💾 Archived View for midnight.pub › posts › 1851 captured on 2024-06-16 at 12:34:53. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Out on the empty scorched Earth, the dry bones of a world once verdant, once home to deep green prehistoric jungles and coral reefs, at a time when the area was home to a similar but entirely separate mountain range known as the ancestral rockies, a lone sprig of grass twitches.
The sprig has been through a lot in its time, has come of age here in this inhospitable climate, has watched over five seasons and knows now that its end is drawing near, that its time in these harsh fields will soon be over, that it will return to the soil and nourish its brethren. It has endured harsh storms, imperceptibly rises every morning with the sun on its gangly stalk, its roots adequately nourished by numerous strange microbes and biological processes.
This twitch, however, on this particular morning, is caused not by the rising of the sun but by a disturbance in the electromagnetic frequencies of the surrounding air- a disturbance initiated the moment Stewart Harrison, host of National Mysteries, the beloved syndicated national radio talk show, signals for the engineer in the recording booth to go on the air.
Harrison is slight, a thin wisp of a man, who has furnished the studio with as many comforts as the FCC will allow- a mini-fridge stocked to the brim with sparkling water and little packs of sausage bites, on occasion for his guests but mostly for himself. A lavish portrait of his second ex-wife above his cushioned leather seat, painted in 1992 by some reasonably well-known Impressionist in Tucson whose name he can’t bring himself to remember. A mirror directly in front of him so he can fix his hair and improve his appearance before each broadcast, which makes him feel good even if he knows nobody is watching. He’s pushing 80, after all.
He nears the state-of-the-art microphone, which is equipped with circuits far more advanced than he knew in his heyday. With this trusty staff, he’ll smite all the demons which plague him and then some, they’ll be vanquished past the point of no return.
“Welcome, from the high desert and the great American Southwest,” he says, the voice of the despondent traveler, the weary and the damned, the lone figure out near the vacant truck stop who can barely make out Harrison’s rasp on the tinny speakers of the japanese build they’ve got clipped to their pocket, designed to carry only the most powerful frequencies, and even then only when the dial is tuned with obscene precision.
“Welcome, one and all, to National Mysteries, and I, am always, am your host, Stewart Harrison. With me today in the studio is my loyal sound engineer, Scott, and as always, all of you.” Scott flashes an appreciative thumbs up. Stewart grins.
“Today- well, today’s episode is going to be a little different. We don’t have any guest today. Instead, we’re going to wing it. What you’re hearing now is unscripted, we don’t even have a particular list of bullet points to follow. Instead, I’d like to tell you about what happened to me last night, because I think it’s something of note. And then, once I’m finished, if we have time, maybe I’ll open up the lines to our audience. But we’ll see.” He loosens his tie. The desert remains quiet and cool, outside the mighty Saguaro stand proud against the encroaching sunrise and the distant sandstone mesas. In many ways, the Saguaro reflect his own story. He leans in, clears his throat.
“I’m talking about the Plastic Men. Yes, people. Some in England may know them as brownies, the more- eh- adventurous among you might know them as Machine Elves. For our purposes here tonight, we’ll refer to them as Plastic Men. Frail, insubstantial beings, each one perhaps six inches in height, whose sole purpose is to torment and confuse. Yes, these entities are very much real. I know because I saw them last night.”
Scott filters out the noise. Harrison lights another cigarette, raises it slowly to his parsed lips, cocks his neck to the right.
“It was around 8 P.M.,” he opines, “I go to sleep early so I can make it out here for Monday’s show. I don’t take sedatives, I feel that’s worth mentioning. Now imagine, if you would, being present for a feeling of intense dread so infectious that it could fill an entire room- that if you were in there with me, you’d be as disturbed as I was, sitting on the couch and preparing to retire to my bedroom for the evening. An overwhelming presence.”
“I closed my eyes, and was enveloped by a sea of featureless gray melancholy. Settling over me like some mist on a quiet sea. I lost all sense in my extremities, as well as muscular control- and it was then that, from the shadows, from this morass of horrible purposelessness, the Plastic Men came to greet me.”
“They were small and out of focus,” he says, “But with them came a horrific pulse, their shrill demands and accusations like the speech behind a window- vague and yet menacing. They raised their arms, which were thin, and their piercing stare was a vibrant scarlet hue, and the room spun like a merry-go-round as they assaulted me- took me for a ride, I tell you-!”
Scott raises an eyebrow.
“I’ve done this for decades,” Harrison concedes, “and many of our listeners- particularly you skeptics- you’ve accused me of lacking skepticism, of promoting dangerous falsehoods. I ask you, if you were there when the Plastic Men came from beneath the floorboards, gnawing through the walls, would you be so hostile then? While their tendrils sucked my skin dry, while they gnashed at me and told me I was worthless? While they robbed me of any self-esteem I may have had remaining, eviscerated my life as a hollow failure? Well?”
Harrison’s nose begins bleeding. It starts without much incident, one drop on the monthly earnings report beneath him, then gradually, as his cadence picks up in intensity, it increases to three drops a second. Scott sets down his headphones for a moment, looks around for a box of tissues, but Harrison seems either not to notice or not to care.
“Damn you people,” he rasps. “You’ve failed me. You’ve all failed me. Worse than that, perhaps, you’ve failed yourselves. When the time comes, and the Plastic Men approach you- don’t tell me I didn’t warn you! Don’t say I wasn’t here to beat some sense into you-!” He picks up the microphone, grabs it, wrenches it from its stand, and hurls it against the wall, where it promptly crashes into a nondescript flowerpot.
“GAH!” Harrison screams, because the blood is really coming now, it oozes unrestrained from his left nostril, then both nostrils pour mercilessly. Scott races out of the recording booth to the side of his employer, who stands amid a frenzy of ruined documents. His irises recede into his forehead until only the whites are visible, and every vein below his chin is throbbing.
“Are you-?” comes Scott’s desperate plea, buried by deep levels of interference. “Are you alright-? Oh, no, oh, shit...” One can only imagine the scene from here, as the sound engineer gently cradles the host’s dead form before dashing to the phone to call 911, memories racing through his head of all the lucky breaks he’s been offered, how vital Harrison’s presence in the world was, how nobody will be able to fill it.
The waves infuse every living particle of air, spread virulently across four states, are instantaneously transferred to Southeast Colorado, run up and down the telephone wires of Highway 50 and surge toward the unkempt park out on Locust St., they blare amid the early rush at Carl’s Jr. and on all the stereos of the rundown beachcombers at Lake Pueblo.
Fifty miles out, the sprig stands tall and proud to greet the morning.