Contents
Producer Credit
Title
Copyright
How to Kill a Celebrity
Chompers
Mental
Dead Men Walking
The Eye at the Door
Cuttings
Bus Driver Man: A Dark Pines Story
In the Shadow of the Masters
My Protector
Sanctuary
Do Not Shake or Rattle
Stray
He is Risen
Squirm
Sharp
Video Nasties
From the Author
About the Author
For More Dark Fiction
Presents
Duncan Ralston's
- a Horror Mixtape -
Copyright © 2017 by Duncan Ralston
All rights reserved.
"Cuttings" first published in The Black Room Manuscripts Vol. One (The Sinister Horror Company), © 2014
"Chompers" first published in Death by Chocolate (KnightWatch Press), © 2015
"Sanctuary" first published in The Sirens Call #21, © 2015
"Stray" first published in The Animal (Edge), © 2015
"He Is Risen" first published in Easter Eggs & Bunny Boilers (Matt Shaw Publications), © 2016
"My Protector" first published in The Devil's Guests (Matt Shaw Publications), © 2016
"Squirm" first published in VS (Shadow Work Publishing), © 2016
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
The characters in this book are purely fictitious. Any likeness to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
Cover design by 77 Studios
ISBN-13: 978-1-988819-01-3
From the Writer of...
Gristle & Bone (collection)
Salvage (novel)
Wildfire (novella)
Woom (novella)
Where the Monsters Live (novella)
The Method (novel)
For more visit
www.duncanralston.com
HOW TO KILL A CELEBRITY
A HOT WIND swept up from the Mississippi as Annie Watkins entered Channel 5 through the employee entrance. Barely a year out of school, she hadn't expected to hear back from "NOLA's Favorite News" at all, let alone in the same week as her interview. The job hunt had been arduous, but with any luck it was finally over. Annie thought, and not for the first time, about destiny.
After a wait of a few minutes a man named Ray Smart met her in the foyer, introducing himself as her supervisor. She laughed aloud, elated by the news, before rushing to apologize for the outburst. After so long working at the City Park Muffuletta stand while looking for a job in her field, she could finally tell them she was done--unless, of course, she screwed it up acting crazy on her first day.
Ray gave her a tour of the station. She'd been to several TV facilities the past year, almost literally begging for unpaid work, but had never gotten the full tour. When Holly Weathers--a fitting name for a meteorologist or an adult film star--strode past them in the hall, beaming her sunny smile on them, Annie found herself a little star-struck, but she managed to conceal it well.
Ray was friendly in a business-like way, chatty about colleagues and staff, but never offering gossip. Annie, with a pad and pen, took notes of things he seemed to feel the need to stress. Rotating shifts, days and afternoons, with overtime as required.
Annie came back on Monday to meet the man who'd be training her. Scrawny, hunched-over, wearing prescription sunglasses, a Rush 2112 t-shirt and cargo shorts with gray tube socks pulled up to his virtually hairless shins, the man reminded her of a grimy '80s record producer. His brown hair was thick and wild, skin like tallowed leather and teeth so clean and straight they could only be dentures.
"I'm Burt Ellis," he said, offering a scrawny hand with too-long fingernails. Annie took it, zapping him with static. She pulled back, shaking out her hand in pain and embarrassment.
"Sorry," she told Burt, who stared, mouth agape, in something like horror. "Must be the carpet."
Burt's dentures clacked shut, and he gave her a measured look. "Musta been," he agreed. He didn't appear to be pleased to have her beside him in the cramped editing suite, but he did as Ray asked, showing her the ropes in a mechanical, droning way as they recut a digitized version of the Rod Serling obituary Burt had edited on 2-inch quadruplex videotape in 1975. Annie was too young to remember The Twilight Zone, but she recognized the theme song.
She found Burt's tobacco smell unpleasant, and his stolen half-smiling glances were vaguely disconcerting, but she learned a fair bit, and made copious notes. During lunch, the two of them sat side by side in the cafeteria, eating without conversation. After lunch, more of the same: a methodical recitation of information and demonstration, after which Annie showed him what she'd learned.
"Close enough for cable," Burt said at five minutes to six, pushing out of his chair. "That's enough for today. Hasta mañana. I need a fuckin' drink."
The following day, Annie returned to work to discover Burt Ellis had retired.
"You're on your own," Ray told her.
"But... but I'm not ready."
"Burt told me you have a gift. He said... what was it he said? Was it 'Practice makes perfect'? You'll do fine. It's just standbys." The telephone rang. Ray gave it a look of annoyance. "Let's touch base at the end of the week, huh?"
"Wait a minute, sir, what are--" The door closed behind him. "--standbys?" she finished with a resigned sigh.
❚❚
"STANDBYS," KYRA NG told her over lunch. "Obituaries of famous people. Say the Queen dies, or, I dunno, Steven Tyler. You need an edited package for a live hit. You've seen them. The more famous the celebrity, the more unstable, the older or sicker they are, we've got their life stories on hand, ready to tweak the second the news of their deaths comes down the wire."
The cafeteria was noisy, every seat packed with techies, office workers, and on-air talent. The sports team took up the table next to them, chatting and guffawing in the phony-sounding way they did during color commentary. Annie found it difficult to hear.
"That's pretty morbid, don't you think?" she asked, leaning in close, taking the opportunity to spear a crouton from her colleague's Caesar salad.
Kyra raised her eyebrows by way of reaction while she chewed and swallowed. "Morbid?" She sipped from her water bottle. "Welcome to 24-hour news."
Annie and Kyra, who worked in the edit suite across the narrow hall, had made fast friends. A little older, a little more cynical, a few too many animal sweaters in her wardrobe, Kyra edited hard news pieces: terrorism, murders, arson, gang violence.
As for Burt, he had edited the standbys for as long as Kyra could remember, and she'd been at Channel 5 for twelve years. Word was he had started in the Telecine days, when they shot programs on film and transferred them to tape for air. "It was weird that he retired like that," she said. "He musta had his foot halfway out the door, just waiting for you to get here."
Annie nodded. "Maybe." She recalled his strange sidelong glances. At the time she thought he'd been ogling her, but now she had to wonder.
"Anyway, you'll do fine."
"That's what Mr. Smart said."
Kyra laughed. "'Mister Smart'!" She shook her head. "It's Ray, hon. Just Ray."
After lunch, Annie sat in Burt's old editing suite--considering it as her own would jinx it, she felt--and waited for an assignment. The whole day long, no one had entered the room after Ray had left her with Burt. She hadn't thought anything of it then, but after hours of twiddling her thumbs in front of
the identical wavy backgrounds on the two computer monitors, she started to wonder if she'd entered the Twilight Zone herself.
Peering across the hall, she waited until Kyra looked up from her work and caught her eye.
"What's wrong?"
"Should I be doing something? It feels like I should be doing something."
From down the hall a deep male voice Annie recognized as one of the Live @ 5 News anchors shouted, "Kyra, how's that ISIS piece coming?"
Kyra threw an annoyed look at the wall. "Keep your pants on, Phil!" She turned back to Annie, looking frazzled. "When they need you, they'll let you know."
"But what do I do until then?"
Kyra provided a brief look of sympathy. "You've got the internet, don't you?"
Annie faced the Mac's desktop, found the browser icon. "Uh-huh."
"Well, there's a whole world wide web there just waiting to be discovered," Kyra told her, and swiveled her chair back toward her desk.
Annie stared at the icon a moment, then clicked it. The browser opened. She watched the cursor blink in the search bar. She hadn't signed on for this. She craved action. She wanted hard deadlines, she wanted Phil Macready yelling at her for the ISIS piece. Sitting all day facing two monitors each with empty edit windows--they were paying her for this?
At six PM, after what seemed like endless hours surfing the internet, Annie grabbed her purse and stood up from the desk. "Close enough for cable," she muttered to herself, and stepped into the hall. "See you tomorrow, Kyra?"
Kyra looked up, still frazzled despite having handed off her piece. "You bet."
Annie made a weak attempt at a smile. "Have a good night."
Kyra saluted her, and returned to the screens.
❚❚
IT WAS A week before Annie's first original standby obituary.
The second day on her own, a young blonde Production Assistant with hipster glasses and a wallet chain told her to update a few older standbys: a hip hop artist with a notoriously dangerous lifestyle, an actor with a degenerative disease, a famously inflammatory politician facing a handful of death threats.
Then... nothing.
Several days, staring at the monitors. On the fourth day, she brought in some home videos to practice cutting. Her father having passed two years prior, she thought she'd put together a little tribute to him for her parents' anniversary this year. Not sure if such a thing would be appropriate, she'd asked for her aunt's blessing before proceeding. It was difficult for her to watch, at first. Eventually, she grew accustomed to seeing her father's face again: the way his bright smile rose all the way to his eyes, the way he often swept a hand across the top of his head, as if brushing away non-existent dandruff from his close-cropped hair, how he'd sweep Annie and her mother up in giant hugs and twirl them from the kitchen, passing under the creaky bannister, to the front room.
Orville Watkins had been a defense attorney before taking up the gavel, though his closest friends had been calling him "Judge" since grade school. He'd been a good father, had called Annie from the office when putting in extra hours, and when he finally attained the chair he'd been born to fill, he'd spent long evenings in the backyard, tooling in the garden while the sun sank over the lake. She'd bring out a tall glass of bitter iced tea, the way he liked it, and he would beam his big smile up at her.
All the while, all those years, an invisible noose had dangled over his head, poised for the right moment to tighten.
At noon, with a good amount of footage digitized and some clips dragged in a rough edit on the timeline, Annie broke for lunch.
How did Burt deal with so much boredom? she wondered, slinking off alone to the cafeteria. With Kyra on days off, she had no one to sit with. Other people in her department were pleasant enough but seemed to be too busy or too into their own cliques to offer much more than a nod and smile.
"This seat taken?"
Startled, Annie looked up to see the creepy old Camera Operator from Live @ 5, though she'd already identified him by the aura of cheap Scotch. He stuffed an apple in his mouth like a cooked pig as he sat, setting his cafeteria tray down on the table. She thought his name was Walt or Wilt, though it didn't matter. She wasn't so desperate for company as to consider making conversation with a career alcoholic.
"Burt asked how you're doing," he said, crunching the apple between words.
She wasn't sure if he was talking to her or the news anchor across from them, but the newscaster--a term Annie always liked, as if they created the news through magic--dressed in a pinstriped suit, didn't look up from the sports pages.
"Excuse me?"
"Burt Ellis," Walt--it was Walt, she remembered, Walt Brenner--said. "The guy whose shoes you filled?"
"Oh." Some people thought Burt had come into money, but it didn't look to Annie like the guy had ever seen real money in his life. He'd retired early, apparently. No golden handshake, just a reduced pension. And no one knew why.
"Never did occur to you why they let you jump the book to get that position, did it?"
"'Jump the book'?"
"Whole ass-load of union members lookin for editing gigs," he said by way of explaining, "not to mention freeloaders--I mean freelancers, excuse me--and they give the job to you, fresh out of college." He crunched his apple, breathing loudly through his nose. "You couldn't give that job away, sugar. Then here you come, fresh-faced and innocent, ready to take on the whole goddamn world." He swallowed just as noisily as he breathed. "Burt knew right away, you were the one."
Annie sipped her vegetable cocktail, playing nonchalant. "What does that mean, 'the one'?"
"He woulda felt a whole lot better if it'd gone to someone who deserved it, you know? Really deserved it. Like that little twerp who does Chyron. I'd love to smack that kid in the chops."
Walt gnawed off a chunk of apple, looking off while he chewed, likely imagining how the scene would play out. "I don't want you to blame Burt in this, okay? He didn't choose you any more than he was chosen. Just bad luck, I guess. Some of that N'awlins juju. But he asked me to tell you, the burden is yours now. And practice makes perfect." He set the apple core down, already beginning to go brown. "I'm real sorry this had to happen to you, kiddo. That's me saying that part, not him."
The last bite of chocolate croissant stuck in her throat and wouldn't go down. She took a big gulp of juice, swallowing hard to dislodge it. "Sorry for what?" She tried not to gasp for breath. "There's nothing to be sorry about. I love my job."
Walt Brenner gave her a look, his tired gray eyes jittery. "Suit yourself." He shrugged up his skinny shoulders and slid his tray away from her, moving himself to the next seat.
A half hour later Annie returned from the tape library with an armload of yellow Betacam boxes. Not sure what she was hunting for, Annie came across a movie she hadn't seen since she was a kid, which started her on a hunt for more of Eddie Bing's comedies, talk show appearances, and standup specials. She made herself stop at the seven tapes she could carry without mishap, hoping to find more footage in the digital archives.
Kyra stopped what she was doing to give Annie a funny look.
"Anyone come by while I was gone?"
"Just some tumbleweed." Kyra smirked. "Looks like you got your work cut out for you."
Annie shuffled the tapes awkwardly. "Yup. That'll be the time someone gives me an assignment, right?"
"Don't count on it."
She stacked the boxes beside the old VTR, and, one by one, began racking through the tapes, looking for the best clips to digitize. With headphones on, her laughter at Bing's antics drew the attention of Kyra.
"You all right in there?"
"Remember that movie Cool Feet?"
Kyra sneered. "Ugh! I hate Eddie Bing. So corny."
Annie shrugged. "I like it." She caught Bing hamming it up as he tried to remove his foot from a toilet, and laughed a little quieter, self-conscious. Kyra shook her head, while Bing ended up slipping out of his shoe and fishing it out of the toilet, on
ly to be caught by his fiancée's father with the dripping loafer in his hand.
Annie cut the footage together into what felt like a fitting tribute, a good mix of Bing's comedy performances and dramatic roles, with sound-ups in all the right places, ending on a slow-mo clip of his famously awkward smile, and fade to black.
Something jingled down the hall toward the edit suites. Shuffling feet on the carpet stopped at her doorway. The P.A.'s wallet chain jingled once more, then quieted as she stopped in the doorway.
"We need a new standby, ASAP."
Annie rose in her chair, brightening... It took her a moment to realize a more respectful expression was required. This was, after all, someone's life. "Who is it?"
The P.A.--Hilary, Annie recalled from her first-day notes--caught a look at the monitors and staggered back a step. "God--" She gave Annie a look of horror. "How did you...?"
Annie followed her wide-eyed gaze. "What? It isn't...?"
"It's Eddie Bing." Hilary shook her head in incredulity. Behind her Kyra peered out of her suite with concern. "Suicide, they think. Dead in a hotel room, that's all I know." She tore her eyes off the screens to look at Annie again. "How did you know?"
Annie felt accused. "Me? I didn't know. It's just a coincidence."
The P.A. took another step out of the room, shaking her head. "Just... I'll get a reporter... for the voiceover." She backed away until the doorway was empty. Her jingle-shuffle disappeared back down the hall. Kyra remained in the door to her own suite, eyeing her queerly.
"Annie? You okay?"
"Yeah." Annie was shaken by the coincidence--at least she hoped that was all it was. She felt like she'd stepped on a live wire plugged directly into the macabre machinery of the universe. "Yeah," she said. "Just a little weirded out, that's all."
"No doubt." Kyra was clearly a little freaked herself. "Let's get a drink tonight, huh? Just you and me."
Annie nodded, turning back to Bing in the dual monitors. Looking at it now, she recognized how haunted it appeared. Unlike her father's, the smile never reached Bing's eyes.
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