Created By

by Richard Matheson

  Alan knew the man could see the eerie snow that fell inside him and smiled thinly, saying he was just coming down with something.

  The sky dripped water, though it was almost eighty-five out; a muggy storm steaming L.A. alive. The Aston was waved through and howled through the dead lot, headlights caroming off dream city.

  It passed Hitchcock’s former office and did a hairpin where the Universal Tour Trams stopped to empty tourists into the funny makeup show. To either side, soundstages rose up like canyon walls. Huge promo art was painted on the side of each, advertising the latest movies and series the studio had going. Enormous actors’ faces grinned, bloated and frightening.

  Alan’s production building was a quarter mile ahead; the suite of decorated offices financed by the incredible success of “The Mercenary”; a mosque built on decimal point madness. His body felt starved; empty.

  He skidded in front of the WHITE ENTERTAINMENT building and killed the headlights as drizzle fell, razor thin. He sat in silence, feeling bleak and clammy. He tilted the mirror down, looked at his milky face. Bedlam pain swirled in his mind. Should he turn back? He knew he didn’t even have the energy or strength to defend himself.

  It’s why he’d brought the gun.

  He pulled it from his inside jacket pocket and decided he had to go through with this. Everything else had failed; been pointless. It was painfully obvious to him, now. Trying to change the show. Get it cancelled. All useless.

  It was time to fight; blood with blood.

  Alan knew the Creature had the overwhelming amount of the vitality they both shared and he was at a terrifying disadvantage. Freud had talked about it; the distribution of essential energy. What the id and superego shared. What they should both be drawing from equally. In Alan’s world, all that was gone. Inside out. He felt the Möbius imbalance hollowing him out.

  He got out of the car, moved heavily through humid rain, toward the three-story soundstage door. His shoes were drenched by puddles and driving rain stabbed his skin. He pulled open the heavy door and entered, leaning for a moment in the entrance, head spinning.

  Inside, air hung stale; icy. The silent soundstage was dark, looming. Every standing set used on “The Mercenary” stood, waiting for lights and cameras and reasons. It was all there.

  Everything Alan had created.

  Barek’s dingy apartment. General Garris’s office. The hellhole cell Barek flashed back to; his POW days of torture and captivity. The room where he was strapped naked to a steel chair and electrically shocked, feet in buckets of water. The nightmare chamber that forged his stoic obsessions.

  Beside it, oblivious to the proximity, was the bedroom Barek had had as a boy, growing up in Sacramento. Its baseball pennants and hot-rod posters watched over the room with haunting innocence. Directly beside the room were the cutaways of Barek’s helicopter and cargo plane, gray process screen behind them, waiting to receive images of sky.

  It was all there; the character’s whole life, in idealized, symbolic fragments.

  The makeup tables and mirrors sat motionless, ready to bring warpaint. Wardrobe racks hung with bloodied clothing; a murderer’s closet. Crates of gutted weapons, squatted uselessly, ready to create artificial death, fueled by blanks and dubbed sound. It was a vast crypt of illusion and lie. The places Barek had been; come from.

  The place the Creature now lived. Where the police had picked him up, after Alan called. Taken the Creature to jail. Away from here, from where it could stop Alan from doing what he had to.

  Alan hit a light switch and banks of overhead lights went on; heating elements in a huge oven. He touched the gun reflexively and moved through the sets, still half-looking for the Creature. For some sign it was there, in its fictive home. Even though he knew it was locked up in a cage by now.

  As he walked, the folding chairs with all the names of the production crew stood, legs crossed. The one that read A. E. BAREK, with its script pouch hanging to the side, was the fanciest, done in tooled leather; a gift from Alan.

  He moved through the sets, feeling sick, helpless; kicking over furniture and yanking aside drapes. He was growing weaker. He knew it was only a matter of time before he wasted to nothing and the Creature siphoned everything. If he let it, it would take every piece of his life. Thoughts. Emotions. Memories. Like some thieving, metaphysical appetite, he could feel it eating his cells; the things he was.

  On the floor, beside the bed in Barek’s apartment, Alan found several porno magazines and an empty package of steak from Vons with the blood licked off. He moved to the other sets. Nothing.

  On a table was a stack of Xeroxed scripts.

  Scripts.

  Alan’s unconscious world seeking form. His feelings and insides shoving aside everything to become substance. The terrible fantasies and horrific, amoral realities. Pieces of the inevitable whole. He was afraid to look, afraid of what it all meant. Filled with revulsion for himself. For what he’d created; what he’d released. What he’d been unable to detect within.

  He began to open cans of flammable gel used to stage contained fires and poured the thick liquid everywhere, walking with the open cans, as if chalking a playing field for some grisly sport. Fumes gathered and the gel darkened floors, walls, and furniture. Alan walked to the stacked scripts, began to ball up pages, and lit them with a lighter. He threw the crumpled plots and speeches, and watched them burst into flame as they connected with the gel.

  The apartment drapes began to burn, spreading to the thinly built facade walls and doors that shriveled black as flames swallowed; moved on.

  Alan watched unnerved, as the sets erupted. Suddenly, there was a deafening noise as a car crashed through the soundstage wall, shredding the mattresslike insulation. Lemon beams raced at him and he dove from its path.

  He was on the ground, not moving. Clutching his gun for protection. The engine blew pillows of exhaust, then died. There was no sound. Only rain, striking puddles and metal outside and the sound of sets burning. Alan belly-crawled to the driver’s door, stood slowly. He sleeved rain from the windshield and jerked back.

  Inside, dyed by pulsing dash lights, two cops slumped, throats cut, eyes plucked out; a sadist’s surgery. One uniform shirt had been ripped away in the back and a message carved into one officer’s skin; crude and deep.

  A. E Rules

  As Alan stared, a jungle knife speared his shoulder and a deep hunter’s scream filled the soundstage. He looked up and the Creature was dropping from a catwalk, two stories up. It landed on him, with bared teeth, as fire rampaged from set to set.

  As they struggled, Alan aimed and fired at the Creature. But he missed, only grazing its cheek. It wiped the diagonal line of blood on its face, kept coming at him. Panicked, Alan fired over and over, blinded by fire and fear, emptying the gun without hitting the Creature. He managed to pull the guard’s bloody knife from his own back pocket and jammed it into the Creature’s ribs. The Creature screamed, stiffened.

  Alan felt the pain in his own torso; a ghostly repetition. He dug the fat blade in deeper and again felt the agony in his own body. The Creature rolled to one side, in anguish, and Alan ran, hearing the Creature’s heavy, booted steps chasing.

  As it passed the burning bedroom it dimly recalled having slept in as a boy, it stopped and looked on in traumatized horror. Pain racked its features and the Creature bellowed loss and torment, trying to stop the fire; unable to touch it. Recalling a childhood which never existed and had no detail, gouged by emotion it couldn’t fathom. Standing in a room it never experienced. Never knew.

  Alan ran from the huge building that glowed orange death as the door opened. His side ached and the sensation of a piercing blade making him look down again to check but see nothing. He clutched the tender midsection, dragged through deep ponds of rain, and began to realize it was more complicated than he’d considered. More fundamental.

  The sets weren’t the key.

  They were only a component. A layer. Only what the Creature insti
nctively reasoned was home. With fire, Alan had rendered it homeless; ravaged its history for now. But it wasn’t the key. He ran through the storm and suddenly understood what he must do.

  Burning the sets was only superficial. The original film negatives would be where essence hid; where genetic codes rooted primary definitions. The negatives weren’t simply an animate photo album. They were the record of a maturing fetus.

  The sky was lowering and as he groaned, he suddenly felt in Viet Nam, rain clouds dense with contaminants, ground seized by blinding mist. He ran toward his production building and couldn’t see more than a few feet ahead; smothered in nothing.

  His breathing went down into body corridors filled with injured flesh and he could almost hear the weightless footsteps of guerilla snipers, hiding near. He imagined trip wires, everywhere he stepped, that would release sharpened pungi sticks, on contact, crucifying his flesh.

  He could see no sky and easily imagined treetops that weren’t there; grinning Vietnamese death angels, ready to soundlessly drop; slit him open.

  Rain fell harder and thunder shook the ground. He felt his cheek, sensing pain. He touched it and saw it was bleeding, exactly where he’d grazed the Creature. He moaned in horror and stopped, eyes darting. Were those the sounds of villagers? Southeast Asian birds? Bare legs moving through rice paddies, knives held in small hands? He crouched down, swallowing. Afraid. Drenched by rain.

  Was he losing his mind? He stood, slowly, head bursting with images he’d written for the show. Faces of slaughtered villagers lunged at his mind. Explosions. Bodies, hanging upside down, skinned like animals. Screaming children, ravaged by napalm, running into his brain, right through his forehead.

  He saw the murders, too.

  Defenseless victims holding hands up to protect faces as glimmering blades cut them apart. Skin, instantly sunken by bullets that left red-black wells. Stacks of bodies, rising higher, soaring into a bleeding spire of distorted faces, clawing arms, voices crying out in deafening misery.

  He clamped hands over ears, and without warning the Creature emerged from mist, face half-melted by fire. It lifted a ghastly smile and elbowed him in the chin. Alan fell to the wet ground, groaning, bleeding from mouth and nose.

  The Creature approached, slowly, leaned down, and touched Alan’s bleeding features, then licked the blood off its fingertips, savoring his taste; gory mother’s milk. It wanted more of him, and Alan immediately lunged out and slashed at the Creature’s leg tendons with the knife. The Creature cried out, reaching down to the cut muscles that split to reveal unfinished tissue; no blood.

  Alan began to run but felt the sensation in his own leg muscles and screamed in pain. The connection between the two was getting stronger; cross-pollinating with almost no delay.

  He knew he couldn’t go back toward his production building; the Creature could be hiding. It could hear him. Get him before he had a chance to kill it. Overpower him. Cut him open and dump his insides. Alan realized if he felt its pain, and it felt his, it could be thinking what he was. It would know he was heading toward the production office to destroy it. It could anticipate him. Trick him.

  Ambush his thoughts.

  He would have to hide out and circle back. Struggle to keep his mind a total blank. Give the Creature nothing to work with other than a monochromatic void. Alan knew if he could get to the narrow drainage pipe that traveled beneath the main road and emptied near his building, he could squeeze himself through and sneak into the main vault where he kept the negatives.

  He moved ahead, trying to fight the pain in his legs, and found himself at one end of a narrow wooden bridge. He started across.

  climax

  It was the stunt bridge.

  Trams would drive across, theatrically stall, and the bridge would collapse, threatening to drop freaked tourists into a death-lake below. Everybody got a hard-on for their photo album.

  Alan knew the drainage pipe was across the way and the bridge the fastest route to its ridged mouth. He began to cross, wincing as the wood creaked and fog hedged; silver neon. Crickets and mosquitoes shrieked and the lake bamboo released air bubbles at shore’s edge as water lapped, filing it down.

  He moved across the bridge, weak.

  Though he feared the Creature was under the damp boards, ready to get him, he was allowed to cross undisturbed. He could hear ducks huddling on the artificial shoreline, rain tapping softly. But the Creature was nowhere close. Or if it was, it did nothing to stop him.

  Alan knew it was as strong as he was weak. As he dissipated and thinned within, robbed by its demands, it became more real. More complete. He tried to guide it to leave him alone, repeating again and again the same thought; a single, insistent mantra.

  “Nothing,” he repeated, saying the word quietly, hoping its sound might make it more real. Hoping the Creature’s instinctive radar couldn’t track him.

  He stopped.

  Sirens. Kniving sky; rain.

  He could wait. They would find him. Protect him. Get him out of this nightmare. But the Creature would find some new, more devastating way to punish him. To pay him back for burning its home. For trying to kill it. Who would it hurt or kill this time? Who mattered to Alan?

  He clutched the knife more tightly and stepped slowly, watching his shoes move, looking in all directions for some sign of the Creature. Fog ran its eraser over everything and he could swear a squad of Vietnamese was hiding under the bridge, clinging to the underside, ready to attack. Ready to reach up, drag him into the water, and force his head under the surface.

  Fuck.

  The Creature was doing it. Filling his mind with images. He was convinced it was learning to think; to imagine. As he lost parts of his own mind, it moved in; took over. It was doing this to him! Suggesting ideas; torturing his mind.

  Or was it …?

  It couldn’t think. It was a killing animal. That’s all he’d ever written it to be. That was its whole complaint. It wanted to be more than just a flesh machine with mere survival in its primitive program. Alan knew that its current only ran in one direction; he’d seen to it. He’d even made it have elements of compassion in the one script he’d written that the network hated. It had added a small measure of humanity but that wasn’t the same as being able to think.

  All it knew how to do was survive; it was its disadvantage and its advantage. It lacked so much; things Alan had never given it. Ultimately, it was only brute force; dominating impulse. Though it could physically overwhelm him, he could outthink it. Everything it knew, he’d thought of. Everything it wanted, he’d told it to want.

  It would only kill him if he let it.

  He stopped, halfway across, hearing a noise.

  Something was under the bridge.

  He stood there, eyes moving frantically and screamed as a blade was shoved from underneath, between boards, and went all the way through his right foot. He stared down at the gleaming metal rising out of his shoe, trying to lift his foot off the blade. He reached down to grab his leg, to help pull.

  He turned, strickenly, hearing the Creature coming toward him, from the other side of the bridge. Saw it grinning. As it stepped closer, Alan lifted harder, straining to free his foot from the blade. It was excruciating and the foot slid up, slowly, releasing blood.

  Alan began to limp away and turned to see the Creature hobbling on its own right leg, coming after him. Fog masked the distance between them and he could see the pipe ahead, its rusted lips forming a narrow, three-foot opening. He picked up rocks, tossed them in another direction, heard the Creature momentarily follow their sound.

  “Nothing, nothing, nothing …”

  He fell to his knees and climbed in, shimmying through the wet metal that ran uphill toward his office. It was narrow and smelled bad and he pulled his body with skinny, unmuscled arms, digging the toes of his shoes into the pipe’s ripples, using them like rungs.

  Rain and mud thrashed through the pipe and Alan turned his head to avoid the filthy current, f
ast-moving rocks cutting his hands. He kept climbing, moving up through the roaring throat. His hands slipped on the mossy walls, bloody; raw.

  He couldn’t remember exactly how long the pipe was and there was no end in sight. His foot was still aching and bloody from the knife wound and the muddy water made it worse. He heard something up ahead. Something shrieking; struggling. Scratching at the cold metal. As he tried to see, a cat twisted closer, trapped in the current. It was half-drowned, fur slick, and clawed at him in terror.

  He tried to pull it off and it went insane, baring teeth, struggling for life. It tore up his face with sharp claws and Alan finally shoved it away. He heard it disappear, crying out like a frightened kitten, washed away.

  As he kept moving, he heard another sound. Sirens pulling into the studio; red banshees. They would go to the soundstage and spray water on the glowing death. They wouldn’t understand what it meant. Insurance companies would settle and the studio would rebuild the sets. They would be ready to commence shooting within days. But Alan knew the show was dead. He was going to kill it.

  If it didn’t work, he began to think of another plan: he could trap the Creature. Pen it up somewhere, where no one would ever come. Let it starve to death while he stood outside the bars and watched with his good qualities; watching the bad ones wither, beg for life.

  He suddenly screamed, dragged backwards.

  Something was grabbing his ankles and he looked back to see the Creature, pulling harder, dragging Alan backwards; downhill. Alan’s chin was gouged open by the rough, galvanized metal and he struggled to hold on.

  He tried to inch himself away, breathing hard, unable to get enough air in this metal vein. But the Creature was too strong. He tried to make it stop, tried to think thoughts that would make it let go.

  “Nothing!” he screamed, kicking madly, voice hoarse.