I applied to go to a contest. I was accepted, but by the time they had offered to pay for my flight to go where they were shooting, I turned it down.
“We don’t want to have to schedule a new applicant,” the woman said.
“Tough,” I slurred the word, drunk as could be from my living room. “You’ll have to deal with it.”
“There’s no reason to be rude, Mr. Harrison. It would be a shame if I wished something ill on you.”
I said something nasty to her, although I am unable to remember specifically what it was. I think it entailed something about how she should use her rich person’s swimming pool to drown herself. Not my proudest moment. It was another example of the heat of alcohol bringing out the worst in someone.
“You’re going to have a terrible fate now,” she said. “You don’t know what I pray to.”
I did not feel threatened by those words at the time, but in retrospect, I absolutely should have.
*
The documentary about the dead contest winners would only be played on late-night television. I would catch snippets of it after a long day of work at the office, usually when I was a few whiskey sours deep.
It would come in fuzzy, which should have mortified me since I had not seen a scrambled channel since the early millennium. I could not understand why any film editor would show a program that was deliberately that way, but it did intrigue me enough to keep watching.
“See here,” the host’s voice would bellow, the tonality of it similar to an old-timey sports announcer obsessed with twirling his mustache and talking about the latest horse race, “you cannot see them on the stage, but they are there, waiting to play this game of trivia to see who walks away with a pass. The one holding the pass can avoid going to hell, isn’t that great?”
The image that I can remember was of a typical game show stage, with three podiums at both ends and neon lights and decorative logos of sponsors behind them.
The main difference between this program and others is that the people who were supposed to be playing were not present.
Something strange happened.
A gigantic wheel propped in the center of the set spun. I was very familiar with how the wheel was relevant to the game.
Each notch where the arrow could point to or land on was not an amount of money, but a question.
The quizzes were usually simple lines of inquiry, such as ‘Who did Benedict Arnold betray?’
Occasionally it would land on a difficult curveball question, like ‘What is the most popular anti-venom for the redback spider?’
It spun on its own, as though a gust of wind had somehow swept through the studio and caused it to move. The prop rotated at such a fast pace that it resembled the type of fan a lunatic might use to try and vanquish a blaze, a wind tunnel on steroids.
It spun for what seemed an hour. When it finally stopped, the arrow pointed to one word that did not even have a question mark at the end of it.
“Uh oh,” the trim and clean-cut host said as he loosened his tie, the words coming out as goofy as a filler line by a comedian hired to entertain children. “It looks like it’s settled, then.”
Behind the effervescent white screen, the scrambled air around his face did not blur his expression as he leaped off the stage.
For a second I would have sworn that something carried him and he floated for a few seconds, an army of unseen angels carrying him on his fatal descent, before he landed with a sound that was reminiscent of wet hamburger meat hitting concrete.
There were a few audience members who screamed in terror. I sweated as an adrenaline dump coursed through me, and I gripped the remote tightly, searching for the power button to turn it off.
The gore was too much for my stomach to handle, even if the visual of it was like a pond of milk on the warped screen. He had landed on a set of cables which penetrated his body. A puddle of blood seeped beneath him.
Before I could shut the set down, another voice filled the ether. It was a narrator, and his voice overrode the remaining footage crisply. The camera panned out to once again show the empty podiums, but a few notes on them were shuffled and moved around by themselves.
“Although it was not shown on camera, at least not in a visible way, six others were condemned that night. It was the most awful and underreported incident in game show history. One person lost their life, and a half dozen others were sent to a permanent abyss. Life truly is random.”