Make Your Fortune

When I started this one I was writing for a short story competition with a five hundred word limit, I don’t think I can achieve that level of brevity, or least I couldn’t with this story.
I had the idea at about 1am, sitting up with my fiancee while she marked exam papers, me next to her struggling to write, getting nowhere. Her mum was there too, and she’d turned the TV to Challenge, which in the early hours runs absolutely ancient episodes of Strike It Lucky and The Price is Right. That was enough to set me off on the following nightmare…

As the lights came up I did as I had been told.  I grinned as wide as I could, feeling insincere and openly desperate, and waved as hard as I could, as if the strength of my wave would contribute to my chances of success.  The stage lights had now obscured my view of the crowd beyond, but I could suddenly hear them clearly, or rather, felt the force of their applause hit me in my stomach.  My bolted on smile faltered as my guts rose in one mass to just under my tongue, and I knew with certainty that I would be on YouTube tomorrow:

Woman Honks on ‘Make Your Fortune!’ Blows Chunks On Ken Carthage’s Shoes

Fortunately Ken didn’t speak to me straight away, delivering a monologue to the audience that I assumed was funny, the audience laughed in all the correct places anyway.  I concentrated instead on lowering my rising gorge.  He finished his preamble and turned to me,

“Hello my dear!” He suddenly seemed to fill the whole universe with the triple towering cliffs of his weirdly large double-breasted jacket, shining forehead and ferocious white teeth. “What’s your name and what do you do?” I took a breath and found myself,

“HI KEN MY NAME’S JANET AND I’M A SOFTWARE ANALYST FROM YORKSHIRE” I blurted. Ken made some joke which I didn’t really hear, but I laughed anyway.  My stomach settled and I started to enjoy myself, this was a fun thing to be doing, I couldn’t see the audience but the cameramen and crew people looked friendly they were all was smiling at me, they all wanted me to win.  I would win! Ken was still talking to me but he turned away and delivered his lines straight into the camera,

“Well Janet, as you know I’m sure, this game is very simple. One Million Pounds can be yours if you successfully complete a mental, physical or skill based challenge behind one of these doors.” He gestured to three doors at the back of the studio, featureless except for a coat of TV show sparkles. “All you have to do is pick one, Door one, two or three! The choice is yours!” The crowd applauded again, and I think they missed him add,

“Or Door number OOOOOOOOO”.

That’s the closest approximation I can make to the sound that came out of his mouth. Not a word, but a deep, rumbling sound. I thought I’d imagined it and carried on, letting Ken lead me up to the three doors, I stood in front of them pondering my choice, the crowd bellowing different numbers in encouragement, their words merging into one nonsense sound, repeated over and over,

“Woooeee! Woooeee! Woooeee!”

On and on it went, morphing into a chant, an invocation to the Dark Gods of Television. Oh Great Square-eyed One, we beseech thee, accept this female as tribute. Hallelujah and twiddle-thy-knobs!

It was then I realised there were in fact four doors, the three I had noticed prior, and another. A ten foot, black wooden edifice that seemed to me to have been stolen from the front porch of some gothic mansion. It had a frame of white marble, every inch of it carved into leering, howling maws and despairing eyes. The imprisoned souls of the forever damned, straining for release from the chains of ivy and dead, brown brambles that had grown over the frame. Above the door, at the top of the lintel where the other doors displayed their number, this door had instead the sideways eight that I knew stood for infinity.

At the time, this seemed perfectly normal to me, and if anyone had asked me about it right then, I would have replied that there were always four doors on the show, that I had seen it many times myself on TV, the three challenge doors and the other one, the one nobody had ever chosen. Though in truth I had never seen it before today.

Ken had taken my arm and was shouting, half to me and half to the crowd, pondering out loud over which door I would choose, leading me first to one, then to another. I played along with the pantomime, all the while feeling an irresistible pull from the fourth door, knowing I would choose that one. The one nobody else was acknowledging.

I looked at Ken then, and saw something changing about him. Like a double exposure on an old photo, there were two of him, one laid over the other.  The paler of the two was smiling at a joke he had just made, turned towards the crowd. The other, which in my head I automatically thought of as The Real Ken was looking straight at me, the smile he had worn so easily gone as if it had never been there.

“Enough messing around.” he said. “We both know you have made your choice, the door awaits.”

“But Ken…” I said,

“No! No more talk. No more fun. Seize your destiny. Open the door and pass through to eternity.”

I felt then as if I too were splitting into two forms. I imagined I could see my physical body standing on the threshold of door two, waving and smiling. I could hear the theme music that normally played at this part of the show, but only as a dim echo, each note stretched out to an infinite, perfect drone, filling the whole of time.

My real self turned, as I had known I would, towards the fourth door.  It swung open, welcoming me, and a sound filled the air, a bass rumble similar to the sound Ken had made when naming the door.  A Gregorian chant echoing out of the abyss.

“OOOOOOOOOOOOOO”

Without pause I stepped through the door.

******************************************************************

Stars surrounded me.

When I was a little girl, I would lie on the grass in my Grandfather’s back garden and watch the stars for hours. They always seemed to be painted on a flat surface, suspended up there on the roof of the world, beautiful, but two dimensional. Now I could see them for what they were, some were close, almost as if I could touch them, and others, most others, stretched off into the depths, infinitely distant, the oldest and furthest ones glowing with light from the birth of the universe.

I had never felt so small and insignificant, but it was not a negative feeling. I was delighted to be made so strongly aware of the magnificence of all of existence. I did not feel separate from it, I was part of it, enveloped by it, so my tiny self began to blur at the edges, and merge with it.

“Yes!” Ken Carthage spoke, “Submit to the infinite my child, forget the meagre world of the flesh, and join your friends in blissful oblivion.” I could see him now, floating in the void, rubbing his hands with glee. His transformation half begun, stubby wings pushing out from beneath his jacket, yet he still maintained some of the mannerisms of the Game Show host he had been a moment ago, the broad, big-toothed smile was unchanged.

In the shock and rapture of first experiencing the void, I had forgotten that I too must be floating out here as he was, yet I still felt hard ground beneath my feet, looking down at myself I could see my body was insubstantial, transparent. I lifted one foot, and brought it down hard, and was rewarded with the resistance of the studio floor, and a loud thump. This was all an illusion, a glamour cast by Ken to entice his prey. For all that it was still dangerous, it had nearly worked on me. The time had come to stop playing up to the empty-headed contestant act and deal with this predator.

“Ken Carthage,” I said “you are guilty of holding the souls of at least 40 individuals against their will, you have one chance to release them and in so doing, avoid any sanctions.”

“Oh little girl,” he said, floating closer, his face growing larger, filling my field of vision, “I’m not holding anyone against their will, they all chose this door, just as you did. Mere wealth is nothing compared to a taste of the infinite.”

“One chance Ken,” I said, “and then I’m taking you down.” Most of my colleagues wouldn’t even give them that. Hating Ken and his kind with every fibre of their being and exterminating them without regret. I didn’t hate them any more than I would hate a poisonous spider. They, like Ken, could only act according to their nature, but I liked to give them a chance to rise above that. Some took it, not many, but enough for it to be worth trying.

“Come on now dear,” Ken said, beckoning me forward, “Join me, and reach Nirvana!” I felt again the desire to become one with the comforting blackness surrounding me, but I resisted. If I gave myself to it I would be his creature, my soul sustaining him over long years, gradually diminishing, until nothing remained except a howling face carved in marble.

He would lure me further and further into this construct of his and then contrive to trap me here, in this particular case I reckoned it would be as simple as closing the black door behind us. Looking around I saw it, hanging in space, the bright lights of the studio shining through, and the bombastic theme music and roar of the game show audience just audible over the hum and rumble of this false ‘infinity’.  Trailing through the door were two cords, like wisps of glowing smoke. The connection to our physical bodies. After drawing me in, Ken would have left again, and shut the door on my connection, trapping my astral self here, for him to use at his leisure.

I ran for the door, wondering what running would feel like. Would I float ineffectually, legs pumping in the vacuum? Luckily, my feet pounded on the floor I could feel but not see and I crossed the space to the threshold quickly. I heard a rasping hiss from behind me, the monster that had been Ken Carthage barrelling through space towards me, teeth growing into stiletto points and skin coloured leathery wings ripping through fabric, but he had misjudged.

I had plenty of time to step through the door and throw it shut. The wispy cord connecting Ken to his body snapped neatly with a satisfying snick sound and I felt a sharp tug in my low abdomen, this was me being pulled back into my physical self, which had been play acting a role in the dreadful game show, I found myself knee-deep in green prop slime (what they used to call Gunge in the nineties) with several gold plastic pound signs in my hands; my prizes.

This happened in an instant. Ken, the human Ken, had been standing over the space where I took the challenge, laughing along with the crowd and shouting encouragement, but as soon as the door shut and I rejoined my body, Ken’s soul was permanently severed from his, trapped in a bottle universe of his own creation with no escape. The body’s face went blank, the light disappearing from his eyes as he fell over sideways, knees straight, his head smacking loudly into the floor.

*******************************************************************

I managed to get on YouTube after all, the title was:

Ken Carthage Dies of Heart Attack On Live TV

It’s got a lot in common with the horribly sad one of Tommy Cooper, where nobody’s really sure if he’s joking or not at first.

I’m quite proud of my performance in this one, laughter at Ken’s antics turning gradually to concern, then horror. The last thing you see is my face, looking around at the studio hands, trying to tell them something’s wrong, but not finding the right words. Then the lights go down, pulling the studio into darkness.