by Neil Gaiman
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 cheque 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 cheque 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 skid-marks 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 honour them, not here or anywhere else.
Now she knew 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.
Dennis Etchison is the recipient of both the World Fantasy and the British Fantasy Award. His short fiction has appeared in many magazines and anthologies and is collected in The Dark Country, Red Dreams, The Blood Kiss, The Death Artist, Got to Kill Them All & Other Stories, Talking in the Dark and Fine Cuts. Along with such movie novelizations as The Fog, Halloween II and III, and Videodrome, his novels include Darkside, Shadowman, California Gothic and Double Edge. He is also the editor of the landmark anthologies Cutting Edge, MetaHorror and Masters of Darkness. About the preceding story, the author explains: ‘One evening in 1997, my wife Kris and I ran into Peter and Dana Atkins at Dark Delicacies bookstore, a favourite haunt of horror writers in Southern California. The occasion was a street fair sponsored by the local merchants along Burbank’s Magnolia Boulevard. At some point Dana and I decided to search out a shop called It’s a Wrap, featuring clothes worn only once or twice in movies and TV shows filmed at the studios nearby, much of it with expensive designer labels and offered for resale at ridiculously low prices. There were rumours of Armani suits for $150. Before we got there, a woman with a clipboard sidled up to us and asked if we would like to attend the screening of a new television pilot. Dana had already spotted It’s a Wrap. I needed her advice about the women’s clothing inside so that I’d know whether to go back for Kris. ‘No, thanks,’ I said. ‘It pays fifty dollars,’ said the woman. That sounded like a painless way to cover the cost of some Oscar-winning threads. We both signed on, and a month later I found myself in a theatre owned by a market research company. The dreary sitcom I saw that day was soon forgotten, and the cash I received was quickly squandered, but certain details remained with me. The two-way mirrors, for example. The hi-tech monitoring equipment I glimpsed on the way out. And the unreadable expressions of the young women who worked at the testing facility. What sort of person, I wondered, takes such a job – and why? Was it only for the salary? O
r were there other, more secret reasons? Dana never followed up, and her husband, who is a horror writer, wasn’t offered the gig. A pity. I can’t guess what story he might have written, but I’m sure it would have been a good one, very different from mine and worth a lot more than fifty bucks. The reasons to be afraid are all around, if you make it your business to look for such things.’
At Home in the Pubs of Old London
CHRISTOPHER FOWLER
The Museum Tavern, Museum Street, Bloomsbury
DESPITE ITS LOCATION diagonally opposite the British Museum, its steady turnover of listless Australian bar staff and its passing appraisal by tourists on quests for the British pub experience (comprising two sips from half a pint of bitter and one Salt ‘n’ Vinegar flavoured crisp, nibbled and returned to its packet in horror), this drinking establishment retains the authentically seedy bookishness of Bloomsbury because its corners are usually occupied by half-cut proof readers from nearby publishing houses. I love pubs like this one because so much about them remains constant in a sliding world: the smell of hops, the ebb of background conversation, muted light through coloured glass, china tap handles, mirrored walls, bars of oak and brass. Even the pieces of fake Victoriana, modelled on increasingly obsolete pub ornaments, become objects of curiosity in themselves.
At this time I was working in a comic shop, vending tales of fantastic kingdoms to whey-faced net-heads who were incapable of saving a sandwich in a serviette, let alone an alien planet, and it was in this pub that I met Lesley. She was sitting with a group of glum-looking Gothic Gormenghast off-cuts who were on their way to a book launch at the new-age smells ‘n’ bells shop around the corner, and she was clearly unenchanted with the idea of joining them for a session of warm Liebfraumilch and crystal-gazing, because as each member of the group drifted off she found an excuse to stay on, and we ended up sitting together by ourselves. As she refolded her jacket a rhinestone pin dropped from the lapel, and I picked it up for her. The badge formed her initials – LL – which made me think of Superman, because he had a history of falling for women with those initials, but I reminded myself that I was no superman, just a man who liked making friends in pubs. I asked her if she’d had a good Christmas, she said no, I said I hadn’t either and we just chatted from there. I told Lesley that I was something of an artist and would love to sketch her, and she tentatively agreed to sit for me at some point in the future.
The World’s End, High Street, Camden Town
It’s a funny pub, this one, because the interior brickwork makes it look sort of inside out, and there’s a steady through-traffic of punters wherever you stand, so you’re always in the way. It’s not my kind of place, more a network of bars and clubs than a proper boozer. It used to be called the Mother Red Cap, after a witch who lived in Camden. There are still a few of her pals inhabiting the place if black eyeliner, purple lipstick and pointed boots make you a likely candidate for cauldron-stirring. A white stone statue of Britannia protrudes from the first floor of the building opposite, above a shoe shop, but I don’t think anyone notices it, just as they don’t know about the witch. Yet if you step inside the foyer of the Black Cap, a few doors further down, you can see the witch herself, painted on a tiled wall. It’s funny how people miss so much of what’s going on around them. I was beginning to think Sophie wouldn’t show up, then I became convinced she had, and I had missed her.
Anyway, she finally appeared and we hit it off beautifully. She had tied back her long auburn hair so that it was out of her eyes, and I couldn’t stop looking at her. It’s never difficult to find new models; women are flattered by the thought of someone admiring their features. She half-smiled all the time, which was disconcerting at first, but after a while I enjoyed it because she looked like she was in on a secret that no one else shared. I had met her two days earlier in the coffee shop in Bermondsey where she was working, and she had suggested’ going for a drink, describing our meeting place to me as ‘that pub in Camden near the shoe shop’. The one thing Camden has, more than any other place in London, is shoe shops, hundreds of the bastards, so, you can understand why I was worried.
It was quite crowded and we had to stand, but after a while Sophie felt tired and wanted to sit down, so we found a corner and wedged ourselves in behind a pile of coats. The relentless music was giving me a headache, so I was eventually forced to take my leave.
The King’s Head, Upper Street, Islington
The back of this pub operates a tiny theatre, so the bar suddenly fills up with the gin-and-tonic brigade at seven each evening, but the front room is very nice in a battered, nicotine-scoured way. It continued to operate on the old monetary system of pounds, shillings and pence for years, long after they brought in decimal currency. I’m sure the management just did it to confuse non-regulars who weren’t in the habit of being asked to stump up nineteen and eleven pence half-penny for a libation. Emma was late, having been forced to stay behind at her office, a property company in Essex Road. The choice of territory was mine. Although it was within walking distance of her office, she hadn’t been here before, and loved hearing this mad trilling coming from a door at the back of the pub. I’d forgotten to explain about the theatre. They were staging a revival of a twenties musical, and there were a lot of songs about croquet and how ghastly foreigners were. I remember Emma as being very pale and thin, with cropped blonde hair; she could easily have passed for a jazz-age flapper. I told her she should have auditioned for the show, but she explained that she was far too fond of a drink to ever remember anything as complicated as a dance step. At the intermission, a girl dressed as a giant sequinned jellyfish popped out to order a gin and French; apparently she had a big number in the second act. We taxed the barman’s patience by getting him to make up strange cocktails, and spent most of the evening laughing so loudly they probably heard us on stage. Emma agreed to sit for me at some point in the future, and although there was never a suggestion that our session would develop into anything more, I could tell that it probably would. I was about to kiss her when she suddenly thought something had bitten her, and I was forced to explain that my coat had picked up several fleas from my cat. She went off me after this, and grew silent, so I left.
The Pineapple, Leverton Street, Kentish Town
This tucked-away pub can’t have changed much in a hundred years, apart from the removal of the wooden partitions that separated the snug from the saloon. A mild spring morning, the Sunday papers spread out before us, an ancient smelly Labrador flatulating in front of the fire, a couple of pints of decent bitter and two packets of pork scratchings. Sarah kept reading out snippets from the News of the World, and I did the same with the Observer; but mine were more worthy than hers, and therefore not as funny. There was a strange man with an enormous nose sitting near the Gents’ toilet who kept telling People that they looked Russian. Perhaps he was, too, and needed to find someone from his own country. It’s that kind of pub; it makes you think of home.
I noticed that one of Sarah’s little habits was rubbing her wrists together when she was thinking. Every woman has some kind of private signature like this. Such a gesture marks her out to a lover, or an old friend. I watched her closely scanning the pages – she had forgotten her glasses – and felt a great inner calm. Only once did she disturb the peace between us by asking if I had been out with many women. I lied, of course, as you do, but the question remained in the back of my head, picking and scratching at my brain, right up until I said goodbye to her. It was warm in the pub and she had grown sleepy; she actually fell asleep at one point, so I decided to quietly leave.
The Anchor, Park Street, Southwark
It’s pleasant here on rainy days. In the summer, tourists visiting the nearby Globe fill up the bars and pack the riverside tables. Did you know that pub signs were originally provided so that the illiterate could locate them? The Anchor was built after the Southwark fire, which in 1676 razed the South Bank just as the Great Fire had attacked the North side ten years earlie
r. As I entered the pub, I noticed that the tide was unusually high, and the Thames was so dense and pinguid that it looked like a setting jelly. It wasn’t a good start to the evening.
I had several pints of strong bitter and grew more talkative as our session progressed. We ate Toad-in-the-Hole, smothered in elastic gravy. I was excited about the idea of Carol and I going out together. I think she was, too, although she warned me that she had some loose ends to tie up, a former boyfriend to get out of her system, and suggested that perhaps we shouldn’t rush at things. Out of the blue, she told me to stop watching her so much, as if she was frightened that she couldn’t take the scrutiny. But she can. I love seeing the familiar gestures of women, the half smiles, the rubbing together of their hands, the sudden light in their eyes when they remember something they have to tell you. I can’t remember what they say, only how they look. I would never take pictures of them, like some men I’ve read about. I never look back, you understand. It’s too upsetting. Far more important to concentrate on who you’re with, and making them happy. I’d like to think I made Carol feel special. She told me she’d never had much luck with men, and I believe it’s true that some women just attract the wrong sort. We sat side by side watching the rain on the water, and I felt her head lower gently onto my shoulder, where it remained until I moved – a special moment, and one that I shall always remember.
The Lamb & Flag, Rose Street, Covent Garden
You could tell summer was coming because people were drinking on the street, searching for spaces on the windowsills of the pub to balance their beer glasses. This building looks like an old coaching; inn, and stands beside an arch over an alleyway, like the Pillars of Hercules in Greek Street. It’s very old, with lots of knotted wood, and I don’t suppose there’s a straight angle in the place. The smoky bar is awkward to negotiate when you’re carrying a drink in either hand – as I so often am!