[For the previous entry on the Countdown, click here.]
#4. "Elusive"
"The first time Kovelant stood in line for Sleepdirt was just before Halloween." So begins Jack Ketchum's 2007 short story "Elusive," which creates an instant sense of suspense. The designation "first time" suggests further times after that, and the reader wonders why Kovelant is so compelled to see the horror film. Is it simply that damned good, or has something prevented him from watching it each time he attempted to attend a screening?
That first night in late October, Kovelant finds himself subjected to a cold rain while standing on line, and decides a free ticket to a preview screening isn't worth the risk of catching pneumonia. The second time he tries to catch Sleepdirt, every showing is sold out at his local theater. An understandable development, especially considering the rave reviews the movie has received from critics. But matters take a turn for the weird thereafter: when Kovelant actually makes it inside a theater, he is stuck by a shooting pain ("an electric eel squirming throughout the entire right side of his body") as inexplicable as it is abrupt, and one that forces him to abort the outing. By the time he recovers, the film is no longer in theaters, and when Kovelant subsequently tries to watch it at home on his VCR, the cassette tape is mangled by the machine. Then his TV set promptly dies before he can watch another rented tape. And so on...
Meantime, the strangeness is compounded by all the odd looks of apparent recognition that Kovelant keeps getting from random people on the street. Finally, the clerk working the check-out at Tower Video informs Kovelant that he is a dead ringer for one of the actors in Sleepdirt, a man who has a small part but makes a big impression via his "amazing death scene." When Kovelant later discusses this alleged resemblance, and his own frustrated attempts to view the film, with his married lover Maggie, the latter brings up the idea that just as a person can't observe his or her own death in a dream (always waking up first by necessity), Kovelant "can't see the movie because you can't see yourself die in it. I mean, maybe in some way it is you. Not some look-alike." Kovelant scoffs at the theory, but welcomes Maggie's offer to watch the film for him. In their follow-up phone conversation, Maggie testifies that the actor uncannily matches Kovelant in both physical looks and mannerisms, and that his death scene is brutal, but before she can share the specific nature of the demise, the phone line (you guessed it) goes dead.
Equally chagrined and obsessed, Kovelant takes matter into his own hands by going out and scooping up dozens of rental and purchases copies of Sleepdirt on VHS and DVD. "Gotcha now you sonovabitch," Kovelant thinks, but as he walks across Broadway in New York City the bottom drops out of his shopping bag. The scene cuts away with Kovelant stooping to retrieve the spilled contents, but when Ketchum writes that the tapes and DVDs have "clattered to the pavement like a fallen sack of dry old bones," the reader knows fatality looms.
The final section of the story finds Maggie fixated on Sleepdirt. When her husband Richard expresses disbelief that she is watching such a disgusting film again, Maggie's reply unwittingly reveals the horrid end of the hapless Kovelant: "It's a horror movie. It's supposed to be scary and discussing. But when's the last time you saw somebody who looks exactly like somebody you know get his head torn off by a New York City bus? In slo-mo no less."
Ketchum, a chip off old mentor Robert Bloch, is at his grimly-humorous best here in "Elusive" (as the author notes in his afterword to the story, the title "Sleepdirt" was borrowed from a Frank Zappa album and stands as "a euphemism for the contents of your nightly bedpan"). But what makes the piece so entertaining is not just the various ways in which Kovelant is stymied in his viewing quest but also the elusiveness of ultimate explanation for such events. Is Kovelant simply the victim of tempted fate, someone who bucked up against some intractable universal law by trying to ogle his own doomed doppelganger? Perhaps, but there could also be something sinister in the production of Sleepdirt itself. Appropriately, "Elusive" concludes with Maggie wondering
"how in hell [the filmmakers] got that scene," just as the reader (who, unlike Maggie, already knows what has happened to Kovelant) is forced to question how the movie was able to proleptically capture the non-actor's death. "Blacker than black!" a New York Post review blurb of Sleepdirt is quoted early in the story, and the same can be said for both the humor and the horror of this superb Ketchum effort.
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