The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 24 (Mammoth Books)

by Stephen Jones

  “You know what’s great about you? You never complained and you never moaned in this whole process.”

  It was the Host speaking next. Hand on my shoulder. Sharp charcoal suit, sharp white grin: “Great comments from the Doctors. What do you think of that? Say something to the audience.”

  With Alfry Linquist’s voice, I said: “Awesome.”

  Soon the clip was on YouTube. Highest number of hits ever.

  I got out of the hospital bed and they handed me a microphone. I sang the single that was released that Christmas and went straight to number one: “Idolised”. One of the biggest downloads ever. Global.

  As soon as I could record it, my first album came out. Producer worked with Frank Zappa (not that I was real sure who Frank Zappa was). Born Winner, it was called. The Doctors decided that. Guess they decided way before I recorded it. Like they decided everything, Doctor Bob and his team, the Judges. Went triple platinum. Grammys. Mercury. You name it. Rolling Stone interview. Jets to London. Private jets courtesy of Doctor Bob. Tokyo. Sydney. Wherever. Madness. But good madness.

  (The other madness, that came later.)

  I wish I could’ve been me out there watching me become famous. Because from where I sat there wasn’t time to see it at all. Grab a burger and Pepsi, then on to the next gig. I was loving it. So people told me. So I believed.

  Big appearance was I guested on the next Emmy awards, telecast across the nation, giving out a Best Actress (Comedy or Musical) to Natalie Portman, my Justin Bieber fringe covering my scars. The dancers gyrated round me, Voodoolike. I spoke and the tuxedos listened. I sung alongside Miley Cyrus and got a standing ovation of the most sparkling people in entertainment. Face jobs and chin tucks and jewellery that could pay off the debt of a small African country.

  It was weird to have a voice. Somebody else’s voice, literally that voice box in your throat not being the one you were born with. Strange to have a talent, a gift, a kind of wish come true that you carry round in your body and it’s your fortune now. Alfry was my voice but I guess I carried him. Without my brain and my thoughts he couldn’t have gotten to the top. Without Anthony and Vince’s big old arms and Allan Jake Wells’s legs and Rico’s perfect abs, without any one of those things neither one of us could’ve made it. But, this way, we all did.

  The Judges gave us a name and it was complete and to say we were happy was an understatement. I just knew Anthony wanted to get those biceps pumped right up fit to explode and I could feel Rico’s insides just churning with a mixture of nerves and excitement, and I said, Okay buddies, this is here, this is now, this is us and this is me. No going back. And I could feel every cell of them saying it with me.

  And every night after performing I counted the scars on my wrists and shoulders and round my thighs and ankles and neck and said, “Doctor Bob, thank you so much for this opportunity. I won’t let you down.”

  But all dreams got to end, right?

  Bigtime.

  I appeared on talk shows. Pretty soon got a talk show myself. Letterman eat your heart out. Guests like Lady Gaga. George Michael. (Outrageous.) Robert Downey, Jr. (Phenomenal. Wore a zipper on his head to get a laugh. Gripped my hand like a kindred spirit.) Title sequence, black hand, white hand, fingers adjusting the tie, cheesy grin on Finbar’s Jagger lips. Salvator’s eyes swing to camera. The cowboy-gun finger going bang.

  All this while Doctor Bob and his people looked after me, told me what to sign, what to do, where to show up, which camera to smile at, which covers to appear on, which stories to take to court. Which journalists to spill my heart to. Rico’s heart. And I did. I did what I was told. Doctor Bob was like a father to me. No question. He created me. How could I say no?

  There were girlfriends. Sure there were girlfriends. How could there not be? I was unique. Everybody wanted to meet me, see me, touch me, and some wanted more of me. Sometimes I’d oblige. Sometimes obliging wasn’t enough.

  That money-grabbing crackpot named Justine, housemaid in some Best Western I’d never stayed at, hit me with a rape allegation, but truth is I never remembered ever meeting her. It was pretty clear she was a fantasist. We buried her.

  Like I say there was a downside, but a hell of an upside. Most times I thought it was the best thing I ever did, kissing my old body goodbye. Didn’t even shed a tear when the rest of me in that coffin went into the incinerator, empty in the head. Just felt Doctor Bob’s hand squeezing Vince Pybus’s shoulder and thought about the camera hovering in my face and the dailies next morning.

  But the peasants were always chasing me. The peanutheads. The flash of their Nikons like flaming torches they held aloft, blinding me, big time. I had nowhere to hide and sometimes I felt chained to my office up on the 99th Floor on the Avenue of the Stars. Felt like a $1,000-a-night-dungeon in a castle, the plasma screen my window to the outside world. Doctors checking me, adjusting my medication so that I could go out on the new circuit of night clubs, appear on the new primetime primary-coloured couch answering the same boring questions I’d answered a hundred thousand times before.

  Sometimes I growled. Sometimes I grunted. Sometimes I plucked a sliver of flesh from my knee and said, “I’ll deal with you later.” And the audience howled like I was Leno, but they didn’t know how bad the pain was in my skull. It was hot under the lights and sometimes it felt like it was baking me.

  “We can fix that,” the Doctors said, Doctor Jude with her legs and Doctor Bob with his nut-brown eyes. And they did that. They kept fixing it. They kept fixing me, right through my second album and third, right through to the Best of and double-download Christmas duets.

  The problem was rejection. Balancing the drug cocktail – a whole Santa Claus list of them – so that my constituent body parts didn’t rebel against each other. That was the problem. The new pharmaceuticals did it, thanks to up-to-the-minute research, thanks to a scientific breakthrough. All sorts of medical miracles were now possible. The show couldn’t have gotten the green light without them. As Doctor Bob said, “It was all about taking rejection. All about coming back fighting.”

  I told my story in a book. Ghostwriter did a good job. I liked it when I read it. (The part I read, anyway.) Especially the part about Mom. Though Dad wasn’t that happy. Tried to stop publication, till the check changed his mind. I did say some parts weren’t true, but Doctor Bob said it didn’t matter as long as it sold, and it did sell, by the millions. My face grinned out from every bookstore in the country. Scars almost healed on my forehead. Just a line like I wore a hat and the rim cut in, with little pin-pricks each side. Signing with Murphy’s hand till my fingers went numb. Offering the veins of my arm for Doctor Jude to shoot me up, keep me going, stop me falling apart. I wondered if anybody had told her she was beautiful, and I guess they had. “You nailed it. You’ve got your mojo back. I’m so proud of you – not just as a performer but as an human being,” she said as she took out the syringe.

  On to the next job. Getting emails from loons saying it was all against nature and my soul was doomed to Hell. Well, doomed to Hell felt pretty damn good back then, all in all. Except for the headaches.

  But pretty soon it wasn’t just the headaches I had to worry about.

  One day they held a meeting at Doctor Bob’s offices and told me that, “in spite of the medical advancements”, the new penis hadn’t taken. Necrosis was the word they used. Bad match. I asked them if they were sure it wasn’t because of over-use. They said no, this was a biomedical matter. “We have to cut Mick Donner off, replace him with someone new.” So I had to go under again and this time had a johnson from a guy in psychiatric care named Cody Bertwhistle. Denver guy, and a fan. Wrote me a letter. Longhand. Told me it was an honour.

  I don’t know why, and there’s no direct correlation, but from the time Mike Donner’s got replaced by Cosmic Cody’s, things went on the slide.

  Maybe it was chemicals. Maybe the chemicals were different. They say we’re nothing but robots made up of chemicals, we human beings, don’t the
y? Well if a tiny tweak here or a tad there can send us crawlin’-the-wall crazy, what does it mean if you get several gallons of the stuff pumped into you? Where are you then?

  These thoughts, I’ll be honest, they just preyed on me. Ate me up, more and more. Maybe that’s the cause of what happened later. Maybe I’m just looking for something to blame. I don’t know. Probably I am.

  Maybe Doctor Bob knows. Doctor Bob knows everything.

  After all, before me made us, he made himself. Out of nothing, into the most powerful man in television. A god who stepped down from Mount Olympus after the opening credits with the light show behind him like Close Encounters on acid.

  I remember standing under the beating sun with four other guys next to a sparkling swimming pool lined with palm trees outside this huge mansion in Malibu. Servants, girls, models, gave us giant fruit drinks with straws and thin Egyptian-looking dogs ran around the lawns biting at the water jerking from the sprinklers. And Kenny started clapping before I’d seen Doctor Bob in his open-neck Hawaiian shirt walking across the grass towards us, then we all clapped and whooped like a bunch of apes. Poor Devon hyperventilated and had to be given oxygen. I’d felt strangely calm. The whole thing was strangely unreal, like it wasn’t really happening, or it was happening to somebody other than me. I couldn’t believe that person who was on TV, on that small monitor I was looking at as it replayed, was me. Maybe I was already becoming somebody else, even then. We toasted with champagne and he wished us all luck, and I don’t know if it was the champagne or the warmth of the Los Angeles evening, or the smell of gasoline and wealth and the sound of insects and police sirens in the air, but I felt excitement and happiness more than I ever had in my life before, and I didn’t want it to end.

  We were buddies, that was a fact. Through the entire competition he was less of a mentor, more of a friend, Doctor Bob. Then, once I’d won, well, our friendship went stratospheric. And I was grateful for it. Then.

  We played golf together. He paid for me to train for my pilot’s licence. Took me up into the clouds. Every week we had lunch at The Ivy. Hello Troy. Hello Alex. Hello Sting. Hello Elton. Hello Harrison. Hello Amy. Still at Sony? He wanted me on display. I was his shop window. I knew that. Sure I knew that. But I always thought he was watching me. If I took too long to chew my food. If I scratched the side of my neck. It started to bug me. If I squinted across the room, or stammered over my words I felt he was mentally ringing it up. Cutting his chicken breast like a surgeon, he’d say, “You are okay?” I’d say, “Of course I’m okay. I’m great. I’m perfect.” And he’d stare at me really hard, saying, “I know you’re perfect, but are you okay?” One day I said, “You know what? Fuck your Chardonnay.”

  That was the day I took that fateful walk in the Griffith Park, up by the observatory. Just wanted to be on my own – not that I could be on my own any more, there being at least half-a-dozen of us in this body, now, that I knew of. Didn’t want to even contemplate if they’d stuck in a few more organs I didn’t know about. The semi-healed scars itched under my Rolex so I took it off and dropped it in a garbage can beside the path. Walked on, hands deep in the pants pockets of my Armani suit.

  You know what I’m gonna tell you, but I swear to God I didn’t do anything wrong. I wouldn’t do that to my mom, I just wouldn’t. She raised me with certain values and I still got those values. Other people can believe what they want to believe.

  She was making daisy chains.

  This little bit of a thing, I’m talking about. Three, maybe four. Just sitting there beside the lake. I watched her plucking them from the grass and casting them into the water, just getting so much enjoyment from the simple joy of it, so I knelt down with her and did it too. Just wanting a tiny bit of that joy she had. And we spoke a little bit. She was nice. She said she wanted to put her toes in the water but she was afraid because her mom said not to go near the water, she might drown. I said, “You won’t drown. I’ll look after you.” She said, “Will you?” I said, “Sure.” So that’s how come there’s this photograph of me lifting her over the rail. I was dangling her down so she could dip her feet in the water, that’s all. They made it look crazy, like I was hurling her, but I wasn’t. The front pages all screamed – People, Us, National Enquirer – he’s gone too far, he’s out of control, he’s lost it. Wacko. I hadn’t lost it. She wasn’t in danger. We were just goofing around. And who took the shot anyway? Her mom? Her dad? What kind of abuse is that, anyway?

  Parents! Jesus! After a fast buck, plastering their kid all over the tabloids? They’re the freaks, not me. And that poor girl. That’s what made her start crying. Her mom and dad, shouting and calling her away from me. “Honey! Honey! Get away from the man! Honey!” And I’m like . . .

  Doctor Bob went ballistic. Brought me in to the Inner Sanctum, Beverly Hills, and ripped me a new one. (Which he could have done literally, given his medical expertise.) I just growled. I snarled. He looked frightened. I said, “See those chains over there?” pointing to his wall of platinum discs, “I’m not in your chains anymore.” He shouted as I left, “You’re nothing without me!” I turned to him and said, “You know what? I’m everything. You’re the one who’s nothing. Because if you aren’t, why do you need me?” As the elevator doors closed I heard him say, “Fucking genius. Fucking moron.”

  I could do it without him. I knew I could.

  But after Griffith Park, it wasn’t easy to get representation. I still got by. Put my name to a series of novels. Thrillers. Sorta semi-sci-fi, I believe. Not read them. Celebrity endorsements. Sports and nutritional products. Failing brands. Except I was a failing brand too, they soon realised.

  Then this lowlife cable network pitched me a reality series, à la The Osbournes, where a camera crew follow me around day in, day out. Twenty-four seven. Pitched up in my Mulholland Drive home for three months. But the paycheck was good. Number one, I still needed my medication which was legal but expensive, and two, I reckoned I could re-launch of my music career off the back of the publicity. So it was a done deal. Found a lawyer on Melrose that James Franco used. The producers sat on my couch fidgeting like junkies, these cheese straws in shades, saying they wanted to call it American Monster. I was like, “Whatever.” The lights in my own home were too bright for me now, and I had to wear shades too. I’d have these ideas on a weekly basis, like my eyes were out of balance and I’d think a top-up from a hypo would get me back on the highway. It did. Periodically.

  More and more I needed those boosts from the needle to keep me level, or make me think I was keeping level. Meanwhile the ideas wouldn’t go away. I didn’t know if the bright lights were inside or outside my skull. The bright lights are what everybody aspires to, right? The bright lights of Hollywood or Broadway, but when you can’t get them out of your head even when you’re sleeping they’re a nightmare. And rats go crazy, don’t they, if you deprive them of sleep? Except the drugs made you feel you didn’t need sleep.

  One of these ideas was there were germs around me and the germs I might catch would affect my immune system and inhibit the anti-rejection drugs. I was really convinced of this. I took to wearing a paper mask, just like the one Doctor Bob wore when he took my brain out and put it in another person’s skull. Wore it to the mall. To the supermarket. To the ball game.

  Then I guess I reached a real low patch. The reality show crashed and my new management bailed. Guess it wasn’t the cash cow they were expecting. Clerval always was a ruthless scumbag, even as agents go, feet on his desk, giving a masturbatory mime as he schmoozes his other client on the phone, dining out on his asshole stories of Jodie and Mel.

  Some reason I also got the idea that germs resided in my hair, and I shaved that off to the scalp. Felt safer that way. Safer with my paper mask and bald head, and the briefcase full of phials and pills, added to now with some that were off-prescription. Marvellous what you can find on the Internet, hey?

  Didn’t much notice the cameras anymore, trailing me to the parking lot or to the g
ym, jumping out from bushes, walking backwards in front of me down the sidewalk or pressed to the driver’s window of my Hummer. Didn’t care. I guess somewhere deep down I thought the photographs and photographers meant somebody wanted to see me. Someone wanted me to exist, so it was worth existing, for them. How wrong can you be?

  It felt like it was all over. It felt like I was alone.

  Then one day I got a call from Doctor Bob. No secretary. No gatekeeper. Just him. He said, “Listen, don’t hang up on me. You know I’m good for you, you know we made it together and if I made some mistakes, I’m sorry. Let’s move on.” I reckoned it took a lot for him to pick up the phone, so the least I could do was listen. “I’m going in to the network to pitch a follow-up series. And if they don’t clap till their hands bleed I’ll eat this telephone. It’s the same but different: what every network wants to hear. Hot females in front of the camera this time, and you know what, I’m not going to even attempt to sell it to them. The pitch is going to be just one word. We’re going to walk in and sit down, and we’re going to say: Bride.

  I said: “We?”

  He said, “I want you in on this. You’re on the judges’ panel.”

  And that’s what happened. Contract signed, everything. It was my baby. My comeback. It meant everything to me. I went back to the fold. Doctor Jude kissed my cheek. I did have my juju. I had nailed it. I was fantastic, as a performer and as a human being . . .

  Overnight, I was booked on The Tonight Show. I was back up there. I was going on to announce Bride. They wanted Doctor Bob to sit beside me on the couch but he said, “No, son. You do it. You’ll be fine.” And I was fine. I thought I was fine. But when the applause hit me and the lights hit me too I got a little high. I was back on the mountain-top. I wanted to sing – not sing, run, run a million miles. And I loved Doctor Bob so much, I said it. I wasn’t ashamed of it. I said it again. I shouted it. I jumped up and down on the couch saying, “I’m in love! I’m in love!” because that’s what it felt like, all over again.