Tales From the Darkside Part 30

And they carried me along with them, and nursed me. And when I woke up I didn't even know my name. You took it. You took away my name."

"Stevens," Loomis said. "Brad Stevens." His hand did not waver on the gun.

"Oh, I remember that now," he said. "I remember it all. I remember Aimee . . . I remember it all."

"I'm glad about that," Loomis said. "I truly am. I've been waiting for you to remember for the most wearisome time. Not much sense in killing a person when he doesn't even know why."

He tightened his grip on the trigger. "But there's something more," he said. "More than that. Something you couldn't remember, because you never knew. Something I been meaning to tell you for a long time.

Longer than you could imagine."

"Make sense," said the man who called himself Cooper. "Make some kind of sense."

"Your name," Loomis said. "It ain't really Stevens. Not really. The name you've been trying so hard to remember isn't even your real name.

Isn't that a hoot? Isn't that the funniest thing you ever heard?" He laughed.

"Make sense," said the man on the ground. "You're still not making any."

"Stevens," Loomis said. "That's just a name they gave you. The folks who picked you out at the orphanage. Picked out the pretty little baby.

That was their name. Good G.o.d-fearing folds. But they only wanted the one, and they wanted a baby, not a full-grown child. And for sure they didn't want a gimp."

"I was adopted? You're saying I was adopted? How could you know that?"

"I was there, little brother. I was there. I was the gimp they pa.s.sed over for the pretty little baby. I was only four years old at the time.

But some things you really don't forget."

"Brother?"

"Right," Loomis said. "You and me, we're children of the very same flesh. Arnold and Mary Jane LOomis. n.o.body ever changed my name.

n.o.body wanted the poor little crippled boy."

"Our parents . . ."

"Dead," Loomis said. "Indians. They killed Pa. Killed Ma, too, after they got through with her. Would have killed us, too, except they got interrupted."

Slowly, deliberately, the man who had been called Cooper climbed to his feet. "We were separated?"

he said.

"For nearly thirty years. You eating your good home cooking and me eating poorhouse gruel. You growing into a solid citizen and marrying and farming. And me drifting from town to town like a piece of dried-up horse dung blown around by the wind. Never finding a place I could call home. And looking, looking for my little brother. And finally I found you . . ."

"Why?" he asked. "Why did you do it?"

"I didn't mean to . . ." Loomis faltered. "It was like a kind of madness came over me. Seeing your house and your farm and your wife, everything you had and I didn't, everything I hated you for having . .

But I don't know. Maybe that was what I was intending all along, intending to make you suffer just a little of what I had to suffer. I don't know. I don't think I meant to kill Aimee, but when I did, I knew I would have to kill you, too. And I thought I did. And then I saw you alive. And I realized that you didn't remember, didn't remember a single thing. So I just waited, watched and waited, until you did start to remember. So you would know why I had to kill you. And now it's time. It's time."

"You can't stand yourself, brother, can you?" said the man who had been called Cooper. "You and you, they don't get along at all. I can understand that. I been through a little of that myself. Not knowing who the h.e.l.l I was or what I might have done or what I should be doing.

But you find out. Maybe not your name, but how you should be living. If you're any good at all, you find that out."

He took a step toward Loomis. "But you're not any good, brother, and you never were. Sure, you had some lousy breaks, sure you did. But that isn't any kind of excuse for what you did. You're just no good to anyone, not even yourself. And if you kill me, you'll have nothing to live for. Nothing. Because n.o.body will know your name and n.o.body will care."

Another step.

"But I care, brother. I care in the worst way. You made me care.

Buzzing around me like some housefly waiting to be swatted. Waiting for me to remember. Trying to make me remember. Remember you."

Another step. He was only a few paces from Loomis now. He glanced down to his own gun on the floor of the stable. It was nearly within reach.

"Stay there," Loomis said. "Stay right where you are."

He took another step.

"I remember you, brother. For what you did to me. No one else will.

Kill me and you'll be all alone again, alone with yourself, the way you always were. Run away now and you'll have something to keep you going.

Fear, brother. Fear. That's a kind of something. Something to make you feel alive. And me, too. I'll have something to keep me going, too."

Loomis took a step backward. "Don't move." he said. "Don't move or I'll kill you now."

"What are you waiting for?" his brother asked him.

The gun wavered in his hand.

The man who called himself Cooper stopped swiftly and scooped up his own gun from the floor.

Two guns blared.

Loomis stood straight for a moment. A strange smile spread over his face. And then slowly, he crumpled to the floor of the stable.

The other continued to stand, in the clearing smoke, holding his wounded left arm.

"d.a.m.n," he said softly, "d.a.m.n."

The lights in the screening room came up. One man was applauding vigorously. Smith. All heads turned toward him.

"Bit of an anticlimax," Hurn said, "don't you think? We were afraid it might be. I think, in a way, we were afraid of having to finish it."

"On the contrary, Mr. Hurn," Smith said. "On the contrary. It's absolutely perfect. Perfect. Real mythic power. A glimpse into human condition. Into a world in which brother must slay brother, even as Cain slew Abel. Archetypal, Mr. Hurn. Archetypal.

He stood up and addressed the small crowd.

"I want to thank all of you," he said, "for making this possible. In particular I want to thank Mr. Hurn and the one and only Vance Maccoby, without whom none of this would have been possible."

Maccoby grinned in a s.p.a.ced-out way. Hurn could smell the drink on his breath from two rows away.

The cure didn't take, he thought. Well, it took for long enough.

"I will be leaving tomorrow," Smith said, "and I will not be returning in the near future. So let me just say what a wonderful group of people you have been to work with, and what a great, great privilege this has been for me."

There was still, Hurn reflected, something rather odd about the young man. He was dressed now in what could pa.s.s as the uniform of the young Hollywood executivea"safari jacket, open-collar sport shirt, gold medallion, aviator shadesa"and yet there was still something not quite right about it. He looked as if he had just stepped out of central casting.

"The show," Hurn said as Smith headed toward the door. "When is the show going to run?"

"Oh, soon," Smith said. "Not in this country at the present time, but we have plenty of interest overseas."

A Canadian tax shelter? Hurn wondered. One of those productions that never actually play anywhere?

But surely they would not have gone to so much trouble.

"Where?" he persisted. "Where will it run?"

"Oh, faraway places," Smith said, fingering his aviator shades. "Far, far away." He disappeared through the door. Hurn would not see him again.

"Far away," Hurn repeated to himself.

"Very far," Maccoby said, staggering a little as he rose from his seat in the back row. He was quite drunk.

"You know something I don't know?" Hurn asked, following him from the screening room.

"Very far," Maccoby repeated as they stepped into the parking lot. The smog was thin that night. Stars twinkled faintly in the sky. "About twenty light-years," he said, looking up.

"What?"

"Twenty light-years," he repeated. "Twenty years for the signals to reach them. Distant, distant signals.

And then they stop. The signals stop. Before the story ends. And they don't like that."

"They?"

"Smith's people. Our overseas investors. Our faraway fans."

"Wait a minute," Hurn said. "You're telling me that our show was picked up . . . out there?"

Now he, too, craned his head to look up into the night sky. He shivered.

"I don't believe it," he said.

"Sure you do," Maccoby said.

"But it's crazy," Hurn said. "The whole thing is incredible. Up to and including the fact that they picked on our show."

"I wondered about that myself," Maccoby said. "But you've got to figure that their tastes are going to be, well . . . different."

"Then he really meant it," Hurn said. "When he said that our show wasa"what did he call it? The peak of televisual art."

Maccoby nodded. "He really meant it."

"Art." Hurn tested the word on his tongue. "Life is short but art is long. Isn't that what they say?

Something like that, at any rate."

"Right," Maccoby said absently. "Art. Or something like that."

He was staring now at the great mast of the TV antenna on the hill above the studio.

"Signals," he said again. "Distant, distant signals."

THE ODDS.

by Michael McDowell.

You would have pa.s.sed it by, even on your thirstiest days. It was set seven crumbling steps down in the bas.e.m.e.nt of a sooty Brooklyn brownstone. A buzzing Ballantine Ale sign in the small, grimy front window futilely announced that this was Phil's Bar and Grill.

When you looked steeply down through the front window from street level, all you could see was a portion of tiled floor patched so many times, it was it was impossible to discern the original pattern: several metal chairs with warped legs and red vinyl seats; and the corner of a scarred pool table, so old that it didn't even have the quarter plungers.

In Phil's Bar and Grill you got to play free.

On one particularly hot day in August, however, the only real customer wasn't playing. He sat on a tall stool with his head buried in his folded arms on the bar. He hadn't ordered for an hour and a half, but his beer gla.s.s remained more than half full.

There was a jukebox, but the records in it hadn't been changed since 1964, and it hadn't been plugged in since 1967. There was a bartender who polished a gla.s.s all day long as he leaned against the wall with his ear against the buzzing speaker of a Bakelite radio tuned to an all-talk station. He went by the name of Phil, though that wasn't the name his mother had given him.

The background music this particularly stultifying afternoon was a one-note synthesized rendition on "Mary Had a Little Lamb." It was punched out on a small gold-colored calculator the size and thickness of a credit card.

Punched out by a clean-shaven balding man in a white shirt with an open collar. This clean-shaven balding man was named Horace, and he was one of those men who was born to be fifty-seven years old.

Horace had witnessed a murder twenty-three years ago and had made a life for himself holding his tongue.

Horace sat in the last booth in Phil's Bar and Grill, the crown of his balding head constantly brushing against the uncoiled cord of the pay phone just above him.

Across from Horace sat Tommy Vale, a bookie. The last booth at Phil's Bar and Grill had been his office for a little more than three decades.

It was beneath Vale to answer the phone himselfa"Horace did that. It was beneath Vale to look at whoever might come in the bara"Horace did that and gave a quick whispered description. Tommy Vale took bets and calculated odds, kept a careful ledger with the stub of a number 1-1/2 pencil, and arranged and constantly rearranged tiny ragged sc.r.a.ps of paper before him on the scratched Formica table.