Stalking the Nightmare (23 page)

And he came out of the wings as cameras 2 & 3 caught him in double-exposure …

“Teddy … Crazeeeee … !”

The applause was deafening. The chimpanzees did not even need a cue card telling them to bang their sweaty palms together. The sight of him was enough. They clapped, and screamed, and yowled, and laughed, and whistled, and stomped, and howled and Jan Breebnick (known to Awakened America as Teddy Crazy) walked in stately fashion across the small stage. Just before he sat down, he did a little dance-step, his famous little dance-step, loose-jointed as an epileptic, and the studio mob went wild again. And then Teddy Crazy took his seat behind the desk, behind the water pitcher, behind the sheets of flimsies on his guests, behind the microphone, and began his three thousand, nine hundred and fifty-fifth show on late night television.

“Who’s the first yo-yo, Rollin?” Teddy Crazy demanded.

From the empty air came the reply, “Your first guest tonight is a winner, Teddy. It’s Professor Heinrich Tessler, who just received a government grant of half a million dollars to explore his theory that there is an entrance to the hollow interior of the Earth somewhere near the North Pole.”

The audience waited a split-second for Teddy to get “his face.” Teddy could let the viewing audience know whether he was going to believe a guest or debunk him, merely by using one of two “faces” he kept in a drawer of the desk. One face was the drooling, imbecilic countenance of a hydrocephalic child, and the other was the studious and informed expression of a Renaissance man.

Teddy pulled out the moron face, and the audience clapped wildly, screamed and beat at the air with their voices as a stooped, septuageneric old man of gray features and weary eyes plodded onto the stage, and took a seat across from Teddy Crazy behind the desk.

Teddy stared at the old man.

Professor Tessler’s beard was as ineffectual as the old man seemed to be. It was gray, and it was hanging from his chin, but it was sparse, stringy, great empty patches of bare skin showing through, as though the face had given up halfway through its growth.

“Boy, you really look like a crazy mad scientist,” was Teddy Crazy’s opening shot.

Professor Tessler began to tremble. “I haf come here to talk aboudt …”

“You talk about what we
want
you to talk about, Prof ole nutso buddy!” Teddy Crazy interrupted the thick Bavarian accent. “And you know
why,
sweetheart?”

It was rhetorical. Teddy didn’t even wait.

“I’ll
tell
you why: it’s because you’ve just been given a half a
million
of United States of America’s taxpayers’ hard-earned money to go off into the Arctic to follow up some coocoo idea you got in a hash dream one night! And how that money is spent, money we all worked like dogs to make, is the concern of the folks who tune in every weekday night at eleven to find out the truth about weirdos like you, who can fleece our corrupt, pinko-loving government out of that much dough …
that’s
why!”

Applause. Stomping. Hooting. A lynch tenor in the mob.

“Now. Whaddaya got to say for yourself, Prof?”

Tessler fidgeted. He wrung his hands together, out of sight below the desk. His rheumy little eyes darted back and forth. “I vas told py your broducer dot if I game on your schow I gould tell aboudt my theory vithoudt there beink vun made uff me …”

Teddy Crazy got a mean look on his ruggedly handsome features. “Oh … now you’re gonna sit there and lie at us, right, Professor? Well, there’s my Producer, Mr. Hobie Pleen, standing right there … would you turn Camera #1 on him, please.” The camera was revolved and the red light went on. “Hobie,” Teddy Crazy asked him, “did you promise this man some sort of immunity from honest constructive questioning?”

Hobie Pleen, a frightened man whose greatest dream was a renewal pickup at the end of thirty-six weeks, spread his hands with obvious disbelief at Tessler’s comment, and shook his head at Teddy Crazy. The camera revolved, and the monitors picked up Teddy Crazy once more looking at Tessler.

Save now he was looking at the old man as though he was a pus-pocket of evil. “No, Professor … now that we’ve proved you’re not only a quack, a fraud, a charlatan and probably an embezzler of government funds, we’ve proved you’re a common garden-variety liar as well. Now, whaddaya have to say to
that?”

Tessler summoned up strength. “My theory iz gorrect!”

“Oh yeah? Well, lemme ask
you,
the audience … do
you
believe this old loon? Do
you
believe there’s an entrance to a hollow Earth at the North Pole? Lemme HEAR IT!”

The screams were thunderous. They beat against the walls, and they showered down like broken glass, and they sliced through the air like shards of steel, and little old Professor Tessler cringed behind the desk. It was what the law courts called
res ipsa loquitur—a.
thing that speaks for itself. No one believed him. Before millions of eyes, Tessler was—that quick, snap!—discredited.

Now slumped hideously, as the screams died away, Tessler could only nod dumbly as Teddy Crazy said (with the uncommon softness one uses in addressing a dog one has just whipped into servility), “Now Professor, let’s talk about your theory …”

It took Teddy Crazy only fifteen minutes—one segment of his show—to demolish Tessler and send him away trembling with hopelessness and frustration. And all across America, no one, but
no one,
believed the Professor was onto anything more significant than a bad case of too much cheap whiskey.

Teddy Crazy took a station break for commercials, four of them, plus two piggybacks, and came back to greet his second guest, Miss Anita DeStyre, topless dancer supporting a fatherless family of seven.

She came onstage to wolf whistles, rumbles of unbridled libidos and a round of applause usually reserved for Ministers of State. She was quite tall, almost six feet, wearing white knee-length patent leather boots, a miniskirt that just reached below her buttocks, and flowing long blonde hair. Her bust was immense. But there was an undeniable sweetness about her; something very close to innocence in the face. Laugh-lines and a directness that belied both her occupation and the moron face Teddy Crazy wore as she approached his desk.

“Good evening, Miss DeStyre,” Teddy Crazy said.

“Good evening, Mr. Crazy,” she replied.

“What kind of an evening is it for sluts, Miss DeStyre?”

The audience dropped back into fitful silence. It had thought for a moment Teddy Crazy would play porno-word games, dou-ble-entendre, with this pretty thing. But apparently he knew something …

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she looked blank.

“What it means is, you’re as phony as Dickie Nixon’s nighty-night prayers. It means you go around telling everyone your measurements, when the truth of the matter is that you are all puffed out with silicone!”

“That’s a dirty lie!”

“Yeah, well, dolly in for a closeup, Camera #3, because this piece of paper I’m holding in my right hand is a sworn affidavit from Dr. Kenneth J. Opatoshu, a plastic surgeon of Beverly Hills, who swears that on July 17th of last year he operated on you for bust expansion, using silicone and—”

Anita DeStyre grabbed the neck of her dress in both hands and ripped down, suddenly. There was the sound of tortured cloth, and then, before the protruding eyes of millions of Americans in the Great Wasteland, Miss DeStyre was naked to the waist. “How about
those,
buddy,” she demanded of her host, “do
those
look like phoneys?”

They were cut off the air instantly. Or rather, the taping was stopped. Miss DeStyre was re-clothed, in a topcoat loaned by a man in the third row of the audience, and they started taping again.

Teddy Crazy sat with folded hands, looking calm and as though he had swallowed something that would enrich him. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “what you have just seen … one of the grossest demonstrations of the debasement of the female mystique … is a living demonstration of the unfittedness of this woman to retain legal motherhood of seven defenseless children. I had no affidavit on that piece of paper … it was merely an attempt on my part to provoke this woman into an act of such ugliness that her true nature would reveal itself. I urge everyone out there to write to the juvenile authorities here in Los Angeles to have those seven small children removed from the custody of a woman who is even less than an honest prostitute …”

Anita DeStyre began to cry.

It took fifteen minutes for that segment, and by the time it aired, three days later, the representatives of the juvenile court had already moved in to take Anita DeStyre’s seven children from her. That they had been happy with their mother, that she had worked endlessly to provide a good home for them, made no difference. Teddy Crazy had done his job well. Anita DeStyre killed herself on the night the show aired.

But that was only one-third of the ninety minutes allotted to Teddy Crazy. As the show progressed he destroyed a promising novelist (accusing him of being a rank pornographer), the manufacturer of a new drug purported to cure cancer (with a barrage that insinuated side-effects of the drug produced something more hideous than thalidomide babies), and a woman seeking her long-lost husband (by proving to the audience’s satisfaction that the man being sought had been in charge of the gas ovens at Dachau).

Teddy Crazy’s show was nearing its end for that night.

It had been a typical, average, interesting show./ What Hobie Pleen would have called “a good show, Teddy.” “And who’s our last guest, Rollin?” Teddy Crazy asked.

There was no answer from Rollin Jacoby.

But there was a flash of light and the distinct smell of something that should have been flushed.

And onto the stage walked His Satanic Majesty, the Prince of Darkness, Satan.

Or at least it looked like him.

His long tail protruded from the seat of his Brooks Bros, suit, and the triangular end of it whipped and thrashed as he stalked across to the desk. His cloven hoofprints were burned into the formica of the studio floor. His horns were ramlike and curved upwards from the thatch of bloodred hair that covered his head. His eyes were burning coals, his fingernails were black, and the expression on his face even startled Teddy Crazy. For a moment.

“The Fallen Angel is your last guest, Mr. Crazy,” the visitor said. And he seated himself, pulling the black crimson-lined cape around himself.

Teddy Crazy stared. For a moment. Then he whipped out his moron mask and stared back at the audience. They got the message. Another weirdo!

They applauded and demanded Teddy take this jerk apart, piece by horn by tail by piece.

Teddy returned the mask to its drawer, and turned to his guest. “Well,
Your Majesty,”
and the words oozed loathing and ridicule, “to what do we owe the special privilege of your presence here on my humble show?”

“To be precise, Mr. Crazy, I’m here tonight to offer you a reward.”

“Oh? And what might that be, you silly goose?”

“A rare delight. A special potion that my imps in the lowest recesses of Hell have concocted just for you.”

“And, uh, might I be accurate in calling it some sort of hallucinogenic crutch that other, less-fortunate folks might use to delight tfte/nselves?”

“Not strictly speaking, no. You can call it a psychedelic if you choose, but it’s much more ancient a recipe than that.”

“Well, let’s just trot it out here.”

Satan reached into an inner pocket, and brought out a small piece of paper that looked like litmus paper. He handed it to Teddy Crazy. He was careful not to touch the emcee.

Teddy Crazy held it in his hand for a moment, then threw it down on the desk. “All right, nutso, enough of this nonsense. Let’s find out exactly what it is you’re trying to promote with that get-up and all these insane shenanigans.”

“I’m not trying to promote anything, Mr. Crazy. I’m here merely to reward you for your unstinting service.”

“Now you’re trying to say I
work
for
you?”

Incredulity, from the audience.

“On the contrary,” said Satan. “Evil is an essence, Mr. Crazy. It is like faith. One must believe to make it so. Contrariwise, if one does not believe, whatever it is that is doubted, ceases to be. I believe Bishop Berkeley introduced the theory on Earth many years ago.”

Teddy Crazy looked bored. “Forget the philosophy, creep, and just sock it to me nitty-gritty.”

Satan nodded agreement. “Fine. Fine. I don’t have too much time to waste in any case.

“The point is, Mr. Crazy, that many of the people you have sent to me from this show—most recently a Professor Tessler, a Miss DeStyre, a Mr. Grogan and two others, just tonight, do not really belong in my operation. They have been discredited, disbelieved in because of your machinations, and so they are cluttering up really overcrowded conditions in my habitat. It seems the only way to get things back on a more-or-less even keel is to reward you for what you’ve done, and put an end to all of this. Thus: the little delight before you.”