for having done this to him?”
“Why should they?” said the demographics expert. “It’s just what he was going to do to everyone else. Besides, we’ve run it through seven focus groups representing the 18-34 demographic, male and female, and the numbers are through the roof.”
The soap-maker was philosophical. “I’m impressed you were able to come up with all those midgets on such short notice.”
The agency rep nodded. “He got what he deserved, then.”
“Like Judgment Day,” said the psychologist with a smirk.
And so the sponsors signed on, and the network aired the series, in twenty-one parts—amidst a barrage of full-page ads decrying its excesses—and The Devil’s Bequest was a ratings success beyond the director’s wildest dreams.
The sequel would, of course, be a challenge.
Push. Push.
A camera lens stared at Rat with its Cyclopic, uncaring eye and therein he could see the image of his soul. The creature’s expression of benign if inwardly troubled contemplation was comically distorted by the curvature of the lens, and in it Rat thought he saw a degree of self-satisfaction. Surely this was warranted if only by the fact that it now possessed a full suit of clothes, and that these were of the finest cut and cloth, created by a tailor of exacting standards for whom the costume was not simply an expression of his art and craft, but the very outward manifestation of his worth.
Rat knew now, having lived so many lives, having been born and died in so many skins, much more of who he was. Even more, he had become acquainted with who he was not. More still, as had troubled the underlying waters of his thought for some time but only now oozed its way into his consciousness, he knew what he was becoming. Once, the possibility would have horrified him. Now, though, he accepted it with an equanimity bordering on welcome. Not the welcome of the condemned man who, having suffered the exhaustion of every recourse for exoneration, welcomes the footsteps of his executioner, but that of a seafarer perceiving from his slowly sinking ship the outline of land against the night sky. Whether the ship would or would not survive the remainder of the voyage was almost a matter of curiosity. The destination was in sight. It existed. Therefore the journey, whatever its outcome, would not have been taken in vain.
“I have seen the enemy and he is me,” he said as Cummings entered the lavishly appointed trailer.
In the face of this greeting, Cummings departed from the prepared text, which was ‘Good-morning, sir.’ Instead, he said, “This is often the case, sir.”
“The most recent vignette,” said Rat, unexpectedly taking the serving tray, upon which a humble yet nutritionally fortifying breakfast had been lovingly arranged, from Cummings’ hands, “was, superficially, about ratings.”
Cummings, having passed his formative years in a time predating the Neilson’s, was not conversant with the term. “Ratings, sir?”
“Ratings, Cummings. Grades. Marks of merit. Benchmarks. Indices by which one’s efforts are measured.”
Cummings, failing in a gentle tug-of-war to retrieve the salver from the Occupant’s grasp, nodded. “I understan
d, sir. Ratings.”
“Just so,” said Rat. “Please, Cummings, take a seat.”
“Sir?”
Rat, who was now standing and whose hands were occupied with the tray, thumped a nearby captain’s chair with his foot. “Sit.”
Sitting in the presence of a guest was not an option to be considered. Cummings therefore, believing that he misinterpreted the command, remained upon his feet.
“Sit,” said Rat unequivocally.
Cummings was aghast. “I could not, sir.”
“Can and will,” said Rat. “Think positively. Your knees bend at the necessary angle, do they not?”
“They do, sir,” said Cummings, wondering if he might excuse himself from compliance with the extraordinary request on the grounds that the joints in question had very recently been invisible and were apt at any moment, given the unpredictability of the condition, to be so again. “However . . .”
“Then exercise the gift, my good man, lest, like the Sivapithecus who disdained his tail, the apparati ceases to function. Sit.” Again he thumped the swivel chair.
Cummings, seeing in frantic inward deliberation no recourse but to accede to his master’s wishes, sat. Not gracefully, as might be remarked by aficionados of the art, but as if, even in the privacy of his pantry, he had never practiced the stunt.
His discombobulation was further compounded when Rat took the brightly polished crystal goblet into which the butler had himself earlier squeezed guava juice, and, without explanation, proffered it.
“That is for you, sir.”
“Wrong, Cummings. It is for you.”
“But . . . but you are the master.”
Rat agreed that this was so. “However, to paraphrase a familiar adage, what master worth his salt doesn’t acquiesce to serve. Need I remind you, ‘the first shall be last and the last shall be first.’”
“So it is reputably reported, sir. But . . .”
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