Showtime

by Ricky Ruszin

Genres: Horror; Time Travel

Synopsis

 

College student Jordan Jones’s life hasn’t been the same since his grandmother, the person who loved and understood him most, died in Matthew Manson’s ruse of an act on Talent Now!, a nationally-televised talent show.

 

When Jordan discovers his grandparents’ television allows him to travel to the past, opportunity trumps fear: a chance to not only save his grandmother from an untimely death, but to exact revenge against the man who caused it. 

 

But as Jordan investigates the massacre—and man—that claimed his grandmother’s life, he discovers an awful truth: just because the past allows him entry doesn’t mean it will allow him to leave.

 

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Release date: December 6, 2022

Publisher: Inkshares

Print pages: 331

Sample

 For Clarine “Louise” Ruszin,

who always had a story to tell

PART I

Jordan, 2020

It’s easy to forget that behind the smoke and the flames, behind each mother and sibling and grandparent who perished, there is a child who was robbed of the chance to say goodbye.

—Michael Roberts, Talent and Tragedy:
An Oral History of the Talent Now! Massacre

 

1

JORDAN JONES WAS no stranger to rage. From the moment he opened his eyes each morning, he felt it humming just below the surface. Today he woke with baggy eyes as he staggered from bed, his clenched jaw sore from another night of grinding his teeth. The familiar rage had taken permanent residence inside him, a squatter that refused to leave. And it remained with him now in his tight fists and narrowed brows as he stepped through the doorway of his grandfather’s brick row home.

Warm afternoon sun flooded the living room, illuminating dust motes floating in the nearly empty space. Though his footsteps were cushioned by the blue shag carpeting, he could still hear the echoes of his movements in the bare house—the creaks and squeaks and groans—that normally went unnoticed.

He hadn’t gone to the viewing or the funeral or the Reading of the Will, the phrase spoken by his mother as if it were a proper noun. He’d been through it all with Granny years ago, and that had been enough.

Jordan slumped through the minefield of boxes filled with newspaper-wrapped china, hardback novels, and piles of faded jeans and jumbled dresses. His grandparents’ material possession—table trinkets and greeting cards, the spreads of mail and opened bills and coffee mugs above chipped coasters—had been unceremoniously packed away. The house lay naked, stripped of its personality. Even the kitchen was alien, the once-cluttered countertops wiped clean and free of tarnished tea kettles, skillets, and Granny’s homemade potholders. Also gone was the small, cross-stitched HOME SWEET HOME sign above the door, as well as the sampler box of Entenmann’s donuts that Granny used to keep on the small kitchen table for unexpected guests. The absence of the box of treats upset Jordan the most.

“Kind of weird in here without Pop, huh?” His mother’s voice chimed too cheerfully for the occasion of clearing out the last of his grandfather’s belongings. She scanned the room through her acrylic-framed glasses, a museum patron perusing the art with disinterest. She wore ill-fitting beige pants and a loose floral top, the puff of curls atop her head more gray than black.

“Yeah,” Jordan grumbled, rolling his eyes behind her back.

He exhaled noisily, surveying the white-walled room. Gone were Granny’s tidy stacks of Reader’s Digest that had once sat on the coffee table until his father’s initial round of Keep It or Chuck It, as if the act of cleaning out his grandparents’ home was some kind of morbid game show. Most of the stuff, Jordan knew, had fallen into the latter category.

“A lot has changed since I was last here,” his mother said, running her slender fingers along the dusty dining room table with a smile. She picked up a stack of mail that had never been opened, then touched Pop’s jacket hanging from the back of a chair with the tap of a tender palm. “It was a good place while they were here. Lots of good memories.”

Every cheery syllable his mother spoke grated Jordan’s patience. He felt his forehead grow hot but forced himself to close his eyes, take another breath, and push the anger back down, knowing that here and now was neither the time nor place for what he was tempted to say.

He stepped to the corner, shaking his head silently. He thought of the old, framed pictures that had lined the end tables—Pop and Granny on their wedding day, photos of their grandchildren, candid shots from their milestone birthday parties. One of Jordan’s favorites had been of Granny’s seventy-fifth, featuring Pop squinting with a jowly-cheeked grin as he shoved a hunk of white-frostedcake into Granny’s face. Her eyes had been wide with surprise before the fit of laughter that would eventually overtake her. Who had gotten those pictures? he wondered. Were they just sitting in a box in some relative’s attic? Had they been carelessly left in the alley for the next trash pick-up?

“It’s like they never even lived here,” his mom chirped, marveling wide-eyed at the lack of clutter.

Jordan plucked a flake of peeling white paint from the wall and watched it sprinkle the plush carpet with fine white crumbs. He looked up at the many other patches of chipped paint on the ceiling. The network of cracks made it seem like some invisible giant was squeezing either side of the living room with large, angry hands.

“It’s so sad,” his mom said from behind him. Her small voice choked with the coming of tears as she ran her hand along the darkened, dusty square on the wall where a family photo had once hung. “You think people will be around forever, and then . . . ”

He felt the rage bubbling closer to the surface now.

“I remember when—”

“Cut the tears, Mom,” he spat.

“Excuse me?” his mother said, her small voice rising to a higher register as her whole face—thin, unpainted lips; large nose; and colorless, slack cheeks—contorted in shock.

Jordan’s eyes widened. He hadn’t meant to speak those words out loud. But he couldn’t take them back, so he pushed forward.

“You were never here,” he said.

“Excuse me?” his mother repeated.

“I said you were never anywhere near this house. After you dumped me here, it was all you could do to run the other way.” He shifted his back to her, one hand in his pocket as he picked at a hole in the seam.

“What are you talking about?”

Jordan scoffed. “You’re unbelievable.”

His mother fell silent, her brows knitted in confusion, though Jordan saw the dim flicker of realization slowly broaching the surface.

“When you and Dad needed to have your time away,” he clarified.

She fixed her gaze on him, her now unblinking eyes boring into her son.

“What happened then was between your father and me,” she said, her eyes darting away from Jordan.

Her voice had trembled slightly, pulling at the edges of Jordan’s anger. He felt a rush of guilt as his mother struggled to meet his eyes, but he knew that if he didn’t say this now, he never would.

“Maybe,” he conceded, “but not when it involves your kid. Not when you’d tell me I was going for a visit, that you’d see me before I knew it, and I’d be back home soon.”

“That was true.”

“It wasn’t, Mom, because parents don’t drop off their kids with a fucking backpack—”

“Watch your mouth, young man—”

“—at their grandparents’ house in the middle of the night if they’re just visiting!”

“I always picked you up!” she said, her voice rising with Jordan’sown.

“Yeah, Mom, you did. But how many days later? How many? There were stretches of days . . . weeks when you were just gone. I didn’t know where you were or when—if—you were coming back. Even Granny didn’t know.” Jordan shook his head again in disbelief. “Do you know how many days I went to school in dirty clothes because you’d spent the night before drinking and had forgotten to wash them? How many times I got myself ready for the bus in the morning? How many times you forgot to pack me a lunch because you were passed out on the couch? I needed you, but you always chose the bottle over me.”

“I dropped you off here to protect you when it got bad! To get you away so you wouldn’t have to see or hear any of the shit that I had to!” She fell silent, but her drifting eyes betrayed that there was more left unsaid.

“Well, your genius plan didn’t work out after all because I saw and heard plenty.”

His mom ignored him. “And besides, you had Samantha here with you a lot of the time to keep you company.”

“Oh, well, that just makes it all better then, doesn’t it?” Jordan scoffed. “Sam wasn’t my mother,” he said. “It wasn’t her job to raise me or make me feel safe or make sure there was food in the house. It was yours.”

His mother shook her head, the corner of her mouth itching toward a wrinkled scowl. “And I didn’t send you away. When you came here, you were just—”

“There were times you dropped me off in the middle of the night! I had no idea why or when you were coming back. But you know what? Granny and Pop didn’t make me feel like a burden, like I was interrupting their lives. They were the ones who told me that everything was going to be okay, that you and Dad would work things out, that none of it was my fault—”

“Don’t you think I would’ve liked to do those things for you?” his mother bellowed. “Don’t you think I wanted to be there for you? To be with you?”

“If you’d wanted to, you would’ve!”

“I did want to!” his mother shouted, her hands balled into fists at her side.

Jordan rolled his eyes, refusing to meet her gaze.

“But I couldn’t. I knew I couldn’t, and it killed me. I had a problem. A few of them. Between my drinking and your dad’s anger and the divorce . . . ” She trailed off, taking a shuddery breath. “I couldn’t be the parent that I knew you needed me to be. That’s why I left you with your grandparents. Not because I didn’t want to be with you, not because I didn’t want the responsibility of you, but because I knew . . . ” She choked on the words caught in her throat. “Because I knew I didn’t deserve you. I didn’t leave because of you. I left for you.”

“It wasn’t just leaving.” Jordan shook his head again, now slumped with defeat. “It was fucking abandonment.”

His mother flinched as if visibly struck. “Watch your mouth,” she said, but there was no fire in it.

“Once again it’s all about you, isn’t it?” Jordan’s fingertips tingled with electricity. “But you know what I discovered those times when you finally decided to come pick me up? I didn’t want to leave. Because Pop and Granny made this house a home. We had hot dinners around the table, where Pop asked me about my day and Granny helped me with my math homework. I didn’t have to listen to your screaming matches as I tried to fall asleep, I didn’t have to walk in from school to see you sobbing at the kitchen table with a red handprint across your face and an icepack on your jaw, I didn’t have to hear your lame excuses when I’d walk downstairs to see something broken—dishes or empty liquor bottles. ‘Oh, I was just clumsy this morning.’ You said you wanted to get me out before things got bad? They already were bad. I knew what was going on then, and I remember it now.”

His mother blinked rapidly, her tiny eyes narrowing behind her glasses. “After everything I’ve done for you?” she finally said. “All the things I’ve done to try to make up for it? Let you live at home while you commuted to college, fed you, not to mention paid for a good chunk of your tuition—”

“You and Dad paid for two semesters, Mom! A year!”

“And that’s more than some people your age get, especially when they don’t even know what they want to do with their lives!”

“I told you I wanted to go to art school!” he bellowed. “I need to get out of here!”

“Then what’s stopping you?”

“Hmm . . . I don’t know, Mom. Money?” he sneered. “Do you really think community college was my first pick?”

“Fine then. Leave. Just like your father!”

“Maybe I could’ve if you hadn’t spent all your savings on wine and divorce lawyers. You and Dad always said that as long as I went to college, as long as I made you proud and kept my grades up, you’d help with the tuition. I did my part. So, what’s the problem? Did I not make you proud? Did I fail to live up to the picture you painted in your head?”

“Jordan, that’s ridiculous. You know—”

“So, when your friends ask you why your son dropped out of college after his first year, make sure you tell them that you dropped the ball. You did. You set me up to fail. You abandoned your son, you destroyed your marriage, you were the reason that home was toxic and—”

The crack sounded in Jordan’s ears before he felt its effect, his cheek stinging as blood rose beneath his skin.

His mother eyed him squarely in the face, doing her best impression of Tough Mother—steeled eyes, straight spine, firm posture—but it didn’t hold long before cracks began to appear in the armor. Her tiny chin began to tremble and when her eyes grew glassy and wet, her round cheeks began to soften. She stepped back as if not quite sure whether she was satisfied or horrified at what she had done.

The crack seemed to hang in the air like lightning, charged and electric.

She turned on her heels, grabbing her purse and car keys with trembling hands before storming across the kitchen linoleum in her scuffed Sketchers. The front door slammed behind her.

Jordan’s jaw quivered with anger, that familiar rage now free from its bottle as he considered the repercussions of everything he had just said.

2

JORDAN SLOUCHED AGAINST the bare wall’s peeling paint. The lack of personal effects gave the living room—and the house itself—a feeling of sterility. Like a model home, Jordan mused. Or a hospital. Without the salty, toasted smell of Granny frying catfish in the kitchen or the sound of Pop snoring in his recliner as The Price Is Right droned in the background, it was no longer Pop and Granny’s house. It was just a house.

His pulse had begun to slow to its normal rhythm, though his cheeks were flushed from the argument with his mother as well as the temperature inside the house. He shouldn’t even be here right now. Should’ve been deep in MICA’s summer studio drawing courses—figures and nature and light and shadow. In a dorm or campus apartment, independent like the rest of his friends and cousins. Not here. Not stuck.

“Leaving?” one of his professors had asked during his last week. “Why’s that?”

“I’m just taking a semester off,” he’d said, embarrassed that money was the reason for the postponement of his dreams. Why he was frozen in place while his friends moved on.

He plucked his black Aerosmith T-shirt from his lean chest, fanning it back and forth. “Jesus, it’s hot,” he muttered, swiping at his sweat-matted bangs with the back of his hand. Even his ink- and charcoal-stained jeans were beginning to stick to his skin. He stumbled through the maze of filled cardboard boxes on his way to the wall thermostat, which he adjusted to a cool seventy. It was there, in the corner next to the staircase, that he saw the object he had come to see.

Pop’s old secretary desk rose to his waist, the genuine oak stained a faded medium brown. The bottom had three drawers on each side, with a small space for an office chair between them. He allowed his fingers to glide over the upper portion’s roll top, eyeing the top shelf’s various knick-knacks and family photos covered in a thin layer of dust. Jordan had never known Pop to use it as a functioning desk, a place at which to work or write. Rather, it had been a place to drop miscellaneous pieces of mail and things he “might need for later” like old postcards and coupons for items he had never bought but might one day.

For as long as Jordan could remember, Pop had told him he’d get the desk when he died. He could remember leaving secret messages in its nooks and cubbies, locking and unlocking the bottom drawers with the tiny brass key, and sliding his Hot Wheels down the curved expanse of the roll top. Knowing that the desk would one day be his had made his six-year-old self giddy with excitement.

But despite his age—ten or fourteen or eighteen—Pop had given him the old reminder in the same matter-of-fact tone of a teacher reciting a fact his student may have forgotten: You’re gonna get that desk when I kick the bucket, you know that, dontcha?

But as Jordan grew from a child to a young adult, his interest moving from toys to sketchbooks, there came a time when the desk was no longer enticing. The magic was gone, his Hot Wheels were long in the attic, and the desk was just a desk. Another outdated, bulky relic he had no desire to keep.

But he never could have brought himself to tell Pop.

In the three weeks since Jordan had received the faded manila envelope that had led him here, his feelings about it had boomeranged between dread and subtle curiosity. Jordan had suspected what was inside, and he hadn’t wanted it. Hadn’t been in the right state of mind to accept whatever his grandfather had left him. But now, as final preparations were being made to sell the house and the offers were rolling in, Jordan knew if he was ever going to confirm his suspicions about the envelope—and why Pop had been so insistent he have it—now was the time.

The crinkled envelope had frayed edges and a blotchy ink stain in one corner. Jordan’s name was printed across the front in big block letters. The neat penmanship combined with the faded Sharpie lettering told Jordan that whatever was inside, whatever Pop had decided to bestow upon his grandson, it had been done long ago.

Now, staring at the desk and the envelope in his hand, Jordan was struck that, even in death, Pop was reminding him, You’re gonna get that desk when I kick the bucket, you know that, dontcha?

Jordan tore open the envelope, tilted it downward, and watched as a small brass key fell into his waiting palm. Even though he knew what it opened, he couldn’t help but wonder why? Keys meant safety and security. Why would Pop leave him a key to something so mundane?

Jordan guided the key into the desk’s lock and turned. When he rolled up the top, he found exactly what he had been expecting.

Junk.

The entire surface was covered with it—papers, memo pads and pens from doctors’ offices and senior centers, old coffee mugs, and a bright orange ceramic ashtray (Pop hadn’t smoked since the eighties).

Jordan sighed as he leafed through a sheaf of old medical bills.

This? he fumed. All this time—all those reminders—and this is what you leave me? Garbage?

Thinking of the weeks it had taken to build up the courage to return here, to face the loss of a place that had once been his safe haven from instability and sleepless nights, his pulse quickened once again.

I came back here for this?

He’d made the foolish mistake of allowing his mind to wander, imagining that Pop had left him something meaningful. But there had been nothing. No inheritance to help him pay for art school or move out of his parents’ house. No magic object to erase the horrible things he’d said to his mother. No box of photos or keepsakes of his grandparents to help ease his anger or fix the aimless present he was living in.

The fury he’d unleashed on his mother, which he had tried to damper, came bubbling back.

“Another few days,” she had once muttered in this very room, her speech slurring. “A week. A week tops. After that—”

“A week tops?” His grandmother had been incredulous. “You gotta be kidding me! What am I supposed to do?” she’d said, unaware her grandson had been listening in the other room. “I’ve got Jordan and Sam here more days than I don’t have them. I can’t do this forever, Diane! You need to step up and be his parent!”

The memory sent Jordan’s head throbbing. He raised his arm to the desk’s surface and swept everything to the floor in one angry swoop. He balled his fist and sent it through the center of a framed family photo. The glass sliced his knuckles, but the sharp sting fueled his anger like gasoline. As he eyed the crinkled papers below, he saw one with a heading that made him pause: Sandywood Elementary School—Report Card (Grade 3). In Art, he saw, he had received an A. A wave of grief washed over him, remembering how Granny had proudly displayed each of his report cards on the fridge while his mother had been too drunk to care.

She kept them.

As if the surprise was too much to bear, Jordan cast the paper aside before opening the desk’s many drawers and dumping the contents, eager to trash it all. But when he pulled on the last one, it didn’t budge. His heart thumped, cheeks pink with exertion as he continued wriggling the handle.

It was when he stopped to take a breath that he saw the drawer’s lock. Jordan fingered the rusted keyhole and noticed its similarity to the one above. He withdrew the small brass key from the metal lock in the roll-top, slid it into the one in the drawer, and turned. When he pulled the handle again, it opened freely. Jordan stared confusedly at the object inside.

The box was made of a hard, black plastic, nearly a foot wide on each side. With its top recessed handle and leather-padded corners, it resembled the kind of container that would have been used to hold old film reels or camera equipment.

What the hell?

Jordan tilted it back as his fingers found the dual latches on the front side and popped them open. He lifted the hinged lid backward and peered inside. The box was full of black VHS tapes, the kind that Granny had used to record TV shows and movies in the days before DVR and Netflix. Jordan assumed they were blank, unused, until he saw the first tape’s faded white label in his grandmother’s neat cursive:

 

Carol Burnett, ’74

 

Then he remembered.

His grandmother had been a television junkie. Whether variety shows like The Carol Burnett Show, scripted ones like Mary Tyler Moore, or game shows like The Newlywed Game, she’d tried to attend as many tapings as possible, either with friends or with Pop. After they’d gotten married, she’d made it a point to schedule a taping of The Price Is Right into their honeymoon plans. “Why do you want to go to those things when we can eventually watch the exact same thing on TV?” Pop had often asked her. She’d smile, eyes glistening like a kid walking through the gates of Disney World for the first time, and say, “Because the magic’s there.”

Jordan remembered watching re-runs of those shows with her when he was younger, his grandmother using them to help him take his mind off what was happening at home.

Curious, Jordan slid over to the TV, inserted the tape into the slot of the ancient VCR, and watched it get swallowed up like some ravenous subterranean creature. The curved glass of the clunky, outdated TV fizzled a moment inside its hulking wooden frame before giving way to a black screen. Then the VCR timer blinked to life, and the video started to play. It was grainy at first, as some older recordings were apt to be, but good enough quality that he could see a glistening white stage complimented by an elegant black backdrop with pinpricks of bright white. The audience lights dimmed as the familiar musical cue began (“Carol’s Theme,” Jordan recalled his grandmother telling him one afternoon). Carol Burnett seemed to glide onto the stage. It was almost like magic, the way she commanded the large room. She smiled and waved, beaming at each person in the audience as if they were old friends.

After the show began with a joke and its signature Q&A portion, the camera returned to Carol as she scanned the audience for raised hands. Her eyes widened and she beamed with a nod as she pointed to a nearby woman with a poof of brown hair and a large-collaredblouse.

Jordan froze.

But it wasn’t the question, or even the woman who had asked it, that made Jordan stop. Rather, it was the woman sitting two rows behind her. ...