Murder by the Numbers
Chapter 3

Copyright© 2014 by Stultus

Halloween Horror Story: Chapter 3 - 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  

Maureen was still crying when I left her late on Sunday afternoon, but these I believe were tears of relative happiness and joy rather than sorrow. Besides, I was sure that those welts on her well sodomized ass would heal up in no time.

We’d both rather enjoyed ourselves this weekend and I was still positively giddy for the duration of the drive back home to New York. Like the redeemed Scrooge on the morning of Christmas day, excitement effused out from every pore and I wanted to laugh and dance and burst forth with merriment. None of which ought to be done while driving, even if the traffic into the city this evening was light. To me now it was if like Dorothy, I too had landed right smack into the middle of Oz and my surrounding world had also changed from dull black & white into glorious technicolor.

Bad News Bruin certainly had something to do with this, but what exactly?

First, I proven that the cartoon had existed and wasn’t just some childish half-dream that I’d created for myself, like some proverbial monster in the closet or lurking under the bed. Maureen had possessed real genuine copies of the entire lamentable series – probably, undoubtedly, the very last remaining original copies of that species of mylar hobgoblin. I knew – we knew that our fears had been real, perhaps once. Now today as adults though ... perhaps these past terrors would no longer trouble us.

Conceivably could there really be horrors in this world that are so terrible that they can only be fully understood by children? Devils of thought that can only corrupt these very special sorts of natural innocence, I thought to myself as I drove that last mile towards home. It just inconceivable that there were terrors left that could conceivably haunt my adult dreams as the bear had done as a child. Maureen and I were both now too cynical, too untrusting and in various degrees already damaged enough inside for the bear to do us further possible harm. Or so I believed.

Something had changed however, and it was either too early to tell what, or else I was still so emotionally connected to the novel experience of our super-charged weekend of sexual sadomasochism that I couldn’t even now tell up from down. I had done things in the last twenty-four hours that I’d only seen in hints from the darker sides of my imagination, stuff too wild, too outright nasty even to appear on most porn websites. It had all somehow been unleashed from within myself, trapped it would seem beneath my armored shell of remote semi-passivity. My protective shell that rarely ever interacted with my employees and coworkers and never unleashed even the tiniest portion of my inner self to them or anyone that could reveal my inner vulnerabilities.

Maureen had changed all of this, and in an afternoon. In what seemed a moment of madness I had aggressively asserted myself unto someone even more emotionally vulnerable than I was and much to her own surprise she found that by sexual submission and surrender begin to ‘feel’ again and embrace life for the first time in many years. Pain had brought her joy and fulfillment ... and she eagerly grasped for more of these new rich sensations, which I had no qualms against providing. The pain brought her pleasure and for all of Saturday and into Sunday I strove to deliver to her as much pleasure as my hands and a sturdy belt could provide. I made a written note to myself to find a good sex shop to buy a proper whip for my next visit.

Reaching home I phoned Maureen just to tell I’d arrived and that the trip had been an unusually easy one and I wished her good night. Her voice was pleasant, cheerful even with a bit of perkiness to it and not the mumbling depressed tone I’d previously associated with her voice.

Before hanging up I gave her a last firm reminder of my prior instructions for her to start organizing her father’s video collection so that it could sold or given way. Frankly I really didn’t care which. We didn’t need the money (already I was thinking of us together as ‘we’) and with her significant depression issues she didn’t need to be living in what was essentially her father’s mausoleum any longer. If she wanted to light a match and just burn down the old ramshackle house entirely, that would work for me too.

We’d both lived a bit too much in the past and now the future was gleaming before us, that bright technicolor road to Oz was laid out right in front of us both, just waiting for our two pairs of feet to step forward in hand and allow that magical road to whisk us away.

“Be careful!” she suddenly said just as I was starting to hang up the phone. I rushed the phone back to my ear but she had already rung off and the line was now dead. Oddly, there was just enough of that old childlike innocence left within me that for quite a long time afterwards I just couldn’t comprehend exactly what she had meant by it at all. I had no particular plans or schemes, just a lingering query or two that I was itching to make purely for my own satisfaction. What had she sensed or feared?

I was well-content to let sleeping bears lie; as far as I was concerned Bad News Bear could (and should) remain an urban myth, fading away from memory with each passing year.


I left the flat at my regular time the next morning but I didn’t walk the seven blocks to work as was usual on a day with good weather. I called the office to just leave a message that I was going to run an errand on the way in and would an hour or two delayed, but Shirlene was already there and she answered the phone on the second ring. Ryan was running early this morning too also present about a half-hour early as well. I left my message, hung up and smiled. It was a fairly open secret that Shirlene our do-everything sales & marketing gal and self-appointed office manager had a growing thing for Ryan, our statistics intern. It’s the plaintive looks of a couple in love, not to mention the fingers that linger on each other’s shoulders and arms when they pass or stop to discuss some minutia of business that give the secret away. I think even my partner Pat has noticed and he’s largely oblivious to anything that happens outside his office door, which he almost never leaves. Interesting...

I decided to continue to feign ignorance until the big August staff confab in about six weeks, where we’d set budgets and staffing for the big fall broadcast season. Our biggest & busiest (and most profitable) time of the year. If Shirlene was really serious about a long term relationship with Ryan then perhaps we could promote the kid into a paid position for the next year, until his Master’s degree was completed. Then the love-happy couple could make proper career decisions together afterwards. We had the money, no doubt about that, and I sort of needed at least a part-time dedicated assistant anyway. As my shadow the kid was more than serviceable and he had learned a lot of my tricks and could already do most of the mundane details of our work more than adequately.

Now that I had Maureen, maybe it was time to back off from my workload a bit and learn to smell some roses myself. Summer was our slowest time of year anyway as nothing of any real importance would happen in the network broadcasting world for at least another month. Summer viewer ratings almost never matter. Any new scripted series (like the miserable Virgin Wilderness) are either predetermined to fail or else so cheap to produce that ratings are virtually irrelevant. You can count the number of historically successful summer launched series on one hand and probably have fingers left over. Most if not all of the choicer spackle stays on the shelf until late September, when the first new series have launched and most begin to immediately bomb. Summer in broadcast land was all about CHEAP filler; even cheaper overseas imports, grade W, X & Y mini-series and reality TV (dirt cheap) by the shovel load.

Really the only fun part of my job would be looking at early previews of new fall scripted shows. Dozens of them, for which only a paucity, six or eight at best would find an immediate scheduled home. Only about half of these would survive long enough to either receive a backload of additional episodes for spring, and historically only a few would be renewed for another fall season. Some of the failed pilots might return for reworking or perhaps just join the castoffs on the spackle shelf to perhaps appear a time or two sometime in the Spring ... or get parceled off or resold to another network, like the CW or even cable.

Shirlene had confirmed that I had nothing critical waiting for me on my desk (nothing that Ryan couldn’t handle on his own anyway) so I lurched off to the subway with a spring in my step and a lingering song in my heart. I was in love and even summer in New York felt delightful, at least at 8:30am before the growing heat began baking the pavements.

My goal was down and west, to an old warehouse on a small side street off of Greenwich near the Holland Tunnel. Any patch of ground or real estate left in New York, no matter how run down and dilapidated, was far too valuable to left to crumble or rust away. Years ago this rather modest building had been turned into a complex of eight semi-premium residential lofts, the top north-most one hosted what was arguably the premier private audio/video laboratory in the city, and quite possibly the entire northeast.

Hubert Watts wasn’t quite a friend; he didn’t like people or human society any more than I did, but we’d done a lot of business together over the years. TVRatings.com is in the information business and we know people who know people, etc ... and both of us often act as impartial mediators between production and/or network factions. Very privately and off the record. If you needed an emergency overnight edit and all of the relevant particulars for the project are out of town or unavailable, and it must get done, then Hubert was your man. His core business these days was A/V forensics, acting as an expert witness mostly for civil trials concerning video and sound editing. He could look a bit of film or sound recording and tell you in just minutes how many different bits of editing (or none) had occurred and the machine or software that had done each of them.

He’d worked the film editing business for nearly forty years and made enough swag in the process to buy this warehouse in the early 1990’s and could have lived like a prince on his rents on the remaining seven units. Instead, like the urban mole he was, he just kept working but increasingly often now he only accepted projects that interested him technically.

I left a phone message to tell him that I was coming with something interesting but he didn’t answer the phone or the buzzer at the front main entrance. I walked around the block to the back of the old warehouse and slid my way through a loosely chained gate and leaned on the rear freight elevator call button for what must have been ten or fifteen minutes. Eventually Hubert responded over the speaker to say that the lift was on the way down to me. This was not unusual for Hubert; I’d once had to wait for just over an hour. When he concentrates on something not even explosives could probably get his attention when he’s absorbed with a problem.

“S’up?” he casually asked, helping me with the outer metal sliding door on the fourth floor. It sticks and he likes it that way. No one was ever going to sneak up on him without making enough noise to be heard at the Tunnel, three full blocks away. Hub wasn’t really that paranoid ... he just usually found visitors, even well-wishing ones, to be annoying and provokingly disturbing to his domain of peace and quiet. Hub was a short and slightly beefy man with more than slightly thinning hair and a more than generous nose. He had more hair on his eyebrows than he probably had left on his head and his tendency to squint at people while his shoulders hunched forward gave strangers the impression that they were conversing with a some odd variety of garden mole.

“Just the Bear necessities,” I joked, handing Hubert my small well-worn backpack that contained the original eight U-matic Bad News Bruin tapes. “Now, what do these little lovelies say to you?”

“Bruin fucking Bear!” he muttered, looking at the tapes one by one as if he were checking items of priceless antique bone china. “One of the lost holy grails of broadcast TV! Nice ... now get your ass out there and find me either the nine hour 1924 lost original cut of Greed, or dig up a print of the lost first Marx Brothers film Humorisk. Nice to see that you’re at last doing something useful with your career.”

“Lost ... true, but the bear’s never been quite forgotten ... but perhaps we should really try to keep him lost. This is all on the QT, burn before reading stuff ... you NEVER saw this – I was never here. Comprehende vous?”

“Got it ... so what do you want me to do with it? Shall I pop popcorn?”

“Pass. I watched them through this weekend ... just as bad, if not worse than the urban legend. Top five worst of all time material, at the least. I’m probably going to have to burn these, just so society can sleep soundly at night, but I thought we’d both enjoy a peep or two at the internals. I think it’s loaded with subliminals and multiple voice tracks and Buddha only knows what else. Really, I’d just like to know who produced this turkey and leave nasty messages on their IMDB page.”

“I’m not really busy at the present, so I can load it up and start isolating the internals.”

That was about the last articulate word that Hubert gave me for the rest of the day. When he concentrates on a task he completely zones in on it, forgetting the world, the telephone and even regular meals during the process. I gave up the thought of even making it in to work today at all and settled in on an oversized sofa with a foot high stack of professional A/V trade and movie/TV trade publications and kept my growing curiosity under control.

It was challenge for my budding new sense of assertiveness to keep quiet but somehow I managed it until the sun started to set through the series of west facing windows. Blinking quite like the mole he resembled, Hubert at length looked up from his array of computer and video monitors and shuffled off to tend to some affairs of nature that he’d been ignoring for hours and at length plopped himself into an oversized leather arm chair facing me and tendered his diagnosis.

“I’ve given the first four tapes a series of detailed examinations and looked over the intro and closing credits for the last four as well, then I gave the first tape a rather in-depth forensic exam”, he announced, as if this statement alone was a significant revelation unto itself. I nodded and beckoned with my hands for him to get on with it and start getting to the ripe juicy details. There were indeed a few ... and they were almost worth the seven hour wait.

All eight of the tapes were structurally identical, the work of a single extremely low budget animation studio somewhere in Korea. He showed me some screen shots of the production credits and said he knew a couple of Korean A/V folks locally who might be able to ID the name of the original studio. The animation had been shot on very low-grade film at perhaps only 405 lines quality originally and later converted upward to meet the US 525 line standard, very inexpertly. The 22 minute cartoon showed electronics markers of having been edited several dozens of times and at least two different sets of editing equipment. The sound editing on the first tape was even more extensive with traces of original Korean dialog, then English overdubs by Asian voices and finally minor additional English overdubs by at least three American voices. Additionally strange voices could only barely audibly be heard uttering strange phrases not in English or Korean. Some phrases sounded nonsense at first but made clearer sense when the recording was played in reverse.

‘Glory to the power of Satan, ‘ one slightly more audible message was revealed to say, when played in reverse. Wild stuff, especially from a Korean children’s cartoon!

The video editing was also very choppy, suggesting for starters that the animation cells had been filmed at about 30 frames per minute and later inexpertly chopped down to meet the 24 frames per second US broadcast standard. Visual subliminal artifacts abounded everywhere. Solitary images were flashed every 13 frames throughout the entire episode. Other unusual symbols also appear like a very light watermark over frequent parts of the program, visible only if you know exactly where to look for them but otherwise just barely over that horizon into invisibility. The symbols seemed religious and often runic, like some lost mystical text from ancient antiquity I thought, when Hubert showed me his stack of screenshot printouts.

It was utterly fantastic!

“So you’re telling me in short that someone bought a probably innocuous overseas animation sweatshop cartoon series, reedited the probably mostly harmless content to better fit their weird agenda, overdubbed some impossibly bad dialog here in this country and then almost successfully sold the hot steaming mess to a major TV network? Intentionally on purpose?”

“No accident about it at all,” Hubert insisted anxiously, waving his two inch thick stack of screen shots, “It’s all too purposeful to be chance or coincidence. Some group of people, at least three of them, bored after a day at Satan’s School for Young Film Editors, decided ... and at some personal expense of money and time, to edit some obtainable but otherwise forgotten overseas media to fit a deliberate Satanic agenda. Their belief was apparently that their subliminal message of demonic and diabolical runes and ritual chanting would be capable of corrupting children, influencing them thereafter towards evil!”

“Bad Craziness... ‘ I muttered shaking my head, “and I’m not sure that I don’t believe that they didn’t at least partially succeed. I saw this tape, or rather one identical to it, as a kid and it fucked up the rest of childhood. Sister of a girl that I know actually did become a Satanist and killed someone and then herself afterwards. Can you just imagine what might have happened if it had actually been broadcast on hundreds of network affiliates all over the country? And the next seven episodes after that? Christ! If it hadn’t been for my father killing his network career to cancel that pilot broadcast the next Saturday morning, it would have – could have happened. There were executives who had preapproved this show and made to look pretty stupid when this turkey was cancelled.”

 
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