The Mephisto Tape by Dana M. Anderson
THE MEPHISTO TAPE
by Dana M Anderson
Blue on blue and the colors buzzed into each other, a pale blue
circle all frazzled at the edges that expanded on the navy field.
Fade to pink on blood red, then to electric yellow on violet till
the circle expanded beyond the screen and the image behind it
could be dimly seen. Mouth moving, emitting light, eyes that
opened to swallow all color. Fading away. Fading away.
It was well after midnight and Arthur Charles was working alone
in the studios of WKKW TV in Minneapolis, Minnesota. As
commercial production director at the station he would normally
have had a full crew to complete the work, but he had to do this
alone. No one must ever know it was he who committed this sin.
So he rushed to adjust the two-inch video machines, and set the
shot on camera three out in the studio, where an impatient model
sat naked and sweating under the lights. He tuned the color
generator and chroma-key himself, completing the electronic
rituals without thought while hurrying to make his five-thirty
deadline, when he would have to clear out any sign of his night
long session before the morning engineer arrived to sign-on.
But could he complete a dream in less than four hours?
Arthur adjusted the chroma-key slightly and told his subject over
the studio p.a. to smile. Her teeth caught the light and
glistened bright green, confusing the video equipment with the
intensity of their whiteness. Arthur adjusted the knob to
increase the defect until her whole mouth was obliterated by the
color keying through.
Could a nightmare be captured on two inch tape? Could reality?
He cued the tape on VTR 1 for a ten second roll, then adjusted
VTR 2 slightly and cued it, rolling 2 on the electronically
generated black, fading to 1 and the blue.
Blue on blue and buzzing like color stolen from an electric
rainbow, expanding and flowing through the colors to the face. A
smile and moss grows within it, vibrating with hot color. The
eyes sucked the color from the scene and she was a negative
image, black on silvery gray, but her eyes were hot white slits.
It was dream time and she was the demon of his nightmares whose
voice he has not yet begun to create.
And if you could capture a nightmare, how well would it carry to
a nineteen inch screen?
Behind her breasts a man was wading through a river as Arthur
adjusted the chroma-key to use her pale flesh as a projection
screen. (He had to settle for a Hollywood war because there
wasn't any Vietnam footage on file.) The man was hip deep in the
muddy water, gun held over his head, when the bullets hit him,
staggering him back, his dying expression lost behind the
burgundy hue of one nipple. She was muddy brown and rippling
from his fall. Her face was green with the tall grass on the far
bank of the river where the enemy was concealed. Small puffs of
smoke appeared. She smiled, and she was a sparkling image, green
on orange. Her eyes were hollow pits, sightless and old. Old
beyond all years.
But would anyone see it? Would they grasp the horror of his
dream? Did video require narration to achieve it's goal or was
the image enough? Was the music essential to acceptance?
Could there be peace after the broken bodies plowed into the
earth across her reclining form? She was a black and white film,
a pile of gaunt bodies stiffly resisting the fall and bulldozers
run by faceless men. She was genocide with a smile laying on a
rumpled bed with a whore's baroque lamp on the stand beside her.
She was matted hair piled in bins and shoes heaped to await new
feet. And she smiled.
Arthur had no idea how any of this would fulfill his
instructions, but the tape was ordered by a very insistent
customer, one who had a reputation for knowing what he was after.
So Arthur didn't question the command, merely followed his
instincts and built the effects until they felt right and hoped
to God the results would get the Devil off his back.
Her hands were bloody, a cheap effect done with colored water and
corn starch. The blood dripped thickly from the tips of her
fingers. (Careful not to stain the sheets; they needed the set
for a commercial taping at nine.) She was a woman again, naked
and smeared with Arthur's ersatz blood. He switched the key to
project the carnage on the pale blue bed linen, and she was
smoothing her hands over her thighs as police in riot gear
marched across the bed beneath her. She smiled on cue with the
first impact of a club, laughing to the rhythm of tear gas
canisters bouncing across the pavement spilling thick gray smoke
into the crowd.
Just as she laughed at the rice paddies and burned children, at
the Klansmen setting fire to their cross, at the row of silent
bodies crucified along the roadside. (Arthur swiped that last
bit from a print of Spartacus.)
It was after four in the morning and his subject was yawning and
rubbing her eyes. She was a student, and used to modeling for
art classes, but it had taken a substantial payment to overcome
her skepticism about his late night art project. She has every
right to worry about my motives, he thought as he moved the
camera in for a tight shot, but not for any reason she's heard
of. No, my perversion goes much deeper than sex.
He smiled reassuringly, telling her that this was the last shot,
and ran back to the control room fighting the headache and nausea
that had become an integral part of his life.
Saving the best for last, he began a nuclear war on the pillow
beside her. It was a bitch to be working alone and have to keep
running between the studio and control room himself, but this
dream had to be absolutely correct, as well as absolutely secret.
His sanity depended on it.
Her face entered the screen from the right, just enough to see
her eyes and mouth as she watched the empty expanse of pillow
next to her head. He had to leave room for the bomb.
She laughed at the fire storm he created by patching the black
and white film through the color generator. The rising cloud was
red and highlighted by hot pink against the vibrant blue backdrop
of the New Mexican desert. Garish and tasteless.
Was it too heavy handed? Of course it was, but he had decided to
leave the colors alone. The sickening brightness made the black
and white Nazi film all the more gruesome.
He finished taping at four-thirty, sending her back to the campus
with an extra twenty for her trouble. There was still an audio
track to mix but time has run out.
He rewound the tapes on their large, aluminum reels and removed
them from the machines, returned the equipment to the standard
settings, and turned out the lights in the control room as he
carried the tapes out to the studio to slip the camera back up
against the wall and remake the bed in the mock bedroom set up in
one corner of the studio. It was two minutes after five when
Arthur started his car in the empty studio lot. Time to get some
sleep if possible.
#
Arthur Charles never remembered his dreams. Some mornings he
woke with the clear impression that he had been dreaming, but the
substance always escaped him. Surely there was some Freudian
conclusion to be drawn from that, but he never let it worry him.
His dreams, or lack of them, were always the least of his
worries.
But then he only rarely had headaches, too. Now they were a
daily thing. He woke to throbbing temples and the pain grew with
the day, held back by hourly doses of aspirin that did less and
less good. He lived with the headaches for two months, barely
remembering anything but the pain. Only in sleep was he free,
but sleep had become a greater horror.
The nightmares that bound him to his nocturnal task predated the
headaches by at least a month, though he wasn't really sure when
they began. At first he was amused by them. When party
conversations had taken their invariable drunken turn to dreams,
he had always been the one branded unimaginative and dull because
he couldn't remember ever dreaming. Now he would have a couple
juicy dreams to report. But every night brought fresh corpses
and the all too real sensations of taloned fingers gripping his
throat. Every night, the nightmares became more real.
The dreams cost him a relationship that had come close to
committing itself to forever. Susan Wilson had given up on his
nightly writhing and sudden tears. She tried to help, but her
lost sleep and his sudden changes in mood had torn that
commitment from her. He was almost glad to see her move out. It
saved him the embarrassment of explanations.
He fought sleep, sitting up with an unread book open in his lap
till it caught up with him in his chair, descending unnoticed and
assailing him with demons.
They were different every night, and that difference made them
all the more threatening. He could have adjusted to the same
parade of horror rerun nightly, but not knowing what he would see
made sleep seem worse than death.
Then, after so many tortured nights suffering the horrible whims
of those dreams, a purpose had become clear, a strident demand
entered the dreamscape. Let me out! And, without knowing how,
he knew what to do to escape the dreaming. He knew the what, not
the why, and had no idea if it could possibly work, but he knew
what was expected of him. And so, he was doing as the dreams
commanded.
Would it let him sleep now? Would it be satisfied that he was
doing his best?
#
He was dreaming. The steel claws tore chunks of flesh from his
cheek and reached for his eyes. He couldn't see the face within
the hood, only the cruel mouth grinning at him, gloating. "Let
me out." The harsh voice hissed, demanding release. "Out!" And
the fingers rose into his vision, too close to focus on them, the
gleaming claws painted with blood.
He woke as they began to press against his eyes, the lids
fluttering against the smooth surface of the nails, and laid
twisted in the bedclothes with an oily film of cold perspiration
coating his body.
Seven a.m. Too tired to rise from the dampened bed. Lying back,
staring at the ceiling, trying to keep his eyes open. Fading.
Fading.
And they were breaking down his door, the hooded demon with the
small, pallid creatures scuttling behind him like twisted
monkeys, their claws clicking across the hardwood floor. "Let me
out!" The voice of thunder issued from within the hood, the
steel claws extending toward him, pointing, accusing. The things
around him pointed their gnarled fingers, mimicking their master
and grinning wetly. "Let me out!" And they jumped upon the bed
as the demon called again, pulling Arthur out to the floor with
hands like snails and steel. The walls exploded and they dragged
him to the alter as the demon drew back the cloth covering the
sacrifice. It was Susan, eviscerated, steaming in the cold air,
her eyes open and turning toward him as he was dragged close
enough to see her heart still pumping atop the bloodied mass
strewn over her breasts. "Let me out," she said, her voice a
reedy whistle, thin and far away. And the demon pressed one
steel claw against her throat, pushing it into flesh that melted
like butter, blood hissing against his hand.
And he was upright, screaming. Sunlight fell across the bed, hot
in his eyes. Eight-thirty. Time for work.
#
The day was like all the others. He delegated his authority to
the crew, letting them pick their own shots as he pushed his
protesting body through the commercials on his taping schedule.
The furniture commercial at nine went smoothly, as did the
uninspired slide shows for the local grocery specials. They had
a car dealer to contend with after lunch, juggling three station
wagons in the suddenly too small studio. He left it up to the
crew and retreated to the men's room to stand retching stale air
into the sink.
The demon was in the mirror, watching, laughing, breathing cold
air on Arthur's neck.
#
He had a voice synthesizer connected to the audio board letting
the tape roll as he went to the booth to create his nightmare's
voice. His head throbbed to the rhythm of some imagined music, a
hellish melody composed of noise and fear. "Let me out!" he
shouted into the microphone, listening to the echoing basso
screech of his voice returning through the headset. "Let me out!
Out!" Laughing then, he howled against the cold mesh of the mike
head. "Out!"
But would it be right? How could it possibly be right? How
could his feeble manipulations of sound and light satisfy the
demon?
He mixed The Rolling Stones with Black Sabbath and with Matovoni
playing backwards on a tape loop, added his distorted voice and
the steady pronouncements of a gong. Not enough. He ran the
mess through the synthesizer again, reducing it to pure noise
with occasional words escaping. Yes. It sounded right. The
demon within him proclaimed it good.
Working feverishly, he set up his tapes, running the last night's
product to try out different computer effects. The video
stretched and bent, turning onto itself and shattering like dirty
glass to reform in agony. It slowed and expanded to focus on one
gaunt hand, a dead, staring eye. Yes!
He dubbed the audio over the undulating video, watching the
monitors, licking his dry lips. Yes!
Things were beginning to happen on the monitor before him. He
could see it. The tape was no longer the sum of the pieces he
recorded but more. It had become a breathing expansion of the
fear he'd tried to capture, as if his production work was merely
the canvas on which the demon would complete the work. His
nightmares were there, all of them complete and dancing across
the screens like mad elves. He could not begin to understand how
it happened, how the images he taped were giving birth to what he
saw, but it was all there in sight and sound. The demon was
there. The death was there. Every small sin he'd ever
committed, ever been witness to, every petty hatred, was there
fluttering across the screen. Every sadness he'd ever known,
every shattered dream. And it was so hopeless and lonely, even
beyond the worst of his dreams, an indescribable sensation
captured on video tape.
He was crying, pushing his fists hard against his eyes and
sobbing uncontrollably. He knew that they would be seeing what
he saw--a parade of their own personal defeats and frustrations,
a display of the despair hidden within their souls.
"Forgive me!" His voice broke, shattering into a wail. "Please,
God, forgive me!"
But all he really wanted was to sleep without dreaming.
#
Now he is sitting in his living room watching the TV and waiting
for the promised release. He kills the remainder of his beer and
pops open another as Alexis chatters on the screen before him.
His artistic triumph will be unveiled in the local break in HARD
COPY, a spot guaranteed to fill his needs. He had replaced the
new car commercial with his piece, artfully hidden on the tape
behind the color bars and ten seconds of the proper ad. They'd
never check beyond that.
He tastes the beer, his fifth in less than two hours as he works
through a twelve-pack. He can't seem to get drunk to save his
soul.
His soul.
If the demon had let him use the gun the night Susan left he
wouldn't be worried about his soul. And if it would allow him to
pick up the telephone he might still have time to save it. But
it sits within him guarding his conscience and laughing, taunting
him with promises that are all too good to be true.
Self preservation is the strongest instinct. Kill or be killed.
Nothing is wrong if it stops your pain. No atrocity is too much
when your life is at stake.
Time is passing and the viewers chuckling over televised greed
and misery are about to get a rare treat--their own greed and
misery televised as an intermission filler. What results the
tape will have, he can only guess. He finishes his beer and
reaches for another, waiting for the hammer within his head to
stop.
The noise begins and she is glistening on the screen, her body
flowing, twisting, and flying across the plains of death. The
blue circle contains the face, hoodless, revealed at last. The
television chants of death and disease, murder served up on the
half-shell and suicide exulted to an art. The screen explodes
with garish color and blood and fades to black.
Arthur stares at the blank screen. The next commercial is not
run. Dynasty does not return immediately. The set is black for
endless minutes, then the network pops on, catching an actor in
mid sentence. And Arthur is aware of his painlessness. The
throbbing is gone.
And he is so tired.
Across the city sirens wail. A barking dog is trampled by an
angry crowd of neighbors outside Arthur's window as gunshots ring
out in the night. There are explosions and the screams of fire
trucks rushing across the city. Husbands and wives stalk each
other through darkened houses, knives ready, eyes reflecting the
flat blue moonlight like ice. Children cry unheard as the fists
strike home, and rapists grow from the most ordinary of men. In
the streets they scour themselves with mud and fashion fence
stakes into spears, hunting naked in restless packs thirsty for
blood. All the sounds of fear echo through the night air, the
howling cries of pain and misery. The demon is set free to live
within those weak enough to accept him, come to them through a
personalized representation of their own sins and folly.
Impatient as always, Mephistopheles has taken the easy path,
gathering what he can among the mass of crying souls already so
close to the edge that the smallest push is all they needed. And
he is laughing.
Alone, slumped before his jabbering television set, Arthur
Charles sleeps. He sleeps deeply and without dreaming, unaware
of the anarchy around him.
And he is sleeping when the first brick smashes through his
window. He sleeps as they hammer down his door and enter in a
tide of angry flesh flooding in around his chair. He awakens
with only a moment left, looking up at their bloodied faces,
their grinning hungry teeth. And then the pipe descends across
his skull, falling again and again until he is given the rest he
was promised and the Devil's new servants are allowed to have
their feast.
There will be investigations and psychological studies and
commission reports after peace has been restored and the bodies
are all counted. But they will reach no meaningful conclusions.
It will be regarded as an anomaly, a never to be repeated spasm
of hatred and fear sweeping through an urban population.
But now, while the fires are still burning in Minneapolis, Jack
Burdell, production director of WCWD in Atlanta, Georgia, is
writhing in the grip of a dream. The steel talons rise again,
and the harvest continues.
COPYRIGHT 1986 BY
Dana M Anderson
715 W. 4th St.
Northfield, MN 55057
(507) 645-7170
by Dana M Anderson
Blue on blue and the colors buzzed into each other, a pale blue
circle all frazzled at the edges that expanded on the navy field.
Fade to pink on blood red, then to electric yellow on violet till
the circle expanded beyond the screen and the image behind it
could be dimly seen. Mouth moving, emitting light, eyes that
opened to swallow all color. Fading away. Fading away.
It was well after midnight and Arthur Charles was working alone
in the studios of WKKW TV in Minneapolis, Minnesota. As
commercial production director at the station he would normally
have had a full crew to complete the work, but he had to do this
alone. No one must ever know it was he who committed this sin.
So he rushed to adjust the two-inch video machines, and set the
shot on camera three out in the studio, where an impatient model
sat naked and sweating under the lights. He tuned the color
generator and chroma-key himself, completing the electronic
rituals without thought while hurrying to make his five-thirty
deadline, when he would have to clear out any sign of his night
long session before the morning engineer arrived to sign-on.
But could he complete a dream in less than four hours?
Arthur adjusted the chroma-key slightly and told his subject over
the studio p.a. to smile. Her teeth caught the light and
glistened bright green, confusing the video equipment with the
intensity of their whiteness. Arthur adjusted the knob to
increase the defect until her whole mouth was obliterated by the
color keying through.
Could a nightmare be captured on two inch tape? Could reality?
He cued the tape on VTR 1 for a ten second roll, then adjusted
VTR 2 slightly and cued it, rolling 2 on the electronically
generated black, fading to 1 and the blue.
Blue on blue and buzzing like color stolen from an electric
rainbow, expanding and flowing through the colors to the face. A
smile and moss grows within it, vibrating with hot color. The
eyes sucked the color from the scene and she was a negative
image, black on silvery gray, but her eyes were hot white slits.
It was dream time and she was the demon of his nightmares whose
voice he has not yet begun to create.
And if you could capture a nightmare, how well would it carry to
a nineteen inch screen?
Behind her breasts a man was wading through a river as Arthur
adjusted the chroma-key to use her pale flesh as a projection
screen. (He had to settle for a Hollywood war because there
wasn't any Vietnam footage on file.) The man was hip deep in the
muddy water, gun held over his head, when the bullets hit him,
staggering him back, his dying expression lost behind the
burgundy hue of one nipple. She was muddy brown and rippling
from his fall. Her face was green with the tall grass on the far
bank of the river where the enemy was concealed. Small puffs of
smoke appeared. She smiled, and she was a sparkling image, green
on orange. Her eyes were hollow pits, sightless and old. Old
beyond all years.
But would anyone see it? Would they grasp the horror of his
dream? Did video require narration to achieve it's goal or was
the image enough? Was the music essential to acceptance?
Could there be peace after the broken bodies plowed into the
earth across her reclining form? She was a black and white film,
a pile of gaunt bodies stiffly resisting the fall and bulldozers
run by faceless men. She was genocide with a smile laying on a
rumpled bed with a whore's baroque lamp on the stand beside her.
She was matted hair piled in bins and shoes heaped to await new
feet. And she smiled.
Arthur had no idea how any of this would fulfill his
instructions, but the tape was ordered by a very insistent
customer, one who had a reputation for knowing what he was after.
So Arthur didn't question the command, merely followed his
instincts and built the effects until they felt right and hoped
to God the results would get the Devil off his back.
Her hands were bloody, a cheap effect done with colored water and
corn starch. The blood dripped thickly from the tips of her
fingers. (Careful not to stain the sheets; they needed the set
for a commercial taping at nine.) She was a woman again, naked
and smeared with Arthur's ersatz blood. He switched the key to
project the carnage on the pale blue bed linen, and she was
smoothing her hands over her thighs as police in riot gear
marched across the bed beneath her. She smiled on cue with the
first impact of a club, laughing to the rhythm of tear gas
canisters bouncing across the pavement spilling thick gray smoke
into the crowd.
Just as she laughed at the rice paddies and burned children, at
the Klansmen setting fire to their cross, at the row of silent
bodies crucified along the roadside. (Arthur swiped that last
bit from a print of Spartacus.)
It was after four in the morning and his subject was yawning and
rubbing her eyes. She was a student, and used to modeling for
art classes, but it had taken a substantial payment to overcome
her skepticism about his late night art project. She has every
right to worry about my motives, he thought as he moved the
camera in for a tight shot, but not for any reason she's heard
of. No, my perversion goes much deeper than sex.
He smiled reassuringly, telling her that this was the last shot,
and ran back to the control room fighting the headache and nausea
that had become an integral part of his life.
Saving the best for last, he began a nuclear war on the pillow
beside her. It was a bitch to be working alone and have to keep
running between the studio and control room himself, but this
dream had to be absolutely correct, as well as absolutely secret.
His sanity depended on it.
Her face entered the screen from the right, just enough to see
her eyes and mouth as she watched the empty expanse of pillow
next to her head. He had to leave room for the bomb.
She laughed at the fire storm he created by patching the black
and white film through the color generator. The rising cloud was
red and highlighted by hot pink against the vibrant blue backdrop
of the New Mexican desert. Garish and tasteless.
Was it too heavy handed? Of course it was, but he had decided to
leave the colors alone. The sickening brightness made the black
and white Nazi film all the more gruesome.
He finished taping at four-thirty, sending her back to the campus
with an extra twenty for her trouble. There was still an audio
track to mix but time has run out.
He rewound the tapes on their large, aluminum reels and removed
them from the machines, returned the equipment to the standard
settings, and turned out the lights in the control room as he
carried the tapes out to the studio to slip the camera back up
against the wall and remake the bed in the mock bedroom set up in
one corner of the studio. It was two minutes after five when
Arthur started his car in the empty studio lot. Time to get some
sleep if possible.
#
Arthur Charles never remembered his dreams. Some mornings he
woke with the clear impression that he had been dreaming, but the
substance always escaped him. Surely there was some Freudian
conclusion to be drawn from that, but he never let it worry him.
His dreams, or lack of them, were always the least of his
worries.
But then he only rarely had headaches, too. Now they were a
daily thing. He woke to throbbing temples and the pain grew with
the day, held back by hourly doses of aspirin that did less and
less good. He lived with the headaches for two months, barely
remembering anything but the pain. Only in sleep was he free,
but sleep had become a greater horror.
The nightmares that bound him to his nocturnal task predated the
headaches by at least a month, though he wasn't really sure when
they began. At first he was amused by them. When party
conversations had taken their invariable drunken turn to dreams,
he had always been the one branded unimaginative and dull because
he couldn't remember ever dreaming. Now he would have a couple
juicy dreams to report. But every night brought fresh corpses
and the all too real sensations of taloned fingers gripping his
throat. Every night, the nightmares became more real.
The dreams cost him a relationship that had come close to
committing itself to forever. Susan Wilson had given up on his
nightly writhing and sudden tears. She tried to help, but her
lost sleep and his sudden changes in mood had torn that
commitment from her. He was almost glad to see her move out. It
saved him the embarrassment of explanations.
He fought sleep, sitting up with an unread book open in his lap
till it caught up with him in his chair, descending unnoticed and
assailing him with demons.
They were different every night, and that difference made them
all the more threatening. He could have adjusted to the same
parade of horror rerun nightly, but not knowing what he would see
made sleep seem worse than death.
Then, after so many tortured nights suffering the horrible whims
of those dreams, a purpose had become clear, a strident demand
entered the dreamscape. Let me out! And, without knowing how,
he knew what to do to escape the dreaming. He knew the what, not
the why, and had no idea if it could possibly work, but he knew
what was expected of him. And so, he was doing as the dreams
commanded.
Would it let him sleep now? Would it be satisfied that he was
doing his best?
#
He was dreaming. The steel claws tore chunks of flesh from his
cheek and reached for his eyes. He couldn't see the face within
the hood, only the cruel mouth grinning at him, gloating. "Let
me out." The harsh voice hissed, demanding release. "Out!" And
the fingers rose into his vision, too close to focus on them, the
gleaming claws painted with blood.
He woke as they began to press against his eyes, the lids
fluttering against the smooth surface of the nails, and laid
twisted in the bedclothes with an oily film of cold perspiration
coating his body.
Seven a.m. Too tired to rise from the dampened bed. Lying back,
staring at the ceiling, trying to keep his eyes open. Fading.
Fading.
And they were breaking down his door, the hooded demon with the
small, pallid creatures scuttling behind him like twisted
monkeys, their claws clicking across the hardwood floor. "Let me
out!" The voice of thunder issued from within the hood, the
steel claws extending toward him, pointing, accusing. The things
around him pointed their gnarled fingers, mimicking their master
and grinning wetly. "Let me out!" And they jumped upon the bed
as the demon called again, pulling Arthur out to the floor with
hands like snails and steel. The walls exploded and they dragged
him to the alter as the demon drew back the cloth covering the
sacrifice. It was Susan, eviscerated, steaming in the cold air,
her eyes open and turning toward him as he was dragged close
enough to see her heart still pumping atop the bloodied mass
strewn over her breasts. "Let me out," she said, her voice a
reedy whistle, thin and far away. And the demon pressed one
steel claw against her throat, pushing it into flesh that melted
like butter, blood hissing against his hand.
And he was upright, screaming. Sunlight fell across the bed, hot
in his eyes. Eight-thirty. Time for work.
#
The day was like all the others. He delegated his authority to
the crew, letting them pick their own shots as he pushed his
protesting body through the commercials on his taping schedule.
The furniture commercial at nine went smoothly, as did the
uninspired slide shows for the local grocery specials. They had
a car dealer to contend with after lunch, juggling three station
wagons in the suddenly too small studio. He left it up to the
crew and retreated to the men's room to stand retching stale air
into the sink.
The demon was in the mirror, watching, laughing, breathing cold
air on Arthur's neck.
#
He had a voice synthesizer connected to the audio board letting
the tape roll as he went to the booth to create his nightmare's
voice. His head throbbed to the rhythm of some imagined music, a
hellish melody composed of noise and fear. "Let me out!" he
shouted into the microphone, listening to the echoing basso
screech of his voice returning through the headset. "Let me out!
Out!" Laughing then, he howled against the cold mesh of the mike
head. "Out!"
But would it be right? How could it possibly be right? How
could his feeble manipulations of sound and light satisfy the
demon?
He mixed The Rolling Stones with Black Sabbath and with Matovoni
playing backwards on a tape loop, added his distorted voice and
the steady pronouncements of a gong. Not enough. He ran the
mess through the synthesizer again, reducing it to pure noise
with occasional words escaping. Yes. It sounded right. The
demon within him proclaimed it good.
Working feverishly, he set up his tapes, running the last night's
product to try out different computer effects. The video
stretched and bent, turning onto itself and shattering like dirty
glass to reform in agony. It slowed and expanded to focus on one
gaunt hand, a dead, staring eye. Yes!
He dubbed the audio over the undulating video, watching the
monitors, licking his dry lips. Yes!
Things were beginning to happen on the monitor before him. He
could see it. The tape was no longer the sum of the pieces he
recorded but more. It had become a breathing expansion of the
fear he'd tried to capture, as if his production work was merely
the canvas on which the demon would complete the work. His
nightmares were there, all of them complete and dancing across
the screens like mad elves. He could not begin to understand how
it happened, how the images he taped were giving birth to what he
saw, but it was all there in sight and sound. The demon was
there. The death was there. Every small sin he'd ever
committed, ever been witness to, every petty hatred, was there
fluttering across the screen. Every sadness he'd ever known,
every shattered dream. And it was so hopeless and lonely, even
beyond the worst of his dreams, an indescribable sensation
captured on video tape.
He was crying, pushing his fists hard against his eyes and
sobbing uncontrollably. He knew that they would be seeing what
he saw--a parade of their own personal defeats and frustrations,
a display of the despair hidden within their souls.
"Forgive me!" His voice broke, shattering into a wail. "Please,
God, forgive me!"
But all he really wanted was to sleep without dreaming.
#
Now he is sitting in his living room watching the TV and waiting
for the promised release. He kills the remainder of his beer and
pops open another as Alexis chatters on the screen before him.
His artistic triumph will be unveiled in the local break in HARD
COPY, a spot guaranteed to fill his needs. He had replaced the
new car commercial with his piece, artfully hidden on the tape
behind the color bars and ten seconds of the proper ad. They'd
never check beyond that.
He tastes the beer, his fifth in less than two hours as he works
through a twelve-pack. He can't seem to get drunk to save his
soul.
His soul.
If the demon had let him use the gun the night Susan left he
wouldn't be worried about his soul. And if it would allow him to
pick up the telephone he might still have time to save it. But
it sits within him guarding his conscience and laughing, taunting
him with promises that are all too good to be true.
Self preservation is the strongest instinct. Kill or be killed.
Nothing is wrong if it stops your pain. No atrocity is too much
when your life is at stake.
Time is passing and the viewers chuckling over televised greed
and misery are about to get a rare treat--their own greed and
misery televised as an intermission filler. What results the
tape will have, he can only guess. He finishes his beer and
reaches for another, waiting for the hammer within his head to
stop.
The noise begins and she is glistening on the screen, her body
flowing, twisting, and flying across the plains of death. The
blue circle contains the face, hoodless, revealed at last. The
television chants of death and disease, murder served up on the
half-shell and suicide exulted to an art. The screen explodes
with garish color and blood and fades to black.
Arthur stares at the blank screen. The next commercial is not
run. Dynasty does not return immediately. The set is black for
endless minutes, then the network pops on, catching an actor in
mid sentence. And Arthur is aware of his painlessness. The
throbbing is gone.
And he is so tired.
Across the city sirens wail. A barking dog is trampled by an
angry crowd of neighbors outside Arthur's window as gunshots ring
out in the night. There are explosions and the screams of fire
trucks rushing across the city. Husbands and wives stalk each
other through darkened houses, knives ready, eyes reflecting the
flat blue moonlight like ice. Children cry unheard as the fists
strike home, and rapists grow from the most ordinary of men. In
the streets they scour themselves with mud and fashion fence
stakes into spears, hunting naked in restless packs thirsty for
blood. All the sounds of fear echo through the night air, the
howling cries of pain and misery. The demon is set free to live
within those weak enough to accept him, come to them through a
personalized representation of their own sins and folly.
Impatient as always, Mephistopheles has taken the easy path,
gathering what he can among the mass of crying souls already so
close to the edge that the smallest push is all they needed. And
he is laughing.
Alone, slumped before his jabbering television set, Arthur
Charles sleeps. He sleeps deeply and without dreaming, unaware
of the anarchy around him.
And he is sleeping when the first brick smashes through his
window. He sleeps as they hammer down his door and enter in a
tide of angry flesh flooding in around his chair. He awakens
with only a moment left, looking up at their bloodied faces,
their grinning hungry teeth. And then the pipe descends across
his skull, falling again and again until he is given the rest he
was promised and the Devil's new servants are allowed to have
their feast.
There will be investigations and psychological studies and
commission reports after peace has been restored and the bodies
are all counted. But they will reach no meaningful conclusions.
It will be regarded as an anomaly, a never to be repeated spasm
of hatred and fear sweeping through an urban population.
But now, while the fires are still burning in Minneapolis, Jack
Burdell, production director of WCWD in Atlanta, Georgia, is
writhing in the grip of a dream. The steel talons rise again,
and the harvest continues.
COPYRIGHT 1986 BY
Dana M Anderson
715 W. 4th St.
Northfield, MN 55057
(507) 645-7170
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