by Neil Gaiman
But if not—
It struck him suddenly that he was trapped here, in this crypt.
The lights went out.
In darkness, Valler cried out.
He had to hide.
He could only think of the ordeal pit.
He stepped into the pit and lay down. It had no cover. He could feel mud working into his shirt collar. The mud was cold, and stank of blood, of old meat.
He crossed his arms over his chest.
The footsteps were still approaching, still getting louder.
Heavier.
Clattering.
Not a girl’s steps.
Valler screamed.
Clattering, like the tread of some huge, monstrously heavy man.
Or of an animal.
A wild, untamed animal.
Like a bull.
Stephen Baxter is the winner of several prestigious science fiction swards, including the Philip K. Dick Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award and the British Science Fiction Association Award. He has also received nominations in the Hugo, Locus and Arthur C. Clarke awards. The author of more than forty novels, including collaborations with Sir Arthur C. Clarke and Sir Terry Pratchett, his most recently published books are Proxima and Ultima. ‘My wife’s family come from Northumberland and this story was inspired by a visit to the area over Christmas 1997,’ explains Baxter. ‘We explored the ruins of the Wall and visited Hexham Abbey, whose crypt – of recycled Roman stone – is very like that in the story. I was struck by the depth and strangeness of the region’s history, and since this story was first published we’ve moved to the area. The past is a foreign country – and Britain’s past is darker and more foreign than most.’
Inside the Cackle Factory
DENNIS ETCHISON
UNCLE MILTIE DID not look very happy. Someone had left a half-smoked cigar on his head, and now the wrapper began to come unglued in the rain. A few seconds more and dark stains dripped over his slick hair, ran down his cheeks and collected in his open mouth, the bits of chewed tobacco clinging like wet sawdust to a beaver’s front teeth.
‘Time,’ announced Marty, clicking his stopwatch.
Lisa Anne tried to get his attention from across the room, but it was too late. She saw him note the hour and minute on his clipboard.
‘Please pass your papers to the right,’ he said, ‘and one of our monitors will pick them up …’
On the other side of the glass doors, Sid Caesar was even less amused by the logjam of cigarette butts on his crushed top hat. As the water rose they began to float, one disintegrating filter sloshing over the brim and catching in the knot of his limp string tie.
She forced herself to look away and crossed in front of the chairs to get to Marty, scanning the rows again. There, in the first section: an empty seat with a pair of Ray-Bans balanced on the armrest.
‘Sixteen,’ she whispered into his ear.
‘Morning, Lisa.’ He was about to make his introductory spiel before opening the viewing theatre, while the monitors retrieved and sorted the questionnaires. ‘Thought you took the day off.’
‘Number Sixteen is missing.’
He nodded at the hallway. ‘Check the men’s room.’
‘I think he’s outside,’ she said, ‘smoking.’
‘Then he’s late. Send him home.’
As she hurried toward the doors, the woman on the end of row four added her own questionnaire to the pile and held them out to Lisa Anne.
‘Excuse me,’ the woman said, ‘but can I get a drink of water?’
Lisa Anne accepted the stack of stapled pages from her. ‘If you’ll wait just a moment—’
‘But I have to take a pill.’
‘Down the hall, next to the restrooms.’
‘Where?’
She handed the forms to one of the other monitors. ‘Angie, would you show this lady to the drinking fountain?’
Then she went on to the doors. The hinges squeaked and a stream of water poured down the glass and over the open toes of her new shoes.
Oh great, she thought.
She took the shoes off and stood under the awning while she peered through the blowing rain. The walkway along the front of the AmiDex building was empty.
‘Hello?’
Bob Hope ignored her, gazing wryly across the courtyard in the direction of the adjacent apartment complex, while Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore leaned so close to each other that their heads almost touched, about to topple off the bronze pedestals. They had not been used for ashtrays yet today, though their nameplates were etched with the faint white tracks of bird droppings. She hoped the rain would wash them clean.
‘Are you out here? Mister …?’
She had let Angie check them in this morning, so she did not even know Number
Sixteen’s name. She glanced around the courtyard, saw no movement and was about to go back inside, when she noticed someone in the parking lot.
It was a man wearing a wet trench coat.
So Number Sixteen had lost patience and decided to split. He did not seem to be looking for his car, however, but walked rapidly between the rows on his way to – what? The apartments beyond, apparently. Yet there was no gate in this side of the wrought-iron fence.
As she watched, another man appeared as if from nowhere. He had on a yellow raincoat and a plastic-covered hat, the kind worn by policeman or security guards. As far as she knew the parking lot was unattended. She could not imagine where had he come from, unless there was an opening in the fence, after all, and the guard had come through from the other side. He stepped out to block the way. She tried to hear what they were saying but it was impossible from this distance. There was a brief confrontation, with both men gesturing broadly, until the one in the trench coat gave up and walked away.
Lisa Anne shook the water out of her shoes, put them on and turned back to the glass doors.
Marty was already into his speech. She had not worked here long enough to have it memorised, but she knew he was about to mention the cash they would receive after the screening and discussion. Some of them may have been lured here by the glamour, the chance to attend a sneak preview of next season’s programs, but without the promise of money there was no way to be sure anyone would show up.
The door opened a few inches and Angie stuck her head out.
‘Will you get in here, girl?’
‘Coming,’ said Lisa Anne.
She looked around one more time.
Now she saw a puff of smoke a few yards down, at the entrance to Public Relations.
‘Is anybody there?’ she called.
An eyeball showed itself at the side of the building.
Maybe this is the real Number Sixteen, she thought. Trying to get in that last nicotine fix.
‘I’m sorry, but you’ll have to come in now …’
She waited to see where his cigarette butt would fall. The statues were waiting, too.
As he came toward her his hands were empty. What did he do, she wondered, eat it?
She recognised him. He had been inside, drinking coffee with the others. He was a few years older than Lisa Anne, late twenties or early thirties, good looking in a rugged, unkempt way, with his hair tied back in a ponytail and a drooping moustache, flannel shirt, tight jeans and steel-toed boots. A construction worker, she thought, a carpenter, some sort of manual labour. Why bother to test him? He probably watched football games and not much else, if he watched TV at all.
As he got closer she smelled something sweet and pungent. The unmistakable odour of marijuana lingered in his clothes. So that’s what he was up to, she thought. A little attitude adjustment. I could use some of that myself right about now.
She held out her hand to invite him in from the rain, and felt her hair collapse into wet strings over her ears. She pushed it back self-consciously.
‘You don’t want to miss the screening,’ she said, forcing a smile, ‘do you?’
‘What’s it about?’ he asked.
The door swung open again and Angie rolled her eyes.
‘Okay, okay,’ said Lisa Anne.
‘He can sign up for the two o’clock, if he wants.’
Number Sixteen shook his head. ‘No way. I gotta be at work.’
‘It’s all right, Angie.’
‘But he missed the audience prep …’
Lisa Anne looked past her. Marty was about finished. The test subjects were already shifting impatiently, bored housewives and tourists and retirees with nothing better to do, recruited from sidewalks and shopping malls and the lines in front of movie theatres, all of them here to view the pilot for a new series that would either make it to the network schedule or be sent back for retooling, based on their responses. There was a full house for this session.
Number Sixteen had not heard the instructions, so she had no choice. She was supposed to send him home.
But if the research was to mean anything, wasn’t it important that every demographic be represented? The fate of the producers and writers who had laboured for months or even years to get their shows this far hung in the balance, to be decided by a theoretical cross-section of the viewing public. Not everyone liked sitcoms about young urban professionals and their wacky misadventures at the office. They can’t, she thought. I don’t. But who ever asked me?
‘Look,’ said Number Sixteen, ‘I drove a long ways to get here. You gotta at least pay me.’
‘He’s late,’ said Angie. She ignored him, speaking as though he were not there. ‘He hasn’t even filled out his questionnaire.’
‘Yes, he has,’ said Lisa Anne and ushered him inside.
The subjects were on their feet now, shuffling into the screening room. Lisa Anne went to the checkin table.
‘Did you get Number Sixteen’s?’ she asked.
The monitors had the forms laid out according to rows and were about to insert the piles into manila envelopes before taking them down the hall.
Marty came up behind her. ‘Which row, Miss Rayme?’ he said officiously.
‘Four, I think.’
‘You think?’ Marty looked at the man in the plaid shirt and wrinkled his nose, as if someone in the room had just broken wind. ‘If his form’s not here—’
‘I know where it is,’ Lisa Anne told him and slipped behind the table.
She flipped through the pile for row four, allowing several of the questionnaires to slide onto the floor. When she knelt to pick them up, she pulled a blank one from the carton.
‘Here.’ She stood, took a pencil and jotted 16 in the upper right-hand corner. ‘He forgot to put his number on it.’
‘We’re running late, Lees …’ Marty whispered.
She slid the forms into an envelope. ‘Then I’d better get these to the War Room.’
On the way down the hall, she opened the envelope and withdrew the blank form, checking off random answers to the multiple-choice quiz on the first page. It was pointless, anyway, most of it a meaningless query into personal habits and lifestyle, only a smokescreen for the important questions about income and product preferences that came later. She dropped off her envelope along with the other monitors, and a humourless assistant in a short-sleeved white shirt and rimless glasses carried the envelopes from the counter to an inner room, where each form would be tallied and matched to the numbered seats in the viewing theatre. On her way back, Marty intercepted her.
‘Break time,’ he said.
‘No, thanks.’ She drew him to one side, next to the drinking fountain. ‘I got one for you. S.H.A.M.’
‘MA.S.H.,’ he said immediately.
‘Okay, try this. Finders.’
He pondered for a second. ‘Friends?’
‘You’re good,’ she said.
‘No, I’m not. You’re easy. Well, time to do my thing.’
At the other end of the hall, the reception room was empty and the doors to the viewing theatre were already closed.
‘Which thing is that?’ she said playfully.
‘That thing I do, before they fall asleep.’
‘Ooh, can I watch?’
She propped her back against the wall and waited for him to move in, to pin her there until she could not get away unless she dropped to her knees and crawled between his legs.
‘Not today, Lisa.’
‘How come?’
‘This one sucks. Big time.’
‘What’s the title?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Then how do you know it sucks?’
‘Hey, it’s not my fault, okay?’
For some reason he had become evasive, defensive. His face was now a smooth mask, the skin pulled back tautly, the only prominent features his teeth and nervous, shining eyes. Like a shark’s face, she thought. A residue of deodorant soap rose to the surface of his skin and vaporised, expanding outward on waves of body heat. She drew a breath and knew that she needed to be somewhere else, away from him.
‘Sorry,’ she said.
He avoided her eyes and ducked into the men’s room.
What did I say? she wondered, and went on to the reception area.
A list of subjects for the next session was already laid out on the table, ninety minutes early. The other monitors were killing time in the chairs, chatting over coffee and snacks from the machines.
Lisa Anne barely knew them. This was only her second week and she was not yet a part of their circle. One had been an editorial assistant at the L.A. Weekly, two were junior college students, and the others had answered the same classified ad she had seen in the trades. She considered crashing the conversation. It would be a chance to rest her feet and dry out. The soggy new shoes still pinched her toes and the suit she’d had to buy for the job was damp and steamy and scratched her skin like a hair shirt. She felt ridiculous in this uniform, but it was necessary to show people like Marty that she could play by their rules, at least until she got what she needed. At home she would probably be working on yet another sculpture this morning, trying to get the face right, with a gob of clay in one hand and a joint in the other and the stereo cranked up to the max. But living that way hadn’t gotten her any closer to the truth. She couldn’t put it off any longer. There were some things she had to find out or she would go mad.
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 theatre. 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 o
ne, 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 theatre seats under several thirty-six-inch television sets suspended from the ceiling.
She took the second chair from the end.
In the viewing theatre, 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 centre.
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 analysed to help the networks decide whether the show was ready for broadcast.
Lisa Anne watched Marty as he paced, doing his shtick. 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 hypnotised 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 twelve-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.