* * * *
REQUEST FORM No. 69
Re:It’s a Madhouse!
From: Constant Drache, Production Designer
To: April Treece, producer
It is vital that my team be supplied with the following as soon as possible:
1: A set of Sabatier kitchen knives. The sharpest in the world, and the most stylish. The full set runs to eighty-five pieces, and includes special blades for paring apricots, shelling crabs, etc.
2: Traditional tools for the shed. Nothing electric or rubber-gripped, just plain old wooden-handled hammers, screwdrivers, saws, awls and axes . I want that rough, honest-work, Waltons feel for this location.
3: Matches (books, boxes, Art Deco containers), cigarette lighters, flints, candles, magnifying glasses, tapers. Every room, almost every surface, will be fully equipped with little temptations. Also: fire-lighters, paraffin, brandy.
4: Paintings. We’ re concealing the video com-link behind a print of Edvard Munch’sThe Scream. It’s a cliché touch, perhaps, but effective. Miss Lark and Dr Wendel have come up with a list of artworks appropriate for every participant, and we can make sure their rooms are designed to reflect, intensify or provoke their particular quirks. Bennett’s room, for instance, will be furnished with erotic prints of male nudes.
5: Ill-hanging doors. The villa is being refitted from the ground up. It is appropriate, given the title and the intent of the show, that none of the doors or windows be fitted properly. Every angle will be a few degrees out of right, every oblong almost imperceptibly a parallelogram. The house is almost an eighth player in our game, and it gets billing on the title so I’m sure even the tightwads at the top of the Pyramid will be pleased to allow the expenditure.
* * * *
MEMO
From: April Treece, meister producer
To: Claire Bates, senior researcher
Re:It’s a Madhouse!
Much as I like the idea of Donger Bennett being woken up at three in the morning every night by an hour of Barry White played full blast through the speakers in his room, I think you’re missing the point. Madhouse! is not about what we do to them, but what they do to each other. Ideally, we should be able to sit back and let them get on with it. That was what all the psycho-babble was about, to harp on Dr Wendel’s favourite tune, ‘to get the right mix of personalities’. However, thanks very much for the contribution: Tiny does see potential in the music. What we’ve decided to do is, in effect, put JOSHUA BREW in charge of the entertainment. The CD library will be equipped with every recording Cliff ever made and the player will be set up so that it can only sound out full blast and in every room in the house, plus outside speakers that cover the whole island. If JOSHUA wants to listen to his favourite God Bothering chart-topper, then the rest of them have to as well. That should be an interesting frill, and comes out of the personality mix rather than being imposed on it.
* * * *
PRODUCTION SUB-MEETING, No. 109
PRESENT, for MYTHWRHN PRODUCTIONS: April Treece (Next to God), Claire Bates (Senior Researcher), Davinda Paquignet (Researcher).
PAQUIGNET: So, Ape, who’s your fave?
TREECE: Fabu fave or urgh fave?
PAQUIGNET: Fabu, first.
TREECE: Weirdly, it’s Petra the Pyro.
BATES: Me too.
PAQUIGNET: Why?
BATES: She’s the human one. If it weren’t for her kink, she’d be just like us. I hope she comes out of it.
TREECE: So do I. She should be the one who surprises the others. I’m betting on her as the star-in-the-making. She could have a scourge-of-God thing going for her.
PAQUIGNET: And as for the urgh fave? Donger Bennett?
TREECE: At first, but after a while he just gets to seem sad. Probably something about his childhood.
BATES: That’s just a strategy, Ape Donger Bennett is filth in a human skin, a dinosaur penis dragging a walnut brain around.
TREECE: Claire, you didn’t. . .
BATES: Give me a break, Ape. I’m not that desperate to rise in the industry.
PAQUIGNET: Easy for you to say. You’re out of minion class now, darling.
TREECE: I’m with Claire now. It’s Andrea I hate most. I remember girls like her from school. Always taking things away from you. BATES: I’ve switched too. The real monster is Wyke. The more they dig into his past, the worse he gets. Lark says he’s the true sociopath in the pack. Do you know he ran a bogus charity marathon for Eritrea? Organised it, rather. Couldn’t run for a bus, if you ask me. And he’s the one who picked up the initial flyer in the VD clinic. TREECE: No, that was Leigh. Wyke came from the Young Conservatives. He’s never voted in his life, because he doesn’t like to give a fixed address. He was buttering up some Andrea clone, trying to get her to invest in a bogus Internet service for dimbo debs. Bastard.
PAQUIGNET: Petra the Pyro is coming for them all, retribution with a flick-lighter.
BATES: Ape, would you watch this show?
TREECE: I don’t want to think about that. In the end, I don’t think I could resist it. You’re still an anti, though?
BATES: No. I cracked when you sent me after Donger. I hate myself for this, but I wouldn’t miss it for the world.
PAQUIGNET: It’s going to be very popular. I think we’re all going to do very well out of it.
TREECE: So, Claire, do you want to change your mind about the credit? After the Donger Affair, Tiny said you could go from Senior Researcher to Junior Producer if you want. It’s a Hell of a way to get it, but. . .
BATES: Ape, I’ll take it. Where do I sign, and in what?
* * * *
CONTINUITY ANNOUNCER SCRIPT, CLOUD 9 TELEVISION.
Seven very special people. One very unusual house. An island paradise.
What happens?
You can find out tonight, exclusively on Cloud 9 TV, the Derek Leech Channel. To subscribe to this pay-per-view premiere, call our numbers now!
The show everyone will be talking about tomorrow!
It’s people. It’s real. It’s raw. It’s struggle. It’s surprise. It’s life. It’s Something Else.
It’s a Madhouse! Coming up next...
Kim Newman lives in London. His recent book releases include the novels Life’s Lottery and An English Ghost Story,the collectionsSeven Stars, Unforgivable Stories and Where the Bodies Are Buried, and the non-fiction volumesMillennium Movies: End of the World Cinema and BFI Classics: Cat People.His award-nominated novella ‘Andy Warhol’s Dracula’ was one of a quartet collected in Peter Crowther’s anthology Foursight and also forms part ofJohnny Alucard,the fourth volume in the author’s popular ‘Anno Dracula’ series. About the preceding story, he says: ‘This is part of a loose series of stories I’ve been doing about the world of media mogul Derek Leech, which includes “The Original Dr Shade”, “Organ Donors” (some of whose characters recur here), The Quorum, the “Where the Bodies Are Buried” series and other items. The real-world precedents for the story are horribly obvious, and have become more so since I wrote it. A good rule of thumb for ordinary folk dealing with the media these days is “don’t sign the release form”.’
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* * * *
Haunts
LISA TUTTLE
John Hutchinson was a haunted man. Not bad - I’ll never believe that - and not mad, as others think, but haunted. Driven to what he did by a ghost. You can’t blame him for what he did; I honestly believe that. Of course, he didn’t believe in ghosts. But in the end belief doesn’t matter a damn. Things happen that make no human sense. Trying to make sense of them could drive you mad - or worse.
I probably knew John Hutchinson as well as anybody. He was one of my best friends in high school - Hutch, John Wayne Barlow, Greg Hainey and me. We called ourselves the Big Four, sometimes the Famous Four. In some ways, it was an unlikely alliance. Greg and Hutch were budding scientists, engineers-in-training, devoted to rationality, practical and smart, whereas John Wayne and I loved the arts, the p
sychological and the weird. Really, we should have hated each other, and maybe at a bigger school we would have. But we were all misfits growing up in a small town in Texas. To everybody else, we were geeks and losers. We didn’t have any other friends. So we tended to kind of get lumped together - bookworms, hopelessly unfashionable, no good at sports - and learned to like each other.
For three years we hung out together, wasted time, and helped each other at school, both socially and academically. It was Greg who kept me from flunking out of Algebra, it was John Wayne who turned him on to Mervyn Peake and Aubrey Beardsley and Edward Gorey, it was Hutch who got me to take an interest in science, it was me who helped him with his English essays, and tried to teach him there had to be more to life than the strictly rational.
We used to go on ghost-hunts. Mostly, I guess, they were an excuse to huddle together in a graveyard or an abandoned house at night and try to scare each other, but we were serious about it as well. Greg and Hutch were complete unbelievers, rationalists who bemoaned the fuzzy-minded attitude which allowed me and John Wayne to reckon that there just might be ‘something’ there. John Wayne and I wanted to see a ghost, for real, to experience what we’d read about so often. Greg and Hutch wanted to prove that there are no such things as ghosts, to force me and John Wayne to admit that they were right and we were wrong.
Well, we never saw a ghost. And since Hutch disallowed self-reported ‘creepy feelings’ as evidence, there were never even any close calls, although we did have a couple of really weird sessions with my mother’s old Ouija board. We ended our brief career as psychic investigators with our established belief-systems unshaken: Greg and Hutch were still rationalists, John Wayne and I still hoping.
After graduation we went our separate ways - Hutch to the West, John Wayne to the East, Greg and me to the University of Texas in Austin. We kept in touch, and got together at Christmas when we could escape from our families.
I might as well admit right here that I used to have a crush on Hutch. But I kept my feelings to myself, and I’m sure he never knew. My self-esteem was low. I was a skinny, flat-chested girl with glasses and a bad home-perm, and I felt that the survival of the ‘Big Four’ was dependent on my sexuality being kept as hidden as John Wayne’s. Like him, I pretended to be ‘one of the guys’ to survive. I had a lot of fantasies about Hutch one day waking up to my presence, really seeing me for the first time - but I couldn’t do anything to try to make it happen. If I made him see me differently, what if he didn’t like what he saw? It wasn’t just that I couldn’t face rejection. If I declared myself, the balance of power would shift. The Big Four would crumble. I couldn’t risk destroying it for all of us.
Then we went away to college. Although we stayed in touch, the old raison d’être for the alliance had gone. Life at the university was totally different from a small-town high school. I found new friends, intellectual soulmates, and also lovers. I let my hair grow long, put on a few pounds in strategic places, borrowed my roommate’s clothes, gained confidence. I felt that I was completely changed.
That first Christmas when I saw Hutch again - saw the new assurance in his skinny, slouching stance, saw the way he filled out his Gap T-shirt and chinos - I felt a fluttering in the pit of my stomach and realised that here was one thing which hadn’t changed: I still wanted him. In fact, I wanted him more than ever - and now there was no reason, I felt, why he shouldn’t want me.
So, after Mr and Mrs Hutchinson had gone to bed, and Greg and John Wayne had staggered off home to their parents’, I stayed on. Hutch got out another six-pack and we settled down on the flowered chintz sofa in the enclosed back porch for more personal conversation.
By way of checking that the path was clear, I asked if he had a girlfriend at college.
He grinned, and told me of his conquests. There were nearly a dozen already; he was averaging one a week. A different girl each weekend. He didn’t like to repeat himself, because if you asked a girl out two weeks running, she’d start making assumptions and talking about a relationship for God’s sake!
’The problem with girls,’ he told me, as if I weren’t one, ‘is they’re hard-wired for monogamy, which guys aren’t. Girls screw around, sure they do. But if they screw the same guy regularly, then after a certain point, which I reckon is about a month, it’s like some switch in their brain gets tripped, and they get flooded with these chemicals, you know, serotonin and that, and suddenly they’re in love.’ He did the fingers-for-quotemarks thing in the air with his hands as he spoke those dire words in a tone dripping with irony.
The attraction - why not be honest and call it lust - which I’d been feeling for him, died inside me.
’The problem is,’ he went on, after pausing to chug some beer, ‘a month is about the time when the average guy stops feeling so horny for her and starts to get kind of bored. His genetic imperative is to move on to fresh pastures, try to knock somebody else up. Even if, you know, you’re not intending to knock anybody up, ever - well, that old urge is still there, genetically encoded.’
’So in other words,’ I interrupted him, trying to make my own voice just as ironic as his, ‘the answer to my question is, no, you don’t have a girlfriend.’
He grinned at me. ‘I couldn’t be that cruel, Becky! Breaking their little hearts? No, but it’s hard. When I find somebody really hot, you know, and think it would be great to get together with her again - well, I just have to resist the urge, and go out to look for somebody new. I always make it perfectly clear that what I want is sex, not a relationship.’
’What about love?’ I demanded. ‘Don’t you ever think about that?’
He shook his head. ‘Love’s a con. It doesn’t exist. There’s body heat, there’s hormones, there’s the genetic imperative - and there’s social myths about romantic love. That’s all it is. It’s not real, just because people believe in it.’
I was reminded of all the conversations we’d had in high school, when Hutch and Greg would put forth the rational, materialistic argument, and John Wayne and I would try (and fail) to shoot it full of holes with alternatives from the arts, from books, from philosophy, from feeling. I suddenly wished I wasn’t alone with Hutch. John Wayne had told me - had he confessed the same to Hutch or Greg? - that he was in love with his roommate. But I didn’t want to use John Wayne’s private feelings as ammunition, and I had no great love of my own to argue from. I’d never been any good at arguing, anyway, not like the boys, who would say anything to score a point. Occasionally, when John Wayne and I were flailing too badly, one of them would switch sides to argue our position, to make it a fairer fight. I knew Hutch could wipe the floor with me, and I’d never be able to believe in love again...
‘Gosh, it’s late,’ I said looking at my watch. ‘I’d better go home.’
* * * *
The years went by. John Wayne did postgraduate work in set design, then moved to New York, where he seemed to be always on the fringes of the theatrical and/or art world, barely surviving, but happy. I worked for a free-sheet in Austin, and then got offered the chance to start up an arts and entertainment paper in Galveston. Hutch had a job with one of the big oil companies based in Houston; I think he had something to do with designing drilling equipment. Greg was the most successful of us all. The little software business he’d started up in college took off in a big way, and by the time we were in our mid-twenties, Greg was a millionaire. He settled in Austin in a big, beautiful house, married a doctor named Linda and became a leading light on the charity fundraising circuit. Despite all the demands on his time, he kept in touch with his old friends.
I’m not sure I would have stayed in touch with Hutch but for Greg. Although I’d thought of myself as being the very heart of the group when we were in high school, now he was the one who forwarded my replies to his e-mails to Hutch, and vice-versa. It was only his efforts which kept alive the ghost of the Big Four.
Even though Houston and Galveston are very close together, I never saw Hutch from o
ne year to the next except at Christmas, when our visits to our parents overlapped, or up in Austin at one of Greg’s parties. He threw great parties, especially at Hallowe’en. Even in Austin, a city where Hallowe’en is taken seriously, Greg’s Hallowe’en parties were the stuff of legend.
I was surprised, and flattered, when Greg invited me to Austin one weekend in April, to discuss plans for that year’s Hallowe’en party. He said he wanted to pick my brain; he desperately needed my help to create a unique and unusual experience.
He sent the same invitation to Hutch and John Wayne. He even paid for John Wayne’s plane ticket.
So there we were, suddenly, the Famous Four reconstituted, with the addition of Greg’s wife, Linda. We stood in their living room, grinning uneasily at each other.
’You should have brought Luke,’ Greg said. ‘I hope I made it clear Luke would be welcome?’
Dark Terrors 5 - The Gollancz Book of Horror - [Anthology] Page 38