The pain hits me unexpectedly. Bates has done something to the console—some sort of modification has been made to give it even greater power capabilities. I am not even able to resist; the machine reaches right to the core of my emotions and begins to suck voraciously at them. Upstairs the console announces the opening of the work with a gigantic chord in brasses, and then settles immediately into a wrenching, twisting theme in the strings. There is an ominous percussive beat in the background, insistent, ponderous and funereal. The beat increases suddenly to a pounding, terrifying level, nearly excluding all other sound. The strings begin to lash at the beat, in staccato fashion. Now the horns join in. It is as if a hundred thousand instruments have been squeezed screaming into the console and are fighting each other and themselves to get out. The level increases, and I can hear Bates howl through my own agony. The cable pads have welded themselves to the red, raw flesh on my temples. Being, existence, is torn from me by the machine above.
I don’t know how much time passes. Existence itself is one continuous, emotive cry. The cable pads rip into me, and the console level, incredibly, is still rising. The music has become one immense, flagellating note, self- destructive and unstoppable. It is out of control. There is a roar of thunder, a burst of unbelievable pain—
I am thrown back against my chair; there has been an explosion in the room above. The wall shakes; the ceiling cracks and plaster chips flake down upon me. I lay, stick-like, broken, in my chair. There is silence.
Plaster dusts the room.
After a few minutes I am able to pull myself up. The cables break away: the wires are fused. I walk, trembling, to the door. The hallway outside is twilit; I can see the dark outline of the curving stairs against the grayness. I slowly make my way up the steps.
The door to Bates’ room is open and unhinged—it has been blown outward by the explosion. Inside all is smoke. There is a sickly smell of burnt meat and wiring. I approach the console.
Bates is slumped over the typewriter, arms outstretched, charred. He is dead. I pull him back, away from the machine. Broken black wires hang from his arms and legs. His huge white eyes are turned up into his head. His fish-like mouth is open in a frozen, lifeless cry. His tongue is black.
Slowly, with effort, I pull Bates from the stool. He collapses and tumbles to the floor, twitching. I sit down, slowly, on the stool.
I am racked with sobs.
VI
Soon someone, possibly Trevor, will come and find me here. I will not be harmed; I am a valuable product. Bates’ contract with me will be destroyed and the chip he was working on will be sold—an unfinished work. The wrecked console, the debris, will be cleared out and another artist will move into this silo. A new console will be installed. The new artist may bring his own Muse; if not, he may contract me. Otherwise, I will be put back on the market. There is nothing else for me to do. The quality of my work with Bates will be a factor in my next contract —because of my sudden notoriety I may be able to contract myself to an artist who will allow me to work under better conditions. It is this or death.
Outside the window the day is bleak; the far-away sun makes this world sallow. I place a new chip in the console and turn it on to a very low setting. It coughs, then purrs haltingly. I hold my fingers over the keys and a tear beads in my eye and makes its slow, ragged way down my face.
I begin to play.
THE DANCING FOOT
By Al Sarrantonio
The stories had littered the newspapers for days—YOUNG GIRL, PROMISING DANCER, PUSHED UNDER SUBWAY TRAIN—and Lansing had collected them all, reveled in the large type of their headlines, relished his secret infamy. That the girl was dead did not matter to him; it was the fact that he had done something and gotten away with it, that an entire city wanted to get its hands on him but had no idea who he was that made him hug himself in satisfaction.
He sat smoking on his mattress in his apartment, remembering the crowded platform, the crush of the morning crowds piled four deep; then the roar and clatter of the oncoming train, the press of the mob toward the yellow safety line in anticipation; the train almost there; and then his foot, quick and silent, tripping the girl, causing her to fall over the edge of the platform in front of the metal beast, too late to stop; the scream of brakes mingled with the girl’s startled, horrified cry—
Lansing rocked himself and smiled, lingering on the sweet moment of impact, thinking of how he had glided silently away in the confusion after making sure to look down for a glimpse of the crushed body.
The papers had said that if she had fallen a few inches to the right she would have landed on the outside of the tracks and that her foot might still have been severed but that she would have survived. As it was, she landed directly under the train between the tracks, and her right foot had been cut off by the wheels, but her body had been dragged and crushed by the momentum of the front car screeching to a halt.
The papers had quieted down some about it in the past week, moving the stories and wild speculations to the inside pages, and though he had slept undisturbed for the first few days after the deed—working a full day just as he always did—he had begun to have bad dreams. He dreamed about the foot. He dreamed that the foot was following him. And what horrified him most in the dreams was the way it followed him, walking. Like some horrible cartoon appendage—like the way his mother used to walk her hand around him with little doll’s shoes on two fingers when he was small, dancing those two little feet before him like a little soldier after he was bad and then suddenly lashing out when he wasn’t expecting it, smacking him across the face with the flat part of her hand. She was doing it now, hitting him, smacking him—
He awoke, suddenly realizing that he had dozed off into the dream again. He was covered with cold sweat, and the room was dark now. He made a move to get off the bed and turn on the lights.
As he did so he heard a sound. He knew he was wide awake now, and he heard something moving around in the closet. Something walking around, pushing things aside,
He thought,
He pulled himself unsteadily from the bed, wiping the sweat from his face with the front of his tee-shirt, and lurched over to the light switch. He clicked it on and the sounds from the closet abruptly stopped. He threw open the closet door and there was nothing there. No rats. Nothing.
He slammed the door roughly shut and went to the bed, settling onto the old, creaking mattress. He took a deep breath. I’ve got to stop this, he thought. He was starting to be afraid to go out, of taking the subway, of doing anything.
This has got to stop.
He thought again of tripping the girl, saw her falling off the platform, and that made him feel better. He looked at the clippings pasted to the wall around the room—YOUNG DANCER CRUSHED—and was even able to smile.
He lay down and slept.
And dreamt, screaming, of the foot again.
~ * ~
The next day he arrived at work late. Walking by a shoe store something made him hesitate; there was a pair of dancer’s shoes, ballet slippers, in the window, and he found himself staring at them. As he looked they suddenly began to move—
He realized with a start of relief that it was just the shop owner, taking the pair of shoes off their hook to show a customer. But the image of the moving shoes lingered in his mind…
