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

“Okay. How many would say ‘very good’?”

There must not have been many because he went right on to the next question.

“ ‘Fair’?”

She closed her eyes and listened to the rustle of coat sleeves and wondered if she had heard the question correctly.

“And how many ‘poor’?”

That had to be everyone else. Even the tall man in front of her raised his arm. She recognized his plaid shirt. It was Number Sixteen.

Marty made a notation.

“Okay, great. What was your favorite scene?”

The silence was deafening.

“You won’t be graded on this! There’s no right or wrong answer. I remember once, when my junior-high English teacher…”

He launched into a story to loosen them up. It was about a divorced woman, an escaped sex maniac and a telephone call to the police. She recognized it as a very old dirty joke. Astonishingly he left off the punchline. The audience responded anyway. He had his timing down pat. Or was it that they laughed because they knew what was coming? Did that make it even funnier?

The less original the material, she thought, the more they like it. It makes them feel comfortable.

And if that’s true, so is the reverse.

She noticed that there was a two-way mirror in this room, too, along the far wall. Was anyone following the discussion from the other side? If so, there wasn’t much to hear. Nobody except Marty had anything to say. They were bored stiff, waiting for their money. It would take something more than the show they had just seen to hold them, maybe Wrestling’s Biggest Bleeps, Bloopers and Bodyslams or America’s Zaniest Surveillance Tapes. Now she heard a door slam in the hall. The executives had probably given up and left the observation room.

“What is the matter with you people?”

The woman with the multi-colored scarf hunched around to look at her, as Marty tried to see who had spoken.

“In the back row. Number. ”

“You’re right,” she said too loudly. “It’s not poor, or fair, or excellent. It’s a great show! Better than anything I’ve seen in years. Since — ”

“Yes?” Marty changed his position, zeroing in on her voice. “Would you mind speaking up? This is your chance to be heard..”

“Since The Fuzzy Family. Or The Funny boner.” She couldn’t help mentioning the titles. Her mouth was open now and the truth was coming out and there was no way to stop it.

Marty said, “What network were they on?”

“CBS. They were canceled in the first season.”

“But you remember them?”

“They were brilliant.”

“Can you tell us why?”

“Because of my father. He created them both.”

Marty came to the end of the aisle and finally saw her. His face fell. In the silence she heard other voices, arguing in the hall. She hoped it was not the people who had made Dario, You So Crazy! If so, they had to be hurting right now. She felt for them, bitterness and despair and rage welling up in her own throat.

“May I see you outside?” he said.

“No, you may not.”

The hell with Marty, AmiDex and her job here. There was no secret as to why some shows made it and other, better ones did not. Darwin was wrong. He hadn’t figured on the networks. They had continued to lower their sights until the audience devolved right along with them, so that any ray of hope was snuffed out, overshadowed by the crap around it. And market research and the ratings system held onto their positions by telling them what they wanted to hear, that the low-rent talent they had under contract was good enough, by testing the wrong people for the wrong reasons, people who were too numb to care about a pearl among the pebbles. It was a perfect, closed loop.

“Now, Miss Rayme.”

“That isn’t my name.” Didn’t he get it yet? “My father was Robert Mayer. The man who wrote and produced Wagons, Ho!”

It was TV’s first western comedy and it made television history. After that he struggled to come up with another hit, but every new show was either canceled or rejected outright. His name meant nothing to the bean-counters. All they could see was the bottom line. As far as they were concerned he owed them a fortune for the failures they had bankrolled. If he had been an entertainer who ran up a debt in Vegas, he would have had to stay there, working it off at the rate of two shows a night, forever. The only thing that gave her satisfaction was the knowledge that they would never collect. One day when she was ten he had a massive heart attack on the set and was whisked away in a blue ambulance and he never came home again.

“Folks, thanks for your time,” Marty said. “If you’ll return to the lobby. ”

She had studied his notes and scripts, trying to understand why he failed. She loved them all. They were genuinely funny, the very essence of her father, with his quirky sense of humor and extravagent sight gags — as original and inventive as Dario, You So Crazy ! Which was a failure, too. Of course. She lowered her head onto the desktop and began to weep.

“Hold up,” said Number Sixteen.

“Your pay’s ready. Fifty dollars cash.” Marty held the door wide. “There’s another group coming in. ”

The lumberjack refused to stand. “Let her talk. I remember Wagons, Ho! It was all right.”

He turned around in his seat and gave her a wink as she raised her head.

“Thank you,” she said softly. “It doesn’t matter, now.”

She got to her feet with the others and pushed her way out.

Farther down the hall, another door clicked shut. It was marked Green Room. She guessed that the executives from the other side of the mirror had decided to finish their argument in private.

Marty grabbed her elbow.

“I told you to stay home.”

“You’re hurting me,” she said.

“But you just wouldn’t take the hint, would you?”

“About what?”

“You can pick up your check in Payroll.”

“Get your hands off me.”

Number Sixteen came up next to her. “You got a problem here?”

“Not anymore,” she said.

“Your pay’s up front, cowboy,” Marty told him.

“You sure you’re okay?” asked Number Sixteen.

“I am now.”

Marty shook his head sadly.

“I’ll tell them to make it for the full two weeks. I liked you, you know? I really did.”

Then he turned and walked the audience back to the lobby.

Farther down the hall, she saw Human Resources, where she had gone the first day for her interview, and beyond that Public Relations and Payroll. She didn’t care about her check but there was a security door at the end. It would let her out directly into the courtyard.

Number Sixteen followed her.

“I was thinking. If you want some lunch, I’ve got my car.”

“So do I,” she said, walking faster.

Then she thought, Why not? Me, with a lumberjack. I’ll be watching Martha Stewart while he hammers his wood and lays his pipe or whatever he does all day, and he’ll come home and watch hockey games and I’ll stay loaded and sit up every night to see Wagons, Ho! on the Nostalgia Channel and we’ll go on that way, like a sitcom. He’ll take care of me. And in time I’ll forget everything. All I have to do is say yes.

He was about to turn back.

“Okay,” she said.

“What?”

“This way. There’s an exit to the parking lot, down here.”

Before they could get to it the steel door at the end swung open.

The rain had stopped and a burst of clear light from outside reflected off the polished floor, distorting the silhouette of the figure standing there. A tall woman in a designer suit entered from the grounds. Behind her, the last of the private security cars drove off. The Eyeball News truck was gone.