The Dark Country

by Dennis Etchison

  "She had some of it packed away before I got home from the hospital. Did you know that?"

  They sat side by side, not looking at each other. Crickets started up outside. It grew very late.

  "To tell the truth, I haven't tinkered with my old sets for a

  long time. Since way before the accident. God knows, maybe it'll get to be like that with the research. Maybe I never will hear them, after all. Maybe the ones who say they do are on some kind of trip. Or it's a function of the equipment. I guess I have to admit that. Don't I, Jack." It wasn't a question.

  Martin felt words caught in his throat.

  "You know why I stopped listening to my old sets?" his father said. "I'll tell you. Because they don't sound as good as they used to. They just don't sound the same at all."

  The old man rose and moved slowly across the room, toward the television set and the door to the hall. When he spoke again, the voice sounded far away, getting farther, and very tired.

  "I was thinking you could help me, son. The research. No, that's right, you have to go back to your work, your own life tomorrow. I understand. It was good of you to come out and help us pack. The movers are taking care of everything. We won't have to lift a finger. It was good of you, though."

  He turned back.

  "Why do you suppose that is? The old sets, I mean. Why don't they sound like they used to?"

  I know why. It's the programs. They aren't the same as they used to be. They aren't the same programs, he thought, and they aren't as good. But he didn't say it. He didn't say anything. He couldn't.

  4 All Screamng, All Bleedng, Ail Dying

  A recap of the news came on the all-night channel; at some point the newscast became something called "Creature Features," this week presenting a double bill of Italian or German horror movies of the sleaziest kind, their screaming and bleeding and dying badly dubbed into English and interrupted every seven minutes or so for repetitions of a commercial spot for a recreational vehicle dealership.

  Unaccountably, he began to feel that he was being watched. He left the set on.

  He passed into the dream as easily as a breath is taken and released. He was aware of the street lamp outside the window, the lights in the last houses along the block finally winking off,

  the passing and re-passing of cars on the empty street, the easy silence, and the night.

  He found himself stranded at the outskirts of an unknown city. He had forgotten what he was doing there, who had left him, when or if it would ever return. From time to time he froze in his tracks, aware of the long umbilical by which he was attached to an electrical outlet, he did not know where. He worked his way through rubble, picking over piles of rags and discard, even though he could no longer remember what it was he was looking for. The sky grew ripe. A panic began to swell in his chest. There was a loosening, a sag and then he felt it slip away and he could not move. Time passed. His kidneys ached with the dull throb of fear. Time was running out. With monumental effort, with the last of the residual energy in his synapses, he strained his fingers to his pockets. He handled crystals, connectors, the myriad spare parts he always carried with him, feeling for the right pieces with which to effect a repair. Then he began to backtrack laboriously along the cord, searching for an alternate power source. He would jerrybuild a tap and go on. He had no choice. It was his life. His movements were jerky, painfully slow, a metal man in search of an oilcan. He would have to splice in an extra-long, heavy-duty extension that would not fail him again. But time ran out; time stopped, and it was too late for anything: too late for help, for divine intervention or for surcease of any kind, ever.

  Martin snapped the television off and sat staring as the image disappeared in a thick, murky cloud of color.

  5 It Will & Here Soon

  "It will be here soon," said the mother. "What will?"

  "The moving truck, what else? Won't that be nice?"

  Martin sat at the table, picking at his breakfast. With his left hand he leafed through the class reunion program. Through the window, he saw the gaunt figure of his father; he had finished his morning walk and was now fooling with some of the cartons from the garage. A few boxes were still inside, next to the kitchen door; these, Martin knew, would be the last to go. The tools of his research.

  The mother finished wrapping the last of her dishes in newspaper. She had grown cheerfully plump, he noticed, and, perhaps for the first time since his dad had married her, she was humming to herself under her breath. "He talked to you last night," she said.

  "Yes."

  He went on thumbing through the book. He came upon a page listing several people he thought he had known once. Each had been allotted a paragraph summary of the last fifteen years. He recognized the name of a boy who had been his best friend.

  "I knew it," she said. She wiped her hands and turned around in the kitchen, distracted, as if trying to spot some small betraying detail. He knew she wanted his plate. He didn't move. "Well, he surely won't need any of that nonsense to keep him occupied once we're settled into Greenworth. A man of his age ..."

  She knew his eyes were on her and stopped.

  "I'll just see to the rosebushes," she said. "The new people made me promise to leave them, but I've packed away enough cuttings."

  He didn't watch her leave.

  He returned to the book. There was the name of his best friend. "... Bill and Cathleen enjoy water sports, horseback riding, camping and life. The proud parents of Kevin and Teri Lynn, they presently reside in Santa Mara, where Bill is General Manager of the Lee Bros. Shoe Mart. ..."

  He stood up.

  He saw his father at the curb, waiting like an animal for the exterminator. Slowly Martin walked to the door. His hand touched a box.

  The deck had been re-packed in the original shipping container. He ran his fingers over the brushed aluminum and molded plastic. The tapes were arranged around the edges of the box Hke eggs in a carton.

  He wandered back to the kitchen table. He turned another page, started to skim the book, then snatched it up and pitched it into the trash can.

  He looked out again at his father, who was now ambling out of sight around the garage, head down, as if watching for cracks in the cement.

  Martin picked up a carton. He would carry it outside, wait for the moving truck and put it in himself so that nothing would be broken. He could do that much. And the box underneath. It was probably full of more tapes. He flipped it open with his shoe.

  He saw a large, misshapen white object.

  He set the box down. The object looked like plaster of Paris.. He touched it. It was a cast, bent and molded to fit an arm and part of a shoulder, the cast his father had been fitted for at the hospital, after the fall. The whitewash was smudged, dirty and—he bent closer.

  It was covered with graffiti. Probably the signatures of nurses, patients. But in among the angular, unreadable letters were the words Do you know the way to Santa Mara?

  What the hell? he wondered. Was this the message "they" had left behind? He read it again.

  It was, unmistakably, his father's handwriting.

  He sighed, shaking his head. He pictured the old man saving the cast after it was removed, hiding it, perhaps even dragging it out every evening and sitting there in front of his TV or his machinery, lost between his earphones, waiting for a sign that they had come again. Like the Cargo Cult out in the South Pacific. Waiting, with the sign he believed he had been given, that had come from the inscape of a fever dream. Waiting. For the return of the gods and their answers and their salvation. It wasn't true, of course. It never was. But, he thought, maybe, just maybe there is a key to some kind of truth in the asking, in the very questioning itself; maybe; maybe there is, after all.

  I want to be out there, he thought, to be there with him, next to him.

  But before he went outside, he knelt down and gingerly removed the deck, disturbing the arrangement of tapes as little as possible. He set it on the linoleum, unwound the cord and plugge
d it into the wall. He found the mike, the headphones and the last tape his father had recorded, the one not yet covered with check marks, the one that had yet to be monitored.

  He inserted it, connected the microphone and headset and started the cassette. He listened to the rushing of blank tape for several minutes. Once he seemed to hear a real sound, only to recognize it as the faint crying of the pups down the block, a plaintive weeping that had been picked up during his father's

  recording. Then, with perfect precision, with perhaps the greatest care he had ever taken in his life, with one eye on the window and one eye on the mechanism, he depressed the SOUND-ON-SOUND RECORD button, uncovered the microphone, lifted it to his lips and, in the weakest and most unrecognizable voice he could muster, began to whisper calcu-latedly inarticulate, mysterious and indecipherable syllables onto the track.

  DEATHTRACKS

  announcer: Hey, let's go into this apartment and help this

  housewife take a shower!

  assistant: Rad!

  announcer: Excuse me, ma'am!

  housewife: Eeek!

  announcer: It's okay, I'm the New Season Man!

  housewife: You—you came right through my TV!

  announcer: That's because there's no stopping good news! Have you heard about New Season Body Creamer? It's guaranteed better than your old-fashioned soap product, cleaner than water on the air! It's—

  assistant: Really rad!

  housewife. Why, you're so right! Look at the way New Season's foaming away my dead, unwanted dermal cells! My world has a whole new complexion! My figure has a glossy new paisley shine! The kind that men . . .

  announcer: And women!

  housewife: . . . love to touch!

  announcer: Plus the kids'11 love it, too!

  housewife: You bet they will! Wait till my husband gets up! Why, I'm going to spend the day spreading the good news all over our entire extended family! It's—

  announcer: It's a whole New Season!

  housewife: A whole new reason! It's—

  assistant: Absolutely rad-i-cal!

  The young man fingered the edges of the pages with great care, almost as if they were razor blades. Then he removed his fingertips from the clipboard and tapped them along the luminous crease in his pants, one, two, three, fout, five, four, three, two, one, stages of flexion about to become a silent drumroll of boredom. With his other hand he checked his watch, clicked his pen and smoothed the top sheet of the questionnaire, circling the paper in a cursive, impatient holding pattern.

  Across the room another man thumbed a remote-control device until the TV voices became silvery whispers, like ants crawling over aluminum foil.

  "Wait, Bob." On the other side of the darkening living room a woman stirred in her bean-bag chair, her hair shining under the black light. "It's time for The Fuzzy Family."

  The man, her husband, shifted his buttocks in his own bean-bag chair and yawned. The chair's styrofoam filling crunched like cornflakes under his weight. "Saw this one before," he said. "Besides, there's no laughtrack. They use three cameras and a live audience, remember?"

  "But it might be, you know, boosted," said the woman. "Oh, what do they call it?"

  "Technically augmented?" offered the young man.

  They both looked at him, as though they had forgotten he was in their home.

  The young man forced an unnatural, professional smile. In the black light his teeth shone too brightly.

  "Right," said the man. "Not The Fuzzy Family, though. I filtered out a track last night. It's all new. I'm sure."

  The young man was confused. He had the inescapable feeling that they were skipping (or was it simply that he was missing?) every third or fourth sentence. I'm sure. Sure of what? That this particular TV show had been taped before an all-live audience? How could he be sure? And why would anyone care enough about such a minor technical point to bother to find out? Such things weren't supposed to matter to the blissed-out masses. Certainly not to AmiDex survey families. Unless . . .

  Could he be that lucky?

  The questionnaire might not take very long, after all. This one, he thought, has got to work in the industry. He checked the computer stats at the top of the questionnaire: MORRISON, ROBERT, AGE 54, UNEMPLOYED. Used to work in the industry, then. A TV cameraman, a technician of some kind, maybe for a local station? There had been so many layoffs in the last few months, with QUBE and Teletext and all the new cable licenses wearing away at the traditional network share. And any connection, past or present, would automatically disqualify this household. Hope sprang up in his breast like an accidental porno broadcast in the middle of Sermonette.

  He flicked his pen rapidly between cramped fingers and glanced up, eager to be out of here and home to his own video cassettes. Not to mention, say, a Bob's Big Boy hamburger, heavy relish, hold the onions and add avocado, to be picked up on the way?

  "I've been sent here to ask you about last month's Viewing Log," he began. "When one doesn't come back in the mail, we do a routine follow-up. It may have been lost by the post office. I see here that your phone's been disconnected. Is that right?"

  He waited while the man used the remote selector. Onscreen, silent excerpts of this hour's programming blipped by channel by channel: reruns of Cop City, the syndicated version of The Cackle Factory, the mindless Make Me Happy, The World as We Know It, T.H.U.G.S., even a repeat of that PBS documentary on Teddy Roosevelt, A Man, a Plan, a Canal, Panama, and the umpteenth replay of Mork andMindy, this the infamous last episode that had got the series canceled, wherein Mindy is convinced she's carrying Mork's alien child and nearly OD's on a homeopathic remedy of Humphrey's Eleven Tablets and blackstrap molasses. Still he waited.

  "There really isn't much I need to know." He put on a friendly, stupid, shit-eating grin, hoping it would show in the purple light and then afraid that it would. "What you watch is your own business, naturally. AmiDex isn't interested in influencing your viewing habits. If we did, I guess that would undermine the statistical integrity of our sample, wouldn't it?"

  Morrison and his wife continued to stare into their flickering 12-inch Sony portable.

  If they're so into it, I wonder why they don't have a bigger set, one of those new picture-frame projection units from Mad Man Muntz, for example? I don't even see a Betamax. What was Morrison talking about when he said he'd taped The Fuzzy Family? The man had said that, hadn't he?

  It was becoming difficult to concentrate.

  Probably it was the black light, that and the old Day-Glow posters, the random clicking of the beaded curtains. Where did they get it all? Sitting in their living room was like being in a time machine, a playback of some Hollywood Sam Katzman or Albert Zugsmith version of the sixties; he almost expected Jack Nicholson or Luanna Anders to show up. Except that the artifacts seemed to be genuine, and in mint condition. There were things he had never seen before, not even in catalogues. His parents would know. It all must have been saved out of some weird prescience, in anticipation of the current run on psychedelic nostalgia. It would cost a fortune to find practically any original black-light posters, however primitive. The one in the corner, for instance, "Ship of Peace," mounted next to "Ass Id" and an original Crumb "Keep on Truckin'" from the Print Mint in San Francisco, had been offered on the KCET auction just last week for $450, he remembered.

  He tried again.

  "Do you have your Viewing Log handy?" Expectantly, he paused a beat. "Or did you—misplace it?"

  "It won't tell you anything," said the man.

  "We watch a lot of oldies," said the woman.

  The young man pinched his eyes shut for a moment to clear his head. "I know what you mean," he said, hoping to put them at ease. "I can't get enough of The Honeymooners, myself. That Norton." He added a conspiratorial chuckle. "Sometimes I think they get better with age. They don't make 'em like that anymore. But, you know, the local affiliates would be very interested to know that you're watching."

  "Not that old," said
the woman. "We like the ones from the sixties. And some of the new shows, too, if—"

  Morrison inclined his head toward her, so that the young man could not see, and mouthed what may have been a warning to his wife.

  Suddenly and for reasons he could not name, the young man felt that he ought to be out of here.

  He shook his wrist, pretending that his collector's item Nixon-Agnew watch was stuck.' 'What time is it getting to be?'' Incredibly, he noticed that his watch had indeed stopped. Or had he merely lost track of the time? The hands read a quarter to six. Where had they been the last time he looked? "I really should finish up and get going. You're my last interview of the day. You folks must be about ready for dinner."

  "Not so soon," said the woman. "It's almost time for The Uncle Jerry Show.''

  That's a surprise, he thought. It's only been on for one season.

  "Ah, that's a new show, isn't it?" he said, again feeling that he had missed something. "It's only been on for—"

  Abruptly the man got up from his bean-bag chair and crossed the room.

  He opened a cabinet, revealing a stack of shipment cartons from the Columbia Record Club. The young man made out the titles of a few loose albums, "greatest hits" collections from groups which, he imagined, had long since disbanded. Wedged into the cabinet, next to the records, was a state-of-the-art audio frequency equalizer with graduated slide controls covering several octaves. This was patched into a small black accessory amplifier box, the kind that is sold' for the purpose of connecting a TV set to an existing home stereo system. Morrison leaned over and punched a sequence of preset buttons, and without further warning a great hissing filled the room.

  "This way we don't miss anything," said the wife.

  The young man looked around. Two enormous Voice-of-the-Theatre speakers, so large they seemed part of the walls, had sputtered to life on either side of the narrow room. But as yet there was no sound other than the unfathomable, rolling hiss of spurious signal-to-noise output, the kind of distortion he had heard once when he set his FM receiver between stations and turned the volume up all the way.

  Once the program began, he knew, the sound would be deafening.