Welcome to a world of plot holes and spelling errors. For my very first blog entry I have procured a copy of the first Point Horror collection of short stories: 13 Tales of Horror (insert ghost emoji here folks). My intention is to devote a blog post to each story … but I make no promises as I have a reasonably short attention span these days.
So the first story up is ‘Collect Call: Part One’ by Christopher Pike, the second part of this story is the last in the book. Our tale of terror opens at a party and Mr Pike immediately sets the mood by informing us that the party is ‘a bummer’, cool dude. The party belongs to Randy Claud (anyone else think this sounds like a porn name?), Randy is described as a social climber who intends to vote republican as soon as he can legally vote, I immediately hate Randy. Randy is also described as 30 pounds overweight and wearing fat glasses. Things that are fat so far in this story:
- Randy
- Randy’s glasses
Also at the party are Janice and Caroline who both have the hots for local bad boy Bobby Walker who apparently ‘looks so fine’ (reading this on the first page made me hum ‘Hey Mickey’ for the next 44 pages). Janice is super into Bobby’s black leather jacket and his tight jeans. Janice however does not like Caroline who is simultaneously described as being ‘a blond babe’, having ‘a large round mouth’ and ‘being as realistic as a sitcom in syndication’.
The sitcom in syndication line feels out of place for the Point Horror age group. It also smacks of personal grievance – are you trying to tell us something Mr. Pike?! Okay back to the story, Janice is skulking in the background drinking a beer and staring at Bobby Walker with love heart emoji eyes whilst he also skulks in a corner at the other end of the room fondling a pot plant, with a beer in the other hand and a cigarette hanging off his lower lip. Janice had apparently been smoking a cigarette earlier in the hope Bobby would come and ask for a light but alas ‘her lungs were still virgin, along with the rest of her,’ Jesus Janice! Although to be fair while at college I carried a selection of poetry books around unnecessarily in the hopes a guy in my English Lit class would be impressed (if you are reading this Hi Ian) sadly he was not, so I do have some sympathy for Janice.
Janice decides that she is going to go and speak to he of the tight jeans Bobby Walker, Randy helpfully informs her that Bobby punched a guy in P.E the other day for the heinous crime of calling him by his name. ‘Guess Bobby didn’t like the way he pronounced it’ he speculates … Um what? How the f*ck else can you pronounce Bobby? I’ve been wracking my brain over this and all I’ve got is ‘Booby’ if you come up with anything better then please leave it in the comments. Janice ponders whether this incident means Bobby is a jerk but Randy assures her that if she likes him then he is definitely not a jerk – this is not the way the world works. So with a pat on her bottom from Randy (ugh Randy!) she goes off to speak to Bobby who is still busy touching up a pot plant.
Bobby has brown eyes the colour of ‘the hard ground’, his breath is cold as he whispers in Janice’s ear and for an instant Janice could swear ‘his eyes were as empty as the barren earth’ he also insists on repeatedly calling Janice Fran rather than Jan, even when corrected. But apparently all these red flags are totally acceptable to Janice because he has a leather jacket and tight jeans you guys! So instead of telling him to f*ck off Janice hangs around giggling like a moron but sadly this romantic tete-a-tete is interrupted by a cheerleader called Suzy McQueen whom everyone refers to as Suzy Q. Suzy announces to everyone that it is head cheerleader Caroline’s birthday and Caroline catches Bobby’s eye – this is the start of a downward spiral for Janice who likens Suzy to a Suzy Q ‘she looked like a Suzy Q with all the white cream pouring out and making a mess of everything’.
I don’t really understand how a person can look like a cake but sure okay Janice. Bobby calls Caroline over and gives her a cassette tape as a gift. Janice is not happy in fact she feels like she looks like a ‘bookmark’ next to Caroline whose face is ‘as round and sweet as apple pie and ice cream … her clear skin knew how to hug the right curves.’ Wow. WOW. Of course her skin knew how to hug her curves, that’s what skin does – also that is kind of a gross description. Was Mr. Pike hungry when he wrote this? Why does he keep referring to women looking like cakes and pies? People in this book who look like things that aren’t people:
- Janice – Bookmark
- Suzy McQueen – Suzy Q Cake
- Caroline – Apple pie and ice cream
The cassette tape is by a guy called ‘The Black Walker’ … wait isn’t Bobby’s surname Walker? Hmm I wonder if that’s important? Bobby gets all music snobby at Caroline’s suggestion she may have seen The Black Walker on MTV ‘The Black Walker doesn’t prostitute himself. You can feel him but you can’t see him. He’s never been on TV.’ Gross he sounds like a creepy sex pest who can’t get a record deal. As the party winds down and Bobby Walker has done a disappearing act (probably gone home with that pot plant from earlier) Janice is forced by Randy to give Caroline a ride home as she lives reasonably nearby. Then we are treated to some of the greatest descriptive imagery I have ever read. ‘Caroline shrugged, staring forward, her head bowed slightly as if she was wearing a fat hat’. Excuse me what?! A FAT HAT! I don’t think I’ll ever recover from reading this. Things that are fat so far in this story:
- Randy
- Randy’s glasses
- A hat
The girls decide to listen to the cassette that Bobby gave to Caroline, the music is full of ‘dark sensual synthesizers, a drum machine in touch with a disembodied spirit. Then a haunting voice as cold as grey snow and as deep as a forgotten well.’ Just in case you like me were too busy laughing at this description as well as the previous ‘fat hat’ incident Mr. Pike immediately follows it with ‘Powerful stuff’. Is grey snow particularly cold? I’d assume grey snow was becoming slush which means its actually a bit warmer? But hey, at least its not yellow.
Next we are treated to the ‘powerful’ lyrics, I personally always find it intensely cringy when authors make up songs in books.
This is my night,
this is your night.
I’m a black walker babe,
touch me softly and you’ll get a fright.
The Black Walker
I was not disappointed, the cringe here is exceptionally strong. Also The Black Walker appears to have the song lyric writing abilities of an 11 year old girl, but Janice and Caroline thinks this is the best song they’ve ever heard so I’m starting to assume all the beer drinking has maybe given them brain damage. To keep herself from throwing up while driving Janice thinks ‘biting conversation’ might be the thing to distract her, so she asks Caroline about being head cheerleader and then we get what I think might be a bl*w job reference(!) which would have sailed right over my head first time around reading this. Caroline describes getting an energy rush when cheering and Janice replies ‘Is it a sexual energy? A satanic energy? A nuclear energy? … I was just wondering what went through your head when you had your megaphone up to your mouth.’ – I mean … right?!
This all culminates in the girls having a fight over which of them gets Bobby Walker as their very own teen dream, Janice calls Caroline a slut and Caroline punches Janice in the face causing her to miss a turn and the car to go sailing over the edge of a cliff. Caroline appears to be dead so Janice convinces herself the most sensible course of action would be to move her to the drivers seat, the logic being Janice was driving drunk but she is alive with her whole life ahead of her, Caroline meanwhile is dead. So Janice drags ‘poor dead Caroline’ into the drivers seat and as she carefully steps away the car explodes and Caroline starts screaming. Oops she was still alive, guess you should have checked for a pulse huh Janice? We are then treated to a couple of paragraphs of Caroline screaming as she burns up in the car while Janice is squeezing her eyes shut and being all ‘Gah why wont you die!’ then finally an ambulance and the police turn up.
Next up Janice is all gowned up in hospital sat on an examination table which we are told is cold underneath her bottom, thanks for that I guess. Her doctor is called Dr. Please, the joke ‘Dr Please, please’ is made twice – hilarious stuff. Janice continues her streak of stellar decision making by lying to the police, she is being questioned by Officer Frank who is ‘young and serious, he was handsome enough for a daytime soap’ ooh la la! He appears to be buying the tale Janice is spinning that Caroline simply drove off the road. Janice explains it really well here: ‘She didn’t exactly drive off the road. She just didn’t turn to stay on the road.’ She explains how she was thrown from the car and then it exploded and that shes sure Caroline was unconscious when the car caught fire and didn’t feel a thing. Just to make sure she has her back covered she has already called Randy and told him to backup her story that Caroline was driving. ‘He had immediately know what the deal was, and was not happy about it, but he was willing to support her.’ Just reminding us here that Randy is indeed a terrible human being.
Officer Frank drives Janice home from the hospital as we are informed that her parents are out of town, how convenient. On her way to take a shower she notices her watch stopped at the time of the accident (spooky). She showers and soaks through the bandages Dr. Please just spent two pages painstakingly applying, nice Janice. While drying off in the kitchen she notices the answerphone light flashing which she thinks is odd as she didn’t notice it when she got in. The message is from Caroline! Asking for a ride to the party. This gives Janice a serious case of the heebie jeebies but she manages to rationalize this away thinking Caroline could have called after she left for the party but she is still a little dubious as Caroline hadn’t called her once in the four years they’d gone to school together. Laying in bed Janice hears the answer machine clicking, someone is calling. Unable to relax and ignore it she checks to see who had called, impossibly it’s Caroline again and she really needs Janice to give her a lift to the party. Understandably Janice is starting to freak out, she unplugs the answer machine and goes and hides in her bed under a blanket – I unlike Janice know this strategy will not work because I have read this and many other point horror stories before.
Not 15 minutes later the sound of the answer phone clicking comes from the kitchen, at this point Janice looses it and starts yelling at the inanimate object ‘No you don’t! I turned you off! You cannot take any messages!’. Perhaps upset that it’s been yelled at the answer machine ignores this warning and continues clicking, Janice debates getting a hammer and smashing the answer machine into tiny pieces but instead opts to listen to the message. Shocker its another one from Caroline! *Gasp*
Janice, you know who this is. Pickup the goddamn phone. We’re going to the party and you’re taking me. There’s no way I can drive myself. I have a fever. I’m burning up. If you don’t come with me I’ll drive off the road. You got that girl? Come get me now.
Poor Dead Caroline
Janice decides the only logical way to determine whether Caroline is really dead or not is to go back the hospital and check for Caroline’s crispy corpse in the morgue. The. Only. Logical. Way. Sure Jan. So for some unfathomable reason she puts on her broken watch and blood stained clothes from earlier, takes the tape out of the answerphone and drives back to the hospital. The hospital is eerily silent and devoid of life ‘The silence of the place was uncanny, as if all patients and personnel alike had died since she left’ yeah because you’re the center of the universe Janice, yikes. Suddenly a hand reaches out of nowhere and touches Janice on the shoulder, it’s an old nurse (the oldness of said nurse is heavily emphasized) ‘She was dressed in wrinkles and white. Her big nose hung over her pruned mouth like a witches beak’ Wow, don’t get old ladies! Janice ask her where everyone is to which this OLD nurse replies ominously ‘They’re here those that are supposed to be.’ Obviously this sinister statement sails right over Janice’s head.
Noticing Janice’s bloodied clothes the OLD nurse asks her what happened. Janice explains she was at the hospital earlier as she had been in an accident with another girl and had come to see how she was doing. The OLD nurse bluntly says she’s dead. Janice says she doesn’t think so as Caroline has been calling her since she got home. This gives the OLD nurse pause and she replies ‘Was Caroline her name? I don’t think that was her name.’ Again, ominous. The OLD nurse says she knows the driver of the car was killed and tells Janice to go home before bustling off leaving her in the empty hall. Janice makes her way to the morgue in the basement where on the the gleaming stainless steel table lays an occupied body bag. She agonizes for a couple of sentences about unzipping the bag to check if it’s Caroline, wondering if Caroline’s face is in bits and if she’s going to vomit. Thankfully she notices a name tag … but it’s her name JANICE ADAMS *gasp* For some insane reason Janice finds this funny assuming the doctors and nurses have made a mistake and got the girls names confused upon admission. She then reasons that there must be someone at school who had heard about the accident and could mimic Caroline’s voice perfectly, mystery solved. As if.
Janice suddenly freaks out and legs it out of the hospital jumps in the car and zooms off. But she has no idea where she is heading the landscape suddenly looks all weird and alien. She turns right then left looking for a familiar landmark but she doesn’t recognize anything! She puts on a tape to calm herself down, it was the tape Bobby Walker gave to Caroline. Janice could remember putting it in her back pocket when she moved Caroline into the drivers seat but she can’t figure out how it could have got into her mothers car the only tape she’d bought from home was the one from the answering machine. While Janice is having an existential crisis we are treated to some more powerful dark lyrics from The Black Walker.
The stars are holes in the sky.
The moon is a thorn in the dark.
It drips white light.
Give me the knife.
Lets cut out our eyes.
The Black Walker
Suddenly Janice remembers that when she got home from the hospital she had laid Bobby’s tape on top of the answering machine after glancing at the machine to make sure no one had called. And no one had called, until a few moments later then the calls from Caroline had started. But when she noticed the first call the tape was no longer on top of the answering machine. The only tape she had taken from home was the tape in the answering machine, the tape with Caroline’s messages. The tape she must have put in the answering machine. The tape Bobby had given Caroline! Say What?! It took me several times of reading this to try and figure out what Mr. Pike was trying to say, in the end I gave up and went and poured myself a glass of wine. On with the story!
The song finishes and suddenly Caroline starts talking to Janice through the cassette tape saying she’s glad Janice got her messages and is going to give her a ride to the party and starts giving her directions. Janice follows the directions, even though she doesn’t want to, because she is lost and wants to go home, if you are thinking this makes no sense you would be correct as Caroline is not directing Janice home but to her home. Janice glances at her watch which has started to tick again (that can not be good) ten to one, ten minutes before the car exploded (definitely not good). Janice pulls onto the shoulder of the road and gets out of the car, recognizing her surroundings as the scene as the accident. Janice climbs down the slope confused at the lack of debris she checks her watch again which is ticking towards one o’clock. Janice suddenly believes Caroline is not dead and remembers her name on the tag of the body bag she rather poignantly thinks ‘how sad that her own name could fill her with such dread’.
Janice looks up at a flicker of headlights and a car goes sailing over her head the screams of the two girls inside filling the night air. Janice rushes to the car and pulls the passenger free, guess who it is! Go on guess … nah you’ll never get it … it’s Caroline! Janice is overjoyed at being able to save her. She returns to the car to free the driver but they instead start some sort of Three Stooges routine where they both keep going for the door handle at the same time meaning the driver is unable to get free. Janice starts to back away from the car when suddenly the drivers head whips around and they make eye contact, she realizes the point of the whole night was to get Caroline out of the car first. Jesus Janice have some self worth! ‘But no one would save Caroline, Janice thought, not according to the accounts that would be written. She would appear to have been thrown to safety. As for the other girl, the driver … well she should have known better that to drink and drive. True that Janice, true that. Then the car explodes and instead of sending her flying it somehow defies logic and sucks her into it where she burns to death, bye Janice.
Now we join Caroline who is waking up in hospital with Dr. Please informing her she was in an accident on the way home from the party and that Janice was killed in the explosion. Her parents have just stepped out for a spot of lunch (how convenient, we don’t need any pesky parents interfering with our Point Horror plot lines do we kids?) but there is apparently a young man outside who has been waiting all night to see her. Why and that boy only happens to be … Bobby Walker! He of the black leather jacket, tight jeans and terrible taste in music. Caroline asks Dr. Please to send Bobby on in and in the meantime uses her bedside phone to call her answer machine and check for messages all the while thinking how awesome it is that Bobby Walker stayed up all night just for her!
She has two messages the first just happens to be from Mr. Walker himself calling her Carol and asking ‘if you loved the tape. If it did something for you. I’ll see you soon, if you’re still alive, that is.’ Ugh way to come across as a major creep Bobby. Caroline ponders that Bobby’s message aint all that and a bag of chips, also his voices sounds kind of like The Black Walkers … hmm ‘interesting’ she thinks, yeah no sh*t Caroline. The second message is from Janice
Hi Caroline, this is Janice. You called me so I’m calling you. But don’t try calling me back. I can’t answer the phone. The fire burned off my hands. But don’t worry I’ll be in touch … soon.
Crispy Fried Janice
Caroline then quite appropriately screams, a lot, and Bobby Walker waltzes into the hospital room wearing a big ole shit eating grin on his face.
So there you have it, blog post number one, thanks for joining me on my trip down memory lane and see you next time around for the second story from 13 Tales of Horror, Lucinda by Lael Littke.
Until then, Goodnight out there, whatever you are.
Helena Does Blogging 