Ten Dead Comedians

by Fred Van Lente

  “What is it?” Janet asked.

  Meredith looked at her.

  “C’mon, sister, have a heart. What if you get dirt-napped, too? Any one of us should be able to get into any corner of this dump. Our lives might depend on it.”

  Meredith weighed this assertion, then said, “It’s 03-12-88. The day his album Can’t Help Myself dropped.”

  “Somebody’s living in the past,” Ruby said.

  “At least he has a past,” Meredith said in a way she must have thought was cutting. Ruby just rolled her eyes.

  Meredith flipped open a small panel on the side of a wine case jutting from the far wall, revealing a ten-button numeric keypad. She punched in the six-digit combination.

  A small red light in one corner of the panel flashed at her but nothing else happened.

  Meredith frowned. “I must have keyed it in wrong.”

  She tried the combination again, more deliberately this time, but with the same result.

  “Brexit,” she said under her breath. “It worked just fine not four hours ago.”

  “Are you sure you’re putting it in right?” Janet said. “You know Americans, we do the month, then the day, not the weird mixed-up way you do across the pond. Like how you people drive on the wrong side of the street.”

  “Yes, I am aware of that,” Meredith said through clenched teeth. “You do realize we think it’s you people who do it the mixed-up way, and you who drive on the wrong side of the street, yes?”

  “Aw, do you? That’s cute. Here, sweetie, let me give it a try.”

  Their back-and-forth had lulled Ruby into a half-conscious state of nearly intolerable boredom, so it took her a few moments to realize her left buttock was vibrating.

  While Janet and Meredith bickered over the panic room entrance code with their backs to her, Ruby stepped behind the nearest monolith of wine and removed the phone from her jeans pocket. It wasn’t her phone, but the drab flip phone she had discovered inside her guest room. A gray text bubble appeared on its tiny pixelated screen:

  We need to talk

  Ruby peered back at the other two women and made sure they were looking at the keypad and not at her. The third rail of her existence had gained power, and she trembled with the knowledge: she was connected to the internet.

  “Unknown caller” was who the phone said was talking to her. She typed back, the plastic keys of the flip phone making tiny kissing noises under her thumb:

  Who is this?

  A few seconds later, the response appeared:

  Meet me

  Library

  She quickly thumbed:

  Not unless you tell me who you are.

  The response was so quick, her correspondent couldn’t possibly have been reacting to her text; he (or she) must’ve already been typing:

  5min library

  Youll wanna here this

  Dont tell others

  Comedy Ambush Xclusive

  Ruby debated the wisdom of this.

  But wisdom had never been her strong suit.

  “Guys, we’re just spinning our wheels here,” she said to the backs of Ruby and Janet as they still bickered over the door. “I’m gonna case the ground floor a little bit, the rooms we haven’t been in yet.”

  “Give us five seconds and we’ll come with you,” Meredith said.

  “I’m sure it’s fine,” Ruby said, “I’ll yell if I find anything.”

  Then she scampered up the stairs before either of them could object.

  V

  TJ followed Dante to the dock stairs, yelling:

  “C’mon, man! You’re making a mistake! You should set aside all that outside shit, man! We’re in a tight spot, and the only way we’re going to get through it is if we stick together!”

  At the top of the stairs Dante spun to face him again. “But here’s the thing: I don’t trust you, TJ.”

  “Why not? What did I ever do to you?”

  “It’s what you didn’t do to me. Do you know what a five-minute spot on 2nite would’ve done to my career? Do you how many overnight car trips on no sleep and ten Red Bulls I’ve had to go on to get from one tiny club to the next? How many times I didn’t draw enough because there was a basketball game that night or it rained a little, so I actually lost money on the gig? You think it’s fun being ‘the hardest-working road comic in the business’? The key word in that phrase is ‘work.’ You actually remember what it’s like to work at stand-up instead of just sitting on your throne giving thumbs-up or thumbs-down to the poor bastards being paraded in front of you? Five minutes on your show, on one night, for so many comics, like Zoe, or Billy the Goddamn Contractor, may he rest in peace, that bumped them up from a middle or an opener to a headliner. How many shows in twelve years you do? How many thousands? And you never gave me a shot, you stingy bastard. One shot, that’s all I needed. And you wouldn’t give it to me.”

  TJ’s face became flat and placid while Dante ranted. When the other comic was done, he said, “You, what, you could’ve been a contender? Yeah, I heard that speech a few times. You know what speech I never hear, though? ‘I went on TJ’s show, and nothing happened. I killed, I did a great set, but it just didn’t happen for me. I don’t know why. The comedy gods didn’t smile on me, there was a bigger guest on somebody else’s show on another network. I got my shot, I nailed it, but I still didn’t make a mark. It happens. It’s nobody’s fault. Showbiz is just a tough row to hoe.’

  “I never hear that speech, man, because there’s no villain, there’s no puppet master to blame. Maybe that chick Cassandra was right once in her life; maybe I didn’t think you were right for our show. But so what if I did? I wasn’t put on this Earth to discover you. I’m not Broadway Danny Rose. I’m not Star Search.

  “I book you on my show, I book anyone on my show, for one reason and one reason only. So you can make me look good. So you make people want to tune in again to me. I got hundreds of people working for me, with families, and problems of their own, whose jobs depend on me. I can’t be looking out for you, man. I’m too busy looking out for me, because no one else will. I got puppet masters of my own up my ass.”

  Dante gave him the slow golf clap.

  “Thank you. Thank you for making my point for me, TJ. Of this whole crew, you are the one most likely to stab a brother in the back because you’re just looking out for number one. And wasn’t it you who kept going on and on about how you’re best friends with crazy-ass Dustin Walker? For all I know you’re working with him. So, with that in mind…”

  Dante stepped to the side of the stairs and invited TJ to proceed ahead of him.

  “After you.”

  TJ shook his head. “Hell, no. I’m not going anywhere with you.”

  “Aw, did I hurt your feelings?”

  “After that speech? You got a lot of pent-up hostilities against me! You got murder motive!”

  “I got murder motive?”

  “Yeah, you got murder motive, son.”

  “Murder motive. Okay. Sure.” Dante rubbed his face with his hand. “You’re probably right, now that you mention it. You stay here, I’ll check out down there.”

  “Don’t tell me what to do, puto.”

  “Whatever, man,” Dante said, and started to descend. “Do me a favor, though, and if you hear me getting murdered, go get help, okay?”

  “No promises!” TJ called after him.

  VI

  “Didn’t Meredith say this was supposed to be where Dave’s-Not-Here the caretaker lived?” Steve Gordon said as he and Zoe Schwartz stepped inside the cabana, up the hill from the main house. The eave over the front portico had a golden sunburst set in the center like a Mayan calendar.

  Just inside the curtained glass entry doors was a large room with dark tile floors. Several small circular tables and chairs faced a stage with a brick backdrop and a microphone on a metal stand. Steve couldn’t help but think it looked like a hostile droid gazing with one baleful eye over the hapless audience it had vaporized.
<
br />   Zoe said, “Wow, yet another thing Intern McJailbait said that didn’t pan out. What a shock.”

  “Boy, you’re a big fan of hers, huh?”

  “Well, she’s sleeping her way to the top and I’m trying to do it with, you know, talent. And hard work. Like a schmuck. So there is a natural hostility there.”

  “Like cartoon cats and mice.”

  “Also, there’s something she’s not telling us, trust me. No one is as clueless as she acts.”

  “What about Orange Baby Man?”

  Zoe thought about it. “Okay, I stand corrected.”

  Tucked away out of the sight line of the doorway was a bar, stacked with booze.

  Steve walked behind the bar, picked up a Bacardi bottle by the stem, and hurled it to the ground as hard as he could. Four-fifths empty, it bounced up and down several times before rolling to a stop beneath a table.

  “Plastic?” Zoe asked.

  “Plastic.”

  Faux votive candles on each table glowed with the only illumination in the faux club. Zoe squinted at the wall tiles and blue dots and purple triangles, each color rendered in gradients to produce an unconvincing 3-D effect. “Jesus. You know the saying, such-and-such raped my childhood? I feel like my childhood raped this room.”

  “Yeah, the early nineties really threw up all over this place.”

  Beside the bar Steve found a doorway and a short flight of steps ascending into darkness. He felt for the light switch along the black wall and flicked it on, then headed up.

  Zoe climbed onstage and grabbed the mic. “Helloooooo, Murder Island! Who’s ready to laugh tonight?”

  She looked out over the empty, silent club.

  “Yeah, I know how you feel,” she said.

  Next she turned her attention to the brick backdrop. Rapping a knuckle on it, she discovered that, as she suspected, it was plastic. Seeing one corner not entirely attached, she pulled it back a bit and found a spongy foam beneath.

  “Hey, Steve?” she called. “I think this room may be soundproofed.”

  “Yeah,” came a voice booming from the ceiling. Zoe jumped halfway out of her skin.

  “Jesus! Don’t do that!”

  “Sorry. Look over the bar.”

  She did and saw the black window of a sound booth on the wall above it.

  “He’s got a sound board, a mixing board, a MacBook Pro running GarageBand, the whole nine yards,” he said. “This is a recording studio set up to look like a club. Just add audience and comic.”

  “I have to admit, even from a psycho, that’s actually a pretty clever idea.”

  “Yeah, I—shit!”

  There was a thud and a staccato squeal of feedback though the speakers.

  “Holy crap, are you all right? Should I run?”

  No answer.

  “Tap once on the microphone if you think I should run!”

  “No…no….Hold on. Sorry, sorry. There’s just…I guess Dave’s-Not-Here has a dog. There’s a food bowl and water dish in here and I walked right into them. Made quite a mess.”

  “I haven’t seen a dog at all…” Zoe wrinkled her nose. “Have you?”

  “Nah. It’s probably dead anyway.”

  She scowled. “Why would you say that?”

  “You’ve never seen a horror movie before? The pets always die first.”

  Zoe blanched.

  Finding a crumpled-up paper towel on the sound board, Steve sopped up the water as best he could. He wasn’t sure why he cared about housekeeping on Murder Island; he did it more out of habit than anything else.

  He hopped down the stairs, saying, “Yeah, whenever a family moves into a haunted house, you can pretty much kiss the dog or cat goodbye. It drags out the first act until the people deaths start happening. I had a writing partner for a long time, and we talked about doing one of those low-budget Paranormal Activity things as a spec. They’re so formulaic…”

  When he emerged from the stairs, he looked around the studio and realized he had been talking to himself for some time.

  Zoe Schwartz was gone.

  VII

  Ruby Ng was no fool. She knew a trap when she saw one. She had forged her whole career by laying traps.

  But as she shut the library door behind her, she felt safe and confident for a number of reasons, not the least of which was that she had convinced herself of the cosmic truth of her bond with Yvette, the love that had brought her up from the dark, self-destructive flailing her life had been until that point. Their shared destiny gave Ruby an unshakable belief in her own invulnerability, that she was somehow fated to continue existing on this Earth as long as Yvette was there to share her life. This was why she was able to enter the library without fear.

  Or much fear.

  Also, and most importantly, she agreed with Meredith Ladipo, so adorable otherwise in her cluelessness, that they were alone on the island. It wasn’t big enough for anyone to hide on for long. Ergo, it was someone among them who had texted her. And she’d been outwitting the motley collection of insecure misfits and head cases that comprised the comedy community for years.

  All this of course begged the question, Which inmate of this particular asylum of emotional cripples had reached out? Ruby had her suspicions, but she didn’t really consider them for too long because that person would soon present himself. And she was almost positive it was a he.

  She wasn’t completely self-delusional. She knew how unpopular she was among her colleagues. They thought she could be a bit too extreme in her criticisms, too strident in her politics. Well, boo-freaking-hoo. Comics should march in unity, arm in arm, as the Anti-Bullshit Army, and she had no problem calling out soldiers who weren’t pulling their weight.

  Besides, how many whining that she took it too far had gotten called a “gook dyke bitch” by twentysomething frat douches in red caps the week after Trump won the election? Had Twitter mentions full of rape threats and promises you were going to get deported? Give me a break.

  She considered it a personal triumph that Dustin Walker had been driven mad by the realization that the straight white bros’ hegemony was at last slipping through their fingers, as perilous as that may have rendered her own personal circumstances. The last gasp of a fading tyrant, killing himself, and poisoning the food and drink he provided for his guests. That was probably his plan, in the end: to starve the comics out.

  Or have them turn on one another.

  While she waited in a Masterpiece Theatre armchair in a corner of the room Ruby attempted to call up her email or a website, any website, on the Wi-Fi-connected phone, but failed. This antique from 2003 was connected not to the wider internet but to some kind of in-house intranet.

  After fifteen minutes or so Ruby began to feel like she was being made a fool of. Ruby did not appreciate being made a fool of. Her thumbs at this point were so limber and dextrous, she could type twice as fast on her phone as she could on a regular keyboard:

  Where the hell are you?

  The room had the overwhelmingly dull smell of cheap leather. She glanced idly at the leather-bound tomes on each shelf and saw that many had the word BOOK stenciled in gold on the spine.

  Frowning, she tipped one spine back, and the entire row of spines came with it—behind them was only Styrofoam. They were the fake books you’d find on bookcases displayed at Ikea.

  The flip phone buzzed, startling her half to death. She looked at its narrow screen:

  Closer than u think

  For the first time since she landed on the island, an icicle of fear lanced through Ruby Ng’s heart.

  She didn’t move.

  She didn’t turn around.

  VIII

  The pier faced west, and as Dante Dupree descended the dizzying wooden stairs along the side of the sheer cliffs, he could watch the sun touch the Caribbean’s distant horizon in an orange burst of glory.

  Encroaching dusk had triggered the light-sensitive lamps mounted on the railing running around the pier. The guests’ luggage lay s
cattered about the dock, unzipped, locks cut off, shirts and blouses and skirts and jeans strewn everywhere. A couple of bags were already drifting out with the tide.

  Dante cursed under his breath and descended the few remaining steps. His own suitcase was one of those currently heading out to sea. Southern Comfort that he could be relatively certain hadn’t been poisoned was safely ensconced inside.

  He nudged a few of the disemboweled bags with his foot, seeing nothing illuminating.

  One corner of the lid to Janet’s enormous trunk was stuck upside down on a post at the end of the dock, as if someone had tried to pitch it into the water but it caught itself there. He reached down and tried to pull it up, but the inside was slippery and clammy. He struggled to get a grip.

  “Holy shit, what’d you do, dude?”

  “Goddamn!” Dante leapt to his feet. He dropped the huge trunk, which he had just managed to free from the top of the post. It fell into the water, sinking beneath the waves with Titanic-esque majesty.

  Dante turned to face TJ, who had materialized behind him, surveying the luggage massacre. “I knew you had a lot of pent-up anger, man, but I don’t know why you had to take it out on everybody’s bags. I should beat your ass; some of my best shirts were in there. You just lucky I got bigger things to worry about.”

  “I didn’t do shit,” Dante said. “I found them like this. Where the hell did you come from?”

  TJ held up the elevator’s OUT OF ORDER sign. “I tried it and it worked fine, though it’s super slow. You may not trust me, but I do not trust that Meredith Ladipo chick, man. Absolutely nothing she says has checked out.”

  “I don’t know. I think that just makes her more in the dark than the rest of us.”

  “Yeah, right. You just want down her pants.”

  Dante shrugged. “You said it—I got other things on my mind.”

  TJ looked at the bags and shook his head. “This is not looking good, man.”

  “No,” Dante said. “It most definitely is not.”