Murder by the Numbers
Chapter 4

Copyright© 2014 by Stultus

Halloween Horror Story: Chapter 4 - A respected TV ratings analyst discovers that a secret he has been protecting for most of his lifetime is in great danger of being prime-time peril. Can a semi-mythical children's cartoon really be a catalyst for pure evil instead? And what would the overnight ratings be for the start of the end of the world? Stay tuned...

Caution: This Halloween Horror Story contains strong sexual content, including Ma/Fa   Reluctant   Mind Control   Hypnosis   Magic   Fiction   Horror   Aliens   Paranormal   Revenge   DomSub   MaleDom   Rough   Oral Sex   Slow  

When our various lusts had been largely sated late Monday morning, I had the sudden odd notion that I ought to call in to the office just to check on things. I’d already told Shirlene and Ryan on Friday that I’d be out for the day, but I just had the urge to check-up on my staff. This was probably the moment that I could later stab a finger at where it seemed everything had really started to all go to shit.

“No,” Shirlene replied after the usual telephone niceties had been observed, “all’s quiet here. Ryan’s crunching last week’s cable ratings, no big surprises ... do you need to confer with him about it?”

“Nope, I trust his instincts, besides it’s just summer cable ratings. Unless he misplaces a decimal place almost no one will even notice, let alone care. Ok, I’m still here in the wilds of Jersey and might linger on another day here then, if nothing’s important.”

“I don’t know about important, but you do have a media envelope from Hubert Watt, Inc. Feels like a DVD ... want me to open it for you to see if it’s anything important?”

“Package from Hubert? Yes, open it now, but first is there a post mark? When was it mailed out?”

“Postmark says Saturday, from the Washington Heights station ... yep, it’s a DVD. The case says, Blade Runner – The Last Final Cut ... that’s what the disc says too. Looks factory ... probably some new beta of an upcoming DVD release for you to preview.”

“Ok ... toss into my slush pile then and I’ll get to it later in the week,” I muttered without any genuine enthusiasm. Something wasn’t right, somehow, somewhere.

“Oh, and Pat sends laudatory congratulations for finding a copy of the long-lost Bad News Bear! It’s already the hottest internet rumor of the week and Pat was burning up the phone lines Friday afternoon try to get marketing deals in place for you. Pat said it’s going to get us millions ... he’s already got a 2.4 mill offer from the Casserly Company and he says they’re really hot to trot.”

“What! How the hell did he find out about that! I never told him, or you or anyone for that matter! It’s supposed to stay secret ... there are issues, maybe legal ones and it might not even be actually for real. I’m dealing with it... quietly ... can you start squashing those burning red hot rumors? That’s an order ... not a suggestion. How did Patrick hear about it anyway?”

“A phone call from a guy in Baltimore early Friday morning, some doctor. Said he’d talked to you on the phone about Bad News Bear and said that you had it, a copy of the real deal. Wanted to talk to you about it again, pretty badly actually. You weren’t answering your cell so I transferred him right to Pat ... I thought it was business and important that had to be immediately handled. They talked for nearly an hour and Pat was literally dancing about the office afterwards with joy!”

Oh fuck! Oh fuck! Oh fuck!

I respect my business partner and we’ve had a good working relationship for ten years now, largely because he likes being the face of the company and handles personally 99% of our clients so that I can actually quietly get the job done in the background. Lot, maybe even most industry insiders don’t even know my name or that I’m the equal co-partner. The drawback, usually only a minor occasional problem, is that he’ll open his big fat jovial mouth a bit too wide and make promises he can’t personally deliver. Spewing out to the various lords and sultans of our industry that he just might have his large nail-chewed paws on one of the lost icons of television history wasn’t anywhere on my radar of fears and private concerns! Casserly Company was big media, a titan of TV and film production since the 1970’s. Independent and almost completely family owned and with colossally deep pockets. If they wanted it, they had the financial means to get it - and the industry clout to not take no for a final answer.

Bugger me!

Doc Arnie had decided to talk after all, but to entirely the wrong person. The Titanic had hit that proverbial iceberg and now the only question was if I could get at least one lifeboat down in time to save Maureen and myself!

“Shirlene, trust me when I tell you that this is a monumental ratfuck of the first order and I need you to get me an open plane ticket for the first shuttle flight that I can possibly catch this evening to go to Baltimore. This has to be straightened out there – and you need to tell, not ask Pat to shut his gawddamn fat piehole about things he knows nothing about, and make him call everyone he then told that it’s all be some humorously horrible misunderstanding. There is NO Bad News Bear ... never was, never ever will be. You can quote me on those words precisely.”

I’d never abruptly hung up on Shirlene before, especially in genuine anger, but I did ... and enjoyed the novel sensation of the experience for several lingering minutes afterwards before I rushed into the bedroom to hastily repack my overnight bag.

Maybe I ought to have taken Maureen with me to Baltimore, now that I knew that all of the proverbial pigeons were leaving the roost, but I didn’t actually even think about it until I was on the road from Jersey driving like a loon to get to the airport. Besides, what else could possibly go wrong?

Trapped in the comfort of a first-class airline seat for the short up-and-down flight to Baltimore and sipping in haste a pair of tiny whisky’s, two rather unpleasant thoughts came immediately into my anxious mind. First was that Hubert notoriously hated the movie Blade Runner in all of its innumerable edits and endless new ‘improved’ director’s cuts. Notoriously so in fact; it was something of a running joke with him that anything that had been excessively over-edited had been ‘Blade Runnered’. New release or not, he’d never send that sort of promotional release to me. The only promo’s he’d ever sent me in the past had all been works of his very own. Also this disc had been mailed a full week after his death and from a distant part of the city that the mole would certainly have never frequented in life. Hell, he never left his loft except to occasionally act as an expert witness in court. He even ordered all of his groceries online and had them delivered once a week!

This immediately suggested to me that the disc was a copy of some sort of insurance policy document mailed or given to a friend to hold just before his sudden death, then mailed out to me afterwards once the news of his murder was positively confirmed. Hubert certainly had the professional hardware right at hand to press and seal in factory plastic a near perfect reproduction of any movie and its packaging that was required. He was also more than paranoid enough to do something just like this.

Now as the plane started to decent to land I suddenly wished I’d gone to the office first to grab that disc – and hopefully find whatever dark secret he’d been killed to suppress.

I didn’t need an inner sense of dread to tell me that I’d made another costly error, perhaps one last fatal mistake too many.


Luck remained with me ... of course all bad.

I arrived in Baltimore late, just after 8:30pm and of course despite dashing to the college and screaming abuse at the hapless cabby to drive ever faster, the film school was shut down for the night without even a janitor available to harass. This meant that I had to spend a near sleepless night at a local hotel counting the hours until I could haunt the halls outside of Dr. Arne’s office and await his leisurely arrival sometime that Tuesday morning. I waited and waited, rather longer than logic told me that I ought to have to. Had everyone on the floor taken the summer week off, I began to wonder?

Right before ten o’clock I heard the echo of a door opening far down the hallway and just around the corner by the elevators. It was the departmental administrative assistant opening up her office but she was just there to quickly pick up mail and check her phone messages.

“Where I can find Dr. Welker? It’s really urgent and I must see him at once ... at home even, if you can give me his contact information.” I stammered, breathless and in something of a real panic.

“Oh ... Dr. Welker! Didn’t you hear? Such a tragedy! He died early Saturday morning ... a tragic house fire, took them all, he and his wife and their two children. It was very sudden and they couldn’t get out in time.

Sudden. Yeah, like the fire that had claimed Hubert. Very, very sudden and certainly arson induced. I was just stunned and honestly didn’t know whether to laugh with hysteria or cry.

Stunned into mindless apathy, I allowed the kindly administrator to fetch me a nearly undrinkable cup of coffee and then she guided me towards the small campus chapel where at 11am this morning the faculty would be gathering for a small memorium service. Since I had no other ideas left of my own, I went and parked myself in a pew somewhere in the center of the few dozen mourners and kept my ears anxiously sifting the whispers in the hushed air for any hint of a clue, but the little snippets of what I heard seemed of no relevance. In short, the professor was well-liked by his peers and the fire was quite an accidental tragedy.

The brief service was non-denominational, but a middle-aged priest did rise up and spoke briefly, the gist being that he’d been Arnie’s parish priest for nearly two decades and only rarely had he known a better, ‘more-upright’ man. Ha! That hadn’t been my own personal experience with the man!

Afterwards there was more (better) coffee and fat finger sandwiches constructed boldly with great earnest with some unnamed mystery meat. I chewed down a few and let the crowd thin out and largely disperse, until the priest made his own farewells and I scampered off after him and corralled him just outside the chapel door in the mostly empty hallway. I was fresh out of cleverness and guile, besides this was a priest, so I settled for the plain unvarnished truth.

“Father, I’d never met Arnold, but we spoke on the phone about a week ago. It was a matter of very great importance to me about something that Arnie had been a small part of many years ago. About television history ... an old better left forgotten cartoon show from Korea. I wanted him to give me some important details about this but he claimed he had forgotten, and maybe perhaps in truth he had ... but he afterwards tried to phone me in New York on Friday, in urgency apparently, but instead may have confessed more than should have ... to someone else that he should not have. This probably, not maybe, cost him his life. Can you tell me anything about this at all father?”

The priest craned his neck at me rather awkwardly, as if he were suddenly examining some strange never before seen rare butterfly. He remained silent for a long pregnant pause before commenting in a rather quiet but firm voice.

“Ah ... and you would be the Cancel Bruin himself?”

“Close ... rather I’m the Renewal Owl. Here’s my card.” It didn’t actually have my pseudonym the Owl’s name on it, rather mine, but it did list the Owl’s website URL and my private office email, renewalowl@tvratings.com; Close enough.

“Indeed,” he said with a wink and twinkle of the eye that suggested he’d misidentified me deliberately on purpose. “That bad business about some bear ... ill-news for everyone, then and now. Delighted to meet you my fine featherless sir, perhaps you can come visit my church sometime while you’re here. I give confessions right before vespers, anytime after four o’clock. I’d be delighted to hear your sins!”

In an expertly casual movement, he slid one of his own business cards into his palm and pressed his flesh into me with a hearty strong handshake of farewell. Suddenly I had hope again ... clearly the priest knew something about the whole sordid affair worth confessing on his own!

On the other hand, once I’d arrived at the church about ten minutes before 4pm, I realized it was going to awhile before the father and I had any semblance of privacy together. Already in residence were a trio of old widows quietly yacking away at each in their respective pews and showing no signs of moving onward to the early senior’s special at Denny’s.

Father Dwayne gave me the briefest of nods as he entered the confessional to await my presence but the ladies were all encamped on that side of the aisle and conceivably within earshot of any discussion within the booth. So I waited and waited as two new parishioners arrived for a quick confession and then both promptly left and the murder of crows, or rather widows finally scuttled on to someplace elsewhere. At almost 5:15pm we finally had the church to ourselves, but from right from the start I began to feel that the entire visit had been wasted.

“Forget Bad News Bear,” he urged me at least a dozen times. Not a chance. It was just a slight exaggeration to say that a friend of mine had been murdered directly because of this and now a supposed friend of his had departed this earthly veil in exactly the same way and for entirely the same reason. Logic didn’t seem to be the strong point of this priest. He had faith instead ... and I suspected a secret of his own.

I refused to budge and kept demanding answers, the least of which was Why? Instead, he instructed me to say a dozen Hail Mary’s and slid quietly out of his end of the confessional with hardly a sound. I was not so easily moved ... I’d had more than enough of this shit.

During the Vespers service I sat on the second row and just kept smiling at Father Dwayne. I’m sure it was a really maliciously evil and nasty smile and when the last Amen was said and the dozen worshipers had all filed out and made their own tracks for Denny’s, I just stayed seated, immobile and grinning probably like a Cheshire Cat.

“On your own head be it then...” he muttered and after crossing himself thoroughly in front of the altar he sat down next to me with a loud exaggerated sigh and began a long confessional of his own, telling me much much more about Bad News Bear than I had actually ever hoped to learn.


“For starters,” he explained with a sigh, “just listen without interrupting and I’ll tell you what really happened. It was really all just a lark ... more of a test of concept than an actual endeavor. There wasn’t even a dream that anyone would get hurt. There were four of us involved right from the start, all film students at the University of Maryland and not one of us, the four of us at least, were actual Satanists. At most we just thought it was joke, really just an academic project that we were told was just for a demo ... a proof of a theoretical technical, nothing more. They’re all dead now except for me. I could give their real names but there’s no point or real value to it anymore, so I’ll just call them Alec, Bob, Carol and me, Dwayne. You can take a new name when you become a priest and I did, but I was there, I helped the cause – so I shared in that great sin together.”

“I’m not going to shift blame, but the core of the plan came from Alec. We’d just attended a seminar on the effectiveness of subliminal advertising in print media and Bob and I started a debate about how effective some of those techniques would be in film. Oh, it was already being done, but in a limited manner. Buy more Coke and popcorn from the theater concession stand, and petty bits like that. Anyway the four of us argued half the night fortified by a couple pitchers of beer and by the next day we’d all pretty much forgotten about the whole thing. Except for Alec. I need to explain here that Alec was at least ten years older than the rest of us college kids were and he was something of a perpetual career student that everyone knew. He’d been hanging around the student center for seemingly forever and he had friends of all sorts and varieties. He was one of those loud mouthed guys that always shooting his mouth off too much, kind of a know-it-all, but he was just smart and interesting enough that we liked being around him despite his oversized ego and constant self-bragging. Alec really knew people ... he actually did have a friend or two involved with actual commercial productions and he always had some pizza and beer money, which we didn’t. About once a month he’d tell us about some little paying gig, like editing down a 43 minute nature documentary to run in just 23 minutes, but keeping some minimal storyline extant. And we could do that, or add subtitles to a Puerto Rican documentary or even redub it into English. He had a close friend at a real TV network, he’d boast laughingly, and doing small gigs for him or her paid us enough irregularly to keep us in pizza and beer and buy the odd textbook.”

 
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