Old-Time Radio

A little boy leans up against a radio that stands taller than he does. It's an immense radio, made in the 1940's, with glowing tubes deep inside that radiate a yellowish light and considerable heat. It emits an unpleasant odor that suggests small, creeping things had been trapped inside and lay decaying and undiscovered. An array of well-worn knobs and dials covers the surface of its fake mahogany cabinet. Their labels are impossible to read. The boy carefully turns the tuning dial to a familiar spot making sure to keep the volume down so nobody else will hear it. A few bursts of loud static startle him but, happily, nobody wakes up. It's long past his bedtime. Finally, with everything to his satisfaction, he snuggles up against the huge radio as the eerie music begins.

"We... bring... you... SUSPENSE!"

Suspense. It terrified me but it was too compelling-- I couldn't make myself turn it off. One night I listened to an episode about a haunted armchair. I remember very little of that show now. The small part that stayed with me was that the chair was possessed by an angry presence. The presence strangled people who sat in the chair-not all the people but just those who hurt it while it was alive. I have never been comfortable in armchairs ever since that time.

Nobody hugged me when I asked them if things like that could really happen. Nobody told me it was make-believe. Nobody ever told me that. The frayed and musty old armchair in our living room disappointed me. It should have strangled my own tormenters but it never showed any signs of life.

I remember another drama on Suspense about a tiny snow globe. Although it had a wooden pedestal and contained a replica of a tiny village, the globe was much more than it seemed to be. The story hero discovered that when he looked into it, he was really looking at a town on another world. When he moved the globe, he caused catastrophic events in that world. I thought the story was literally true. I learned to be very careful. Otherwise, there was no telling what harm I might have done to other worlds just by being playful or careless.

I believe firmly that windows exist into other dimensions disguised as ordinary items but really windows I remember a television drama about the aftermath of a nuclear war. Most of the survivors wandered aimlessly like undead golems. Their bodies emitted a pulsing electrical glow and strange humming noises. If they touched a normal survivor, that person was transformed into one of them-a buzzing, radioactive zombie. I was terrified and I cried. My parents mocked my terror and cursed me for being stupid.

When I was in high school, I joined protests against bomb testing. It was the beginning of years of political activism.

I remember becoming deeply suspicious of the dentist when I was little. I had gone to his office for something routine (I was told) but woke up in a hospital bed. My tonsils had been removed. I forgot the stay in the hospital a few days afterward. I didn't even remember going there. I didn't trust the dentist after that. I didn't trust anyone who wanted me under their control.

I remember the Ray Bradbury story, The Crowd, about the ever-present onlookers at car accidents. The story's hero, a reporter, discovered that the onlookers were all dead. They had all died in accidents over a period of many years. When the onlookers realized that the reporter found the truth about them, they staged an accident to kill him. After death, he found himself in the crowd, an onlooker just like the others. Part of the nonliving crowd. I knew how that story would play out before I had read the first three pages. And I knew that it contained more truth than fiction. It's the stuff of my nightmares.

what happens if I discover the watchers' true purpose?
will I join them?
will I become a watcher too?
can they read this?
they are watching me write it

The little boy moans in his sleep. He doesn't know that he moves through a dream. His entire world is no more than a chessboard the size of a house. It rocks gently from side to side against a background of the moon and a few stars.

Only three others live in his world. All three are monsters, gray, silent, and ominous. They stand in the far corner of the chessboard. Their hideous and lumpy bodies are the texture of wet clay.

Daddy Monster, the biggest and most menacing of the three, smokes a crooked cigar and spits. He looks like a gorilla modeled from glistening clay.

Mommy Monster is in a drugged stupor. She leers at him through her glowing red eyes and laughs shrilly.

Nameless Monster is small and dominated by the other two. Its forked tongue darts out as it hisses at him.

The monsters turn toward the boy. They stagger blindly but reach him in a few seconds. The biggest monster shoves him roughly. Suddenly, the two big ones begin to wrap their clay bodies around him until they blend into a shapeless mass. It rolls out of control toward the edge of the board and the abyss beyond it.

He screams.

Three people in the dingy little apartment wake up. He will be punished.