Christopher Fowler - The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 10

As he got closer she smelled something sweet and pungent. The unmistakable odor of marijuana lingered in his clothes. So that’s what he was up to, she thought. A little attitude adjustment. I could use some of that myself right about now.

She held out her hand to invite him in from the rain, and felt her hair collapse into wet strings over her ears. She pushed it back self-consciously.

“You don’t want to miss the screening,” she said, forcing a smile, “do you?”

“What’s it about?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Honest. They don’t tell me anything.”

The door swung open again and Angie rolled her eyes.

“Okay, okay,” said Lisa Anne.

“He can sign up for the two o’clock, if he wants.”

Number Sixteen shook his head. “No way. I gotta be at work.”

“It’s all right, Angie.”

“But he missed the audience prep. ”

Lisa Anne looked past her. Marty was about finished. The test subjects were already shifting impatiently, bored housewives and tourists and retirees with nothing better to do, recruited from sidewalks and shopping malls and the lines in front of movie theaters, all of them here to view the pilot for a new series that would either make it to the network schedule or be sent back for retooling, based on their responses. There was a full house for this session.

Number Sixteen had not heard the instructions, so she had no choice. She was supposed to send him home.

But if the research was to mean anything, wasn’t it important that every demographic be represented? The fate of the producers and writers who had labored for months or even years to get their shows this far hung in the balance, to be decided by a theoretical cross-section of the viewing public. Not everyone liked sitcoms about young urban professionals and their wacky misadventures at the office. They can’t, she thought. I don’t. But who ever asked me?

“Look,” said Number Sixteen, “I drove a long ways to get here. You gotta at least pay me.”

“He’s late,” said Angie. She ignored him, speaking as though he were not there. “He hasn’t even filled out his questionnaire.”

“Yes, he has,” said Lisa Anne and ushered him inside.

The subjects were on their feet now, shuffling into the screening room. Lisa Anne went to the check-in table.

“Did you get Number Sixteen’s?” she asked.

The monitors had the forms laid out according to rows and were about to insert the piles into manila envelopes before taking them down the hall.

Marty came up behind her. “Which row, Miss Rayme?” he said officiously.

“Four, I think.’’’

“You think?” Marty looked at the man in the plaid shirt and wrinkled his nose, as if someone in the room had just broken wind. “If his form’s not here — ”

“I know where it is,” Lisa Anne told him and slipped behind the table.

She flipped through the pile for row four, allowing several of the questionnaires to slide onto the floor. When she knelt to pick them up, she pulled a blank one from the carton.

“Here.” She stood, took a pencil and jotted 16 in the upper right-hand corner. “He forgot to put his number on it.”

“We’re running late, Lees. ” Marty whispered.

She slid the forms into an envelope. “Then I’d better get these to the War Room.”

On the way down the hall, she opened the envelope and withdrew the blank form, checking off random answers to the multiple-choice quiz on the first page. It was pointless, anyway, most of it a meaningless query into personal habits and lifestyle, only a smokescreen for the important questions about income and product preferences that came later. She dropped off her envelope along with the other monitors, and a humorless assistant in a short-sleeved white shirt and rimless glasses carried the envelopes from the counter to an inner room, where each form would be tallied and matched to the numbered seats in the viewing theater. On her way back, Marty intercepted her.

“Break time,” he said.

“No, thanks.” She drew him to one side, next to the drinking fountain. “I got one for you. S.H.A.M.”

“M.A.S.H ,” he said immediately

“Okay, try this. Finders.”

He pondered for a second. “ Friends?”

“You’re good,” she said.

“No, I’m not. You’re easy. Well, time to do my thing.”

At the other end of the hall, the reception room was empty and the doors to the viewing theater were already closed.

“Which thing is that?” she said playfully.

“That thing I do, before they fall asleep.”

“Ooh, can I watch?”

She propped her back against the wall and waited for him to move in, to pin her there until she could not get away unless she dropped to her knees and crawled between his legs.

“Not today, Lisa.”

“How come?”

“This one sucks. Big time.”

“What’s the title?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then how do you know it sucks?”

“Hey, it’s not my fault, okay?”

For some reason he had become evasive, defensive. His face was now a smooth mask, the skin pulled back tautly, the only prominent features his teeth and nervous, shining eyes. Like a shark’s face, she thought. A residue of deodorant soap rose to the surface of his skin and vaporized, expanding outward on waves of body heat. She drew a breath and knew that she needed to be somewhere else, away from him.

“Sorry,” she said.

He avoided her eyes and ducked into the men’s room.

What did I say? she wondered, and went on to the reception area.

A list of subjects for the next session was already laid out on the table, ninety minutes early. The other monitors were killing time in the chairs, chatting over coffee and snacks from the machines.

Lisa Anne barely knew them. This was only her second week and she was not yet a part of their circle. One had been an editorial assistant at the L. A. Weekly, two were junior college students, and the others had answered the same classified ad she had seen in the trades. She considered crashing the conversation. It would be a chance to rest her feet and dry out. The soggy new shoes still pinched her toes and the suit she’d had to buy for the job was damp and steamy and scratched her skin like a hair shirt. She felt ridiculous in this uniform, but it was necessary to show people like Marty that she could play by their rules, at least until she got what she needed. At home she would probably be working on yet another sculpture this morning, trying to get the face right, with a gob of clay in one hand and a joint in the other and the stereo cranked up to the max. But living that way hadn’t gotten her any closer to the truth. She couldn’t put it off any longer. There were some things she had to find out or she would go mad.

She smiled at the monitors.

Except for Angie they barely acknowledged her, continuing their conversation as though she were not there.

They know, she thought. They must.

How much longer till Marty saw through her game? She had him on her side, but the tease would play out soon enough unless she let it go further, and she couldn’t bear the thought of that. She only needed him long enough to find the answer, and then she would walk away.

She went to the glass doors.

The rain had stopped and soon the next group would begin gathering outside. The busts of the television stars in the courtyard were ready, Red Buttons and George Gobel and Steve Allen and Lucille Ball with her eyebrows arched in perpetual wonderment, waiting to meet their fans. It was all that was left for them now.

Angie came up next to her.

“Hey, girl.”

“Hey yourself.”

“The lumberjack. He a friend of yours?”