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