Faces; aghast witnesses.
"Please help us. . ."
They squirm, scream. Bones snap. Brows split wide. Brains shine. Skin deforms, tears. Eyes plead.
"MAKE IT STOP!" The big one, holding head, protection from nothing.
Blood gushes; lakes.
Patrons in horrid spell.
The three struggle; tortured.
Cigarettes.
Silence.
Sickened stares.
Death scent.
The woman watches. Glares into their eyes; souls. Pitiless; accusing.
They writhe.
Her mind fills.
Awful images. Cruel sounds.
Pups clubbed. Brown eyes trusting. Skinned alive. Pleading.
White fur ripped off. Whiskered mothers protecting; crying out helplessly. Ice strewn red.
She stares at the last man; pleading, dying. The hunter's eyes close.
She slumps, breathes hard.
Silence.
She slowly opens eyes. Exhausted.
Pays. Leaves.
Outside, white buries snowmobiles; erases horror.
Hammers, bats. Knives. Blood-iced pelts. Red-soaked; ghastly.
She sits in car. Weak, pale. Half-sick.
Unfolds map.
Drives dark, icy road.
Chained tires grind. Fog lights slash blizzard; dead of winter.
A month until hunting season ends.
Six towns to go.
Echoes
Lupo was in in his huge office, sipping coffee, and going over contracts, when a sound of crying leaked into the room, from the distance.
It startled him, and he moved to his window, looking out, as the voice pleaded for someone to take away the pain.
Sixteen stories below, the tangles of mid-town traffic moved in tiny patterns, horns blasting ant noise.
But it wasn't the sound.
He closed his eyes, concentrating harder on the direction the noise was coming from, as wind clawed his building, sideswiping mirrored surface with a muted whine. But it was a different sound; not the one he heard.
His expression darkened as he began to wander his office, and the weeping continued; misery worsening. He turned left and right, trying to pinpoint its source, but heard only the faraway clacking of typewriters, as secretaries sprayed words on paper, outside his door.
He shook his head. Lit a cigarette.
Bizarre.
Hearing things.
What next? Guys in the drool wagon coming to cart him away?
He was about to head out of his office and recruit a second opinion, when the crying suddenly vanished; gone as quickly as it started. The groans, which rose and fell, underscoring the helplessness, were gone, too.
All of it simply stopped.
He let go of the doorknob, took a deep drag on his Winston, holding smoke in his lungs, waiting.
Nothing changed.
He was in his office, on a Monday morning, going over contracts, and everything was normal.
He waited two minutes. Three.
Crushed his cigarette out, smiled.
Whatever the hell it was, it was done with. Maybe he'd better start getting more sleep, not working out so hard at the club. Pass on the blow. He remembered what his doctor had said about successful executives in their forties. Had to watch it. Stressola, buddy. Nobody came with a warranty.
He walked back to his desk, but stumbled halfway as a woman's tortured shriek exploded in his head.
With each passing second, the scream multiplied, growing to hundreds, then thousands, as if some audible cancer. But now there were different voices. Children's. Men's. Old voices. Young. All calling out in helpless suffering.
It sounded as if the entire world had gone mad inside his head, and Lupo slapped his hands over his ears, feeling like throwing up.
But the dread chorus only got louder, the infinite voices continuing to bellow their anguish.
His face went white and he tried to reach for his intercom . . . his secretary could call an ambulance. Get him to a hospital. Some kind of sedative. A shot. They could cut his head open and take the noise out. . . God, he was losing his mind.
The howling voices grew still louder, calling out like tormented animals, and Lupo's fingernails dug into his palms, causing blood to drip. He tried to yell, tried to move. But he had fallen to the floor and his entire body drew into itself, shuddering.
Then, without him feeling it happen, his mouth contorted into a monstrous opening, and a ghastly sound climbed his throat.
But he couldn't hear it as it burst from his mouth. His screams were only one tiny voice, in the countless, as he lurched toward the window.
MILLIONAIRE EXECUTIVE PLUNGES FORTY FLOORS
No motive evident in strange death of arms manufacturer
Who's You In America
It is somehow comforting and mysteriously liquid how the universe scatters its evidence of design; a sweet distribution both specific and random. For example, last night, though we can agree he's been dead for several years, I ran into Peter Sellers.
It was all there. Every certifiable nuance.
Coffin-shaped glasses, a dark turtleneck plattering the frozen lithium grin, interest in the opposite sex rising off him like lewd dew. Was he an illegitimate son? Impersonator?
Was the resemblance via design, refinement?
Mere genetic roulette?
I notice these things, drawn to odd similarities of appearance, rather fixated by its peculiar selections. My mother says it's because I have one of those faces.
People often think they know me from somewhere; that we've met. It seems I trigger this suspicion because I somehow possess a reminiscent aspect of many faces; an anomaly which results in encounters troubling and touching.
But these are not like deja-vu, which is more about sensing cosmically steered repetition of event, an experience which seems to transport one to genuine spiritual consideration.
My situation is more a byproduct of Euclidian bounce; the angles and curves of my face conspiring to grant me a mask of approximation. Because of this, people stare, but can't recall where we've met. Ninety-nine percent of the time, we haven't.
Still, in their disorientation, they assume alliance, imagining some relationship they suppose you've had. They stare, determined to find meaning, much as they did at those 3-D illustrations printed on flat paper, which became popular a few years ago. The ones that seemed only a wash of pixilation, until you allowed your gaze to cloud, and it hit you like a petty miracle: the world "PEACE", or Elvis complete with gut and cape, an eagle in flight, Ghandi; you name it.
Despite lurking on flat paper, these images arose in otherworldly, blockish relief, having napped there all along, patiently awaiting your stare to go fuzzy and capitulate. A Rorschachian pop-quiz which favored the astigmatic and inherently unfocused.
It was ultimately not simply a trick, but a perceptual invitation to bypass your own limiting, visual habit; to get out of your own way; allow all you know, and can see, to become irrelevant. Arrival via departure, as the Taoists are fond of saying.
Related somewhat to this theme, is a woman, I met at an otherwise normal party, some years back. While nibbling Doritos, she told me she loved my television series.
"It's really entertaining," she beamed.
Since I was writing/producing a one-hour, network action series at the time, I thanked her and tried to pry myself from her unnerving pupils. That was when she said she loved my character. It took too many exchanges to go into here to actually clarify her meaning, but I soon discovered she thought, was actually convinced, I was the star of my own action television series, in which I played a tough, wise-cracking P.I.
I tried to straighten her out, but she wouldn't have it, and eventually became frustrated by what, I'm sure, she took to be my evasions, seeing as how I was a big TV star, and all. I'm sure she figured I was dodging my public and would decide to never again watch the show I starred in, which didn
't actually exist.
Still, for her, despite my discouragements, I was not who I actually am, but who she thought I was. She clearly preferred it that way. She'd seen a kind of apparition; someone she needed me to be. Delusion, imposed on fact, to conjure connection . . . all in service of emotion; such is the algebra of confused hope.
It is not, wise men tell us, what befalls us, good or bad, but what we make of it. All that you see. Everyone you meet. It's in your head; joy, catastrophe. Meaning. The spiritually minded term it transcendent distortion.
It's a thought.
So are you.
So am I.
But I began to tell you about Peter Sellers; about odd reactions stirred by those who resemble others. This much I know: the man I met wasn't the actual, womb-hatched Sellers. Actually, he's a comedy writer of slight stature, who plays violin; in my book, one of the more ideal comedic props; aristocratic, too small for comfort. It forces tucked chin, beady eyes; a crammed, de-humanizing spectacle.
He was playing at a small nightclub I was invited to last night; a sleepy cocoon filled with INTERVIEW Magazine leverage types; gaunt thoroughbreds variously addicted to something chemical or conceptual. A blonde singer I know was performing, and "Peter Sellers" backed her on an especially touching ballad; something about how all things are lost and nothing ever is. One of those quiet melodies that painlessly remove your heart with an offhand twist.
The man who looked like Peter Sellers was superb. Low-key, dead-on. Grinning like an Orca under peach spots. Exhuming improbable notes, deep within his fiddle, setting them loose. Everyone in the club was thrilled by his performance, chic silhouettes experiencing momentary feeling.
But in truth, it was Peter Sellers they watched; Peter Sellers they missed and wished was still alive to make them laugh and smile and remember easier days when funny faces and silly accents fixed everything. Still, the moment, both simultaneously real and exquisitely counterfeit, was profound; a truth within the hypnotic coils of a falsity.
By evocative and handy coincidence, my father, who is an author and screenwriter of some grace and repute, tells me that during the shooting of his film, Somewhere In Time, the movie's gifted and very British composer/arranger, John Barry, had a striking quirk which my father found more than slightly distracting. Apparently Mr. Barry bore an uncanny resemblance to Peter Sellers.
Another man with Peter Seller's face.
Could there be more than two? It can be reasonably observed that there should be only one. But three? Could there be many multiples of that? Fifty. A hundred? While dizzying and provocative, it is actually a separate conversation.
But before I abandon this tributary altogether, I should mention a friend who briefly resembled Cat Stevens, during Cat's days of Kabuki fame. Via this effortless, commonality of face, my friend was able to meet women, secure free hotel rooms, sign autographs; essentially co-opt Cat's privileged, furry world. Soon enough, perhaps inevitably, a young woman fell in love with him, and bragged for many years about how she'd won Cat's heart. She eventually married and settled into suburbs. But the memory of Cat keeps meowing as happy subtext in her life, helping her remain young.
And my friend?
Now he looks more like Hugh Downs. Who looks like Gore Vidal.
Such anomalies are everywhere. Eric Idle is a zany variation on the choirboy refinement of Paul McCartney. To me, Chris Isaac has always looked eerily like Bridgett Fonda and they both share facial aspects with Jodi Foster, who looks a great deal like the actor Perry King. Jagger and the late Klaus Kinski shared a rumpled, Sharpei succulence, as does Steven Tyler of Aerosmith. Streisand looks a bit like comedian David Brenner; that Bronx-Nefertiti countenance.
As I said, it is somehow comforting and mysteriously liquid how the universe scatters its evidence of design.
I couldn't go to sleep the night I returned from the club.
I kept seeing Sellers in my mind. That Pink Panther, Shot in the Dark trench coat and goofy hat; the clinical instability aplay under Clouseau's ego-cluttered inexpression. The tight-lipped, unblinking, parrot-like weirdness as he surveyed a crime scene, missing everything. His impossible confidence, despite all around him gone chaotic by his own silly hand.
That night, Peter Sellers hadn't died at all.
I'd seen him perform and he'd made eye-contact with me from the stage. The late star had graced the footlights once more and it had been haunting to hear the soaring notes of a violin that stilled a trendy club into a cathedral.
It all made me realize how much I miss the real Peter Sellers. And John Lennon. And George C. Scott. And Jim Croce. Carl Sagan. Phil Hartman. Princess Diana. Gilda Radner. Freddie Prinze. Frank Sinatra. Cousteau.
The list is endless; it gets longer every day.
I miss a lot of people. I know you do, too.
I thought about how the crowd had smiled when "Peter Sellers" finished his solo. How happy they all were to see him. How much I was. And how we miss the ones we love who are gone; some forever, perhaps permanently, barring an encounter in the afterlife.
I hope you see someone today who looks like a person you've loved, and might now be gone. Or that you can be that for someone else. Thank God there are similarities, some vague, some remindful, some breathtaking xeroxes.
Whether we realize it or not, we all look like someone else. Our faces bear the stirrings, perhaps infamies of what came before, of people we've never met and never will; the distant genetic expressions of people who lived long ago in places far away. Or may be living, at this moment, on the other side of the world. Or the country. Or our own town.
We are each of us ghosts; our faces and smiles séances, our eyes spirits at play.
It all goes on; nothing stops, nothing truly dies.
And to someone, you resemble the person they've been missing with all their heart.
Peter Straub
Afterword
I have been a friend of the inimitable RC Matheson's ever since our first meeting years and years ago at a snow-bound World Horror Convention in Stamford, Connecticut, when Richard stationed himself about four inches in front of me and proceeded, in the nicest possible fashion, to fire off question after question as to my working methods, my variations in approach from book to book, my general sense of what I had managed to do and how well I had done it, what I felt about other people's reception of my work, if my dealings with editors had been helpful and if so why, and a great deal else besides.
Ordinarily, the experience of being interrogated by people I do not know during social occasions brings on a grim, depressive chill that produces increasingly brief answers of ever multiplying grumpiness, especially if my interrogator has violated my comfort zone, which happens to extend three or four feet from the tip of my nose. Faced with RC, I felt nothing like that. He did not even seem to be invasively close - clearly, the guy just liked getting eyeball-to-eyeball, and his instinctive confidence was such that you had no problem exchanging your sense of comfort-level boundaries for his own. The flow of questions and my responses to them seemed far more like true conversation, which is to say, like a variety of spontaneous mutual entertainment, than the half-desperate, needy, essentially impersonal encounters it resembled.
Richard rendered the entire desperation/neediness construct absurdly irrelevant. It didn't at all come into play. He was involved, he was interested. And his questions were of a sort I can only call accurate. Very few people know enough to frame questions that invite actual thought, actual investigation, while suggesting that whatever one says in response is going to be understood. By the time we finished talking, I felt as though Richard Christian Matheson and I had known each other more or less since childhood.
As the above should have made clear, RC possesses to an almost overwhelming degree the quality commonly though imprecisely known as charm. (Strictly speaking, genuine charm involves an element of coercion completely foreign to our boy.) In his case, the exertion of delightful personal appeal expressed in a comprehensive atte
ntiveness to one's particular state of mind and an unflaggingly graceful consideration, which is after all remarkable in itself, in no way reduces one's awareness of his wonderfully savvy self-sufficiency, his tough-mindedness, and his unique talents. Part of Richard's charm lies in his knowing, far more than most people, exactly what he is doing.
When he began to write fiction, RC must have been excruciatingly aware of his context. His father, the legendary Richard Matheson, and his father's friends and colleagues in Los Angeles, Ray Bradbury, Robert Bloch, William F. Nolan, George Clayton Johnson and Charles Beaumont, had reinvented the contemporary horror story in a particularly idiomatic, efficient way deeply informed by their experience in film and television studios. Weird Tales had gone to Hollywood and evolved into Southern California Gothic, a new phenomenon distinguished by clarity of line, haiku-like concentration of effect, and trap-door conclusions. For these writers, dramatic irony shaped the very idea of narrative. Digression, expansion, pauses for reflection, irresolution, ambiguity, had no place in their aesthetic, which foregrounded control, economy, unobtrusiveness of style, deception, precise placement and timing. An atmosphere of suspended, pervasive wit surrounds this aesthetic, and for all its apparent impersonality, a kind of playfulness is always at work in it. The essential model requires shaping the fancies of a lively, inventive imagination through an absolute discipline as to means. I can think of few methodologies more demanding.
Richard Christian responded to this artistic context with utter daring - brilliantly, he upped the ante. If clarity, efficiency, control, economy and wit were the touchstones, he would be the epitome of transparent, witty, economical control. His stories represent the ultimate refinement, the perfection of a particularly honorable approach to story-telling and fiction in general. No one else could have thought to write this way; no one else would have imagined it possible.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Dystopia Page 30