When I was a young man, about eighteen or so, my friend Scott asked if I wanted to help strip out this house prior to it being demolished. I jumped at the chance, figuring I could use the extra cash.
So, me, Scott, and a couple of other guys, started work on that house, clearing it from top to bottom, and I was paid about thirty dollars a day, back when thirty dollars was actually worth something.
I was assigned the basement while the other guys worked on the ground floor and attic, which didn’t bother me; I liked working alone.
The basement came as something of a surprise. There were easy chairs down there, a moth-eaten sofa, a small broken-down refrigerator, and a massive collection of Time magazines stacked in one corner, with dates going back to the late sixties. And squatting in front of the sofa was this really old pre-digital TV set. It was huge and ugly, like a great big box sitting on four wooden legs.
The entire basement smelled of mould and sour milk and prehistoric vomit.
Because I figured it would help the time pass quicker I switched the television on. It took a few seconds to power up and when it did there was some kind of 80’s gameshow playing. I knew it was the 80s because of the clothes people were wearing, and their style of hair. The sound was pretty garbled and the quality of the broadcast was hit and miss but I remember the host, he was a large man with a huge, almost cartoonish, chin, like he was wearing some kind of prosthetic or something. He was the original lantern jaw and he wore this ridiculous tweed suit that strobed pretty badly as he moved around the studio.
The contestants were equally weird looking. There was this woman with real birds nesting in her beehive hair-do. They’d start singing every time she got a question right. It was a gimmick, of course, probably concocted to make the show stand out in a crowded schedule, but still, that woman’s eyes were freakish, they were slanted at a really weird angle and she’d blink in sudden rapid clusters.
Another guest, a middle-aged man, was dressed in the uniform of a Major with the US military. He was even more freakish than the woman because his entire lower jaw was missing. His face literally ended with his top row of teeth. It was some kind of war injury and the Major used a voice amplifier to communicate. It was hooked into his throat and it made him sound like a robot.
The other guests were a mixed assortment of strange to totally fucked-up, a young man wearing black sunglasses with an eye painted on each lens. An old woman with false teeth that she kept taking out and polishing against the sleeve of her blouse. Whenever she took her teeth out her cheeks would cave in to a ridiculous extent.
I couldn’t believe this shit. Pretty soon I’d forgotten all about my work and I was crouched in front of the TV, watching the show with a growing sense of disbelief. It was like they’d raided the local freak farm. I turned the volume up as high as I could but the sound quality was crap and it was still an effort to hear what was going on.
I figured the host was called Mr Pontiac because his name kept flashing up on screen, but for some reason everyone on the show called him Mr P. It took a while to realise there were actually two Mr Pontiacs. I think they were twins, or else they were made-up to look alike. One version of Mr Pontiac was cheerful as fuck. He kept laughing and joking and he’d perform this weird little dance every time someone got a question wrong.
The other version of Mr Pontiac seemed perpetually pissed off. He never smiled. Never joked. And at one point he seemed on the verge of hitting one of the contestants. He wore a tie whereas the cheerful Mr Pontiac wore a large striped bow tie, other than that they were both identical.
I never quite figured out what the object of the game was, but the guests kept winding up in some pretty weird predicaments, like standing in a huge tank and stomping on thousands of live roaches, or running around this enclosure, trying to snap the heads off squawking chickens with a pair of garden shears, it was insane, not even cable would carry shit this extreme, but for some reason I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the screen. It was like watching a slow car crash.
That first day I completely forgot what I was doing there. I just sat on the old couch and watched this show. It never ended. It didn’t cut to commercial breaks. It just went on and on. I could hear my friends working away upstairs and occasionally they’d shout out to each other, but they sounded far away, not really part of my reality anymore.
I had this uneasy feeling that kept growing inside me the longer I sat there, but I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the set. I felt compelled to answer the questions, trying to beat the contestants’ time, I’d start repeating all the gameshow slogans, and I’d get really mad with a contestant if they flunked a task – I was becoming emotionally committed to the outcome of the game and I still didn’t know what the game was about.
Scott’s voice ricocheted down the stairs. ‘Hey, Nicky, boy, what the hell are you doing down there?’
I gave a start and quickly switched the set off.
‘I’m working my ass off,’ I called back. Checking my watch, I realised almost two and half hours had passed. Strange. It only felt like five minutes. I hadn’t even started clearing out the basement.
I got home later than usual that evening.
My girlfriend, Jessie, tried to tell me about her day, but, somehow, we wound up getting into a huge fight, I felt really agitated for some reason, everything pissed me off, the sound of her voice, the way she’d arranged her hair, even the Goddamn colour scheme of the living room, I couldn’t believe I’d let her get away with this shit for so long.
I wound up sleeping on the sofa. I Googled the gameshow on my laptop, Mr Pontiac, Mr P, nothing, no mention of it, which made no freakin’ sense, the show had a pretty big budget, and it was extreme enough to have registered on someone’s radar, I mean how many gameshows feature the slaughter of live chickens for cryin’ out loud, but like I said, there was nothing – zip -
I tried to get to sleep but I kept seeing images from that show, every time I dozed the most grotesque visions would come oozing into my skull, terrifying me so badly I’d physically jerk up off the sofa and stare wildly around me.
At last I grabbed my clothes, took a carving knife from the kitchen, snatched up the car keys, and drove out to that house. I don’t know what made me do that, it was like I was being compelled – all I knew was that I had to get back to that house, to that basement - I had to carry on watching that show, and I vaguely remember Jessie screaming at me as I left the house. She must have thought I was nuts.
I had a spare set of keys so I parked a little way down the road from the house, walking the rest of the way and letting myself in.
In the basement I switched the TV on and sat on the sofa. The room was almost entirely bare. The TV and the sofa were the only things left.
The gameshow was in full swing. The contestants looked even more surreal than they did this morning, if that was humanly possible, exaggerated features, bizarre mannerisms, several of them resembling human/animal hybrids, one man with a left eye that bulged hideously out of its socket, a woman with only half a head, the other half lost to some gruesome accident, and there was a tall, thin guy with boils swarming his face that regularly burst open and leaked puss.
The games were just as extreme as before. One game required the contestants to eat live maggots out of plastic buckets, another had them tip-toeing across a floor covered in primed bear traps, whilst a third game forced them to negotiate a primary-coloured room filled with an assortment of lethal-looking booby-traps.
I tried to convince myself that no real blood was being shed, that the lady with the missing nose wasn’t really decapitated in the third elimination round, or the guy with the muzzle-shaped mouth didn’t really lose a leg, but Jesus, it all looked so real, and the audience was baying for blood, Mr Pontiac screaming with laughter every time someone suffered an injury, or howling with rage every time they made it safely through a round, and I found myself screaming and howling along with him because the game was everything, because the game was the only thing.
Slowly but surely, I began to realise that the contestants were all dead. That this was some kind of horrific afterlife, and that the two Mr Pontiacs were aspects of the same demonic entity.
But I couldn’t tear myself away, I felt like my soul was slowly being sucked into that game, I couldn’t remember who I was before I started watching, and it seemed my every waking hour since birth had been consumed by it.
‘Yes, Sir-eeee,’ Mr Pontiac shrieked at me out of the television set, ‘you ready to come on over to our side of the screen, Nicky boy, play for some real stakes, hmmm?’
‘Come on, Nicky boy,’ the audience roared.
‘…All you got to do is man-up and end your miserable life,’ Mr Pontiac drew his thumb across his throat in a sudden slicing gesture, ‘it’ll be over in a second, and boy, have we got games for you….’
‘Man-up, Nick!’ the audience thundered.
‘Take your life,’ Mr Pontiac suggested, ‘take your girlfriends’ while you’re at it, she’ll thank you for it….’
It made sense.
I held the knife I’d brought with me, turning it over and over in my hand. Christ, it all made so much sense.
The game had no beginning and no end.
The game was all there was.
…And all there would ever be.
I raised the knife to my throat, grinning as the audience chanted: “man-up, Nicky-boy!”
A shadow fell across the room as someone stepped between me and the television set and suddenly the screen was shattered by a heavy blow.
Instantly I was on the ground, flailing about and gasping for breath. I felt as though I’d been drowning and someone had reached down and dragged me out of the water at the very last moment.
When I’d sufficiently recovered I looked up to see Scott standing in the basement, staring down at me with a workman’s mallet in one hand.
‘What the fuck were you up to?’ he demanded.
‘How did you know I was here?’
‘Jessie called me,’ he said, ‘told me you left the apartment with a knife, yelling something about the basement,’ he shrugged, ‘so I figured you must have been coming here.’
He crouched down beside me and once again he asked what I’d been up to.
I stared at the destroyed television set, a gaping hole where the screen had been.
‘Did you see it?’ I demanded, ‘did you see the gameshow?’
He shook his head. He told me that he’d seen me through the basement window. I was sitting on the sofa, hunched over with my hands clasped together, laughing and cackling and cheering at the top of my voice, completely entranced by the television set –
Strange thing was, Scott said, the set wasn’t even switched on.
Submitted December 18, 2017 at 07:36PM by ChikeDeluna http://ift.tt/2CYVb2T NoSleepOOC
