I was too weak to rise. When at last I found the strength, I crawled weakly out of the pipe, into the waiting dark.
RED LIGHT.
by David J. Schow.
A relative newcomer to the field, David J. Schow has become a favorite of readers and reviewers of The Year"s Best Horror Stories with his entries in the last three volumes. It has to be a matter of writing excellence, since each story evoked a different mood than the others-and "Red Light" is no exception.
The versatile David J. Schow was born on July 13, 1955, in Marburg, West Germany-a German orphan adopted by American parents. After seeing the world in his younger days, Schow seems to have settled in Los Angeles. His short fiction has appeared in Twilight Zone Magazine, Night Cry, Weird Tales, Whispers, and elsewhere, and he has been a columnist for various publications and a contributing editor to film books. His most recent opus is The Outer Limits: The Official Companion from Ace-the long-expected guide to that television series. Schow has also written some sixteen television/film tie-ins and series books, under various names. Under his own name, look out for The Kill Riff and The Shaft, both horror novels from Tor. Meanwhile Schow is busy over a pair of horror anthologies. He admits to having invented the term "splatterpunk" at a very-late-night party.
Tabloid headlines always make me laugh. You know: I Aborted Bigfoot"s Quints, or See Elvis" Rotting Nude Corpse, or Exclusive on Jack the Ripper"s Grandson! Earlier today, while pa.s.sing one of those Market Street news vendors, I saw similar hyperbolic screamers, and I laughed. I did not want to laugh: it came out as a sick coughing sound.
TASHA VODE STILL MISSING.
Terrorist Kidnapping of International Cover Girl Not Ruled Out.
What the h.e.l.l did they know about her? Not what I knew. They were like vampires; they sucked, ethically. Morally.
But what did that make me?
At the top of the dungheap was the good old National Perspirer, the hot, steaming p.o.o.p on Tasha"s disappearance, and how one of three juicy fates had befallen her. One: She had pulled a Marilyn Monroe. Two: She had had a Dorothy Stratten pulled on her by some gonzo fruitbag lover. Three: She was tucked away in the Frances Farmer suite at some remote, tastefully isolated lunatic asylum.
Or maybe she was forking over richly to manufacture all this furious controversy in order to boost her asking price up into the troposphere-in a word, hoax time.
It was pathetic. It made my gut throb with hurt and loss, and downtown San Francisco diffused behind a hot salt-wash of welling tears. I blamed the emissions of the Cal Trans buses lumbering up and down the street, knowing full well I couldn"t cop such a rationalization, because the buses ran off electricity, like the mostly-defunct streetcars. Once, I"d nearly been decapitated by one of the rooftop conductor poles when it broke loose from the overhead webwork of wires and came swinging past, boomlow, alongside the moving bus, sparking viciously and banging off a potted sidewalk tree a foot above my head, zizzing and snapping. Welcome to the Bay Area.
I had no real excuse for tears now, and wiped my eyes with the heel of my hand. My left hand; my good hand. I was still getting used to the weight of the new cast on my other one. One of our famous denizens of the streets had stopped to stare at me. I stared back, head to toe, from the cloud of gnats around his matted hair to the solid-carbon crustiness of his bare, black feet. He had caught me crying, with his mad-prophet eyes, and the grin that snaked his face lewdly open suggested that yes, I should howl, with grief, I should pull out a Mauser and start plugging pedestrians. I put my legs in gear instead, leaving him behind with the news kiosk, the scungy, sensationalist headlines, and all those horrifyingly flawless pictures of her. The b.u.m and I ceased to exist for each other the moment we parted.
I know what happened to Tasha. Like a recurring dream, she showed up unannounced on my doorstep just four days ago. Like a ghost then, like a ghost now.
People read People. The truth, they never really want to know, and for good reason.
Her real name was Claudia Katz. In 1975, n.o.body important knew my name, or either of hers, and I"d already shot thousands of pictures of her. When I replaced my el cheapo scoop lamps with electronically synchronized umbrella shades so new that their glitter hurt your eyes even when they weren"t flashing, I commemorated the event by photographing her. New Year"s Eve, 1974-five seconds before midnight, I let a whole roll rip past on autowind, catching her as she pa.s.sed from one year into the next. Edited down, that sequence won me a plaque. Today, it"s noteworthy only because Tasha is the subject.
"Claudia Katz is too spiky and d.y.k.ey," she explained later, as she pulled off her workout shirt and aired a chest that would never need the a.s.sistance of the Maidenform Corporation, b.r.e.a.s.t.s that would soon have the subscribership of Playboy eating their fingernails. "Claudia Katz is somebody who does chain mail and leather doggie-collar spreads for b.i.t.c.h Records. Claudia Katz is not somebody you"ll find on the staple page in Sports Ill.u.s.trated"s Swimsuit Issue."
I pushed back an f-stop and refocused. "Part your lips. Stop. Give me the tip of your tongue, just inside your teeth." Her mouth was invitingly moist; the star-filters would trap some nice little highlights. Click-whirr click-whirr. "Tilt your head back. Not so much ... stop." I got a magnified closeup of the muscles beneath her skin, moving through the slow, programmed dance of positions. My big fan was on, making her amber hair float. "Hands together, arms back over your head. Turn, turn, turn ... whoa, right there, stop!" Click-whirr-another thousandth of a second, immobilized. "Sports Ill.u.s.trated? Why bother aiming it at a bunch of beer-swilling beat-offs in baseball caps, anyway?"
"You don"t understand the way the world works, do you?" She spoke to the camera lens, because she knew I was in there, watching. "You"ve got to make people look at your picture and either want you, or want to be you. When they antic.i.p.ate your next picture, that means they"re fantasizing about you. Saying to themselves, "Geez, I wonder what she looks like in bed, without that d.a.m.ned bathing suit on?"
It was my privilege to know the answer to that one already. Grinning, I baited her: "The women say that, do they?"
"No, not the women, you dork." The warm, come-hither expression on her face was entirely contrary to her tone. She was, after all, very good at her job. Click-whirr. "The men. When all the men in the country, in the world, l.u.s.t for you, then you can say no to the lot of them. If all the men want you, then all the women l.u.s.t to be you. Voila."
"Excluding lesbians, Tibetan lamas and some Kalahari bushmen." Her reply begged my sarcasm. She expected it. "Not that, um, l.u.s.t and envy aren"t admirable goals ..."
If I had not been shooting, her brow would have rearranged and a familiar crease would appear between her eyes, indicating her annoyance at my childish, defeatist, irrelevant, smarta.s.s remark. And then she"d say- "You just don"t understand." Right on cue. "But I"ll be on top someday. You"ll see."
"I"d like to see you on top after you finish your shower." It flew out of my mouth before I could stop it. File a lawsuit if you want. "It"s your turn."
She decided not to blow up, and rolled her eyes to keep from giggling. Click-whirr. My heart fumbled a beat. I"d just netted a shot of an honest-to-U.S.-Grant human being, peeking out from behind a cover-girl facade of plastic. Nude from the waist up, sensual not from flaunted s.e.xuality, but because her expression let you in on the secret that the whole sham was strictly for laughs and wages. A real woman, not a fantasy image. I wanted that photo. It reduced the rest of the roll to an exhausted, mundane repertoire of t.i.t shots-pretty billboard face, pasted-on bedroom eyes of that inhuman chromium color, the "ideal," a dime per double dozen from one shining sea to the next, from the four-star hookers at the Beverly Hills Hotel to the smartly attired, totally paranoid corporate ladies who took their Manhattan business lunches in neat quarters.
"To h.e.l.l with the shower," she had said then, lunging at me with mischief in her eyes.
I still have that photo. Not framed, not displayed. I don"t make the effort to look at it anymore. I can"t.
Claudia-Tasha-got precisely what she wanted. That part you know, unless you"ve spent the last decade eating wallaby-burgers in the Australian outback. The tiny differences in the way we perceived the world and its opportunities finally grew large enough to wedge between us. Her astronomical income had little to do with it. It was me. I made the cla.s.sic mistake of trying to keep her by blurting out proclamations of love before my career, my life, was fully mobilized. When you"re clawing through the riptide of your twenties, it"s like a cosmic rule that you cannot be totally satisfied by your emotional life and your professional life simultaneously. We had been climbing partners, until I put everything on hold to fall in love with her. So she left, and became famous. Not many people know my name even today. They don"t have to; I pull down a plush enough income. But it did come to pa.s.s that everybody wanted Tasha. Everybody still does.
I was halfway through my third mug of coffee at the Hotel Restaurant when I admitted to myself that I was consciously avoiding going home. Bad stuff waited for me out there. A Latino busboy had made off with my plate. Past the smokey front windows, Geary Street was acruise with the bunboys that gave the Tenderloin its rep. In New York, where things are less euphemistic, they"re called f.u.d.g.e.p.a.c.k.e.rs. I wondered what gays made of all the media fuss over Tasha.
Nicole was giving me the eye. She"s my favorite combat-hardened coffeeshop waitress in the charted universe, an elegant willowsprout of West Indies mocha black, with a heaving bosom and a lilting, exotic way of speaking the English language. When I watch her move about her ch.o.r.es at the Hostel, I think she"d probably jump my bones on the spot if she thought I could click-whirr her into the Tasha Vode saddle-worldwide model, budding cinema star, headliner. And still missing. When I try to formulate some logical nonsense for what happened to her, I fail just like I did with the street b.u.m. Nothing comes out. Instead, I watch Nicole as she strolls over to recharge my cup. She watches me watching her.
"How"d you know I wanted more, Nicole?"
She narrows her panther eyes and blesses me with an evil smile. "Because you white boys always want more, hon."
My house c.u.m studio hangs off the north end of the Fieldings" Point Pier, which is owned by a white-maned, sea-salt type named d.i.c.kie Barnhardt, whom no mortal dares address as "Richard." He sold me my home and plays caretaker to his pier. I live in a fabulous, indifferently-planned spill-together of rooms, like building blocks dumped haphazardly into a corner. Spiderwebbing it together are twelve crooked little stairways, inside and out. At first I called it my Dr. Seuss House. On the very top is a lighthouse tower that still works. d.i.c.kie showed me how to operate it, and from time to time I play keeper of the maritime flame because the notion is so irresistibly romantic. In return for spiffing up the place, I got another plaque-this one from the U.S. Lighthouse Society in San Francisco. Lighthouses have long been outmoded by navigational technology, and the Society is devoted to a program of historical preservation. There"s no use for my little beacon. But there are nights when I cannot bear to keep it dark.
After ten years without a postcard, Tasha knew exactly where to find me. Maybe she followed the light. I answered my downstairs door with the alkaline smell of developer clinging to my hands; the doork.n.o.b was greened from all the times I"d done it. And there she was.
Was I surprised? I knew instantly it was her, knew it from the way the ocean tilted and tried to slide off the edge of the world, knew it because all the organs in my body tried to rush together and clog up my throat.
"You look like you just swallowed a starfish," she said. She was burrowed into a minky-lush fur that hid everything but the tips of her boots. The chill sea breeze pushed wisps of her hair around. I don"t have to describe what her face looked like. If you want to know, just haul your a.s.s down to Slater"s Periodicals and check out the covers of any half-dozen current glamour and pop-fashion magazines. That"s what she looked like, brother.
Her eyes seemed backed up with tears, but maybe tears alone were insufficient to breach the Tasha forcefield, or maybe she used some brand of eyeliner so expensive that it was tear-resistant. I asked her why she was crying, invited her in, and then did not give her room to answer me. I was too busy babbling, trying to race past ten years in ten minutes and disguise my nervousness with light banter. She sensed my disorientation and rode it out, patiently, the way she used to. I fixed coffee and brandy. She sipped hers with picture-perfect lips, sitting at the breakfast overlook I"d gla.s.sed in last summer. I needed the drink. She needed contact, and hinted at it by letting her leg brush mine beneath the booth-style table. My need for chitchat and my awareness of the past hung around, dumbing things up like a stubborn chaperone. Beyond the booth"s half-turret of windowpanes, green breakers crashed onto the rocks and foamed violently away.
Her eyes cleared, marking time between me and the ocean outside. They grew darkly stormy, registering the thunderheads that were rolling in with the dusk to lash the beach with an evening sweep of rain.
At last I ran out of stupid questions.
She closed my hand up in both of hers. My heartbeat meddled with my breathing. She had already guessed which of my odd little Caligari staircases led to the bedroom loft.
The night sky was embossed by tines of lightning somewhere between us and j.a.pan. Fat drops splatted against the seaward hurricane gla.s.s and skidded to the right as a strong offsh.o.r.e wind caught and blew them. I had opened the shutters on the sh.o.r.e side, and the wooden blades of the ceiling fan cast down cool air to p.r.i.c.kle our flesh, sweat-speckled from fervent but honest lovemaking.
A lot of women had drifted through my viewfinder after Tasha had left me. Except for two or three mental time-bombs and outright snow queens, I coupled enthusiastically with all of them. I forgot how to say no. Sometimes I was artificially nice; most of the time I was making the entire s.e.x pay because one of their number had dumped me. The right people found out my name, yes. My studio filled up with eager young lovelies. No brag, just a living. I settled into a pattern of rejecting them about the time they tried to form any sort of lasting attachment, or tried to storm my meticulously erected walls. Some of them were annoyingly persistent, but I got good at predicting when they would turn sloppy and pleading ... and that made snuffing their flames oddly fulfilling. I was consistent, if not happy. I took a perverse pleasure in booting cover girls out of my bed on a regular basis, and hoped that Joe Normal was envious as h.e.l.l.
l.u.s.t. Envy. Admirable goals, I thought, as she lay with her hair covering my face, both of her legs hugging one of mine. We had turned out to be pretty much alike after all.
When I mumbled, she stirred from her doze. "What ...?"
"I said, I want a picture of you, just like you are, right this moment."
Her eyes snapped open, gleaming in the faint light. "No." She spoke into the hollow of my neck, her voice distant, the sound of it barely impressing the air. "No pictures. No more pictures. Ever."
The businessman part of my brain perked up: What neurosis could this be? Was Tasha Vode abandoning her career? Would it be as successful as her abandonment of me? And what was the difference? For what she earned in a month, I could buy the beach frontage below for several miles in both directions. What difference? I"d gotten her back, against all the rules of reality, and here I was looking for the loophole. Her career had cleaved us apart, and now it was making us cleave back together. Funny how a word can have opposing definitions.
After five minutes of tossing and turning, she decided not to make me work for it. "Got anything warm?" She cracked a helpless smile. "Down in the kitchen, I mean."
"Real cocoa. Loaded with c.r.a.p that"s bad for you. Not from an envelope. Topped with marshmallows, also real, packed with whatever carcinogens the cocoa doesn"t have."
"Sounds luscious. Bring a whole pot."
"You can help."
"No. I want to watch the storm." Water pelted the gla.s.s. Now and then lightning would suggest how turbulent the ocean had gotten, and I thought of firing up my beacon. Perhaps there was a seafarer out there who was as romantic about boats as I was about lighthouses, and he"d gotten caught in the squall without the latest in hightech directional doodads.
I did it. Then I dusted off an old TV tray for use as a serving platter, and brought the cocoa pot and accoutrements up the narrow stairs, clanking and rattling all the way.
My carbon-arc beam scanned the surface of the water in long, lazy turns. She was facing her diaphanous reflection in the gla.s.s, looking through her own image into the dark void beyond.
I had pulled on canvas pants to make the kitchen run, but Tasha was still perfectly naked and nakedly perfect, a siren contemplating shipwrecks. She drifted back from the window. I pitied my imaginary seafarer, stuck out in the cold, away from the warmth of her.
"You know those natives in Africa?" she asked as I served. "The ones who wouldn"t let missionaries take their pictures because they thought the camera would trap their souls?"
"It"s a common belief. West Indians still hold to the voodoo value of snapshots. Mucho mojo. Even bad snapshots." I couldn"t help that last remark. What a pro I am.
"You remember April McClanahan?" She spoke toward the sea. To my reflection.
"You mean Crystal Climax, right?"
She nodded. "Also of wide renown as Cherry Whipp."
All three were a lady with whom Tasha had shared a garret during her flirtation with the hardcore film industry in the early 1970s. Don"t swallow the negative hype for a second-every woman who is anyone in film or modeling has made similar contacts. Tasha never moved beyond a couple of relatively innocuous missionary-position features, respectable p.o.r.n for slumming middle-cla.s.s couples; a one-week run at the p.u.s.s.ycat Theatre, max. April, on the other hand, moved into the p.o.r.n mainstream-Hustler covers, videoca.s.sette top-lines, "Fully Erect" notices in the film ratings. And no, she didn"t get strangled or blow her brains all over a motel room with a Sat.u.r.day Night Special. Last I heard, she was doing TV commercials for bleach and fabric softener as "Valerie Winston," sort of a Marilyn Chambers in reverse.
"April once told me she"d figured out, with a calculator, that she was responsible for more o.r.g.a.s.ms in one year than anybody else," Tasha said, holding the big porcelain mug with both hands to warm her palms. "She averaged out how many movie houses were showing her films, how many times per day, multiplied by however-many guys she figured were getting their jollies in the audience per show. Plus whoever was doing likewise to her pictures in G.o.d knows how many stroke magazines. Or gratifying themselves to the s.e.x advice column she did for Leather Life. I remember her looking at me and saying, "Think of all the energy that must produce. All those o.r.g.a.s.ms were born because of me. Me." "
"I"m sure there are legions of guys getting their jollies to your photos, too," I said. "No doubt, somebody is out there yanking his crank to Christie Brinkley"s smile, right now."
"It"s not the same thing. April was tough. She got something back." She sat on the bed facing me, tucking her legs beneath her. She reminded me of Edvard Eriksen"s famous sculpture of the Little Mermaid, rendered not in bronze but shaped from milk-white moonstone, heated by living yellow electricity called down from a black sky, and warmed by warm Arctic eyes-the warmest blue there is in our world.
"You mean April didn"t mind getting that p.o.r.n-star rap laid on her-literally?"
I could see the sadness in her being blotted away by acid bitterness. "The people in p.o.r.n have it easier. The thuds out there in Bozo-land know in their tiny little hearts that p.o.r.n stars f.u.c.k for jobs. Whereas cover girls or legit models who are rarely seen in the buff, or full-frontal, are suspect."
"You can"t deny the public their imaginary intrigues."
"What it always boils down to is, "Climb off it, b.i.t.c.h-who did you really blow to get that last Vogue cover?" They feed off you. They achieve gratification in a far dirtier way, by wanting you and resenting you at the same time. By hating your success enough to keep all the tabloids in business. It"s a draining thing, all taking and no giving, like ..."
"Psychic vampirism?" It was so easy for someone in her position to sense that her public loved her only in the way a tumor loves its host. But a blacker part of my mind tasted a subtle tang of revenge. She"d left me to go chase what she wanted ... and when she"d finally sunk in her teeth, she"d gotten the flavor of bile and chalk and ashes. I suppose I should have been ashamed of myself for embracing that hateful satisfaction so readily. And from the hurt neutrality on her face, she might have been reading the thoughts in my head. She watched her cocoa instead of drinking it-always a bad sign.
Just as much as I never said no, I never apologized. Not for anything.
After a cool silence, she said, "You"re saying to yourself, "She"s got it made, for christsake. What right does she have to be dissatisfied with anything?" Right?"
"Maybe a tiny bit, yeah." She let me take her hand regardless. She needed the contact. The missing ten years settled between us to fog the issue. I was resentful, yes. Did I want to help her? Same answer. When I guiltily tried to pull back my hand she kept hold of it. It made me feel forgiven; absolved, almost.
"In science cla.s.s, in eighth grade, they taught us that when you smell something, your nose is actually drawing in tiny molecular bits of whatever it is you"re smelling. Particles."
"Which means you clamped both hands over your mouth and nose whenever you pa.s.sed a dog t.u.r.d on the sidewalk after school, am I right?" My prescription for sticky emotional situations is rigid: Always-always joke your way out.
Her smile came and went. "The idea stuck in my head. If you smelled something long enough, it would run out of molecules and poof-it wouldn"t exist anymore."
"Uh-huh, if you stood around sniffing for a couple of eons." Fortunately, I"d forgotten most of the junk with which school had tried to clog my head. About hard science I knew squat, like math. But I did know that there were billions or trillions of molecules in any given object.
"My point is that each one of us only has so much to give." She cleared her throat, almost as though it hurt her, and pressed valiantly onward. "What if you were to run out of pieces all of a sudden?"
"Happens all the time," I said airily. "That"s what a nervous breakdown is. Entertainers who can"t give their audiences an ounce more, collapse onstage. Corporate guys get physically ill and can"t go near a meeting room. People exceed their operational limits ... and you"re in one of the most high-pressure professions there is."
"No." She was shaking her head to prevent me from clouding her train of thought. "I mean run out of pieces literally. Suppose every photo of me ever taken was an infinitesimal piece? Every magazine ad, every negative, every frame of motion picture film-another tiny molecule of me, stolen away to feed an audience that is never satiated. And when someone is fully consumed-vampirized-they move on, still hungry, to pick their next victim by making him or her a star. That"s why they"re called consumers."
I looked up from the muddy lees in my cup just in time to see the pa.s.sing lighthouse beam blank the ghost of her reflection from the windowpanes. Just like her smile, it came and went.
Her voice had downshifted into the husky and quavering register of confession. Now I was really uncomfortable. "I know there are celebrities who"ve had their picture taken two million more times than I have. But maybe they can afford it." She stretched across the bed to place her head on my thigh and hug my waist, connecting herself. "Maybe some of us don"t have so many pieces ..."
I held her while the storm rallied for a renewed a.s.sault. My modest but brave beam of lamplight chopped through it. She did not grimace, or redden, or sob; her tears just began spilling out, coursing down in perfect wet lines to darken my pantleg.
Did I want to help her?
She feared that consumers wanted so much of her that pretty soon there would be nothing left to consume. And Claudia Katz no longer existed, except in my head. I"d fallen in love with her, become addicted to her ... and now she was clinging to me because Tasha Vode was almost used up, and after that, if there was no Claudia, there was nothing. She had not brought her exhaustion home to my stoop to prove she could still jerk my leash after ten years. She had done it because the so-called friends who had gorged themselves on her personality were now nodding and clucking about celebrity lifestyles and answering their machines and juggling in new appointments to replace her as the undertow dragged her away to oblivion.
I stroked her hair until it was all out of her face. The tears dried while the seastorm churned. She snoozed, curled up, her face at peace, and I gently disengaged. Then, with a zealot"s devotion toward proving her fears were all in her imagination, I went downstairs to load up one of my Nikons.
I asked her how she felt the next morning. When she said terrific, I spilled the beans.
"You what-?"
"I repeat for clarity: I took pictures of you while you were asleep. Over a hundred exposures of you wound up in my dark blue sheets, sleeping through a gale. And guess what-you"re still among the living this morning." I refilled her coffee cup and used my tongs to pluck croissants out of the warmer.
She cut lose a capacious sigh, but put her protests on hold. "Don"t do that again. Or you"ll lose me."
I wasn"t sure whether she meant she"d fade to nothingness on the spot, or stomp out if I defied her superst.i.tions a second time. "You slept like a stone, love. Barely changed position all night." My ego was begging to be told that our mattress gymnastics had put her under, but when I saw the care she took to lift her coffee cup with both hands, I knew better.
"Look at this s.h.i.t," she said with disgust. "I can barely hold up my head, let alone my coffee. I"m slouching. Models aren"t supposed to slouch, for christsake." She forced her sitting posture straight and smiled weakly. Her voice was a bit hoa.r.s.e this morning, almost clogged.
"Hey, lady-slouch away." Worry stabbed at my insides while I tried to sound expansive and confident. "Do what thou wilt. Sleep all day if that"s your pleasure. Just wait till you discover what I"ve learned to cook in the last ten years. Real salads. Stuff you have to saute. Food with wine in it. I can artistically dish up all the squares you require. Loaf on the beach; read my library. I have said it; it is good." I watched a glint of happiness try to burn away the caution in her eyes. She did so want to believe me. "And no more photographs. Promise. Anybody who tries has gotta shoot through yours truly."
She brightened at that. I"d gotten the reaction I wanted from her. It was the challenge-and-reward game. And G.o.dd.a.m.ned if that tiny acid-drop of doubt didn"t settle into my brain, sizzling-what if what if what if.
What if I was playing it safe because she might be right?
"I don"t want to see those pictures," she said. "Don"t even develop them."
"I"ll toss "em in the woodstove right now, if that"s what you"d like." I"d made my point.