John Keats 02 Paper Moon

by Dennis Liggio

  Had this been another day this would have been a great opportunity. I would have had an hour in a mostly empty studio to walk around, but it wouldn't have been so late that it would be strange or show up odd in security logs. But this was the worst day for it. Since it was my first day, I didn't have a security badge yet. Adele had said they would have one for me later in the day or the next, but for today I was supposed to rely on Ben and Terry to get around, not realizing they would be out at first opportunity. Without a badge, I couldn't go through any door other than the bathrooms or the exit. If I left the building, I couldn't get back in. Hell, if I left even the Grips Lair I wouldn't be able to get back into it, that door locking behind me.

  This resulted in more than enough time to search the Grips Lair and look at the equipment there, but I quickly decided Nick's disappearance was not an equipment failure or a mislit set. It didn't seem like Ben or Terry was involved in his disappearance, so there was not much of a reason to check for clues of their misbehavior. Instead, I tried to remember everything I could about the Creature Room. If I was going to get back in there, I needed to go for the likely clue locations immediately and make the most of a minute or two in there. I realized sadly that even if I could get back in, I wasn't sure if I was going to find anything. Like Meredith had said, it definitely seemed to be a dead crime scene, too well travelled, too changed that it would hold anything two weeks later.

  Just before the end of the day Adele showed up in the Grips Lair with my badge. She looked annoyed when she learned Ben and Terry had taken off early for the day but said nothing about it. Then she left. Now I could go anywhere, though technically I was being tracked every time I used it. Probably not a big deal unless I gave someone cause to try to monitor where I was going or they saw the badge being used afterhours. Unfortunately, it was now afterhours.

  Meredith showed up a few minutes after Adele. To anyone who noticed this, it wouldn't have been suspicious; it would look like she's checking up on her friend the first day on the job. But we needed to talk over my experience.

  "I almost forgot!" she said first. "I wanted to give you this. Make you look more official, I guess."

  She handed me a little plastic figure on a tiny little string. I held it in my hand. It was a tiny plastic Hornswaggle. His features looked a little different in hard plastic, but it was otherwise the same visage.

  "It's for your phone," she said. "Or your keys I guess. We take pride in our work, so sometimes we like grabbing old merch prototypes and putting them around the office. We don't take most of it home, obviously, since that would affect our NDA, but there's stuff nobody will miss. Especially a failed prototype like that one. We almost all have defective prototypes on our phones. It's kind of our badge of pride."

  I looked back down at the tiny figure. I wasn't sure about it; something made me uneasy. Staring down at the tiny plastic figure reminded me of my strange fascination with the Hornswaggle puppet. I had stared at it too long - why? I didn't have the same strange draw to this little figure, instead this figure made me uncomfortable. I didn't want to hold it; I didn't want to look at it. But it was a gift and Meredith was staring at me; I couldn't just throw it out or refuse it. So I took out my phone and clipped it to the loop on my case. As it dangled in my hand, I wondered how things came to this, having a phone with a cute plastic figure that made it look like it was owned by a Japanese schoolgirl.

  After leaving the studio, Meredith and I found a cheap place for dinner that allowed us some privacy, not that most of the other customers would know or care what we were talking about. It was some hole-in-the-wall taco place two blocks off I35.

  "So how was your first day?" she asked.

  "Strange," I said. I told her all about my experience with the other grips and my brief conversation with Deb.

  "Yeah, that seems par for the course with Deb," she said. "If anything, she sounded almost nice. She could actually not hate you. She hates nearly everyone else. Or it feels like that. Consider yourself lucky!"

  "What a small blessing," I said sarcastically. "So what's the deal with Boulder? I've heard it mentioned a few times like it was some kind of evil monster."

  "Studio Boulder is PBS's main puppet production studio," she said. "It's been around for years and is a lot bigger than us. We're a new studio and Hornswaggle & Friends is our first project. That already put us on shaky ground. We were supposed to produce something during a gap in Boulder's schedule, which made sense financially and for the programming lineup. It was a safe bet. But now something changed and Boulder is developing something right now instead of having a gap. We all know PBS only has so much money, so there's a big fear that if their show is ready first, we'll get the axe."

  "What, and just throw away all the work done and the money spent here?" I asked.

  "Maybe." She was trying to keep a reasonable tone, but there was a edge of nervousness in it now. "Some execs don't like throwing good money after bad. And they might still keep the show, but put it on ice for a year or two so it doesn't conflict with the other show. That means we'd all be out of work, with only the possibility of new work if the show is popular... They might rehire us for new episodes, assuming they don't get a new team to do it. But if they've already killed off the Austin studio, any later work on the show would be in Boulder. We'd have to move if we want those jobs, and some of us don't want to move."

  "No wonder everyone's crazy, they're all scared for their jobs," I said.

  "Not just their jobs, but everything they put into their project. How would you like to pour a year of work into something, just to have it cancelled at the end?"

  "That is rough," I said.

  "And everyone thinks Boulder is working against us, as if they're trying to sabotage us. All because two of our employees have transferred to jobs at the Boulder studio. Everyone thinks they were poached. I don't think they were, but it's got everybody panicked. The Key Grip, Ken, who was Terry and Ben's boss, transferred over there because he has family in Boulder. And before that Lindsey took a job there, which was a huge hit for Hornswaggle."

  "Why?"

  "Lindsey was our Executive Producer," she said. "Adele keeps everything running, but she's more administration. Lindsey was the one making sure the show got made and everything worked. She also made sure everyone worked together. Since she left, that job is mine and Deb's. I'm only an Associate Producer, so it's still newer to me. Deb's a full Producer, but she's not used to EP duties, and the general sentiment is that she wasn't ready for it. So both of our inexperience and difficulty in covering the lack of Lindsey has meant, well..."

  "Everyone's at each other's throats and everyone thinks everything's on fire," I suggested.

  "Yes," she said glumly. "Neither of us carry the respect Lindsey had. And since we've not been given the go ahead to hire a new executive producer, everyone thinks Boulder is out to get us."

  "But why would they be out to get you?" I said. "It doesn't seem like this studio is a threat. If Boulder's been around for years and works on other things, it sounds like none of your success would hurt it. And don't people realize that just maybe Lindsey and Ken just saw a better opportunity with better pay or something?"

  "That may be true," she said, "but that's not the reality everyone lives with. Nobody here can just think 'it's probably nothing,', because then they immediately think, 'but what if it is?' and freak the hell out. There's too much emotion here between the project deadlines, the newer studio, the communication problems, and fear for jobs. I'm probably making it sound way worse than it is, but it's all there in the background. I love what I'm doing to make Hornswaggle happen, but it all tires me out. I have to deal with my work, my own anxiety, and then also somehow try to keep everyone else from freaking out, sometimes putting me at odds with Deb, the one person who should be helping. I was exhausted even before Nick disappeared. I need a vacation that I can't take."

  "Maybe Nick took off because of that stress," I said, bringing up the burnout theory again.<
br />
  Meredith shook her head vigorously. "No way. Just no way. Nick was not walking away from the show, no matter what. It was his show, no matter what anyone else said, no matter PBS's claim nor Deb's attempts to strong arm change she wants to see. He had almost this obsession with making sure Hornswaggle got on the air. He said he was ready to go down with the ship if he could just even get the pilot made. Oh, he bitched about the stress and the bullshit, but stress didn't make him disappear. No way he just walked because of that."

  I sighed. "Well, that's another possibility gone."

  "It doesn't sound like your investigation's going well," she said. "Not that you've had long in the studio."

  Normally I'm not so open about how badly a case is going in front of a client. But since she wasn't actually paying, she was just using a blank check from her father, I didn't think it mattered. "It's not open and shut, I'll say that. But it's the first day at the studio, and I'm still gathering information. I haven't done anything drastic like..." I was going to say break into his apartment, but decided it would be better not mention anything illegal that would haunt me later. "I'm just keeping my eyes and my options open. The Creature Room... the puppet storage, I mean, was a dead end like you said. But the studio itself? There's something weird going on there. I can't say why. I just have this feeling tickling at the back of my mind, and I sure as hell don't like that feeling. The last time I felt this..." I thought back to the Vanders Incident and shook my head. "It's just weird here."

  Meredith laughed. "Weird is our normal day to day life. We're a bunch of stressed out people that are passionate about getting a kids puppet show on television. Weird is what we are."

  "I'm thinking something different than quirky," I said. "Just call it a hunch, or... I don't know, a Spider Sense or something. Maybe it's nothing. Maybe it's unrelated to Nick. But I do need more time here. One day wasn't enough. So it looks like I'll see you at work tomorrow."

  Four

  That night I had the dream.

  I hardly ever know where dreams begin - if they ever even have beginnings and aren't an endless song that plays across the universe. All I know is that for this one, I remember a rushing feeling, as if I was travelling across a long distance, and then a sudden stop, lacking inertia or a jarring end. I found myself standing.

  The next thing I was aware of was the thing I remember the least. In the space far away but still across from me was someone - something else. I knew it wasn't human; that much was certain. I can't remember what it actually looked like, but it was dark and powerful. I knew it was there, yet I can't remember anything more about it. We stared at each other across a great distance, eyes locked. I don't know if this stare was a challenge or a knowing. Its eyes were red - that I do remember.

  I then realized that I was standing on a stylized version of a building, a skyscraper shooting up into the sky. This rooftop was probably not more than ten foot by ten foot, an impossible building anywhere other than a dream. It was a dark night, absent of moon, stars, or visible clouds. A heavy rain fell over everything, but it offered me no discomfort. That thing, that Other that I stared at, stood on another building. Though there was distance between us, I could still see its red eyes clearly.

  The city below was my city, Austin. The skyscrapers shot out of the city like prickly needles stabbing at the sky. It wasn't a true representation of Austin, it was more like a flat satellite map had been placed down and certain notable features had distorted height and depth. I saw Downtown buildings around me, a few other stylized skyscrapers shooting up into the stormy night, but only two rooftops were occupied: mine and the one with the red eyed beast.

  I broke my stare and looked around. At the edges of Austin, I saw some landmarks that I didn't recognize. While I do not intimately know every street and hill in Austin, I have a good idea of what is in Austin and what isn't. These weren't Austin locations. They seemed almost added to Austin, as if below them I might see floating islands of earth. The first I noticed I knew too well. The broken collapsed ruin of Bellingham Psychiatric Institute. As I watched it, the ruin rebuilt itself to an unbroken hospital, then a white beam of light occurred and it fell apart again. Then it rebuilt itself. I averted my glance, a cold chill within me. Next I saw The Well, that strange pyramid I had only seen in Max's memories. A stone Mayan pyramid with strange pillars around it, I also tried not to look at it.

  The other landmarks were less known to me. An old mansion on a hill that seemed to shiver into pieces and recombine as I watched. A shitty apartment building in some city, blood scraped on a wall in agony. An opulent Hollywood-style mansion with a heartbreaking absence. A casino about to fall. There were others, their details lost to me. I knew not what they meant, other than they seemed to gravitate to and become part of Austin's edges in this dream.

  Around the whole city at the edges were fiery clouds, as if the world around the city burned in an apocalypse. The smoke seemed as orange as the flames below it, stretching as far up as the dark night sky. In that fiery smoke I saw five figures, evenly spaced in a circle around the city. These figures were massive, easily as tall as the skyscraper I stood upon. I couldn't tell if the giants stood at the edges of the city, or if they were simply moving slowly, taking massive steps toward us. I had some vague insight as I looked at them... they were not only giants, they were... kings.

  Something alerted me, causing me to lose my focus. I can't remember if it was a sound or a light, or if I just somehow knew. All I know is that I looked down below me, to the streets. Out of drains and manhole covers swirled a thick black fluid. As if there had been a storm, the streets overflowed with a vast darkness, like oil flooding the city. It did not simply spill out and stop, however. The black fluid kept coming. All of Austin was covered with an inch of that darkness, but it still did not cease its emergence from below. The blackness was coming and the city was going to drown. That was horrible, but not even the worst part. What I feared was that what this fluid evil wanted most was me.

  In moments, the darkness was a few feet deep, swallowing up doorways and pedestrians. I could only vaguely hear the voices of the Austin natives as that tide welled up and swallowed them. There were shrieks and screams, but then their voices were silent. Now the only sounds heard were the rain and the surging of the black waves. The blackness kept going, a rising tide of dark water that kept getting higher and higher. Austin was submerged into a fluid darkness, only a few skyscrapers poking out of it. I stood on one of those.

  I knew it was coming for me, rising to meet me on top of the building. When I first saw it, I had a fear that it was coming for me, but now I knew without any doubt. I also knew that I had nowhere to go. There was no higher ground, no door to another place. My only escape would be to leap off the building and plunge into that darkness sooner rather than later, as if giving into fatalistic self-destruction was even a worthwhile choice.

  I looked across at that red eyed beast who I still couldn't identify. It was intrigued by the blackness, but I knew it and the blackness were not related. It did nothing as the darkness came for me.

  The black tide kept rising. I could sense almost an eagerness as it rose for me. I remembered the dark eyed Katie on the top of the pyramid behind one of the many doors of Bellingham and knew this was the same darkness. Though it had not called me by name this time, it knew me. I knew that without any doubt. It wanted me.

  As it rose to three quarters of the height of the skyscraper, the city submerged hundreds of feet below, the dark waters grew eager. The raging sea seemed to roil with anticipation. Out of the black waves emerged dark tentacles of fluid. They grasped the side of the building and flowed up, almost as if trying to pull the entire sea of black water up to me.

  There was no escape. Every moment the blackness grew closer and every moment fear rose within me. Unless I learned to fly, I could only either stand and wait or jump into the blackness - a move I knew to be suicide, obliteration.

  The blackness was getting even closer. I f
elt cold fear all through me as those black tendrils reached the roof. I did not scream but only shivered as they came at me from all sides. When they touched me it was a cold unlike anything I had ever experienced. It was the chill of a vast void, absent of anything other than black emptiness. That darkness flowed up me, circling me like thick sentient water. When the fluid reached my face, I let out the last breath of a scream before it was stifled. That black water poured into my ears, my eyes, and my mouth. I felt cold darkness reaching down my throat, trying to get as far down inside me as it could while I writhed frantically in its cold embrace.

  And then I woke up.

  It took a few moments to realize I was not on that rooftop, that there was no horrible tide, that I wasn't drowning in a frigid darkness. I couldn't forget the feeling of something so cold plunging down my esophagus, trying to grab my stomach from the inside. Something in my mind could not believe the experience wasn't real. Revulsion welled within me. I turned to the side of the bed and dry heaved - as if my body wanted to expel black fluid that wasn't there. I convulsed, vomiting nothing but stomach acid, the involuntary spasms making me feel like I turned myself inside out. Every time I thought I was done, some new fading feeling from the dream would cross my mind again, and I'd start vomiting again. I don't know how long this went on, but it felt like hours. Probably just minutes.

  When I was finally done, I pulled myself back into bed, sitting up. My fingers weakly clutched the bed sheet, as if holding it for security. I was lightheaded, weak, my abdomen sore, and I still shook with fear. There was a heaviness on me that made me sort of want to cry.

  This time I didn't get up and try to get out of bed and do something like with most of my nightmares. I just sat in bed staring at the wall until light came through the blinds. Only when I could bathe my whole apartment in daylight did I feel both well and safe enough to get out of bed.