None of these things happened. The TV jostled a little, and then was still.
Jonathan fell headlong into a black and airless hole in reality.
Chapter •
Fifteen
The hole bottomed out abruptly, dumping Jonathan on a sandy desert floor with a soft but distinct thump! He sat up, scrubbing sand out of his hair, looking around in bewilderment. He had gotten sand in his mouth as well, and leaned forward to spit the grit out before it made him sick to his stomach. He got to his feet, wobbling a bit, spluttering a lot. A merciless afternoon sun blazed down on his head from a flawless blue sky; not far to his left was the bleached skull of a cow, nested in sagebrush. Mountains ranged up to his right, looking shimmery and purple in the distance. The whole backdrop was dotted with thirsty-looking cactus that marched away to the horizon. The scenery seemed oddly familiar, though Jonathan had never been farther west than St. Louis.
He started walking, too stunned to think right. Sweat sprang up on his forehead and stayed there. His Reeboks picked up a load of sand with every step, but he went on, unable to figure out why he had landed here, or if he had knocked himself out on the television screen and was snoozing peacefully in his bedroom on the floor. And, by the way, where was Pinker?
A sudden screech made him turn around.
An Indian in warpaint and feathers was sprinting toward him, barely ten yards away. In his upraised fist he held a long steel knife.
Hmm, Jonathan thought. What do you think of that?
The Indian lunged with a shriek of rage. Jonathan cowered back, not believing much of this, but not quite ready to disbelieve it entirely. A movement to the left caught his eye, an orange streak of something quite familiar. Pinker charged at the Indian, wrestled him to the ground at Jonathan’s feet, and cut his throat with his own knife. Blood washed across the sand, sparkling red. The Indian made slobbery noises as he tried in vain to breathe. Pinker straightened, sneering down at the warrior.
“No one gets to do it but me, fool.” He looked over to Jonathan, then turned the blade so that it caught the sunlight, making it wink cruelly through its dripping coat of blood.
He charged at Jonathan. The knife swooped horizontally, intending to slash his stomach open. Jonathan jerked back, sucking his stomach in. The blade whispered across his tee shirt, flew from Pinker’s grip, and then Jonathan was falling again, a victim of the hole, tumbling from black to black with a silent scream bursting out of his mouth.
Pinker fell, too.
Jonathan landed face-first in snow. He raised himself, blinking, trying to see in the half-light. He stood up, and realized his feet were in six inches of icy water.
A gigantic explosion ripped the night with harsh light. Jonathan ducked instinctively, covering his head against the rain of dirt clods. Shrapnel whistled overhead.
More explosions, a barrage of them. Jonathan realized he was in a trench. There were other men here, wearing dark uniforms and old-fashioned coal-scuttle helmets. German helmets.
He had fallen into World War One in the middle of winter, wearing only his Reeboks and his Levi’s and his black tee shirt. His teeth began to chatter.
Someone shouted something. Jonathan turned to look. The rows of exhausted-looking men on either side of the trench were attaching long bayonets to their old-fashioned wooden rifles. The smell of used gunpowder drifted over, burning his throat.
Another shout. Men clawed their way out of the trench. A distant machine gun began to chatter. Some men fell; some didn’t. Still they charged, jumping low barriers of barbed wire, at times flinging themselves into bomb craters when the bullets came too close.
Jonathan watched in dread. The attack was faltering. Men were raked down like dominoes. The screams of the wounded and dying filled the air. And then the other side was charging, men wearing heavy coats and helmets, clambering out of their own trench not forty yards away. As they ran they stabbed the wounded on the ground with their own long bayonets, then ran forward again. Jonathan saw that their helmets had a curious ridge on top. He vaguely recalled having seen such things in a book. These men were French, the romantic French, but French or not, they didn’t seem to be romantically inclined right now. One soldier—just a boy, Jonathan saw as the soldier jumped into the trench—swung his rifle around and prepared to stab Jonathan. Once again Jonathan cringed back, and there was Pinker, all orange and checkerboard squares, popping out of nowhere. Someplace along the line he had picked up a rifle. He stabbed the French boy in the back of the neck. The bayonet punched through with a wet popping noise. The boy fell forward and hit the muddy water with a splat.
Pinker chuckled.
A voice blared suddenly, seeming to come down from the sky:
“In the last eighty years alone, over one hundred twenty million people have been killed outright in warfare between civilized nations. This is the equivalent of the combined populations of England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and East Germany—or the entire population of the United States in the 1930s.”
Good grief, Jonathan thought as Pinker swung out with the rifle butt. This is a PBS documentary!
He dodged the rifle and crawled out of the muddy trench. Another barrage of artillery was raining down on the dead and the dying, blowing bodies into mushy pieces. Jonathan ran from Pinker, dodging explosions as best he could, as terrified of this battlefield as he was of Pinker. He tripped and fell into a crater, breaking through a thin layer of ice, his face splashing into the muck. He pushed himself up on his arms and found that he was staring at the shattered face of a skull.
He dived out, horror and revulsion crawling up his throat like cold slime. Parker lashed out and cracked the rifle butt across his head above the right ear.
The PBS narrator started to chatter about the senselessness of war, the voice of God from heaven. Jonathan couldn’t agree more: War is hell. But so was Pinker, and his rifle-butt trick had sent Jonathan reeling. He stumbled backward toward another crater in the black earth and fell in with a scream, expecting more ice and muck and corpses.
Instead he was falling, falling. The hole had struck again. This time it dumped him on another barren chunk of desert, one that stretched to the horizon in all directions, no more mountains, no more Indians, just sand. Dusk was approaching, the last light tingeing the clouds orange. Distantly Jonathan thought he could see a tower of some sort with a red light flashing on top. The TV tower in Maryville? He thought not. Maryville was not famed for its deserts.
Pinker materialized out of the same nowhere Jonathan had come from, thumping down onto the sand, landing on his feet and ready to lunge in an instant. He snapped the bayonet free from the rifle and tossed the rifle away, more content with his usual weapon.
“I don’t know about you,” he said, “but I’m having a blast!”
Unbearable white light flashed, the world’s biggest flashbulb, making Jonathan close his eyes. Four seconds later the blast came, and Jonathan knew: some old footage of a 1950s atomic bomb test. Life in TeeVee Land was turning out to be rather morbid. The shock wave crashed into him and Pinker in a wash of superheated air and blown sand, bowling them head over heels, flinging them to a new scene in this celluloid nightmare. Jonathan pinwheeled through the darkness of the hole, able this time to see a tiny square dot below, aglow with shifting colors. He fell toward it, wondering dimly what strange new nightmare lay ahead.
The Herb Jackson family had no idea what strange things lay ahead for them, either. Herb was an assistant manager of the Maryville Plumbing Supply Company, a job that paid him just enough to live and eat and support his wife, Margaret, and their two kids, Betty and Chuck. Occasionally there were a few hundred bucks extra in the bank, and when that lucky event came to pass they would go shopping and buy themselves some little trinket or doodad that they normally wouldn’t buy. The last time this happened, they had two hundred dollars, and went out to see what kind of gizmo they could rustle up. After pounding the pave
ment all day (with Betty and Chuck whining and fighting) they decided to take a breather in the Maryville Towne Center Square, a large shopping mall on the southern side of town. While in there, they stopped at Jimmy’s Television Sales to admire one of the new giant-screen sets, in particular an RCA with a picture tube roughly four feet square and a built-in VCR.
They admired its appearance. They marveled at its superb giant picture. They delighted in the fake wood casing, which just happened to match the paneling in their living room perfectly. Their current TV was no slouch, a twenty-five-inch Japanese affair with remote control, but in a burst of mad splurging they decided to ask how much this giant screen cost. If it was more than two hundred bucks, well, the shop could just shove its TV someplace else.
Herb, feeling decidedly giddy, drunk on wealth, confronted the nearest man with a nametag clipped to his suitcoat lapel, and inquired as to the cost of the beast. The salesperson first gave him a brief introductory lesson in how to operate this new monster TV, showing Herb the fabulous remote control, which had more buttons than a shirt factory, and the features available on no other TV yet made. Herb was able to grasp the concept immediately. The salesman whipped out a brochure that described in agonizing detail every feature of that massive behemoth. Well, Herb said at long last, how much?
Two thousand, the man said. Only two thousand clams.
Two grand? Christ in heaven, it would take him fifty years to pay for it.
Not at all, he was told. How much you got on you?
Just two hunnert, Herb said, feeling absolutely dismal.
Two hundred down, the fellow said, and fifty bucks a month for thirty-six months.
Herb thought. He sweated. He paced around while Betty and Chuck howled for pennies to dump in the gumball machine, which would aid the Shriners in their battle against childhood diseases. Herb paced and fought mental duels with his budget. His brain’s energy pile was nearing critical mass when he decided to say screw it, and handed over all his money.
The television was delivered the next day. This day, to be exact.
Thus it was that even though it was close to midnight, the kids, Betty and Chuck, were still up, as were Herb and Margaret, and they were watching every show they could get their eyes on while Herb fiddled endlessly with the remote control. The old TV, incidentally, had gone into Betty’s room, under the stipulation that she use it for one week, and Chuck the next. This way the old dinosaur could serve both masters until it fizzled out and died.
It was commercial time, and Herb was flipping through all 130 channels, seeing how far his reception would go. He nearly went spastic when the new TV produced a snowy, hazy version of Channel 64, Channel 64 in Cleveland, if you can believe it. Boy was Herb happy. Then everybody barked at him to go back to the original show, which was some kind of call-in thing discussing the rise of neo-Nazism in northern Idaho.
He flipped back to the right station just as Jonathan Parker thrust out of the giant picture screen, a man covered with mud and dreck, cut off at the waist. This strange apparition propped its hands on the floor and looked around.
Margaret screamed and jumped behind the couch. Herb squawked like a chicken and dropped the remote. Betty flew into her bedroom with a shriek. Chuck’s little eyes bulged. Man, but was this a television!
Jonathan crawled out, looking strangely translucent, a multicolored ghost crawling out of the mammoth picture tube. Horace Pinker burst out behind him, slashing the air with the bayonet. Jonathan sprinted away, knocking over furniture. They locked arms and wrestled, smashing noisily into an end table, crushing it to sticks and demolishing the expensive vase that was on it. As they slammed each other, all the framed pictures on the wall popped off and slid to the floor in multiple crashes. The large potted palm in the corner went next, crushed to shards under the writhing steamroller that was Jonathan and Pinker.
Herb swore off spending splurges forever while these two ghostly enemies demolished his living room. He lifted his feet when they rolled against the couch; he made a noise of protest that came out in a mousy squeak when the orange ghost sliced the carpet to rags in a futile attempt to stab the muddy guy in the face.
He saw the muddy one look at his ghost watch. This mud-creature looked at the remote control, lying where it had been kicked in the melee, and rushed over to pick it up. Then he dived back into the TV. The orange ghost followed with a howl.
Margaret poked her head up from behind the couch. She surveyed the destruction. “Gosh,” she breathed, agape at the carnage. “Talk about audience-participation shows!”
Herb went over and unplugged the set. “Piece of shit,” he grumbled, and aimed an angry, shaking finger at the dead TV. “Tomorrow your ass goes back to the store!”
Jonathan let the hole in reality take him wherever it wanted, no longer frightened of it, knowing now that he could no more control his next destination than he could control the orange monstrosity flailing in the emptiness behind him, some ten yards back.
There was no square of light this time, nothing to see at all except Pinker, squirming just as helplessly as he was. Jonathan closed his eyes, trying to count off the seconds, wondering how long this free-fall could go on.
It ended before he got to three. He fell with a fleshy thud on top of the television evangelist, sending him skidding on his ass across the tiny stage. His Holiness recovered and stared in amazement as Pinker dropped out of nowhere, this time falling to his knees with a grimace of pain. Jonathan scuttered around to face him, not feeling the slightest pity that poor Pinker had hurt his bad knee. If it was so awful, why hadn’t he dropped the knife?
“Sweet Je—sus,” the fraud minister blurted. The choir off to the left gave a community gasp. For the camera they were arranged in a bowling-pin formation.
Pinker grinned at the man. “Not quite Jesus yet, asshole. Close, but not quite.” He stalked over to the man and waved a hand. A zigzag of blue electricity arced between them, and the evangelist flew backward into the choir at the edge of the stage. Bodies and long robes scattered, leaving only a seven-ten split. Pinker snarled his disappointment, then wheeled around to face Jonathan, who was watching the time while sweat poured down his face, erasing the mud in lines. It was nearing midnight.
“What are you looking at your watch for, pencil-neck? You’re not going to give me the slip again, and I’ve got all the time in the world.”
Jonathan looked at him, gasping for breath. “I’m not going anywhere, Pinker. We are!”
He jammed a finger on the remote control’s CHANNEL button and held it there. Suddenly they were flipping from one new scene to the next, too fast to follow. Pinker let out a yelp and dived for Jonathan and the remote control, but Jonathan spun around and kept it out of reach. Bizarre scenery flashed around them, a forest, a Tom and Jerry cartoon, a prairie with a little house, a cat food commercial. On the exotic TV beeper Jonathan saw that he was approaching Channel 8. One more press of the button and they were at the Parker House, in Sally’s bedroom where the nightmare had started. It was seven minutes to midnight.
Walker Stevens was lounging around feeling grumpy while his cameraman and sound man played two-handed whist on the floor with a tired old deck of Bicycles one of them had brought along. Walker was about ready to call it quits and storm out of the room and the house. Five till midnight indeed. The copycat killer in custody. Bah. The Parker kid was playing a practical joke as revenge for Channel 8’s extensive coverage of his arrest.
“Two more minutes,” he muttered. “This had better be good.”
At that moment Jonathan and Pinker burst into glowing, half-visible life in the far corner of the bedroom, two translucent specters pounding the crap out of each other. Walker fell back, too amazed to speak. Dave the cameraman jumped up and shouldered his camera, ignoring the tripod. The camera, feeding into the truck and beaming live signals to the station without so much as We Interrupt This Program For A Special News Bulletin, rolled while the sound man hopped to his feet and began fiddl
ing with his equipment. Jonathan and Pinker were busy trashing each other and the room.
“Rolling,” Dave shouted.
“You’ve got sound,” the other barked.
“Holy shit,” Walker screamed. “It’s him! Horace Pinker!”
Pinker turned long enough to smile into the camera. “Special bulletin, huh? I’ll give you a show you won’t forget.”
He threw Jonathan on the bed. “Boy, I killed your phony momma and your little sister here. I’ll do you here too!”
As Jonathan struggled up, Pinker ran a thumb along his knife, drawing a small trace of blood. He licked it clean, beaming idiotically. “At last,” he said, and lunged. Jonathan sidestepped the knife and smacked Pinker on the face. He roared and hit back, knocking Jonathan into a wall. The necklace’s clasp opened and the heart pinged to the floor. Pinker kicked it away and raised the bayonet, ready for the final strike.
“Say your prayers, sucker,” he said. “I’m gonna do this real slow.”
Jonathan swung the borrowed TV beeper up and pointed it at Pinker’s face, knowing that if this didn’t work, nothing would.
He pressed the FREEZE FRAME button even as he cringed backward, awaiting the knife.
Pinker froze with his arm still raised, the knife gleaming. He swiveled his eyes around, looking stunned. “Hey!” he shouted, struggling to move. “What the hell—”
It was Jonathan’s turn to grin at last. “You’re what’s wrong with TV today, Pinker.”
He fingered the FAST REWIND button.
Pinker flew backward, arms flailing, legs uselessly pedaling. He looked like a man suspended by wires, a puppet driven by an insane puppeteer. He snarled and bellowed as he circled the room. The news people ducked, but caught it all on camera.
“You bought into TV, Pinker, and you’re bound by its rules,” Jonathan said, and began punching buttons on the remote control in a frenzy, nearly laughing at Pinker’s crazy reactions, FAST FORWARD was nifty, but SLO-MO was hilarious. The big bad man was utterly helpless at last.
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