The Year's Best Horror Stories 11

DEATHTRACKS by Dennis Etchison

This past autumn marked a long overdue major event in the history of horror literature—the publication of The Dark Country, Dennis Etchison’s first collection of short fiction. This book is overdue by at least a decade; in 1971 what was to have been Etchison’s first collection of stories, entitled The Night of the Eye, was stillborn when its publisher went bankrupt on the eve of publication. Etchison has been selling short stories since 1961, and it’s unthinkable that fans have had to wait an additional ten years to read a collection of his work.

Born March 30, 1943 in Stockton, California, Etchison is finally receiving deserved recognition as the finest writer of psychological horror this genre has produced. Etchison’s nightmares and fears are intensely personal, and his genius is to make us realize that we share them. He is that rarest of genre writers: an original visionary, whose horrors are those of loneliness, of an individual adrift in a society beyond his control, beyond his comprehension, in which only sheeplike acceptance and robotlike nonawareness permit an individual to survive until his allotted time. The reader in avid search of shambling slashers and tentacled monstrosities will only be baffled by Etchison’s fiction. A longtime resident of Los Angeles, Etchison is deeply interested in films and has written a number of screenplays from his own material and from works by Stephen King, Ray Bradbury and others. Recently Dennis Etchison has written the paperback novelizations for the horror films The Fog, Halloween II, Halloween III, and Videodrome (these last three under his pseudonym, “Jack Martin”).

ANNOUNCER: Hey, let’s go into this apartment and help this housewife take a shower!

ASSISTANT: Rad!

ANNOUNCER: Excuse me, ma’am!

HOUSEWIFE: Eeek!

ANNOUNCER: It’s okay, I’m the New Season Man!

HOUSEWIFE: You—you came right through my TV!

ANNOUNCER: That’s because there’s no stopping good news! Have you heard about New Season Body Creamer? It’s guaranteed better than your old-fashioned soap product, cleaner than water on the air! It’s—

ASSISTANT: Really, rad!

HOUSEWIFE: Why, you’re so right! Look at the way New Season’s foaming away my dead, unwanted dermal cells! My world has a whole new complexion! My figure has a glossy new paisley shine! The kind that men…

ANNOUNCER: And women!

HOUSEWIFE:… love to touch!

ANNOUNCER: Plus the kids’ll love it, too!

HOUSEWIFE: You bet they will! Wait till my husband gets up! Why, I’m going to spend the day spreading the good news all over our entire extended family! It’s—

ANNOUNCER: It’s a whole New Season!

HOUSEWIFE: A whole new reason! It’s—

ASSISTANT: Absolutely RAD-I-CAL!

The young man fingered the edges of the pages with great care, almost as if they were razor blades. Then he removed his fingertips from the clipboard and tapped them along the luminous crease in his pants, one, two, three, four, five, four, three, two, one, stages of flexion about to become a silent drumroll of boredom. With his other hand he checked his watch, clicked his pen and smoothed the top sheet of the questionnaire, circling the paper in a cursive, impatient holding pattern.

Across the room another man thumbed a remote-control device until the TV voices became silvery whispers, like ants crawling over aluminum foil.

“Wait, Bob.” On the other side of the darkening living room a woman stirred in her beanbag chair, her hair shining under the black light. “It’s time for The Fuzzy Family.”

The man, her husband, shifted his buttocks in his own beanbag chair and yawned. The chair’s styrofoam filling crunched like cornflakes under his weight. “Saw this one before,” he said. “Besides, there’s no laughtrack. They use three cameras and a live audience, remember?”

“But it might be, you know, boosted,” said the woman. “Oh, what do they call it?”

“Technically augmented?” offered the young man.

They both looked at him, as though they had forgotten he was in their home.

The young man forced an unnatural, professional smile. In the black light his teeth shone too brightly.

“Right,” said the man. “Not The Fuzzy Family, though. I filtered out a track last night. It’s all new. I’m sure.”

The young man was confused. He had the inescapable feeling that they were skipping (or was it simply that he was missing?) every third or fourth sentence. I’m sure. Sure of what? That this particular TV show had been taped before an all-live audience? How could he be sure? And why would anyone care enough about such a minor technical point to bother to find out? Such things weren’t supposed to matter to the blissed-out masses. Certainly not to AmiDex survey families. Unless…

Could he be that lucky?

The questionnaire might not take very long, after all.

This one, he thought, has got to work in the industry.

He checked the computer stats at the top of the questionnaire: MORRISON, ROBERT, AGE 54, UNEMPLOYED. Used to work in the industry, then. A TV cameraman, a technician of some kind, maybe for a local station? There had been so many layoffs in the last few months, with QUBE and Teletext and all the new cable licenses wearing away at the traditional network share. And any connection, past or present, would automatically disqualify this household. Hope sprang up in his breast like an accidental porno broadcast in the middle of Sermonette.

He flicked his pen rapidly between cramped fingers and glanced up, eager to be out of here and home to his own video cassettes. Not to mention, say, a Bob’s Big Boy hamburger, heavy relish, hold the onions and add avocado, to be picked up on the way?

“I’ve been sent here to ask you about last month’s Viewing Log,” he began. “When one doesn’t come back in the mail, we do a routine follow-up. It may have been lost by the post office. I see here that your phone’s been disconnected. Is that right?”

He waited while the man used the remote selector. Onscreen, silent excerpts of this hour’s programming blipped by channel by channel: reruns of Cop City, the syndicated version of The Cackle Factory, the mindless Make Me Happy, The World As We Know It, T.H.U.G.S., even a repeat of that PBS documentary on Teddy Roosevelt, A Man, A Plan, a Canal, Panama, and the umpteenth replay of Mork and Mindy, this the infamous last episode that had got the series canceled, wherein Mindy is convinced she’s carrying Mork’s alien child and nearly OD’s on a homeopathic remedy of Humphrey’s Eleven Tablets and blackstrap molasses. Still he waited.

“There really isn’t much I need to know.” He put on a friendly, stupid, shit-eating grin, hoping it would show in the purple light and then afraid that it would. “What you watch is your own business, naturally. AmiDex isn’t interested in influencing your viewing habits. If we did, I guess that would undermine the statistical integrity of our sample, wouldn’t it?”

Morrison and his wife continued to stare into their flickering 12-inch Sony portable.

If they’re so into it, I wonder why they don’t have a bigger set, one of those new picture-frame projection units from Mad Man Muntz, for example? I don’t even see a Betamax. What was Morrison talking about when he said he’d taped The Fuzzy Family? The man had said that, hadn’t he?

It was becoming difficult to concentrate.

Probably it was the black light, that and the old Day-Glow posters, the random clicking of the beaded curtains. Where did they get it all? Sitting in their living room was like being in a time machine, a playback of some Hollywood Sam Katzman or Albert Zugsmith version of the sixties; he almost expected Jack Nicholson or Luanna Anders to show up. Except that the artifacts seemed to be genuine, and in mint condition. There were things he had never seen before, not even in catalogues. His parents would know. It all must have been saved out of some weird prescience, in anticipation of the current run on psychedelic nostalgia. It would cost a fortune to find practically any original black-light posters, however primitive. The one in the corner, for instance, “Ship of Peace,” mounted next to “Ass Id” and an original Crumb “Keep on Truckin’ ” from the Print Mint in San Francisco, had been offered on the KCET auction just last week for $450, he remembered.

He tried again.

“Do you have your Viewing Log handy?” Expectantly he paused a beat. “Or did you—misplace it?”

“It won’t tell you anything,” said the man.

“We watch a lot of oldies,” said the woman.

The young man pinched his eyes shut for a moment to clear his head. “I know what you mean,” he said, hoping to put them at ease. “I can’t get enough of The Honeymooners, myself. That Norton.” He added a conspiratorial chuckle. “Sometimes I think they get better with age. They don’t make ’em like that anymore. But, you know, the local affiliates would be very interested to know that you’re watching.”

“Not that old,” said the woman. “We like the ones from the sixties. And some of the new shows, too, if—”

Morrison inclined his head toward her, so that the young man could not sec, and mouthed what may have been a warning to his wife.

Suddenly and for reasons he could not name, the young man felt that he ought to be out of here.

He shook his wrist, pretending that his collector’s item Nixon-Agnew watch was stuck. “What time is it getting to be?” Incredibly, he noticed that his watch had indeed stopped. Or had he merely lost track of the time? The hands read a quarter to six. Where had they been the last time he looked? “I really should finish up and get going. You’re my last interview of the day. You folks must be about ready for dinner.”

“Not so soon,” said the woman. “It’s almost time for The Uncle Jerry Show.”

That’s a surprise, he thought. It’s only been on for one season.

“Ah, that’s a new show, isn’t it?” he said, again feeling that he had missed something. “It’s only been on for—”

Abruptly the man got up from his beanbag chair and crossed the room.

He opened a cabinet, revealing a stack of shipment cartons from the Columbia Record Club. The young man made out the titles of a few loose albums, “greatest hits” collections from groups which, he imagined, had long since disbanded. Wedged into the cabinet, next to the records, was a state-of-the-art audio frequency equalizer with graduated slide controls covering several octaves. This was patched into a small black accessory amplifier box, the kind that are sold for the purpose of connecting a TV set to an existing home stereo system. Morrison leaned over and punched a sequence of preset buttons, and without further warning a great hissing filled the room.

“This way we don’t miss anything,” said the wife.

The young man looked around. Two enormous Voice-of-the-Theatre speakers, so large they seemed part of the walls, had sputtered to life on either side of the narrow room. But as yet there was no sound other than the unfathomable, rolling hiss of spurious signal-to-noise output, the kind of distortion he had heard once when he set his FM receiver between stations and turned the volume up all the way.

Once the program began, he knew, the sound would be deafening.

“So,” he said hurriedly, “why don’t we wrap this up, so I can leave you two to enjoy your evening? All I need are the answers to a couple of quick questions, and I’ll be on my way.”

Morrison slumped back into place, expelling a rush of air from his beanbag chair, and thumbed the remote channel selector to a blank station. A pointillist pattern of salt-and-pepper interference swarmed the 12-inch screen. He pushed up the volume in anticipation, so as not to miss a word of The Uncle Jerry Show when the time came to switch channels again, eyed a clock on the wall over the Sony—there was a clock, after all, if only one knew where to look amid the glowing clutter—and half-turned to his visitor. The clock read ten minutes to six.

“What are you waiting to hear?” asked Morrison.

“Yes,” said his wife, “why don’t you tell us?”

The young man lowered his eyes to his clipboard, seeking the briefest possible explanation, but saw only the luminescence of white shag carpeting through his transparent vinyl chair—another collector’s item. He felt uneasy circulation twitching his weary legs, and could not help but notice the way the inflated chair seemed to throb with each pulse.

“Well,” trying one more time, noting that it was coming up on nine minutes to six and still counting, “your names were picked by AmiDex demographics. Purely at random. You represent twelve thousand other viewers in this area. What you watch at any given hour determines the rating points for each network.”

There, that was simple enough, wasn’t it? No need to go into the per-minute price of sponsor ad time buys based on the overnight share, sweeps week, the competing services each selling its own brand of accuracy. Eight-and-a-half minutes to go.

“The system isn’t perfect, but it’s the best way we have so far of—”

“You want to know why we watch what we watch, don’t you?”

“Oh no, of course not! That’s really no business of ours. We don’t care. But we do need to tabulate viewing records, and when yours wasn’t returned—”

“Let’s talk to him,” said the woman. “He might be able to help.”

“He’s too young, can’t you see that, Jenny?”

“I beg your pardon?” said the young man.

“It’s been such a long time,” said the woman, rising with a whoosh from her chair and stepping in front of her husband. “We can try.”

The man got slowly to his feet, his arms and torso long and phosphorescent in the peculiar mix of ultraviolet and television light. He towered there, considering. Then he took a step closer.

The young man was aware of his own clothing unsticking from the inflated vinyl, crackling slightly, a quick seam of blue static shimmering away across the back of the chair; of the snow pattern churning on the untuned screen, the color tube shifting hues under the black light, turning to gray, then brightening in the darkness, locking on an electric blue, and holding.

Morrison seemed to undergo a subtle transformation as details previously masked by shadow now came into focus. It was more than his voice, his words. It was the full size of him, no longer young but still strong, on his feet and braced in an unexpectedly powerful stance. It was the configuration of his head in silhouette, the haunted pallor of the skin, stretched taut, the large, luminous whites of the eyes, burning like radium. It was all these things and more. It was the reality of him, no longer a statistic but a man, clear and unavoidable at last.

The young man faced Morrison and his wife. The palms of his hands were sweating coldly. He put aside the questionnaire.

Six minutes to six.

“I’ll put down that you—you declined to participate. How’s that? No questions asked.”

He made ready to leave.

“It’s been such a long time,” said Mrs. Morrison again.

Mr. Morrison laughed shortly, a descending scale ending in a bitter, metallic echo that cut through the hissing. “I’ll bet it’s all crazy to you, isn’t it? This stuff.”

“No, not at all. Some of these pieces are priceless. I recognized that right away.

“Are they?”

“Sure,” said the young man. “If you don’t mind my saying so, it reminds me of my brother Jack’s room. He threw out most of his underground newspapers, posters, that sort of thing when he got drafted. It was back in the sixties—I can barely remember it. If only he’d realized. Nobody saved anything. That’s why it’s all so valuable now.”

“We did,” said Mrs. Morrison.

“So I see.”

They seemed to want to talk, after all—lonely, perhaps—so he found himself ignoring the static and actually making an effort to prolong his exit. A couple of minutes more wouldn’t hurt. They’re not so bad, the Morrisons, he thought. I can see that now.

“Well, I envy you. I went through a Marvel Comics phase when I was a kid. Those are worth a bundle now, too. My mother burned them all when I went away to college, of course. It’s the same principle. But if I could go back in a time machine…” He shook his head and allowed an unforced smile to show through.

“These were our son’s things,” said Mrs. Morrison.

“Oh?” Could be I remind them of their son. I guess I should be honored.

“Our son David,” said Mr. Morrison.

“I see.” There was an awkward pause. The young man felt vaguely embarrassed. “It’s nice of him to let you hold his collection. You’ve got quite an investment here.”

The minute hand of the clock on the wall ground through its cycle, pressing forward in the rush of white noise from the speakers.

“David Morrison.” Her voice sounded hopeful. “You’ve heard the name?”

David Morrison, David Morrison. Curious. Yes, he could almost remember something, a magazine cover or…

“It was a long time ago. He—our son—was the last American boy to be killed in Vietnam.”

It was four minutes to six and he didn’t know what to say.

“When it happened, we didn’t know what to think,” said Mrs. Morrison. “We talked to people like us. Mostly they wanted to pretend it never happened.”

“They didn’t understand, either,” said Mr. Morrison.

“So we read everything. The magazines, books. We listened to the news commentators. It was terribly confusing. We finally decided even they didn’t know any more than we did about what went on over there, or why.”

“What was it to them? Another story for The Six O’Clock News, right, Jenny?”

Mrs. Morrison drew a deep, pained breath. Her eyes fluttered as she spoke, the television screen at her back lost in a grainy storm of deep blue snow.

“Finally the day came for me to clear David’s room…”

“Please,” said the young man, “you don’t have to explain.”

But she went ahead with it, a story she had gone over so many times she might have been recalling another life. Her eyes opened. They were dry and startlingly clear.

It was three minutes to six.

“I started packing David’s belongings. Then it occurred to us that he might have known the reason. So we went through his papers and so forth, even his record albums, searching. So much of it seemed strange, in another language, practically from another planet. But we trusted that the answer would be revealed to us in time.”

“We’re still living with it,” said Morrison. “It’s with us when we get up in the morning, when we give up at night. Sometimes I think I see a clue there, the way he would have seen it, but then I lose the thread and we’re back where we started.

“We tried watching the old reruns, hoping they had something to tell. But they were empty. It was like nothing important was going on in this country back then.”

“Tell him about the tracks, Bob.”

“I’m getting to it… Anyway, we waited. I let my job go, and we were living off our savings. It wasn’t much. It’s almost used up by now. But we had to have the answer. Why? Nothing was worth a damn, otherwise…

“Then, a few months ago, there was this article in TV Guide. About the television programs, the way they make them. They take the tracks—the audience reactions, follow?—and use them over and over. Did you know that?”

“I—I had heard…”

“Well, it’s true. They take pieces of old soundtracks, mix them in, a big laugh here, some talk there—it’s all taped inside a machine, an audience machine. The tapes go all the way back. I’ve broken ’em down and compared. Half the time you can hear the same folks laughing from twenty, twenty-five years ago. And from the sixties. That’s the part that got to me. So I rigged a way to filter out everything—dialogue, music—except for the audience, the track.”

“Why, he probably knows all about that. Don’t you, young man?”

“A lot of them, the audience, are gone now. It doesn’t matter. They’re on tape. It’s recycled, ‘canned’ they call it. It’s all the same to TV. Point is, this is the only way left for us to get through, or them to us. To make contact. To listen, eavesdrop, you might say, on what folks were doing and thinking and commenting on and laughing over back then.

“I can’t call ’em up on the phone, or take a poll, or stop people on the street, ’cause they’d only act like nothing happened. Today, it’s all passed on. Don’t ask me how, but it has.

“They’re passed on now, too, so many of ’em.”

“Like the boys,” said Mrs. Morrison softly, so that her voice was all but lost in the hiss of the swirling blue vortex. “So many beautiful boys, the ones who would talk now, if only they could.”

“Like the ones on the tracks,” said Mr. Morrison.

“Like the ones who never came home,” said his wife. “Dead now, all dead, and never coming back.”

One minute to six.

“Not yet,” he said aloud, frightened by his own voice.

As Mr. Morrison cranked up the gain and turned back to the set, the young man hurried out. As Mrs. Morrison opened her ears and closed her eyes to all but the laughtrack that rang out around her, he tried in vain to think of a way to reduce it all to a few simple marks in a new pointless language on sheets of printed paper. And as the Morrisons listened for the approving bursts of laughter and murmuring and applause, separated out of an otherwise meaningless echo from the past, he closed the door behind him, leaving them as he had found them. He began to walk fast, faster, and finally to run.

The questionnaire crumpled and dropped from his hand.

Jack, I loved you, did you know that? You were my brother. I didn’t understand, either. No one did. There was no time. But I told you, didn’t I? Didn’t I?

He passed other isolated houses on the block, ghostly living rooms turning to flickering beacons of cobalt blue against the night. The voices from within were television voices, muffled and anonymous and impossible to decipher unless one were to listen too closely, more closely than life itself would seem to want to permit, to the exclusion of all else, as to the falling of a single blade of grass or the unseen whisper of an approaching scythe. And it rang out around him then, too, through the trees and into the sky and the cold stars, the sound of the muttering and the laughter, the restless chorus of the dead, spreading rapidly away from him across the city and the world.