— The Editors

***

I come to this Introduction from a somewhat strange perspective. I was one of the people who woke up on November 9, 2016—as a Canadian living in England, whose eyes were still fixed south of the border, across the pond—in what seemed to be an alternate reality.

The morning of the General Election, I remember logging on and experiencing almost a doubling of vision, as if the universe had split into two tracks that were radically diverging from one another. There was a hallucinatory space of about a week where I still felt as if I could see another world layered underneath mine. There was shock and disorientation, not a little fear—but also bewilderment at how fragile the norms and traditions which formed the bedrocks of reality—my reality, as it turned out—had proven to be.

I don’t mean to rehash politics. The tumultuous events of the last twelve months have been a shock to the system as one by one our certainties about the way things are have been cast aside. New futures have been dreamed up and rapidly discarded. Tiny bubbles of consensual realities have surfaced and burst, or gained power, grown, come to englobe more and more people. The speed of change has been rapid, disorienting. But in the wake of all this I’ve begun to think about my own experiences critically as a way of examining what literature is and what it ought to do.

I grew up in a little town in Ontario, on the border with Port Michigan, and so I’m used to border crossings. I have two passports, and this means I can pass easily, more easily than most, choosing whichever identity is most likely to be granted access. I know that liminal spaces are dangerous, and multiple identities can be useful—but they are also cause for suspicion. If you are two things—or three things, or many things—then you are not easily one thing; you can pass but you still present a risk. And increasingly, as I’ve crossed borders over the last year I’ve registered a radical sense of difference, as the cultures of three countries I’ve felt as familiar as breathing, have shifted and re-aligned.

Weird fiction is a strange beast, an eclectic genre (or subgenre). It originated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century through the works of authors including Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Machen, and M. R. James, and has since developed over the course of the last hundred years to encompass new writers such as China Miéville, M. John Harrison and others. Weird fiction is notable for its generic uncertainty; it exists at the boundary between science fiction and horror—perhaps—or between literary fiction and horror—perhaps—or between Lovecraft and whatever happens to be floating close to hand at any given moment—perhaps!

In 1933, in the lull between two world wars, a year which included the death of President Calvin Coolidge, an assassination attempt on President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt, the beginning of the Great Depression and the premiere of the original film version of King Kong at Radio City Music Hall, a middle-aged pulp writer by the name of H. P. Lovecraft began work on an article addressing weird fiction which would later be published in the June 1937 issue of the Amateur Correspondent. “I choose weird stories,” he wrote, “because they suit my inclination best—one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve, momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which for ever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis.” In this article Lovecraft sketched out the parameters of a kind of story interested in using the language of dreams and fragments, vague impressions, snatches of scientific discourse, in order to interrogate the nature of reality. This work, whatever we may think of the man himself and his influence on the field now, both of which have deservedly (in my opinion) required re-evaluation, is still ongoing—and still necessary.

In fact, it would seem that in our moment this work is more necessary than ever.

***

Recently, another short story writer interested in the nature of reality had something to say about a moment of catastrophic change. In 2011, Dominican author Junot Díaz interrogated the response to the devastating earthquake in Haiti in an article entitled “Apocalypses: What They Reveal” in The Boston Review. He wrote of the etymology of the word “apocalypse”, which means “to uncover and unveil.” There are three kinds of apocalypses, he argues: there are those that follow the actual imagined end of the world; there are those that comprise catastrophes which resemble the imagined end; and there are those disruptive events that provoke revelation. The apocalypse, he says, quoting James Berger, “is the End, or resembles the end, or explains the end.”

We are, by all accounts, no matter where you might fit yourself in the political spectrum, in an apocalyptic moment. We are witnessing the end of something, or an event that resembles it; we are searching for an account that can explain that end.

On the day following the announcement of the results of the American election I was teaching a group of writers at Anglia Ruskin University. It was an evening class. The students had always been a lively bunch, eager, full of questions and comments and jokes and affection for one another. But that day I didn’t know how to address them. One colleague had told me not to talk about Trump, to just leave it out of the room, but that seemed impossible. Politics, whatever we believe, is at the heart of writing; it is a vital part of living and participating in society.

I did the best thing I could think of in the situation. I cribbed something I’d heard from Ben Markovits, a lecturer at Royal Holloway: that the purpose of teaching creative writing is, on the one hand, to help students to become published (in the best cases)—but in all cases, regardless of the quality of the writing, it is to help students to become better witnesses to the world. I have thought hard on that maxim since I first heard it. We are all witnesses of the world. The tools of storytelling can help us, in this respect: they help us to understand our world, to observe it, to process it. This is a fundamentally imaginative act and it is an act with great power—the power to witness.

We are living in an apocalyptic moment and we have a duty to be witnesses. We have a duty to observe, to imagine, to speculate, and to create.

***

Weird fiction is a genre that knows about the apocalypse.

It is a genre used to dismantling the status quo and exploring what lies beyond the margins of what is known in the world. It is genre obsessed with bringing to light what wishes to remain hidden and dealing with the consequences of that revelation.

The rules of reality have changed. This is an age in which it seems impossible to count on shared assumptions. Gary Dunion on Twitter cleverly captured the zeitgeist by pulling together a number of headlines he had read recently:

• Suspect in North Korea killing “thought she was taking part in TV prank”
• Robert Mugabe could contest election as corpse, wife says
• German parents told to destroy doll that can spy on children

His caption? Season 4 of Black Mirror is coming along nicely…

Indeed.

The Twitter account for Black Mirror states: “Our job is to explain what’s happening to you as best we can.” As we have seen, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between fact and fiction. I can only imagine the problem is going to get worse.

When Lovecraft talked about his short stories he imagined fear to be at the heart of the process of discovery and revelation. He said:

These stories frequently emphasise the element of horror because fear is our deepest and strongest emotion, and the one which best lends itself to the creation of nature-defying illusions. Horror and the unknown or the strange are always closely connected, so that it is hard to create a convincing picture of shattered natural law or cosmic alienage or “outsideness” without laying stress on the emotion of fear. The reason why time plays a great part in so many of my tales is that this element looms up in my mind as the most profoundly dramatic and grimly terrible thing in the universe. Conflict with time seems to me the most potent and fruitful theme in all human expression.

In this respect, weird fiction seems a perfect vehicle for exploring our present moment. For it does seem to us, I think, to many of us, anyway, that time is out of joint; are we moving back to the happy utopia of the 1950s? Are we moving toward the dystopia of 1984? Are we returning or progressing? We do not know. We cannot decide. And the possibilities are not so much divergent as layered overtop of one another. We are existing in multiple moments at most, in multiple times at once.

And it is scary.

Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, in their introduction to The Weird compendium recognize the murky taxonomy of weird fiction writing:

Because The Weird often exists in the interstices, because it can occupy different territories simultaneously, an impulse exists among the more rigid taxonomists to find The Weird suspect, to argue it should not, cannot be, separated out from other traditions.

Weird fiction then is used to this strange overlapping, this occupation of simultaneous moments at once. It is a revelatory mode of writing, an apocalyptic mode of writing.

***

This volume was edited with the assistance of a group of students from my university who read through the solicited stories, made recommendations, debated the value of individual pieces and applied—and often questioned–the definition of weird fiction to them. Though the final selections were my own, our conversations shaped my thinking. One particular definition resonated strongly with me. It came from Marian Womack, a spectacular Spanish short story writer and translator whose work has appeared in a previous volume of this series.

She said:

We have a long tradition of [the Weird] in Spain, and this only increased during the dictatorship as new symbolic ways of communicating ideas were rehearsed in narratives (cinematic and literary). This kind of fantasy, in which “something is not quite right”, lends itself very well to Gothic sensibility, with its convoluted use of language and its tormented heroes. And then there is an element of irrationality built into the rational and, coming from a Spanish background, I interpret this as surrealism, for me this is a major element I recognize in weird writing, and one that is present in my own understanding of the weird.

Her response pointed away from, not toward, Lovecraft; it sketched out other directions for inquiry, other crises, other narratives, other points of view than those in which weird fiction has been traditionally grounded. Yet her definition struck me as capturing the essence of the weird tale, the embedding of irrationality within the rational: a way of writing which uses the one to expose the other, to make the reader realize that all supposedly rational systems are inherently irrational.

In thinking about the state of the genre, I’m reminded of an article written by a provocative critic, Jonathan McCalmont, who traced the history of the resurgence of weird fiction in the twentieth century. In particular, he focused on several months in 2003 in Britain when the TTA Press message boards were alive with a great discussion about the nature of the “New Weird”. The discussion was prompted in part by the success of Miéville who published The Scar in 2002 and received critical acclaim in the British Fantasy Award and Locus Awards of 2013.

The topic under debate was the rise of a new type of writing that seemed to have links with the past—a writing to which critics had begun to apply the label “New Weird”—but the forum conversations were riven with arguments from critics and authors alike. M. John Harrison succinctly summed up the problem. A lively figure who emerged as part of the New Wave in the 60s and 70s, he had seen the dangers of labelling a movement. He felt as if the energy of the writing might well be diminished through successive waves of commercialization:

…once the New Wave parameters were codified, there was a general softening-off as second generation writers stripped out the edgier stuff. I mean, I think it’s inevitable that people seeking to understand a movement select the similarities rather than the differences between exponents. That drives you towards the mean–the main stream. New writers imitate that, & before you know it, the energy’s gone, because it lay in the creative tensions between the different exponents.

His response shows a distinct suspicion of the rise of both the conventional and commercial frameworks which have tended to define new “waves” of writing historically and which would go on to attempt to define the so-called “New Weird”. He felt that if he didn’t speak up then he would have left it to others to describe what exactly it was that he was writing. And he believed that in and of itself would enervate the work.

But in describing the discussions that took place on that message board, Jonathan McCalmont said something that struck me as a sort of remedy to this:

Every cultural entity (be it a genre, a sub-genre, a scene, a movement, or a school) is born of a particular place and time… a sudden awareness that the wider culture has changed and that the old tools are no longer up to the job.

McCalmont suggested that the New Weird encapsulated one of those moments.

But where are we now?

Much has happened in the years since those debates and there are signs that weird fiction has been codified in exactly the way Harrison feared it would be. This anthology by definition is one of those forces for codification, attempting to sum up what weird fiction is in order to assess what is “the best.” The best of what? The best of that which is mixed and hybrid, the best of that which defies easy categorization, the best of what ought to remain unnamed. So—no new labels. No New New Weird or Post New Weird. Just weird.

A year ago I would have said there was a danger that weird fiction will—or has already begun to—lose its edge, moving from innocence, to plausibility to decadence, according to the formulation of Joanna Russ, in which originally distinct ideas and voices have become assimilated to the point of stale repetition.

And yet I believe we are in one of those moments of rapid re-imagining when the old tools of writing no longer seem up to the job.

The language of weird fiction speaks to the irrationality of our present, floundering systems. Whereas these stories have typically looked outward to generate their horror, from the undeniable xenophobia of some of Lovecraft’s writing to the misogyny embraced by the slasher flicks of the 70s; but it could just as easily look inward. To be horrified by one’s self, to feel a disconnection from what is labeled “traditional” or “natural” or “essential” is a vital step toward embracing a radical empathy with what might have heretofore been labeled as Other. This is work that weird fiction can do.

The stories within this volume were published in 2016. Many of them were almost certainly written before the upheavals which I have been talking about, yet each in my mind embodies the spirit of upheaval and revelation, madness, despair, horror and also, sometimes forgiveness, accommodation and change that seem to mark our apocalyptic moment. Among these writers are many names you may not recognize, and this is, to my mind, a good thing. They are writers from different countries, different languages, and different traditions. Many of these writers may not consider themselves to be weird writers in the strictest of terms and that as well is a good thing. As the editor of a volume that sets out to define the genre I confess I have the same reservations that M. John Harrison had in 2003: that weird fiction has on the one hand become too stable, too easily recognizable, and on the other so diffuse that the term no longer has any meaning at all. There is a danger with labels, but also an opportunity.

We are living in weird times. As I write, a snap election in the UK has just shocked the nation with another upending of the pollsters’ predictions and the future seems very uncertain. In moments such as this, time itself seems out of joint. We need new tools to interrogate our present moment. We need a new language to understand it, to articulate our concerns, our hopes, our dreams—our possibilities. The writers within this volume have been, first and foremost, witnesses to their world. Their stories suggest a new language, not only for weird fiction, but for a contemporary fiction that looks for new answers in unexpected places.

Helen Marshall,
Cambridge, England

The post The State of Weird appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Stephen King (1947–) is one of the most prolific, best-selling, and influential living authors of American horror fiction. Born in Portland, Maine, King’s father left the family when he was just two years old, and he was raised by his mother alongside his adopted older brother. Inspired significantly by H.P. Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson, and Richard Matheson, King knew from a young age that he wanted to write horror fiction. After earning a B.A. in English from the University of Maine in 1970, he began selling short stories to men’s magazines and his debut novel, Carrie, was acquired by Doubleday in 1973. He married author Tabitha (Spruce) King during this period, and they have since raised three children: Naomi, Joe, and Owen, the latter two of which have become successful authors in their own right. King subsequently published several novels that have become classics of supernatural horror, such as Salem’s Lot (1975) and The Shining (1977).

Since these beginnings, he has published 55 novels, 6 works of nonfiction, and approximately 200 short stories, many of which have been adapted for film or television. He has won all major awards associated with horror and dark fantasy, in addition to numerous others that include the National Medal of Arts and the O. Henry Award for “The Man in the Black Suit” (1994), reprinted in The Weird. King has also frequently shown an interest in experimentation with publishing media and form, releasing The Green Mile in serial installments and Riding the Bullet digitally before it was common. He has long resided in his birth-state of Maine, a setting that has become famously associated with him due to its frequent appearances in his work. His most recent book is End of Watch, the concluding entry in a trilogy of crime novels.

— Christopher Burke, editor of 101 Weird Writers

***

When I was twelve years old, I was afraid—desperately, morbidly afraid—of horror flicks. My best friend in grade seven was a girl named Steph Melnychuk. We played softball together back in Sarnia—a small town in Ontario maybe double the size of Bangor where Stephen King grew up—and her throw was something to be reckoned with. I was the only one willing to catch for her (badly at that) and I still remember the hot sting when the ball went blazing into my clumsy glove. She was taller than me by about five inches, smart, effortlessly cool. She liked to throw slumber parties at which we’d dance to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” and one night on a dare we locked ourselves in the basement bathroom to paint our faces with glow-in-the-dark nail polish. But it was her idea, her deep-seated love of the macabre.

She was the horror fan, not me.

In the early 1990s, Steph invited me over to watch a made-for-TV flick called “Sometimes They Come Back” in which a reluctant high school teacher returns to his hometown only to be harassed by the ghosts of the school kids that killed his brother. I was nervous from the get-go, and true to form the thing—schlocky as it was—stayed with me. In a recent conversation, the writer Sam J. Miller suggested that every horror writer has a personal monster, something that scares the bejesus out of them. For me, that monster is—and always has been—the ghost. Ghosts are like a warning about mortality, and at twelve years old I was only just beginning to grapple with those fears. No one in my family had died. I had never been to a funeral. The idea of dying fascinated me: it was repellent, awful, but it wasn’t unnatural. Precisely the opposite.

That was my first experience with Stephen King.

In Danse Macabre, King lays out his theories surrounding the purposes and practices of writing horror:

Terror—what Hunter Thompson calls ‘fear and loathing’—often arises from a pervasive sense of disestablishment; that things are in the unmaking. If that sense of unmaking is sudden and seems personal—if it hits you around the heart—then it lodges in the memory as a complete set.

What I experienced as a twelve-year old was a profound sense of the possibility of unmaking, the possibility that a bunch of kids a little bit older than me could do hideous things—that kids my age were vulnerable; they could be murdered, they could drown, they could be struck by trains that seemed to come out of nowhere.

When I was in my final year of high school, a tanker truck smashed into the side of my dad’s car on an icy stretch of road within sight of the chemical plant where he worked. My mom was in South Africa at the time, clearing up the effects of my grandmother who had recently passed on, and my older brother Justin was living just outside of Toronto, a good three hours’ drive away. So it was my younger sister and I who were driven to the hospital—I don’t remember by whom—while my dad was in critical care. My dad had always had a definite vitality about him. He used to regale us with stories of his childhood growing up in Rhodesia where he set scorpions and matabele ants to fight; later, he barely missed an opportunity to be on the South African fencing team. He had, he told us, a pet chimpanzee. But when we saw him it was like meeting a stranger. He was badly bruised, black wires everywhere, and I couldn’t make out much of what he was saying, only enough to know he didn’t recognise me, not in that moment.

That moment brought about a sudden understanding that someone I loved could come undone. Could be unmade.

The power of ghosts is the power of memory, or at least that’s what I’ve always thought. Memory is what gives us a sense of continuity, a sense of self. And ghosts are the most vital form of memory, just as haunting is really just a different kind of remembering.

My dad survived. The bruises healed. And although he was always frailer after that, prone to losing both his balance and his mental equilibrium as many who suffer traumatic head injuries were, I didn’t lose him. But his memory suffered. Some part of that continuity—who he had been, who he was after—had shifted.

My second moment of unmaking occurred more recently. Six months ago I took up a permanent position at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge as Lecturer of Creative Writing and Publishing. It meant leaving Canada for good. But I had felt it was worth it. The job was a good one, a dream job in fact, and there were people I loved whom I didn’t want to leave. I was prepared to make England my home.

But after my first semester had passed, a semester which had mostly masked for me the bitter campaign of misinformation and demagoguery that was raging in the background, the United Kingdom voted by a narrow margin to break away from the European Union. For those of my generation it had seemed an unthinkable outcome. Like so many others, I had gone to bed early that night, unwilling to watch another hour of political mayhem, feeling relatively secure that reason would prevail… and the pre-voting polls had backed me up.

In H is for Hawk, the nature writer Helen MacDonald speaks about the origins of the word bereavement in the Old English bereafian, which means “to deprive of, take away, seize, rob.” She writes that the death of her father felt like that:

Imagine your whole family is in a room. Yes, all of them. All the people you love. So then what happens is someone comes into the room and punches you all in the stomach. Each one of you. Really hard. So you’re all on the floor. Right? So the thing is, you all share the same kind of pain, exactly the same, but you’re too busy experiencing total agony to feel anything other than completely alone.

This image stuck with me on the day that Brexit was announced. It felt as if everyone I knew and loved had been damaged by what had happened—had been punched in the stomach—and yet I felt totally alone. I remember my partner telling me to come out for drinks in the city—to commiserate in company—but I didn’t want to because I was crying and I wasn’t sure if I could pull myself together enough to be presentable. And when I walked outside a week of grey skies and rain had perversely cleared to sunshine, so there were tourists walking along the canal; everything seemed strangely normal, and yet I couldn’t shake the feeling that the world had changed irrevocably overnight. I felt untethered, unprepared for what was to come next.

The world has become a scary place. On July 14, less than two weeks before I write this, a 19-tonne cargo truck was driven into the crowds celebrating Bastille Day in Nice, France. 84 people were killed. I don’t like reading the news much right now.

King writes about a similar feeling after JFK’s assassination, how those three days of grief which followed “is perhaps the closest any people in history has ever come to a total period of mass consciousness and mass empathy and—in retrospect—mass memory…Love cannot achieve that sort of across-the-board hammerstrike of emotion, apparently.”

But horror can. And that’s the point, really.

As I write this, I’m sitting on a bus headed from Portland to Bangor for a research project about the publication of Carrie (1974), Stephen King’s first novel. My own first novel was sold to Random House Canada this year, but that isn’t what the project is about, only an excuse, really, to understand the origin of a writer whom I have come to respect and deeply admire.

The Hunt for Red October, streaked with static and all its buried Cold War anxieties, is playing on the overhead monitors, and outside everything is pure black. If the sun were shining, then perhaps I would recognise the landscape. Many do; there are fans who say that when they first enter Maine it has an instant recognisability, as if they’re coming to a place they have always known. For me, it’s a bit different. What hits me first are the smells, the thick scent of pine. My family used to vacation in nearby Kennebunk when I was a child.

They say that you’re more likely to die in a car accident than in a terrorist attack.

I lied earlier, about my first encounter with Stephen King. Or rather, I misremembered.

I have a vague recollection: perched in the backseat of my parents’ station wagon, someone was pointing into the distance, saying, “That’s where Stephen King lives.” My dad was driving. I felt completely safe. Untouchable. We had been fishing. I had got nothing but two-inch long feeders, but my brother kept telling me about how he had been going after a big one, a pike with crazy teeth set in a jagged old grin. I was seven or eight years old, I think. My brother was always telling me ghost stories, telling me whoppers. But I didn’t believe them much. When you’re that age it’s still possible to feel completely safe.

Much of this is prelude, so forgive me. On to the matter at hand.

“The Man in the Black Suit” is typical in many respects of King’s oeuvre. It’s a good story, a solid story—so good, in fact, that it won the O. Henry prize in 1996. The narrative has a nostalgic quality to it; it is retrospective, a single memory that is offered up without explanation or even the hope of belief:

I am now a very old man and this is something which happened to me when I was very young—only nine years old. It was 1914, the summer after my brother Dan died in the west field and three years before America got into World War I…. What I might have done yesterday, who I might have seen here in my room at the nursing home, what I might have said to them or they to me … those things are gone, but the face of the man in the black suit grows ever clearer, ever closer, and I remember every word he said.

It is a tale, however, that is about transitions, about how life can slip away from you and how the grave is always waiting. King’s writing has an undeniable charm to it. His stories drift along almost lazily, glinting with a touch of malice, maybe, but soothing too. His stories are like fish hooks, and once they catch you, struggle as you might, he’ll reel you in all the same.

“Is horror art?” King asks in Danse Macabre. “The work of horror can be nothing else; it achieves the level of art simply because it is looking for something beyond art, something that predates art.”

This particular story has always struck me as one of those which looks outward, beyond, before. As a narrative about an encounter with the Devil, it has a certain timeliness to it; yet King’s Devil, despite his fancy suit, isn’t urbane. He isn’t a charmer. He’s pure madness all the way through, and the tale he tells the narrator is perhaps one of the scariest of all: “‘Sad news, fisherboy,’ he said. ‘I’ve come with sad news….Your mother is dead.’”

What follows is a harrowing account in which the Devil taunts the narrator with a story about a fatal bee sting. The same allergy, the same weakness in the blood which had killed his brother Dan, was also shared by his mother, the Devil says, and that very day, only a few minutes ago, a bee flew through the window and caught her by surprise:

‘You need to hear this, Gary; you need to hear this, my little fisherboy. It was your mother who passed that fatal weakness on to your brother Dan; you got some of it, but you also got a protection from your father that poor Dan somehow missed….So, although I don’t like to speak ill of the dead, it’s almost a case of poetic justice, isn’t it? After all, she killed your brother Dan as surely as if she had put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger.’

The narrator resists, of course, but the tale is terrible precisely because it has the ring of truth. We’ve all inherited from our parents a terrible mortality. And at the same time the tale hooks deeply into the narrator’s secret fear, the fear we all share about our loved ones: that while we were sleeping, while we weren’t paying attention, something terrible might have happened…

In June, 1999, Stephen King was walking eight feet to the side of the road in North Lovell when a van hit and seriously injured him. He sustained an assortment of broken bones, a punctured lung, and a head injury. When I began reading The Dead Zone for the first time earlier this month, I was struck by the description of Johnny Smith in his coma. I had thought it was one of those filched autobiographical bits that often show up in King’s work (“Write what you know,” he says, and boy, does he!). But, of course, The Dead Zone was one of King’s early novels, published in 1979, twenty years before the accident. And my point is not the supernatural but the hypernatural; after all, it’s easy to imagine your own death when you’re a horror writer. We do that kind of thing all the time.

The story is interesting in that it comes with very little moralizing. This is not a Devil eager to trick a man in order to steal his soul. The Devil here is malice, pure and simple; he is hunger; he is a grinning set of jaws that will devour you whole simply because you are there. It is old school religion, that, a religion of black and white in which the Devil comes, not because of a sin committed for which he might legitimately be feared, but simply because the Devil is and that is exactly what he does: he comes, and he comes, and he keeps on coming.

“The Man in the Black Suit” is a story about fishing; this is appropriate because fishing has such Biblical overtones, certainly, but also because it’s a sport born half out of hunger and half out of playfulness. The narrator hooks himself a big one, a nineteen-inch brook trout. Quite the accomplishment for such a young boy. It is that fish alone that saves him, for it is enough to distract the Devil, who eats the thing whole with jaws that open up like a snake’s.

In a recent interview following the publication of Revival, a Lovecraftian novel about a minister who loses his faith, King said he believed “in evil”, but he has for all his life “gone back and forth about whether or not there’s an outside evil, whether or not there’s a force in the world that really wants to destroy us, from the inside out, individually and collectively.” The Devil of “The Man in the Black Suit” is an outside force, but it isn’t purely religious, to my mind, nor is he the accrual of bad forces, of crimes and transgressions, manifested in novels such as ‘Salem’s Lot (1975) or It (1986).

The Devil here is a kind of sudden badness that comes out of the blue.

Like a bee sting when you’re allergic.

Like a truck coming out of nowhere in the darkness.

And there is a part of me that is thinking about this story as I sit on the bus, thinking about what it means to write about memory and to write about the fear of death. Outside, the world around me has fallen into darkness. I can’t see my way clearly. Sometimes it seems as if the only lights are headlights.

Perhaps the end of the story isn’t where we should be focusing. Because “The Man in the Black Suit” ends as all horror stories end: with a tremor, with that sinking feeling of “what comes next and do I really want to see?” But another way to look at the story is this: it’s a fishing story, and all fishing stories are about lies, aren’t they? Big whoppers. Tales that grow bigger in the telling.

And the Devil lied.

The narrator survived two World Wars, the atomic terror of the 60s, and God alone knows what personal tragedies that have come his way. He was born in 1905, and he has lived out his ninety years, suffering losses, yes, but living all the same. Maybe this fear has always been clawing at him, the image of that terrible grin—relentless as oncoming headlights—and the hungry words, “Biiig fiiish!” chasing all the truths of the moral world into ruin.

Except it is just a fear, a fear we all have.

Our man is still kicking, even after everything.

He may not be strong enough to run much more. He may not have fine large brook trout.

He may be old, and his creel may be empty.

But the Devil lies. And our man is still alive.

____

Bibliography

King, Stephen. Danse Macabre. New York: Hodder & Stoughton, 2006. Electronic.

King, Stephen. The Dead Zone. New York: New York: Doubleday & Company, 1979. Print.

King, Stephen. It. New York: Viking Press, 1986. Print.

King, Stephen. “The Man in the Black Suit.” In The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories. Ed. Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer. New York: Corvus, 2011. Electronic.

King, Stephen. Revival. New York: Hodder & Stoughton, 2014. Print.

King, Stephen. ‘Salem’s Lot. New York: Doubleday & Company, 1975. Print.

MacDonald, Helen. H is for Hawk. London: Vintage, 2015. Electronic.

Sometimes They Come Back. Dir. Tom McLoughlin. 1991. Based on a short story by Stephen King: “Sometimes They Come Back.” Cavalier. March, 1974. Reprinted in Night Shift. New York: Doubleday & Company, 1978.

The post 101 Weird Writers #43 — Stephen King appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

This post is part of an ongoing series on 101 weird writers featured in The Weird compendium, the anthology that serves as the inspiration for this site. There is no ranking system; the order is determined by the schedule of posts.

Kelly Link was born in Miami, Florida, and is the author of numerous short story collections, most recently Get in Trouble from Random House. In 2000, she and spouse Gavin Grant co-founded Small Beer Press, an independent publisher of fantasy, weird, and other forms of speculative fiction, whose releases have been nominated for numerous awards in the field. She is a graduate of Columbia University and UNC-Greensboro, and has taught writing workshops at Lenoir-Rhyne College, Bard College, Clarion East, Clarion West, and others.

Link’s work has been described as magical realism, slipstream, and weird, amongst other categories. “The Specialist’s Hat,” included in The Weird, originally appeared in Event Horizon in 1998 and was subsequently collected in her debut collection Stranger Things Happen. It was selected for multiple Year’s Best… anthologies and received the World Fantasy Award in 1999. She has won numerous other honors, such as the Locus and O. Henry Awards. Link’s other collections include Magic for Beginners and Pretty Monsters, and her debut novel is forthcoming. She lives in Massachusetts. More information can be found at www.kellylink.net.

– Christopher Burke

***

“The Specialist’s Hat” has become a touchstone for a number of overlapping literary movements (magic realism, slipstream, interstitial, metafiction, fabulation, weird fiction), and there is good reason for this. It infuses tropes drawn from Gothic tales such as Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto or ghost stories such as M. R. James’s classic “Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” with a playfully postmodern sensibility. The story has a peculiar lightness to it, as it weaves together children’s games, fairy tales, oral histories, and snatches of poetry whose deliberate awfulness amuses us even as it unsettles us. This sort of brilliant cognitive dissonance is a hallmark of Link’s particular brand of fiction.

The story begins easily enough. Samantha and Claire are twin sisters, aged ten. Following their mother’s death, their father has relocated them to Eight Chimneys, a typical Gothic mansion complete with exactly one hundred windows, three-stories, and a supposedly haunted forest. It is revealed that the girls’ father has been studying the literary stylings of the house’s previous occupant, Charles Cheatham Rash, who wrote “three volumes of bad obscure poetry, and an even worse and more obscure novel” (888). While their father works, the twins are cared for by the nameless babysitter, fourteen-years-old, who comes and goes as she pleases. Their favourite game is playing Dead (“When you’re Dead…you don’t have to brush your teeth…”; “When you’re Dead…you live in a box and it’s always dark, but you’re not ever afraid.”) (888). One day they discover the Specialist’s hat hanging on a nail in the attic, apparently made by the poet Rash out of the fifty-two teeth of a range of exotic creatures as well as those of his own vanished wife. The Specialist’s hat, we are told, looks like nothing, but it can sound like anything. The plot of the story itself follows a kind of dream logic that makes it difficult to précis; but its effects creep up on you, a sort of shivery, nerveless numbness, the mental equivalent of knocking your funny bone badly. Is it a love story? A ghost story? Does it end happily or not? Most readers would agree the story is fundamentally disquieting; but few, I think, could agree on why.

You Can’t Make a Hommelette…

While searching for a way to explain the curious effects of “The Specialist’s Hat”, I found myself recalling “Troubles with the Real”, an essay written by the Marxist philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Žižek, which I first encountered as a graduate student. The essay, a strange piece of Gothic-tinged criticism in its own right, discusses a monstrous figure first described by the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan as the lamella or the hommelette (the “man-omelet”), a membranous creature that apparently flies off the moment the foetus emerges. It is extra-flat, moving like an amoeba, capable of surviving any division, and, for all intents and purposes, immortal. “Well!” exclaims Lacan, “This is not very reassuring. But suppose it comes and envelopes your face while you are quietly asleep…” (197–98)

Suppose, indeed! What a horrifying thought! That element of horror was something Žižek picked up on in Lacan’s account of the lamella, leading him to make the leap between the psychoanalytical concept (the lamella represented for Lacan the libido or the “death drive”) and the horror genre. For Žižek, the lamella—indivisible, indestructible, and immortal, an “entity of pure surface…first heard as a shrilling sound, and then [popping] up as a monstrously distorted body”—is undead, possessed not of a “sublime spiritual immortality” but rather the “obscene immortality” of a zombie. It is a creature which cannot die; it recomposes itself in the face of violence and clumsily staggers on. It is unstoppable, a representation of “an uncanny excess of life”; it is the urge to persist beyond the natural cycle of generation and corruption. Žižek memorably compares the lamella to the face-hugger in Ridley Scott’s Alien, an indestructible creature which multiplies when it is cut into pieces, and whose extra-flat body can suddenly fly up and envelop your face: “In it,” he writes, “pure evil animality overlaps with machinic blind insistence.”

So far, so terrifying—but what does it have to do with Kelly Link? In rereading “The Specialist’s Hat” for the umpteenth time, I noticed a striking similarity between the eponymous piece of clothing and Žižek’s lamella:

Hanging from a nail on the nursery chimney is a long black object. It looks lumpy and heavy, as if it were full of things. … There are holes in the black thing, and it whistles mournfully as [the babysitter] spins it. “The Specialist’s hat,” she says.

“That doesn’t look like a hat,” says Claire. “It doesn’t look like anything at all.” (893)

And then:

Claire snatches the hat off the nail. “I’m the Specialist!” she says, putting the hat on her head. It falls over her eyes, the floppy shapeless brim sewn with little asymmetrical buttons that flash and catch the moonlight like teeth. (893)

Is this not an eerily evocative description? The lumpy, shapeless, toothy object which emits a strange sound and creeps over your face in order to seal it up? “Yes,” you might cry, “but so what? What does it mean?” Or better yet: “Why does it frighten me?”

Here we might return to that classic ghost story I mentioned at the beginning of the essay: “Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” by M. R. James, a tale with a rather similar uncanny presence. When Professor Parkins arrives for an off-season visit at a seaside hotel, he wanders into the vicinity of a ruined Templars’s church where he discovers an ancient whistle engraved with the words QUIS EST ISTE QUI VENIT (Who is this who is coming?). The sound of the whistle fascinates Parkins, but as he sleeps he is haunted by a terrifying vision of a long stretch of shore, absent of any distinguishing features except a man, fleeing.

So far no cause whatever for the fear of the runner had been shown; but now there began to be seen, far up the shore, a little flicker of something light-coloured moving to and fro with great swiftness and irregularity. Rapidly growing larger, it, too, declared itself as a figure in pale, fluttering draperies, ill-defined. There was something about its motion which made Parkins very unwilling to see it at close quarters. It would stop, raise arms, bow itself toward the sand, then run stooping across the beach to the water-edge and back again; and then, rising upright, once more continue its course forward at a speed that was startling and terrifying. (20)

The subsequent night, Professor Parkins discovers the entity has invaded his room, taking up residence in the empty second bed, a rustling and shaking thing to be described later as “a horrible, an intensely horrible, face of crumpled linen” (26). In a fit of panic, Parkins dashes for the whistle which he has left by the window:

This was, as it turned out, the worst thing he could have done, because the personage in the empty bed, with a sudden smooth motion, slipped from the bed and took up a position, with outspread arms, between the two beds, and in front of the door. Parkins watched it in a horrid perplexity. Somehow, the idea of getting past it and escaping through the door was intolerable to him; he could not have borne — he didn’t know why — to touch it; and as for its touching him, he would sooner dash himself through the window than have that happen. (26)

For all intents and purposes, the monstrous apparition of James’s story possesses the very same qualities as the Specialist’s hat: it is formless and flat, nothing more than crumpled linen and yet somehow indestructible, indescribable and intensely horrible. Like the lamella, it emits a strange noise, and it can move at a terrifying speed. It unsettles because its lack of form speaks to its monstrous immortality; how would you destroy such an entity? Is it even possible? What is it? If we return to the inscription on the whistle, we discover our question is only repeated back to us: Quis est? Who is this?

This is precisely the question that Link returns to in the chilling conclusion of “The Specialist’s Hat.” Claire and Samantha have worn the Specialist’s hat, they have allowed themselves to enter a strange stasis, somewhere between the Death of their childhood game and real annihilation. “He’ll be coming soon,” the babysitter tells them. “It will be coming soon” (894). But who is the Specialist? There are only vague hints and suggestions.

Who’s there?
Just air. (894)

No one is there. Nothing is there. Or rather nothingness is there. Death.

And then the front door opens. Samantha and Claire huddle together as they listen to someone creeping up the stairs. “Be quiet,” the babysitter commands them “It’s the Specialist.” And then we hear him ourselves:

“Claire, Samantha, Samantha Claire.” The Specialist’s voice is blurry and wet. It sounds like their father’s voice, but that’s because the hat can imitate any noise, any voice. “Are you still awake?” (894)

Is it their father who has come for them? Or is it, as the babysitter suggests, the Specialist? And is this what we find terrifying in the story: the disappearance of the father, his replacement by a simulacrum, almost identical, someone who pretends to love them but who is fundamentally a stranger? Quis est? Perhaps this is part of the terror, but it isn’t everything. What leaves us most disturbed, I think, is not their father’s transformation into the Specialist but rather their own transformation, facilitated by their interaction with the Specialist’s hat—the lamella. And in fact it is the lamella that they themselves seem to become. Think about it. They gain the ability to move strangely, to vanish up the chimney and fly, if they want to, from the bed; they are trapped in a kind of pre-sexual stasis between ten and eleven; they are indivisible:

Last year they were learning fractions in school, when her mother died. Fractions remind Samantha of herds of wild horses, piebalds and pintos and palominos. There are so many of them, and they are, well, fractious and unruly. (894)

Their mother’s death has left them in this state, but they have also chosen it; as a game, as an escape, as a way of liberating themselves from the need to grow up. Like the zombie, the alien, and the spectral presence, they have taken upon themselves an obscene form of immortality; they are undead.

…Without Breaking a Few Eggs

But what then is “The Specialist’s Hat” about? At one level, this is a story invested with enough sexual imagery to make it any psychoanalyst’s (wet?) dream. We begin with Samantha and Claire, two prepubescent girls who lose their mother, only to find that their widower father has recently met a woman in the woods. We learn that the woman is a distant relation of Rash; we know by this point that Rash had a pretty wife who met another man “who wanted to go with her” (889). When Rash’s wife finally agreed, her husband found out and tricked her into drinking the blood of a snake:

And in about six months snakes created in her and they got between her meat and the skin. And they say you could just see them running up and down her legs. They say she was just hollow to the top of her body, and it kept on like that till she died. (889)

This is the first explanation we hear of what sex might mean in the context of the story: snakes, hollowness, and eventually death. The image of the snake reoccurs throughout the story. One of Rash’s poems tells how he met a woman in the wood, and “her lips were two red snakes” (890). The Specialist’s hat makes a noise like a snake. Most importantly, when the girls’ father comes stumbling into the bedroom, he claims “I think I’ve been bitten by something. I think I’ve been bitten by a goddamn snake” (894). The sense of this image is clear: the snake is a symbol of consuming sexuality, a creature that hollows you out, and eventually kills you. Only the twins, who escape as ghosts through the chimney, remain untouched.

So what might Žižek say about this? Recall that the lamella is itself a representation of the libido in Lacanian theory. He describes it as the irrepressible sexual urge, the death drive, the drive for “an uncanny excess of life.” It is also something thrown off from the foetus, amoeba-like, the thing without any sex of its own. It is pre-sexual. The symbolic resonance of the snake as a representation of the lamella is obvious. What haunts Samantha and Claire is the fear that their father has become fundamentally different because of his libido, somehow alien to them; he has vanished into the woods to meet his lover, and he has been bitten by the snake; it will kill him—or worse yet, it will change him.

But the real anxiety, I think, is not simply what the snake has done to their father, but what it will do to them. Sexual women become dead women in this story: Rash’s wife, their own mother. And so they must find a way to stop themselves from growing older, from falling into the inevitable trap of puberty. “Samantha doesn’t care for boys that much,” the story reminds us.

She likes numbers. Take the number 8 for instance, which can be more than one thing at once. Looked at one way, 8 looks like a bent woman with curvy hair. But if you lay it down on its side, it looks like a snake curled with its tail in its mouth. This is sort of like the difference between being Dead and being dead. (894)

For Samantha, the image of the number 8 oscillates between the form of the bent woman, the sexual woman, and the snake devouring itself. Becoming a sexualized woman is like being Dead: it is liberating, the Dead fear nothing, the Dead can move as they will. But the snake also symbolises true death or annihilation: “The morning comes not, no, never, no more” (892). When the twins put on the Specialist’s hat—the ultimate vagina dentata—they gain control of their sexuality, or rather, they gain the power to annul their own sexuality, to control it. The Specialist’s hat, then, is both a sign of what haunts them and the mechanism by which they learn to escape it.

But the horror of the lamella extends beyond a purely sexualised reading of the story. It is truly disturbing, Žižek might say, because it represents the intersection between the imaginary and the Real; it reveals the Real in its most terrifying dimension as the primordial abyss which dissolves all identities and swallows everything. This concept of the Real will be familiar to readers of weird fiction. It is represented in a range of literary guises from Poe’s maelstrom to the horror at the end of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to Lovecraft’s elder god Cthulhu, a creature who presents such a dangerous vision of the universe that he cannot be seen without causing madness:

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. (139)

The critic Benjamin Noys identifies in Žižek’s critical writing a true Gothic sensibility. For Lacan, the Real is inscribed into the notion of human sexuality, but for Žižek, the kernel of reality is horror, the horror of the Real—an encounter with the universe as it really is, stripped of imaginative protection and representation.

“The Specialist’s Hat” terrifies us in much the same way that Lovecraft terrifies us: it hints at an encounter with something which is beyond the realm of our experience—death—and yet which is simultaneously so deeply embedded in our own nature that it is always already there. Beneath the awfulness of Rash’s obscure poetry is an insight we recognise as fundamentally true: we are dying, we have always been dying, and sex, which seems to promise immortality, is not a way out of that trap, but rather a way further into it. Sex is the disappearance of the self, just as death is; there is no immortality, there is only the restless seeking after it, the repetition of the journey into the woods, the bite of the snake, and the hollowing out of the body as skin pulls away from meat, as you grow accustomed to slowness, as your eyes sink in, your flesh decays…

This repetition, this annihilation, this image of the future is what terrifies us—because we know it is true. The twins embrace another kind of formlessness—Death—as a way to ward off or sublimate the vision of natural death they witnessed when their mother passed away. The ambiguity of the ending comes not in the identity of the father—whether he has turned into the Specialist—or indeed in whether something awful has happened to the twins. Rather it comes in the irresolution of the twins’ stasis: like Peter Pan, will they choose Death forever? Or will they accept life with all its dangers, its delusions, and its ultimate dissolution?

Bibliography

James, M. R. “Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad.” In Great Horror Stories: Tales by Stoker, Poe, Lovecraft and Others. Ed. John Grafton. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2006.

Kay, Sarah. Slavoj Žižek: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Polity, 2003. Print.

Kelly, James Patrick and John Kessel, eds. Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology. Francisco: Tachyon Publications, 2006. Print.

Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar, Book XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Eds. Richard Feldstein, Bruce Fink and Maire Jaanus. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995. Print.

Link, Kelly. “The Specialist’s Hat.” Event Horizon November 1998. Reprinted in Stranger Things Happen. Brooklyn, NY: Small Beer Press, 2001. Print.

Lovecraft, H. P. The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories. Ed. S. T. Joshi. London: Penguin, 1999. Print.

Noys, Benjamin. “The Horror of the Real: Žižek’s Modern Gothic.” International Journal of Zizek Studies 4 (2010). <http://zizekstudies.org/index.php/ijzs/article/viewFile/274/372>.

Žižek, Slavoj. “Troubles with the Real: Lacan as a Viewer of Alien.” Lacan.com. 2009. <http://www.lacan.com/essays/?p=180>.

The post 101 Weird Writers #37 — Kelly Link appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Copyright © Chris Roberts/Dead Clown Art

“It’s rude,” Jonah’s brother-in-law, Petar, whispered beforehand, “to turn down food. We’ve found the trick is to leave a little room at the end of the first helping so you can take some more when my aunt asks you.”

At the time, Jonah had agreed, but when ten o’clock rolled around, after the plane trip to Zagreb and the ensuing drive, the thirty-year-old programmer found that he was starving. Petar’s aunt served up a pot of peppers stuffed with rice and pork, mashed potatoes, thick crusty bread, baked string beans, and another bowl full of potatoes fried with mushrooms. Jonah began to salivate, and try as he might to follow Petar’s advice, he found his plate heaped higher and higher with food. He couldn’t help it. He never could.

“Aunt Katica may look stern,” Petar had told him, “but she’ll love you. You’re family after all, what with Deborah and I.” When he said that, he leaned over and kissed Deborah—Jonah’s super-beauty of a little sister—on the cheek. She smiled, and wriggled her body again at Petar in a way Jonah didn’t entirely approve of. “She’s just very old fashioned, you know, caught in the old ways. Her sons died when the Serbs bombed Dubrovnik back in the War of Independence. She takes good care of us now. And she’ll feed you until you’re fit to burst.”

Jonah had been doubtful about the trip, and about his reception with this new family he was supposed to be part of. He wasn’t terribly close to Deborah, had showed up to her wedding late, and missed most of the major festivities before and after. And, so when he arrived in Petar’s family home, back in the old country that Deborah had told him so much about, when they started piling food in front of him, despite the doctor’s warning, despite his avowal to drop thirty pounds, and despite Petar’s advice, he began to eat.

Travelling made him nervous; Petar’s family made him nervous; and when he was nervous he wanted to eat. After all, eating meant that you didn’t have to talk.

He shovelled forkful after forkful into his mouth, long after Petar and Deborah had stopped, while Petar’s cousins chatted to each other in Croatian. They were big, burly men, all of them, with bulky biceps and skin burnt to an attractive red-gold. Jonah, on the other hand, felt pudgy and fish-belly white. He went to the gym when he could, but sitting in front of a computer all day did nothing for either his complexion or his physique. So his own wife had told him before she packed her bags to leave him for her fitness instructor.

“You’ve let yourself go, honey,” Sarah said, eyes big with concern. “I can’t watch you doing this to yourself anymore. I don’t want to see who you are becoming.”

Doing what? He had wanted to ask. Working twelve to fourteen hours a day organising trade routes for shipping companies, implementing database systems, waking at six in the morning to answer his Blackberry all so that she could have a beautiful house in the nice part of town and spend hours at the high-end FemChic gym in Yorkville?

But Jonah had not said that. He had said nothing when Sarah left, and so here he was, joining his little sister, her husband and his Herculean cousins in an apartment in Dubrovnik.

“What you need is to get away,” Deborah had told him, patting his hand with that awkward breed of affection and contempt that only family can get away with. “Come with Dam and I. He won’t mind. And his family is our family now.”

They certainly didn’t look like his—Jonah’s—family. The younger Malinaric men had large foreheads and faces that seemed moulded from clay. They had welcomed Jonah solemnly, drank a shot of šljìvovica with him, and then ignored him completely in favour of Petar, the prodigal son, and his beautiful bride.

Mashed potatoes it was then, mixed with tomatoes and onions, and a second piece of bread that he could stuff in his face, so that when, at last, all the bronze, golem-faces turned to him, he could shrug and mumble apologetically.

“You don’t have to eat so much,” Deborah leaned over to whisper discreetly. “Really, you can just say no. They’ll understand. You aren’t from here.”

Jonah wanted to point out that neither was she, but Deborah, being Deborah, had left a smattering of meat and vegetables on her plate just to prove that she had really, really tried and that she was definitely good and full.

Jonah instantly put down the piece of bread he’d been about to finish off. “Okay, sis,” he whispered, “thanks.”

But when she turned away, he quickly popped the stub into his mouth and chewed as fast as he could. Petar shot him a look, a friendly are-you-having-a-good-time smile, but Jonah caught the quick eye flick to his belly, bulging out from beneath his navy t‑shirt.

Only the aging Aunt Katica, a buttery-looking woman with sagging skin and sharp, bird-like eyes, looked on in approval. When at last Jonah’s plate was clear, she tapped a wooden spoon against her chin twice, and smiled at him. It was a strange smile, but the only genuine smile he had received since he arrived.

*

Deborah and Petar wanted to go with the cousins to a nightclub and they insisted that Jonah tag along as well.

“The women here are beautiful,” Petar said. “My parents were shocked that I found a Canadian girl as pretty as the girls in Dubrovnik.”

“Prettier,” Deborah rejoined. “And Canadians age well. It’s the cold. Keeps us well-preserved.”

They kissed then, a long post-honeymoon but pre-anniversary kind of kiss that involved a lot of tongue. Afterwards, they bobbed along, hand in hand, like two buoys floating in the ocean. Jonah felt a pang as he watched them. Sarah would have fit right in here. All the Croatian girls had surprisingly perfect bodies. It was the kind of place where everyone felt comfortable wearing bikini-tops. The cousins had each managed to find themselves identical counterparts: tanned, well-built girls with dark curling hair and sombre faces.

The nightclub was dark and dingy, just like every other nightclub Jonah had ever attended. They played American music, and served Croatian beer—“Pivo,” Petar informed him, “the only Croatian word you need to know.” The beer came in half-litre bottles, and tasted gritty but not unpleasant.

The music was hypnotic, and Jonah was still exhausted from jetlag. His belly felt too full, and the beer was very strong. These were people who liked to drink. Liked to drink and fight, Jonah remembered. It hadn’t been that long since the civil war had ended. You could see bullet holes, Petar had said, on the doors in some of the smaller cities where they hadn’t yet rebuilt. And there were villages bombed by the Serbs during World War II that still lay empty and deserted. It was a place for strong beer and quiet faces. When Jonah looked around, there seemed to be something angry and feral to the dancing.

“The Croatian women are very beautiful, yes?”

Jonah muttered a reply he hoped was polite, but he didn’t really want to talk to this hulking behemoth of a man—family, Deborah had said. Not his family. Hers.

“Is okay. Very beautiful. You dance now?” Jonah shook his head emphatically. “Is okay,” the cousin repeated, smiling.

A moment later, Jonah was alone again.

*

Disorientated and a little drunk, Jonah took a taxi home alone, hours, he suspected, before the others would be getting in, drunk and grinning, arms hugging companionably around oversized shoulders. When he slipped through the front door, Aunt Katica was there at the little kitchen table, clutching a hand-rolled cigarette.

She beckoned him to the table, and though he was tired, Jonah did not refuse.

The smell of tobacco was heavy. Wordlessly, she poured a small cupful of šljìvovica from a plastic water bottle in the fridge. The air conditioner buzzed angrily, but it was still hot in the room. Jonah sipped the liquor, enjoying the sweet, burning sensation it left in his throat.

“You did not like the club?” the old woman asked him. Her English was surprisingly good, though the syllables still sounded heavy and guttural in her mouth. She didn’t have the high-pitched voices of the cousins’ girlfriends. Hers was harsher; her mouth scowled when she spoke English.

“It was very nice,” Jonah lied. “I’m just tired after the flight, is all.”

She grunted in reply, and poured him more liquor. Jonah felt lightheaded. The smoke scratched the inside of his lungs. It had been a while since he’d smoked, something he’d given up when he and Sarah had started dating.

“Is okay,” she said. “You are good boy. You will do well in this country.”

He coughed as he swallowed the šljìvovica. She stood, eyeing him, and cracked a window open. A breeze wafted into the room, stealing some of the heavy, circling smoke.

“I’m not staying long,” Jonah replied.

The old woman took a long drag from her cigarette. Jonah found himself studying her in the paper-yellow light. Her skin was brown and doughy, a thousand lines creased into the soft folds of it. She hadn’t gone to fat like so many of the other old women in the country, brought up the old way. In fact, Jonah had yet to see her eat. She had simply brought plate after plate to the table, and then observed as the family sat down to dine.

“It was a woman, yes?” she said after some time. “A woman from your country?”

Jonah nodded, feeling uncomfortable. “She’s gone now.”

She took another drag, and Jonah wondered where all the smoke had gone, whether it was pooling in her lungs. Finally, she exhaled a small cloud. “We have many ghosts here,” she said with a soft snarl. “The young people can be foolish in their forgetfulness.”

“It must be hard.”

“Yes. Very hard in Croatia, for a long time.”

She extinguished the last of the cigarette in an ash tray, and then rose to shut the window again. Jonah watched the red ember die to ash, while Aunt Katica looked on in thoughtful silence.

*

That night, Jonah dreamed that he was hungry. A woman sat on the other side of a table, but there was so much food piled between them that he couldn’t see her face properly. He began to eat and eat and eat. Dumplings, cabbage rolls, roasted chicken legs, breaded pork chops. His stomach pressed against the table, curving overtop and spilling onto the plate. The more he ate, the closer he felt to seeing that figure on the other side. Soon, he knew, soon.

Finally, as Jonah felt his stomach begin to burst, he heard a voice, Sarah’s: “I can’t watch you doing this to yourself.” But when he saw who was on the other side, she wasn’t alone. Aunt Katica sat next to her, sucking on her cigarette, eyes burning like red-hot embers as she watched him.

“You must eat,” she said. “Is good.”

And she pushed Sarah onto the plate.

Jonah couldn’t help it. He was so hungry. He took one of her pale, manicured hands and he popped it into his mouth, crunching down on the fingers. Soon he had eaten his way to her elbow, but Sarah only looked on with those sad eyes of hers. “This won’t make me love you any more,” she said. And then she gave him a languorous wink, and he imagined her rubbing up against the man at the club.

He could feel his skin tingling, could feel her pressed up against his insides as if she was wearing him like a second skin.

“This won’t make us closer,” she said, her words rippling out from his lungs, through his windpipe.

Aunt Katica nodded, tapped a wooden spoon to her chin, and smiled.

*

Deborah and Petar were late waking the next morning, and they grinned foolishly to each other at the breakfast table.

“I’m not used to drinking like that,” Deborah said. “You Croats must have cast-iron stomachs.”

“It’s taken practice. At least we excel at something.”

“In Croatia,” said one of the cousins, “we say we are very good at fighting. Not so good at peace.”

Aunt Katica gave him a dark look as she set down a pot of hot coffee. Jonah helped himself to a cupful, serving it out with a long, rounded spoon as he listened to the banter. He felt guilty he hadn’t stayed. They all seemed closer now without him. Deborah laughed easily with the cousins, making quick and clumsy jokes in their language.

They poured another round of šljìvovica—“It’s how we start the day over here,” Petar winked—but Jonah was somehow left out. He didn’t mind. The coffee was sweeter than he expected, and when he had finished it, he poked the dark silt at the bottom and licked the grounds off his finger.

Deborah gave him a look, and he tucked his hands back under the table, as the others all downed their liquor.

They ate thick slices of bread, spicy salami and cheese, along with a heaping spoonful of scrambled eggs. The cousins seemed in fine form, nudging each other in the ribs, their appetites unaffected by the apparent debauchery of last night. Deborah looked a little paler, and only nibbled at the food. Aunt Katica’s stared disapprovingly at her, and Jonah found himself doing the same thing.

Food was a gift. Food was hospitality. Food meant you were family.

He hadn’t felt like he had family in a long time. Deborah was great, but the two of them were nothing alike. She was tiny, trim, the kind of woman who went for a ten-kilometre run first thing in the morning. After their parents’ divorce, the family had become fragmented, with holidays so unbearably tense that Jonah had been happy to ditch them in favour of a low-key morning with Sarah, and dinner with her teeming, multitudinous assortment of cousins, nieces and nephews. But they had never been his family.

Here, though—here he felt a warmth creeping into his stomach, and at one point, Aunt Katica came and rested her hands on his shoulders. They were icy cold, but the touch was kind, a gesture of affection.

“It’s the dragon’s own weather outside,” Petar muttered. “I wanted to show you the beach today. I guess we can go to the market instead. The Old City.”

“Pijaca,” said one of the cousins. “Is very nice.”

It took some time to get moving, but eventually they boarded the tram into town. Even early in the morning, underneath a cover of grey clouds, the sun beat down on Jonah something fierce.

They passed through the ancient gateway into the Old City. Despite the sun, and the heat, and the sweat, even Jonah was impressed. The ancient fortifications still stood intact after all these years—after a vicious earthquake that had almost levelled the city, and after invasions by Venetians, Turks, later by Napoleon.

The walls towered up over Jonah. There were already a number of people up there, tourists for the most part, remarking at the colour of the ocean, taking pictures of the Adriatic. Jonah felt exhausted from last night as it was. Jetlag tugged at his eyelids, and he felt as if he had eaten a cannonball for breakfast, the weight of it sagging from his stomach. But up sprinted Deborah with her trim runner’s legs, the flesh smooth and expensively tanned. Jonah followed, taking one step at a time. He didn’t like heights much. But when he reached the top, the view really was spectacular. On one side, he could see a patchwork of red clay rooftop tiles jostling one another for space. There were so many different shades: the old tiles, grey where they had cracked and sun-bleached where they hadn’t; a variety of reds, oranges, browns of the newer tiles. In some places, he could make out the bright, coloured tiles where the rooftops had been patched. After the war, he thought. The too-even colours had a bright flesh-over-a-scar gloss.

It reminded Jonah of the way their apartment in Toronto had looked, the week after Sarah had left. She had let herself in while he was at work to collect all of her things. When he’d returned at the end of the day, exhausted from troubleshooting the glitches in the system he had been working on for the last month, he had found empty craters in the dust on bookshelves and tables where a lamp or vase had stood, nails sticking out of the wall.

She’d left a note:

Dear Jonah, sorry to collect my things while you were away, but it didn’t feel right to see you. Not yet. I know this is all my fault.

I left the key in the ashtray on the kitchen table.

            Sarah

Perhaps all loss felt like that, empty places where you knew something special, something important, had stood.

Traversing the walls took a good hour. Jonah sweated through most of it with a fairly good temper. Deborah and Petar often asked him to take cute-couple pictures of them kissing. Each time, Petar would open his mouth, like a fish, to suck on Deborah’s top lip. They fit together like two gears turning, mouths clicking together, camera clicking to capture the shot.

Finally, they found themselves in a large plaza filled on the one side with two-person tables where tourists reclined, drinking pale beer out of enormous glass mugs. On the other side, the square was filled with stalls perched under rectangular, blue and white striped umbrellas. The bustle of people was ferocious and Jonah was almost immediately swept away from his group by the crowd. There were enormous watermelons bulging out of crates, tomatoes, cucumbers, limes, olives, eggplants, bunches of bananas, and strings of garlic hanging from the rafters.

He made his way to a huge statue with large, bronze panels on it that stood in the centre of the square. The panel before him depicted a dragon and a winged lion bowing before a woman on a throne. It was beautiful, and imposing, a relic of the ancient spirit of Dubrovnik exerting itself against its would-be enemies. Libertas, Jonah remembered, was the motto of this town. It had never let itself be conquered, not by the Venetians who ruled the rest of Croatia nor the Turks, their ancient enemy.

But Jonah’s gaze soon swept back to the lines of burdened stalls. Where had the others gone? He tried to shade his eyes and get a better look.

“Try, yes?” called out a slender woman selling giant wheels of cheese. She shaved a piece off a crescent and offered it to him. Jonah, without thinking, put it into his mouth. “You try, yes? Try all!” She cut off more from something darker, an orange-yellow with a red skin to it. He took it. And the next piece, and the next. He tried to put his hands up apologetically.

“No more, no more,” he pleaded, and disentangled himself from the booth, offering twenty kuna to satisfy the woman.

Where were Deborah and Petar? He thought he spotted Petar’s head towering over the crowd, and he tried to wade through the crowd to rejoin them.

Someone tugged at his arm.

It was a small child, shirtless, nut-brown from head to toe like all the Croats. His eyes looked up with an eager expression on his face. In his hands, he clutched a thick slice of watermelon, which he held out before Jonah. He did not resist when the fruit was pushed into his hands. He bit down, felt the juice running over his chin.

Then there was a girl, fifteen or sixteen maybe, in a knotted white dress. She came up to him shyly. He still held the green rind of the watermelon in his hand, so she leaned in close and pushed some kind of sweet pastry into his mouth.

“No,” he whispered. “I don’t need it.” But she simply smiled and fed him another. He dropped the shell of the watermelon.

There was another hand. Something dark with a thick, aromatic juice was pushed toward him. And then a red sliver of tomato.

Jonah had barely closed his mouth, barely chewed. His stomach felt tight against his shorts. It bulged out under his shirt. He tried to protest, but there were so many hands, so many offerings. He couldn’t stop. He felt his mouth unhinge like a snake’s, as meat and cheese slid down his gullet almost effortlessly.

“Alklha,” he heard them whisper. “Alklha.” He didn’t know what the word meant, but it didn’t seem to matter. The marketplace came alive before him, a thousand tanned hands and smiling faces. He was fit to bursting, but his hunger was deep, so deep. It was as if he had never eaten in his entire life. Jonah could feel a fire beginning to burn in the pit of his stomach, a fierce joy, protectiveness, something like love even, for these people and their gifts.

“I love you,” he wanted to say. “I love you all.”

The chatter began to grow louder. There was quite a crowd of people now, all those dark, brown eyes staring up at him with hopeful, expectant faces.

It was then that the nut-brown boy—the one who had first offered him the watermelon—was pushed to the front of the crowd. His eyes were bright, shining, his skin smooth and youthful, long-limbed. He would be a handsome boy one day, barrel-chested like the cousins. He slipped his short child’s fingers into Jonah’s mouth. They tasted sweet, sweeter than anything Jonah had ever tasted before. The boy pushed further, and soon it was his whole arm, and then a leg, and then both legs, so that the boy was sitting on the edge of Jonah’s jaw, half in, half out. He didn’t seem scared. In fact, he seemed happy, excited. Jonah couldn’t speak. His throat began to work, constricting in tight circles that caught hold of the feet and dragged them deeper into his throat.

And then the people were pushing, pushing the boy further into him. Jonah squeezed his eyes shut, caught somewhere between the fear and hunger, the moment dreamlike in its intensity.

The boy’s head disappeared, and then, at last, the final hand slithered between his lips.

Jonah felt heavy now, terribly heavy.

The crowd was dissipating, all those happy, faces blending back into the dull morass of hot, sticky tourists and bored vendors. The bright white and blue of the tents were blinding. Jonah found himself slumped on a bench, half in the shade, his stomach sagging pitifully over the belt of his shorts. He felt queasy. His vision blurred. The sun was too hot, and he could feel prickles of sweat running down his neck.

Deborah and Petar appeared, as if out of thin air. Deborah sat down on the bench beside him, while Petar peered off, his hands shading his eyes. The cousins ringed them like an entourage.

“You don’t look well,” she said, her voice laced with concern. “Maybe you should go lie down?”

Jonah nodded his head, moaned something low.

Deborah put her hand on his wet, sticky back. The gesture was so intimate, so familiar, that for a brief moment Jonah felt tears at the edges of his vision.

“One of the cousins can take you home,” Deborah said softly. “Petar wants to show me the harbour. It’s supposed to be beautiful. Do you want to come … ?”

Jonah shook his head. There was an intense pain in his abdomen. He felt hot and sleepy, fevered. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them, a cousin had propped him up under one arm, and they were walking toward the tram.

“Sorry about this,” Jonah muttered. “I hate to spoil your day.”

He looked up, and the cousin was smiling a tight, sharp smile. Jonah recognised him as the one from the bar, the one who had sent him fleeing back to the apartment. At that moment, he didn’t care though. He didn’t think he could make it back on his own. Another wave of pain overtook him, and he almost doubled over with it.

“Is okay,” the cousin said. “Alklha. We wait for you.”

*

The air in the apartment was thick with the growing heat of the afternoon. Jonah was sweating profusely now, his shirt almost soaked through. At one point, he half-dreamed he saw Sarah in the kitchen, but when he blinked his eyes, it was Aunt Katica, clucking sympathetically, while she poured a glass of cold tap water for him. She wore a green, printed dress, and for a moment, Jonah was glad it was her there and not Sarah. When he had got the flu, she had locked him in their shared bedroom with an electric kettle, a small jar of honey, and a box of Twinings teabags. Not much of a caregiver.

But when Aunt Katica put her hand to his brow, he felt something blissfully cold slither down his spine. “You rest now,” she said firmly. “Grow strong.”

The bedroom felt smaller today. Jonah’s belly heaped like a mountain under the cover. The walls were so close on either side that he felt he could reach out and touch them.

Sleep was difficult coming, but when it did, he saw Aunt Katica staring down at him from an enormous height. Her cigarette tip glowed in the darkness like a third eye, and Jonah found himself enwreathed in delicious smoke. He breathed it in, feeling it travel through his veins, bringing a rich wave of shuddering heat to the tips of his body.

Aunt Katica drew closer, and her eyes flashed red. The folds of her skin now were a burnished bronze, gleaming in the light of the cigarette. She took his hand in hers and pressed it against her cheek. There was no give. Jonah felt something hot and metallic underneath his fingertips, like a penny that had been out in the sun too long. But he didn’t want to stop touching it. He hadn’t felt desire for anyone since Sarah had left. He had thought his capacity for it burnt out of him. But Aunt Katica’s age sloughed off her like a second skin: her flesh was smooth, taut, her breasts were firm and perfect, thighs slim and tapered. She tugged him closer, and his erection was stiffer than it had ever been in his entire life, his penis engorged, terribly sensitive. Her smooth, metallic fingers touched it gently, and he almost came right then. But she grasped him firmly, and her fingers were very hot.

“Is good, yes? You grow big?” she whispered and suddenly there was no air in his lungs for speaking. His white flesh shuddered against her. She leaned in close to kiss him, her tongue darting in and out of his mouth. Their tongues met for a moment, his large and fleshy, hers soft, sharp, forked at the end like a snake’s. But, god, that was even more erotic. She kissed his neck, his chest, flicking across his nipples as if she was tasting them.

He tangled his hands in her hair, overwhelmed by their combined scent. She smelled dry, like the desert.

She moved against him now, rubbing his erection between her legs until he was gasping with pleasure, with the pain of wanting her so much.

She guided him into her then, and he just about dissolved into the hot, liquid warmth of her. He thrust once. Again. He could see the weight of his stomach bouncing with the effort, but he didn’t mind. He seemed to be growing thicker, not with fat, but with muscle, his body expanding, expanding. Suddenly she was a tiny thing next to him. He thrust and he thrust, each stroke engorging him further as if his entire body had grown priapic. Then, at last, release came.

His muscles contracted, painfully, ecstatically, all at once.

*

When he woke, Deborah was sitting by the side of the bed. She had a small, strange smile on her face.

“Do you want to come down to dinner?” she asked. “Aunt Katica said you’ve been sleeping all afternoon. Feel any better?”

“I—I think so,” he replied. Jonah found he did feel better. The queasiness and the pain in his stomach had all but disappeared. He looked over at his sister, small and petite, next to the bulking mass of him. His body wobbled as if it had grown an extra set of skin.

“Are you doing okay here?” She flicked aside a fly that had settled on the sheets. “You don’t seem yourself. Is it—”

“It’s not Sarah,” he finished.

She nodded, her smile sympathetic, not really hearing him. “We thought you were going to get married, Mom, Dad, all of us. I really liked her.”

There was something soft and accusing in her tone. Like it had been Jonah who had screwed it all up.

“I know, sis.”

“We want you to be happy.” Jonah wondered who the we was. His parents? They hadn’t called after the break up. Petar? He hardly knew the man. “Look, I know Mom and Dad were shit. Arguing all the time. And I know you’re still angry at them—”

“I’m not—” he protested.

“—but it’s not always like that. Petar and I, we—”

Jonah wasn’t listening. He shut his eyes and let the hum of the air conditioner buzz around him. I didn’t want her to go, he thought. I wanted her to stay. I wanted her to love me. He thought about Petar and Deborah kissing, their mouths open, trying to devour each other. His stomach rumbled.

“Family’s important,” she was saying. “That’s why I brought you here. I wanted you to see what Petar’s family is like. They’re all so close. It’s different. It can be different.

“You don’t want to end up alone.” Again, that strange smile.

“I know, sis,” he repeated. He patted her hand gently, though he wasn’t sure if he was comforting her or the other way round. He wanted to tell her about what had happened in the square, but looking at her just then, the gulf between them seemed so wide, unbridgeable.

She quirked her lips, tossed her hair back with a sweep of her muscular arms. “So, dinner then?”

He nodded, and heaved himself out of the bed.

*

There were new faces at the dinner table: the girlfriends were there alongside the cousins, but also several older men and woman, some grey-haired, some burly, some dough-faced with creases in the folds of their flesh from age. But they all had the same sloping foreheads, the same dark eyes. Jonah wasn’t sure how they all managed to fit in the apartment. He felt bulky beside them, and try as he might to take up less space when he was seated at the dining table, he still felt his flesh crowding those beside him. He tucked his elbows in, but there seemed nowhere that he could put himself.

Aunt Katica stood in the corner, directing an armada of pots and vessels to the table. They drank, all of them, small glasses full of šljìvovica. One, two, three shots they knocked back in quick succession. Jonah’s eyes watered and his stomach burned with the liquor. He noticed, though, that Deborah had not touched hers this evening. “Živjeli!” they shouted, as each glass went down.

The chatter buzzed around Jonah. He couldn’t make out the slurred Croatia syllables. It all sounded so strange and yet comfortable. The woman beside him—she looked familiar somehow—wore a white knotted dress that stood out against the dark burnished brown of her skin. She smiled genially at him, and clinked her glass against his.

“You are the brother, yes?” she asked. Jonah nodded. “Good, good. Welcome!”

Her leg brushed against his.

And then Petar was hushing everyone. The murmurs died down, and all eyes turned toward him.

“Deborah and I are so glad everyone could be here tonight.” Deborah stood beside him. He snaked an arm around her, pulling her closer. “Because we have an announcement to make.”

Jonah stared at his sister, saw the way her hand fluttered against her belly delicately, almost protectively. Her eyes were downcast as if, for once, she didn’t enjoy all the attention. For a brief moment, Jonah almost felt sorry for her. Her glass of šljìvovica still remained untouched. Jonah felt a stab of panic.

“I’m pregnant,” she said, voice shy, uncertain. Her eyes darted up to meet Jonah’s. They were wide, blue, maybe a little bit happy, maybe a little bit scared. Petar tugged on her. She turned her face toward him, and then they were kissing with that open-mouthed, fishy kiss of theirs. Her body relaxed into him.

The cousins burst into a happy chatter, some banging forks against plates, some raising glasses. The šljìvovica went round again. And again.

Jonah drank to steady himself. The woman beside him murmured something into his ear and patted him on the back. “We are family now, yes? It is good luck, this baby.”

But Jonah was only half listening. He searched the crowd, looking for a face, and then he found it: Aunt Katica was nodding approvingly, but not at Deborah. She was looking directly at him with eyes that burned through the haze of the alcohol. For a moment, as she drew a cigarette to her lips, he thought her skin flashed gold and metallic. Heat swept through him.

And then they were all rising from the table, the cousins and their girlfriends, the woman in the white dress, Petar, Deborah. They were spilling out into the night, into the streets, a sea of white teeth set in dark faces. Jonah felt drunk. He was unsteady on his feet, but someone put an arm out to help him. The air was cooler now that the sun had set. Jonah breathed it in, tasting the salt of it on his tongue. Someone jostled him. They were moving now, sweeping past white buildings roofed in red clay tiles. The ground was uneven beneath his feet, but he kept up with them. The alcohol sang in his blood.

Pregnant. She was pregnant.

He felt large and clumsy, but this time, somehow part of the crowd. It felt good. A new child. That was something to celebrate.

Plum liquor poured down his throat, as the woman in white offered him a slug from a plastic bottle.

“We are family. Is good!” she shouted.

The streets seemed to contract around him, and he had to suck in his belly to pass through the narrow corridors, elbows pushing at him, hands pulling him along. His legs and arms felt enormous. He could have been floating, a giant blimp above them, thick sausage-like fingers, legs thick as pillars.

Down, down, they went, along the city walls, until they stood on a pier, the whole riotous lot of them. Jonah could hardly see, but he could smell the tang of the Adriatic, could hear the crash of the waves against the rock. He stumbled, and fell hard against the wooden boards of the dock. The ocean leapt up in a spray between the planks, cool against his skin. There were hands on his shoulders now. He couldn’t quite get up. His body felt too round. He couldn’t get his legs under him. The hands pinched into his flesh like claws, and Jonah looked up to see Aunt Katica standing over him, but her face was different now, like in the dream. Her skin was metallic, and her fingers were long, with sharp nails that tug into him. Those eyes burned, and when she exhaled, a small plume of smoke formed.

And then the woman, the one who had been sitting next to him, leaned down, her lips brushing lightly against his. His mouth formed a surprised “o” and before he could think, before he could react, she had reached both hands into his mouth, and pried his lips apart, crawling in, all the way, disappearing down his throat.

He tried to struggle, but his limbs felt so heavy. Aunt Katica’s nails dug into his shoulders. His mouth was opening again, and then one of the cousins climbed in, and then another, and then another: the old men, the young, all those Slavic faces disappearing inside him.

“They come soon,” Aunt Katica whispered in his ears, looking across the Adriatic, beyond the borders of Croatia. “The young, they are foolish, they forget. But we do not forget. The serpent will always rise again, and it will eat our children, our grandfathers.

“We cannot forget this. You understand, yes?” Jonah squirmed, but he could not escape. They had to crawl over him now; his body was mountainous. He had long since split the seams of his clothes, and he lay naked on the dock, as the line of cousins and uncles and aunts grabbed hold of the thick folds of his skin, pulling themselves atop him.

“You are family, yes? You help. You protect us, the child. Your sister’s child.” He couldn’t see Deborah or Petar. Did not know if they had been left behind somewhere along the way. There was a fire burning his belly now. The child, yes, the child must be safe.

“Our blood is your blood.” Aunt Katica whispered. Her tongue flicked out, forked, to tickle his ear. “Is good now.”

And then she twisted her grip, and he was rolling off the pier into the Adriatic. Inside him, there was an inferno, and the air hissed and twisted into strands of steam that braided above him. He was heavy, so very heavy. The waves lapped over his face and he sank, Aunt Katica’s words whispering in his brain.

The water felt cool against the heat of his skin, and he did not struggle. He could feel all the cousins inside him, the thick muscles of their bodies, their quiet strength seeping into him. There was a fierce joy to it, as if all the empty parts of himself had suddenly been filled with presence. He opened his mouth, and the water rushed inside.

Somewhere he could hear Sarah’s voice: I don’t want to see who you are becoming.

Her face was turning away from his, and his heart felt empty, bombed out, each word dropping with an explosive force that shattered memories of the two of them together, dreams of the future he had once thought they might share.

His tears mingled with the salt of the ocean, his skin felt hot and molten, moving and sliding, until the water burst in. Then it cooled and grew hard. The shape of it was strange and unfamiliar. His blood sang with a thousand new voices that drowned out the destruction Sarah had wrought. They were with him. He was them, could feel the ache in his bones, bones like the mountains that ringed the country, protective, imposing. He rubbed up against the coastal rock, and felt a screeching kind of pleasure as the sharpness of it made channels in his skin for the water to seep through.

He took it all inside of him, drank in the jewelled water of the Adriatic.

His muscles began to respond again, and he stretched, feeling all those bodies, not as a weight, but as a wonderful fullness. He lifted his head, and water streamed off it.

There stood Aunt Katica on the pier, flame-eyed, beautiful in her grimness, but smiling, smiling down on him.

“Yes,” she said with a sibilant hiss. “You grow big now. Beautiful, beautiful boy.”

He opened his mouth, and a tendril of smoke drifted out to wreath around her like a coronet. Then he tensed, corded the thick, ropey tendons, the great bulk of him, and lifted himself out of the water. His body was long and sinuous, gleaming in the light of the moon, and he curled his body around her. She touched her hand against his massive, sloped forehead. Her nails traced along his snout, and around the bunching muscles of his jaws.

They would come again, he thought, remembering the patchwork rooftops where the bombs had fallen. A flicker of anger burned through him, inferno-hot, and with it something like joy. They would come again.

It is good, he thought. He was hungry.

The post The Mouth, Open appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.