Darker Terrors Read online

  The show was something called Dario, You So Crazy! She sighed and sat back, studying their expressions while keeping one eye on the TV screen. It wouldn’t be long before she felt his hand on her forearm as he moved in, telling her what he really thought of the audience, how stupid they were, every last one, down to the little old ladies and the kindly grandfathers and the working men and women who were no more or less ordinary than he was under his Perry Ellis suit and silk tie. Then his breath in her hair and his fingers scraping her pantyhose as if tapping out a message on her knee and perhaps today, this time, he would attempt to deliver that message, while she offered breathless quips to let him know how clever he was and how lucky she felt to be here. She shuddered and turned her cheek to him in the dark.

  ‘Who’s that actor?’ she said.

  ‘Some Italian guy. I saw him in a movie. He’s not so bad, if he could learn to talk

  English.’

  She recognised the co-star. It was Rowan Atkinson, the slight, bumbling everyman from that British TV series on PBS.

  ‘Mr Bean!’ she said.

  ‘Roberto Begnino,’ Marty corrected, reading from the credits.

  ‘I mean the other one. This is going to be good …’

  ‘I thought you were on your break,’ said Marty.

  ‘This is more important.’

  He stared at her transparent reflection in the two-way mirror.

  ‘You were going to take the day off.’

  ‘No, I wasn’t.’

  The pilot was a comedy about an eccentric Italian film director who had come to

  America in search of fame and fortune. Mr Bean played his shy, inept manager. They shared an expensive rented villa in the Hollywood Hills. Just now they were desperate to locate an actress to pose as Dario’s wife, so that he could obtain a green card and find work before they both ran out of money.

  She immediately grasped the premise and its potential.

  It was inspired. Benigno’s abuse of the language would generate countless hilarious misunderstandings; coupled with his manager’s charming incompetence, the result might be a television classic, thanks in no small measure to the brilliant casting. How could it miss? All they needed was a good script. She realised that her mind had drifted long enough to miss the screenwriter’s name. The only credit left was the show’s creator/producer, one Barry E. Tormé. Probably the son of that old singer, she thought. What was his name? Mel. Apparently he had fathered a show-business dynasty. The other son, Tracy, was a successful TV writer; he had even created a science fiction series at Fox that lasted for a couple of seasons. Why had she never heard of brother Barry? He was obviously a pro.

  She sat forward, fascinated to see the first episode.

  ‘Me, Dario!’ Benigno crowed into a gold-trimmed telephone, the third time it had rung in less than a minute. It was going to be his signature bit.

  ‘O, I Dream!’ she said.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘The line, Marty. Got you.’

  The letters rearranged themselves automatically in her mind. It was child’s play. She had almost expected him to come up with it first. They had kept the game going since her first day at AmiDex, when she pointed out that his full name was an anagram for Marty licks on me. It got his attention.

  ‘You can stop with the word shit,’ he said.

  He sounded irritated, which surprised her. ‘I thought you liked it.’

  ‘What’s up with that, anyway?’

  ‘It’s a reflex,’ she said. ‘I can’t help it. My father taught me when I was little.’

  ‘Well, it’s getting old.’

  She turned to his profile in the semidarkness, his pale, clean-shaven face and short, neat hair as two-dimensional as a cartoon cut-out from the back of a cereal box.

  ‘You know, Marty, I was thinking. Could you show me the War Room sometime?’ She moved her leg closer to his. ‘Just you and me, when everybody’s gone. So I could see how it works.’

  ‘How what works?’

  She let her hand brush his knee. ‘Everything. The really big secrets.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Had she said too much? ‘But if I’m going to work here, I should know more about the company. What makes a hit, for example. Maybe you could tell me. You explain things so well.’

  ‘Why did you come here?’

  The question caught her off-guard. ‘I needed a job.’

  ‘Plenty of jobs out there,’ he snapped. ‘What is it, you got a script to sell?’

  The room was cold and her feet were numb. Now she wanted to be out of here. The other chairs were dim, bulky shapes, like half-reclining corpses, as if she and Marty were not alone in the room.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said.

  ‘I told you to stay home today.’

  No, he hadn’t. ‘You want me to take the day off?’

  He did not answer.

  ‘Do you think I need it? Or is there something special about today?’

  The door in the back of the room opened. It connected to the hall that led to the other sections of the building and the War Room itself, where even now the audience response was being recorded and analysed by a team of market researchers. A hulking figure stood there in silhouette. She could not see his features. He hesitated for a moment, then came all the way in, plunging the room into darkness again, and then there were only the test subjects and their flickering faces opposite her through the smoked glass. The man took a seat at the other end of the row.

  ‘That you, Mickleson?’

  At the sound of his voice Marty sat up straight.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘I thought so. Who’s she?’

  ‘One of the girls – Annalise. She was just leaving.’

  Then Marty leaned close to her and whispered:

  ‘Will you get out?’

  She was not supposed to be here. The shape at the end of the row must have been the big boss. Marty had known he was coming; that was why he wanted her gone. This was the first time anyone had joined them in the booth. It meant the show was important. The executives listened up when a hit came along.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she said, and left the observation booth.

  She wanted very much to see the rest of the show. Now she would have to wait till it hit the airwaves. Was there a way for her to eavesdrop on the discussion later, after the screening?

  In the hall, she listened for the audience reaction. Just now there must have been a lull in the action, with blank tape inserted to represent a commercial break, because there was dead silence from the theatre.

  She was all the way to the reception area before she realised what he had called her.

  Annalise.

  It was an anagram for Lisa Anne, the name she had put on her application – and, incredibly, it was the right one. Somehow he had hit it. Had he done so naturally, without thinking, as in their word games? Or did he know?

  Busted, she thought.

  She crossed to the glass doors, ready to make her break.

  Then she thought, so he knows my first name. So what? It’s not like it would mean anything to him, even if he were to figure out the rest of it.

  She decided that she had been paranoid to use a pseudonym in the first place. If she had told the truth, would anybody care? Technically AmiDex could disqualify her, but the family connection was so many years ago that the name had probably been forgotten by now. In fact she was sure it had. That was the point. That was why she was here.

  Outside, the rain had let up. A few of the next hour’s subjects were already wandering this way across the courtyard. Only one, a woman with a shopping bag and a multi-coloured scarf over her hair, bothered to raise her head to look at the statues.

  It was disturbing to see the greats treated with such disrespect.

  All day long volunteers gathered outside at the appointed hour, smoking and drinking sodas and eating food they had brought with them, and when they went in they left the remains scattered among the s
tatues, as if the history of the medium and its stars meant nothing to them. Dinah Shore and Carol Burnett and Red Skelton with his clown nose, all nothing more than a part of the landscape now, like the lamp-posts, like the trash cans that no one used. The sun fell on them, and the winds and the rains and the graffiti and the discarded wads of chewing gum and the pissing of dogs on the place where their feet should have been, and there was nothing for any of them to do but suffer these things with quiet dignity, like the fallen dead in a veterans’ cemetery. One day the burdens of their immortality, the bird shit and the cigarette butts and the MacDonald’s wrappers, might become too much for them to bear and the ground would shake as giants walked the earth again, but for now they could only wait, because that day was not yet here.

  ‘How was it?’ said Angie.

  ‘The show? Oh, it was great. Really.’

  ‘Then why aren’t you in there?’

  ‘It’s too cold.’ She hugged her sides. ‘When does the grounds crew get here?’

  ‘Uh, you lost me.’

  ‘Maintenance. The gardeners. How often do they come?’

  ‘You’re putting me on, right?’

  She felt her face flush. ‘Then I’ll do it.’

  ‘Do—?’

  ‘Clean up. It’s a disgrace. Don’t you think so?’

  ‘Sure, Lisa. Anything you say …’

  She started outside, and got only a few paces when the sirens began. She counted four squad cars with the name of a private security company stencilled on the doors. They screeched to a halt in the parking lot and several officers jumped out. Did one of them really have his gun drawn?

  ‘Oh, God,’ said Angie.

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘It’s the complex. They don’t like people taking pictures.’

  Now she saw that the man in the dark trench coat had returned. This time he had brought a van with a remote broadcasting dish on top. The guards held him against the side, under the call letters for a local TV station and the words EYEBALL NEWS. When a cameraman climbed down from the back to object they handcuffed him.

  ‘Who doesn’t like it?’

  ‘AmiDex,’ Angie said solemnly. ‘They own it all.’ She waved her hand to include the building, the courtyard, the parking lot and the fenced-in apartments. ‘Somebody from Hard Copy tried to shoot here last month. They confiscated the film. It’s off-limits.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘All I know is, there must be some very important people in those condos.’

  ‘In this neighbourhood?’

  She couldn’t imagine why any VIP’s would want to live here. The complex was a lower-middle-class housing development, walled in and protected from the deteriorating streets nearby. It had probably been on this corner since the fifties. She could understand AmiDex buying real estate in the San Fernando Valley instead of the overpriced Westside, but why the ageing apartments? The only reason might be so that they could expand their testing facility one day. Meanwhile, why not tear them down? With its spiked iron fences the complex looked like a fortress sealed off against the outside world. There was even barbed wire on top of the walls.

  Before she could ask any more questions, the doors to the theatre opened. She glanced back and saw Marty leading the audience down the hall for the post-screening discussion.

  She followed, eager to hear the verdict.

  The boys in the white shirts were no longer at the counter. They were in the War Room, marking up long rolls of paper like doctors charting the vital signs in an intensive care ward. Lights blinked across a bank of electronic equipment, as many rack-mounted modules as there were seats in the theatre, with dials and connecting cables that fed into the central computer. She heard circuits humming and the ratcheting whirr of a wide-mouthed machine as it disgorged graphs that resembled polygraph tests printed in blood-red ink.

  She came to the next section of the hall, as the last head vanished through a doorway around the first turn.

  The discussion room was small and bright with rows of desks and acoustic tiles in the ceiling. It reminded her of the classrooms at UCLA, where she had taken a course in Media Studies, before discovering that they didn’t have any answers, either. She merged with the group and slumped down in the back row, behind the tallest person she could find.

  Marty remained on his feet, pacing.

  ‘Now,’ he said, it’s your turn. Hollywood is listening! How many of you would rate—’ He consulted his clipboard. ‘—Dario, You So Crazy! as one of the best programmes you’ve ever seen?’

  She waited for the hands to go up. She could not see any from here. The tall man blocked her view and if she moved her head Marty might spot her.

  ‘Okay. How many would say “very good”?’

  There must not have been many because he went right on to the next question.

  ‘“Fair”?’

  She closed her eyes and listened to the rustle of coat sleeves and wondered if she had heard the question correctly.

  ‘And how many “poor”?’

  That had to be everyone else. Even the tall man in front of her raised his arm. She recognised his plaid shirt. It was Number Sixteen.

  Marty made a notation.

  ‘Okay, great. What was your favourite scene?’

  The silence was deafening.

  ‘You won’t be graded on this! There’s no right or wrong answer. I remember once, when my junior-high English teacher …’

  He launched into a story to loosen them up. It was about a divorced woman, an escaped sex maniac and a telephone call to the police. She recognised it as a very old dirty joke. Astonishingly he left off the punch-line. The audience responded anyway. He had his timing down pat. Or was it that they laughed because they knew what was coming? Did that make it even funnier?

  The less original the material, she thought, the more they like it. It makes them feel comfortable.

  And if that’s true, so is the reverse.

  She noticed that there was a two-way mirror in this room, too, along the far wall. Was anyone following the discussion from the other side? If so, there wasn’t much to hear. Nobody except Marty had anything to say. They were bored stiff, waiting for their money. It would take something more than the show they had just seen to hold them, maybe Wrestling’s Biggest Bleeps, Bloopers and Bodyslams or America’s Zaniest Surveillance Tapes. Now she heard a door slam in the hall. The executives had probably given up and left the observation room.

  ‘What is the matter with you people?’

  The woman with the multi-coloured scarf hunched around to look at her, as Marty tried to see who had spoken.

  ‘In the back row. Number …’

  ‘You’re right,’ she said too loudly. ‘It’s not poor, or fair, or excellent. It’s a great show! Better than anything I’ve seen in years. Since—’

  ‘Yes?’ Marty changed his position, zeroing in on her voice. ‘Would you mind speaking up? This is your chance to be heard …’

  ‘Since The Fuzzy Family. Or The Funnyboner.’ She couldn’t help mentioning the titles. Her mouth was open now and the truth was coming out and there was no way to stop it.

  Marty said, ‘What network were they on?’

  ‘CBS. They were cancelled in the first season.’

  ‘But you remember them?’

  ‘They were brilliant.’

  ‘Can you tell us why?’

  ‘Because of my father. He created them both.’

  Marty came to the end of the aisle and finally saw her. His face fell. In the silence she heard other voices, arguing in the hall. She hoped it was not the people who had made Dario, You So Crazy! If so, they had to be hurting right now. She felt for them, bitterness and despair and rage welling up in her own throat.

  ‘May I see you outside?’ he said.

  ‘No, you may not.’

  The hell with Marty, AmiDex and her job here. There was no secret as to why some shows made it and other, better ones did not. Darwin was wrong. He hadn’t figur
ed on the networks. They had continued to lower their sights until the audience devolved right along with them, so that any ray of hope was snuffed out, overshadowed by the crap around it. And market research and the ratings system held onto their positions by telling them what they wanted to hear, that the low-rent talent they had under contract was good enough, by testing the wrong people for the wrong reasons, people who were too numb to care about a pearl among the pebbles. It was a perfect, closed loop.

  ‘Now, Miss Rayme.’

  ‘That isn’t my name.’ Didn’t he get it yet? ‘My father was Robert Mayer. The man who wrote and produced Wagons, Ho!’

  It was TV’s first Western comedy and it made television history. After that he struggled to come up with another hit, but every new show was either cancelled or rejected outright. His name meant nothing to the bean-counters. All they could see was the bottom line. As far as they were concerned he owed them a fortune for the failures they had bankrolled. If he had been an entertainer who ran up a debt in Vegas, he would have had to stay there, working it off at the rate of two shows a night, forever. The only thing that gave her satisfaction was the knowledge that they would never collect. One day when she was ten he had a massive heart attack on the set and was whisked away in a blue ambulance and he never came home again.

  ‘Folks, thanks for your time,’ Marty said. ‘If you’ll return to the lobby …’

  She had studied his notes and scripts, trying to understand why he failed. She loved them all. They were genuinely funny, the very essence of her father, with his quirky sense of humour and extravagant sight gags – as original and inventive as Dario, You So Crazy! Which was a failure, too. Of course. She lowered her head onto the desktop and began to weep.

  ‘Hold up,’ said Number Sixteen.

  ‘Your pay’s ready. Fifty dollars cash.’ Marty held the door wide. ‘There’s another group coming in …’

  The lumberjack refused to stand. ‘Let her talk. I remember Wagons, Ho! It was all right.’

  He turned around in his seat and gave her a wink as she raised her head.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said softly. ‘It doesn’t matter, now.’

  She got to her feet with the others and pushed her way out. Farther down the hall, another door clicked shut. It was marked Green Room. She guessed that the executives from the other side of the mirror had decided to finish their argument in private.