An intercom mic and buttons were located under each monitor. He hit the Listen button under the wine cellar camera and was nearly deafened by the invective and blows directed his way.
He pressed the Speak button and said: “Hey, hey, you guys. Come on, chill out, this is great. I can work this to our advantage.”
The speaker must have been mounted near the camera because his trio of pursuers turned and looked in its direction, with none of them figuring out exactly where his voice was coming from.
“This is bullshit, TJ. Let us in, man,” Dante said.
“I don’t think so, potential murderer,” TJ said into the intercom. “Hey, look on the bright side. Now you guys know I didn’t do it because the murderer would not hunker down and wait for rescue instead of, uh, you know. Murdering you.”
“None of us thought you were the killer,” Zoe said.
“Yeah, you’re way too much of a dumbass to pull this off,” Dante said.
“Gee, that really hurts my feelings. Now I’m definitely not letting you inside my private bunker.
“Aw, who am I kidding? I was never gonna let you in anyway.”
IV
Ollie reentered the house and stuck his head in a couple rooms. He surprised himself by feeling relieved when he did not find the others.
He was just effing sick of it all, sick of all their effing bee ess. At first he was scared to be trapped here, where he might be murdered like Billy or Janet, but now he was more angry at being stuck here with the living—people who were saying or doing nasty things to him all the time. It was the same suffocating claustrophobia he had experienced on the school basketball court before first bell. On that wide, flat tarmac he had nowhere to hide, just like here. And no bell to release him from the jungle into the semi-safety of the company of adults and teachers.
Except…that wasn’t technically true, was it?
About him having nowhere to hide.
He did know a place, thanks to the orange binder that Dustin Walker had so generously left him, to signal he was better than the others, that their host also had sympathy with his pursuit of the Radical Yes. One of the blueprints in the book said that there were a bunch of hidden gags around the island, like the secret switch that turned the elevator on and off and made the bottom fall out of the lift. Ollie thought that seemed more cruel than funny, but to each his own—he wasn’t going to question how another performer designed his act.
He knew of another gag, though, that was highly applicable to his current predicament.
Ollie retrieved the binder from the bar in the clown lounge. He went into the library and pulled the false bookcase “door” that seemed to open to a blank wall, with the cartoon outline of a figure running through it. That was a clue, the binder told him, because, in a double-ironic twist that appealed to Ollie’s professionalism, the fake door opened to a fake wall that was actually a real door, which opened when he pushed on its edge near the lower left-hand corner. He felt the release and heard the click and discovered he was able to slide the panel to the right, into the wall, revealing a small recess beyond. And inside that was a narrow unpainted metal staircase that spiraled up claustrophobically in a narrow shaft behind the wall.
He suppressed a squeal of delight and went inside; behind him the bookcase swung shut with a thump, startling him. For a moment his knees buckled in fear, and he thought about calling out.
But he didn’t want to call out. He didn’t want the others to know where he was. He didn’t want to share his discovery with them. The best he could ever hope for from those bees and dees was that they would ignore him. He’d hide where they couldn’t get him. They’ll think Walker got him—or maybe that he was the killer. Wouldn’t that be something! That would show them. All he wanted to do was inspire love and laughter in the world, but dee-bags like these other comics, who made money making fun of other people and putting them down, they would never understand that. All they responded to was fear. So that’s what he would give them.
He took a deep breath and climbed the spiral staircase alone.
V
A kind of cushioned metal bench that could act as a bed or a sofa was attached by hinges to the panic-room wall opposite the bank of monitors. TJ Martinez lifted the seat and discovered a wide variety of goodies in the cabinet beneath, including a cloth first-responder case full of medical supplies, three neatly folded blankets, a tray of 100-hour ReadyCandles, a shrink-wrapped case of iodine pills, and a briefcase filled with neatly stacked thousand-euro bills on one side and thousand-U.S.-dollar bills on the other.
Returning to the Speak button he said, “You all have ill will toward me. Particularly you, Zoe, and you, Dante. But maybe we can reach some kind of arrangement.”
“Take your arrangement,” Zoe said, “and please shove it sideways up your ass.”
“Don’t answer too quickly.” TJ looked around the room. There was a sink, a plastic toilet, and a shelf stocked with cardboard boxes stamped SELF-HEATING EMERGENCY MEALS (LOW SODIUM).
“I got all kinds of things you could use in here, like, gee, I don’t know, off the top of my head, food. So let’s see how this shakes out, and maybe I can figure some way to send food out to you guys so you don’t starve. At the same time, I need to maintain my, you know, personal security and shit.
“And that means you explaining what your deal is, chickstick. Yeah, you, Meredith. You’re still the likeliest guilty party among all these freaks and basket cases, so as long as you’re around, I’m not inclined to open this door for nobody.”
Meredith didn’t say anything. She just shook her head wearily and turned her back to the camera.
VI
Oliver Rees knew he could never be completely safe, not on this island, and his nerves were all aflutter, like when he was awaiting the arrival of a Grindr date. But the unknown was also exciting, yawing before him and eager to be explored, like when he was awaiting the arrival of a Grindr date. And maybe his detractors were right. Maybe he was greedy. He wanted the glory—and the discovery—all to himself. Serves those dee-bags right, for all they made fun of him.
The staircase spiraled up through the building inside a stuffy, hollow tube until it reached a square opening with light streaming in from above. With considerable difficulty he squeezed his rotundity through the aperture and found himself in a garret with no windows. If he had to, he would have guessed there was a secret third attic level, above the belvedere gallery but accessible only from the library on the ground floor. The ceiling was barely seven feet above the carpeted floor. The air inside was sun baked and dead. The only visible movement came from the dust spiraling through the light thrown off by a single overhead bulb.
The room was empty save for a leather armchair, a small table with a dorm fridge underneath and a flat gray Ikea desk with a plasma screen on top and a tower CPU below.
Ollie went for the fridge immediately, and was somewhat disappointed to find a few pieces of fruit—a banana, some ripe plums, and a Granny Smith apple—and two small bottles of Poland Spring water. He would have preferred candy. Then he remembered that fruit, of course, was nature’s candy, and he grabbed a plum and instantly bit into it, sweet juice squirting down his chin.
He tapped the keyboard and the monitor burned to life, showing some kind of chat app that displayed a text conversation:
We need to talk.
U didnt come to libary u werent there
I was there. Then Janet got shot.
I still want to hear what you have to say. Can you still meet tonight?
U no were playroom is
Yes. Meet you there in thirty minutes? 1am?
K
Boring, Ollie thought, and then quit the message app.
He had finished the plum and was looking around for someplace to throw away the pit, or perhaps a napkin to wipe the sticky ichor off his hands and chin, when he saw them stacked on one side of the room:
Framed photos. Two or three sets, on the floor. He went over and picked
them up. They were copies of the same headshots from the front gallery.
This seemed significant, in ways that weren’t immediately apparent to him, until another thought bounded into his head and pushed all others out:
Messaging.
Someone was messaging from the computer.
He whirled back to the monitor just as it darkened in sleep mode. He immediately slapped the space bar with a finger, and if anyone had a problem with the keyboard being all sticky with plum juice they could just kiss his grits.
The monitor came back to life and he found the full-barred broadcast symbol in the status bar indicating that this thing did, in fact, have a Wi-Fi signal.
He chuckled deeply, in a way that he hoped made him sound like a comic book supervillain, because he had achieved what the others couldn’t. He did the first thing he always did whenever he got online.
He checked his horoscope.
Some benefits are definitely coming your way, Gemini, although everything isn’t quite as promising as it seems.
“Pshaw, thanks for nothing, Kreskin,” Ollie said out loud. “Tell me something I don’t know.”
VII
TJ realized that if he could press the Speak button and lock it in place, he could broadcast his voice through every camera on the grounds.
“Hey, Ollie, buddy, we did it! Come on out, wherever you are!”
“Aw, not Ollie, too,” Dante groaned.
“You didn’t really rope him into your stupidity, did you?” Zoe said.
“What do you care?” TJ said. “I was the only who didn’t treat him like dog dirt.”
“Except, you know, when it matters. Like now,” Dante said.
TJ said into the intercom, “Listen, Ollie, I can’t let you inside the panic room, okay? It’d be a tight fit, buddy. And besides, how could I open the door to let you in without these pendejos pushing their way inside, too? Listen, you’re far more valuable to me out there, being my eyes and ears, making sure they’re not plotting against me. Keep ’em honest, Ollie, and I’ll fulfill my end, I promise.”
With that, the others in the wine cellar groaned and headed single file up the stairs.
VIII
Ensconced in the attic garret, Ollie couldn’t hear the speakers at all. Even if he could, he was too entranced by his Yahoo homepage, which said there was a terrorist attack in one of those poor countries he’d never heard of, and it seemed that during his time here stocks had fallen, then risen, then fallen again. He was already getting bored and ready to grab the Granny Smith from the mini fridge when it occurred to him that he should probably get word about their predicament to somebody in the outside world.
But who? The local authorities? Who were they, and how was he supposed to get in touch with them? He didn’t know how to make phone calls on this thing. Hadn’t William Griffith gone on and on about how this island was sort of owned by the Netherlands and sort of owned by France? Which country should he call?
Should he email the FBI? How long would that take? And what was their email address?
Maybe he could contact his agent or manager? Like everyone else in Hollywood, they were taking the month of August off for vacation, and he wasn’t entirely sure how to get a hold of them. Plus they both had a tendency to yell at him when he got himself into trouble, which was a lot, so he was more than a little scared of them.
Then he knew—he knew exactly who to contact, and who would respond immediately.
A small spherical camera was mounted on top of the monitor, so he scrolled through the applications on the desktop and found the one that controlled it. He passed an open window showing views from various cameras planted around the island—the library, a sound booth of some kind, the dock—but these meant nothing to him, so he shut down the app.
At last he figured out how to turn on the camera, and when the light burned green and the on-screen numbers counted down to zero, he looked in it and said:
“Hello, Sandals, this is Oliver Rees, but you know me better as Orange Baby Man. I am the creator of Orange Baby Man and the president and CEO of Orange Baby, LLC. I am supposed to be in Saint Thomas, with you, inspecting our theater on Tuesday. But I am not going to be there because I have been kidnapped. I have been trapped with a whole bunch of famous people on Dustin Walker’s private island and we are getting killed off one by one. Janet Kahn, she’s dead. Billy the Contractor, he’s dead.
“I am pretty sure Ruby Ng is dead, but I’m not sure how famous she is anyway, so never mind.
“But look! I am still here. TJ Martinez is still here, and even though he is kind of a giant dee, I have no desire to see him dead. I have no desire to see any more people here die. I’m just not that kind of a person. It takes too much energy to be vindictive, you know?
“Dante Dupree is here—he is black. And so is Zoe Schwartz.
“I mean that she’s here, not that she’s black. Not that that would be anything to be ashamed of if she was black. I am just saying, for the record, she isn’t.
“A couple of other not-famous people are here, but I do not remember their names.
“We are almost out of food, and more importantly there is a crazy person trying to kill us in all sorts of different ways, with guns and poisons and nooses and things. We need help. And food.
“Well, no, we need to be rescued and brought to a place where there is a more reliable supply of food. Like Sandals Virgin Islands! If you took us back to Sandals, that would be great. I don’t really know where I am, though. It’s this teeny-tiny island off the coast of, uh…Saint Croix? Saint Louis? One of those saints that are named after islands. Look, I’m sure you’ll be able to talk to somebody who can find out.”
As Ollie talked, it became increasingly impossible to ignore that not only was he rambling, but to any rational listener, what he was saying probably sounded like the ranting of a crazy man. So he tried to look as serious as possible, like the old man who introduced his favorite classic movies on TCM, and said:
“Look, I know you think of me as hilariously, hilariously funny. Which I am. Most of the time. But you have to believe me, owners and operators of the Sandals Orange Baby Man Theatre. In this particular instance I am being one hundred million percent deadly serious.
“Pun not intended.”
Much to his surprise, he found himself tearing up.
“I shouldn’t have to die just because my whole life I’ve been funny and I look funny and I talk funny and everything about me is funny. Because it took me a long time before I figured out how to make that work for me, and if it now killed me after I got all rich and famous, well that would suck. It would really, really suck big veiny bulbous donkey dee.”
He wiped snot from his nose and tears from his eyes. “We are fighting for our lives here. We really need your help. Please. This isn’t a joke. Don’t wait until I don’t show up on Tuesday. Do something now.”
He took a deep breath. He searched for something else worth saying and came up empty.
“Thank you in advance. This is Orange Baby Man, aka Oliver Rees, saying goodbye.”
IX
Ollie turned off the camera and scrolled through the Contacts in his phone until he found the email for the Sandals people in the U.S. Virgin Islands, slowly typing out the address with his sticky fingertips on the keyboard.
He wondered whether he should hit Send. The whole thing, when you said it out loud, just sounded so…preposterous. Stupid. Like a weird setup to a surrealistic prank.
But he hit Send anyway, and was surprised at how long it took the video to upload to the email. He guessed the file was pretty big. He did talk for a long, long time.
He hit the Cancel button a few times, but the window froze. It seemed as though every iota of the computer’s processor was being used to compress his massive, rambling cry for help. So maybe the message would go through, and the computer would recognize his cancel command after it was too late; or maybe it would cancel it before the fact, like he had intended.
&nbs
p; He pushed away from the desk in despair. He couldn’t find the right words to make the outside world believe him. His brain wasn’t wired that way. He was going to have to swallow his pride and ask someone for help—probably the black girl who wasn’t famous and had a British accent for some reason, who had not, to his memory, made fun of him (yet)—because the idea of admitting to the others that he was exactly as inadequate as they thought was something he just could not bear.
He thudded down the stairs and unlocked the false-wall door from the inside.
The door was halfway open when the sledgehammer swung out from behind the wall.
Ollie didn’t have time to comprehend what he was looking at until it slammed into the bridge of his nose and his eye sockets, and caved in his skull, and ended his vision for all time.
X
TJ realized he could switch the three monitors to different views from cameras around the estate by flicking the dial to the side of each screen. He flipped through to the clown lounge, then the pool patio.
Steve Gordon, noticeably absent from the wine cellar contingent, had managed to light the fire pit in the concrete island in the middle of the pool and was holding his own headshot to the flame, making sure it was thoroughly burned.
TJ giggled to himself and spoke into the intercom. “What do you think you’re doing, Gordo?”
The voice in the patio made Steve drop the photo into the fire pit, where it was quickly consumed.
“I see you,” TJ laughed into the mic. “You’re not getting away with it. You never get away with anything. You just don’t have it in you, Gordo.”
Steve’s eyes found the camera in the corner of the patio. “TJ,” he said, “I knew you knew who I was.”
“No shit, Sherlock,” TJ said. “I always knew who you were. And what you are. And I got eyes on you now, buddy. Eyes everywhere. I’m gonna make you pine for the days when I acted like you didn’t even exist.”
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