The Collective

by The Collective [lit]

  at the tiger.

  And Green Terror stopped.

  He swung his huge head back to Mr. Legere, almost turned, and

  then slowly turned back to Mr. Indrasil again. There was a

  terrifyingly palpable sensation of directed force in the air, a mesh

  of conflicting wills centered around the tiger. And the wills were

  evenly matched.

  I think, in the end, it was Green Terror's own will -- his hate of Mr.

  Indrasil -- that tipped the scales.

  The cat began to advance, his eyes hellish, flaring beacons. And.

  something strange began to happen to Mr. Indrasil. He seemed to

  be folding in on himself, shriveling, accordioning. The silk-shirt

  lost shape, the dark, whipping hair became a hideous toadstool

  around his collar.

  Mr. Legere called something across to him, and, simultaneously,

  Green Terror leaped.

  I never saw the outcome. The next moment I was slammed flat on

  my back, and the breath seemed to be sucked from my body. I

  caught one crazily tilted glimpse of a huge, towering cyclone

  funnel, and then the darkness descended.

  When I awoke, I was in my cot just aft of the grainery bins in the

  all-purpose storage trailer we carried. My body felt as if it had

  been beaten with padded Indian clubs.

  Chips Baily appeared, his face lined and pale. He saw my eyes

  were open and grinned relievedly. "Didn't know as you were ever

  gonna wake up. How you feel?"

  "Dislocated," I said. "What happened? How'd I get here?"

  "We found you piled up against Mr. Indrasil's trailer. The tornado

  almost carried you away for a souvenir, m'boy."

  At the mention of Mr. Indrasil, all the ghastly memories came

  flooding back. "Where is Mr. Indrasil? And Mr. Legere?"

  His eyes went murky, and he started to make some kind of an

  evasive answer.

  "Straight talk," I said, struggling up on one elbow. "I have to know,

  Chips. I have to."

  Something in my face must have decided him. "Okay. But this isn't

  exactly what we told the cops -- in fact we hardly told the cops any

  of it. No sense havin' people think we're crazy. Anyhow, Indrasil's

  gone. I didn't even know that Legere guy was around."

  "And Green Tiger?"

  Chips' eyes were unreadable again. "He and the other tiger fought

  to death."

  "Other tiger? There's no other ---"

  "Yeah, but they found two of 'em, lying in each other's blood. Hell

  of a mess. Ripped each other's throats out."

  "What -- where --"

  "Who knows? We just told the cops we had two tigers. Simpler

  that way." And before I could say another word, he was gone.

  And that's the end of my story -- except for two little items. The

  words Mr. Legere shouted just before the tornado hit: "When a

  man and an animal live in the same shell, Indrasil, the instincts

  determine the mold!"

  The other thing is what keeps me awake nights. Chips told me

  later, offering it only for what it might be worth. What he told me

  was that the strange tiger had a long scar on the back of its neck.

  THE

  REPLOIDS

  Stephen King

  Appeared in

  Night Visions #5, 1988

  No one knew exactly how long it had been going on. Not long.

  Two days, two weeks; it couldn't have been much longer than that,

  Cheyney reasoned. Not that it mattered. It was just that people got

  to watch a little more of the show with the added thrill of knowing

  the show was real. When the United States - the whole world -

  found out about the Reploids, it was pretty spectacular. just as

  well, maybe. These days, unless it's spectacular, a thing can go on

  damned near forever. It is neither believed nor disbelieved. It is

  simply part of the weird Godhead mantra that made up the

  accelerating flow of events and experience as the century neared its

  end. It's harder to get peoples' attention. It takes machine-guns in a

  crowded airport or a live grenade rolled up the aisle of a bus load

  of nuns stopped at a roadblock in some Central American country

  overgrown with guns and greenery. The Reploids became national

  - and international - news on the morning of November 30, 1989,

  after what happened during the first two chaotic minutes of the

  Tonight Show taping in Beautiful Downtown Burbank, California,

  the night before.

  The floor manager watched intently as the red sweep secondhand

  moved upward toward the twelve. The studio audience

  clockwatched as intently as the floor manager. When the red sweep

  second-hand crossed the twelve, it would be five o'clock and

  taping of the umpty-umptieth Tonight Show would commence.

  As the red second-hand passed the eight, the audience stirred and

  muttered with its own peculiar sort of stage fright. After all, they

  represented America, didn't they? Yes!

  "Let's have it quiet, people, please," the floor manager said

  pleasantly, and the audience quieted like obedient children. Doc

  Severinsen's drummer ran off a fast little riff on his snare and then

  held his sticks easily between thumbs and fingers, wrists loose,

  watching the floor manager instead of the clock, as the show -

  people always did. For crew and performers, the floor manager

  was the clock. When the second-hand passed the ten, the floor

  manager counted down aloud to four, and then held up three

  fingers, two fingers, one finger ... and then a clenched fist from

  which one finger pointed dramatically at the audience. An

  APPLAUSE sign lit up, but the studio audience was primed to

  whoop it up; it would have made no difference if it had been

  written in Sanskrit.

  So things started off just as they were supposed to start off: dead

  on time. This was not so surprising; there were crewmembers on

  the Tonight Show who, had they been LAPD officers, could have

  retired with full benefits. The Doc Severinsen band, one of the best

  showbands in the world, launched into the familiar theme: Ta-da-

  da-Da-da ... and the large, rolling voice of Ed

  McMahon cried enthusiastically: "From Los Angeles,

  entertainment capital of the world, it's The Tonight Show, live,

  with Johnny Carson! Tonight, Johnny's guests are actress Cybill

  Shepherd of Moonlighting!" Excited applause from the audience.

  "Magician Doug Henning!" Even louder applause from the

  audience. "Pee Wee Herman!" A fresh wave of applause, this time

  including hoots of joy from Pee Wee's rooting section. "From

  Germany, the Flying Schnauzers, the world's only canine

  acrobats!" Increased applause, with a mixture of laughter from the

  audience. "Not to mention Doc Severinsen, the world's only Flying

  Bandleader, and his canine band!"

  The band members not playing horns obediently barked. The

  audience laughed harder, applauded harder.

  In the control room of Studio C, no one was laughing.

  A man in a loud sport-coat with a shock of curly black hair was

  standing in the wings, idly snapping his fingers and looking across

  the stage at Ed, but that was all.

  The director signaled for Number Tw
o Cam's medium shot on Ed

  for the umpty-umptieth time, and there was Ed on the ON

  SCREEN monitors. He barely heard someone mutter, "Where the

  hell is he?" before Ed's rolling tones announced, also for the

  umpty-umptieth time: "And now heeeere's JOHNNY!"

  Wild applause from the audience.

  "Camera Three," the director snapped.

  "But there's only that-"

  "Camera Three, goddammit!"

  Camera Three came up on the ON SCREEN monitor, showing

  every TV director's private nightmare, a dismally empty stage ...

  and then someone, some stranger, was striding confidently into

  that empty space, just as if he had every right in the world to be

  there, filling it with unquestionable presence, charm, and authority.

  But, whoever he was, he was most definitely not Johnny Carson.

  Nor was it any of the other familiar faces TV and studio audiences

  had grown used to during Johnny's absences. This man was taller

  than Johnny, and instead of the familiar silver hair, there was a

  luxuriant cap of almost Pan-like black curls. The stranger's hair

  was so black that in places it seemed to glow almost blue, like

  Superman's hair in the comic-books. The sport-coat he wore was

  not quite loud enough to put him in the Pleesda-Meetcha-Is-This-

  The-Missus? car salesman category, but Carson would not have

  touched it with a twelve-foot pole.

  The audience applause continued, but it first seemed to grow

  slightly bewildered, and then clearly began to thin.

  "What the fuck's going on?" someone in the control room asked.

  The director simply watched, mesmerized.

  Instead of the familiar swing of the invisible golf-club, punctuated

  by a drum-riff and high-spirited hoots of approval from the studio

  audience, this dark-haired, broad-shouldered, loud-jacketed,

  unknown gentleman began to move his hands up and down, eyes

  flicking rhythmically from his moving palms to a spot just above

  his head - he was miming a juggler with a lot of fragile items in the

  air, and doing it with the easy grace of the long-time showman. It

  was only something in his face, something as subtle as a shadow,

  that told you the objects were eggs or something, and would break

  if dropped. It was, in fact, very like the way Johnny's eyes

  followed the invisible ball down the invisible fairway, registering

  one that had been righteously stroked ... unless, of course, he chose

  to vary the act, which he could and did do from time to time, and

  without even breathing hard.

  He made a business of dropping the last egg, or whatever the

  fragile object was, and his eyes followed it to the floor with

  exaggerated dismay. Then, for a moment, he froze. Then he

  glanced toward Cam Three Left ... toward Doc and the orchestra,

  in other words.

  After repeated viewings of the videotape, Dave Cheyney came to

  what seemed to him to be an irrefutable conclusion, although many

  of his colleagues - including his partner - questioned it.

  "He was waiting for a sting," Cheyney said. "Look, you can see it

  on his face. It's as old as burlesque."

  His partner, Pete Jacoby, said, "I thought burlesque was where the

  girl with the heroin habit took off her clothes while the guy with

  the heroin habit played the trumpet."

  Cheyney gestured at him impatiently. "Think of the lady that used

  to play the piano in the silent movies, then. Or the one that used to

  do schmaltz on the organ during the radio soaps."

  Jacoby looked at him, wide-eyed. 'Mid they have those things

  when you were a kid, daddy?" he asked in a falsetto voice.

  "Will you for once be serious?" Cheyney asked him. "Because this

  is a serious thing we got here, I think."

  "What we got here is very simple. We got a nut."

  "No," Cheyney said, and hit rewind on the VCR again with one

  hand while he lit a fresh cigarette with the other. "What we got is a

  seasoned performer who's mad as hell because the guy on the snare

  dropped his cue." He paused thoughtfully and added: "Christ,

  Johnny does it all the time. And if the guy who was supposed to

  lay in the sting dropped his cue, I think he'd look the same way.

  By then it didn't matter. The stranger who wasn't Johnny Carson

  had time to recover, to look at a flabbergasted Ed McMahon and

  say, "The moon must be full tonight, Ed - do you think - " And that

  was when the NBC security guards came out and grabbed him.

  "Hey! What the fuck do you think you're - "

  But by then they had dragged him away.

  In the control room of Studio C, there was total silence. The

  audience monitors picked up the same silence. Camera Four was

  swung toward the audience, and showed a picture of one hundred

  and fifty stunned, silent faces. Camera Two, the one medium-close

  on Ed McMahon, showed a man who looked almost cosmically

  befuddled.

  The director took a package of Winstons from his breast pocket,

  took one out, put it in his mouth, took it out again and reversed it

  so the filter was facing away from him, and abruptly bit the

  cigarette in two. He threw the filtered half in one direction and spat

  the unfiltered half in another.

  "Get up a show from the library with Rickles," he said. "No Joan

  Rivers. And if I see Totie Fields, someone's going to get fired."

  Then he strode away, head down. He shoved a chair with such

  violence on his way out of the control room that it struck the wall,

  rebounded, nearly fractured the skull of a white-faced intern from

  USC, and fell on its side.

  One of the PA's told the intern in a low voice, "Don't worry; that's

  just Fred's way of committing honorable seppuku."

  The man who was not Johnny Carson was taken, bellowing loudly

  not about his lawyer but his team of lawyers, to the Burbank Police

  Station. In Burbank, as in Beverly Hills and Hollywood Heights,

  there is a wing of the police station which is known simply as

  "special security functions." This may cover many aspects of the

  sometimes crazed world of Tinsel-Town law enforcement. The

  cops don't like it, the cops don't respect it ... but they ride with it.

  You don't shit where you eat. Rule One.

  "Special security functions" might be the place to which a coke-

  snorting movie-star whose last picture grossed seventy million

  dollars might be conveyed; the place to which the battered wife of

  an extremely powerful film producer might be taken; it was the

  place to which the man with the dark crop of curls was taken.

  The man who showed up in Johnny Carson's place on the stage of

  Studio C on the afternoon of November 29th identified himself as

  Ed Paladin, speaking the name with the air of one who expects

  everyone who hears it to fall on his or her knees and, perhaps,

  genuflect. His California driver's license, Blue Cross - Blue Shield

  card, Amex and Diners' Club cards, also identified him as Edward

  Paladin.

  His trip from Studio C ended, at least temporarily, in a room in the

  Burbank PD's "special security" area. The room was panelled with

  tough plastic that almost did
look like mahogany and furnished

  with a low, round couch and tasteful chairs. There was a cigarette

  box on the glass-topped coffee table filled with Dunhills, and the

  magazines included Fortune and Variety and Vogue and Billboard

  and GQ. The wall-to-wall carpet wasn't really ankle-deep but

  looked it, and there was a CableView guide on top of the large-

  screen TV. There was a bar (now locked), and a very nice neo-

  Jackson Pollock painting on one of the walls. The walls, however,

  were of drilled cork, and the mirror above the bar was a little bit

  too large and a little bit too shiny to be anything but a piece of one-

  way glass.

  The man who called himself Ed Paladin stuck his hands in his just-

  too-loud sport-coat pockets, looked around disgustedly, and said:

  "An interrogation room by any other name is still an interrogation

  room."

  Detective 1st Grade Richard Cheyney looked at him calmly for a

  moment. When he spoke, it was in the soft and polite voice that

  had earned him the only halfkidding nickname "Detective to the

  Stars." Part of the reason he spoke this way was because he

  genuinely liked and respected show people. Part of the reason was

  because he didn't trust them. Half the time they were lying they

  didn't know it.

  "Could you tell us, please, Mr Paladin, how you got on the set of

  The Tonight Show, and where Johnny Carson is?"

  "Who's Johnny Carson?"

  Pete Jacoby - who wanted to be Henny Youngman when he grew

  up, Cheyney often thought - gave Cheyney a momentary dry look

  every bit as good as a Jack Benny deadpan. Then he looked back at

  Edward Paladin and said, "Johnny Carson's the guy who used to be

  Mr Ed. You know, the talking horse? I mean, a lot of people know

  about Mr Ed, the famous talking horse, but an awful lot of people

  don't know that he went to Geneva to have a species-change

  operation and when he came back he was-"

  Cheyney often allowed Jacoby his routines (there was really no

  other word for them, and Cheyney remembered one occasion when

  Jacoby had gotten a man charged with beating his wife and infant

  son to death laughing so hard that tears of mirth rather than

  remorse were rolling down his cheeks as he signed the confession

  that was going to put the bastard in jail for the rest of his life), but

  he wasn't going to tonight. He didn't have to see the flame under